21 (2)

Not in Salem.

Well, it’s finally happened. At midnight on Friday morning, I instantly and unexpectedly gained a wealth of worldly knowledge and maturity that vastly changed my outlook on alcohol and its recreational purposes. The state, in turn, recognized this change in my psyche by giving me permission to drink, a privilege which I recognize as a bold new responsibility.

Really, though? Really, it’s like they say about having an affair: “Half the fun is the sneaking around.”*

*I’m pretty sure this is something They say, because I think I heard it on TV or in a movie. However, I would not put it past myself to come up with a totally creepy, morally questionable saying all on my own.

When I was under 21, drinking had a certain rebellious vibe to it that I kind of liked. Sure, it was rebellious in a pathetic way, like peeing outside, but it was rebellious all the same – furthermore, drinking and peeing outside usually went hand in hand anyway. Getting together with friends and drinking was fun, yes, but in a subconscious way we were saying, “Fuck you, America, for not letting us drink until we’re 21! We can handle it! Watch us drinking!” We would talk passionately about how stupid it was that we weren’t allowed to drink or be around people who were drinking. In some cases, we wrote blogs about it.

Having turned 21, all that fire has gone out of me. I’m like a hippie in any decade except the 1960s – rudderless, bereft of cause, and sitting in a bar.

My birthday was the day after Thanksgiving and most of my friends were otherwise indisposed (or so they said), so instead my parents and I went to a steakhouse for a fancy dinner with a quick stop for a drink in the bar beforehand. In the low light the bartender had to examine my ID carefully under a lamp, and I was worried for a second that he would accuse me of fakery and throw me out.*

*”Nice try, asshole. Truman? Go for a halfway plausible name next time, McLovin.”

Instead, he flashed me a big smile and wished me a happy birthday, and I made a big show of knowing the names of drinks by ordering a Cuba Libre (which is basically a rum and Coke with a lime in it). I was expecting the sort of drink that you get at a college party, wherein somebody splashes a bunch of either rum or vodka into a glass, followed by an entire can of soda, to the point that you can only barely taste the booze.

What I got instead was a glass full of rum with a splash of cola in it, which served to give it a pleasant light brown color and did little or nothing to make up for the fact that it tasted like a glass full of vaguely sweet, intensely painful napalm. This, I realized, was a Big Boy Drink, while the countless dark brown rum and Diet Cokes I’d sucked down at band parties were the equivalent of milk taken through a Jonas Brothers crazy straw. I was 21 now, and I could no longer get away with drinking alcohol that didn’t taste like alcohol.

I had to taste the pain.

I nursed that drink all night, much to the consternation of the staff at the steakhouse, all of whom were quick to share their 21st birthday experiences with us and were somewhat disappointed when I didn’t order six more Cuba Libres, turned down the offer of wine with my steak, and didn’t act in a way that would require them to forcibly eject me from the restaurant and/or break out the body fluids kit.

The next day I travelled to Salem to be with Alexander (as seen on Hair Guy), who had turned 21 about a week before while serving in Afghanistan. To my understanding, a 21st birthday is a difficult thing in a Muslim country that is also a warzone filled with people who hate you, so we had agreed to go visit a bar in Salem and do our 21st birthdays up right.

The problem is that Alexander and I are both men of discerning taste. We like good things, and unfortunately we were in Salem, where there are no good things (or happiness). This applies to bars as well – there are a few hundred bars where truckers go to drink Coors and play video poker while overweight 45-year-old unemployed receptionists sit on the deck and smoke Virginia Slims through their tracheotomies. However nice that may be for them, it is not exactly our scene.

Alexander’s dad recommended a bar downtown called The Brick, his reasoning being that it catered to a “younger crowd.” When we told our friends that that was where we were going, everyone groaned and said, “Not The Brick!”, and then, when we got there, all it took was one look to realize that people who Mr. Jasper considers young are still old enough to be our overweight trucker parents.

We wound up going to a bar nearby called Pete’s Place, which had a friendly enough look to it in spite of the fact that there was a hobo sitting at the bar making no end of trouble for the bartender. We arrived, showed our IDs, and then balked when asked what we wanted to drink.

Wary from my Cuba Libre experience the other night, I asked for a rum and Coke, and then really distinguished myself as a class act by asking the bartender how he made a rum and Coke, in the interests of seeing if the proportions were to my liking. Alexander, who has drank far less than me in his life, ordered a double shot of Jack Daniels, no chaser, which he put away in about five seconds.

“What,” he said, staring at his empty glass. “That’s it?”

We left shortly thereafter, returned to Alexander’s house, and played PS2 until the break of day.

Truman Capps has not given up on drinking just yet.

Hey!

I'm hanging out with Alexander today, so the update is going to be later tonight. Support our troops!

Some Other Times, Alexander...

War is hell.

As you may recall, my main guy Private Alexander Jasper left for Afghanistan in February. Over these past nine months, he’s been playing a lot of video games, taking pictures of dirt and sunsets, reenacting Lady Gaga music videos, and being a fucking all-star American hero in his spare time.

Alexander will be coming back to the States on two weeks’ leave in the next few days, which will put him in the position to decide which place is worse: Afghanistan, or Salem, Oregon. In honor of his return, I’ve decided to once again chronicle some of the crazy shit he got up to back in the day.

Some Other Times, Alexander…

…used his father’s camera to revolutionize the film world.

During my junior year, I was hanging out at Alexander’s house when we found his dad’s old video camera under a pile of dirty laundry in his bedroom. “Huh!” Alexander said. “I haven’t seen this in over a year! Let’s hook it up to the TV and see what I was last using it for.”

