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

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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 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
  • Man Undercover: Maybe My Incessant Complaints about Everything That Happens Can Tell Us Something about the Need for "Conflict" in Works of Fiction

    Man Undercover: Maybe My Incessant Complaints about Everything That Happens Can Tell Us Something about the Need for "Conflict" in Works of Fiction
    Jun 13 2025
    I wish I could wear a wire to the jacuzzi at the YMCA near my house. I wish I could record the voices of the old men who stand in the hot tub for way longer than they’re supposed to and harangue everyone who joins them at the hottest tubby-tub in the city. There’s this guy who goes there every day with a plastic cup full of ice. I have learned that under no circumstances can I make eye contact with him. If I do, he will ask me a question, pretend to listen to my answer, and then talk at me about whatever is on his mind until someone else gets there—fresh meat!—or I leave.The other day, he learned that another man in the rub-a-dub-dub tubby-tub had served in the Marines, in Vietnam. The ice cup guy proceeded to admit that while he himself never served in the military, he admired what the Marines have done and continue to do. He asked this veteran if he had heard of Fallujah. Did he know what the Marines did in Fallujah? “They cleaned that place out,” he said. I don’t know why he brought up the battles of Fallujah—there were two of them, in 2004. A lot of people died in those battles. Many civilians were killed. Twenty-seven US servicemembers perished in the first battle of Fallujah. In the second, ninety-five were killed. Many more were wounded. I had to look those figures up; I am no military historian; but I remember hearing how brutal the fighting was in Fallujah, back when it was happening. If it had occurred to me, I would not have guessed that I would hear an old man who, like me, was never in the military, recall it fondly twenty years later to a real-life Marine combat veteran.Maybe it’s a way to support the troops, to brag at the YMCA about bloody conflicts you had nothing to do with, while having voted for the guy whose administration is working to eliminate what real-life support veterans have in the USA. I mean, I’m pretty sure the guy with the ice cup voted for our current president; he insisted to yet another old man, not long ago, that the president was making strategic use of tariffs, that the man he was speaking to was misinformed when he questioned that strategy. The president was making all those other countries finally pay. It was the right thing to do.More recently, I heard this same guy tell a couple of men, who were eating up everything he said with grins on their faces, how glad he is he doesn’t live in a country with secret police, like the Gestapo coming and hauling you away to a secret prison. He’s so glad that instead of that we have the regular police. “And if you get pulled over,” he said, “you know what to do, don’t you? You put your hands on the steering wheel, you keep them there, and you do whatever they say. ‘Yes, dear. No, dear. Yes, hon. Mm-hmm.’” He meant, in case it’s not clear, that you should do what they say as if you were obeying the orders of your domineering wife. This prompted a man who was almost completely submerged in the water, like you could only see his bald head sticking out from the surface, to talk about how he would never, ever take his wife with him to get his pontoon boat reupholstered. I can’t wear a wire to the YMCA jacuzzi. I always have on a bathing suit when I’m there, and no shirt. It’s very sexy, and someone would see the wire. They would ask about it. I would have to talk to them. Also, the wire would get wet. I could wear a suit and a tie to the jacuzzi. But I think someone there might think something was up if I tried doing it that way.Why am I like this? Why do I complain about people? What if that guy from the jacuzzi reads this? Isn’t it bad enough that all the slime and the juices that ooze out of that old man’s pores and his hair and scrotum get into the hot tub and mix with my slime and touch my skin? I don’t want that man to get mad at me, and splash his juice into my mouth in retribution.I’m not really worried. I know what will happen if that guy reads this. He will go straight to the hot tub, make eye contact with a stranger, tell them about it, and then yell at them about something else for forty-five minutes while chewing and slurping ice. But you know what? I think that my tendency to find a problem with every experience I have, and my insistence on complaining about even the good things that happen in my life, help me as a fiction writer. One way I make money is by reviewing and critiquing the work of other writers. I read entire novels sometimes, by writers who think they could use some assistance. Lately I have read several manuscripts that have a fundamental problem running through them: they are lacking in tension. They have no conflict. In scene after scene, characters get along with one another. They have a great time. Maybe one character develops a crush on a new character, who arrives from someplace else. Everyone encourages this person to pursue their crush. There’s no competition; there is no strife. Everyone is living it up in their personal galaxy of ...
