Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Heartbreaker or heartbroken?

GL

Gert Lampley, retired apology archivist

Currently avoiding Dayton, OH

Heartbroken. Heartbreak gives a person depth, posture problems, and one drawer full of things that should have been thrown away during the Clinton administration. Heartbreak is not pleasant, but at least it comes with receipts.

VC

Vance Cribble, certified exit strategist

Last seen near a bus station in Reno, NV

Heartbreaker. Not proudly, but efficiently. Some people end relationships with long talks and herbal tea. I prefer a clean emotional incision, followed by relocation and a new email address no one deserves.

SL

Shonda Leek, municipal tenderness inspector

Allegedly stationed outside Utica, NY

Both, obviously. First you break someone’s heart by being honest, then your own breaks because honesty turns out to be less freeing than advertised. Love is just a minor clerical error with candles.

Book of Daze: National White Van Day℠

6 years philmaggitti bookof-daze

an image

Baltimore, MD—Mayor Bernard “Jack” Young urged citizens not to park near white vans because “evil, evil people in white vans” are trolling the city searching for young women to enslave, force into prostitution, and murder, before selling their body parts, the ones that haven’t been worn out by prostitution, to Dark Web laboratories.

“We’re getting multiple reports of human monsters in white vans, I’m told, so we have to be really, really careful,” said Mayor Young, according to WBAL-TV. When a reporter asked the mayor who had told him about the human monsters in the white vans, he replied sarcastically, “It’s all over Facebook.”

A CNN report, corroborating Mayor Young’s assertion, located viral postings of the white van narrative, which appeared to have begun with a November 13 Facebook post. In it a Baltimore woman claimed that two men in a white van outside a convenience store “would not stop staring” at her. Those two men were “part of a bigger story,” she wrote. “I don’t think they were two random guys.”

an image

As the predicable backlash occurred—vigilantes in cars spraying white vans with gunfire—Mayor Young reminded his city, “We’re not the Baltimore Bullets any more. Besides, what if there was active, depraved assaults in progress in those vans? If you’re seeing what we’re not saying, put it on Facebook instead.

Next Ellen: Why are no young men being abducted by white vans?

Browse the full Book of Daze

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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 disguised as poetry may induce brief clarity, misplaced certainty, and the sense that something has already been decided without your approval.

There is a moment, just before sleep,
when the mind loosens its tie
and admits what it spent all day denying.

Read It All

There is a moment, just before sleep,
when the mind loosens its tie
and admits what it spent all day denying.

You remember the thing you said—
not the words,
but the angle of them,
how they leaned slightly wrong
and stayed there.

A life is not ruined in grand gestures.
It goes soft at the edges first.
Corners round off. Standards blur.
You start calling things “fine”
that would have once kept you awake.

Which is the problem.

Because now you do sleep.

Beautifully. Efficiently.
Like someone who has made a series of
very small, very reasonable surrenders
and arranged them into a pillow.