So we did just that, digging up a bunch of red/yellow/white cables to hook the ancient camera up to Alexander’s equally ancient TV. I remember being pretty excited to see what was on the camera; Alexander was always remarkably creative, and so I figured that whatever footage he’d shot was bound to be something bold and groundbreaking.

We hit “Play,” and the screen came to life, showing a bobbing, handheld recording of one of the family’s houseplants. From behind the camera came Alexander’s voice:

“Oh, hey there, Mr. Plant!”

And then, in a gravelly, high pitched voice, Alexander shouted the response:

“AW HI ‘DERE ALEXANDA HOW’DYA DOOOOOOOOOOO?”

“Oh, I’m just fine, Mr. Plant! Hey, what’s your favorite kind of soda?”

“AHHH YEEEEAH, YOU KNOW I LIKE-A DA MOUNTAIN DEEEEEEEEEEWWWWW!”

Maybe this isn’t as funny on the page, but there was essentially no background noise in this video, which suggests that Alexander was just sitting alone in his house, pointing a camera at a potted plant and having a conversation with it.

The camera then abruptly cut to one of Alexander’s experiments with stop motion, in which he had pointed the camera at a pair of fingernail clippers on the carpet and, by turning the camera on and off and moving the clippers around, tried to make it look like they were marching across the floor. Other amateur filmmakers would have used action figures or toy cars or something, but Alexander’s reasoning had clearly been something like, “Well, I’ve got the camera here, and I’ve got the fingernail clippers here, so why not just make some lemonade?”

…had a multiple year-long feud with his neighbors.

In middle school, I was walking up Alexander’s long-ass driveway with him when he pointed to his neighbors’ house and said, “Those guys are assholes.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I was out here yelling at the moon the other night, and they came out and told me to shut up.”

Keep in mind that Alexander lived way the hell out in rural Marion County, and his neighbors’ house was a football field or two away from where the Jaspers’ property ended. This, clearly, must have been some yelling if it was loud enough to wake the neighbors.

“Why were you yelling at the moon?”

“What, you don’t yell at the moon?”

He never quite let go of this grudge, and several times over the next few years he mentioned his continual anger at these assholes next door who tried to discourage him from yelling at a celestial body. Finally, my senior year, he said:

“Oh, yeah, I talked to the folks next door. They’re actually pretty cool.”

“So you’re okay with the whole yelling at the moon incident now?”

“…Yeah, I guess.”

…was the most regular motherfucker on Earth.

If we may descend into potty humor for a second, Alexander shat more often than anyone I’ve ever met. This was especially interesting considering his affinity for large pieces of red meat, which, in my experience, pass about as easily as rubber cement.

This one time, senior year, I was trying to sweet-talk this girl in our British Literature class when Alexander comes up to me, his eyes bulging, and says in a hoarse whisper, “Truman…! I have to poop so bad!”

When we would play Dungeons and Dragons on Sunday afternoons, Alexander would often take two or more three-minute breaks to drop a superfast deuce. Eventually, when he’d come out of the bathroom after his power dump, everybody would clap for him and he’d bow.

While using a toilet stall at our high school, I looked at the wall and noticed a great deal of remarkably literate graffiti that included references to Faulkner and Neil Gaiman as well as a token “Who Watches The Watchmen?” Seeing this, I knew that Alexander had been there, probably for some time, and that he’d clearly put more thought into his bathroom graffiti than his schoolwork.

…laughed in the face of human reproduction.

During our Wellness II class, our moronic wrestling coach of a teacher showed us a BBC documentary about pregnancy that included footage of a woman giving birth. He warned us as we got closer to the Moment of Truth that squeamish people should look away from the screen, and so I did (because the last thing I want to see right after lunch is a screaming, bloody baby crawling out of a complete stranger’s vagina).

I turned my head to the left, which meant that instead of seeing the screen, I saw Alexander’s face as he watched the screen. And as the baby was born on TV with a great symphony of moist noises, while everyone else in class groaned at the sight of it, Alexander’s entire face lit up like he was seeing the funniest thing in the world, and he just cackled for the rest of the video.

…further thwarted my Wellness II teacher’s lesson plans.

Wellness II was a class taught by idiots to idiots, in an attempt to give kids a basic education of how not to get fat and/or pregnant. Seeing as our teacher was far better at coaching wrestling than teaching, most of the curriculum was videos. For the nutritional section of the course, we watched Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me, and had to write down five facts we learned from the movie (you know – for the learning).

Those of you who have seen Super Size Me may remember that the opening credits start with the song “Fat Bottomed Girls,” by Queen.

After the movie, Mr. Cox went to the front of the class and asked us to read back some of the facts we’d written down. Alexander raised his hand.

“Okay, Alexander, what’s one of the facts you wrote down?” Mr. Cox asked.

“I have: ‘Fat bottomed girls make the rockin’ world go ‘round.’” Alexander said, with a completely straight face. I looked at his paper, and yes, he had written it down.

However, what made this experience the best was Mr. Cox’s reaction. Shaking his head as though Alexander had actually mistaken late 1970s classic rock as legitimate medical advice, he said:

“No, Alexander – that’s just a song.”

It only could have been more condescending if he’d added the words, “You silly goose!” or smacked Alexander across the snout with a rolled up newspaper.

…was forced to change his culinary ambitions.

A lot of my great memories of Alexander come from Wellness II, which was less of an educational experience and more of an excuse for Alexander and I to goof off at the expense of Mr. Cox’s patience.

The final project for our nutrition unit was to create a menu for a health food restaurant, listing the caloric content of each item, based on our wealth of newfound knowledge of how to eat properly.

