Camping II: Die Darkman Die

Jesus on the Columbia.

Boardman, and, for that matter, the entirety of Eastern Oregon, give visitors the strong impression that they are unwanted and would do best to pack their things and leave, or better yet, not even visit in the first place. Everything in Eastern Oregon is really far away from all the major population centers in Western Oregon, the climate is a tad inhospitable, and there is the ever present Puncturevine.

I had never known that something so insidious as Puncturevine existed, but I found out quickly when Whitney, who had been walking around our campground in cheap rubber flip-flops, shrieked several times and then presented the sole of her shoe to us, revealing several small spikes that had embedded themselves so deeply into the sandal that the spines had come through the other end to poke her foot. This was Puncturevine, the spiny offshoot of an indigenous plant that’s so sharp it’s been known to deflate bicycle tires. The City of Boardman had put wanted posters up, advertising that they would pay people $1.00 for every bag of Puncturevine they brought to city hall. When a cash-strapped village of 1000 is willing to pay people to go and tear up local flora even in these environmentally conscious times, you know you’re dealing with a plant that is, to say the least, a bad motherfucker.

Most of our second day in Boardman was consumed with the aforementioned construction of the awning and expedition to Hermiston in search of propane. That evening we lit multiple citronella candles well before the mosquito horde arrived; as a result, the bulk of the pestilence stayed away and let us enjoy our bratwurst in peace. However, several times I thought I heard rain pattering against the awning, only to see it was swarms of flies and mosquitoes trying to find a way to get at us that didn’t put them in citronella’s line of fire – for them, this meant repeatedly flying into the roof of the awning in hopes that it would eventually tear open and grant them better access to our delicious blood.

We had been unable to go tubing on our second day because the Columbia River was too choppy, thanks to the heavy winds coming from the Gorge which succeeded in destroying our campsite while we were gone in Hermiston. However, on our third day we awoke to find the river calm and serene, like a muddy mirror filled with seaweed.

We hopped into Henry Winkl- We hopped into Whitney’s Dad’s motorboat and set off down the river, looking for a suitable place to tube. Sitting at the bow of the boat was a refreshing and wonderful experience for me, because it exposed to me to an unending windstorm in the face. You see, at that point, I had not showered for over a day, which meant my hair didn’t have any product in it, which meant that it was constantly flopping down into my eyes like a thick greasy blindfold. The wind at the front of the boat, though, plastered it all back to my head like a thick greasy form fitting helmet.

To look at the Columbia River you’d think its deepest point was in the middle, but that’s not the case. Whitney’s Dad had a depth indicator set up in the boat that would frequently jump from 30 feet to about 2 feet as we moved through the Columbia, as though the riverbed was trying to spring up surprise us. In some places in the middle of the river the water was so shallow that you could look over the edge and see the sandy riverbed. I was tempted to get out and go for a stroll around the river, but we were in a hurry to find a suitable depth for tubing.

What can I say about tubing? Tubing, I believe, is almost all my fears at the same time – all of them if a bikini-clad Sarah Palin is along for the ride. I had expected that we’d be using innertubes for our tubing, but in fact Whitney’s Dad owned a big inflatable craft with three seats and handles in it; truly the Titanic of innertubes.

Well, okay, maybe that’s a bad comparison.

The innertube was connected to the boat by way of a long rope, and for the next ten minutes Whitney, The Girlfriend, and myself were towed along behind the boat as Whitney’s Dad did donuts in the river. This sent us skipping off the wake like a big inflatable rock and at other times sent water cascading over the front of the innertube, leading me to believe that everything I’d learned about air being lighter than water was false and that we were all going to die. I guess I have a hard time enjoying an activity where it’s basically accepted that the vehicle you’re riding in will eventually spectacularly crash and send you flying God knows where. Grand Theft Auto is a rare exception, mainly because the aforementioned crashing can also be used to kill hookers.

Before we could crash and kill any hookers, however, the boat broke down, marooning us in the middle of the Columbia. I was more than willing to walk over to shore to get help, but a friendly couple on jet skis arrived first, noticing our orange distress flags.

“We’re dead in the water.” Whitney’s Dad explained. “Can you go get someone to tow us in?”

The man, suntanned and powerfully built, his head shaved, eyes hidden behind Oakleys, said, “I can do it.” He ran his hand appreciatively across the handlebars of his jet ski, and I suddenly knew what pure testosterone looked like. True to his word, the friendly giant towed us back into Boardman Harbor, refused any payment, and then rode off into the sunset. As we loaded the decommissioned boat back into the trailer, I looked over my shoulder for one last glimpse of our rescuer. I think, but I’m not sure, that I saw him kicking a rampaging grizzly in the face as he and his wife blazed downriver.

The boat’s engine out of commission, we spent the rest of the day swimming in the harbor before going back to our campground for a dinner of steak, potatoes, corn, chicken, hamburgers, s’mores, and cigars. People may go on vacation, but hedonism does not.*

*Of course, by its very nature, hedonism is always on vacation. Work would be a vacation for hedonism.

