Foobonia and Points West.

This tendency of Lynn to recycle rejected plotlines isn't the only instance in which the Lost Strips can be seen to predict the future. While it's true that the sequences that I'm about to discuss were reasonably harmless back in the late Seventies and early Eighties, they tend to be off-putting in the hear and now because of all that's happened afterward. The first such lost sequence concerns first grader Michael's big, sloppy embarrassing crush on Deanna. Back in 1979, what we saw is a small, scruffy boy developing a crush on a classmate who saw him as something of an irritant. While it's true that most parents would look at his flat-footed attempts to impress the girl and make a cute little aside about how funny it would be if they were to eventually marry, most sane people would think that that was at best, a very long shot. If they found out that the two of them actually did get married, said average, normal healthy person would describe that is a very odd little coincidence. The problem is that Lynn ain't most people. If questioned, she'd probably chuckle that they were indeed destined to be married all along. What's more, most of her fans would join in being impressed at how romantic this all is.

The second set of rejected strips that predicted the Pattersons' present day started off when Elly got a letter from Marian telling her that her grandfather had passed on. The first rough-draft goes as follows:

Panel 1: Elly holds a letter in her hands and says "Oh, dear, John! My grandfather has just passed away! What an awful shock for my mother!"
Panel 2: John 'comforts' Elly by reminding her that the man was ninety-three, that they've been expecting this and that her mother will by okay.
Panel 3: He then says that the man wanted to go before saying that her mother will be relieved now that her life has been made so much easier.
Panel 4: She agrees with this but then says that Marian now feels as if she a fifty-five year old orphan.

While the second goes like this:

Panel 1: Elly tells John that it's easy not to talk about it but wonders what will happen when their parents are elderly and need care.
Panel 2: John mutters something about they owe them so much and need to repay all they were given but can't see living with the parents.
Panel 3: Elly tells him that Jim and Marian will never move in with them but she herself can't bring herself to park them in an old age home.
Panel 4: John ends the discussion by agreeing that it's an awful decision that they don't have to think of yet so should stop talking about it.

The interesting thing about all of this is that John's jerkish remark about how happy Marian will be now that she's no longer looking after a very old man not only demonstrates that he's a heartless dick who can only think of things in terms of what's convenient, it seems to me to foreshadow the way Eva Warzone, the Continental and Luis Refugee deal with April's grief over what happened to Jim. The underlying idea that since Jim and Elly's grandfather were very old, the best thing to do is be grateful that their suffering is at an end so that one can move on to things that actually matter. In John's case, it's not having to worry about the future; in the case of Eva Warzone, it's crushing Becky before she can crush them.

This leads me to another thing wherein making John and Elly's life easier comes into play: his comment about how he and Elly are somehow beholden to their parents for something that they don't actually seem to want to be rewarded for doing. I do not know where these two came up with the idea that parents should somehow or other present their children with an itemized bill for services rendered when they leave home because their folks sure don't believe that they're owed anything more than happy children. What I do know is that for some reason, the two of them think that they have to own horses because of that favor bank system of morality they believe in.

This, I think, is why Jim was very reluctant to move to the Pattermanse. He didn't want to impose because his children had their own lives. He stayed a couple of years so as to make Elly happy and to get his bearings after Marian passed but soon found himself wanting a private life again with Iris. The problem is that by the time that Elly's horrible cooking gave him a minor stroke, their refusal to plan for that sort of thing left them scrambling around like lunatics and treating April like someone who has mittens pinned to her jacket sleeves in July. What it also tells us is that when he actually did pass on, April will have been  accused of wanting to make his death about her and her drama by inquiring as to why the assembled hypocritical vermin come to whine about how much they'll miss a man they shunned like a leper because they feared his aphasia was contagious didn't do more for him when he was still alive.

As we all know, the in-strip reason that Deanna didn't picture herself living together with Mike before they got married is that, as a character in the comic strip For Better or For Worse, she had mapped her whole life out ahead of her when she was twelve or so. The reason that she supplied Mike, on the other hand, was that she was trying in her own stupid way to at least try to consider Mira's feelings.

Since Mike is a sociopathic arsebucket who is genetically incapable of understanding that the feelings of other people should influence his behavior in the slightest and who regards being asked to do so as a hateful burden by evil tormentors, this was an unnecessary and ridiculous obstacle to his need to have a maid and bedmate in his life right that second. Rather than risk her figuring out what kind of monster she was marrying, he had to find some way to shut her up. It was thus that he hit on the plan of having a private wedding ceremony so that Deanna could tell herself that she wasn't actually living in sin. Since she's not really all that bright and she doesn't like confrontation much, it would probably never have occurred to her to ask if the "minister" was legally allowed to marry anyone.

This means that whoever it was that suggested that the first wedding was the one for show meant to placate a gullible woman and protect Mike's right to let himself be made a stooge for Elly and John's plan to own his horses could well be on to something. It would also make Evil Mira into another evil person whose evil evilness comes from her evil habit of evilly and accurately assessing the situation and even more evilly saying what she evilly thought.

