A Roast of the Author

I’m in Pullman, Washington at the moment with the Oregon Marching Band, helping to pep up the fans as we trounce Washington State, whose football team couldn’t successfully take on a leper colony. This puts me in an awkward position for updating, so I’ve asked my oft-mentioned friend, The Aspiring Leader to take over the reigns for this week’s entry. Please think of her as the cool substitute teacher who everyone always likes having – she’s in no way even close to being better than the teacher you have, but she’s a refreshing change of pace every once in a while. If you find that you like her change of pace, please do keep reading her blog, and if you don’t, well, I’ll be back on Wednesday. So without any further ado, go team business major!

It's like this, only without the exotic spit-tender and the actual fire. The pig is pretty spot on.

When HairGuy asked me to write a guest column, my first response was, “No way, you asshat. You constantly berate my work in a public forum, hang up on me when you’re in front of your friends, and have now sworn to have zero free time this year with which to shower attention upon me.”

But then I thought twice. With adversity comes opportunity, and the Pink Unicorn of Atheism knows that T and I have been nothing but adversaries since the day we met. Nothing short of a grease fire in my eye sockets could keep me from mocking his iniquity in the dating world, and only Inara Serra holding a meatloaf and wearing a marching band helmet could distract him from mocking my affiliation with the craft of business.

The good news for our friendship is that deep down, beneath the layers of blithe condescension and thinly-veiled ridiculing, we’re really the same creative genius. He simply executes his talents in more blatantly creative ways. We have a deal, actually. He promises to remain my friend until fame and fortune flow unto him like so many concubines at the foot of Xerxes, and I promise to let him crash on my couch when he resorts to burning blog posts for heat in the meantime. I’m banking on the fact that being a friend of “that funny guy who writes that one show I watch once in a while” will eventually pay for the extra hummus and diet coke rations.

Not only do I see future gain from my friendship with T, but there are plenty of immediate perks as well. Anytime I come over to his parents’ town home for a play date, I am fed delicious food and imbued with spirits of all kinds*, not to mention delighted with scintillating conversation that usual revolves around mocking their only child. However, the Capps clan is not to be mistaken for a peaceful tribe. I have fallen victim to their nefarious plots for dinner table domination many a time. One night, over bowls of cioppino and glasses of red wine, they played a secret game (at least unbeknownst to me) of Make Dinner Come Out Kristin’s Nose. After a particularly valiant attempt that resulted in a fair amount of coughing on my end, I put on a brave face and postulated that, “It’s not the worst thing I’ve had come out of my nose.” Quick as a fouled-mouthed whip, I heard, “Was it the Holocaust? Did the Holocaust come out your nose?” Never have I known T to pass up a chance to insult an endlessly persecuted religion (or Christianity, whichever be more convenient at the time).

*By the by, his hair only gets softer and shinier with every sip of cognac one takes. Future wife of Truman: do bear this in mind.

The first time I saw the preview for the Patrick Dempsey flick Made of Honor, I bounced gleefully in my seat while repeatedly smacking T on the arm and whisper-yelling, “That is SO going to be us! You HAVE to be my maid of honor!” to which he either exploded in fury and then immediately reassembled or simply sat in silent rage. If Buddha and the Dalai Lama ever did go ice skating in hell and T did fill a primary organizing role at my wedding, I foresee plenty of bite-sized peanut butter sandwiches, a DJ who’s a diehard fan of the Rushmore soundtrack, and dice on every table for the guests to roll their fancy dessert bonuses.

From a mutual hatred of organized athletics to differing opinions on the societal benefits of Sex and the City, our friendship is built on a foundation of metaphorical volcanic magma: when free time for lunch abounds and he’s batting greater than 50% on pickup attempts, the interactions are solid and the living is easy. And, when a butterfly flaps its wings in Malaysia, we have a bitch fight that ends in words like, “That? Oh, that’s what you want to go with? This coming from the guy (girl) who liked (hated) Punch Drunk Love.”

At the end of the day, I’m pretty certain I can say it’s worth it. I’ve managed to mooch the entire series of Firefly, most of Freaks and Geeks, and more MST3K than I can shake a stick at, and he’s gotten…well, I’m sure he’s told you about that.

Drop It Like It's Hot

I dropped history like one of these.

