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.

“Digging for Digital Ghosts,” An Interview with James Howells

10 months philmaggitti

A baby curiously touching a man's face while he lies on grass. — “Which direction is upwind?”

![A landfill with crime-scene tape and distant industrial fog]
“Please advise: which direction is upwind?”

From the rickety observation deck overlooking the Newport, South Wales landfill – a kingdom of forgotten appliances, expired snacks, and items whose destinies were never properly negotiated – we spoke with James Howells, a man forever linked with one of the most expensive accidental disposals in modern human history.

In 2013 he discarded a hard drive containing 8,000 early-era Bitcoins, then thought to be digital trivia. Today the missing asset is valued at hundreds of millions, depending on the daily mood swings of cryptocurrency markets and whichever billionaire is tweeting from orbit.

Q: How does it feel knowing the search is officially finished?
James Howells:
Like attending a funeral for something that was never truly alive, yet somehow carried my alternate future inside it – a ghost-ship wallet sealed beneath layers of municipal sediment and indecipherable seagull messages. I did not even get visiting-hour rights. The landfill has custody now.

Q: People say fortune favors the brave. Do you agree?
Howells:
Fortune favors whoever labels storage devices more clearly. Courage is wonderful, but it does not help once the bulldozers have sung their final lullaby.

Q: Just to clarify, how did the drive actually vanish?
Howells: Two hard drives. One bag. A moment of tragic overconfidence. Destiny did not shout; it merely whispered, and I misheard the message.

Q: The council has repeatedly denied permission to excavate. Thoughts?
Howells: They cite environmental caution. I cite the environmental consequence of losing an opportunity to retrofit Wales into the world’s largest solar-powered utopia with free public biscuits. We are each correct in different dimensions.

Q: You proposed drones, AI mapping, and robotic canines. Too ambitious?
Howells: Ambition is simply realism that has not been discouraged yet. Besides, if we can map distant galaxies, surely we can map yesterday’s trash.

Q: Did you ever consider unconventional search methods – such as mystics or dowsers?Howells:
I attempted assistance from a professional intuitive consultant. She sensed many things, most of them involving distant ancestors seeking closure and a recommended payment plan.

Q: If the drive were recovered, what would be your first reaction?
Howells: Tears. Possibly interpretive dancing. Definitely a documentary titled Landfill of Lost Futures.

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.