Bacon

Courtesy of xkcd, the Internet's other favorite thing.

Nowadays, whenever people are bored on the Internet, they entertain themselves with Stumbleupon, an application that bounces users to a random website based on a predetermined set of user interests. I’m not sure if pornography is available as one of the interests, but if it were I could see that leading to a lot of hilarious situations at work or during a lecture.

“Woah, sorry professor! I was just kind of getting tired of taking notes, so I hit the ‘Stumble’ button, and I guess I forgot that I listed ‘boner jams’ as one of the topics I was interested in. Before you judge me, take a look at this picture and tell me if it doesn’t make you just a little interested in boner jams too.”

I myself am a fan of Digg, a somewhat older version of the same idea, wherein other Internet users vote on things they find interesting, which are then listed based on their popularity. After a year or more of actively using Digg, I’ve found that while the people of the Internet can’t agree on President Obama’s birthplace or whether Halo sucks or not, there are three things which they all vote for on Digg:

1) xkcd comics
2) Pictures of cute animals
3) Anything - anything - to do with bacon.

Yes, that’s right – bacon, apparently, is the solution to all the world’s problems, something that we all can unite behind in total harmony. Hardly a week goes by that an article doesn’t appear on Digg that somehow relates to bacon – be it a trendy new restaurant that serves bacon on everything, a new recipe involving egregious amounts of bacon, or a medical study which suggests that bacon might not be the single least healthy animal product that isn’t produced in the colon.

So it should come as no surprise that I, as both an Internet user and a human being, am a huge bacon fan. Mike loves the Portland Trailblazers; I just love bacon. If I owned a pro sports franchise, I would change the mascot to bacon.

“Well, the Nets crushed the Reno Bacon today. I tell you, they’ve got absolutely no defense, but just talking about them makes me hungry.”

The Ex Girlfriend, an ardent vegan, didn’t understand this mythical substance that my friends and parents and I would rave about. To her, it was like we were raving about Frankinsense. “I don’t get it,” she used to say. “What’s so great about bacon? What’s it like?”

It was like trying to describe what’s so great about green. I mean, bacon is more or less happiness in oblong, crispy form. Sometimes, it even tastes like maple syrup. How are you supposed to quantify that in words? You can’t even describe it with pictures, although it doesn’t hurt to try:

Wut.

When I embark on my little cooking adventures, I usually don’t prepare a lot of meat – not out of any health concern, but more out of the fact that I don’t have a lot of practice cooking meat. If I undercook some vegetables due to my own inexperience, they’re just a bit crunchier than I’d like – if I undercook some meat, I have a potentially much more serious problem on my hands. I mean, raw chicken, for God’s sake. To hear my parents tell it, you’d be safer trying to fry up a nuclear missile.

Part of bacon’s allure, though, is the ease with which you can cook it, which is why I’ve found it to be a great jumping off point in my experiments with meat preparation. Bacon is so thin that you don’t have to worry about not cooking it all the way through, and it’s completely socially acceptable to burn it a little bit and still serve it. If you burn a steak, it’s burned. If you burn bacon, it’s crispy. Some people like it that way.

I’ve come to enjoy just the very act of preparing bacon – standing vigil over a pan full of crackling meat and fat, flipping it, deciding what foods in the house I should eat with my bacon (the answer, of course, is all of them). Knowing that I have the power to create my own bacon is a really liberating feeling. It’s the one kind of natural, non ready-to-eat food that you know will taste good so long as you apply heat to it for some amount of time. You don’t need to season it or add anything to it. You just throw it in a pan and let the magic happen.

I’ve eaten most of the food in the house save for my four remaining strips of bacon, and I was going to go downstairs and fry them up when I realized I had yet to write today’s blog. Hopefully that explains why you read what you just read.

The doctor told Truman Capps that he has very low blood pressure, so the idea is to do everything in his power to change that before his next appointment.

The Pregnancy Pact

They look more like a crack squad of all-pregnant assassins, y'know?

I once got a bit riled up that black people had Black Entertainment Television, while white people had no channel of their own. My friends quickly reminded me that all the other TV channels could be considered White Entertainment Television, that black people probably earned their own TV channel through 400 years of slavery perpetrated upon them by white people, and that a white people only channel would probably devolve into racism pretty quickly, as groups of exclusively white people so often do.