My dear friend The Aspiring Leader and I have a longstanding tradition: At the beginning of every term, she excitedly reads to me the list of all 43 classes and extracurricular activities she’s taking (for a grand total of 4000 credit hours per term), and I say, “Wow, that’s an awful lot of work, are you sure you have time for all that?” And she says, “Oh, it’s really not that much!” And then, nine weeks later during finals, I have to drop everything and talk her down from suicide as she tries to prepare for 17 exams, 4 speeches, and the final presentation for Grizzly Bear Deathmatch 301. Somewhere in this process, she utters the words, “I took too many classes!”, and then I utter the words, “I told you so!”, and then she utters the words, “Truman, you’re a horrible person who no one will ever love!”, and I utter the words, “That’s about right.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I feel a certain smug superiority that I don’t need to be occupied to be happy. People like The Aspiring Leader seem to thrive when they’re so busy that amphetamines are a legitimate study aid, whereas I tend to work best in situations that can be either postponed or forgotten entirely should something good happen to come on TV. This is why I never joined the National Honor Society at my high school – I mean, come on! Community service? Screw that! These YouTube videos won’t watch themselves, and even if they could, I wouldn’t trust them to do it as well as I can. I value my leisure time, and when it’s taken away from me I usually react poorly.

So here I am, then, staring the first week of school in the face with a courseload consisting of Spanish, Journalism, Humanities, and United States History, along with the marching band, my column in the paper, and writing/co-directing/costarring in my own TV show. I look at this schedule and I see frightening visions of the future in which there is no part of my life that belongs to me, rather than the school. In the future I see, the University of Oregon has electrodes hooked up to my balls and is forcing me to stand naked on one foot, wearing a black hood, and it is taking pictures of me and laughing. This is not the college experience that people tell fond stories of later in life, unless it happens as part of a fraternity initiation, in which case I suppose it’s A-OK.

This is unusual for me, because a schedule this tight requires me to be a lot more responsible than I’m used to being. Ordinarily, I’d flip off a whole busload of nuns if it meant I’d have the least responsibilities possible, because to me, responsibilities are the explosive speedbumps on the deadly postapocalyptic freeway of life – they are to be avoided at all costs. My previous experiences with responsibility have proven this to be a good strategy; when I was given the seemingly innocuous responsibility of leading the eight-person trumpet section in my high school’s marching band, the result was ten dead, fourteen wounded, and the near-destruction of the state of Israel.* Now I’ve got articles to write and actors to manage and drill and music to learn, not to mention some classes on top of all that if I’ve got the time (and for those of you playing at home, I definitely won’t have the time), and the only possible outcome I can foresee of a situation where there are so many “ifs” riding on my abilities is one with a lot of fire and people screaming.

*And, one more time, I’m really sorry about that, Israel. It won’t happen again.

As with most situations that worry me, the method I’ve been using to cope with my anxiety over my schedule is a healthy combination of losing sleep and nervously asking my friends what they think. The response I usually get is, “Wow, you’re going to be pretty busy!”, which doesn’t do a whole lot besides worry me more, which in turn leads me to lose more sleep and ask more friends, thus perpetuating the cycle. The real answer I want is either, “No, you’ll be fine” or “Yes, that’s too much” – essentially I want somebody to tell me what to do, because even being in command of my own fate is a little more responsibility than I need at this point.

Today, after some soul searching and premonitions of a bleak future with no time for peanut butter or Diet Coke, I made the executive decision to drop my US History class. Having done so, I guess I should feel better, but I can’t help feeling like a slacker. The course registration system at the University of Oregon has an oddly judgmental interface – once it had processed my dropping history, its response (“Class dropped”) felt oddly snarky. “Oh, congratulations,” It was saying. “You’re not even going to try, are you? You’re not even going to go to class for the first week before dropping it? Well, well – it looks like StudentID 950934549 is majoring in Quitting, with a minor in Sloth and maybe Music if there’s time.”

In the end, I guess that dropping my history class was the best choice. For one thing, it means that my head won’t explode, which works out pretty well for me seeing as I really enjoy having a head, and it also works out well for you, because without a head my hair would be pretty much homeless. What’s more, this is good news to the people affiliated with the other classes and activities that I didn’t get rid of, because now there will be marginally more Truman time available to them. But I think what’s best is that I chose to sacrifice a class instead of an elective. Getting rid of a class is one thing – there are plenty of classes to take, and I’ll always have to take them. However, electives are my own interests and passions – be they putting stupid jokes in the once-respectable school newspaper or playing a thinly veiled version of myself on public access TV – and I’m glad that when the time came to put something on the chopping block that I decided not to put aside my true interests in favor of busywork meant to help me attain a piece of paper that certifies me as Officially Smart.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I bear a fond farewell to my professor and classmates from History 352 – I’ve never met any of you because classes haven’t started yet, but I’m sure I would have either liked or disliked you all. If any of the women in this class are in the market for a boyfriend, please don’t let my absence from the class hurt my chances with you.

Truman Capps is counting the days until his creativity well runs dry, and worrying about the impending doom when that finally happens.

Game Day

Even our mascot wants to heckle! Look at him go!

