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 Clocks Strike None Day

8 months philmaggitti bookof-daze

An image of a melting clock fasce to illustrate Book of Daze Clocks Strike None Day. — When time called in sick.

ðŸ•°ï¸At precisely 4:32 a.m. the Bureau of Unscheduled Moments issued a silent advisory: all clocks are now considered decorative until further notice. The bureau cited “an excess of temporal ambiguity” and “widespread compulsive clock checking” as the chief causes for the edict.

Subsequently on Book of Daze Clocks Strike None Day, people overslept, and when they awoke, they found that their clocks had been replaced with patches of fog. Scheduled meetings disappeared into the vapor. Deadlines became folklore. When a man attempted to schedule a GrubHub order, the app replied, “Time is a thief, do you want utensils with that?

At the office, Bob in accounting tried to invoice the present moment but he could not see his smart watch or the office clock through the fog. Digital billboards around town displayed misty countdowns to “Now,” which reset whenever somebody blinked. A local weatherman forecasted “perpetual maybe” with a 70% chance of dÃ©jÃ vu. At the DMV, applicants were issued licenses that never expired.

Meanwhile, on Book of Daze Clocks Strike None Day the library sent notices to all patrons informing them that their books were overdue. A man tried to schedule a haircut but was told his hair had already stopped growing. The moon rose at noon and demanded overtime.

The Bureau of Unscheduled Moments has long maintained that time is a consensual hallucination. Today, however, the hallucination refused to cooperate. Trains derailed. Airplanes crashed. The sun punched out early.

In response to these timeless events, the Bureau of Unscheduled Moments recommends that people replace their wristwatches with small, loyal birds, and that they read only books that are not time stamped. And as Book of Daze Clocks Strike None Day unfolds, remember that punctuality is a myth invented by anxious, anal retentive beings.

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.