The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand: The Podcast

By: Robert Long Foreman will die if people don't listen to his podcast.
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  • Summary

  • It is now mandatory for all US citizens to have podcasts, with episodes coming out at least twice a month. If I don't achieve a certain unspecified number of listeners, I will be executed. Help me. Please.

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Episodes
  • Attack of the Tub Studs: How Guys Talk When They Get Hot

    Attack of the Tub Studs: How Guys Talk When They Get Hot
    Jan 8 2025
    I was in the hot tub at the YMCA. My wife was there with me. We wanted to relax and talk about our day—but a couple of studs had other ideas.One of them was 87 years old. I know his age because he’s in the hot tub every I’m at the YMCA. If a stud wants to live a long time he’s got to be hot. Someone told me, one time when I was there, that this guy was 87. Maybe now he’s 88. When we’re both there at the same time he stares at me constantly. It’s what a stud does, when he sees a lesser stud. He’s got to stare him down, put him in his place. Sometimes you’ve got to show a guy what’s what.This time, though, he started talking to my wife, who is also known as Incrediwife. He asked how many kids she has.While he was busy taking my woman away from me—and doing it effortlessly—another man turned to me and struck up a conversation. It was like a game of cat-and-mouse in there. And I was the mouse. This other man wasn’t 87, he was 45 or 40, and for probably ten minutes he explained his life plans to me in great detail. I didn’t ask about his plans for life. I asked him no questions at all. He explained that he works for immigration enforcement. He has over a decade of experience there, and soon he will attend law school. His ultimate goal is to be a federal judge, which is why the tattoos he has are not on his neck. You can’t have a judge with neck tattoos. Right? He will be a federal bankruptcy judge, and by the time he gets to that stage in his plans he will have been with immigration enforcement long enough to have earned a pension. He will also own two businesses. He has already started one of them. He’ll be able to retire, eventually, something like four times. Four times! But then, he’ll probably only retire three times, because why would would any sane person retire from the federal judiciary? Why not keep being a judge, when you’ve got a whole staff to do most of the work for you?A few days ago, I started writing about this hot tub double-stud man and wife experience, where I learned so much about that guy I’ll never see again and didn’t want to know anything about. But then I took a breath and thought, Okay, Rob. Calm down. Maybe you’re the one who’s the problem here. Maybe you’re too sensitive to how men talk to you. Maybe the way they seem to only ever want to deliver monologues about their plans and lives, rather than have conversations, is due to your failure to be a tub stud. Maybe you should man up. Have you considered that, dear Robert?I had not considered that. I was going to press delete on this whole freaking newsletter-in-progress, but then, a day later, my daughter wanted me to take her and her friend back to the scene of the crime—not to the hot tub, but to the pool that the hot tub is next to. And I knew when I agreed to take her there that I’d end up in that boiling tub. I knew what would happen once I was in it. It took no more than one minute in that hot tub for another old man to strike up a so-called conversation. This encounter actually went okay for a minute. The guy told me he used to come to the YMCA five times a week. But he had been coming in less often, recently, because he had to have a couple of surgeries. I was like, Here we go again.But then something unexpected happened. He asked me a question. He asked what I did for a living. I knew my answer wouldn’t satisfy this man. No one over the age of 50 is ever glad to find out about my life. I said some version of, “I used to have a career, but I gave it up and have been freelancing while Incrediwife is the breadwinner and I do freelance work and raise the kids—but then the kids don’t need all that much attention anymore, so I’d like to restart full-time work again in some capacity if the kids will let me”—which I’m not sure they will, you know? Because someone has to be the one to drive kids to swimming pools and then to lunch at fast food restaurants. Sometimes you have to do that at eleven a.m. on a Friday. The man endured my fifteen-second explanation, and I was starting to think maybe this was it. Maybe I had found a man who knows how to have a conversation, in which two people ask each other questions, in which there is mutual sharing and listening. No suck luck! After my quarter-minute filibuster, he spent ten minutes talking my ear off about his career. It took him all over the world! He was a missionary of some kind. There’s not a state in the union he hasn’t been to, and he’s lived all over the world.More recently, though, this man’s wife wrote a book. He gave her some criticism, when she asked for it, and that was a bad idea, because then he had to help her out by writing two chapters of the book. And he didn’t get any credit for all of his work. You know how it is. He said he completely changed the state of things for homeless people in Seattle, and added that they’ve let the situation get completely out of hand. They let guys pitch tents ...
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    33 mins
  • The Insufferable Guy Writer: Who Is He? Why Is He Like That?