College football is an oddly pagan experience. Every Saturday, tens of thousands of people get up, drink various foul smelling tonics with exotic names like “Busch”, and then flock to a gigantic concrete and steel circle to watch two groups of burly men beat the everloving fuck out of each other in pursuit of a small object that is ostensibly made out of a pig’s skin. Meanwhile, beautiful women dance suggestively, people dress up like animals, and ordinarily respectable musicians throw all sense of proper playing and common decency out the window in favor of making as much noise as possible and being total dicks to the other team. Keep in mind, all of this happens on the campus of an organization devoted to enhancing human knowledge.

Home games are a pretty exciting time at the University of Oregon, as I guess they probably are at just about every school in the country save for the University of Self Loathing (which, of course, is in El Paso). They offer the student body a chance to get drunk; this isn’t special in and of itself, because the average college student sees every occasion in life (funerals, weddings, baptisms, traffic court appearances, AA meetings) as an opportunity to get trashed just waiting to happen, but at a football game there’s the lucrative nature of The First Law Of Conservation Of Drunk Assholes, a fascinating mob mentality wherein thousands of inebriated people unite behind a common goal. The First Law has been the cause of several major world events, such as Stonehenge and all of Irish history.*

*Yeah, I did just reinforce a negative stereotype about Irish-Americans. Thing is, even though I’m not Irish, I feel like I’m entitled to say this sort of crap, because if there’s one type of politically correct discrimination we Anglo-Americans of European descent are entitled to anymore, it’s discrimination against other Anglo-Americans of European descent. I’m sure my Irish friends will agree with me, and as we speak they are no doubt cooking up some really blistering jokes about Finland.

At the heart of The First Law is the timeless, ageless principle of “Fuck those guys!”, which itself is a simplified version of Newton’s Second Law Of I Hate Everyone Who Isn’t Me. To embrace the philosophy of “Fuck those guys!” is to look into your heart and recognize that Those Guys suck, and that the only way to prove to them how much they suck is to beat them at organized sports and/or a drinking contest.

If you’ve ever been to a college football game, you’ll notice that the announcer refers to the opposing team as “Our guests”. However, while the announcer will take pains to refer to the other team diplomatically and thank them for accepting the home team’s invitation to play, the students at the game will treat the other team’s players and fans as one would a burglar who breaks into his or her house, sets the cat on fire, and subscribes to a bunch of junk mailing lists using that address. I’ve seen all kinds of things – tailgaters from one team casting nasty looks toward the tailgaters from another team, shouting matches between fans using adjacent urinals, the occasional full on fistfight… Last year, I watched as all 5000 18 to 22 year olds in the student section jumped to their feet and booed a passing 10 year old in a Cal sweatshirt. They all seemed really pleased with themselves afterwards – and hey, who wouldn’t be? I mean, that kid went running.

Yesterday, U of O played Boise State, and we lost. There isn’t much more to say about the game than that – I think the only way we really could have won was if we’d scored more points than they did, and that clearly didn’t happen. In the fourth quarter, as it became obvious that we weren’t going to win, the stands began to get mysteriously empty as our fans skipped out on the last of the game rather than see things through to their horribly depressing conclusion. What this proves is that the “Fuck those guys” mentality only lasts as long as our team is winning – when we start to lose, the motto quickly becomes, “I strongly disagree with the fact that your team has the gaul to try and score more points than my team, and I would love to discuss this with you but I think I hear my Mom calling so I’d better get going.”

On the walk home from the stadium, I passed by a group of Oregon fans wearing handmade T-shirts that read, “I JUST FARTED… AND IT SMELLED LIKE BOISE STATE!” Sure, these guys may have been about as creative as a sack full of hammers in terms of T shirt slogans,* but let’s at least applaud them for 1) Staying for the entire game, and B) Wearing those shirts all the way home. It takes true courage to admit that your team received a serious whooping from an opponent that, by your own definition, smells like farts.

*“Win Or Lose… At Least I Don’t Have To Go Home To Idaho!”
“Boise Isn’t A State – Dur-Hey!”
“[Picture of an Elmer’s Glue bottle with the Boise State Broncos on it]”
“Idaho – Oregon’s New Jersey!”
All of these are just off the top of my head. Come on, guys. Don’t hide behind flatulence.

Critical as I may be of the classless elements of college football, I can’t help but love it. There are few people in the world more foul than the Oregon trumpets – during basketball games, I’ve screamed things at USC’s players that would make George Carlin weep tears of blood – and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every minute of earning college credit for being a highly obnoxious and abrasive fan with a loud instrument clutched in my right hand (keeping my left free for whatever rude gestures the situation may call for). Sure, maybe it was uncivilized of me to start a Facebook group branding Cal’s mascot as a pedophile. Maybe it was not proper social decorum for me to say that all of Oregon State’s sports teams were fathered by drunk farmers and sheep. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t PC for me to call the University of Washington an overrated excuse for a two-bit community college. But that’s okay – it’s sports!