The next morning we dismantled our equipment in record time and trekked back home again. There isn’t much I can do to make this paragraph terribly funny, so let’s move on to the next one, shall we?

In spite of anything in this update or the previous one that’s made camping sound un-fun, I actually had a remarkably great time. Yes, there were mosquitoes and yes, I did have to walk farther than I normally want to when I had to pee, but that’s really what camping is about. In a world where everybody is so hooked up to technology, it’s really refreshing to be able to take a few days where the only people you have to contend with are the ones right in front of you, not the ones on your cell phone or your Facebook page.

What’s more, camping is an opportunity to truly rediscover our roots as hunter-gatherers: Being out in the open, confronting and solving problems that don’t involve finding reliable Internet access. Like a good fight club, a camping trip offers a chance to reclaim the instincts and abilities we’ve lost thanks to evolution and indoor plumbing.

And tubing? Tubing reminds us what fear really is.

Truman Capps didn’t smoke any cigars, but the s’mores were probably less healthy.

Camping, Episode I

Film and TV star Henry Winkler, who happens to look EXACTLY like Whitney's Dad.

Thanks to heavy traffic leaving Portland, we arrived at Boardman Marina and RV Park at around 8:00 in the evening as the sun took a nosedive behind the hills. This led a certain frenzied atmosphere to our preparation of the campground – with diminishing light and in some cases nonexistent instructions we put together a jumbled mass of nylon and tent poles to create shelter. All around us, retired couples peered through the windows of their RVs at these five fools trying to set up a tent on a campground and quietly snickered over white wine and JAG reruns.

The Girlfriend and I had gone camping with our friends Whitney and Collin, both of whom were unfortunate enough to be involved with Writers, and Whitney’s father Dave, who you may remember as The Fonz in Happy Days or, more recently, Barry Zuckercorn on Arrested Development.


They’d selected a campsite in Boardman, Oregon, a positively microscopic town of some 1500 people situated about halfway down the Columbia Gorge in Eastern Oregon; a location more commonly known as The Middle Of Nowhere. To give you an example of how isolated we were, on our second day in Boardman we ran out of propane. After trips to both of Boardman’s stores, we found out that the entire town of Boardman was out of propane as well, requiring us to drive for half an hour to a Home Depot in Hermiston. Those of you who aren’t familiar with Oregon may not understand the severity of this situation, but let me be frank: When Hermiston makes the town you’re in look primitive and isolated, you know you’ve definitely fallen off the end of the Earth.

As previously mentioned, I’ve never been camping before, so when we arrived at the campground and were confronted with dwindling daylight, strong winds whipping out of the Gorge, and an army of oncoming mosquitoes, I felt a bit helpless. The people running the campground had seen fit to provide us with a spigot and a picnic table; other than that, all we had was a gravel patch on which to park an RV.* We had to hit the ground running in order to create shelter before we ran out of light, the sort of situation that for me has never been any closer than an episode of Survivorman.

*We were not allowed to pitch our tent on the grass, which was considerably softer than the gravel. The gravel poked through the tent’s thin nylon floor and made it unpleasant to walk around without shoes when inside the tent, and also was a terrible surface to hammer a stake into, to the point that upon returning from Hermiston we found that our tent had blown over and collapsed in on itself, unceremoniously eating our belongings in the process.

Once the tent was constructed, we settled in for an improvised dinner of vegetables dipped in Greek tzatziki yogurt sauce. It was pretty tasty, and the mosquitoes agreed, as a few dozen of them made kamakaze runs into the dip. We lit a bunch of citronella candles to try and ward the mosquitoes off, but all the repellant smoke seemed to do was get them drunk, because not long after we’d set up the candles we had mosquitoes flying headlong into our faces and ears, after which they’d land on the table to crawl around in squiggly circles while calling their ex-girlfriends to demand sex.

Working by the flickering light of our one lantern, we dug out the air mattresses and vacuum pump from the truck, only to discover that the pump’s battery was low and needed to be charged. We plugged it into the electricity hookup that the campground had thoughtfully provided and then dragged our air mattresses out to the pump to be filled up. The vacuum pump, however, was not really jazzed about doing its job until it had a full tank of electricity, so we spent about half an hour pumping the mattresses full with about three farts’ worth of air while mosquitoes crashed into us, giggling and singing “Just A Friend.”

Waking up the following morning was easy for two reasons: The mattresses slowly deflated during the night until at around eight in the morning our spines were flush with the gravel driveway, and the bright shine of the high desert sun turned our tent into a hotbox – not the kind you make when you and all your friends smoke pot in your stepdad’s Acura; the kind they have in prison movies set in the South.

It was yet another blustery day, with stiff winds whipping through the tent, carrying evidence of which RVs needed to empty their waste tanks. For breakfast I was overjoyed to discover a large carton of vanilla yogurt, which I proceeded to calmly work my way through each morning for the rest of the trip. Once we’d eaten, we attempted to set up an awning over the picnic table. At the outset, the task seemed simple enough – we had a bag filled with numbered poles and a canvas to be draped over the pole skeleton, the end result of which would be an awning to give us shade during the heat of the day.

