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 Ignore Your To-Do List Day

8 months philmaggitti bookof-daze

A man looking at a to-do list. — When life hands you a to-do list, set it on fire.

Origin Story
Book of Daze Ignore Your To-Do List Day was established in 2013 by the Society for the Advancement of Procrastination, a group that insisted the holiday should be celebrated on a random date each year–preferably one you had already marked “Important.” The founders believed that lists are an oppressive technology invented by productivity Nazis to guilt ordinary people into performing unnecessary labor like folding laundry or answering email before 11 p.m.

Current Record Holder for Book of Daze Ignore Your To-Do List Day
The record for longest ignored to-do list belongs to Marlene “Screw It” Prather of Des Moines, Iowa. Her list has remained untouched since 2019 and includes such half-hearted ambitions as “learn Italian,” “clean the garage,” “brush the dog’s teeth,” and “call Mom.” Marlene’s garage has since been declared a wildlife preserve, and her mother has stopped speaking to her.

How to Celebrate on This Day
To celebrate Book of Daze Ignore Your To-Do List Day, write down every single task you need to accomplish today–then place the list in a locked drawer, bury the key, and spend the day doing absolutely anything else. Consider binge-watching a prestige drama you never quite got around to, rearranging your spice rack according to color, or staring into space until you achieve enlightenment. True devotees post pictures of their untouched lists to social media with the caption “Not Today, Satan.”

If you made it this far without checking one item off your list, congratulations, you are already winning Book of Daze Ignore Your To-Do List Day. Tomorrow you may panic and try to catch up, but that is tomorrow’s problem. Today, lean into the chaos.

Browse the full Book of Daze

Find Us Elsewhere
Instagram
X (Twitter)

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.