Book of Daze Archives - Postcards from The Pug Bus

Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Passion or stability?

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.

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.

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.

Reply all accidentally button designed as red nuclear launch mechanism with horrified office worker face, illustrating email disaster moment

One click. Entire company. Eternal regret.

Book of Daze

Book of Daze: Reply All Accidentally Day

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An observance born not of dignity but of humiliation, Reply All Accidentally Day commemorates the most mortifying sort of accident in the digital workplace: One… Read More

A woman reading a work auto reply at her office computer while a semi-transparent coworker-like figure hovers over her shoulder.

"I'll be watching you."

Book of Daze

Book of Daze: Passive-aggressive Work Auto Reply Day

philmaggitti bookof-daze 3 months

Passive-aggressive work auto reply day honors the art of not being at work while remaining inside everyone else’s inbox emotionally. This day is devoted to… Read More

A man walks down a busy street carrying a massive boombox that displays a volume of 130dB, causing a carriage horse to rear up in a state of panic. In the foreground, a wooden sign reads "Don't Frighten the Horses Day," while pedestrians in the background are seen covering their ears to block out the noise.

A local audiophile demonstrates exactly how to fail the Don't Frighten the Horses test.

Book of Daze

Book of Daze: Don’t Frighten the Horses Day

philmaggitti bookof-daze 3 months

Postmodern society has obviously forgotten the golden rule of Victorian decorum: “Don’t frighten the horses.” This was the bedrock of civilization: maintaining a public facade… Read More

A cartoon-style illustration showing a woman in a red car surrounded by four characters—a doctor, a priest in a confessional booth, a police officer, and a jogger—each offering conflicting advice, symbolizing the absurdity of seeking a second opinion from wildly unrelated sources. The background is warm yellow, and the scene is playful and satirical.

Book of Daze

Book of Daze: Second Opinion Day

philmaggitti bookof-daze 3 months

There are days when the universe seems to insist that one opinion is never enough. Today has been declared Second Opinion Day, a civic holiday… Read More

Fake Holidays List illustration featuring a woman with a quizzical look on her face and a calendar on the wall next to her.

Is it September or November that has thirty days?

Book of Daze

The Complete Book of Daze: Fake Holidays List

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Welcome to The Complete Book of Daze, Fake Holidays List a masterful collection of bogus holidays for people who have had it with the “real”… Read More

A weary adult sits on a couch surrounded by phones, spreadsheets, and streaming app icons, visually representing streaming service cancellation chaos and subscription fatigue.

You cancelled three services, upgraded two more, and somehow still ended up back at Netflix.

Book of Daze

Book of Daze: Streaming Service Cancellation Day

philmaggitti bookof-daze 3 months

Streaming service cancellation day was born on February 12, 2019, when Portland resident Marcus Chen received his fourth consecutive monthly charge from Netflix, which he… Read More

A despairing office worker sits in a grey cubicle with his face in his hand, paralyzed by the suspicion that he did forget to lock the front door. A vivid thought cloud above his head illustrates the inevitable consequence: three European badgers wearing floral aprons have invaded his home kitchen. The badgers stand on stools to reach the stove, where one ruins a non-stick skillet with a metal spatula while another pours a box of premium risotto rice into the mix, confirming that the house now belongs to the woodland creatures.

The productivity of the modern worker plummets to zero the moment the brain decides to simulate a culinary takeover by local wildlife.

Book of Daze

Book of Daze: Did You Forget to Lock the Front Door Day?

philmaggitti bookof-daze 4 months

You begin to wonder did you forget to lock the front door the second you are too far away to turn back. This observance is… Read More

A censored illustration of Saint Arthur standing in a town square wearing a lightweight sweater and no pants while extending both middle fingers toward the lens of the CCTV spies monitoring the area.

Celebrate Flip Off the CCTV Day with our comprehensive guide to saluting the CCTV spies in your neighborhood.

Book of Daze

Book of Daze: Flip Off the CCTV Spies

philmaggitti bookof-daze 4 months

CCTV spies are watching. Always watching. They have eyes in the sky, eyes in the supermarket, eyes in the bank and the shopping mall, too.… Read More

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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.