The problem was that the instructions for the awning were nowhere to be found and that the numbers on several of the poles had worn clean off, leaving us with no directions and only half of the poles identified. The missing instructions was definitely a pisser, but the incomplete numbering was really just a case of straight up dickery on Fate’s part – it meant that even with the instructions we’d be screwed, and without them, we were double screwed.

We spent the next hour mixing and matching pole combinations until we finally assembled the skeleton and draped the canvas over it thanks to nothing more than luck and the process of elimination. This, I realized, could be why camping was so popular – it provides a means to assert oneself over the elements or, barring that, shoddy camping equipment.

Truman Capps advises you to tune in for Part 2 on Sunday!

Substitute for another guy.

Dear geeks and/or David and Kelsey Capps,

I apologize for the late post. I really do. I had no idea it was Sunday until I sold my seventh Sunday New York Times today at work. I believe that makes me a day late (and undoubtedly a dollar short). Please forgive this trespass. I know Hair Guy followers (Hi David! Hi Kelsey!) get pretty peeved when they don't get their bi-weekly dose of snarky science fiction-related humor. Anyway, if Truman ever asks me to do this again, I promise that I will be on time. Hell, I might even part my hair like a huge dork to prepare for the role.

Anyway, now that you've accepted my apology, I'd like to present you all with some good news. Truman is not only surviving his adventure, he's actually thriving in his new surroundings. He sent me this photo on Friday:

Great shot, Jen!

So you see, he's doing just fine out there in the wilderness. Now, to the blog. I have a confession to make. Although Truman and I are Best Dudes Forever, I rarely ever read his blog. I refrain from reading for the same reason I refrain from boring holes into my forehead with a power drill or taking a cheese grater to my genitals. However, I am roughly familiar with the Truman Capps Method of Humor Writing and Tomfoolery, having read most of his work for the award-winning Oregon Daily Emerald. With that said, I'm afraid I must reject the format with which the 12 of you are familiar and break new ground. I know change can be scary, but think of this like a rebirth, if you will. A baptism by fire. There will be no coherent essay today, friends. No social relevance. No Keith Olbermann impressions and definitely no "the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and we all learned something today!" In short, this is Truman's blog on drugs.

Question:
How many friends do you have? Go ahead and think about it. Got a number? Good. Now, if you answered more than about seven, I'm going to have to call bullshit. Your friends are not your acquaintances. Your friends are the people who you fart in front of on purpose, end of story. Unless, of course, you are of the female persuasion, in which case you are ruled out by scientific evidence published by Stanford's biology department in 1999 confirming what many had already assumed: girls do not have anuses.

Observation:
As a formerly unemployed college graduate and general scumfuck, I have found that the longer one goes without showering, the easier it becomes to continue to not shower. Once you get over the three day hump, the rest is cream cheese until you hit what I like to call "the ten-day paradox." If you hadn't guessed, this involves a lot of wild screaming and throwing of fecal matter coupled with gross self-mutilation. Happy Day 18, everybody!

Recommendation:
Watch the first six Star Trek films. With the exception of the fourth installment, the hexology is one of the more underrated in the history of cinema. Don't believe what anyone says, friends. Wrath of Khan is NOT the only awesome film starring the original cast. Trust me on this one. In two weeks, you're going to be emailing Truman about how awesome The Undiscovered Country was. And no, before you ask, I haven't seen the new film. Pansies.

Half human. Half Vulcan. All sexy.

Question:
Have you ever been in the bathroom getting ready to pee and been terrified for a moment that you'd lost your penis? Let me just say this, friends: it's all fun and games for about 15 seconds. It's amusing that you can't locate that little slot in the front of your boxer briefs because they'd gotten slightly twisted throughout the morning. Then, out of nowhere, absolute terror sets in. Pure panic. I'm not even joking. "OH GOD, DID MY PENIS JUST TURN INVISIBLE??? OH NO, NO NO NO...DID IT...DID IT FALL OFF??? OH NO PLEASE GOD NO NO FUCK FUCK FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK."

Think I'm mad? Just wait till it happens to you.

Observation:
Starbucks Coffee Corporation does not count on its customers being movie dorks. They play a lot of classical music at the store that I work. Most of the time, it works like elevator music. I tune it out and forget that it's even there. But on certain occasions, I will come alive and breech the still waters of my work trance when I recognize a particular tune. Here are the tunes I recognized:

So there I am, all these cronies sipping on their double tall skinny cinnamon dolce flat extra hot lattes like they're something special, and all I can think about is Dr. Lecter painting himself in Sgt. Pembry's blood before slicing off his face and creating an art exhibit with his partner's intestines. Oh, and this:



Well, I'm not much for conclusions, so I guess that's it. You're welcome.

Mike Whitman has found that writing proverbial graffiti on the Truman Capps Wall of Ninny-Words has not helped him conjure up the stolen data tapes, nor has it given him clairvoyance enough to find the rebels' hidden fortress.

Within The Woods

See?