In ancient Rome, people got together in huge stadiums and watched gladiators beat the everloving fuck out of one another. Football is very much the same thing – it’s a violent and highly competitive sport, only this one doesn’t involve Russel Crowe. Back then, the Romans blew off steam by watching people kill one another, nowadays we blow off steam in a pretty similar way. So what if we go a little overboard in our response? It’s healthy to sacrifice manners every once and awhile – all the better that you should do it in a large crowd when alcohol is within reach.

Truman Capps hates Boise State and their highfalutin’ blue turf.

My Apartment: A Treatise

Soviet Union, or college?

Listen:

College and Communism have two things in common: Both have a lot to do with parties, and both involve a lot of standing in line and waiting for simple things. This sort of crap starts as early as freshman orientation, most of which is spent waiting in line to fill out new and interesting forms and insurance releases, and continues until graduation, when you stand in line with everyone else in your class and wait your turn to walk across the stage. The Communism parallels go even deeper if you’re in a marching band – you stand in line twice as much as usual so you can get basic necessities like food, shoes, and the exact same clothes as everyone else.

As you may recall, I’ve elected to move out of the odious black hole of the dormitories and into the odious black hole of off campus housing. My intrepid roommates, Jeff and Josh, and myself had thought we’d beat the system by finding an apartment complex that was newly remodeled, cheap, and close to campus. However, there is always trouble in paradise, even if your paradise is a tiny room in which the toilet is uncomfortably close to the bed. The company in charge of my apartment sent out an email to all of the people who had signed a lease with them and told us that we’d need to come to the rental office on September 15th with a check for the first month’s rent, and only then would we be allowed to pick up our keys and move in. The cheap solution here is to use a crowbar to smash the door open and move in without keys, but seeing as I didn’t have a crowbar and didn’t want to mess up the beautiful, richly aged faux-wood of our new doors, I decided to gain entry to my apartment through the normal channels instead.

September 15th, as it happens, was the first day of band camp,* which is traditionally the most line-happy of marching band oriented days. There’s the line to sign in, the line to check out an instrument, the line to get each different part of your uniform, the line for auditions, the line for the single bathroom provided in our rehearsal space… It’s like the bank meets Disneyland, only instead of someone waiting to give you cash or let you go on a roller coaster, you’re waiting to get a garishly colored uniform with a gigantic “O” on it. I was fortunate to have a three-hour break between the initial spate of standing in line and the subsequent hours of marching in lines, so I took that opportunity to walk a mile and a half from registration at the stadium to my apartment complex so I could pick up my key.

*Having read this, you’ve probably smiled to yourself and gleefully said, “This one time, at band camp!” to no one in particular. If so, I’d encourage you beat yourself over the head with a sack of Valencia oranges until all the stupid is purified out of you by stinging, acidic citrus. I’d do it myself, but I’m really busy these days.

Looking back, I don’t know exactly what I’d expected to happen: September 15th was the day for everyone with a lease at this company to pick up their keys, regardless of what complex their apartment was in, and everyone had been told to come to the same place to do it. I should have been able to see the inevitable outcome, but I suppose I hadn’t thought it through very well. Evidently, the apartment managers didn’t either, because there were approximately six people on staff to process the approximately literally hundreds of tenants who showed up that day, checks in hand, ready to make a few signatures and get their flashy new keys. The result was a line that stretched from the rental office, down the hall, down a staircase, across the sidewalk, and practically into the street. Yes, this was a line of Disneyworld proportions. However, I don’t think they’re ever going to make “Finalizing The Lease Papers And Paying Your First Month’s Rent - The Ride”, because I doubt that a very slow three hour long ride that ends with you giving a complete stranger $400 would be really popular. Judging by Disney’s creativity as of late, though, they’d probably make a movie out of the ride anyway.

Hours later, I finally obtained my key and was able to personally get to know my room for the first time. The experience was a little less exciting than I’d expected. The demo unit that had won Jeff, Josh, and myself over in the spring was beautifully furnished with mirrors, towels, and fake framed pictures, while the room I walked into was bare and desolate and had a toilet that was still covered in fresh drywall. At the time, I’d assumed that this was the contractor’s fault – the idiots had forgotten to install the Charm! I was so convinced that my apartment was unlivable that I opted to stay at a friend’s house for a few more nights rather than sleep in an apartment so lacking in the homey-yet-suave furnished beauty I’d been promised. Today, though, when I stopped by and peeked in to see if any Charm had arrived, I noticed that Josh had been in and set up all his stuff in his room before heading back to Reedsport for a few more days. It was then, seeing his bedspread and kitchen appliances in a room that had been blank yesterday, when I remembered that while we’d ordered a furnished unit, Charm was nowhere on the list of provided items – we had to bring that on our own. My apartment will only start to feel like home once I actually start putting my stuff in there; until then it’s just a big empty room with a bed, the sort of place a mild mannered serial killer might inhabit.

