Category

Podcasts

Scroll down to see a list of my podcasts.

Be a poll worker! Save democracy! Make a tiny amount of money!

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Being a poll worker was one of the best things I’ve ever done. If you’ve ever thought about doing it, here’s my advice: Give it a shot! Poll workers were under attack four years ago and they’ll be under attack this election too. It’s a hard, complicated, sometimes boring but wonderfullly rewarding experience. Democracy doesn’t work without poll workers...

Is sex a “disgusting, wicked drive”?

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Dear reader, Sometimes a comment on a column can sound like a cry of agony, and a cry of agony can sound like a question. So today I respond to the below comment, posted on last week’s column. The author apparently read my 2006 Salon.com column on suicide which after 15 years still attracts fresh readers and comments. (The comments section is still open!) Ugly hunchback May 17, 2021 at 9:39...

Is my boyfriend cheating on me?

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Hi Cary, I have huge trust issues and it’s affecting my relationship with my partner of 3 years. My trust issues have stemmed from my childhood for many different reasons and to top it off, last year I found out my step dad had been abusing me. My partner has never given me a reason to not trust him. He says he has his morals and knows deep down he has never done anything wrong. His dad cheated...

Finishing School: The story behind the workshops … and the book

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[Note: This is pretty much a literal transcription of the podcast.]–ct Good morning, or evening, this is Cary Tennis, it’s Thursday, April 29, 2021, and today I’m going to do things slightly differently because this is the story behind the workshops and the book, that is, the Finishing School workshops. So how it really began is like this: In 2004 I was finishing up an article...

Famous Actress Disappears: The Ferris Wheel

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The giant Ferris wheel stopped and the car at the very top containing the man and the woman swung slightly back and forth. Then the first pink bunny came flying out of the car. You could see them way up at the top of the Ferris wheel, the woman and the man, stopped up there, just sitting, swinging gently back and forth in their seat, and every so often one of the pink bunnies comes flying out and...

Leaving San Francisco

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We didn’t know for sure what their lives were like before they came to our town. We watched them from afar, from high buildings, from shadowy cafes across the street. We watched them in the rain as they lined up for their buses, with their backpacks and their sensible shoes, their skinniness, their soft hands, their way of walking which was arrogant in its sloppiness, as if they could barely...

The Traveler: The Hand of God

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It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. I was not assigned to kill anyone. I was just supposed to meet a fellow agent and receive a little gift, a slip of paper with a number on it, and a key to a locker. And then a whole series of unexpected things happened and I was hanging from a cliff by a thread, a very strong thread, one of the threads from our lab, actually, a thread based on spider silk, like...

The Traveler: A Practical Man

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One reason I can do this job is that I don’t need theories. I don’t need explanations. I don’t need concepts or symmetry, or a belief that it all makes sense in the end. I accept that things don’t make sense. I’m a practical man. I care how things work. For instance, I wonder, How does the Academy maintain its family-like cohesion? Is it more than Skinnerian conditioning? There must be something...

The Traveler: A Walk Along the Shore Becomes Dangerous

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I took it slow walking along the shore. A problem was working its way through my mind, indistinct, murky. Some threads leading into a haze, a room full of voices whose words I could not make out, that kind of thing. I turned to look back at my footprints in the sand. There was someone back there, far back, like a phantom in the salty mist. His figure would emerge as I rounded a bend in the shore...

The Traveler: Falling in Love

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“I’m not sure I remember how to do this,” I said. “It’ll come back to you,” she said. And it did, in a way. We stopped on a drive over the mountains, over the sea, and I held her in my arms and we kissed, and sure enough some things came back to me from long ago, and in spite of my training, against all good sense, I told her who I was, that I was looking for a way out, that she’d come along at a...

The Traveler: A Sudden Memory of Terror

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At this moment, dear reader, I realize I am doing something the habit of which I have been trying to break. I am paying too much attention to the external, the tangible, while my purpose in writing this long and at times meandering account has been to expose my inner purpose, my inner experience, so that you might come to know me as a person like yourself, a person who has some skills and...

Voting Rights, Democracy, Hope, Optimism, and the “Arc of the Moral Universe”

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This morning, Monday morning, March 29, 2021, I woke up in Castiglion Fiorentino as usual and was still thinking about a column I published on Salon.com just over fifteen years ago titled, “What’s the Best Method for a Painless Suicide?”. I still to this day receive an occasional letter about that column, both from people who find solace in it and people who call me mean names...

My Mother the Narcissist

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Dear Cary, I hate my family of origin.  I recently discovered that I grew up in a mostly narcissistic family, with a narc mother who subtly but persistently projected her own guilt and shame and anger about her situation onto us, her six children.  During those childhood years, we – my siblings and I – felt so much compassion for her suffering. It seemed like almost overnight our...

The Massage Parlor Murders: What can you do?

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This is not an advice column. This is commentary. Robert Aaron Long, 21 years old, of  Woodstock, Georgia, was arrested Tuesday in the murders of eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent working in massage parlors. Initial media reports indicated that he claimed he did it because he was a sex addict. Sex addiction is not a trivial matter. But right now his claim feels like a...