    The Insufferable Guy Writer: Who Is He? Why Is He Like That?
    Dec 17 2024
    One of the things I don’t like about that story that emerged recently, concerning Cormac McCarthy, is that it provides me with more evidence that I am not the right kind of guy—or, rather, that the kind of guy I have chosen to be doesn't suit me. Every guy who exists, you see, has to be a certain kind of guy. It is mandatory. If a guy somewhere doesn't fit readily into one of the available categories, and/or if he hasn't adjusted himself so that he fits into one of the preestablished roles the world has for guys, then a guy type will be assigned to him. It will be whichever one he most closely resembles, based on the traits he exhibits.The good news is that there are lots of types of guys a guy can be, or be considered to be. There are jocks, former jocks, incels, comic book guys, vinyl record guys, comatose guys, egomaniacs, Harvey Weinstein types, sensitive guys, pretend-sensitive guys, Guy Pearce, and many more. These guy roles can overlap; Harvey Weinstein, the original Harvey Weinstein type, appears to have occasionally been pretend-sensitive. For all I know, he was also a collector of vinyl records, and was therefore one of those guys as well.The bad news is, there is only one variety of guy writer: the insufferable guy writer. Every guy who invests in writing enough to be considered "a writer" is assigned the role of insufferable guy writer. It doesn't matter if he is not actually insufferable, or if he is like me and is quite insufferable but not as much as certain other people. If he is a guy and he writes, he will always be considered to be, to one extent or another, an insufferable guy writer.If you don’t believe me, it’s possible that I am wrong about this, and that this is stupid. If that’s the case, you’re not allowed to get mad at me, about this or anything else. But you may recall an account on a website that was once called “Twitter.” It was the “Guy in your MFA” Twitter account, and someone at The Rumpus wrote about it at some length in 2018. The Twitter account featured a stream of annoying statements that sounded like they would come from an insufferable guy writer in the context of an MFA program. The Rumpus article I’ve linked to attests to how accurate a depiction of the MFA guy the Twitter account was—and how the real-life MFA guys, the insufferable writer guys, while laughing at the Twitter account, and getting all of the jokes, still managed to be insufferable. If you’re a guy or anything like one, and you also write, there is no escaping the insufferable guy writer. He is what you will be considered to be, no matter what you do.Do I like that this is how it is? No. Am I complicit in it? Yes. I have been guilty in my life of thinking guy writers are insufferable when they’re possibly not. In fact, the reason it took so long for me to start taking writing seriously, to engage in it as an artmaking endeavor, rather than something I did for literature seminars, was that every guy writer I met for many years was a card-carrying insufferable guy writer. They checked every box: they were arrogant; they didn't listen; they thought the world of themselves; they behaved as if they had arrived at their destinations already and were sighing into their clove cigarettes as they waited for the rest of us to catch up. I didn't want to be like them, so I didn't do what they did. I refrained from writing until I could not take it anymore. The dam burst, the writing began, and here I am, carrying on with it, growing more insufferable by the sentence.I did, eventually, meet some good writer guys. I didn't think they were insufferable, and I came to believe I could make myself into a guy writer who was all right to be around. What I didn't realize was that it didn't matter if I knew some good guy writers, and tried to be one myself. I would always represent the insufferable guy writer archetype, because that is the only guy writer archetype there is. Every guy writer is an insufferable guy writer. All that you can do is modulate the degree to which other people think you are insufferable.Am I saying things are easier for women writers? No, I am not saying that. I think everything is hard for everyone, and although I have been using he/him pronouns for guy roles, I don’t think they’re gender-specific. Anyone can be a kind of guy, whether it’s a pretend-sensitive guy or a shy artist guy. It doesn’t matter who you are. I am also fairly certain that the second Beetlejuice movie was originally written to be a TV show. The way the story played out seemed awfully episodic to me. Every major character gets their own fifteen or twenty minutes, the way in a prestige TV show they would get their own episode. I liked the movie, but that dimension of it bothered me. I don’t like it when I think I can see through a movie and identify what it was like in an earlier draft.And I’ve been having unrelated fun with The Death Generator, which is the source of most of the images...
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    30 mins
  • This Is the Hour of Lead

