Foobonia and Points West.

The other interesting part of the traditional Patterson holiday celebration is how they celebrate New Year's Eve. While most of us picture John and Elly sitting at home on the couch grumbling about how it's just another night, there was a time when the Pattersons were allegedly more social on the evening of the thirty-first day of December. As we're seeing right now, it used to be that the Pattersons would either head out so that John and Elly could feel terribly awkward in a social setting that intimidated the Hell out of them or have people over so that they could feel terribly inadequate. Around about three years from now, John decides to grow up and quit pretending that he likes doing this sort of thing. Not only is it too much to ask for him to stay up past ten at night, he and Elly really don't like to be in largish crowds.

That being said, were we to roll the curtain back up on the Pattersons right now, it seems to me that Michael has made much the same decision for much the same reasons. After all, he's pretty much the same age Elly was when she signed on to the let's just stay in thing and he too associates large gatherings with lots of booze and noise with his carefree youth. He's responsible now and knows better. Not for him the crazy partying that Liz and April are respectively forced to endure and anticipate, no way. That part of his life is done because he's looking through eight eyes now. He's probably joined in being a stick in the mud by a wife who desperately wants to avoid emphasizing that there's a fact about the Holidays that she'd prefer to keep hidden: the fact that she and Mike scammed the Hell out of Mira for a stupid, self-serving reason.

Of course, Phil isn't the only person who wages a mighty war on straw so as to keep himself from seeing a reality that would make him far less cool a dude than he'd like to think he is. The Patterson closest to him in looks and temperament also struggles valiantly against his own array of windmills that he mistakes for monsters. Let's see what form the monsters Mike isn't really fighting take so as to see what truth about himself he wishes to not see.

It seems to me that his melodramatic over-reaction to Martha's being forced to reveal a secret when he'd have not had that happen is the perfect jumping off point. Our boy simply did not want to listen to any 'excuse' she might make about how her posse didn't care a fart in a high wind about his feelings. He was sure that the only reason that she pretended to like him in the first place was so that she could humiliate him and laugh at him for daring to think that he too could have what other people have.

Time and again, the old hobgoblin about how people were only using him so that they could kick him in the face and tell him that no one was ever going to like him and he should just accept being shoved off into a corner and end up only being remembered when people want to laugh a malicious laugh at that kid EVERYONE hates for no reason would arise to screw up his life. The problem is that on some level, Michael has to believe this sort of rubbish rather than face harsh truths that 'cannot' be true:

• "I am a very pessimistic person who always expects the worst in any situation."


• "I find it very difficult to trust the people around me."


• "I despise having to do things that don't interest me."


• "I take a sick delight in the misery of people who get in my way."


• "I would rather not accept responsibility for my mistakes and bad behaviour."


• "I find it difficult to sympathize with other people because since their pain is not my own, it can't really be said to matter."


• "I am not really especially curious as to why people do what they do."


• "I hate the idea that people can do what they want without running it by me first."


• "I am filled with the desire to tyrannize and humiliate that I ascribe to others."


• "I am primarily motivated by envy."


• "I hate the idea that other people can get attention when it's all supposed to be for me."


• "Deep down, I really do think that I'm the only person who matters and people only exist to do what I want."

Again, we have to deal with the same sort of self-serving bias that makes Phil go out of his way to not see that maybe Elly has a point about his immaturity and stupidity being shrugged off because he's got a Y chromosome. Michael does not especially want to see that when people do things that hurt him, it isn't actually personal because he doesn't like to think of himself as the sullen, antagonistic dipshit we know him to be. Being forced to finally confront the fact that he would have fought with a little brother because his fragile little ego simply cannot deal with competition would leave him with the same impossibility that Phil would have to deal with in that he'd be stuck wondering how to rebuild a life wasted on whining about nothing.