Pretend Hangovers
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics which I turned over to a colleague, Wayno, in January of 2018. Wayno does a weekly blog post, too, and I highly recommend it.
PRETEND HANGOVERS
You regular readers of my cartoons and blog posts know that I usually post on Sunday. But yesterday I decided to take the day off and watch the NFL playoffs, which carries some wonderful nostalgia for me. I don’t normally write about sports and though I’m doing that today, I hope you’ll find it worth a read even if you’re not a sports fan.
I learned about football at my father’s knee and grew up as a fan of our home team, the Kansas City Chiefs. The Chiefs were a powerhouse back then and won the Super Bowl in 1969, took a 50-year break, then became a powerhouse again recently, winning the championship for the second time two years ago. Yesterday, they were half a game away from returning to the Super Bowl for the third time in as many years. Imagine Dad’s and my excitement!
They’ve played terrifically well in recent weeks and continued that in the first half of yesterday’s game, looking as though they would win handily. Then, in the second half, they thoroughly fell apart. It was as if they’d spent halftime drinking margaritas, smoking pot, and changing into the kind of wooden clogs that they used to wear in Holland. That’s one theory—another is that they were replaced by their siblings, ones who resembled them physically but got none of the family’s athletic genes. Whatever the reason, it was a humiliating catastrophe.
As a fan, I could find no silver lining to this humiliation other than to see firsthand how well my wife and daughters and I might fare should we ever decide to take on the Cincinnati Bengals. Thanks to yesterday’s game, we will be sure to avoid making that mistake.
In my younger adulthood, I let losses like this completely ruin my mood and carried a football hangover with me for the rest of the following week. But I’ve changed.
Some years ago, I realized in a deep way what non-fans of sports already know; it’s all just make-believe and amounts to nothing. That’s no huge revelation, I know, but what perhaps is a little surprising is that that’s actually what makes it fun. The magic of sports is that you can pretend it is important, which gets your adrenaline pumping and triggers your primal instincts but without any lasting consequences—sort of like how rollercoasters are more fun than driving narrow mountain roads at 100 mph. When your team wins, you get a huge chemical rush, as if you have successfully defended your village from a band of huge, bloodthirsty barbarians (in this case, dressed as tigers, for some reason) and now that they lay dead and defeated, you can sit down at the campfire and enjoy dinner with your family. But the best part about it is that you’re only pretending because when you lose, you aren’t actually lying dead, facedown in the mud while your wife and children are taken as slaves back to Cincinnati.
Most of us have known a sports fan whose life is temporarily ruined by a big loss, and I used to be that guy. If that’s you and you’re looking for relief, consider taking a moment to be grateful that all along you were only pretending it was a matter of life and death. In fact, in every aspect of my life, I like to remind myself that almost nothing is a matter of life and death. The number of days in our lives that include a major tragedy are a tiny fraction of the number of days we voluntarily ruin with foul moods by pretending things are more important than they are. In a larger sense, even death probably isn’t as important as we think it is. How much trouble did the billions of years before we were born give us? Why do we suppose that the time after our death will be any more bothersome?
As a friend’s email signature used to say: Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff.
And now let’s have a look at the Bizarro cartoons that my pal, Wayno created while pretending our deadlines were a matter of life and death…
If you’re having trouble with this one, buy a vowel.
Which suggests the question of whether Botox is a comedy or a tragedy. By the look on the recipients’ faces, it’s neither.
Even as a child, I thought that building an entire franchise around a recording gimmick was a stretch.
The bucket from Clam Haus simultaneously makes me chuckle and gag. I can’t stomach any kind of food that lived in water, including seaweed.
Would you rather be thrashed soundly or smited sorely? I'm on the fence.
I’ve always said that skulls make the best gifts. If you’ve not seen Wayno’s blog post this week, check it out. A fan got a tattoo of one of his cartoons, which, in the cartoon business, is considered a form of near-immortality.
And that’s what we have this week. If you enjoy what we do here and that we’re not charging you for it or offending your sensibilities with pop-up ads or clickbait, please help us keep it that way via one of the links below. We’ll thank you from the bottom of our skulls.
Until next week, count your blessings and price them reasonably.
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