Whenever I find myself traveling deep into the remote wilderness, I can’t help but be reminded of the opening of The Shining, complete with crazy helicopter shots and foreboding music. I guess it’s because I assume that as one goes further from tall buildings and coked-out hobos, there is greater the potential for abject terror. Think about it; there aren’t an awful lot of horror movies about people getting chainsawed to death in downtown highrise penthouses. Serial killers and evil spirits, by their nature, seem to like camping about as much as everybody else.

Of course, I’m not actually camping at this point; I’m yurting (a verb that I have reluctantly adopted for convenience’s sake). I’m cohabiting a yurt with The Girlfriend, The Girlfriend’s Father, and The Girlfriend’s Father’s Girlfriend (take notes; this will be on the test) in Cape Lookout State Park, and what I’ve learned so far is that while living in a yurt is not necessarily camping, it comes awfully close.

A yurt is a tent with a stronger skeleton – a circular wooden frame over which thick canvas is draped. This creates a space that is luxuriously large by tent standards and cripplingly small by ordinary building standards. When we first pulled up outside the yurt I remember idly hoping that it would turn out to be bigger than it looked, like some sort of Harry Potter-esque creation, but once we got inside my fears were confirmed: It was a bunk bed, a futon, a table with two chairs, and… Well, did I mention the bunk bed?

Most of all, this has been a vacation from privacy. Not just in the sense that the yurt is a single room with nothing to hide behind when you want to change your clothes or masturbate, either – sitting in the yurt with all the doors and windows closed, you can still hear everything going on outside, just as everyone outside can hear everything inside. This is still tough for me to get the hang of, as I was brought up to believe that any structure larger than a tent is a cone of silence of sorts. However, last night, as I lay awake listening to the tent-dwelling couple in the adjoining campsite have sex, I became acutely aware that I was not in the Portland Metro Area anymore.

Cape Lookout State Park is pretty wonderful, as it’s right close to the beach and the bathroom facilities are fairly close to top notch. The problem is that the closest town is Tillamook, which perfectly fits the bill for the xenophobic small town the teenagers in the horror movie pass through on their way to the wilderness where they get killed. To give you an example of the essence of Tillamook, the “Tillamook Restaurant Guide!!” provided by the chamber of commerce listed Papa Murphy’s and McDonald’s as local restaurants visitors should try.

If you like fine cheese, you may well be aware of Tillamook’s existence thanks to Tillamook Cheese, which is undoubtedly the finest cheese on science’s green Earth. The thing is, that old adage “I like my sausage but I don’t want to see how it’s made” applies here as well. Tillamook is a town of about 4400 people and 25,000 cows, which live in the surrounding pastures. I’d venture that these cows spend about 40% of their lives being milked for the purpose of supplying the local Tillamook Cheese Factory and 90% of their lives moving their bowels, because anywhere you go in or around Tillamook smells like the inside of a barn. If you don’t know what the inside of a barn smells like, you should go to Tillamook and find out – keep in mind, however, that you can always walk out of a crumbling, fetid barn, whereas escape from Tillamook is far more difficult.

This is my third stay in the greater Tillamook County area, and thus it has also been my third visit to the Tillamook Cheese Factory, the local tourist attraction. This was something of an awkward visit for me as The Girlfriend is vegan and the entire factory tour is just a big all-American salute to gluttony, complete with free cheese samples and an ice cream bar. She didn’t seem too bothered, though – probably because the sight of armies of morbidly obese geriatrics frantically waddling through the parking lot in hopes of scoring some free cheese curds is as good an argument against excessive dairy consumption as any PETA campaign.

The yurting expedition is really just a training mission of sorts for my upcoming camping adventure with friends in the Columbia Gorge, which begins tomorrow. Many of the elements are the same – the lack of easily accessible toilets, privacy, or Internet* - but there’s still a certain safety net in the form of a rigidly constructed roof and an actual bed. Also, camping will see the addition of a speedboat and innertube, for which no amount of training can prepare me.

*To that end, this week’s Sunday update will be provided by Mike Whitman, Smoker of Cigarettes.

With that, I’m off to roast some tofu over the fire. If I’m not back by next Wednesday, rest assured that the serial killers got me.

Truman Capps imagines he will soon forget what it’s like to shower.

21

No, that's not... It has NOTHING TO DO with that at all, god damn it.

You know what, laws? Fuck you. I’m old enough to drink and I don’t care what you say about it.

Mike called me up a few weeks ago. “Hey, Truman!” He said. “There’s this theater in town called The Laurelhurst where they serve food and show old movies, and this week they’re showing Chinatown!”

And I said, “Holy shit, that’s my favorite movie! We should totally go see it!”

And then Mike, salivating as he anticipated his upcoming feast on my dying dreams, said, “And the best part is, they’re only showing it after 3:00, when no minors are allowed because they’ll be serving beer.”

Now, Mike isn’t what I’d call a regular reader, but if you ever do happen to see this, old chum, mark my words: You’re ugly, and nobody likes you.