After figuring this out, I dropped by a nearby store to buy toilet paper, because I think the first step toward a livable apartment is knowing that you’ll be covered if your food starts to disagree with you. I wound up caught in a checkout line behind four other people, carrying just an armload of TP. This was yet another line that didn’t have anything fun or exciting at the end (unless you consider hygiene to be the ultimate thrill ride), but it felt worth it to me. For one thing, it was bringing my home-away-from-home that much closer to being a “home” in any sense of the word, and for another, it’s just begging for trouble to have a fully functioning bathroom but no toilet paper. Real Ben Stiller quality stuff.


Truman Capps has never had to pay for his own toilet paper before – it’s a strange feeling, given the intended use of the product.

More Letters To People

You tell 'em, Mexico.

As you may recall, I periodically run across people in my life who, in my opinion, could benefit from a nice long fireside chat with yours truly, but seldom have the time or ability to tell them what’s on my mind. It’s my last night in Portland before I begin the two-week long hazing marathon otherwise known as Oregon Marching Band camp, therefore I figure I should nip some of these loose ends in the bud while I still can.

To Everyone Who Thought I Was Going To Keep Doing Video Updates
Aww. You actually thought I was going to keep going to the effort of reading, shooting, and editing my blogs with music? That is adorable. Really, though, I do appreciate your optimism, but I’m not the sort of guy who does a regular video blog, because a regular video blog is impossible to do well, unless you’re zefrank or have tits. For one thing, it is, as I’ve said, a lot of work, and between 16 credits, a marching band, a newspaper column, and my own TV show, I doubt I’ll even have time to go to the bathroom on a regular basis, much less add more steps to the completion of my blog. Also, despite the fact that I’m devastatingly handsome and have a voice that makes statues weep tears of bacon, I think I come across better in text than on video. The highly tangential nature of my work doesn’t lend itself well to being read in front of a camera, and I’m not ready to sacrifice my tried and true routine in favor of a cheap gimmick until the cheap gimmick actually becomes easier than what I usually do. That being said, I may sprinkle in a video update here or there in the future when I deem the subject matter worthy of a cheap gimmick to distract from poor scripting.

To Sarah Palin
Miss, I am sick and tired of you and the disgusting lies your Republican cronies on all the major news networks are cramming down our throats. It’s an absolute insult to the electoral process and I won’t stand for it any longer – you are not all that cute. Alright? You are not a VPCILF (Vice Presidential Candidate I’d Like To…). I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks so, I’m just the only one with the steel cajones to come out and say it. Sure, you’re better looking than Chester Arthur and Dick Cheney, but so is Steve Buscemi. You want to know what a hot woman in politics looks like? She looks like Elizabeth Kucinich. Yeah, that’s right, she’s married to Dennis Kucinich, who, if Congress were Lord of the Rings, would be Gimli, both for his political tenacity and for the fact that he’s small enough to sleep in a violin case. Had he won the nomination and the election, his wife would have become a royal FLILF (First Lady I’d Like To…). So when people wax on about which female political figure is the cutest, I will always be forced to compare their choice to the leggy 31-year-old redhead from Cleveland. Sure, she may not hold an actual political title, and sure, she may not be a hockey mom/pit bull, but I don’t care – she’s a hopeful reminder that sometimes even total foxes will get desperate and marry a guy for his zany philosophies instead of his looks.

To Chris Summers, Kicker For Purdue University’s Football Team
Hey there. So, I don’t know if you noticed, but yesterday your football team lost to the Oregon Ducks in double overtime, an instance that could have been avoided had two of your attempted field goal kicks not missed the goalposts. Now, let me be the first to say that I’m not mad about what happened – mainly because I go to the University of Oregon, and I’m really happy that I got to watch us win in double overtime. Also, you shouldn’t feel bad about it; the loss yesterday wasn’t a result of just your mistakes, but the mistakes of the whole team. That being said, from the looks of things on TV, your fellow students at Purdue don’t share in my feelings, and it may be a very long time until you once again know the gentle warmth of a woman’s embrace. I’m just here to tell you that, as time goes on, the loneliness won’t bother you as much. I find that it’s best to channel the frustration caused by lack of female companionship into creative pursuits, like drawing, or knitting, or a blog. Sure, the pleasant memories of days gone by may drift through your subconscious, causing you to wake up crying in the middle of the night, but in time you’ll learn to love these late night breakdowns. If all else fails, I’m sure there are plenty of Oregon fans willing to bang you.

