Foobonia and Points West.

The irritating thing about John's breezy assumption that it's safe to leave April at the tender mercies of his idiot son is that he doesn't really understand how bad a babysitter Mike is. He doesn't know that Mike had to be bailed out the first time and let the Nichols kids run amok the second time so he could record their bad behaviour. This allows him to assign Mike intellect, resourcefulness and willingness that were notable for the purity of their absence. Elly, however, did remember by giving him means of escape that he did not take advantage of because he didn't want to look like what he was: a stupid idiot out of his depth. He cannot call them because he thinks he'll get yelled at. He cannot call Anne because he's worried she'll tell Elly that he's too stupid to live. He cannot call Gordon because he's afraid he'll get teased.

Most of all, he cannot follow the instructions Elly gave him because he's got his pride and doesn't want to face the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing so has to be nagged by remote control. Also, he could not tag in Martha because he didn't want to be accused of turning the Pattermanse into a hanky-panky house. This means that he's what I expect him to be: a nitwit who can't cope with a stressful situation stuck without someone to yell to for help. This is what Deanna is for, after all.

The irritating thing about the Mike's "Meet (and make enemies) of Martha's family" arc is that no one named Patterson has any real idea what happened. An objective analysis of events is as follows: Fred MacRae is a woefully inept and negligent boater who proceeded to strand himself, his family and a guest in the middle of nowhere because he failed to keep his engine in proper working order. He was unable to extricate himself from the situation because he is a foolhardy dimwit who thinks that oars and a radio are an unnecessary expense and makes me worried that he'll think the same thing about life vests. Mike stood there like a passive lump watching this because ribbing from Stan MacRae caused him to shut down and also because his default reaction to a crisis can be charitably likened to standing around like a wooden Jesus in a country graveyard. Eventually, after an unknown period of time, the OPP spotted Fred's Folly, summoned a marine salvage service to tow Fred back to the dock and charged him double the normal rate for failing to maintain his boat properly.

Michael's version of events is that they ran out of gas, Stan drove everyone crazy, Martha's parents fought and the police towed them to shore. If you're stupid like John and Elly, you're going to come to the conclusion that Stan freaked out because they ran out of fuel and that's why the parents fought. This is because you either forget or never actually learned something very important about Mike: he always comes to the wrong conclusions because he's fixated on all of the wrong things and doesn't understand why people do what they do. We saw this two years ago when he stood around like a galoot about playing a game whose rules he understands because Martha violated his stupid "act like a teenage girl afraid of being called forward" notes protocol. An objective analysis of events shines a harsh light on the fact that Michael has no idea how to behave around Martha when she's a real person and not a fantasy projection and is too fixated on the allegedly dreadful prospect of being mildly teased by other scruffy non-entities (who he thinks of his his best friends despite the fact that they barely tolerate his presence) to realize (or even begin to realize) that everyone else would think it's kind of cool that he has a girlfriend. Since he feels humiliated, he treats her like garbage for dumping on him because he can't understand why she thinks it's okay that he not control who gets to know things about him. As I've said before, he will repeat this same stupid mistake because there's something that keeps him from learning from his mistakes that isn't "blaming other people for his own hang-ups and stupidity." I'll get to that in a while too.

Now that we're about to be subjected to the "Mike has to get a summer job because he idiotically volunteered the damaging information that he can't be trusted around the house" arc, let's remind ourselves of a fact that he'd rather not face about himself. He spends pretty much all of his wasted life yowling about the cruelty of people standing over him barking orders and treating him like he's this moron who needs to be told what to do and where to do it all the time when he knows that if he were let be, he'd find all kinds of amazing things to do with himself that would show the cruel people who don't love him that he's not a slave or a housewife or something awful only to not notice that he really kind of does have to be told what to do all the time.

We get a good look into his thought processes in an upcoming strip when John tries using the phrase "It sure would be nice if someone were to mow the lawn" in the foolish belief that Mike would get the hint only to be gobsmacked when the boy says that he was not told to do anything. John ascribes this to defiance and mischief and so on and so forth because it's less scary than having to realize that someone will have to yell "YOU FORGOT TO BREATHE OUT AGAIN, STUPID!!!" at Mike for the rest of his life because, boy howdy, left to his own devices, Mike would stand around like a shivering pillar of shit without an idea in his head.