Alcohol has been something of a constant in my life. For years, Mom and Dad have designated the hall closet in every house we’ve lived in as a wine cellar, wherein they store cases of wine they buy at Costco and Trader Joe’s (along with our parkas, an environmental factor of the storage which lends to the wine a certain Gore-Tex aftertaste). When we eat at brew pubs, each parent will order a different sort of beer and sample one another’s throughout the meal, commenting on the differences, similarities, and variable “hoppiness.” And every Friday and Saturday night for as far back as I can remember, they’ve made gin martinis (one each) as part of a grander relaxation ritual.

I grew up watching this happen and came to believe that all families greeted their weekend with a stiff drink. When in 4^th grade we were tasked with making Christmas cards for our parents, I drew a picture of two martini glasses in front of a Christmas tree accompanied a sentence pointing out that Christmas that year fell on a Friday and was thus “martini night.” I later found out that this gave my teacher the impression that my parents were insufferable boozehounds. I’m pretty sure they aren’t.

And me? As I’ve said before, I don’t really like alcohol. Whenever I drink a rum and Diet Coke, the first thought that pops into my head is, “Damn, this would taste a lot better without rum.” Bailey’s Irish Cream is admittedly delicious, but it’s tough to get really enthusiastic about a drink that half the time will give you explosive diarrhea thanks to lactose intolerance. The closest I’ve come to actual beer is a few sips of Hamm’s that Mike has bullied me into. I’m learning to love it, but there’s clearly still a long road ahead.

Yet I’m not allowed to go into bars or movie theaters showing my favorite movies, and my friends who are over 21 have learned the hard way that they can’t buy alcohol when I’m within sight of the cashier. This is because society, God bless it, believes that if I’m allowed into these places I will in turn deviously get my hands on as much of the stuff as I can and, as a minor who lacks the maturity and wisdom necessary to handle alcohol, will fly into a drunken rage and kill the Pope, perhaps by beating him to death with a flaming orphan.*

*Speaking of alcohol, Flaming Orphan would be a badass name for a drink.

This is what’s so painful about the whole drinking age thing: Society thinks that they can’t cut me any slack because I’ll just get drunk and be corrupted, but in all honesty, if I never had a taste of alcohol again I really wouldn’t feel like I’d lost that much. I might be the only 20 year old who doesn’t want to get his booze on; I just want to be around people while they get their booze on, because that’s always where the fun is.

And I know that everyone points this out, but I think I should too: My Main Guy Alexander* is currently in Afghanistan with the Army. He’s only a few days older than me; thus, it’s legal for the government to send him overseas to kill terrorists and be shot at by them in return (like energy, Alexander cannot be created or destroyed, although he will sometimes make your hair stand on end and your laundry stick together) but if he wants to drink after all that, it’s suddenly not okay.

*Who doesn’t give two fucks about anything, or even one fuck about a lot of things.

At age 18 we get handed a whole bucket filled with rights and privileges, but alcohol, for whatever reason, is conspicuously absent. When I turned 18, I got the right to vote, which I was very happy about, along with four other abilities I wasn’t so thrilled with: The ability to buy cigarettes, the ability to be drafted, the ability to buy pornography-

Well, okay, three other abilities I wasn’t so thrilled with: Cigarettes, draft, the lottery…

Call it two – two abilities I wasn’t so thrilled with. Cigarettes, which are vastly more harmful than alcohol, and the draft, which implies that the government has no qualms about sending me off to my death but can’t get behind letting me see Chinatown while people around me drink beer.

Truman Capps can’t wait to turn 21 so that he can get carded and then triumphantly produce his ID, preferably while yelling, “BOOYAH!”

Toy Stories

In a world...

I realize that I talk about Transformers a lot here. Sure, I don’t dedicate entire updates to conundrums of the series, such as what would happen if you were riding in a Transformer and it transformed with you in it, but I make passing reference to the films and the merchandise on a fairly regular basis. I think that happens a lot because these days I feel as though Transformers is a pretty good way to gauge the stupidity of our times, and how far people are willing to go to pander to it.

From the start, what Transformers was about was selling cheap shit to stupid kids, which is the very textbook definition of ‘advertising.’ Hasbro created a line of toy cars that could be converted into robots and then built an entire animated series around the merchandise to sell it. Years went by and the kids who were targeted grew up; Transformers became less cool. But then, when those kids were in their 20s, Michael Bay went and made a movie about the TV show designed to advertise the toys, which appealed to the same generation’s nostalgia and convinced them to start pumping their money into the same gimmick as before, only this time around it’s got boobs and it runs in slow motion. The movie begat sequels and a new line of toys as well as a new animated series. This is an excellent example of, if I may quote Elton John, “The circle of liiiiiiiiife!”

And all of that is fine – par for the course, really. I fully expected the first movie to suck, and it was actually pretty good in spite of the fact that it was a movie about toys that cost more than the GDP of Iceland to make. The second one apparently sucks, which is no great surprise – after all, Hollywood is not content to simply milk a cash cow; their preferred course of action is to fertilize it with dragon sperm in hopes that it will give birth to a cash dragon/cash cow hybrid that breathes rainbows and cries golden tears when confronted with its hideous dual nature. But even at its stupidest, whoriest point; the Transformers franchise has one thing going for it: It has roots in something with an actual story.

