Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast. On this episode, Anne and I share the principles that guide us as we make playlists for our respective runs and walks. We also hope to try and bring to life for y’all where it is that we run and walk. Anne, what walk did you choose for this assignment?
Click above for The Art of the Playlist Podcast
Valle Crucis Community Park 45 Minute Run:
The park is 7.8 miles west of Boone, North Carolina where App State University is. This is the mountains of North Carolina.
The park is on the Watauga River. There are often people playing in the river and there are lots of people fishing for trout.
There are at least two streams feeding into the Watauga River that also run through the park.
It’s a rare flat valley surrounded by mountains.
The trail I run four times is over a mile long.
Also discuss: the trail, who is there, it costs $5 sometimes, paved and grass, playgrounds, basketball
Nearby: The Mast Farm Inn, Valle Tavern, Mast Store Annex, Original Mast Store (building constructed in 1882), Pearl’s Kitchen, Valle Crucis Farm, Taylor House Inn.
The park is 1.8 miles from my house.
Torg’s 45 Minute Run Playlist
What are some guiding principles of putting together this playlist?
I signed up for my first race in a long time on June 14th. I’m running the 4-mile version. There’s a 10 and 14 mile version too. It starts at The Rock, which is App State’s Football Stadium.
The move from podcasts where I might forget what I’m doing to music. I wanted music because I was trying to tap into the routine that would get my body read to run.
I’ve even added drive over to the park music: Weird Fishes by Radiohead and Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve. I pick these for the pace of the beat that I think could be my feet hitting the ground in rhythm. So for these, I’m getting ready to run. My body hears these songs and thinks, we’re going running.
“Theme from Hoosiers” by Jerry Goldsmith. I have a walk from the car to the starting line. I like having the start and finish line the same to help me remember lap times and see how I am doing.
More instrumentals to get started:
“Gonna Fly Now,” the Rocky theme song by Bill Conti, “Training Montage” also from Rocky by Bill Conti. Imagine the Russion running indoors in Rocky IV while Rocky is out chopping wood in the Russian winter.
My list is always evolving according to my pace and how the songs are hitting. I just moved “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence and the Machine out.
Just keep it going songs: Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People, It’s a Sin by Pet Shop Boys, Safe and Sound by Capital Cities, and “I Ran (So Far Away)” by A Flock of Seagulls.
Now we’re going to get more serious and try and turn it on. I bumped up Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” to kick off this section because it starts slow. If it was later in this section, there’s kind of a lull that breaks the flow. I also have Eminem’s “Till I Collapse” in here and it starts a little slow too and that’s a bit of a problem and I don’t feel like I want those two songs next to each other.
Cake’s “The Distance” works great in this section.
I like to finish, and my favorite song to run to, is the Beastie Boys “Sabotage.” I also like this song better on a run than at any other moment in my life.
If I happen to still be running after “Sabotage,” I have ACDC “Thunderstruck,” and Ozzy Osbourne “Crazy Train” ready to go.
Bill’s Mountain Run Playlist
Anne’s Los Angeles Walk Playlist
Thanks for checking out this episode of the Torg Stories Podcast!
Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast. On this episode, Anne and I are going to talk about the new Noah Kahan album. It’s titled The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs.
Noah Kahan The Great Divide Podcast
Noah Kahan’s album The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs was released during April of 2026.
Be sure to check out my favorite musical storytellers of all time at the bottom of the page.
Torg Family Updates:
Mom:
tries to call Dad on her phone, asks when she’s going home. She forgets anything I tell her, and I’d have to tell her again. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.
Septic:
it was the seal of the toilet flapper. $5 repair and the yard is showing improvement already! However, about $350 to try and repair the yard with dirt and sod.
The prom:
Our living room turned into Boone’s hottest restaurant serving 20 people Sat night.
Noah Kahan’s album The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs
A few details about Noah Kahan:
29 years old born in Strafford, Vermont.
Strafford is half the size of Winamac, population around 1000
I watched his documentary on Netflix. It’s called Noah Kahan: Out of Body. Click here to watch trailer. Quote from his mom: Noah makes our family’s dirty laundry just seem like being human.
