Frontier Road (Short Stories, Poems, Abridged Classics, and Questions of Belief)

About Frontier Road (Short Stories, Poems, Abridged Classics, and Questions of Belief)

Frontier Road podcast includes short stories, poems, and excerpts and or abridgments of classical literature, often deriving themes of questioning God, liberation of unbelief, ambiguity and the absurdity of life. We often introduce themes of mid-life crisis, sometimes from a male perspective. Issues of marriage, raising children, mental struggle and melancholy are all major themes within the selected literature. *Frontier Road can often times be satirical and/or irreverent and/or sincere. Viewer discretion advised.

Publisher

ContemplateBooks.com

Category

arts

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 Oct 2023

Latest episode

30 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

100 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Layoffs, Happen (A short story about a man that lost his job to ai)

   I read the email notifying me that I had lost my job, then shut my laptop and stared at the cubicle wall in front of me. I could already hear my wife asking if there was anything I could do; petition someone, beg, stay on in some lesser role? I thought about calling Tyler Rinock myself and agreeing to take a pay cut if it meant I could just stay. Tyler made something like thirty-five million dollars a year, plus stock incentives, and was said to be worth somewhere north of three billion. I wasn't mad about that. I was, at least one time in my life, a Republican. I still believe in markets, ownership, in men building things and keeping what they earned. Still, those beliefs felt a little more abstract sitting in a cubicle at nine in the morning wondering how I was going to pay my mortgage. Maybe Tyler could show me some mercy. I'd seen the writing on the wall since the first time I opened ChatGPT four years earlier. That thing can code like crazy, I'd thought as I watched it script in seconds what sometimes took me hours. It translated languages more efficiently than I ever dreamed software could. It found bugs, wrote documentation and explained unfamiliar code almost instantly. I knew where this was headed. The industry would eventually move away from large teams of engineers toward smaller groups of higher-level engineers who knew how to use AI to do the work of several people. I raced to become one of those engineers. What else was I supposed to do? I didn't have a fallback career. I had received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan and was hired by Ribbed Software almost immediately after school. Coding was what I knew. For the last eleven years, I'd worked on the systems that kept Ribbed Software's medical dictation platform running. The product itself was mostly invisible to the people who used it. Doctors spoke into a microphone, our system captured their dictation and converted it into a record that could be stored, searched and signed. I kept the dictations flowing, the records synced and the whole thing from breaking. If something failed at two in the morning, I got the alert. If a hospital's dictation files stopped processing or a physician's notes didn't make it into the record, I traced through the logs until I found the fault. I felt like I was an integral part of the software. If it wasn't for me, the software would fail. That's how I felt. I've also never been especially ambitious about my job. My passions were elsewhere. I enjoyed writing and I did so on the weekends, maintaining a small blog that noone read but that kept me entertained and educated about classical prose. I wrote short stories and submitted them for publication, but was never published. Life was fine really.

2. 

   20 Jul 2026

   Odysseus: Homer vs. Hollywood

   "Hello, students. Hope you had a crappy weekend. How many of you went to the theater to watch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey?" Three hands shot up. One very excitedly. "Yes, Jeremy. What did you think of it?" Jeremy was a polarizing figure in the class. Intelligent? Yes. Disruptive? Yes. Rude and obnoxious? Yes and yes, almost always. But Mr. Grey liked him anyway because he was always there and usually willing to contribute to the discourse. "Bro, Mr. Grey, this movie was slinging. I've seen Troy with Brad Pitt. This ain't Troy. I liked it." "Thanks, Jeremy. What was it about, at its core? No spoilers, but give me some context here." "It's Odysseus, played skillfully by Matt Damon, journeying home after war, and the people waiting for him." "Thank you, Jeremy. And if you don't mind, I'm going to keep you on the spot for the rest of class. We're going to dissect what this story means and the greater context of one of the greatest works of literature in the history of the world." "Okay, now a quick lecture about what The Odyssey is. Don't get lost here, and don't fall asleep. I'll keep it short." "The Odyssey is a Greek epic poem. It was composed sometime around the 700s B.C., but it wasn't originally written down. It was part of an oral tradition, passed down and recited by bards over the centuries. The story was eventually written down, and later manuscripts preserved it for future generations." A hand from the corner shot up. "Yes, Julie?" "What's a bard?" "It's a poet, artist, or singer." "Thanks." "No problem." "And by the time The Odyssey was composed, it is almost certain that the poet had before him a well-arranged mass of legends and traditions from which he could select his material. And as Jeremy said, this recent Christopher Nolan film has re-sparked interest in the tale." "Odysseus was the king of Ithaca, a small and rugged island off the western coast of Greece. Soon after he married and had his only son, Telemachus, the Trojan War began." "The poets tell us the purpose of the war was to recover Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Odysseus had no interest in Helen himself. He was already married to Penelope. But years earlier he had sworn an oath to defend Helen's future husband if the need ever arose, and when Troy refused to return her, he was bound to keep his word."

3. 

   15 Jul 2026

   Making my High School C Team

   I am fifteen years old, and I can only tell what I see, what I hear, and what I think is going on. If you want the whole story, you'd have to ask my dad, my coach, the other parents, and probably a few of my teammates. They might all tell it differently then I do. There are a little more than three minutes left before halftime, and we're losing by ten points. It's to a smaller school. Not a terrible school or anything, but a school we should be beating. We have more athletes than they do. At least that's what everybody said before the game. I'm sitting on the end of the bench. It isn't really the end. There are two guys sitting farther down than me, but they are on the JV team, even though they are in my grade. They are just here to watch. I look across the gym and see my dad.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 42 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

61

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

60

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Guest appearances

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