Witch Way to Ride
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 can be seen here. I highly recommend it.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to the Secret Symbols in this week’s Sunday comic, above.
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Hey, Jazz Pickles. Olive Oyl, our two dog ladies, and I just returned from a couple of weeks’ vacation on a remote beach in Mexico. It sounds exotic but rustic is a more fitting adjective.
I call it remote because the nearest village was 20 minutes away by car and was only a surf town with a handful of shops, restaurants, and small motels. The whole town resides along about a mile stretch of straight road; you literally can’t get lost unless you leave the pavement and drive off into the trees.
The house we rented was simple: there was a gas stove and a fridge but no oven, no microwave, no coffeemaker, dishwasher, washer or dryer, television, or way to keep flying insects and lizards out of the kitchen. In fact, a stray dog walked into our kitchen one afternoon and stole a big bag of bread. We saw him trotting jauntily down the beach with it in his mouth.
The beach was wide and sandy with big, dramatic boulders strewn about as though someone was staging a postcard shoot. The water was both clear and blue, a trick only the ocean seems to be able to pull off. Swimming pools try to but it always seems forced and phony.
The foot traffic on this beach hasn’t increased much in thousands of years. You could watch it all day long and not see more than ten people walk by. Tragically, an occasional teenager would zoom down the beach on a motorcycle making me sorry I’d left my sniper rifle at home, but to be honest, with the roar of the surf you could barely even hear them.
You can call it a house but only by a liberal definition of the word. It looks like a house in photos but in person, you can see that the largest living area—comprising a large dining room table and sideboard, a sofa fronted by a large, low coffee table, two end tables, a couple of chairs, and some lamps is under a giant palapa which is held up by posts on three sides, not walls. The bedrooms and kitchen are indoors and capable of being closed off at night, but the living areas are all outside. I don’t know about the hot or rainy seasons, but in January, the weather is perfect and we felt a bit like the Swiss Family Robinson. A couple of hammocks flanked the sofa and they did not go unnapped in.
A highlight for me was that there was always a delightful breeze but never a hint of wind. That distinction is important because I love a breeze but hate hate hate wind. To me, wind feels like an invisible bully flicking my face with his fingers and tousling my hair. I can’t stop him because I can’t see him. It makes me want to tell the principal on him and get him sent to detention but I’m afraid he’d beat me up after school with a tornado or typhoon.
As I mentioned in last week’s post, the Internet was as rustic as the “house”; more akin to 1990s dialup than what we’re all used to these days. It was frustrating but it made us realize how much we rely on the Internet for everything. Are the restaurants in that town down the road open on Mondays? Dunno. No Internet. Is there a place around here to rent some snorkel gear or a boat? Dunno. No Internet. Is this red spot on my foot a blood blister or a flesh-eating virus? Dunno.
Without reliable Internet, it is also very hard to keep track of the super incredibly important things that people email to you every ten seconds all goddam day. You might at first think lousy Internet is the perfect excuse for ignoring emails but you immediately realize that you’ll just have that many more crashing in on you when you get home like an avalanche of dirty socks that should have been washed days ago. Like annoying relatives, emails don’t just “go away,” you have to answer or delete them.
As for the dog ladies, they were in doggy heaven. Our place was just a house on the beach and there were no fences or barriers, so they had the world at their doorstep. Both enjoyed playing in the surf, racing or strolling up and down the beach, and rolling in every dead thing the tide brought in the night before. They loved the beach so much more than our boring stupid house in town that you could see it in their faces. They absolutely did not want to come home with us but since we put the dog food and snacks in the car they had no choice.
O2 and I had a deeply nourishing time that really rebooted us. We both tend to work seven days a week so getting away now and again is essential. As much as we miss the chill vibes of the beach, we’re happy to be home if only to sleep in our own beds on pillows of our own choosing. I hate to admit it but I’m also enjoying TV and reliable Internet again. Having full access to the conveniences of the modern world has its advantages even if we have to share the place with a couple of mortally morose dogs.
Let’s move on now to Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week…
And the tree stump is your marzipan dessert.
Wayno did a great job with the look on the woman’s face. That exact level of annoyance is hard to portray in a cartoon.
What’s permanent, kid, is how they’ll be financially responsible for your sorry ass until you finally get arrested. Then you’re the state’s problem.
That was usually my approach to working traditional jobs. I was a pretty crappy employee.
His sheets have a horse head print at the bottom.
You can lederhosen to water but you can’t make it toot.
That’s the final bell of our cartoon beerfest, jazz polkas. Thanks for hanging around until the yodeling stopped echoing off the alps. If you enjoyed our brew and want to thank us for offering it without ads or paywalls, please consider the links below.
Until next time, contemplate whether it is culturally insensitive to remark on the comical nature of lederhosen.
BIZARRO SHOP Fun and cheap!
COMICS KINGDOM SHOP (now with Bizarro products!)
… Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels