Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Salad dressing on the side or on the top?

MB

Marlowe Brint, artisnal jewelry designer

Reportedly outside Santa Fe, NM

On the side, obviously. A salad should retain the illusion of free will until the very last moment. Once dressed, it has chosen a direction and can never go back.

EV

Evelyn Voss, lobster fisher person

May once have lived in Bangor, ME

I prefer it on top, but only in a thin ceremonial line, as priests once applied oils to objects they feared and respected. A salad without dressing is just yard work in a bowl.

CK

Clyde Ketter, attack dog trainer

Unverified, but emphatically from Akron, OH

Neither. The correct approach is to keep the dressing nearby in a separate vessel and let the salad absorb its presence psychologically. That is how my father did it, and his lettuce feared him.

Book of Daze Therapeutic Shopping Day

8 months pwsbuilder bookof-daze

Aperson shopping online. — “Shopping well is the best revenge.”

Because nothing fills the void like a tactical air fryer.”

Book of Daze Therapeutic Shopping Day
Owes its celebration, if not its invention, to marketing intern Andrea Lutz of Omaha, who ordered a sequined Hello Kitty yoga mat after crying in a break room closet because her boyfriend had ghosted her.

“I felt better for six minutes,” she later told a colleague in HR, “which is still longer than most relationships.” Her impulsive checkout was timestamped at exactly 10:24 a.m., and the date became canon.

If you wanted to argue that the internet was created to facilitate therapeutic shopping, you’d be part right. Same-day delivery and emotional instability had their thumbs on the scales, too. Americans now spend an estimated $83 million annually on “justified emotional purchases” during this twenty-four-hour shopping orgy.

The Book of Daze Therapeutic Shopping Day Record
The biggest therapeutic shopper on record is Elliot Mendoza of Tempe, AZ, who, after a dentist appointment and a bad breakup on the same day, ordered seventy items off Etsy, including a taxidermied raccoon in a fez, a Viking-themed birdhouse, and a personalized prayer candle featuring Bea Arthur. “I felt alive again,” Mendoza reported, “until the credit card bill arrived.”

Book of Daze Therapeutic Shopping Day Endorsements
Drew Barrymore endorsed therapeutic shopping on her talk show. “We all deserve to emotionally implode in the shape of a new hat.” Barrymore further suggested that people celebrate this day by filling online carts to the max, deleting everything, and then re-adding three items out of spite. Or by convincing themselves that buying an indoor koi pond is technically self-care. Bonus points are awardedif the needless item you buy never gets opened and becomes a permanent resident of your Shame Pile.

Book of Daze Therapeutic Shopping Day Is a reminder that material possessions can’t buy happiness–but they can distract you long enough to forget your therapist is on vacation.

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

⚡ The FDA has approved the first prescription-strength silence, available in 30-day supplies for patients whose doctors have determined they are talking too much. Side effects include clarity, improved listening, and a brief period of being liked.

⚡ A bipartisan congressional caucus has formed to study the feasibility of doing nothing faster. Early results suggest the group is ahead of schedule.

⚡ Netflix has announced a new content category called Shows You Will Start But Not Finish, to be featured prominently alongside Things You Have Already Seen Twice and Movies You Forgot You Watched. Subscribers describe the experience as having a lot of options.

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 ...

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.