Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Passion or stability?

MD

Mavis Drouk, emotional escrow officer

Believed to be near Harrisburg, PA

Stability. Passion is what people choose when they still believe a staircase can be made entirely of sparks. Stability may not sing outside your window, but it does remember where the insurance cards are.

RC

Rufus Clenn, freelance thunder consultant

Last reported west of Tulsa, OK

Passion, obviously. Stability is just boredom wearing shoes with arch support. I want life to arrive late, smell faintly of lightning, and explain nothing until several lamps have been broken.

NV

Nora Vell, deputy curator of small regrets

Possibly sheltering in Eugene, OR

Passion is useful for beginnings, stability for the paperwork afterward. I prefer both in moderation, which is another way of saying I would like to be ruined briefly and then driven home safely.

Book of Daze: Don’t Trust Your Doctor Day

4 weeks philmaggitti bookof-daze

Illustration for Don’t Trust Your Doctor Day showing a skeptical patient in an exam room citing a phone while a tired doctor listens. — Nothing says wellness like arguing with a doctor using evidence from a woman who sells mushroom powder.

Don’t trust your doctor day was inspired by the modern patient’s highest calling: arriving at a professional appointment after six minutes of internet research and behaving as if the physician is merely there to validate what was already discovered between an ad for fish oil and a message-board thread from 2011.

Formerly, people went to doctors for answers. Now they go for a second opinion after the first opinion was supplied by a wellness influencer named Kelsey who cured her fatigue by eliminating joy, dairy, and all vegetables that cast doubt on her journey.

Medicine, unfortunately, has become too complicated to inspire confidence. Every diagnosis sounds either terrifying or made up. Every prescription comes with a side-effects list that reads like a doomed Victorian diary. Every office visit ends with a handout nobody reads and a copay that suggests you have financed a midsized car.

Naturally people adapted. We now approach medical expertise the way we approach airline gate announcements: with suspicion, selective hearing, and a quiet certainty that we ourselves could do a better job if given access to the microphone.

Observe don’t trust your doctor day by questioning every recommendation, preferably while mispronouncing the name of your condition. Ask whether your symptoms could instead be “systemic inflammation,” “toxins,” or mercury retrograde. Nod politely at the doctor, then ignore the advice and do exactly what a podcaster with excellent lighting told you to do. For added authenticity, begin at least one sentence with, “I am not against science, but…” Spend the rest of the day seeking reassurance from people with no medical training whatsoever. By evening, declare yourself cautiously optimistic about a treatment plan involving celery, resentment, and magnesium.

Browse the full Book of Daze →

The preceding is satire. Straight up, Skippy. No warranties are expressed or implied. For life advice, try a professional. For investment tips, try a dart board. For salvation, the gentleman in the robe has been handling that portfolio for 2,000 years.

The Pug Bus Breaking News

The Pug Bus Breaking News requires no email address, no mother's maiden name, no first pet's nickname, and no DNA sample. You simply mash the link below and read.

Deliver It

⚡ Scholars at the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Obvious Things have concluded, after eleven years of exhaustive inquiry, that people who speak at great length in meetings do not thereby become more correct. The findings have been submitted to a committee for review.

⚡ It has been determined by authorities in several jurisdictions that the phrase "I just want to be honest with you" reliably precedes the portion of the conversation one would most prefer not to have. Legislation is pending.

⚡ The Bureau of Perpetual Reassessment has announced that this is not, in fact, the most divided the nation has ever been, a distinction that continues to belong to a prior era when the disagreements concerned rather more consequential matters and people occasionally died over them.

Adverse Effects

The following lines of prose cleverly arranged as poetry may induce brief clarity, misplaced certainty, and the sense that something has already been decided without your approval ...

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

Read It All

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

The years do not accuse.
They simply pile up like newspapers you meant to read,
each one carrying news that is no longer news.

You think: I should have said that differently.
I should have stayed. I should have gone.
The mind is efficient this way,
filing the same cases under the same wrong headings,
finding them again at 3 a.m. in perfect order.

What surprises is not the weight of it
but the patience —
how regret waits,
how it has nowhere else to be,
how it sits across from you at breakfast
and asks for nothing,
knowing you will offer it everything
on your own.

The body slows.
The catalog does not.
You carry the unlived lives
the way old houses carry
the smell of people who are gone —
not haunting exactly,
just present,
just there,
just refusing
the simple courtesy
of leaving.