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
  • Who's Afraid of NotebookLM's Capacity to Analyze Texts by Virginia Woolf and Other Authors?

    Who's Afraid of NotebookLM's Capacity to Analyze Texts by Virginia Woolf and Other Authors?
    Oct 31 2024
    I almost hit SEND on this thing before I realized it’s Halloween. Two Halloweens ago, the magazine hex published my 1,000-word short story “Spider.” It’s about a spider that follows a woman out of the dream she is having and into her life, making it more complicated. Read it now, or hear me read it at the start of the audio recording of this newsletter.I dreamed I lived in a neighborhood where residents of four households near my house were angry with me. Why four? I don’t know. I had gone to their lawns, dug rectangles out of their grass with a shovel, and replaced the grass with bronze plaques I had made. They featured some of my original writing. I don’t recall what the writing was, but everyone was upset. These people didn’t want bronze plaques, they wanted grass. I had to apologize to the homeowners, telling them I have these borderline-manic episodes where I feel so inspired, and so full of things I want to tell everyone, that I have to do something to get it all out. What I did this time was make bronze plaques and embed them in lawns. I had to atone for what I had done. I had to remove the plaques and spread grass seed on the rectangles I had dug. Much of the dream consisted of planning these corrective measures. I thought I should wake up in the middle of the night and undo what I had done under cover of darkness. That way, no one would see me out there working. I might not feel so ashamed. This dream was plainly inspired by two things. One is that not long ago some workers from Google Fiber went through our neighborhood, digging rectangular holes in the lawns of all of the people who live here. They didn’t tell anyone they were going to do it. The only communication we got from Google were signs sticking out of our lawns that read, “Thank you for your patience.” Patience with what? The little signs didn’t say. Later, someone came and spray-painted the parts of the lawns where they would dig. I didn’t know what the spray paint was for. A few days after that, the crews arrived and they started digging. It didn’t take them long. They dug the holes, they ran cable through the ground, I guess, and most of the holes they covered again, while others, like the one on the edge of my lawn, now has a box of some kind embedded inside.The other thing that I don’t doubt inspired the dream is that I once again have that cyclical misgiving—it may be a seasonal misgiving—that the creative work I do is an imposition on anyone it’s presented to. Writing something and making it available to other people is equivalent to tearing up someone’s property and shoving the thing I have made where the nice grass used to be. They didn’t ask for this thing to be there. Why is it there? Why haven’t I done something more useful with my time than this? Come on, man.D.A.R.E.I wanted to share something I saw in the news about a substitute teacher.This guy in Minnesota apparently subbed for an English class where he—in order to help the students understand literature, I guess?—reenacted the murder of George Floyd. In the reenactment, he was the murdering officer, and the role of George Floyd was played by a high school student.But that’s not all. He did a series of other things:“According to the school’s statement, the substitute also:* Twisted a student’s arm behind the student’s back and showed pressure points on the chin* Fake punched a student with his fist “really close” to the student’s face* Mimicked holding up a gun and pointing it at students* Repeatedly made racially-harmful comments and told sexist jokes* Spoke in disturbing detail about dead bodies he had seen and shared explicit details about two sexual assault cases he investigated* Stated cops would be the best criminals because they know how to get away with stuff, adding that he once received an “A” grade on a paper about how to get away with murder* Stated police brutality isn’t real”Apparently, he told the students he is a police officer. The story says that status of his has not been verified by the school district. One thing I find really frustrating about the story is that it isn’t funny. Maybe I would laugh, if I heard these details in the right context, but it would be the way I laugh out of surprise. It would be mirthless. Having been a substitute teacher on occasion for the last year or so, I know from on-the-ground experience that there is a great deal of potential humor in the concept of a substitute teacher entering a classroom, ignoring whatever lesson plans they’re given, and instead doing a bizarre series of things that make no sense. If done properly, this person could be like Mr. G, the high school teacher in the film Bottoms, played by NFL running back Marshawn Lynch:Alas, what happened at the school in Minnesota isn’t funny. If his classroom performance had been caught on video, I don’t doubt it would be horrifying. If we could hear the “jokes” he told the students...