If you've ever ready the alternate history novels Harry Turtledove writes, you'll know that he uses the phrase "it never occurred to X to think something he or she would jolly well not want to occur to him/her" a whole lot. It's one of the man's favourite ways of pointing out that a character either doesn't want to face something that would lead to the realization tht his or her whole life had been a lie or said character can't conceive of something amazingly obvious because he or she is a product of an environment that would foreclose on that being a possibility.

The reason that I mention that is that while we know that Mike eventually judges Martha's extended family as being horrible people he's too good for (and also passes on the stupid advice about how meeting the other person's relatives is a humiliation waiting to happen to poor, dim Lizardbreath), it would never occur to Michael to ask himself what they think of him. This is probably because it never really occurs to him to ask himself what anyone he knows thinks of him and the way he acts. Because there's enough of Elly in him to confuse how he feels with what people intend, he just assumes that for some reason that's probably unfair, people take violent exception to his just trying to get through the day because he's also not aware of who he himself is.

The telling part of the idiotic hormone attack story line is Mike's admission that he has not the least idea of what really went on at his birthday party. We saw what was really going on because we saw a stupid idiot in the midst of a panic attack standing next to the snack table shoving his face full of food telling himself that he was going to humiliate himself and being laughed at only to find that Martha got sick of waiting and tried pulling an Operation Jealousy thing to get him to do something that wasn't "stand around like a shivering pillar of shit."

What he saw (and what he probably still sees) is that he told her he liked her and she got bored with him and went off with someone else. The reason that this matters is that Mike has a long history of not actually seeing what Martha is doing or why because of that hang-up of his about being laughed at by boys who, despite his belief otherwise, are not really his friends. This time last year, we were dealing with that idiotic note protocol of his wherein no one was supposed to know about their relationship and how her not seeing that it simply HAD to be a secret from her friends so that his not actually friends wouldn't tease him meant she didn't really like him and she was just stringing him along to see him groaning in pain and misery. This is followed by his idiotic belief that she was supposed to love a Valentine that insulted her because he couldn't be asked to suppress his individuality by acting like someone whose brain ain't just two neurons tied together in a slipknot. Blaming her protects him from having to look in the mirror and see a gutless, spineless, brainless, clueless, heartless and dickless little non-entity who should be fed head-first into a damned wood chipper for being a moron letting a good thing slip through his fingers because he can't admit that everything wrong that happens in his life happens because he's always wrong.

What most people don't quite understand is why it is that Martha dropped Janet like a bad habit while Mike still labours under the laughable misapprehension that Lawrence is a friend looking out for his best interests. I should think that the strip that's being re-run this Monday:

hints broadly as to why that is. Let's take a good long look at the visual imagery to see what's going on.

As we see in Panel 1, we have Janet smiling smugly at Martha because she has successfully managed to take Michael from her while Martha frowns at her as if to say "We aren't friends any more, boyfriend thief!" We also notice that Mike and Lawrence have no real idea what's going on because they ain't looking at the girls' faces.

This switches to Panel 2 where Mike glowers at Lawrence who smiles and does that stupid palms-out gesture the characters do. The message he's trying to convey is that it's not his fault this happened, that Martha threw herself at him. Again, the other dance partners have no idea what's going on.

We find out why it is that Mike ends up telling Gordon pure twonk about how Mart got bored with him and went with someone else this September when she looks at him with a despairing frown when he looks at her as if she's something he dug out of his ear or something. This tells me that at some point, someone came along and told him that girls get bored with boys all the time and the stupid piece of shit believed him because why would his friend Lawrence lie about that despite throwing him under the bus all those other times?

Yeah. I went there. I got the T-shirt and brought back a bunch of souvenirs. The reason that Mike believed bullshit about Martha for all that time is that someone who he never realized doesn't actually like him and views him as someone he can torment with impunity because he's gullible and pathetic told him a lie and the pea-brain is desperate and stupid enough to believe everything he says no matter how often he gets in shit because of it.

One of the least pleasant facts of life in the Patterson's world is the fact that for some reason, that graceless stumblebum Michael stands around with his nose out of joint because Elly does something to "embarrass" him because she somehow hates the idea of his being popular. We've just seen the template recently when he freaks the Hell out because he found out she used to sing in coffee houses when she was a teenager because his slipshod thought-processes had him confuse effect (If my idiot friends found out, they'd never shut their fat yaps about it and also, my social standing would be in the crapper) with cause (she only did that to ensure that his life would be ruined) because he's a vain halfwit who thinks that he's the protagonist of the human drama.