    This Is the Hour of Lead
    Nov 8 2024
    I am suspending these Hoedowns for the time being. They have been going pretty steadily, on one platform or another, for several years. It’s time for a break. I don't know how long it will last—maybe a month, maybe a year, or forever. But I am as stunned as a lot of people are, and I woke up Wednesday morning, having barely slept, needing to revise myself in significant ways. I have suspended my social media accounts, also maybe for a week but maybe forever. I can't write something that's wryly funny, or hysterically stupid, when I feel like god has buried his fist in my chest. Everyone with a paid subscription to the Hoedown: your support means more to me than I know how to say, and I am thankful for it. But you may not get your money's worth for a while, so by all means suspend or halt those contributions, and put your money toward something that gets results.I find I am all but allergic to anything having to do with the recent election. I don’t want to turn on the radio. I don’t want to hear those voices, and I don’t even mean the candidates’ voices, but rather the voices of smart radio people who talk with their noses as much as their mouths. They all matriculated at the Smarm Academy, and have fond memories of casual evenings spent on the Quad Bucolic, playing lazy games of soccer and comparing trust funds. But as much as I hate this recent election, and everything about it, I will tell you this thing. I substitute taught at the luxury high school on election day. I overheard students discussing the election. One girl, a ninth-grader, was telling a classmate that it didn't matter if Kamala Harris did "something sexual" to "get herself a job," she was still a better candidate than Trump. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I don’t know where people get their disinformation anymore. Hearing that was not the first inkling I got, that things would go badly on election night. But it was a big inkling, that things were not going to happen the way I hoped they would. Why are people so eager to tell the same horrid stories about every woman they find out exists? Why do the people who hear those stories apparently clamor to believe them? Why do people hate women so much? It is true that Harris should have distinguished herself more from Biden. It's incredible to me that she didn't. She shouldn't have campaigned with Liz Cheney, but I don't even know if it would have made a difference. People have lost their minds. They will believe anything. I have read some op-eds since election night, about how as citizens of this nation we shan't disengage. We cannot give in and lose hope, because we need all the strength we have to fight and resist what's coming. We have to be the neighborhood Winston Churchill, holding the line against the horde. I think I said similar things in 2016, but what does it even mean? Where is the fight they keep talking about? Is someone leading it? How does the fighting work, exactly? Should I drive around in my car, and hope I see the fight somewhere, so I can lend it my formidable strength? Are we getting together to fight whatever we’re fighting, or are we all doing it in our own ways, and hoping for the best? What are the long-term goals of this resistance? How will it lead to a better world than the one we have now, which I want to hide from for the rest of my life?My experience of political engagement has brought me twenty-five years of defeat, horror, and disappointment. The best parts have been when the disappointment is delayed a few months, after some moments of quasi-triumph, and everything goes back to getting worse. If anyone knows how to get new results that will make me stop looking up small cities in Guatemala I can try to persuade my family to move to, before things get really bad, let me know if I can help. Because even though Guatemala is in the same time zone we live in right now, there is no way my family would go with me there. Also, I’m sure there are bigger problems in Guatemala than the ones we have here, and I have too much stuff now to relocate like that. Where in Guatemala would I put all these books? I don't think the Democrats we have right now know how to get different results from the ones we’ve been getting throughout my lifetime. I’m not sure they even want them. Not like the rest of us do. And if they run another lawyer in four years who campaigns with Republicans and/or talks about how the Republicans are fundamentally good and we need them to be at their very best, so that we can be our best, I will burst into flames. I will turn into lava. Here I am, announcing the suspension of the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand, and I can’t seem to stop typing. It’s a form of mental illness, I think, to imagine there is a point to this, to think that when you talk someone else really listens. It's not unlikely that a week or a month from now I'll be back to my old self again, spewing ...
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    9 mins

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