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    28 mins
  • "Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open."

    "Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open."
    May 27 2025
    I’m thinking again of migrating this newsletter to another platform. It can be done. It probably ought to be done.People get angry about newsletters being on Substack because the management of the company Substack is awful. Strangers yell at me on the street about it. The department store manager kicked me out of the menswear department. The problem with their argument, their insistence that everyone must leave Substack because the people in charge of it are bad, is that the management of almost everything is bad. There are alternatives to Substack, but who manages those platforms? What do they believe? I don’t know. Even if I knew for sure that they were perfect, companies can and frequently are sold by good people to others who aren’t good. There’s no perfect platform for newsletters. The other platforms cost money to use, which is why I haven’t taken my Pig City Hoedown elsewhere.I am wearing my new reading glasses, though. Glasses are insane. I know that “insane” is a word that it’s best not to use. I know that the stigma of mental illness runs deep in our vocabularies, and that saying things are “crazy” and “nuts” may perpetuate it. Saying them is one thing, I think; writing them is another. It’s worse, because if it’s written down that means I reread it several times and didn’t change it. Still, I find the sentence “Glasses are insane” to be a justifiable use case. It further dilutes the meaning of the word “insane” in a way that I find funny. But I may never use the word again. We’ll see. I once defended my use of the word “lame” to describe something as boring to someone who pointed out that it’s been said to be ableist. After I defended it, I gave it some thought, and never used the word that way again. It’s easy to give up a word, it turns out. I don’t think I ever liked saying that one much anyway.But I’m not used to having glasses on my face. I’m not used to having anything on my face. Until recently, I was physically perfect. Doctors would ask me to undress even when it wasn’t necessary, so that they could take in the sights and smells of corporeal perfection. They had never seen it before, and here I was to show them all. Now I am aging fast, and there doesn’t appear to be much time left, because I have to wear glasses if I want to read Shakespeare.I have been reading Shakespeare. I have had the Norton Shakespeare—a large, green book that’s heavy—sitting out for a while, in case I felt like picking it up. Last week, I was in the middle of reading a novel, one I had looked forward to reading, but which turned out, once I started reading it, to be less a rollicking adventure than The Detailed Explanation of Non-Events That Aren’t Interesting. So I said what the hell. I read All Is True, a late Shakespeare play about Henry VIII. It had some great lines that I wrote down, but I could see why no one ever suggested I read it before, or required me to read it for a class I was taking. There’s not much that happens. I mean, I’ve heard that Henry VIII did some wild stuff, like ripping the heads off of women, but that doesn’t make it into the play. His wife gets replaced by Anne Boleyn, and dies giving birth to a child? It seems like a fairly sanitized account of someone who is notable for having a lot more women executed than almost everyone in human history.I read All’s Well That Ends Well. I read The Merry Wives of Windsor.I am reading the plays people don’t really talk about. I’ve read MacBeth before; I’ve read King Lear. I’d like to read them again, and I might, but for now I am having the time of my life taking a long look at these other plays people don’t talk about, at least not to me.There are people I have known in my life who, if I told them what I was reading, would tilt their heads in my direction and say, “The Bard? You are perusing the work of the Bard? His genius was staggering.”I’m going to order a glasses case to put my glasses in. But it has to be one that was designed for men. I know I don’t have to tell you why. It should also be leather, because leather is the hottest kink there is.This leather glasses case has a lot of online reviews. But there’s no review online that tells me what I need to know, which is whether the glasses case will be enough to save me. I read The Murmur of Everything Moving, the most recent book by Maureen Stanton. Maureen once directed my dissertation, but that’s not why I read it. I read it because I wanted to, and because her books are good.It got me thinking about the suspension of disbelief, and what it means in autobiography. In fiction it means that you are willing to believe what you’re being told for the sake of the work of art. You are taking the ride that the author has invited you to take, despite whatever reservations you might have. Something like that. I don’t care.I don’t know that I have heard anyone talk about disbelief suspension in ...