Mr. Cox was addressing the class, laying out what items couldn’t be on the menu:

“No fried food, and absolutely no alcohol!”

To which Alexander said, “Damn! So much for my Beer Battered Beer Beer.”

…inadvertently freakdanced on the band director.

Those of you who have been to high school know that all high school assemblies everywhere tend to suck. That’s just how it works.

My sophomore year, those of us cool enough to be in band had taken to hanging out in the band room during assemblies. The band director looked the other way about it, and it was only band kids anyway, so the school never really noticed.

During one assembly my sophomore year, a bunch of my friends and I snuck Alexander into the band room during an assembly. He wasn’t in band, but we figured he’d blend in easily enough with the other 20 or so people in the room.

We were all standing around talking and Alexander had his back to the band director’s office door. And then we said or did something that made Alexander start singing The Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or maybe we didn’t say or do something – maybe a car honked outside or Alexander started thinking about the space-time continuum. Honestly, it doesn’t take a lot to get him started on The Time Warp.

As he was singing, the band director came out of his office and walked up behind Alexander, somewhat perplexed at what was going on in his band room. Still unaware that there was anyone behind him, Alexander got to the part of the song about doing the pelvic thrusts, and stuck his ass out behind him and waggled it around as he sang. This more or less resulted in him grinding his ass against the unamused band director’s crotch.

Realizing what he’d done, Alexander turned around and nonchalantly said, “Oh, sorry.”

To which the band director responded, “WHO ARE YOU!?”

Nobody really knows.

Truman Capps hopes to generate enough material during Alexander’s leave in Salem to make another one of these updates.

Special Thanks

The Hair Guy Board of Regents would like to take this opportunity to recognize the following Eugene institutions for their contributions to the city’s overall quality of life:

Robert Saks Mattress Company

While mattress retailers such as Sleep Country USA hawk their wares with jingles, synthesizers, and attractive spokespeople, Robert Saks decided to go in a bold and unprecedented direction. He decided to eschew the notion that slick and exciting ads make people want to buy things, and instead decided to let his undying enthusiasm for mattresses speak for itself.

Mr. Saks, while Billy Mays spent years yelling at cameras, you address your audience in a hoarse whisper, as though you have just been told a highly exciting mattress-oriented secret that you are discreetly trying to share. Furthermore, you have clearly decided that music in this commercial would only slow you down, so you’ve left it out entirely. This combination of the quiet voice and lack of musical accompaniment gives the viewer the impression that he is seated alone with you in a completely silent room, looking you directly in the eye, and listening to your sales pitch about mattresses. And this gives him a powerful desire to buy some mattresses.

And special mention must be given to your slogan – “Come see me!” It is simple, elegant, and to the point – so much so that you decide to use it twice within ten seconds. After the first usage, the viewer doubts whether you are serious; the second time he knows that Robert Saks does not fuck around when it comes to mattresses.

The Kiefer Kia Princess

Small town car dealerships have never been known for their high advertising standards, but your majesty, you do the world a great service every time you prance around a lot filled with compact cars while waving a magic wand and wearing a pink dress.

Many girls grow up wanting to become princesses; alas, sooner or later they give up on their dreams and instead nurse an unhealthy obsession with Disney films that will sabotage their love lives with ridiculously unrealistic expectations for years to come. You, however, refused to give up on your dreams and proved to the world that it’s possible to be both a princess and a car saleswoman. We can only imagine which of those occupations you put on your income tax return.

You are a role model to girls everywhere. You don’t passively sit back and wait for customers to come to you – you yell loudly enough that viewers can often hear you in the other room, if not the other county. Yes, you are a grown woman dressed as a princess, but your enthusiasm and passion for your car dealership comes through clearly enough that countless men have been inspired to get up and buy a brand new compact sedan out of fear that you might physically reach through the TV screen and suck out their souls like that girl in The Ring.

DoughCo

In a world where pizza chains now sell sandwiches and McDonald’s sells coffee, you have refused to do anything but calzones and cookies. While others have diversified and tried to be something they’re not, you have recognized that so long as there are human beings and marijuana existing in the same general area, there will shortly thereafter be a profound need for a bready pocket filled with cheese and meat. That’s where you come in.

We also wish to recognize the incredible friendliness of your telephone operators – while employees at other establishments might get tired of constantly reminding callers what the five side dips are, yours say the words “Ranch, marinara, bleu cheese, barbecue, and hot sauce” as though there’s nothing they’d rather be doing than talking about dipping sauces with a complete stranger. When one is ordering a cheap calzone late at night that he will eat alone in front of his computer, it’s good to hear a friendly and sympathetic voice whisper the word “marinara.”

My Neighbor The Lowrider Owner

Some people are ashamed of their tiny penises, but you, sir, put that information right out in the open with your grey two door sedan which rides a few inches off the ground, has a wicked spoiler, and an engine loud enough to wake up your neighbors every time you decide to turn on the car.

You may be surprised to find out that your engine is capable of waking up your neighbors, but it is. It definitely is. It has proven itself quite capable time and again over the past three months. In fact, some have begun to doubt whether your car is even a car at all or just a big mobile alarm clock for douchebags.

When you turn on your car, the powerful engine purrs to life with all the subtlety of an atom bomb riding a Harley Davidson into an Insane Klown Posse concert. And then, not content to end the experience by driving away, you hop out and smoke a cigarette for a few minutes, allowing the engine to rattle the floors of the units above the parking overhang. It’s like a free foot massage nobody asked for.

With a dick that small, there are any number of opportunities available to you – phone sex patron, University of Washington linebacker, journalism major – but you have not let any of this go to your head. No, while you could write your own ticket in the absolutely tiny penis world, you haven’t forgotten your roots, and persist in having a tiny penis right there in Unit 4.

