I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, a short essay, and then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner Wayno, whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.

And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.

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Greetings, Jazz Pickles. How did your first week of the new year go? Mine was remarkably similar to most weeks last year, which leads me to believe that perhaps there is no special significance to the exact day we celebrate the new year. Food for thought.

For years, I pooh-poohed New Year’s hoopty-doos as celebrations of “another random moment in time.” But I now find it meaningful to commemorate another circuit around the sun. In the past ten years, I’ve become a big advocate of paying attention to my relationship to the cosmos, and it has improved my life. I have a lot less existential angst, and I’m less self-critical. Both benefits are due to a fundamental realization that in the big picture, nothing about my life really matters. 

That sounds negative and it certainly could be if you think of it a certain way. But in another sense, it’s a terrific relief: My mistakes and shortcomings no longer amount to anything worth getting upset about.

It’s natural to become transfixed with what’s going on in our personal bubbles: deadlines, debts, responsibilities, chores, ambitions, obligations, regrets, and so on. But when we note our utterly brief and microscopic existence in this infinite universe, it can change our perspective. 

The image below, which I‘ve never been able to find attribution for, impressed me and made me laugh.

I think our inability to see the Milky Way at night (too much ambient artificial light) has changed us. When nights were truly dark, humans were hard-pressed to ignore the billions of visible stars, which instantly connected them to something much bigger than them and their lives. It also filled the human species with wonder and mystery. Curiosity about the sky may have been the seed that gave birth to the entire field of science.

Now, even way out in the suburbs of an average city, I’d guess less than a hundred stars are still visible. It is no wonder we have so much trouble keeping a big-picture perspective on our lives. 

That’s my Sunday pontification for this week. I’d be embarrassed by my pompous bloviating if the Universe weren’t so big. 

Before we move on to Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week, a quick update on the newsletter project. We’ve cleared another technological obstacle so I may be able to launch sometime this week. Fingers crossed!

And now the rest of the chuckles…

I can sympathize. I’ve been an H-D all my life.

The old “bad ponyhood” defense.

I don’t care much for fish in my coffee but I see why he likes it.

He later developed crunch berries and they proved incurable.

My grandparents were Sicilian and would not have given him a second chance.

I don’t see either of them. Who is talking?

That concludes today’s comedy clambake. If you enjoy what we do and that we don’t charge you for it, please help us keep it that way via the links below. We’ll dance like drunken ballerinas in gratitude.

Until next week, don’t drink and dance.

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My wife, Olive Oyl’s art, writing, and photography