Foobonia and Points West.

The interesting thing about the Middle Years is that while John hasn't changed his opinion about the BAD ATTITUDE Mike allegedly has because he's not a grinning fucking robot brainlessly eager to do yardwork, Elly changes why he's a bad kid who hates all the love in her great big heart. This is because instead of being thumpingly forthright about why his life stinks, he, as a ploddingly normal teenager, feels that it's his duty never to volunteer information to the enemy his parents have become.

This is because we're dealing with that annoying period in which the child who implicitly trusts his parents becomes the adolescent who, having noticed Mommy and Daddy have feet of clay, have not much compassion or sympathy for them because he thinks that he's the first person to discover this. When they finally upgrade the man's firmware by installing common sense, he stops resenting them for being people like himself but, man, is it ever a pain to have to deal with at the time.

Given that Elly (and John) are hilariously full of shit and lacking in self-awareness, it should come as no surprise that she plays the "But That's DIFFERENT" card when Marian points out that it took months to find out what was bothering her as a child and that her lack of communication infuriated her as much as Mike's does to Elly. She had actual problems while Mike has a life of ease and bliss because he doesn't have a domineering petty tyrant breathing down his neck lecturing non-stop and Marian can jolly well stop smirking and rolling her eyes when she says that.

The interesting thing about Elly and John's panicky bleating as regards how Michael is suddenly a hostile stranger who disrepects them and wants to usher in a world where he makes his own rules and so on and so forth is that they not only look like panicky morons pissing themselves because he's starting to think for himself, they're also obsessed with his hairstyle.

The reason that I mention this is that the extra-annoying Christmas At Exile Farm arc sort of gives the game away. We have Mike desperately trying to look like this cool dude only to have either Elly or Bev lecture him about how no one is there to impress when Bev musses his hair up like he's some little kid. If he's got his hair slicked up in order to attract girls with dangerous body language and impress his hoodlum friends, he hates the family and wants to destroy goodness and niceness. If he lets his hair get arranged in the rightful and mother-respecting Evil Linus Van Pelt look, he's Elly's baby who loves her and kindless and all the love in her great big heart. This leads us to what I'm starting to call a Foob Axiom:

Axiom 3a: John and Elly hate like fire the idea that their children have people who influence their lives that are not them. According to John and Elly, they or people they trust should be the only people on Earth their kids listen to and respect.

As we know, we're about to have Mike come into conflict with Elly about the town theatre because his being teased by other scruffy little irrelevances weighs more on his empty mind than the happiness and self-worth of his mother. As I've said before, his rear-guard action against the advent of the Middle Years has him interpret every single thing that Elly does that might expose the greatest kid ever to the sort of mockery he has no trouble dishing out is obviously part of her plot to destroy and ruin him because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing a crazy and stupid egomaniac who won't admit that he's just another slob who's gotta do stuff he doesn't like.

This doesn't, of course, sit well with the oblivious clod because the same grandiosity that distorts Liz into a monster trying to kill him because he has to share makes him think that if he has to endure teasing and if Elly has her own life to live, the world is a terrible place because he cannot occupy all of it. He thus doesn't see the spoiled, entitled brat who thinks that the world rotates around his needs that the rest of us see. He also doesn't see that Elly is a depressive narcissist whose egomania takes the form of thinking that the whole world rests on her shoulders.

Since he has no such insight, he doesn't realize that Elly spends most of her free time taking his maunderings far more seriously than they need to be. The occasional flare-ups of self-respect when he exceeds the limits of her tolerance seem to teach him nothing about the woman who's raising him and I honestly doubt that they ever will. As I've said before, we can look forward to an indeterminate future in which the dumb-dumb calls her crazy because she says that there was a good reason she had to wait until she was in her late sixties to get her BA and he's it because he's conned himself into thinking that he was her cheerleader and not her persecutor.