Thank you. Thank you for subjecting us to an impromptu earthquake drill three times a day.

Truman Capps genuinely respects the Kia Princess and Robert Saks as pioneers of bizarre local advertising – so if you two are reading, good job!

Registration

The purple one is me. Yeah, that's right - the one who's WINNING.

I consider The Perfect Class Schedule to be the ultimate achievement in the college world, followed by Free Alcohol, Convincing A GTF To Give You A Higher Grade, and, somewhere much further along the line, Graduation. The Perfect Schedule resides at the top of the list because once you have that element of your life in order, everything else falls into place.

Class registration has come once again, and starting tomorrow at 8:00, I’ll be able to register for the four classes that will determine how much bitching I’m going to be doing over the course of the next term. Students are allowed to register based both on how many credits they have as well as the last four digits of their student ID number – this element of randomocity ensures that no matter how long you’ve been going to school, you’ve still got just as good a chance to get screwed out of the classes you want as everyone else.

In the days leading up to my appointed registration time, I’ve gone to painstaking lengths to find classes that live up to my criteria:

No Classes Before 10:00: I spent four years getting up at 6:00 AM every day for jazz band in high school – six years, if you count middle school jazz band as well. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all the waking up early I’ll ever need in my life. So help me God, I will not find out what the garbage men look like around here.

Tuesdays And Thursdays Only: This just might be the only time in my life that I’ll be able to get away with only having to put pants on twice a week (and potentially less than that, if the University alters its definition of sexual harassment).

Overall Coolness: Once I’ve isolated classes that take place after 10:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I cross reference the instructors with RateMyProfessor.com to make sure I’m not walking into a “No laptops allowed, and I will be taking attendance every day” sort of situation.

Relevance To My Major (Optional): I’d really like it if The Perfect Schedule fulfilled all of my credit requirements and put me on track for graduation. I’d also like to barbecue with Jack Nicholson.* Some things are just too good to be true. In the pursuit of perfection we all have to make some sacrifices, and a 400 level Volcanology class that meets at 2:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays is one of them.

*”Say, Mr. Nicholson, why aren’t you using any A1 on your steak?” “I guess I just don’t see the point in ordering something ‘rare as hell’ if you’re not gonna be able to taste the blood. And Truman {shades off}, call me Jack, for Chrissake.”

All told, I put one hell of a lot more work into selecting and structuring my classes than I do into the classes themselves.

The main roadblock to me achieving schedule nirvana is the presence of my arch nemesis: other people. Yes, I am not the only one who wants to get up as late as possible for infrequent education, and the competition with other students for the cherriest classes is usually why I wind up taking classes that require me to get up when it’s dark outside.

For example, I had earmarked J387 as a class I wanted to take next term – a class about journalism history or law or karate that, more importantly, met from 4:00 until 5:20 PM. Monday night, I saw that there were twelve openings left in the class, and held my breath in hopes of securing a spot for myself. Today, however, I found that twelve punk-ass bitches with earlier registration times than my own had already discovered the class and filled it up.

Seeing that was like watching my dreams get executed in front of me by the Viet Kong. Sure, they’re also offering J387 at the same time on Monday and Wednesday, but then I’d be in class a whopping four days a week, like a chump.

As we speak, there is only one spot left open in J371, the introductory magazine journalism class that is more or less the cornerstone of my major, and (ideally) a class that I will like (which, in a rare and fortunate coincidence, happens to start at noon). Constantly refreshing DuckWeb and earnestly monitoring that single solitary digit, I can only darkly wonder how many other people with my registration time are doing the same thing, eagerly plotting how quickly they’ll pounce on that last spot as soon as they become eligible to register tomorrow morning. The rush for the final opening in J371 will start out like a horse race and end like Reservoir Dogs.

To pass the time between page reloads, I’ve been pacing back and forth in my room, fantasizing about bounding to my computer tomorrow morning and typing the course registration number for J371 into the registration window mere milliseconds before my legions of competitors. Then my imagination runs wild, fueled by my somewhat quaint ideas about how the Internet works:

I picture a cluster of ones and zeroes (my registration) rocketing through a maze of tubes (the Internet) at breakneck speeds (broadband) toward some grand docking mechanism with only one space left open (J371). My registration is in a desperate race against several other clusters of ones and zeroes (my competitors’ registrations), and it just barely manages to squeeze into the final spot ahead of all the others, causing the students controlling them on the other end of the Internet to throw up their hands and curse while I triumphantly backflip onto a motorcycle and ride off into the sunset at breakneck speeds. I must hurry, because the barbecue is about to begin, and Jack Nicholson does not like to be kept waiting.

Truman Capps admits that there is also a J371 class offered at 8:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but… Well, there you have it.

On Failure

The cat is me, and physics is the cheese.

As an atheist, I prefer the concrete facts of science to the theology of religion. Somewhat ironically, however, my overall understanding of most sciences (take your pick – biology, chemistry, and, most recently, physics) is embarrassingly bad, and I find it much easier to think that things like cellular mitosis and velocity happen because of some fantastical magic that nobody can comprehensibly explain. Essentially, instead of accepting a belief system that has been lent societal credibility by a few millennia of existence, I prefer to make up my own version of science and substitute that instead.

So I guess I could argue that the fact that I have to take four science classes in order to graduate is against my religion – if I were teaching my Physics 152 class, the syllabus would look something like this:

Physics 152 – The Physics Of Sound And Music

Physics is an unproven theory, the mysteries of which humanity’s greatest minds have yet to unravel, although the general consensus is that wizards are responsible for most of it. As it is fruitless to try to try and understand magic, the bulk of the class will be dedicated to the study and pursuit of the perfect Christopher Walken impression.

