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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Since my last post, I “celebrated” my sixty-fifth birthday. Milestones like this seem important to us somehow, even though we know that there is no single moment when a gradual thing like aging occurs. One day after a kid’s sixteenth birthday, he is not appreciably more capable of operating a motor vehicle responsibly than he was the day before his sixteenth birthday. (That won’t happen until he is thirty.) But you have to draw the line somewhere, so we almost arbitrarily choose a day on the calendar and say: now you can drive; now you can vote; now you can drink; now you can retire. I didn’t feel nearly as old as I do now when I could call myself sixty-four.

When I was in my late twenties, my (first) wife hated growing older and was dreading her impending thirtieth birthday as though it were dental surgery. From my current location on the elusive, mind-fucking wheel of time, distinguishing between one’s twenties and thirties seems laughable. But I get it; certain years seem to grab us by the throat and make us take special notice. For most, it’s the changing of syllables that gets us: twenty to thirty, thirty to forty, etc. The only reason sixty-five is a big deal is because it has traditionally been considered time to retire. (Left over from a time when most people could afford to retire that young!)

Anyhow, as my wife’s birthday approached, I was an immature jackass (only the adjective in that two-word phrase has changed over time) and well-practiced at the art of tormenting my three sisters, so I enjoyed teasing her about turning thirty. The thing that really cooked her wig was when I pointed out that her thirtieth birthday actually marked the end of her thirtieth year, not the end of her twenties—and that the next day, she’d be starting her thirty-first year. She really hated that.

All these decades later, I’m now feeling a little hoist from my own petard. I didn’t just turn sixty-five, I completed my sixty-fifth year and am now careening into my sixty-sixth. It isn’t as funny now as it was when I teased my wife.

But, at the same time, it almost feels better to get past the ominous, throat-grabbing sound of “sixty-five” and onto an age that no one talks about. Sixty-six isn’t so bad—it’s almost cool; it’s reminiscent of the famed Route 66, two sixes is the highest you can roll on a pair of dice, and 66 is two-thirds of the mark of the Devil. 

To assuage my wrestling match with mortality, I’m trying to fall back on something from the scrapbook of Buddhist concepts I have attempted to tuck into my consciousness: it is always and only ever now. It was never the past and will never be the future, always only now. So it doesn’t matter how much time we have behind or ahead. All that matters is now. What am I going to do with it?

First, I’m going to nurse the hangover that resulted from last night’s attempt to escape the throat hold of reaching “retirement age.” After my head clears, do I plan to retire? Not a chance. I’ve been profoundly blessed to be able to combine my work with my play. There’s nothing I’d rather do than write and draw, so I will continue to do that for as long as I can get away with it. 

Regardless of how I feel about sixty-five, we should stop using it to refer to retirement age.  Almost nobody can afford to retire that early anymore since Rupert Murdoch succeeded in convincing a large portion of the United States that asking the absurdly rich to contribute to supporting the society that made them absurdly rich is somehow morally objectionable. Whatever—lo que sea será. The elusive, mind-fucking wheel of time rolls on.

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We now join our regularly scheduled week of Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons, already in progress…

If you’ve never driven a banjo, you don’t know what you’re missing.

She’ll be replaced by AI soon enough, as will the person she’s talking to.

If you’re like me and too lazy to make real waffles, just crush up some waffle cones and put syrup on them.

Soon to be a minor motion picture.

To hear their first album on repeat, just take a walk in the country.

Leave the one that looks like Macaulay Culkin. It’ll be hilarious.

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