I’m in love with a memory

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Dear Reader, I’m doing it again. I’m going long. In the past, in my blessed twelve years writing the advice column five days a week for Salon.com, the most commonly remarked-upon flaw in my work was my tendency to overwrite, to write long, to repeat myself, to go off on tangents (see what I mean?). My friend and mentor David Talbot, bless his soul, never gave me much trouble about it, perhaps...

Learning from Covid-19 Delirium: How I went Crazy in the ICU and Lived to Write About it

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Hi Folks! Wow, was I insane! This week’s podcast dives deep into the fantastical delirium I experienced in the intensive care unit of San Donato hospital in Arezzo, Italy. I’ll be publishing a longer prose version soon and will let you know when that is available. Also, this is the January 12, 2021 Smithsonian Magazine article I mention at about 1:20 into the podcast. But for now...

Finding the Faith to Act on Conscience

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How do you reach a point where your conscience is overwhelming and you must make the leap?
How do you get to that point?
… where the conscience … blooms, and all the fear subsides, and the conscience floods the spirit, floods the mind, floods the brain, and gives one the courage to just do the right thing. Just fucking do the right thing!”
Full podcast:

I Cry for my Country, plus: The Post-Covid-19 Acute Renal Failure Happy Kidneys Diet

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Dear reader, This week I made two podcasts. This first podcast, “I cry for My Country” emerged from relentless self-interrogation: What am I feeling about America? What is the origin, the heart of this vague tangle of feelings and evasions that is hovering about me? How can I stop taking refuge in trivialities? What needs to be said? What is urgent, important, necessary? And then, the...

The Traveler: You Are Being Watched

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There is a sign in the mess hall that says, “You are being watched.” We laugh about it because we have never known anything else, not since we were babies left alone perhaps for a few hours. I have glimpses now and then of that early me, the one before the training, before the constant surveillance, before the surrendering of all self to the company. It feels alien to recall that before I stood...

The Traveler: A Curious Feeling of Transcendence

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  Every once in a while a curious feeling would come over me, while walking in the woods that bordered the inn, or sitting in my room doing paperwork. People don’t realize how much paperwork is involved in a job like this. They think it’s all shooting people and running through the woods with dogs chasing you, but that’s only a small part of it. We also gather intelligence, naturally...

The Traveler: We Went up High in the Mountains Where it was Quiet

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We went up high in the mountains where it was quiet. There was an unused cabin up there, off the grid, not on Google maps, strategically hidden from the satellite scans, with no cellular footprint, having been lead-shielded from the start, no phones ever used up there, no trace of anything, just our analog trail, our knowing that it was up there, and we went up there, just a few of us, after the...

Are you at the end of your rope?

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Do you feel like life will never return to normal? Does the future seem like a dim, unending nightmare of isolation? Do you fear that the habits we have acquired will forever dampen the bright spontaneous spirit of social life? Does despair feel like the only realistic response to world conditions? I know many people feel this way. I myself, having survived the COVID-19 disease, having spent...

Revenge of the American Id

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NOTE: This is my podcast made the day after the the January 6 2021 attempted insurrection. On the podcast I get the date wrong; I say it’s January 7, 2020. I think that is because, as you can hear, my voice is still hoarse, as I was just three weeks out of my five-week stay in San Donato hospital in Arezzo, Italy after my catastrophic illness.   NOTE: This is my podcast made the day...

Serene in the noise of catastrophe

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How to balance our grief about the pandemic with the desire for happiness and normalcy? How to remain whole and vital and strong when the world seems to be falling apart? Where is the line between staying informed and obsessive news-watching? I ponder these things in this week’s podcast. If I were bodily able and living in the States, I think I would feel the need for action: volunteer at a...

Famous Actress Disappears: Trouble from the start

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There was trouble right away the first day of the Lydia Favors Beholden Riverwash Film ’n Theater Festival. Protesters ringed the town and were blocking entrance roads. Sheriff Stern was looking for David Twist and Marc Chute with a warrant to search their mobile command center trailer. Rock star PR1ckè® was threatening not to perform unless his contract rider specifying three changes of...

Podcast–Advice Column No. 3 Podcast: On grief

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Hi friends. this  … is the audio of “Advice Column No. 3,” posted on Soundcloud. I haven’t mastered the whole rss/podcasting process yet, so i just keep posting these audio files here. I was thinking, what can I play on guitar to put with this, and of course “Amazing Grace” came to mind so in the intro and interspersed throughout i play those big sad notes on...

Famous Actress Disappears: Johnny Favors Changes His Tune

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(I performed this on Wednesday night, January 3, 2018, at the Tasso Hostel open mic in Florence.–Cary T.) Johnny Favors was a junkie sax player in the Tenderloin playing punky jazzy avant-garde new wave bebop when he got so strung out he couldn’t hit the high notes opening for Blondie and backstage Debbie Harry wouldn’t give him one of her last three Marlboros so he called her an airheaded...

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