Foobonia and Points West.

As fun as it is to comment on how Francie is going to be treated like a problem by people who see her as one is, I'd like to talk about another child who's going to be a problem soon: Meredith. While we would have just started to get the beginning of a very foolish long-term arc right now had the strip continued, October 2015 would have heralded the start of a very annoying problem: Meredith's thirteenth birthday. This is about when the kewpie-doll that Elly calls a granddaughter would have become an out-of-control rebel overnight. The reason is that she's the child of two emotionally fragile people who live in an eternal present and who see everything as a surprise no one could have anticipated.

The only problem that faces us is not deciding what it'll take for Deanna to decide that that's it, she's through with motherhood or how lame Meredith's attempts at rebelliousness will be or Mike being glad that Exile Farm exists and that Laura has a cousin Meredith's vague age. The problem that faces us is wondering if Elly can actually contain the glee she's bound to be feeling at watching her son finally see what he put her through. I mean, she's barely keeping in the guffaws as it is so watching Mike confess like an ancient mariner for being a horrible son might just overload the pleasure center of her brain.

As I've mentioned on many an occasion, the Pattersons and their friends love to wallow in self-pity so they can avoid facing up to having done wrong. Over the years we've seen:

- Mike's tormenting Liz being justified by his complaints of persecution and injustice.

- John feeling like he was the wronged one after Elly calls him out for yet another impulse purchase.

- Elizabeth sitting in her room filled with angst because her parents are too busy cleaning up after Mike and don't have the time or energy to satisfy her insatiable hunger for approval.

- April's denials that she was the aggressor in the collapse of her friendship with Becky.

- Elly herself moan and groan because she'd outsmarted herself by running away from her parents and marrying John, who expected her to live up to her insincere claims to love kids and housework.

- Deanna's constant claims that her mother is trying to control her life when we see a kindly, albeit abrupt, woman who wants to look out for her child.

- Anthony's moaning that he has no home because Therese, a woman he won't ever cut a break, expected him to live up to a promise he made with his fingers crossed.

It occurs to me that, sooner or later, Meredith and Robin will pick up a nasty habit from their environment. Sometime in the not-to-distant future, someone is going to howl that she had no choice but to do something to her kid brother, that he had to welch on a promise. We don't have to see them to know they'll whine that their actions aren't their fault.

As we continue our jarring journey into the hybridized format, we can point out two logical absurdities in the staging device. The first is, of course, obvious to everyone who isn't looking for an excuse to jam it to the storyteller. Namely, a small child is naturally going to think that the people that she's met have always been the same age that they are right now. If you were to show Merrie a series of photos of Jim taken at ten year intervals, she'd assume that she was looking at six or seven different people. The second absurdity is far less obvious. Not only does Merrie think that people have always been and always going to be the same age, they've always lived and always will live in the same place. This is, of course, because a preschooler thinks the universe is essentially static and change unnatural and wrong. When you add in the fact that said child doesn't really believe that there are places that she has never been, we're in for a confusing round of nostalgia. This attatchment to place is not only going to confound a five-year-old, it can also, as I've said before, explain some of the deeper resentments in the strip. To start with, Mike had to move at a very young age. As far as he knew, his world was being turned upside down without his prior approval to accomodate his baby sister. He may have forgotten the trauma of having to move but he never got over resenting Liz for 'making' him. He can safely be said to marrying his own kind depending on which back story of the Sobinski family Lynn has decreed official. If it's the one where Wilf and Mira fled Cold War Poland, Deanna sometimes wishes they'd've stuck around waiting for the Iron Curtain to come down. That way, she'd have been spared the trauma of being the child of weird foreigners.

Now that Elizabeth's story arc is coming to whatever sort of resolution can best fit into the hybrid format and April has been more or less reduced to a glorified walk-on, it's the turn of the original central characters to be reduced to a secondary status. Their move from the home Mike and other others grew up in to the smaller Stibbs house is more or less iconic of their second banana status, as is Michael's ownership of the larger dwelling. The fact that Michael mentioned all the photo albums Elly left behind foreshadows the way things will work after the hybrid starts: Mike looking at a snapshot and telling his audience the story associated with it. AS for the issue of the furniture and Deanna's seeming refusal to part with it, there are three explanations. First, she might see them as a welcoming sight after the trauma of the fire and keep them because they make her feel comfortable. Second, she may think she somehow owes Elly and wants to keep her beloved furniture in the house it belongs to. Third, and most likely, she just plain likes old furniture.