His dad won Ironman contests when Noah was a kid and suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bike crash. His parents got divorced.
Two brothers and a sister who seem to figure largely into his songs.
Kahan family professions:
Mom has written how parenting guides and taught English
Dad worked in IT and played the guitar
Brother Richard is a firefighter. Documentary said the attention-deficit kids in their gym clothes is Richard.
Sasha is a pediatric surgeon in Park City
Simon works for a global consulting company based in New York
Wife Brenna: engaged 2023, married 2025. Known each other at least since 2014.
For April, 2026 article in Burlington Free Press, click here.
This is his fourth album and it’s coming after Stick Season. There’s 21 songs on this one, an hour and 36 mins long.
Favorite or Most Interesting Songs on Noah Kahan’s album The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs
There’s a thumping energetic beat to open and a line, “I’d hurt anyone who got too close and anyone who wouldn’t look.
Significant lyric:
I was born into a one-hundred-year storm
Foot of ice across Vermont
And in that dark, and in that frost, a heart was formed
Malcontented and unwarm
You were unsuspectin’, not unwarned
We get a metaphor of opening up doors here.
Seems like a challenge or even an instruction from Noah to someone else: you don’t want to get involved with me. You have been warned. I am a losing streak waiting to happen.
I’m left staring at the ceiling listing reasons you should pack all your shit up.
What do I make of it all?
Kahan touts the mental health issues. I see that in characters who take or don’t take their medication. I see it in lots of songs about drinking too much. People in the songs have wounds.
Exhausted, guilty consciences
An unwillingness of some of the characters to open up, talk about the past
The lyric, “I scream in my sleep.”
Feels like a lot of people feel what Kahan describes in the songs and his music is a balm for their suffering. I like this album as much as anything I have heard for the first time but I like studying it and I like to have it on working in the yard.
I heard Taylor Swift talk about this once: a song is just what I felt in that moment, and the song preserves that feeling. (Noah doesn’t have to feel this way all the time to put it in a song, and it’s something I think through and don’t put into the work because I’ve thought it through, and I think that can be a mistake).
Kahan’s use of the word “you” and all the people that might address.
Using you: Great Divide, Haircut, Willing and Able
He has this really emotionally tangled relationships with friends and family that I feel like I never had.
The rest of the songs:
End of August, the second part of the title comes from this one: Endin’ of August, the bugs are just starting to die.
It’s a matter of time until everything dies
Downfall: I hope it all goes terrible for you so you come back home.
Lighthouse
Paid Time Off: feels like the good choice of the simple life in Sheffield working for paid time off, getting high, playing a round of golf on your day off
Staying Still: think I’m going to like this one when I spend more time with it. I can’t keep starting over… Are you good at staying still?
Dashboard: it’s about running away from your problems (driving and the dashboard) only to find all the same problems, the person is still an asshole
Kind of a funny song that tells someone they are an asshole.
23: it’s about if he leaves someone at 23 then they will always be this good thing. If you leave someone then they can stay this perfect vision.
Porch Light: title comes from he tells whoever the song addresses he’ll leave the porch light on. Lyric: I choke on the Poison spreading to my lungs.
Headed North: wishing someone he knows was headed North, funny line about someone with a coexist sticker telling another to go to hell
We Go Way Back
Spoiled – so his children get spoiled
All them Horses
A Few of Your Own – I was high when I met you…
Orbiter –
Dan – let’s talk about him. Where do we go when we die? He wouldn’t mind that spot where he’s camping.
Favorite Musical Storytellers
Jim Croce: Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, Time in a Bottle, You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, Roller Derby Queen, Operator, Workin at the Car Wash Blues
Everclear: Santa Monica, I Will Buy You a New Life, Everything to Everyone, Heroin Girl
Liz Phair: Divorce Song, Polyester Bride
Ben Folds: Brick, the couple’s trip to an abortion clinic, Annie Waits
Billy Joel: Piano Man, Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, Captain Jack, The Entertainer
Paul Simon: Address about 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, America, Kodachrome
Thanks for checking out this episode of the Torg Stories Podcast!
Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast. On this episode, Anne and I are discussing the David Foster Wallace essay titled, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” Anne, if Wallace was a less creative writer, he could have called this “Playing Tennis in Central Illinois.”
Click above to listen to episode on David Foster Wallace’s essay “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”
Acceptance is its own verve -DFW
The graphic in the featured image was by Julianna Brion and appeared in a The New Yorker piece titled “David Foster Wallace’s Perfect Game” by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Click here to connect with that.
Breaking down the title:
I take that word “derivative” to be a math term and this essay is loaded up with math words and phrases and math metaphors.
Something for a writer to consider: When I make choices about what words to use and what metaphors I will employ, from what world will I draw? For example, if I’m writing about an Indiana basketball player, then word choices and metaphors might come from those worlds: like a ball swishing through the net or his face was as red as a barn.
Derivative sport speaks to tennis being a game of geometry, a game of angles. You have the boundary lines, you have the angle the ball is coming in and going out, and you have other variables such as wind.
Here is the National Centers for Environmental Information on tornado alley: Tornado Alley is a nickname given to an area in the southern plains of the central United States that consistently experiences a high frequency of tornadoes each year. Tornadoes in this region typically happen in late spring and occasionally the early fall.
I hadn’t really thought of tornado alley as in Illinois but I did find this on WCIA out of Champaign, IL: The Insurance Information Institute said Illinois topped the list as the U.S. state with the most tornados in 2023, with 136 touching down. Alabama came in at second with 101 tornadoes.
Discussion questions:
How would you describe David Foster Wallace to someone who has never heard of him? How would you tell someone about this piece?
I came to him through his essay “The View from Planet Trillaphon as Seen in Relation to the Bad Thing.” I think he wrote it as a student at Amherst. Click here to read. Then I just went on a reading binge and especially liked his nonfiction such as “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” and “Ticket to the Fair.”
I read a biography about him Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by DT Max.
Also, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky (2010).
That was also a movie in which Jason Segel plays Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg plays Lipsky.
From the biography I read:
There was a moment in many of his fellow students’ lives when they realized Wallace was not just smart but stunningly smart, as smart as anyone they had ever met. One friend remembers looking over his shoulder in a class on twentieth-century British poetry after the professor returned their essays on Philip Larkin and seeing on Wallace’s, “A+—One of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read.”
He did a double thesis at Amherst. One in philosophy and one in English. The bio on the English thesis: Wallace’s thesis panel gave Broom an A-plus, and Wallace matched Costello double summa for double summa. But he had also discovered something more important about himself—he knew now what he wanted to do. Fiction held him as no other effort had; it took him out of time and released him from some of the pain of being himself. He told his roommate that when he was writing, “I can’t feel my ass in the chair.”
What are the themes in this?
Childhood
Acceptance as its own verve AND Stoic cheer
Some Golden Lines from the piece:
P. 6 for this description of the town he lived in: Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid: nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest, fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest at Urbana, plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north.
P.7: The best planned, best hit ball often just blew out of bounds, was the basic unlyrical problem.
P. 7 a question for Anne: I, who was affectionately known as Slug because I was such a lazy turd in practice, located my biggest tennis asset in a weird robotic detachment from whatever unfairnesses of wind and weather I couldn’t plan for. Question: Anne, would you say you were a lazy turd in practice?
P. 7 Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind; or rather I at least felt the wind had some basic right to be there, and found it sort of interesting, and was willing to expand my logistical territory to countenance the devastating effect a 15- to 30-mph stutter-breeze swirling southwest to east would have on my best calculations…
P. 14: Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages bought it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them. Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law.
What do I appreciate about Wallace’s essay?
One, the mind at work with the knowledge of math being applied to tennis with the ability to put all kinds of sentences together that I could never think of and balance sophisticated word choice with just an easy going funny voice.
Makes me nostalgic for my own Midwestern days playing sports outside, in barns, on the golf course, running the wind for cross country.
