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.

Book of Daze Panicked Awakening Day

9 months philmaggitti bookof-daze

A young woman waking up in a panic. — “Holy (crud).”

“What time is it?! What day is it?! Who the hell am I?!”

Welcome to Book of Daze Panicked Awakening Day. Historians trace the origin of this electrifying holiday to 1974, when U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz reportedly sat bolt upright at 3:43 a.m. and shouted “THE SOYBEANS!” He had not, in fact, forgotten the soybeans–but the emotional damage of the panic awakening was done. The incident was scrubbed from official records but lives on in legend as the First Panicked Awakening.

Book of Daze Panicked Awakening Day is beloved by teachers who didn’t grade anything all marking period, office workers who skipped mandatory training, and middle-aged dads who remember–too late–that it’s Aunt Sharon’s birthday. It is observed in three distinct phases:

Awakening in terror, sitting bolt upright, adrenaline pumping, convinced you’ve ruined your life. The fumbling phase, grabbing your phone, flipping through calendars, emails, dreams, and moral failings. The sigh of relieved emptiness, realizing nothing was due today.

Kristen Bell confessed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that she once woke up convinced she had forgotten her own wedding. She had already been married for three years. “I got out of bed and started putting on mascara,” she said. “I don’t even wear mascara.”

If you don’t have a wedding to forget, you can celebrate today by checking your inbox twelve times in a row without finding new information; googling your own name followed by “deadline”; or sending a preemptive apology email for something that may or may not exist

For hardcore observers, there’s the full-body ritual: bolt upright at 3 a.m., whisper “No. No. No. No.” into your hands, then spiral until dawn. If you’re lucky, the thing you forgot will turn out to be completely imaginary. If not–well, there’s always next year.

Book of Daze Panicked Awakening Day reminds us that memory is a trickster god, and our sense of peace is only leased month-to-month.

Browse the full Book of Daze

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.