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    34 mins
  • Are Your Men on the Right Pills?

    Are Your Men on the Right Pills?
    May 10 2025
    Our cat Oscar likes to go in the garage. He will do whatever it takes to get there. He bolts past us when we open the door, and when he does we tell him he is the worst guy in the world, that he is a villain. When we say that, we are correct.There is nothing for him to do in the garage, no food for him to eat.He stayed in the garage too long, one recent evening, and when someone finally let him back out he was starving. It had been at least two hours since his last meal.He ate too much. He scarfed all the food he could and threw up on the floor.That’s basically what this newsletter is, this installment of the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand. I want you to know, before we take this any further, that this is basically the writing equivalent of someone puking cat food everywhere.I subbed for four days last week at the high school, the one where I like to be a substitute, because the kids there aren’t unruly—they are in fact quite ruly—and I can work there like I do at home. The students need nothing from me. They do their stuff and I do mine. I get paid to be at the high school, and I also earn money doing the work I would otherwise carry out in my unbelievably furnished basement.I actually get more work done at the school than I do at home on some days. So, the way I see it, when I have a chance to go over there, and I don’t take it, I leave money on the table. About $150 per day.Is that enough? No, it is not. But I have never been paid enough, and this is how it will always be.A couple of years ago, I went to a menswear store, here in Kansas City, and admired the clothing. What blazers they had! What shirts. I looked at the price tags on some of the blazers and shirts and shook my head. I said to myself, “Maybe someday I will afford to put on something nice like this.” I was, at that time, forty-two years old. I realized I must have said the very same thing twenty years before then, when I was twenty-two, at a different clothing store. At the rate I’m going, it will take another eight decades for me to afford a nice blazer.It’s a good thing I am so beautiful. I mean, thank goodness I look a hundred times better in my thrift store rags than the billionaires do in their finery.I ain’t broke, but I am not a big earner. I am of little to no value to this world and its economy. I care too much about the placement of commas in sentences to see a comma in my weekly earnings figures.But I have found, in this week of substitute teaching, that there is no sound that grates on me more than the sound of performative laughter. There was a lot of it at the high school on Monday. A group of kids huddled together and acted more excited than they could have been about stuff nobody really cares about. They described things they saw on TikTok, and as they did it they were beside themselves with put-on amusement. One of them would say something that was meant to be funny, and it wasn’t funny, but the person beside them would snort and hiss in a way that was meant to denote hilarity. It sounded something like laughter. It was not laughter.I thought it was an evil sound. It sounded to me like derision, like the way bullies snicker back and forth to unnerve their victims. I thought it must be the way guards laugh in the off-hours at Guantanamo Bay.After Monday, I didn’t hear much of that laughter anymore. I don’t know why not.But we are living in evil times, and I am thinking of the people I have known who are dead to me, to whom I will never speak again. Or, if we do talk, it won’t be like it once was. They will not hear the noise it makes, but the next time we meet, the door to my heart will slam in their faces.At a conference, some years ago, I was having a good conversation at a bar with a couple of other guys. We got along. We laughed at stuff together, in a way that wasn’t fake. It was, as the Irish say, “good craic.” We finished our drinks. I offered to fetch more of them, and I did. I bought my acquaintances their drinks. When I returned, I handed the drinks over, and in unison the pair of them turned their backs to me. They began talking to other people.It was fine; they were under no obligation to continue entertaining my company. I walked across the room and spoke to a staff member from the university press that was putting the event on. She was nice. When my drink was empty, I left.Maybe those two guys meant nothing by turning away from me abruptly. I doubt they planned to disregard me like that; it was just as likely an organic turning away from someone they were done talking to, who was wrong in thinking that getting us all more drinks implied that the conversation would continue. Maybe they are just like me, doing their best to be good people in a roomful of strangers and coming up short from time to time.But if they were trying their best, they could hardly have done a worse job. Their disregard seemed altogether deliberate, and I trust ...
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    26 mins
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