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 past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post I recommend highly.

And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to the Secret Symbols.

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Next weekend, I hope to become an adult. 

As a child, I dreamed of doing so for what seemed a millennium. I yearned for the myriad freedoms of adulthood: choosing your own bedtime, spending money however you like, wearing whatever you want, buying booze, skipping church forever. And, later—after copping a few sweaty teenage gropes—the grand prize of adult agency: living with your lover and having sex whenever the mood struck, anywhere in your very own domicile that you feel like!

What I didn’t know about adulthood then, was everything that anyone over a certain age knows all too well: you can choose your own bedtime as long as you can report to your job on time; you can wear what you like only when you’re not wearing your stupid work uniform; you have to share your apartment with others because you cannot afford one of your own; you can spend your money however you like but there’s nothing left after rent and food; you can skip church but your Sunday morning hangover ruins the fun of it. And regarding the topic of sex whenever, wherever you feel like it; your lover (if you can find one) has to feel like it, too. And on the rare occasion when that happens, your roommates are listening.

I was in such a rush to enjoy all of these things (of which I had no realistic concept) that I got married at twenty-one (the age, not the restaurant) after only a few months of dating. In no time, I crashed headlong into the-realistic-tunnel-the-Roadrunner-painted-on-a-concrete-wall that is the difference between “love” and “infatuation.” 

I had no idea that the person I thought I’d fallen in love with only existed in my mind, not in the biological bag of meat and fluids and synapses and thoughts and desires and insecurities and trauma and hopes and dreams that I had married. Getting to know her under the harshly lit microscope of reality was a bumpy ride. 

It turned out she was not the fairy tale porn princess I had imagined, free of imperfections or weaknesses and always ready to make me happy. She was a real person who casts shadows and farts in her sleep. Worse yet, she seemed to believe our problems were the result of faults in me, of all people.

Some years later, we gave up and parted ways. Some years after that, I found the perfect partner and married again. To find out how that turned out, go back and read the previous two paragraphs.

By this time, I was twice divorced and middle-aged, and had been what most people would call an “adult” for three decades. But I still didn’t feel like one.

My parents were examples of what I’d always called adults and I saw very little similarity between myself and them. I didn’t shave every day, I didn’t wear a suit and tie to work, I didn’t drag my kids to church every Sunday, I didn’t think marijuana was dangerous, I didn’t marry my high school sweetheart and celebrate sixty-some anniversaries. Would I have to do that kind of stuff to feel like an adult?

Olive Oyl and I are now ten years into the relationship which became my third marriage, her second. We’ve learned through a combination of experience, study, and slamming into tunnels painted on walls, that we all have what depth psychology calls a “shadow.” It’s the dark side of our psyches that we hide from society and—more importantly—ourselves. Our shadows are unpleasant, selfish, perverse, violent, ugly, and more, and we all have one. And there is almost no better way to get to intimately know someone else’s shadow than to marry them.

Somewhere in the mud as I crawled through the trenches of the battlefields of my past marriages I came across this nugget of wisdom: Love is a choice, not a feeling.

Why is this not a mandatory part of seventh-grade curriculum? 

Infatuation is the feeling we confuse for love, and it passes like a butterfly in a hurricane because it is entirely our projection of who we want someone to be, and will resemble the real person little, if at all. To stay in a relationship past that initial tempest, you have to get to know your partner’s shadow and choose to love them anyway. And if you want them to do the same for you, you need to get to know yours.

Olive Oyl and I have learned through our shadow explorations that, yes, we’re both hiding some monsters in the dark. But the love we’ve found for each other despite them has been worth the journey. We’ve also learned that my first wife was right—I was an unmitigated asshole. Admitting that to myself doesn’t mean I’m no longer capable of being one, but I am now able to recognize it when it happens and apologize sincerely. Olive says that makes me a mitigated asshole, and I take that as a compliment.

I don’t anticipate wearing a tie to work or dragging my adult children to church anytime soon, but in less than a week, I will have my sixty-fifth birthday. Will that make me an adult, or will I just skip adulthood and go straight to “geezer?” Time will tell.

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As I stop keeping track of my age by removing every mirror in my house, let’s scroll down together to see what wisdom Wayno’s week of Bizarro cartoons has to impart…

Watch the amazing documentary My Octopus Teacher, and join me in never eating a cephalopod again.

“Sumo wine?”

“Okay, just one more glass.”

His band is called “Melville and the Wailers.”

Dirty chess joke: If he picks up the check and doesn’t get to mate, will he feel rooked?

Changing channels takes days.

I think a fun flashmob would be if a few hundred people in the atrium of a shopping mall suddenly ripped their clothes off and were all dressed like Waldo.

We’re done, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for your eyes. As Wayno lays out in his post this week, Bizarro lost another batch of newspaper clients last week as the newspaper industry continues to crumble. As our incomes shrink, we won’t be able to post cartoons for free for much longer, I’m afraid. Please consider helping us stay in the game via one of the links below. We’ll thank you with 18-carat gratitude!

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