The interesting thing about the five characters that I've mentioned is that while Connie only ever seems to interact with Elly so that she can try to do something futile and get her to see how great her life is, the others seem to interact by arguing at cross-purposes with each other. Since he seems to serve as more of a foil to Elly than John does, let's examine how it is that Michael and his mother end up not relating to one another all that well.

What rapidly becomes obvious is the reason why this is: they're too damned alike to coexist in harmony. The strip that makes this quite clear takes place three years or so from now. You see, Phil is telling Mike that when Elly was in her late teens, she used to be a rather earnest folkie hitting the coffeehouses of Vancouver singing songs about how war is unhealthy for children and other living things. Mike's insane and stupid reaction is all about how she set out to do solely to embarrass him in front of other scruffy and short-sighted imbecile children. The fact that Elly had no idea that she'd have a son to embarrass or that there was an oaf dentist in her future has no hold on the Delicate Genius's alleged mind; all that matters is the potential teasing he'd get and how his mother decided "I know what I'll do! I'll go on stage and humiliate a purely hypothetical son in front of equally hypothetical friends."

The reason that I mention this example of pants-on-head stupidity is that it's the same sort of unreasonable reasoning that led Elly to assume that Mike wanted to dress up as Adam Ant because nuclear war made him so angry, he turned his back on kindness and happiness. They don't along well at all because deep down, Elly views Mike as someone who spends his days plotting new ways to humiliate her in front of everyone who could ever matter while at the same time not noticing that he sees her in exactly the same ruinous and imbecilic light. What's more, the nasty little thing we call confirmation bias keeps them from noticing any sort of evidence that contradicts this comforting confirmation that yes, they are so super amazing that there actually is a conspiracy consisting of every jealous nobody who couldn't compete with them in a fair race to hobble them.

The only thing that I see as somehow snapping one of them back to something approximating objective reality is Michael achieving the success fate somehow manages to deny Elly. What will happen then is that something she never has to worry about will take hold of him: the impostor syndrome. Once he starts seeing himself as a fraud who's tricking people into thinking he matters, he'll start looking back at his past and seeing a jerk being a jerk to the people who saw clean through him.

As you probably know, I'm not especially fond of the reason why Elly volunteered to chaperone the dance. Instead of doing what a mother who actually is firm, fair, loving and kid would do and say that the dance sounds too fun to pass up, Great Big Jerk Elly has to tell her horrible burden son that he's such a horrible child to his teachers that she has to make things right. The problem with that is that not only does average clod Mike do average clod things that no normal adult would have a problem with, it's a reminder of why Mike grows up to be a fetid lump of crap in his own right: there was nowhere on this Earth that he could be said to be welcomed or loved.

After all, he sure isn't welcomed or loved at home. Not only does he have an asshole father with a hair-trigger temper touched off by the least thing, he's got a thin-skinned imbecile mother who cannot deal with conflict in a reasonable fashion. From the beginning of the strip in which she told Connie that Mike's being a normal kid trying to find his way in the world actually meant that he was a defiant monster who she couldn't love because he wanted to run her into the ground to her flat-out telling him when he was allowed to invade his own home and thus ruin her life, it's obvious that Elly saw Mike as a stranger that she couldn't be asked to tolerate until he became something she could identify with: an ignorant, anger-prone asshole who can't understand children and doesn't like having them around.

Searching for a home at school was futile too. From teachers who seemed to have the same lack of tolerance for his being a normal, average clod who only acted up because the people at home recoiled in horror when he got too close and an endless series of mean kids who exploited his pathetic need to belong to make a fool of him, we had the same Hell there only with different idiots expecting mindless obedience. The end result is that he expects humiliation and rejection because he hasn't the blindest idea how people actually behave because no one ever sat him down and talked to him; he's just winging it and basing his life on bad television because it's the only source of knowledge he was allowed.