Attendance: Attendance and class participation is mandatory. Talking like Walken is not a spectator sport.

Homework: The Deer Hunter. Every day. Until you get it right.

Extra Credit: Only students willing to engage in no holds barred Deathfights in front of the class or during my office hours will be eligible for extra credit. Only the victors shall receive it.

*

Sadly, the actual syllabus for my Physics 152 class is far more sacrilegious, making outlandish demands such as the purchase of a scientific calculator and a working knowledge of high school algebra.

Many people have asked me why I took a physics class, as physics is apparently the mathiest of sciences. The fact is, I had not known just how mathy physics was, and even if I had, I would’ve assumed that as it was a 100 level class I probably would have been able to muddle through with my usual combination of charm, sexual favors, and crying.

Well, you heard it here first – physics is fucking hard, no matter what level the class is. Do you know what a Hemholtz Resonator is? I’m not sure I do, either – I know that you blow into it and then magic happens and a lower sounding note comes out, but that’s about it.

The thing about physics is that they want me to explain how the magic happens. If you’re a Christian, imagine somebody asking you, on the penalty of failing a class, to explain exactly how a virgin got pregnant. “God did it” is not an acceptable answer. You’d be a little bit fucked, wouldn’t you? That’s kind of where I’m living right now.

Hubris got me on the first midterm. I assumed that physics was no different than any other class I haven’t understood before, and that a night of studying right before the exam would be enough to get me a B. So I studied with a friend who was far more versed in the mythology of physics than I was, and the next day went in and took the midterm. I left confident that I’d pulled at least a C.

A few days later, when I found out that I had, in fact, received a D, I knew that shit had just gotten real.

I’m by no means a perfectionist. In most cases, I’m usually willing to settle for less if it can get me passable results with minimal effort,* and what I figured was that it was this reprehensible character failing that resulted in my poor grade. I’d been too lazy to put any serious effort into my studies, and as a result I got a D on a college midterm, which is not necessarily easy to recover from.

*Have you ever noticed how some updates on here aren’t very funny? Yeah, there you go.

Fortunately, the professor is a lenient guy, and he told me that if I could improve my performance for the second midterm that he’d base my grade more off of that than the first. So last week during the leadup to the second midterm, I studied like a motherfucker. I hit the book hard, I reviewed old homework, I did practice questions and studied with friends who had gotten As on the first test. I went into class on the day of the midterm confident that I would make the test my bitch and not the other way around like last time.

The good news is that I only got 48% of the questions on the second midterm wrong. The bad news is that scoring 52% on a midterm that comprises 20 percent of your grade is definitely not a good way to qualify for scholarships, and it’s usually a pretty bad sign if you were at all interested in not writing the past ten weeks off as a several hundred dollar goof.

52% is an F. Had I stayed at home that day and masturbated instead of taking the test, I still would have gotten an F, but probably would have been in a much better mood all afternoon.

I guess what confuses me is how 90 minutes of studying the night before the exam got me a grade that was eleven points higher than the one I got after some eight hours of studying over the course of the week leading up to the next one. Had I just gotten another D, I would have assumed that the course materials had progressed further than my study habits since the last exam, but the fact that hours of concentrated, thoughtful study got me a lower grade suggests that maybe studying is not the best way to prepare for tests.

Maybe I should get drunk before the final.

Truman Capps can’t wait to use his science skills to become the best journalist ever.

Reporting 1

The Google Image Search results for "reporter" and "journalism" weren't so good, so I just ramped up the Chevy.

Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook may have noticed that over the past seven weeks or so my status has periodically indicated some level of dissatisfaction with the journalism class I’m currently taking, Reporting 1. Some of you have called me out for being an obnoxious whiner; I always thought everyone had sort of accepted this, seeing as I’ve got a blog upon which I obnoxiously whine on a regular basis. Calling a blogger out for bitching too much is like calling Batman out for having an ostentatious car – it sort of comes with the territory.

To give you an idea, though, of why I bitch about Reporting 1, let me tell you about Monday morning:

I’d had a really great weekend. There hadn’t been a home football game, so I was able to sleep in to my heart’s content, and in spite of the Ducks’ poor performance at Stanford on Saturday my friends and I were still able to pick ourselves up and throw on hell of a party that night. The following day I ate a nutritious breakfast and spent several hours playing video games (hence Sunday’s late update). I went to class Monday with a spring in my step, feeling optimistic about the week ahead.

When I arrived, our professor assembled us around a table and said, “Sometimes in the newsroom, a disaster strikes and you’ve got to drop everything you’re doing to report on it, which is what we’ll be doing today. In a few minutes we’ll be having a simulated press conference in which several faculty members posing as public health officials will inform you about a hypothetical swine flu outbreak that has overwhelmed area hospitals at the same time as a freak windstorm. After the press conference you’ll have an hour to assemble the facts into a story.”

It was 9:00 AM.

It was 9:00 AM on Monday, some of my classmates were probably still drunk, and we’d been dropped headfirst into an episode of 24. I guess this is just one of those situations where learning how to do a certain job is a lot less glamorous than the job itself. When George Clooney was on ER I’m pretty sure there was never an episode where had to sponge up some homeless guy’s diarrhea, and All The President’s Men didn’t have a scene where Woodward and Bernstein have to cover a fake apocalypse.

Reporting 1 has always been very good at forcing me to confront my mortality head on. For the first two weeks of the term, we spent the bulk of our class time reading press releases from the Oregon State Police about fatal car accidents and then using the raw information to write newsbriefs, which we would then share with the class like excessively bland, rigidly structured beat poetry.