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    29 mins
  • I Sacrificed a Short Story to the Spirits of AI. In Return, They Gave Me a Podcast about It.

    I Sacrificed a Short Story to the Spirits of AI. In Return, They Gave Me a Podcast about It.
    Oct 18 2024
    Last week, I sacrificed a short story to the gods of artificial intelligence. I was curious about Google’s NotebookLM feature. It’s the latest thing that they have now. If you give it a link to a website, or upload a document, it will use AI to provide you with a summary of whatever you’ve given it. You can chat with an AI personality about the document, and respond to any questions you have. It will make claims and cite passages from the text in order to back them up. It will furthermore—and this is the really weird part—generate an audio conversation in which two people discuss the document you have given it, as if they were recording it for a podcast. But neither of the people actually exists, and the conversation never took place.It is yet another strange new thing in the long parade of strange new things. It’s one more thing that makes me wonder how anyone can teach literature now. A student can take any essay prompt you give them, feed it to NotebookLM, and get a fairly competent response, which they can then turn in for a grade. AI detectors can only do so much, and I can’t imagine it’s hard for young people to outsmart them.I wanted to see what NotebookLM would make of my short story “Midnight Oil.” It’s a story I wrote some time ago, and which I gave up trying to publish. I decided it just isn’t good enough to persevere with. It is too ridiculous for its own good. Maybe its wings aren’t strong enough for it to fly on its own. But it definitely has its moments, and I don’t want to just burn it or bury it somewhere. So I’m devoting this newsletter to it. I’ll read it for the audio version, and for this written version I will cut and paste it, below. First I’ll show you what NotebookLM spat back at me when I fed it “Midnight Oil.” Here is the summary:The excerpt, taken from "Midnight Oil.C.pdf," presents a darkly humorous and poignant story about a brother and sister, Jack and Suzie. The text unfolds through a series of events centered around Jack's impulsive and eccentric business ventures. The story begins with Jack announcing his intention to open a pet cremation service called "Midnight Oil," much to Suzie's initial disapproval. The narrative then follows the chaotic day as Jack's business takes off, unexpectedly receiving a flurry of customers with dead pets. However, the most dramatic turn of events comes when a customer arrives with a bucket of live kittens, prompting a conflict between Jack and Suzie. Their differing perspectives on the situation - Jack's ruthless capitalist drive versus Suzie's moral concern for the kittens - culminate in a physical altercation. Ultimately, Suzie prevails, preventing Jack from cremating the kittens and ultimately taking them in herself. The text explores themes of familial bonds, the complexities of morality, and the struggle between idealism and practicality. It examines the clash between Jack's reckless entrepreneurial spirit and Suzie's attempt to inject compassion and ethical consideration into his business dealings. Through this seemingly absurd narrative, the author reveals the intricate interplay between human connection, personal responsibility, and the unexpected consequences of unchecked ambition.Key TopicsPet cremationFinancial troubleFamily tiesBrotherly conflictMoral dilemmaIt’s an excellent summary. All of the most important story elements are represented there. It also expresses pretty succinctly, I think, what’s wrong with the story, and why it ultimately just isn’t as good as other things I’ve written. The moral dilemma is too absurd for the story’s good. One of the characters thinks it’s okay to burn living kittens to death. It doesn’t make any sense.In a realistic short story, anyway, it doesn’t look right. Absurdity and gravity are at odds with one another, and the written thing suffers as a result.I wrote the story in the first place as an experiment. I used to give an assignment to students in fiction workshops, in which I challenged them to take one feature of their word processing software that they’ve never used before, and make it the foundation for a page or two of text. If they never tried using footnotes, now was their chance to play with footnotes. Students never failed surprised me and themselves, with what they came up with. It was a good time. It’s also something I like to do sometimes with my own writing. What does that button on the Microsoft Word “Insert” ribbon do? I have no idea. Let’s make a story out of it.In the case of “Midnight Oil,” I wanted to write a short story that had math equations in it. I wanted some of the math equations to make no sense and not really be mathematical.When it was finished, I liked the story. No one else did. I came to understand why. So I offered it up to the artificial intelligence. I cleaved some meat off of my brain and presented it to the AI gods, so that they may devour or discard it. I’ll put it below, and ...