To Reader’s Digest
Stop trying to scam my grandmother with your nickel-and-diming “Book Of The Month Club” pyramid schemes and subscription based lottery sweepstakes, or I’m going to start using your Business Reply Mail envelopes to mail you bricks and bags full of washers that you’ll have to foot the bill for. You’re a bunch of fucking crooks, Reader’s Digest.

To People Who Spontaneously Dance In Crowded Restaurants
I’ve dealt with this both at Carl’s and Bella Fresca, and I have a shocking revelation for you: We, the wait staff, do not think you are cute and free spirited. When you see us piling up nearby and watching you twirling your girlfriend around in all her low rider jeaned, muffin-topped glory, we are not thinking, “Wow! This guy is teaching his girlfriend to tango in the middle of a fast food restaurant! He’s so fearless and silly!” We are all wondering how much longer you’re going to try to be the center of the attention of the entire restaurant, how much longer you’re going to try to live out your fantasy of being the male lead in a quirky romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and featuring the new hit single by Faith Hill, how much longer we have to watch you two hornily stumble around and prevent us from doing our jobs.

To The Heavily Botoxed Woman In Bella Fresca Last Night
Hi there. Do you remember me? You were pretty drunk last night, and you’re also profoundly stupid, but if you search through your memory banks you might just recall some blurry visions of a guy with poofy hair in a black apron and polo shirt, standing by your table while you blathered and dickered at him. Allow me to explain. I have worked at Bella Fresca for some two and a half months, and I have seen all sorts of nights. I’ve seen slow nights, and I’ve seen busy nights. However, last night, my final night at Bella Fresca for the summer, was arguably the busiest night in the history of fine dining – you might have noticed that every table was full, that my superiors were barking orders at me like sergeants in a war movie, that water glasses were empty and tables needed to be bussed and Cthulhu himself had risen from R’lyeh and was actively harvesting motherfucking souls. However, despite all of this, when I attempted to pick up your plate with two bites of pasta left on it, you said, “Ooh, no, actually, I think I’m still eating that.” When I set it down and started to step away, you chirped, “Actually, nevermind – I’m finished!” I stepped back to the table to pick it up, but no sooner had my hand touched ceramic than you were saying, “No, nevermind, I do want to finish.” And then, as I walked away, you called me back and asked, in a roundabout fashion that took a solid 15 years, if I could put your four ounces of penne into a box for you to take home. Let me just say this: I can tell from your bleached blonde hair and your stretched, pseudo-plastic 52 year old features that you have spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to convince men my age to sleep with you. As a man my age, let me say this: It’s not going to happen. Honestly, if you want all that plastic surgery to start paying for itself, you’d best head to Purdue University and look for their kicker.

Truman Capps feels manlier and manlier every time he says double overtime, for it is one of the 4 sporting terms that he learned without Wikipedia.

All About Vaginas

There's about two minutes of dead air on the end of this video - if it weren't 4:30 AM, I'd really care about figuring out why. When the screen goes black with no text left on it, that's the end - there's no hidden surprise in the next two minutes.

The Pseudoscience Of Sleep

I know that this runs contrary to a point I make early on, but I never find images that tie into my topic this well.

Perhaps you’re such an obsessive fan of my blog that, every time you finish an article, you lament that you’ll have to wait another 2/3 days to read run-on sentences and overly verbose descriptions of vulgar things. Perhaps, in this post-reading desperation, you start scouring my update for anything else to read from which you can glean some sort of humor or insight on my life. Perhaps, while doing this, you notice that my update was posted at an obscenely early hour of the morning. So if you’ve ever been wondering why that is, Mom and Dad, do please allow me to explain by way of run-on sentences and overly verbose descriptions of vulgar things.

I hate the thought of calling myself a ‘night owl’* because I have it in my head that anybody who self applies a cliché term like that is trying to posture his or herself as suave and alternative, and is thus a tool. Also, the term, clichéd as it is, tends to describe somebody who is out all night dancing it up at nightclubs and hitting all the trendy bars – so, y’know, a tool – and those are most certainly not things that I do when I’m staying up late. My late nights usually consist of me in front of the computer exploring the Internet (there’s this great new site out of Mexico where they do webcam broadcasts of donkey shows as they happen) or laboriously adding on to the now 450 page monstrosity that is my novel. Sometimes, hummus is involved. ‘Night owls’ do not do these things. The term that best describes me after dark is ‘Late Night Loser’.