Warren Jenkins, age 56, of Springfield
was
pronounced dead on Sunday afternoon when the
Pontiac
Firebird
he was driving ran off the road near mile post 118.
He was ejected from the vehicle.
Jenkins was not wearing…
HIS SEEEEAAAATBEEELLLLT!

There’s nothing quite like getting up early on a Monday and promptly being handed a terse list of everybody who died in a car crash while you were partying over the weekend. It makes you feel kind of irresponsible for having any joy in your life at all when there are half a dozen families across the state all grieving and making with the funeral arrangements. It also makes you never want to drive again for fear that your inevitable death will become fodder for a bunch of sleepy journalism students.

Shortly after that came obituary training, where we learned how to take the necessary information off of death reports from funeral homes and put it into a brief, drab, and spectacularly uninteresting block of text that will probably only be read by family members and other journalism majors looking for a good template on which to base their obituaries.

The reasoning behind learning how to write obituaries and traffic accident reports is that pretty much anyone who goes to work for a newspaper will at first be the newsroom’s bitch, relegated to the worst available duties. This is true of most jobs - it’s just not as readily apparent in the minimum wage world because no matter how long you’ve been working at Mike’s Drive In you still have to clean a bathroom at the end of every day.

Now, of course Reporting 1 has to be like this, both in order to weed out the pussies and because the whole reason I’m even going to college is ostensibly to learn how to do journalism. Reporting 1 is teaching valuable journalistic skills, but it just so happens that learning valuable things isn’t always fun. In Kill Bill, Uma Thurman wasn’t having fun when she spent several months getting her ass handed to her on a daily basis by the cruel master samurai Pei Mei, but if you’ve so much as seen a trailer for the movie you know that she makes it through her training and goes on to establish the world’s first hotel for dogs.

That might not be right. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie.

I’m sticking with Reporting 1 because I don’t want to get weeded out like the aforementioned pussies, but I’m still enough of a pussy to make a point of bitching whenever school interrupts the cycle of video games and pornography that is my life. I guess that’s a part of who I am – I enjoy finding new and innovative ways to bitch about things (hence, again, the blog). If I quit doing it, I wouldn’t be staying true to myself.

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure “stay true to yourself” was the moral of Kill Bill.

Truman Capps has to go to bed now so that he can wake up in seven and a half hours for the NONSTOP MISERY FIESTA that is Reporting 1.

Little Known Facts About The Healthcare Bill

Bow before your new god!

The House of Representatives narrowly passed a health care reform bill a few days ago, to much condemnation from the right and praise from the left. Here are a few interesting facts about this controversial piece of legislation:

Death Panels Are Go
The brouhaha over Death Panels that ensued over the summer died down after it was proven that the public option would not empower the government to decide when old people died. Yes, it turns out that the actual language of the bill allows the government* to decide when any person can die, young or old. Also, if the person the Obama Administration has selected for termination does not already have a preexisting medical condition, the bill gives government commandos the authority to create one. Special attention shall be paid to babies, whose blood will be used as ink for future healthcare legislation.

*And by “government,” they mean “the Illuminati,” and by “the Illuminati,” they mean “President Obama’s fellow countrymen in Kenya.”

We Will Punch Mortality In The Face
Democrats are quick to point out that the only reason the Health Care Bill allows for rampant, Holocaust-style extermination of innocent people is because once there’s a public healthcare option available, average lifespan in the United States is projected to jump from 79.5 years to Infinity. While this is great for the bulk of the non-Marilyn Manson listening population, it will create something of an overcrowding problem, hence Death Panels.

Taxes Will Jump A Bit
Once it officially becomes the government’s responsibility to care for every sick or injured person in America, everyone, particularly small business owners and single mothers, can expect to see a significant tax increase in order to fund abortions for illegal immigrants. In some cases, the taxation may surpass simple monetary payments and instead require taxpayers to physically perform the abortions themselves, on the penalty of being Death Paneled. This is, after all, necessary in order to provide enough ink for forthcoming healthcare legislation.

Justifies Not Giving Money To Homeless
Fine print in the healthcare legislation will make it a federal law that people no longer have to feel bad for not giving money to panhandlers, as they are a part of the generation that provided free healthcare to all Americans. Instead, people are now allowed to point at the homeless and shout, “Spare change!? I just saved your life!” The homeless person in question will then be so overcome with gratitude for his savior that he will kick his heroin habit, get a job at Starbucks, and volunteer on the weekends at a charity of your choosing.

Innovative Cost Cutting Measures
In order to cut down on the number of injuries requiring government funded medical attention, the Obama Administration will be collecting everyone’s guns in order to prevent any unnecessary injuries. This is also intended to make it easier for the Death Squads to do their work, and to better mimic the actions of other Socialist* countries. This ban on firearms will also extend to the military, as the healthcare legislation will coincide with President Obama’s plan to call off the War on Terror and allow Osama bin Laden to live in a house belonging to either a heroic fireman or Lance Armstrong.

*Oh, yeah, we’re officially socialists now, if you didn’t notice.

We Will All Be Heroes
Democrats who voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election will be recognized the world over as bold, renegade humanitarians who defied all odds in order to bring medical care to all. When visiting Europe, they will be entitled to no less than three (3) free drinks and ten (10) high fives from Europeans who are overjoyed that America has finally joined all other industrialized nations by recognizing the true value of human life. Also, in about ten years, Michael Bay will direct a feel-good biopic about each and every Obama supporter’s life in order to further commemorate the gravity of their decision to single handedly eliminate human suffering (in America).