He's also the last one on Earth who should ever be talking about being a public embarrassment. Sure, Elly can be the nut with the sandwich board and she can be the stereotypical sitcom mom who has the kneejerk habit of shaving five years off of her kids' ages and who also doesn't see the point of his impressing kids his own age because they don't pay bills or what-have-you but to my knowledge, she has never been caught trying to spy on girls as they get undressed. What the Mike standing around mortified because his mother reminds his friends of her presence never sees is that most people would find her slightly better company because listening to paranoid whining about being fat and ugly and getting replaced is less painful than enduring Mike's hapless inability to understand the female mind. Of all the clueless men in the world, he's the Michael Pattersoniest......

We're coming up to the first of two arcs in which Mike is forced to sit for the hellions next door. While much is made of the fact that Anne and Steve's kids are hard to handle and take a grim delight in antagonizing Mike, nothing is learned except for the fact that no matter what payment is made to those forced to tend children, it can never be enough. We get the same stupid anti-child message when April sits for other people's kids because we aren't going to get a moral that might actually help Elly.

Said moral is to have a much younger Michael realize that he was no more of a joy to be around as a younger child than the Nichols kids are. We cannot have Mike think dangerous thoughts about how Elly is a person in her own right and deserves respect before the age of twenty because that would mean not pandering to the target demographic by offering up an appreciative, grateful child who does not deserve to be thrown off an overpass so that We Moms can laugh at his shattered carcass and laugh all the way to federal custody.

As one could expect, Lynn appears to have based the irritating way Michael is going to spend the next few years treating Martha on some incident from her childhood that she cannot and will not get over. I distinctly remember pointing out years ago that she had this big, sloppy crush on some boy she was sure felt the same way about her that she did about him only to be gutted when he found her love letters to be comic fodder when he was supposed to fall madly in love with her. Since she's not designed to ever let things go, her in-built need to stand around bellowing "Behold!! I HAVE BEEN WRONGED AND DEMAND VENGEANCE AND SYMPATHY!!!" translates itself into Mike moaning because Martha is forced to share her notes with her friends when someone presumptuous and unaware of social norms demands privacy.

The problem is that given that Martha is behaving like a human being is supposed to in this situation and is doing nothing wrong that most of us can see, she has once again made an antagonist unintentionally sympathetic while making the alleged injured party out to be a whiny little puke who loves being irrationally angry and self-righteous more than he loves this girl. He sees himself as the victim. Since I'm a garbage snarker-troll person who doesn't care about refugees dying of world diseases in war zones, I see a world-class jerk looking for any excuse he can invent to be upset with this poor thing. Eventually, his need to feel like he's been mistreated corrodes any good will he might have felt towards her and he comes to the conclusion that he made her up.

The very interesting thing about the looming "adolescent children are always upset over nothing at all" thing we're about to be subjected to is that we're about to deal with a grievance that baffles me as much today as it did twenty-nine years ago. We're introduced to said confusing casus belli when Martha says her name in a mocking tone of voice and starts screaming about how an old lady name that belonged to someone who's dead doesn't at all suit her. This leads Michael to grouse about how he's gotta be named after some old person he never met either and how that clearly means that parents decide to name their children things to ruin their lives.

As I sit here and wonder exactly how fruitless it would have been to try to get the nitwits to explain what the Hell their folks were supposed to name them and why they'd still be the same dreary clodhoppers living the same dismally boring existences were their names Tyler and Britney, it occurs to me that we're dealing with the same sort of messed up logic that informs Mike's over-reaction to the discovery that Elly used to play guitar in public. As we're about to see in about a years' time, his unreasonable reasoning is

1) Mom used to go out in public and do things.
2) Said things will get me teased if they're discovered.
3) Therefore, she must have done them to get me teased because the alternative is understanding that she couldn't be asked to care about the social standing of someone who didn't exist at the time.

because of

4) Mike is too stupid to understand that the not yet born don't get a vote.

This means that instead of adhering to a cultural norm in order to conform, their parents were deliberately trying to hurt them because the alternative is admitting to being stupid and vain. It's like how they'll probably grow up to assume the same thing Elly does: children only pretend to have feelings to wreck their parents' lives.