Those from IN/WI/Northern IL think of their own Midwest as agronomics and commodity futures and corn-detasseling and bean-walking and seed-company capps, apple-checked Nordic types, cider and slaughter and football games with white fogbanks of breath exiting helmets.
Wallace is funny!
The Midwest as a person when it comes to weather and “our own personal unsheltered asses.” p. 3
Starts a paragraph this way: Still strangely eager to speak of weather,
As a midwesterner who grew up playing sports, what do you connect with here? Does Wallace offer you anything new?
Riding my bike to Twelve Mile, riding to Curt Kline’s house.
Playing golf at Pond View in the wind, running back to school in the wind during cross country
Thinking of Jeremy Vogt and Scott Blum and Matt Painter
Vocab words I had to look up (definitions from Webster’s)
Conferva as in conferva-choked ditches: any of various filamentous algae that form scums in still or sluggish fresh water
Detente as in the opponent smelled some breakdown in the odd detente I’d had with the elements: detente as in the relaxation of strained relations or tensions
Threnody as in the two sirens in Philo weave in and out of each other in a godawful threnody: a song of lamentation for the dead, as in an elegy
Wallace writes about two things he is pretty good at: tennis and basketball.
What would be my two things?
I need a synonym for basketball as in his “derivative sport” and I need a second synonym for where I grew up as in his “tornado alley.”
Blacktop Basketball in The Winamac Town Park
Playing Fours in Basketball and Watching Out for Telephone Poles
What adjective before basketball? Outdoor, Park, Rom Com
What phrase for Winamac, Indiana?
What about the state of our games when we were in high school is gone now? What do players have today that we didn’t have then? In short, how have sports changed since we played in the 80s and early 90s?
Back then: team shoes, knee sleeves, wristbands, short shorts, park and barn basketball
Now: travel basketball, trainers, social media, the full leg or arm sleeve, music during practice
Anything else you want to say about this?
Philo, IL (about which Wallace writes) is 150 miles southwest of where we grew up in Winamac, Indiana.
The 23 line second to last sentence that precedes the last sentence: Antitoi’s tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn’t.
click player above to listen to episode about HBO’s Rooster
Have you heard about HBO’s television show The Rooster? On this episode, Anne and I discuss episode 1 of the show that stars Steve Carell as the writer Greg Russo. He’s a bumbling, gold-hearted author who says he writes the kind of novels people like to read at the beach. The show follows Greg as he heads to an elite East Coast college under the guise of a doing a reading. In reality, he’s there to check on his daughter Katie, whose life has spiraled after her husband Archie (played by Ted Lasso’s Phil Dunster) cheated on her with a graduate student.
The episode, titled “Release the Brown Fat,” introduces us to a quirky cast of characters at Ludlow College, from John C. McGinley’s eccentric, sauna-obsessed President Walter Mann to Danielle Deadwyler’s aggressively forward and hilarious poet, Dylan Shepard.
We compared the show to another Bill Lawrence project, Ted Lasso, noting the show’s massive heart and 80s and 90s infused soundtrack. While it shares that signature Lasso warmth and a focus on the wages of divorce, Rooster carves out its own identity through Carell’s portrayal of social discomfort and use of his “shot in the face” metaphor for heartbreak. We cover the “Hot House Rules” of the sauna and that shocking ending involving a first-edition Tolstoy and a house fire.
Is this show worth a watch? (Spoiler: at least for Bill Torg, it definitely is!)
In this episode of the Torg Stories Podcast, my sister Anne and I discuss the men’s and women’s basketball Final Fours. It was a Big Ten takeover as both Michigan and UCLA won national titles, though the headlines were just as much about some of the coaches as they were about the games. We dive into the physical battle between South Carolina and UConn, Geno Auriemma’s controversial exchange with Dawn Staley, and how Michigan’s was able to secure their first championship since 1989.
Beyond the box scores, we discuss the mass exodus at Tennessee on the women’s side to Mike Malone’s move from the NBA to the ESPN studio to UNC. I also share a few stories from my own trip to the 1997 Final Four in Indy and reveal my updated list of coaches I admire.