Music Will Never Be The Same
The words to “Freebird” will be rewritten to instead be overtly congratulatory towards President Obama and liberals in general. The same is true for “God Bless Texas” and every song by Bruce Springsteen. All unaltered (or “inferior”) music will be wrapped up in surplus old-style American flags,* set on fire, and dropped in the ocean.

*The new style will consist of a single large picture of Michael Moore high fiving Keith Olbermann, accompanied by the full text of Moore’s firey rant about the Bush Administration at the Academy Awards several years ago.

Everything Will Be Fixed, Forever
Once healthcare legislation breezes through Congress and is signed into law, the economy, abortion, gay marriage, war, swine flu, and people driving slow in the left hand lane will all take care of themselves, simultaneously, in the space of about a week. Then, President Obama will undoubtedly be recognized as the greatest president of all time and you won’t have to feel bad about all the trash you talked to your Republican friends during the election or worry that maybe Obama won’t accomplish quite as much change as he promised.

Everything Will Be Ruined, Forever
Once they railroad healthcare legislation through Congress and get it signed into law, the economy, abortion, gay marriage, war, swine flu, and people driving slow in the left lane will all become much, much worse in the space of about a day. Your only comfort after you’ve killed and eaten your neighbors just to stay alive in the postapocalyptic nightmare that is 2010 will be that you were right all along – they can keep the change.

Truman Capps squeaked in kind of late on this one – blame it on the alcohol.

Strange Moments In Public Bathrooms

"Man, this is one hell of a public bathroom. I think I'll take a picture of it and put it on the Internet!"

My age: 15
Location: Newport Bay restaurant, Portland

I walked into the bathroom to find it completely empty save for one closed stall door. As I was making my way over to the urinal, the stall’s occupant, who sounded to be about ten years old, said:

“Hey there.”

And right away I knew that this was going to get really weird, really fast.

“Hey,” I said, entirely out of politeness, realizing as I spoke that I had now committed fully and would be unable to turn tail and run out of the bathroom, having joined in the conversation.

“I don’t normally poop at restaurants,” the kid said, quite matter-of-factly. “But tonight I just felt like I couldn’t wait ‘till I got home.”

“Uh huh.” My impulse was to use the bathroom as quickly as possible and get the hell away from this overly conversational little tyke, but he was making it very difficult to concentrate.

“I dunno what it was,” he mused, prepubescent voice echoing off tile. “I guess I had too much chicken at dinner or something.”

As a general rule, I don’t have a problem with being talked to by people who are using the bathroom or vice-versa. I really don’t have much choice; Mike seems to make a point of using the bathroom at least once during every one of our phone conversations.

However, I do have a problem with strangers talking to me out of the blue – moreso when the stranger in question is talking about the regularity of his bowel movements, and double moreso when he’s actually moving his bowels while he talks about them. The fact that the stranger in question was a child did not make this situation any easier. All I could imagine was what would happen if someone walked in right at that moment:

“What’s going on in here?”

“Oh, y’know, I’m just chatting with this 10-year-old about the regularity of his restaurant pooping, as he poops, in a restaurant.”

“Do you know him?”

“I didn’t when I first came in here, but I feel like we’re a lot closer now.”

It was inevitable – the longer I stayed in the bathroom, the worse my life would become. I abandoned any hope of peeing in the foreseeable future and instead went about noisily washing my hands.

“Well, I’ve got to run,” I said. “It sure has been something, though.”

“Wait,” the kid said. “I’m almost done. Just a sec.”

And I was already out the door.

My age: 10
Location: Wellington International Airport, Wellington, New Zealand

We had about an hour between flights, and so I went to use the bathroom while my parents sat and waited on a bunch of those uncomfortable black vinyl chairs you only find in airports. As this was several years before Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom extravaganza in Minneapolis, my parents had no qualms about letting their son walk into an airport bathroom unattended.

Just like in the previous example, I was alone in the bathroom save for one other person, but once I got into the stall, it was clear that the guy next door was not doing so well. Honestly, it sounded like a symphony of wretching, belching, and farting, all going on about a foot away from where I was trying to do my business.

Now, at first this was great, because I was ten years old, and when you’re ten, there’s nothing better than having a front row seat for an epic display of bodily functions – and believe me, this guy was like the Bruce Springsteen of disgusting bodily functions. There would be a long burst of gagging followed by a wall-rattling belch, topped off with a brief yet substantial round of flatulence. I’m serious. This guy was literally The Boss. To me, he was like every episode of All That! rolled into one.

However, the appeal of a guy being violently ill quickly wore off for me, and I started to get worried. For me, when I had been violently ill in the past, the noisy part of it usually lasted about five seconds, if that, and this guy had been going strong for the better part of a minute. It was kind of freaking me out, so I left the bathroom without peeing to get my Dad’s help.

In retrospect, I’m not sure what I expected him to do. Come in with me and say, “Hey, Sick Guy! Quit being sick!”?

Dad, who was more concerned with us making our next flight than some tourist’s digestive pyrotechnics, told me to go back in the bathroom, take care of business as quickly as possible, and leave.

So I gathered up my courage and did as I was told, picking the stall as far away from the sick guy’s as I could. And so help me God, the poor bastard puked, belched, and farted the entire time.

In years since, I’ve wondered if maybe somebody had just recorded a bunch of bodily functions, spliced them together, and then stuck a tape player in the bathroom to flummox kids like me. If that’s actually the case, though, I’m honestly a little more freaked out than before.

I think the most likely option is just that people in New Zealand are really, really good at being sick.