Transformers has unfortunately set the precedent that a movie based on anything currently rotting at the bottom of most 20somethings’ closets is a surefire hit.* G.I. Joe was one thing, but as studios begin to run through all the toy lines with actual stories, we can predict a real tidal wave of terrible entertainment on the horizon.

*Pornography: Rise of Carmen Electra, coming soon to a theater near you.

For example, it’s confirmed that a Stretch Armstrong movie is in the works. Now, Stretch Armstrong was a little before my time, but as I recall (and Wikipedia confirms), he was “…a well muscled blonde man wearing a pair of swimming trunks. Its most notable feature was that its arms and legs could stretch outwards, presumably without breaking.” That’s it. The rest of the Wikipedia page is all about cultural references and the description of his accessories. So, in case you’re keeping score, the plot of your movie is: A well muscled blonde man in swim trunks can stretch his body really far.*

*Pornography 2: Whiplash Wang

Now, I might be old fashioned, but I feel like a movie needs a little more than that to have half a shot at not sucking. A stretchy blonde guy in swim trunks isn’t a movie; it’s not even a YouTube video. At best it’s a photograph, and not a very interesting one at that.

Maybe you’re saying “This gives the screenwriters a blank slate – they get to give Stretch Armstrong a voice and a backstory he never had! It’s creativity, stupid!” However, I’ve got to disagree – no matter how blank your slate is in this situation, you’re still trying to write a summer blockbuster around a blonde stretchy dude in swim trunks; at best this is fan fiction, and as someone who spent most of middle school writing fan fiction, I can assure you that it’s going to suck. If you really want a blank slate, maybe do away with Stretch Armstrong entirely and just write an original movie straight from your own head.

And so long as we’re talking about originality, I may as well mention that a Lego movie has been greenlit. This is arguably the only toy to movie conversion more obscure and stupid than Stretch Armstrong.* Legos did have some overarching themes, which give them a leg up on Stretch, but those themes were things like, “Cowboys,” “Pirates,” and “Space,” all of which Hollywood has tested with varying degrees of success.

*Scratch that – Play-Dough and Pet Rock have the lead.

That aside, the real reason I can’t see any good coming from a Lego movie is the fact that Legos really didn’t need much story; they literally were a blank slate for every elementary schooler who was bored on a Saturday afternoon and had the artistic vision of a spaceship on wagon wheels flying the jolly roger covered in tiny yellow plastic pizzas. What did it all mean? That was for the kid to decide. My Lego cowboys orchestrated heists, chases, and shootouts that raged for days between the living room, the hallway, my room, and the bathroom (where the last of the bandits drowned after the sheriff shot a hole in their rowboat while they tried to escape across the sink).

Just because a toy was popular doesn’t mean it’ll make a popular movie; a movie needs a story, a toy does not. Kids give toys their own stories. Hollywood should look somewhere else.

Truman Capps recently found out that The English Patient was in fact based on a popular line of brooding, melancholy action figures with emotionally charged backgrounds.

Glenn Beck Is A Bad Journalist And An Asshat

"Latent racism combined with black president make Glenn Beck something-something."
"Go crazy?"
"DON'T MIND IF I DO! BWALALALALALALA!"

I don’t have a problem with Republicans, in and of themselves. There’s nothing wrong with wanting minimal government intervention in your life or being in favor of fiscal responsibility and states’ rights and all that. To be honest, that’s all fairly reasonable stuff to want. I’m personally a big fan of fiscal responsibility myself – a little bit of fiscal responsibility would have gone a long way toward keeping Wall Street from burning down, falling over, and sinking into the swamp.

My problem with the current incarnation of the Republican Party is that over the last 30 years or so they’ve fallen in with the “family values” crowd, and now a lot of big Republican talking points are things like outlawing gay marriage and abortion, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, seeing as the government dictating who can and can’t get married and what women can and can’t do with their bodies is hella intervention in day to day life. It’s this sort of hypocrisy that gets me: I didn’t see an awful lot of fiscal responsibility during the last eight years of Republican rule, as evidenced by the war over nonexistent weapons and the fact that Wall Street did burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp. Furthermore, a lot of the same senators who are so up on family values are the ones who usually get caught in airport bathrooms or are flying to Argentina for booty calls on the state’s dime.

But then, there’s the conservative pundits. And I think they’re just about the scariest thing on Earth. Sure, hypocritical family-values Republicans who want to impose their so called morality on the rest of the country are no good, but they tend to self destruct pretty quickly because it only takes one minor infraction to destroy their credibility.

Look at Bill ‘O Reilly. Everybody hates him. Hitler would think he was a prick. And that’s not just because of his bullying, tantrum-prone antics on his show or the fact that he sends camera crews out to ambush his opponents. He and Fox News paid a hefty settlement to a female staffer on his show after she sued him for sexual harassment, citing a conversation where he proposed they hop in the shower and rub one another with loofas and falafels.

Can you imagine what this sort of thing would do to a politician’s career? He’d be run out of town on a rail. But Bill O Reilly wasn’t elected. Much like genital warts and diarrhea, Bill O Reilly just kind of showed up, and he won’t go away until he’s good and ready. Negative publicity can kill a politician, but not a pundit – like the robots in The Matrix, they feed off our hate and turn it into ad revenue.

