Attack Of The Black Rectangles

Mac’s mom’s blue mug symbolizes the damage Mike has caused for Mac’s family when he smashes it due to his anger without remorse. The mug often served as the beginning of many stories about Mac’s grandmother and was a cherished possession for his mom. Mike understands the mug’s significance and destroys it anyway, further symbolizing the image Mac has of the state of his family. Like the pieces of his grandmother’s mug, Mac struggles to feel as though his family is a cohesive unit.

The blue mug also serves to represent the strong family relationships that do exist for Mac, his mom, and his grandad. They maintain their support, love, and mutual respect for each other in the way that his mom continued to do with her mother’s memory through the mug’s presence. That Mac’s mom kept the mug illustrates her investment in and love for her family, an attribute that was passed from Mac’s grandad to his mom and to Mac himself.

Mac frequently says that he feels like an “office guy” when he is not processing his feelings well or is interacting with others in a stiff, unnatural way. To him, feeling like an “office guy” is a metaphor for being unemotional and avoidant. When Mac struggles to process his emotions, he does not feel like himself and has difficulty talking about his feelings and the challenging things in his life without feeling shame. Grandad helps Mac process his feelings instead of just filing them away, like a folder in a filing cabinet. One method in which grandad does this is to introduce Mac to punk music, a genre built on the ethos of questioning authority and rejecting social expectations. He also encourages him to be open about his emotions by talking about what he is ashamed of, crying openly, and meditating to take care of his mental and emotional health. Through these strategies, Grandad helps Mac feel more like himself and less like an office guy.

Grandad's car is an important symbol in the novel, as it connects to Mac’s relationships with his grandad and his dad and represents truth versus the omission of details, an ongoing conflict in the book. Mac’s dad often comes over on Saturdays, works on the car, and tells Mac that the car is really his spacecraft because he is an alien just visiting earth to learn about humans. Mac accepts this explanation because it helps explain his father’s strange behavior and lack of emotion or empathy for others. His father sometimes wakes him up in the middle of the night to take him for a ride, or flight, and the car is one of the few places where Mac indulges in his father’s alternate reality. When Mac’s dad takes the car and disappears, he tells his mom and grandad what his dad told him about the car being a spacecraft and him being an alien. The omission of information finally stops, and Mac feels simultaneous relief and confusion that the car is just a car. His father’s fixation on a vehicle for escape ironically lends a sense of hope for Mac that his father has legitimate reasons for his actions. When the car is returned to Mac’s grandad and Mac sees his baseball gear still in the car, it represents a shift back to the structure he has craved. For Mac, the car represents both the stability of his grandad and the instability of his father.