I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that I now have a chapbook coming out, from Cutbank.
It’s called Heavens to Betsy. It’s about a time last year when I ran out into the street to save a pug dog from getting murdered by an oncoming dump truck. It’s also about what it means to be a hero, and the burdens that come with putting everything on the line to save the life of a precious creature. One of the chapbook’s threads is a parody of Tuesdays with Morrie, in which I imagine what it would be like if Betsy the pug dog were a man I visited every Thursday who was dying of tuberculosis and loved to dispense wisdom.
You can see the list of winner, runners-up, and finalists here; check it out for yourself it you think I’m lying: https://www.cutbankonline.org/
The bad news is that the Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand may be coming to an end.
I have suspended paid subscriptions. The suspension is likely to be permanent, at least as long as the PCNWRHQRTaT is on Substack.
Some weeks ago, the Substack app sent a push notification to its users that was antisemitic and authored by the owner of a Nazi newsletter that Substack hosts.
I have known for a while that Substack hosts Nazi newsletters, which is why I have wanted to find an alternative. I have not found an alternative that doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars per year, and so this newsletter hasn’t gone anywhere.
I considered the situation all right enough to keep writing and sending stuff out. Just because Nazis, I thought, use the same service I do, that doesn’t make me a Nazi. And, you know, I shop at the hardware store. Maybe a Nazi also shops at the hardware store. That doesn’t stop me from biking over there when I need to buy nails.
But it’s time, now, to have some principles and act on them. A fraction of every payment that comes to me through Substack goes to Substack; and I can’t have my glorious newsletter funding, even in a minor way, people who are associated with actual, real-life Nazis.
I mean, if every time you went to write a new newsletter you had to reenact some version of this scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you might think twice about writing more newsletters:
I’m going to take more seriously the relocation of this newsletter somewhere else. I will make time for it.
In the meantime, I will only use it to make announcements concerning my grand achievements, like the chapbook I now have coming out, which I hope some of you will order and read. It’s something I feel really good about and I think you will like it. I think you will have a better time reading it than you would doing a lot of other things.
Is Heavens to Betsy better than getting a good massage? Yes, it is.
Is reading my chapbook better than having sex? Yes, it is better than sex. A lot better, actually, and not only because you can read it at the park without getting arrested.
If you have paid money into this newsletter, and my suspension of it leaves you feeling ripped off, then write to me immediately at robertlongforeman@gmail.com. I will make things right. I will send you a signed copy of one of my books, or something. I’ll send you photos of my glorious smile—only my mouth, not the rest of my face. I’ll do that for you.
And I don’t mean to imply that I judge other people who continue to use Substack. Hell, I still have an account with them. I’m sending this thing to you right now. Part of what makes it easy for me to end this one is that I don’t make much money from it. Some people make lots of money from theirs. Ending it would harm them financially.
And I will continue to subscribe to a limited number of Substacks. But I am also undertaking what I call The Great Unsubscribing.
I get so many emails I don’t read. Lots of them are from Substack people, whose newsletters I signed up for but have never actually read. As soon as they show up in my inbox, I hit delete. I suspect lots of people do that with mine, too. I’m starting to doubt whether this is a useful form of communication.
I am taking the trouble, now, to unsubscribe to everything. I don’t want to see things anymore that I don’t like to see. I wake up most mornings, now, with no new emails. It is wild.
I will offer one brief anecdote that has nothing to do with self-promotion. Because I was at the YMCA again, recently, and I can’t help myself.
I was in the steam room this time. There were three guys in there, one to the right of me, one to the left, and another pacing back and forth across the steam room like a dog that had some kind of fever and thought walking around would cure its fever. He was talking nonstop about how he used to be a landlord and owned fifty-two units in Columbus Park. That’s a neighborhood in Kansas City.
It once was the city’s Little Italy, and it’s one of the only parts of KC that feels to me like its own self-contained neighborhood.
I don’t mind that other parts of it don’t feel like that. But I grew up in Appalachia, and my first experiences of a city were in Pittsburgh, where the rivers and the mountains box you in everywhere you go. They restricted what could be built and where, and so you have narrow streets and compact neighborhoods. Being there feels like you’re always surrounded.
This man in the steam room, who owned part of Columbus Park, said he never showed his tenants any sympathy. He said he never gave them any relief.
You can’t do that when you own rental properties. You just can’t. “If you feel sorry for other people,” he said, “soon you’ll feel sorry for yourself.” It was what his mother used to tell him, and it was true.
Why is every trip I take to the YMCA hot tub or steam room like attending a one-act Arthur Miller play? Where do these horrible men come from? How have they survived as long as they have?
The one who was talking so much moved like he was on Adderall. Maybe he was on Adderall.
I didn’t speak up. I didn’t want to interrupt his monologue.
I remained in my usual steam room posture: hunched over with my face in my hands, which is the position I take so no one will talk to me. It also gives me that pleasant boxed-in feeling that I miss from being back home.
The man kept asking the other guys if they agreed with him. They said yes. They agreed with him.
This is the pattern for all YMCA guys. One of them takes the floor and spews his heartless mania across the room. The lesser men nod and quietly cheer him on. It’s that way every time.
Goodbye for now. If you subscribe to this newsletter, I have your email address on a special list. I will import that special list to wherever it goes next—if, that is, it goes anywhere at all.