A lot of people pull out Ann Coulter as an example of a conservative pundit they hate, but that’s never made a lot of sense to me. Ann Coulter describes herself as a polemicist, which is literally defined as somebody who says crazy shit to get attention. Her whole game is saying outlandish and offensive things in order to piss people off to the point that they buy her books just to see what crazy thing she’s going to say next. I doubt that she actually thinks that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, much in the same way I doubt that clowns actually think that tiny cars and huge shoes are effective means of transportation and dress. They don’t really buy into it; they do it because they’re good at it and it makes them money.

The reason that I hate Glenn Beck so much is because he isn’t that.

When my parents were childless yuppies living in Seattle in the mid 1980s, they would pass by a homeless man who stood on a downtown corner on their way home. He would pontificate to the passing commuters, without notes, for hours on end about a wide variety of topics, namely the evils of “symptom causing nerve gas and organized religion!” As Mom has described it, he didn’t look out of the ordinary, and if you listened to him for a short period of time he might even seem like a fairly normal guy. But then, if you stopped and listened for a few minutes or more, it would become rapidly apparent that this man was in fact totally batshit insane.

To me, Glenn Beck is that guy, the only difference being that he’s got a big platform and a wide audience that seems to believe what he says. People latch on to his trumped up 9/12 project, in spite of the fact that he publicly criticized the families of 9/11 victims in the past. People nod their heads when he goes on air and agrees that Al Queda should attack America again. People listen when he says Barack Obama hates white people, in spite of the fact that his own goddamn mother is white.

If it was Ann Coulter saying this, I’d be slapping my knee and laughing, toasting her with my Diet Coke, saying, “Oh, Ann – Alec Baldwin is going to pitch such a fit about that on The Huffington Post tomorrow.” But Glenn Beck is Ann Coulter crazy with Bill O Reilly conviction – he says things that have no bearing in common sense and believes in them completely.

Happy ending: Three of Glenn Beck’s sponsors, among them Progressive Auto Insurance and Proctor and Gamble, have pulled their ads from his program thanks to a petition from colorofchange.org. It’s just proof that sooner or later the true crazies will snuff themselves out when people quit throwing change into their hats.

Truman Capps hates that Glenn Beck named his TV show Glenn Beck, because if that sort of thing is okay now he may as well just call his blog Truman Capps.

Signs Of The Times

Pic unrelated.

Like I said last week, I’ve been coming to Lummi Island with my family for years upon years, as far back as I can remember. And like I said last week, the ride up to Lummi changed a lot from one trip to the next. However, having spent a few days here now, I’m struck by the things that have changed on the island as well.

When I was a little kid, I positively loved it up here (which isn’t to say I don’t now – I just get antsy being this close to Canada) and whenever I wasn’t here, I usually wanted to be. When I’d watch Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego, a children’s geography quiz show where winners received a free trip anywhere in North America, I was consistently shocked and appalled that when the winners gleefully showed the card on which they’d written their desired destination, it never read “LUMMI ISLAND, WASHINGTON.” Those morons, I had thought, are going to have a terrible time in New York City or Orlando! It never entered my mind that everyone in the world didn’t know about the tiny, isolated island where my family spent our vacations, nor the fact that maybe people wouldn’t want to blow their free trip anywhere on a jaunt to an island where the primary activities are reading or picking up slimy rocks at low tide and seeing what’s underneath. Back then, I really wished that everybody could know what a great, hidden gem Lummi Island actually was.

Well, 14 years later and my wish came true, only the people showing up at Lummi Island aren’t eight year olds with a preternatural knowledge of geography but instead rich people, who are, in my estimate, far less desirable. On my last regular trip to the island, back in 2002, cell phone reception was spotty, television was a luxury, and if you wanted Internet you had to go out into the woods with a pitchfork and shovel and dig for hours until you hit a vein. Back then, throwing dried branches on the fire in the stove and watching how they burned was my Gears of War 2.

But since then, the rich people found Lummi Island and realized that it was peaceful and secluded, and in their efforts to acclimate it to their lifestyle completely trashed all that. There are now about a dozen McMansions spread across the island like a herpes infection that promises to get much worse if not burned to the ground. Old houses facing the San Juan Islands across Legoe Bay have been bought and remodeled into mission style villas the likes of which you’d see in Southern California, completely out of place with the pleasantly ramshackle fishermen’s houses and rusting dinghies in the area. What’s worst, however, is The Asshole.

The Asshole bought the plot of land next door to that of my uncle, who lives on the island, and one door down from The Green Cabin, where my parents and I used to stay when we came up here. The Asshole, a real estate developer, demolished the old house on the property and built a sprawling three story dwelling with multiple peaked rooftops and siding that looks enough like logs to make passers by think, “Wow – this person has enough money to buy fake wood to make their house look like it’s an authentic log cabin with a satellite dish and Traeger grill!”

