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: Seat Belt Alarm Silencer Day℠

6 years philmaggitti bookof-daze

The never-ending resistance to the nanny state and to soccer moms everywhere is marked by small but sustaining victories. Folding, spindling, or mutilating where prohibited. Sending contraband through the mail. Swapping prices on items in the supermarket. Little things mean a lot. One massive little thing in the war against those who would tell us how to live is the seat belt alarm silencer. Inserted where that annoying seat belt clip normally goes, this device prevents your car from ding-ding-dinging throughout eternity . . . or until you cave in and fasten your damn seat.

Who hasn’t dreamed of ripping the vocal chords out of the Seat Belt Nanny . . . of strangling that tinny-voiced (woman) into silence? Now you can for the low, low price of $8.28 on Amazon. Brilliant, and even more brilliant, the design of this seat belt alarm silencer allows it to double as a bottle cap opener, which allows you to pop the top on a frostie before setting off in blissful silence.

Don’t order just one of these beasties, however. You’ll need at least two for your car, one for your wife’s car, and a spare for any other car in which you ride.

Warning: if you are unfortunate enough to share a car with a seat belt user, you will have to spend some time training that person to put the silencer back where she found it after using your car; and if you leave a silencer in the passenger side of your wife’s car, don’t expect her damn friends to bother to put it back either. We have met the enemy and they are (messing) with our seal belt alarm silencers.

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.