*Unless I’m comparing myself to the lovelorn alternate-1985 Batman parallel Night Owl 2 from Watchmen, that is! Please allow me to congratulate the three other hopeless nerds who got that joke as I slowly alienate the rest of my considerably cooler fanbase.

There was a time when I considered staying up until midnight to be really late. Eighth grade has come and gone, however, and now I consider going to bed at or before midnight to be a bizarre and alien ritual. As I progressed through high school, I further pushed the boundaries of when I deemed it necessary to go to bed – 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM… 3:15 is about my limit now, but I have been known to go to 3:30. Of course, I only stay up this late when I don’t have any pressing engagements or classes the following morning – on those nights, I’m definitely in bed by 2:00.

I don’t want to be this way. I don’t think anybody really does - there’s no pride to be taken in staying up really late doing nothing in particular. I didn’t put it on my resume – “Surfed Newgrounds.com until 3:00 AM the day before a final exam” – and I don’t think I’d win a medal for it. But the point is, even as I’m sitting up late, reading the latest biased election news on Digg or learning about bizarre and fascinating serial killers on Wikipedia, I’m thinking, “This is getting you nowhere. You’d be better off sleeping. You’re bored anyway – just go to sleep!” But no matter how hard I try to stop reading about the Zodiac Killer and go to bed, it never seems to work. It’s like I’m addicted to not sleeping, only I don’t think you can be addicted to the absence of something. Every single day of my life I’ve not done a line of cocaine – am I addicted to anti-cocaine?

What’s more likely is that my brain is addicted to thinking*. When I’m asleep, I’m not thinking, and my brain just won’t tolerate that, so it prods me into staying up late by making it physically impossible to step away from the Internet – which, if things to think about are drugs, is the ghetto. For instance, even as I write this I’m cruising through the intersection of Wikipedia Boulevard and Penny Arcade Lane in hopes of finding my dealer.

*Sometimes, I consider making T-shirts with lines from my blog on them, and “My brain is addicted to thinking” would probably be the first one. Honestly, having just written the words “My brain is addicted to thinking”, I feel as though my life has taken a turn of sorts. Not necessarily in the right direction.

The side effect of staying up so late is that I usually sleep in until noon or so, which makes me feel like something of a spoiled debutante when I come downstairs for breakfast only to find out that breakfast is lunch, and I missed lunch. As I stand over the counter eating my midday meal (which usually consists of peanut butter and bread, not necessarily in that order), I resolve to go to start going to bed earlier so that I can get up earlier and not miss out on as much of my day.

But, just like my plan to microwave a cold stick of butter to soften it up, this fails catastrophically. Even if I can raise myself from my desk chair and get into bed at a reasonable hour, the simple fact is that I only really woke up 11 hours ago and won’t be tired for another four. So then I just lie in bed, in the dark, thinking – and thinking will totally cockblock sleep, every time – until I run out of things to think about and am just a bored, very awake person in the dark, at which point I go to the computer for another four hour long fix.

The logical way to solve this problem is to set my alarm clock for an early hour and get up at that hour, regardless of how tired I am, and then go about my day so that I’ll be sufficiently tired to fall asleep at a normal hour, thus getting myself back onto a normal sleeping schedule and gradually recovering a shred of my long lost humanity. However, this is tough to do, because when my alarm wakes me up at 9:00 AM, I’ve had four hours of sleep, and I don’t have an expensive and possibly educational class to go to, I cross everything off of my morning agenda and replace it with “Get more sleep – starting NOW”.

There have been a few, ever so precious mornings when I’ve been able to rouse myself early, shake off the urge to go back to sleep, and start going about my business for the day. I can’t distinctly remember these mornings, though, because they were incredibly boring. My first instinct, with the entire day stretching out ahead of me, is to call my friends and see if we can get together and do something. However, at 9:00 AM a lot of my friends who aren’t at work are still sleeping, because most of them are Late Night Losers too. Desperate not to go back to sleep but with nobody to occupy my attention, I head for my computer and start surfing the Internet or plugging away at the ‘ol novel.

When I do those things in the middle of the night I’m not nearly as sleepy.

Truman Capps reminds you that non-losers do anti-cocaine.

Hair Guy Back To School Special

Maybe you did this, but I was playing Bioshock.

September has begun, and with it have begun all the typical back-to-school rituals. Marts of both the Wal and K variety are airing slick ads for the latest ludicrous school fashions, teachers are refilling their hip flasks, and flute players across the country are already creating and spreading the rumors and gossip that will inevitably lead to the standard quota of brooding, pouting, crying, and tantrums that define a typical season in a high school marching band. The time for fun is over, and Mother Nature agrees – in the coming weeks, my part of the country will turn from a sunny, pleasant Garden of Eden to a grim and stormy nightmare not unlike the end of Jurassic Park (without the dinosaurs. Hopefully.)