As we all know, Lynn has a very bizarre and silly way of looking at the creative process; for some unguessable reason, she seems to believe the following stupid things:

1. The ability to come up with an idea for a story is a rare gift bestowed on a select few.
2. A person cannot write anything that he or she has not experienced.
3. An author cannot alter or revise a story concept in mid stream.
4. An author cannot alter how a character behaves as part of said revision.
5. Her way of looking at the world is a universal truth.
6. The lame jokes that were old when she was young are cutting edge.
7. The writing process is akin to a trance state that must necessarily isolate a person from interacting with other human beings.

What we’re describing, of course, is the thought processes of The Delicate Genius; we’re also reminding ourselves that like Lynn, he’s a pompous ass and derivative, plodding failure who has no idea how ridiculous he looks to those around him because he has no idea of how to actually write anything worth reading. The reason for that is that he can't see past the surface of a situation to find the story buried underneath.

Let's use an example I once saw in a creative writing course; what I was told was to picture a man in his mid-forties standing on his porch lighting a barbecue. The reason that was used as an example was that, well, any number of events could have led to the gathering together of man, home and barbecue at that specific time and that there were just as many possibilities of what happened to him afterward. A good writer could see that what looks like a rather banal, day-to-day, slice-of-life non-event could, in fact, be part of a fascinating, possibly even riveting, drama; Lynn and Mike can only see a man grilling meat, no more and no less.

Lynn has been able to hide her lack of talent by dribbling out her leaden inability to observe in thirty-second installments; Mike has a harder time of it because he's suffering logorrhea-by-proxy. What he does is that he takes one of the empathy-free human interest stories that he sent in to some fishwrap and buries the pedestrian lack-of-insights under a mountain of high-sounding words so as to bury anyone trying to penetrate his opaque verbiage underneath an avalanche of nonsense. It's like the Twilight saga but without the humanity.

Lynn’s on-going attempt to foreshadow Michael and Deanna’s marriage (not to mention her moving to Burlington) in the new-ruin era of the strip is one of the more, well, idiotic things she’s done. It would have been better to see younger versions of the Sobinski family last year instead of Lynn's teasing us with the false hope that Connie wasn't going to go to Montreal. That way, we could have seen whether Deanna’s horror stories about her childhood held water instead of learning the super-important fact that Lawrence suffered from shy bowel syndrome. What makes it all the worse is that when it came to depicting Mike being in love, Lynn got it right the first time. What’s more, she did so three times:

• Deanna: In the original, simpler, better version, Michael acted like a regular dumb kid from the sticks who, like the incredibly average little boy he was, was of two minds about the little girl in pigtails with the soft-palate lisp. His curiosity and desire to be friends with a girl conflicted with his need to be one of the guys and, well, not be friends with girls. This, of course, meant that he did all the dumb things that regular people do when they have a crush on someone: he blurted out stupid things at the wrong time, he’d ignored (or, more truthfully, been totally unaware) of the times he’d offended her and generally acted like pretty much every kid who’d ever lived. Sometime in the middle eighties, she’d faded from view; at the time, a case could be made for her joining Daryl Smythe and Janice Madigan in some sort of Valhalla for characters who, having served their purpose, were never mentioned again.
• Martha: Michael first became aware of her while attending Summer Camp when he was twelve or so. They got to talking and found out that they had a few interests in common; they both accepted dares in order to fit in and be liked, they weren’t all that fond of Elvis and they were going to be attending the same middle school in the Autumn. As before, what we saw was a typical example of young, small-l love; we had the usual misunderstandings, the botched attempts to impress her, the idiotic refusal to get off his high horse when he thought she was doing him wrong and the panicky idiot parents who confused raging paranoia for a proper concern for the interests of their son. This, as I said before, led Elly to agree with his being shipped to Exile Farm; John, having conveniently forgotten being a moody young pain-in-the-ass when he was fourteen, shipped him there to ‘adjust his attitude’ while Elly feared and hated Martha because she reminded her of all the popular girls who got boys she wanted by the sinful and unfair means of smiling, dressing well, not slouching and, worst of all, not complaining about everything that ever bothered them since they were in diapers. It didn’t change his attitude any but, since Martha wasn’t allowed to write to him because her parents didn’t like Mike, had the desired result of torpedoing a relationship that would have collapsed on its own anyway.
• Rhetta: This brings us to the third of our boy’s love interests. He’d first met her working as a bag boy down at Megafoods and, well, went through the typical crap high school kids who take things way too seriously do. Even the rough patch wherein he bleated pathetically about his being a bug on a windshield because she (dun-dun-DUNNNNN!!!!!) said they should go on break while they were at University was something you could legitimately claim was realistic. If, in the year 1995, you had asked me what would be happening in the year 2010, I’d have told you that they’d be married and living a quiet, orderly life off camera. Every so often they’d show up to remind us that the Pattersons had adult children but the strip itself would be about John, Elly and their teen-aged foil.

That, of course, was before Mike had witnessed a motor vehicle accident and more or less forced a victim of PTSD to marry her stalker. To justify this, Lynn has revised history in order to make it look as if their union was destined; the end result, of course, was to make what was normal and healthy into an exercise in abnormal psychology.