About the only reinforcement he ever did get from his friends and relatives is angry nonsense about how, yes, the people who inconvenienced him are plotting against him so it's best to stay home and work for Elly and Elly alone. This is sort of a shame because when she and her lackeys aren't around to suck the fun out of things by never praising him, he can actually do good things.

As you will recall, I recently linked to a strip that had one of Elly's trademark rages be touched off by Mike playing his music really loudly while she was trying to let her mind go blank so she could do something. This and an upcoming strip that has her lecture Mike about how he can't possibly concentrate with music playing and an arc that has the Muzak system John installed in his clinic make people dancing reminds us that much like Lynn herself, Elly needs silence in order to be able to function properly. It's not that she intends to be a jerk to her children or anything, it's just that she simply cannot get herself in a working frame of mind when there's any sort of noise because she was brought up in a house where it was always quiet at meal and homework time.

The reason that I seem to be letting her off the hook is that she doesn't realize something very important about Michael: he's not really used to quiet yet. The Michael of 1985 needs the warm-up he talks about because until he leaves home, he's never been in a situation where it was quiet. What seems to be happening is that his mind won't let him buckle down and get to work until the normal, standard angry lecture about how he's a bad, selfish child who's stabbing his poor mother in her great big heart is delivered so that life is normal. He needs to have her screaming in rage to feel that life is okay because history teaches him that when she's silent, she's really angry.

Of course, now that he's gotten used to a life without people barging in and yelling at him about nothing at random intervals, he's got it into his head that he needs an alcove to protect him from his children.

As we know, John and Elly aren't the only people who view those around them not as the people they are because getting to know them would take a lot of work and expose them to a crippling loss of face. This not only blighted April's life during the infamous Housening, it also made the roller-skating thing a horrible mess. It, as had been said, would have made more sense and made John and Elly into something resembling actual parents had they said "Well, Mike, we'd like to help get the skates but you change your mind so rapidly, it's kind of hard to justify buying you something you won't want. Tell you what. If you're still interested at the end of the week, we'll match whatever you raise and get you a pair, okay?"

The reason for this is pretty much the same reason a lot of people love the strip itself. Unlike strips that require a lot of mental effort to understand, Foob is unchallenging pabulum that doesn't make craven mush-heads who played it safe feel stupid, lazy and ignorant and tells them that they're right. This sort of poison syrup of the mind doesn't just attract whimpering fools who think that the world owes them a living because they confuse a Depression kid's justifiable need to not want to imitate a vending machine with actual want; it also appeals to a confused and angry little boy who feels as if the world is trying to crush him.

Given that the years in which Michael's personality congealed into its current Lovecraftian horror-freak state were spent listening to the organic adjunct of a sofa and a hysterical loon of a mother scream GO AWAY at him when he wanted to know if he was still wanted, it must have been a grand and glorious thing for him to discover that the large box in the living room told him "Come hither. You are wanted." The problem is that his need to have someone who will accept him and tell him that there's a place under the Sun for him despite what his parents seem to think is that said person has pretty much the same level of good will as Kortney Krelbutz.

The reason that I say is that that I know that the idiot lantern not only sold him tooth-rotting cereals and gender-specific toys, it also sold him a damaging and limiting world-view. Take, as a for instance, his insistence that Elly's constant striving to have a life out of the confines of a home she sees as a penitentiary she shares with sadistic inmates means that she's not a real mother. Granted, the kid is self-absorbed and blind enough to think that not wanting to be shackled to his groovy self all day long is a bad thing and would have made that accusation were the Pattersons living in interstellar space; adding in media imagery that state that 'everyone' knows that mothers love waiting hand and foot on their families and never ask for praise just made a bad situation worse.

The trick box also seems to amplified the horror caused by Elly's stupid need to pit the children against one another in order to not cry herself to death knowing she was the 'bad' guy. Seeing Lizzie as a fellow victim would have taken effort on Mike's part; effort that his wonderful friend who never lies to him and tells him that he's stupid, lazy and ignorant says that he doesn't need to waste because everyone knows that if people get in your way, they're trying to get you. The idea that he's a person in Lizzie's way is not one that occurs to him because he'd rather not be the bad guy either.

The real problem, however, comes from his dealings with obstacles to his getting his own way all the time like he's 'supposed' to that aren't related to him. His being in a constant state of confusion as regards Martha's intentions tell me that we're not dealing with a person who 'gets' girls at all. He never saw that she too had a code of honour in which she was required to divulge every little detail of her personal life to 'friends' who would turn into tormentors in a heart-beat because the sitcom writers never mentioned them. Diito with his dealings with Rhetta in which he didn't understand being on break any more than Lizzie did. It was about when he started wailing idiotically about cruel, false-hearted women who lied about liking him so they could laugh at his torment because the alternate would be his being a puerile, self-absorbed dick who didn't understand how things worked that Aaron moved to Vancouve. Since she had started to retreat into herself and thus wasn't around Rod enough to refresh her memory, Lynn had no males she cared to model human behaviour on and Mike transmuted into an effeminate monster horror freak who behaves how someone who is terrified of normal man she can't intimidate because she thinks that since they might hit her if she pushes them too far, they will hit her thinks men should behave. This is why I thought that his reaction to Divala would be to shriek and hit her with his purse. This is why I thought that when he cravenly quit Portrait, he was going to down to the spa for a good cry with the gals. This is why it gets harder and harder to see him mincing around and not burst out in derisive laughter.

Yesterday's entry about how Lynn really hates being told that the Pattersons treat April shabbily reminds me of the lowest, most despicable episode in their failed attempts at parenting: The "I Quit Motherhood" episode. As you will recall, Elly stupidly badgered April about the need to eat something only to lose her shit like the imbecile she is when the kid stood up for herself. While I'm quite sure that a more or less accurate accounting of events would enrage moron bully John owing to that whole "children are just puppets whose job it is to do whatever I say" complex of his, I tend to think that Elly might have been less than accurate. What gets me to thinking that is all the times that Michael says shit like "Why can't I have sugar cereal" when a REAL child would name the brand of the evil commodity that evilly exists to martyr his whining cornball materfamilias. What seems to be actually happening is that Mike does ask why Elly has to feed him something boring like "NootraBran" when he would rather have some "Frosted Zappos"; since Elly thinks that doing so would cause her mother to beam down and call her a failure, she doesn't hear brand names but instead hears a generalized expression.

The reason that this sort of self-serving exercise in demonizing her children for not wanting to feed into her martyrdom complex is important in the here-and-now is that we don't really know what Mike's objections to her being at work all the time are. We get some broad hints as to what the real problem is every time she gets into a snit about how her children's very real need for just a moment of her time to see if she actually likes them 'actually' means that they're selfish, chaos-loving parasites who hate HER and want HER to not have an identity because they're parasites who hate her and love chaos. Mike could actually have made an aside about how nobody asks him anything, they just tell him to do it and if he doesn't, he's a bad kid who is bad. Since Elly is a jerk propelled by self-pity, she can't help but assume that Michael's wanting to have some input into what his life is like means that he wants to enslave her and take away her identity.

Well, there's that and the fact that Elly is clearly upset that Michael wasn't sympathizing with the person he should have sympathized with. All he cared about was some irrelevant sick child who only got sick to take away the real victim's identity. Had he worried about someone important like Elly, he might have stood a chance of having his words and actions depicted with something like accuracy.

As I said the other day, Elly doesn't understand the value of play at all. It seems to me that she has always labored under the misapprehension that if a person doesn't take his life seriously as she does, if they are known to laugh, if they enjoy what they do, they're not doing anything worthwhile. This tendency to regard playing as a useless, destructive activity that will ruin her children's lives is a hindrance to her ability to relate to them when things are normal but only gets worse when she expects something of them.