All throughout school, I was always just as stoked as everyone else for classes to end for the summer. I’d eagerly anticipate summer vacation until I could stand it no longer, and when school finally did let out I was always overcome with nearly incomprehensible joy at the prospect of not having to use the thought centers of my brain for a full three months. Every June, I’d leave school saying to myself, “This is gonna be the best summer ever!”, and nearly every fall I’d come back a broken boy, wondering how the time had passed so quickly. My problem wasn’t that summer came to an end – linear progression of time is a feisty bitch, and I’ve always accepted this – but that I had done nothing particularly memorable during my summer. Of course, it’s tough to really seize the day when most of your interests and hobbies take place indoors in front of a television or computer, but I’ve always been driven to strive for greatness because twice in the past I’d actually achieved summers that were, for lack of a better word, perfect:

1) I will always have joyful memories of the summer between 5th and 6th grade, because that was the summer in which Perfect Dark, arguably one of the best games ever made for the Nintendo 64, came out. That’s it. That’s pretty much the only reason. I spent the entire summer playing a video game, as usual, but that summer it was one of the greatest video games I’ve ever wasted a summer on.

2) Between my junior and senior year of high school, I didn’t have a job. I instead elected to wile away my days playing Resident Evil 4, arguably one of the best games ever made for the Playstation 2, and my evenings spending time with a particularly attractive young lady, arguably one of the best games ever made for a 17 year old with wandering hands.

Sure, there have been other great video games, and sure, there have been a paltry few other women, but never at the same time, and certainly never during the summer. This is why, every June, I wonder if the summer I’m about to embark on will be anywhere near as fulfilling and entertaining as these last two, and almost every September I ruefully admit that, no, it wasn’t.

Living in Portland now, with all of my old high school friends 50 miles away and most of my Portland-area college friends living across the Multnomah Triangle in Beaverton, I hadn’t expected this summer to be one of the landmark few that I would remember forever. That was why I took two jobs and also why I was so dead set on getting an Xbox 360 – the jobs would keep me occupied and financially secure, and the Xbox would keep in line with my summer tradition of wasting my summer. So far, my prediction has been correct; there have been no excellent video games and women, nor has my life taken a turn for the Dawson’s Creek with late night bonfire parties and road trips.

This doesn’t bother me as much as it would were I still enrolled at that disease ridden Black Hole of Calcutta otherwise known as Sprague High School. During my public school days, the school year wasn’t all that different from the summer, save for the fact that the weather sucked and every day I had to get up early and waste seven hours of my day with 1600 other people, most of whom I wasn’t too jazzed about seeing. College, as I have always said, is so very different because unlike high school, it doesn’t blow. The thought of going back to high school always was a downer because it wasn’t particularly fun or educational – college, on the other hand, has tons of fun and a bit of education too.

For the first time in my life, I’m almost more excited to go to school than I was to get out of school. Summer, while pleasant, has been pretty boring. I’ve done more or less the same thing every day, and I’m here to tell you that while playing video games all day and then working a few hours every evening may seem like paradise, it does start to wear thin after awhile. I bet that island Tom Hanks was on in Cast Away looked like paradise at first, but if you go for too long without changing up your routine, pretty soon you wind up talking to a volleyball and yelling at the moon. Fortunately, thanks to my rather sedentary lifestyle, there isn’t a lot of sports equipment around here for me to form a friendship with – however, I feel like the moon is trying to start some shit.

Going back to UO means a change of surroundings, both physically (the toilet in my new apartment is much closer to my bed than I’m comfortable with, but oh well) and socially (I’ve been in Portland so long I’ve almost forgotten what marijuana smells like). I’m glad that’s happening, because those are entertaining surroundings to return to after a few months in my current surroundings. This is not to impugn the state of the surroundings here, Mom and Dad – they are excellent surroundings, some of the best I’ve ever been surrounded by, but any surroundings, no matter how nice, get old after awhile. I guarantee you, come the end of Fall Term I’ll be sick and tired of my Eugene surroundings and dying to get back to my Portland surroundings. There’s no such thing as a surroundings for all seasons: Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and at the moment I’m fond of the thought of being at the heart of a much younger social scene, getting back to the independence one enjoys when he lives on his own, and taking part in the four months of crass debauchery and dick jokes otherwise known as the Oregon Marching Band trumpet section.

As I start packing for my trip back down to Eugene, I can’t help but think that this is gonna be the best school year ever! If my friends, classes, and the band don’t make that statement true, well, Resident Evil 5 comes out in March. There’s no way I can lose.

Truman Capps will probably start hating his surroundings the second he gets his first homework assignment.