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    54 mins
  • Women Are the Rocky Balboa of Women

    Women Are the Rocky Balboa of Women
    Oct 8 2024
    The women I know are getting strong. They’re lifting weights. They’re powering up. They’re doing forms of exercise I’ve never even heard of. Every time I talk to a woman, she tells me about her new workout routine. They all involve some form of strength training. I’m not afraid of this development. But I can’t help wondering what the women are planning, what it is they’re preparing for that I haven’t heard about and which requires physical strength. I doubt it’s anything nefarious, at the same time that I’ve decided to focus on my own physical fitness just in case. I picked up some weights for the first time in at least a year. I’m doing Pilates.There is no sense in not being ready for what’s coming. I’m watching my back. This Is a Free Stock Photo of a “Strong Woman.” It’s Exactly the Kind of Thing I’m Talking about.Announcing: The National Adult Male Believers in Literacy AssociationOne of the problems with life right now is that men aren’t reading books. The people who read books are women. In their meaty hands they clutch the works of Rachel Kushner, Sally Rooney, and Miranda July. Their eyes bulge as they fortify their optic nerves with muscle tissue that didn’t even exist there before they read the books. They are power-reading. It’s the next stage of human evolution.I don’t know for sure if I would have more of a career if men read books. I don’t think it could hurt. Would I have sold more copies of Weird Pig if men bought books? It’s not out of the question, is it?I’m thinking of starting an organization that’s devoted to promoting literacy among adult men. Many of them know how to read, but they might as well not know how to read, because they hardly read anything. They haven’t picked up a book since high school, and they probably didn’t read any books in high school either.I’m thinking of calling this organization the National Adult Male Believers in Literacy Association, or NAMBLA. The mission will be simple: teach men to read things that aren’t statistics pertaining to baseball, hockey, football, and basketball. Help them regain the ability to read a full sentence to its conclusion, then read the next one, finish the paragraph, move on to the next paragraph, and so on. They are going to need help with this. They will complain that it’s too hard. But it happens all the time, that I speak to a woman, she tells me what book she’s reading, her biceps strain her shirtsleeves as she gestures with both arms, and she volunteers, as an aside, that her husband does not read books. He just never does. It’s a little weird.It’s not actually weird. It’s sadly normal, and we should do something about it.The time has come to start making a difference in the lives of adult men who might as well not know how to read. Join NAMBLA today. Disregard What I Just SaidPlease don’t actually join NAMBLA. Don’t even go to the website. You’ll get put on a list. As you probably know, the real NAMBLA is an organization for child molesters. I do wish that men would read books, but men are mostly hopeless. I don’t think they’ll get better in my lifetime. I am far from one of the best ones, but I do at least read books. There is at least that. Maybe soon we’ll have a woman president. That seems like a step in the right direction. Who even knows what the right direction is anymore, though. Maybe it’s northeast.I talked to my friend Gabi on the phone on Friday morning, and she said she thought the reason women are getting strong is that they’ve all found that trying to get thin is the wrong way to go. It’s unproductive and misguided, so instead they’re building muscle and the strength that comes with it. I said that sounded great. What I was thinking, though, was that her explanation is a great way to distract from whatever it is that she and the other women are planning. She said it was okay if I quoted her in my newsletter.Let’s Press Pause on Dying for a Few Days, PleaseYesterday I learned the writer Lore Segal died. She was ninety-six years old, but I kind of thought she’d always be alive. It didn’t seem to be out of the question, somehow.Also, late last week, Robert Coover died. He was ninety-two. It’s great that both of these writers had good, long, productive lives. I have admired work by both of them. We’ve lost a lot, now that they’re not here. I’d like to write more about both of them later, but in fact I have already written about Robert Coover. Just last week I was revising the essay I wrote some years ago, so I could add it to a book manuscript that will be incredibly hard to publish, if it ever gets published. I will read that essay at the end of the audio version of this newsletter. The short version: I used to see Robert Coover around town, when I lived in Providence. I never introduced myself to him. That’s what the essay is about, though it goes in several directions from there. Lore Segal was the author ...
