Foobonia and Points West.

As we will eventually learn when Mike and Deanna channel the cowbirds from Pogo and displace John, Elly and April, the Pattersons have the irritating habit of being generous in such a fashion that they inconvenience themselves greatly because they tend to lack the courage to tell people who are in the way to get lost. In the real world, Mike would have been handed the want-ads and told to put on his big-boy pants. In the strip, we get family farm crap and yapping about princesses because Elly wants to not look like the bad guy to people who are screwing with her while not caring about what the victims of her generosity think.

That being said, the very interesting thing about the Fiona saga is that John does something here that he should do later on in life: he arranges matters so that the person disrupting Elly's life by being too vibrant a presence to co-exist with so that she leaves. Sure, his staff think that he ran away and chased something fluffy down a rabbit hole. Sure, he's still wondering why they give him the stink eye and why they mutter about how ill-used Elly is. Of course, Fiona gave them one last middle finger by blowing the deposit at the track.....but at least she is out of Elly's hair and being somewhere Elly wouldn't be seen going to.

The problem is that in the process, they set themselves up to be displaced because Idiot Mike had to sleep in the rec room for a couple of weeks like a weenie. It outraged him so much, he commandeered April's bedroom and shooed the people who made him into a peasant out of their homes.

One of the things one must remember about Elly is her tendency to make a pleasant myth of painful experiences in order to avoid learning from the past. While it might look as if Michael is the only Patterson who was about to transmute the ridiculous and needless clusterfuck that was spending Christmas at a failing family farm in the coldest spot on the continent into a Hallmark Movie Of The Week, we have proof that somewhere in the next two and a half years from now, they'll come to the conclusion that what Mike needs to cure him of "defiance" (by which John means not agreeing with every stupid thing that comes out of his ignorant fucking yap quickly or cravenly enough) and "dangerous attachments" (by which Elly means associating with a girl she doesn't know) is to send him to the Magic Land of Wonder and Enrichment that is a dirt farm because absence has made the depressing stain on the map more delightful the longer they're away from it.

The reason that I mention this is that by the year 2007, it is quite likely that all of the Pattersons who bore witness to the horrid and preventable mess that blighted the Christmas of 1988 have let a fine haze of pea-brained nostalgia blur the past to a more pleasing and less teeth-grindingly stupid shape. Instead of remembering being cheek by jowl with dumbass hicks, they choose to remember the place as a sort of Xanadu filled with love and companionship. This is why, I should think, it made sense to everyone who wasn't April to just crowd into the Pattermanse like idiots and stay until Mike forced Elly to flee her home by waving his brats under her nose. This means that like a lot of stupid things, the Housening is really Danny's fault. If he were a better host, the Pattersons would remember a boring but pleasant time and be less inclined to recreate it.

The interesting thing about the current arc is that Elly thinks that it's pretty much a given that she and John had to give up the master bedroom in order to be seen as good hosts. After all, we had to deal with the fact that she browbeat Mike into sleeping on a crappy air mattress in order to 'prove' to Connie and Lawrence that she and the rest of the family weren't selfish and awful so it's sort of a thing that she lives with the silly expectation that yes, she has to take it up the ass in order to be thought of as a nice person the Quality Women will approve of. This, I should think, is because she has to deal with a father who seems to think that the world is so arranged that he gets the pigs' share of every damned thing who raised a son with a similar insouciant disregard for the rights and wishes of other people and a mother who only ever started to warm to the idea of letting Elly win arguments because looking at her own behaviour from the outside finally made her realize what a total freaking omnishambles she was as Elly's mother.

Sadly, Elly will never have the same epiphany because she's too busy trying to prove herself to her zombified moron parents and is averse to learning things. This means that she's going to repeat inconveniencing herself and her family in the name of being thought of as being good people. While we see a lesser form of the infection in four years time when she and John stupidly decide to save money on a hotel room by cramming everyone into Exile Farm like imbeciles, the ultimate example of her need to make the family's life worse in the name of phony graciousness was the Housening. To this day, she doesn't regret letting Mike dither and take her house away nor does she regret treating April like a piece of furniture no one wanted. Hell, she doesn't even regret letting Liz do her grieving widow dog in a manger lie in a fetal position call April pickyface because she's too bratty and selfish to cope with the real world thing because she's being gracious. The only thing is that she wanted to inconvenience herself without actually being inconvenienced.