Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Dan Casey

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• The bacchanal has begun on the Thursday OPEN thread
• Marketing the mayor in his other job as a legal beagle

You should buy stock in a pet store corporation.

This conclusion is based on the recent addition of a new member to the Casey household.

His name is Rocky, and he is a bearded dragon. (Unless he turns out to be a she, in which case her name will be Rockette).

Rocky belongs to my 11-year-old son, Zach.

Short long story: On May 1, we participated in the Mayor's Bike Ride, then we went down to the chili festival and then back to the farmers market.

We were hanging out there when a young woman came by with a fat, foot-long lizard clinging to her shoulder. She told us it was a bearded dragon.

It was tan and far uglier than your average sewer rat. It seemed remarkably sanguine given the hustle and bustle of the market that day.

Alas, she let Zach hold the beast. And he fell in love with it.

It was all Zach talked about for the rest of Saturday. When my wife got home from work that evening, he was still at it.

By then, he had priced the critter at a local pet emporium, figured out what to feed it (crickets and green leafy vegetables) and was doing a full-court press on both of us.

Baby bearded dragons, which are the size of a righteous salamander, run about $35.

They eat pea-sized live crickets, four to five a day, at 10 cents a cricket, or about $15 a month. Of course, you need a cage.

Anyway, Zach had saved up a bankroll that was way more than enough to cover everything.

We thought.

So Sunday afternoon Zach filled his pockets with his small fortune and he and my wife, Donna, ventured to the pet store to buy a bearded dragon.

Giving our house a total of two, including yours truly.

As it turns out, you can't buy merely the dragon and crickets and cage (a 50-gallon aquarium).

You also have to buy a cage for the crickets. And cricket food so those don't die before you can feed them live to the lizard.

You also need calcium/vitamin D3 dust to put on the crickets, for bearded dragon bone development. And three kinds of lights to keep them warm, and the hardware to mount them.

Plus a book on how to care for them.

And because Donna is into interior decorating, well, a bare cage won't do. It has to be done up in a desert motif.

"They're from Australia," she said. "You have to make it feel at home."

Here, in our Southwest Virginia basement.

So, they did some interior decor shopping at the pet store, too.

A fake hollowed out log. And a fake Flintstones-like stone structure. A dragon poop pad, whatever that is. A hunk of real driftwood, and plenty of moss, and two small dishes, one for water and the other for leafy greens.

The bottom line: $313. Which (you knew this was coming) was way more than Zach's $193 bankroll.

He is now flat broke and committed to many chores this summer.

Meanwhile, we are committed to actually paying for crickets for the next eight to 10 years, as tiny Rocky matures into a 2-foot-long adult bearded dragon behemoth.

If car dealers ran their business like this, a $20,000 car would cost you $198,000 before you drove it off the lot.

And that is why you should buy stock in a pet store corporation.

But don't buy a bearded dragon.

Our cat already is licking his chops at that thing.