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    27 mins
  • Why Should I Defend Ohio?

    Why Should I Defend Ohio?
    Sep 25 2024
    I tested negative for COVID a couple of weeks ago, but I was sick with something, and the symptoms were just like the ones I had when I had COVID the last time. I couldn’t do anything for more than twenty minutes without having to lie down for two hours. I think I’m still feeling the effects. My left ear is ringing. Is it Long COVID? Will I have to change my name to Robert Long Covid? Whatever this illness is, it seems like everyone in the United States either had it in the last few weeks, has it now, or will have it by mid-October. Are the tests inaccurate? Are we all getting COVID again? What if we’re headed for reinfection after reinfection, followed by many years of suffering under our idiosyncratic forms of Long COVID? Mine will be like chronic fatigue syndrome plus deafness in one ear and dementia. Yours will be brain fog and post-exertional malaise.What if Ovid got COVID? What would happen then? Ovid wrote Metamorphoses. What if COVID is the author of our collective metamorphosis, the force that will ultimately, either the first time it strikes us or the twenty-first, transform us all into people who are dead or nearly there?OhioI need to do something about my face. I have been querying agents with my novel We Eat the Rich, and I have reason to believe that some of the agents I contact are curious enough about me to go to my website. The reason I believe this is that the company I registered and made my website through has a handy app that shows me the IP address of everyone who visits it. I can’t see who they are, but I can see where they are. When someone in New York City visits www.robertlongforeman.com, I gather that sometimes it’s an agent I have recently contacted, who wants to see what I’m like before taking an interest in me. They go to the front page, they go to the Bio page. They see what my face looks like, and they say, No thank you. So I need to do something about my face. I am forty-three, which means that in the next year I am likely to need corrective lenses. I have never needed them before, and when I do I can start wearing glasses. It’s possible that with glasses on in photos I will look more appealing to the right people. I’ll look smarter and stronger, more trustworthy and less bustworthy. What do I do until then? I don’t know. Continue to go unrepresented, I guess. There are worse things. I tried having AI generate a new author photo for me that represents me better than the extant photos do, but I’m not sure if I’ll use it. Meanwhile, I subbed for my daughter’s fourth-grade class on Monday afternoon. Let me tell you, grade school teachers have one of the hardest jobs there could be. They should be paid five times what they’re paid. It’s infuriating that things are the way they are. The kids were talking constantly. Nothing I said or did stopped them from yakking it up with one another, getting out of their chairs to go talk to their friends, whatever. The experience took a week off my life, and one of the strangest things about it was how I was reminded of what the word “Ohio” means to children across America. When I was growing up, Ohio was a state with millions of people in it that my family lived half a mile from. We were in West Virginia. Ohio was right over there. One of the kids asked where I had lived before, and I obliged, since trying to maintain order in the class was a lost cause by then, so I might as well make conversation. I mentioned I lived in Ohio for a while, and half the kids in the room started laughing. Ohio? Seriously? Children think Ohio is funny. I guess there are songs about it? People say mean things about Ohio. They think people from Ohio have something wrong with them.I found that I wanted to defend Ohio, and explain to them that it’s an enormous state with millions of people and a bunch of large cities in it. There’s Cincinnati, there’s Cleveland, there are Dayton, Toledo, and Columbus. Those places are not at the top of many lists of favorite cities of the world, but they are full of people and they’re not conceptually funny, the way children seem to think they are.But why do I want to defend Ohio? I would be lying if I said I didn’t get that schadenfreude buzz from everyone around me thinking Ohio sucks without ever having gone there or knowing anything about the place. I’m from West Virginia, the most universally disdained part of the United States. It’s kind of nice to see another state getting ridiculed for no apparent reason.And I’m kind of glad it’s Ohio the kids think is a wasteland of degenerates, because it was people from Ohio who always gave me the most s**t for being from West Virginia. I lived there from 2003 to 2007, and when George W. Bush was reelected to the presidency several people took me aside to give me a hard time about it. West Virginians voted for Bush, and he won the state’s electoral votes, so of course these Ohioans acted like I decided, all by myself, that the ...