Alexander’s age: Middle school-ish
Location: Portland International Airport

After a long flight from God knows where, Alexander’s Mom ordered him and his brother (“The Spaz”) to go use the bathroom before the family got in the car for the drive back to Salem.

And so Alexander and The Spaz did just that. As soon as The Spaz entered his stall, though, he called out to Alexander.

“Alexander, get over here!” Alexander later described his younger brother’s tone as reverent. “You have to see this!”

Alexander dropped what he was doing and ran to see what The Spaz was talking about. What he found his brother staring at was shocking and also somewhat humbling:

The previous occupant of the stall had sprayed excrement across the wall above the toilet in what Alexander described as a “majestic brown rainbow.”

“And all I could think was, ‘Somebody wanted to do this.’” Alexander said later. “Because doing that could not have been easy or pleasant. Whoever did this clearly had a plan that he was very solidly committed to.”

It didn’t make sense to him then, and it didn’t make sense to me when he told me about it. For a while we wished we could have been there when it happened to ask the guy what motivated him to do it, but then decided that maybe that was a situation we shouldn’t have been wishing to be close to.

If he and I learned anything from our speculation, it was that more often than not, public bathrooms raise more questions than they ever answer.

That’s just a natural side effect of places where complete strangers gather to do taboo acts in close proximity. Sometimes, elements of peoples’ private lives are best left shrouded in mystery.

Truman Capps admits that potty humor is probably somewhat played, but it's still a damnsight better than Twitter.

Sorry Folks, This One's Kind Of About Sports

But first, some Star Wars.

I’ve said many times that there’s nothing better in college football than absolutely pounding Washington, but after last night I’ve realized that I was wrong.

The thing is, Washington fans have come to expect it. Sure, they get drunk and scream at us with all the acumen expected of born and bred Seattle hillbillies, but you can tell that deep down, they’re just getting drunk and screaming for the sake of getting drunk and screaming. Their team is still in such bad shape that it lost a recent exhibition match with the Oregon School for the Blind – the fans know this, but their logic is that college football is one of the last social institutions that does not frown on drinking Coors before 9 AM, telling a stranger that you fucked his mother, and vomiting in public, so why pass it up just because the team won’t win?

USC is a horse of a different color.

I’m always kind of shocked to see USC fans walking around in the world – I guess it’s a constant surprise to me that they actually exist. USC has been dominating the Pac-10, as well as a lot of college football in general, for about as long as I’ve been paying attention, and presumably for a while before then, too. They’re the reason that Midwestern douchetrucks call us the Pac-1. They have a tried and true record of steamrolling just about everyone, and in so doing have earned a reputation for being a bunch of snotty cockhammers* about it.

*Not to be confused with early 80’s English punk rock frontman Snotty Cockhammers.

I guess what I find entertaining about college football is the act of swearing allegiance to your team through thick and thin, and being there for the bad times as well as the good times. USC, however, has only had good times, and I feel like that’s kind of cheating. It’s basically guaranteed that their team is going to win. I mean, why even bother showing up? The only reason the fans (and their fucking band) seem to go to the games is to be spiteful after their team wins.

It’s like watching Star Wars and rooting for The Empire, because hey – how could they lose, right? “Fuck you, Alderaan! You just got your ass kicked by the Death Star! EMPIRE FOREVER!” And then the band plays that fucking song.

So last night, when we beat USC 47-20 (their worst loss in 12 years), we were essentially blowing up their Death Star, and watching the looks of vacant shock and confusion on their fans’ faces was priceless. The fact that we did it in front of a national television audience? Double priceless.

I think hubris was really USC’s biggest problem last night – that and the fact that they lost big time. When their team came on the field to warm up, our student section booed them, as is tradition (it’s not like USC has a monopoly on asshole fans – they’re just the very best at it). Their players reveled in it, one of them smiling at the students and sweeping his arms upward to encourage them to boo louder.

A few hours later he and his teammates were running for their lives to make it to the locker room as mobs of Oregon fans pushed past security guards to rush the field, eventually filling it up like a swimming pool full of drunk people.

That being said, we weren’t without hubris either – our fans were jingling keys and singing “Kiss Him Goodbye” when there were still seven minutes left in the fourth quarter. Admittedly, we had more than doubled USC’s score at that point, but we would have looked incredibly bad if they’d come back and won then. On the other hand, I’ve never heard that many keys jingling in unison before, and I’m pretty sure USC hasn’t either.

It all takes me back to the game against Boise State almost three months ago. That could charitably be described as a really awful day – The Girlfriend and I broke up that morning, and when I went to find solace in football, all I got was a well publicized ass-kicking show with a little bit of Rocky at the end. September 3rd was no fun at all.

But then last night I was looking at a scoreboard, and the number in lights underneath ‘Oregon’ was a lot larger than the one underneath ‘USC’, which is definitely a rare thing.

In light of Boise State, though, I can kind of understand how USC’s asshole fans feel. They tuned into the game expecting their team to teabag us and end all the national hype here and now, a lot like Oregon fans did three months ago. The results were hard for us to swallow then, and I’m sure they were hard for USC to swallow last night – particularly because at the time we were physically brushing their teeth with our dicks.

It’s surprising how quickly something terrible can turn an organization around. Maybe we should start every season with an embarrassing loss to galvanize us into greatness. Maybe USC should too – last night knocked them down a few notches, and I like that very much, but this is really an opportunity for them to quit trading on the fact that they’re USC and maybe quit playing like they’re The Empire.

Sure, The Empire thought it was invincible, but there was an exhaust port on the Death Star the whole time.

Truman Capps hopes that USC gets #3 in the Pac-10 so their fucking band has to spend four days in El Paso.