Voluntary Victims
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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Hey there, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for spending a few seconds of your life with us.
I admit that I am perplexed by gambling. When I was growing up, it wasn’t legal in most places in the U.S. outside of Nevada, and certainly not in Baptist-run Oklahoma, where we lived. My only exposure to the topic was in TV shows and movies about seedy characters in big city basements and back alleys. When I watched those kinds of shows, I never imagined my parents as characters in them.
But when, to my profound surprise, Indian casinos began opening in Oklahoma in 2004, it became one of my retired parents’ favorite activities, minus the seedy, big-city element. Like most people, they occasionally won and usually lost; gaming systems are mathematically designed to provide that occasionally/usually equation with calculated accuracy.
I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to support a family by writing jokes and drawing pictures, and it hasn’t always been easy to make ends meet. So my cursory understanding of casino math combined with knowing how hard money is to come by have kept me from seeing the appeal of gambling.
The puzzling thing is that my dad is much better at math than I am. He has a couple of degrees—engineering, and finance—and made those fields his career. In contrast, my mind does not lean in that direction enough even to correctly fill out the application forms for schools that teach those things. They’d likely take one look at the various colors of crayons and markers I used to fill it out, and the weird little characters I’d drawn in the margins as my mind wandered, and relegate my application to the bulletin board in the break room. I imagine humor can be hard to come by in the admissions office of an engineering program.
Dad is fully aware of how small his chances of winning are but assures me that this tiny possibility is worth the money he knows he’ll lose. That must be engineering logic because it escapes me completely.
My parents are not addicted to gambling by any means, they just enjoy playing the noisy, colorful, flashing games enough to drop a few bucks on them a couple of times each month.
The “noisy, colorful, flashing” part of casinos is the final nail in the coffin for me. Those places feel to me like an LSD trip gone horribly wrong. I could barely stand to pass through a casino if it was the only escape route from a fire, much less remain in one while giving my money to strangers who most definitely do not need it. (To get an idea of the profit margin casinos enjoy, consider how much it would cost to decorate your home that way.)
In writing this, however, I realized that dropping out of college against my parents’ adamant objections and trying to make a living as an artist was a far greater risk than occasionally plopping down a few bucks on games of chance. It was often a tough and scary road, but I managed to make it work, and the rewards have been worth it. My dad, on the other hand, followed his father’s advice and got degrees that assured him a career in fields that he did not, ultimately, find satisfying. I now wonder which of us was more comfortable with risk.
I’m thrilled that Native Americans have found a way to recover some of what European colonists took from them—albeit not a remotely even exchange. Whatever your thoughts on gambling, it would seem that opening a casino is a much smaller risk than visiting one.
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It doesn’t take engineering logic to realize that you’ll get more bang for your buck with a $5 monthly subscription to my writing project The Naked Cartoonist. You’ll get four or five essays each month with humor, survival philosophy, cartoons and art, and none of the noisy, flashing lights of a casino. And nobody will mug you in the parking lot afterward.
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There’s a much higher probability of finding a few chuckles in Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week than hitting a jackpot during a seizure-inducing visit to a casino. Let’s do that now…
Wayno didn’t use the caption “Extreme Streaming” because it invokes images of an elephant that has consumed too much beer.
Anyone else hearing the theme song from Green Acres?
In Xtreme Voodoo, they use javelins.
When I was in high school, an art therapist looked at some of my art and said I was obviously into recreational drugs. At the time, I was sanctimoniously drug-free. I didn’t start using psychedelics until my fifties, and even then, it was not for art inspiration.
The same will be true for your next psychotherapy session.
The next one certainly will be.
With metaphorical tears in our eyes, we say goodbye until next week. Thanks for suffering through this small stretch of reality with us. If you enjoy our work and appreciate that we offer it for free, please consider helping us keep it that way via the links below. We will be truly and deeply grateful.
The Naked Cartoonist…My weekly subscription newsletter of humorous creative writing, photos, art, videos & more.
… Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
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