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    18 mins
  • The Most Gullible Man in Kansas City

    The Most Gullible Man in Kansas City
    Sep 5 2024
    I’m putting a call out to any confidence tricksters who subscribe to this newsletter, or to anyone reading this who knows a good flimflammer. I may have identified the most gullible man in the greater Kansas City area. I don’t know his name. I know one place that he goes to, though, and he’s easy to identify. A resourceful scoundrel could learn his name with ease. I was at the YMCA, some days ago. I went swimming, and then stepped into the adjoining sauna. The facility would close in fifteen minutes, and I wanted to feel hot. The sauna was filled with men. One was younger than I, the rest my age or older. Men of certain ages say incredibly stupid things, especially when no women are around, and so I knew all I had to do was sit tight and keep my ears peeled. I heard a man outside the sauna, telling yet another man a thing he liked about Donald Trump. He said that Trump had promised to reinstate anyone who was removed from military service for refusing to get a COVID vaccine. “That probably doesn’t affect many people, does it?” asked the second man.“Probably not,” said the first man. “But still.”The first man stepped into the sauna. He said hello to the younger guy, who asked what he had been driving.The guy who had just entered, the “first man” from before, said he had been driving his truck around town, which was frustrating.Frustrating how? asked his friend.“Well,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing: “Kids yell at me when they see me. A lot of people take pictures, like when I’m at a stop light. They just lift their phone cameras and point them at me, you know? And I’m sitting there like, at least stop and say something nice about the truck before you take the picture! You don’t have to talk to me. You can say the nice things to the truck!”It was something much like that. I was so confused. It was like when I read The Expendable Man, the 1963 novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, at the start of which the protagonist (spoiler alert) has just driven away from a small town where a crowd of people shouted at him and drove him away, rattling him, making him afraid for his life. There is no immediate explanation for why they’ve done this, and it’s peculiar. The reason it’s bewildering is that Hughes delays indicating to the reader until page thirty or forty or so, that the protagonist is a Black man. People drove him out of town because they were racist white shitheads, but she doesn’t make that so obvious at first, and it makes the whole thing even stranger and more unsettling than it would be otherwise. The realization I came to, some seconds after this man in the sauna complained that people were yelling at his truck and taking pictures of it, was that he owns a Cybertruck. I had seen one around town, and laughed at it. Now here he was, right in front of me: the guy who was sitting behind that ridiculous Cybertruck steering wheel. He said he was looking to get a new car. He has a Model Three, which I guess must have been his other, smaller Tesla. The conversation broadened to other subjects, and included other men in the sauna. It’s something that happens when you get a bunch of men together. Everyone feels like they’re part of the conversation, and all of the men seem to want to participate. Everyone pitches in, to guarantee quality colloquy. I never say a word when this happens. I have never felt like I belong in these impromptu conversations with groups of strange men, and it’s happened a few times in my life that someone has confronted me about that. I’m not kidding. It’s not cool.Anyway, the Cybertruck man shared with another man something he had learned the day before: if you spend ten minutes in an ice bath, it burns 1,000 calories. The other guy shook his head. “There’s no way,” he said. “1,000 calories? No. Maybe, like, fifty.”Everyone agreed that it was nonsense to think ten cold minutes could burn 1,000 calories. You might burn some calories, sure. But there was no way they would add up to 1,000. The Cybertruck guy then said that he noticed the other day how his phone kept showing him things he hadn’t looked up online, but had been thinking about. It was like his phone was reading his mind, it was so weird. Another guy said that had been debunked a long time ago, that your phone only seems to read your mind because it’s reading your eye movements. It’s tracking what you’re looking at and showing you more of it. If you were thinking of something, it was probably because you saw an ad for that thing, and you’re only seeing another, similar ad.From there, the conversation went on in this same vein. This guy would say something that wasn’t right, and the other guys would correct him. Then I left. I was getting too hot.So, yes, if anyone who knows how to rip guys off wants to travel to Kansas City, I will help you to identify this man in exchange for a modest finder’s fee of 5 percent. That’s all. If you want me to help with the...
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    22 mins