The reason that I mention this is that unlike Phil, Elly cannot and will not see that Michael is allowed to play the trumpet just as a useful skill. If he plays the trumpet for fun instead of making a career of it right the Hell now, he shouldn't bother because he's not being serious. This constant badgering about how wanting to hang out with his friends instead of being berated by a lunatic getting ahead of herself is going to wreck his whole life so he'd better plug away OR ELSE is pretty much guaranteed to make him want to quit. Not, of course, that Manic Mommy sees her "excellence NOW!!!!!!!!! or die a failure" ethos is why Mike felt like his trumpet was a torture device; she never sees her horrible parenting as being horrible.

Then again, we are dealing with a mercenary jerkwad who never does anything without the expectation of money coming her way. Most of why she thinks Mrs Walsh is a tight-wad is that she can't admit that she was expected to volunteer her time and money and most of why she worked at the library was to get paid. Doing things without getting cash in return is so alien to her way of thinking, the idea of Mike doing anything without getting anything back is as baffling and wrong as the idea that she doesn't deserve to be paid back in full for parenting him.

Of course, the really interesting thing about the current arc is trying to figure out how the Pattersons of 2013 remember as having happened. Since Michael is the one that made the biggest stink about this for the longest time, it seems fitting that I examine how the thirty-seven year old imbecile churning out abuse porn must think he behaved back when he was a nine-year old imbecile whining about real moms. As we know, there are four personality traits that block a Patterson from remembering the past accurately.

The first of these factors is their horrible selfishness and sense of entitlement. While it's true that Jean got to lecture John about how selfish a pig he was being, no one on Earth managed to force Mike to see that he was being a churlish little twerp about the whole thing; every time they tried, he just laid another freaking guilt trip because he simply couldn't be asked to see things from another person's point of view.

The reason for that is that is the insane belief Pattersons have that by doing so, he'll have to knuckle under to someone else's family politics and never be allowed to be right again. In his mind, having to accept the fact that his life has to change means that he loses and people will laugh at him and kick him in the face when he tries to get up off his knees. (Another example of this oh-so-Foobish belief that his is a life of brutal gladitorial combat is the way he treats Lizzie. As Mike sees it, she isn't a helpless child defending herself against pointless malice; in his mind, she spends her whole day plotting his ruin; this is why when questioned about his idiocy, the dumb bastard whines that she hurt his feelings. The sad thing is that Michael honestly believes this because the fact that any sort of objective look at the past would tend to indicate that the only way that she did so is by not taking abuse like she was supposed to.

This leads to the next annoying thing that keeps a Patterson from remembering things the way they actually happened: their inability to accept that their own behaviour could ever be inspired by malice, jealousy, spite and envy. While Mike is pretty good at noticing when other people are being jerks, he spends a lot of time and mental capital trying to avoid seeing that he too can be a royal pain in the arse as well as a greedy jerk and monster of vanity.

Finally, we have to contend with the fact that as a general rule, the Pattersons have no idea what's really going on around them owing to having their heads wedged up their arses. I can readily see a scenario in which Elly tried to explain to Michael that she didn't hate him but simply wanted to be treated like a person instead of a servant only to have Mike tune out because Mom was lecturing him about something stoopid. After all, most of why Mike's life sucks is because he's too dumb to know what's going on around him and too lazy to learn so his lack of brains and curiosity has to be most of why he got all bitchy.

What this means is that just as he shies away from admitting that he was a jealous little tool who treated his sister like shit because he was a sulking little globule of pus with an attitude that needed adjusting, he's not going to see himself as having been a sullen creepola who thought that Elly wanted to take away the childhood his real parent Network Television promised him. Either he's going to remember her as having spent even more time ranting about what she could have done with her life if she hadn't been burdened with selfish, greedy, ungrateful, chaos-loving children who hate her or he's going to remember himself as having been more supportive than he actually was. What he isn't going to see for a hill of beans is the fact that his life would have been a lot easier if he didn't think that people were trying to destroy him and laugh as they kicked him in the face.