My uncle had a handshake contract with his old neighbor that they could both use the neighbor’s driveway to clear the 20 or so feet from the road to where the houses lay, even though the driveway was entirely on the neighbor’s property. Once The Asshole bought that piece of property, however, he informed my uncle that he would not be allowed to use the driveway anymore, forcing my uncle to construct his own. Next, he cut down a lot of the trees on the property that he felt interfered with his view.

And most recently, he’s been trying to exploit an error in a land use contract signed between the original owners of both plots that will make the beach in front of my uncle’s house his property, giving him the right to restrict access to the beach that my family has been using for multiple decades. Keep in mind that The Asshole has been coming to the island for a couple years, as opposed to my uncle, who has been living here for well over ten years.

Rich people like The Asshole have pumped up the island’s economy, too – both restaurants have gone a little more upscale, and we’ve got a winery now, which is as surefire a sign of classiness as you’ll ever get. Wireless Internet is abundant – I’m using it right now – and cell service is strong. That’s the thing about modern amenities; they’re expensive, so they almost always follow the people who can pay for them, and an influx of people usually tears apart the individual character of what was there before.

Today we visited The Green Cabin, and made a point of poking around on the beach in front of The Asshole’s house for a long time, much to his poodle’s dismay.

Truman Capps thinks that those who live in glass houses near beaches full of stones would do well to check themselves before they wreck themselves.

On The Road

I'm in there somewhere, hating life.

I’ve never liked driving, most likely due to the fact that I’ve never felt the need for speed – nor, in fact, even a strong desire for it. At first I was receptive enough to the idea of learning how to move a large piece of machinery over a great amount of space, but the good folks at my high school saw fit to try and scare us into driving safely with lots of sad stories and pictures of teens who had died in their prime because they’d gone 35 in a school zone.* While most of my classmates disregarded what they’d been taught and drove recklessly anyway, I took it all to heart, to the point that I came to see driving as more dangerous than smoking and far less cool.

*Out of everything I heard over the course of two health courses, the scariest thing I remember is the trauma nurse from Salem Hospital who told us that when paramedics respond to a car accident, standard operating procedure is to give all unconscious victims a catheter, whether they need it or not. The thought of bumping my head on my steering wheel and waking up with a tube in my wang has horrified me into years of signaling before I leave the curb and stopping for yellow lights.

I don’t have my car at school, which means that nine months out of the year I’m not driving, which is fine by me. However, during the summer I’ve got to drive occasionally, and it’s usually a somewhat frantic experience because I’ve been out of practice for the entirety of the school year. Surface streets in Sellwood are bad, downtown Portland is worse, and the Interstate is like a really boring video game which only gets exciting right before you die (or so I’ve heard).

Yesterday, my parents, The Girlfriend, and myself all left off for Lummi Island, my family’s occasional vacation retreat in Northern Washington. Seeing as The Girlfriend’s presence meant more luggage which wouldn’t fit in our Prius, we opted to take two cars, which resulted in me spending the entire day driving through Washington on the Interstate. For the record, as I write this I have no tubes in my wang – at least, not to my knowledge.

My parents and I have been making the drive from Oregon to Lummi Island for a lot of my life – a couple times a year when I was in elementary and middle school, mostly during the summer. It was a lot of fun up there for a little kid – the island was close to an Indian reservation where they sold illegal fireworks at bargain basement prices all year round, so every trip brought with it the promise of the potential to set oneself on fire or at least blow off a limb. When I was in middle school, my aunt who owned the family cabin on the island died, and afterwards we didn’t go up as often.

What in some ways is more memorable than the island is the drive up. A six hour trek up the I-5 corridor through just about every backwater hillbilly town in Washington – Centralia, Maytown, Everett, Seattle – that eventually leads to the ferry that takes drivers to Lummi Island. We’ve been taking the same route for my entire life, so I’m used to seeing all the same landmarks, but this was the first time I’ve made the drive myself.

It’s strange to go back and take a spin through a childhood tradition as an adult – I learned this the hard way when I got thrown out of Discovery Zone last year. But driving to Lummi Island is unique because not only did it put me behind the wheel for longer than I’d ever driven before, but also because none of it was new. It’s like watching a movie you haven’t seen in years, only now you’re in the title role and have the ability to spin off the road and wind up in a ditch if you so choose.

Maybe it was the fact that I was in the driver’s seat or maybe it was the fact that the last time I made this trip I wasn’t as aware of my surroundings, but I picked up on a lot more of the nuances of the ride. The redneck message board outside Centralia was even more offensive than usual (“WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE??” was the neocon message du jour) and I was more aware of the poor condition of the Interstate highway when I was white knuckling steering wheel, feeling teeth rattle out of my head thanks to poor resurfacing.

Making it to Lummi in one piece added a sense of accomplishment to the jubilation at completing the six-hour journey. It’s like making your own ham sandwich instead of having one made for you – it’s basically the same sandwich, but you feel like you earned the one you made for yourself. It’s the same thing with driving to your vacation location as opposed to being driven there – having spent all day doing something I hated, I feel like I’ve earned my week of leisure.

Because this summer of unemployment has just been taking the piss out of me.

Truman Capps is considering asking The Girlfriend to drive home.