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 Go Through Old Photos and Weep Day

8 months philmaggitti bookof-daze

A trio of two men and a woman. — “Will the real …?”

On Book of Daze Go Through Old Photos and Weep Day, a bittersweet day of remembrance, we scroll through old photos–digital, printed, or burned into our retinas–and descend into a nostalgia trap lined with bad haircuts, dead friendships, and exes who still haunt our Spotify algorithms like unpaid ghosts demanding royalties.

Whispering, “What happened to me?” while zooming in on a blurry beach photo from 2013 is a fine way to begin Book of Daze Go Through Old Photos and Weep Day, which goes fist-in-glove with National Self-Flagellation Day. If that vision doesn’t sink your boat, try staring at group pics and guessing which of those people are now in jail, married to chiropractors, or running for school board on a platform of “Bring Back Jell-O Shots.”

Because an old-photos emotional death spiral can be triggered by as little as a single bowl-cut image, experts warn against mixing Book of Daze Go Through Old Photos and Weep Day’s activities with alcohol, Drake playlists, or late-night DM fiascos. Side effects may include texting an ex, “Hey, weird question, but do you remember if I looked hot in cargo shorts?”

For the pros, there’s the advanced technique: pausing a slideshow on that one cursed photo where your eyes are half-closed, your teeth resemble a picket fence, and you appear to be auditioning for a reboot of The Walking Dead.

Although few but the most masochistic practitioners can close this day on anything resembling a high note, we mortals can at least reopen a hideous, makes-us-want-to-claw-our-eyes-out image and say out loud: “I forgive you. But never again.” Or, failing that, just hit the delete key and pretend you were never twelve years old with frosted tips.

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.