NEW FEATURE ALERT

I have never done this before but this post by my cellie and fellow serial cereal eater TS has inspired me.

With that Lambchop picture I posted yesterday my mind is firmly in the past when PEANUTS was a touchstone for all of us. I had a couple of the treasuries that I read until they fell apart.

The best thing about religion in elementary school was that you could CHOOSE which class you went to. Boring old 'you will burn in hell' Catholic Class or 'Peanuts' slides with music hip and cool Protestant Class which was held in the gym because that was the one everyone went too.

I was Catholic but I learned to just misplace that letter my mom signed to insure I went to Catholic Class. One hour hour of you life on Wednesday afternoon with Father Hobo. Good Lawd! (sorry - that expression seems to have seeped into my vernacular this week)

The Protestant guy was young and he had a wife and kids. His son was my best friend and when I went to his house he always had pop and chips for us and he left us alone in the basement to play our 'rock and roll'. He would check in just to get hip to our 'vibe' but he never 'bummed our play'.

I can only imagine what you got if you went to Father Hobo's 'one room with a hotplate' cell in the bell tower.

Anyway, I digress. The 'Peanuts cartoons', I found, taught lessons about life. This is something TS reminded my about with his post. So I post his post in it's entirety here so that you can read it and my comment (which even for myself is brilliant - don't be hating, I am in love with myself this week).

If you want you can post your comment back at his site or here. No matter. If you aren't at his site you are missing out. I like his blogging because it's so unique and totally different from the way I do it. It's fresh. It's what all the 'cool' kids are into.

So feel free to give your take on the 'gang'. Except I must insist you leave Franklin alone. That kid was 'alright' and 'out of sight'.

(You ever realize that the two black characters we knew - Franklin from 'Peanuts' and Franklin from 'Sesame Street' had the same name? That's how 'the man' kept a brother down back then. Labels baby. Not cool.)


"Review: Peanuts

"Wah wah wah wah wah wah..."

Recognize these words? These are the words of an absent parent.

How many times reading the comics, watching the holiday specials, or the feature movies, did you see an adult actually acting like one? Charlie brown is a child with serious emotional issues. I don't believe in antidepressants (not in a 'Tom Cruise whack job' sort of way), but by today's standards he'd have been on them from birth. Course given the side effects it probably would've ended in a murder suicide with Snoopy.

I highly doubt he even needed therapy though. A simple parental hand on his life might have done the trick. Where's his mother? She's a stay at home mom, but I've never seen her. Charlie's dad? A barber. Barbers do not work that late. I highly suspect him of sowing his oats on other fields. And by sowing his oats I mean sleeping with Linus's mother.

Honestly, how else could you explain the van Pelt mother's absence? A little boy has an unusually strong attachment to a blanket and no one but his sister cares. Speaking of Lucy, she cutely refers to herself as the happy winner of the title "World's Biggest Fussbudget." Meanwhile back at the ranch, everyone of us knows her to be a sociopath who beats on her brother, his friends, her friends, animals, and I bet if we were to see in her room at night when the lights go out, herself. I've often suspected Lucy is a self harmer. Most likely a cutter. She has all the marks of someone who's overcompensating for a lack of self esteem.

Even on holidays the van Pelts seem to have no interest in caring for their children. Lucy and Linus decorate their own eggs for Easter. They Make their own costumes for Halloween. And yes, they put on their own Christmas plays. It goes even further, because Lucy is a substitute parent for Linus, and Linus is a substitute brother for Sally. He's the one who drags her out into the fields at night to wait for his crazy delusions to arrive. The great pumpkin... I would guess the great pumpkin was a story his father told him one night in a drunken stupor. Sadly he's held onto it alongside his blanket, the only pieces of his tattered childhood left.

Pigpen wanders the streets dirty. He has a home, but he has no boundaries, and he has no one looking out for him. Everyone remembers the kid at school who was never clean. Part of you couldn't help but wonder how the parents could allow that child to go to school day after day as dirty as he was. Pigpen's house though is spotless, so I can only assume his parents are more concerned with the material things than with the love of a child.

All the kids in neighborhood are largely ignored by their parents. Well, except in the case of one kid. Schroeder sadly is in a class of his own. You think that talent came naturally so young? Clearly his parents are obsessed with turning him into a piano maestro, even if it's at the cost of his childhood. In the face of adversity, he's managed to play the most elaborate songs on a little more than a toy. It's like a modern day Rumplestiltskin, where he must spin gold from straw.

Yes, peanuts is more than a comic about silly antics from a boy and his dog. It's about neglect, self abuse, adulterous affairs, dissociative disorders, and also Franklin. After spending their lives being ignored, is it any wonder when an adult talks, the children just hear noise?"

"Hey, first of all Linus' Mom was the ORIGINAL MILF. She drank like a trucker and swore like a lumberjack. Smoked two packs and day and gave Lucy the stones to kick ass and take names. Then she went all 'heath kick' and over parented poor Rerun and terrorised him on that damn bike of hers to the point where he was more skittish than a tree lemur with a ten cups of coffee a day habit. Charlie Brown's dad would have been lucky to 'hit dat'.

And don't blame Charlie for his relationship with Sally. She was always the reminder that there was a 'spare' in the next room everytime he screwed up. She had it easy. He had nothing she had to live up to.

I blame that damn delusional dog for not stepping up and giving ol' Charlie a sweet nudge every once in awhile. Think about it. There was a bird and a dog but no cat. How weird is that? Contrary to popular opinion cat's like to be in relationships with dogs. Unless they are unmedicated dogs then it's just too much damn effort.

And Pigpen wasn't dirty. He was just the bad boy. He left the house clean - neglected but clean. Dirt couldn't avoid him - dirt flocked to him like bounty hunters to Han Solo - he was a stallion brother and stallions run free.

Now Schroeder. He was the one who had the real problems. He played that same damn song on that piano and drove himself mad like Chopan. When he wasn't 'tickling the ivories' he was tickling the trigger on his dad's revolver.

And Franklin. I got no problem with Franklin. Kid like that would grow up to be President some day. Now there is a thought."