So basically, I had what I thought was a great idea that nobody else had come up with, only to realize that nobody had come up with it before because it was racist. This sort of thing happens to me all the time.

The closest we’ll ever get to WET (got to work on that name…) is Lifetime, the women’s entertainment channel.* The programming here has a decidedly female touch – nearly every ad is for fat free yogurt or microwavable teriyaki that you can take with you to the office with only five grams of fat, and the only movies they show are Thelma and Louise, Pretty Woman, and Steel Magnolias.

*Initially, I also demanded that there be a men’s entertainment channel, until I remembered SpikeTV, which is pretty much World’s Wildest Police Videos and Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns, both of which would be fine if they didn’t act like sitting around watching Jean-Luc Picard was the most powerful expression of one’s manhood.

Every channel targets its programming and ads to an audience, though – there’s nothing wrong with that. Do you want to see Soul Plane? Then you turn on BET. Do you want to see ads for online dating services? Go to SciFi. What makes Lifetime so great is that they churn out countless Lifetime Original Movies, all with the exact same production value and, inevitably, the exact same proportions of melodrama, poor acting, and royalty free synth-pop in the background.

On Monday night, I was a pretty busy guy. I had to pull together a couple of presentations for two different classes in addition to studying for a midterm the following day in J396. So when I went down to the kitchen to grab something to eat, I didn’t intend to take more than a few minutes away from my work. But then, I heard Bret and Jack yell at me from downstairs:

“TRUMAN! GET DOWN HERE! PREGNANACY PACT ON LIFETIME!”

And suddenly, school was the least important thing in the world.

In 2008, a high school in suburban Massachusetts gained national notoriety when its teen pregnancy rate spiked to four times the previous year’s number. The principal made an unsubstantiated claim that several girls had entered into a pact to all get pregnant together, and afterwards no amount of factual evidence from any of the involved girls would dissuade the mass media that they had done anything but agree to all catch the same STD at the same time.

And honestly, who can blame the media when there’s a name like ‘pregnancy pact’? I mean, the principal didn’t say ‘pregnancy agreement’ or ‘pregnancy contract;’ he went right for the alliteration. He was probably a journalism major.

Lifetime, seeing the opportunity to throw together a movie with women in it, quickly jumped on the story. The movie, which premiered on Monday, was pretty much everything we could have hoped for – slow pacing, C list actors casting doughy glances back and forth, and a decidedly milquetoast debate about the ethics of providing contraception in school.

Lifetime makes these movies in order to put a lot of content out there in which women are strong protagonists, in order to make up for the bulk of mainstream entertainment in which women are relegated to the position of ‘squealing pair of tits.’* I can see why they do this, but if you’re looking for a film that casts women in a positive light, The Pregnancy Pact is not it.

*In case any women reading this are determining whether they want to sleep with me or not, both Firefly and Battlestar have a pretty good cast of female protagonists. This, I hope, makes up for the fact that I love The Shining, wherein all Shelly Duvall does is cook or be scared.

Essentially every woman in this movie is shortsighted and stupid. The protagonist among the pregnant girls, Sara, joyfully tells her boyfriend that she’s pregnant. Her boyfriend didn’t know about this pact – he’d been under the impression that he was merely boning a non-crazy girl. Her boyfriend starts to panic, and Sara rationally explains that they can get married and stay in town forever, just like her parents did. When he, a promising college-bound athlete, doesn’t like that idea, she seems confused, as though the willingness of her boyfriend to throw his life away was the one element of this plan she’d forgotten to consider.

At one point, an investigative reporter interviews a group of the pregnant girls, who gleefully talk about how their babies will be best friends all through school, “Just like us!” In spite of repeated warnings from parents about the difficulties of childrearing, they blissfully maintain their glowing opinions of motherhood, right up until they start having the babies and realizing that the only thing worse than having something huge come out of your vagina is then taking care of it for the next 18 years.

Seeing the girls realize what horrible mistakes they’ve made is as close as we get to any real resolution in a movie that consists mostly of huffy arguments and hormonally-charged tears. When Sara, eight months pregnant, goes to surprise her now ex-boyfriend at college only to see him with a non-pregnant chick, I couldn’t help but cheer. When we see the other girls in the pact miserably raising their bratty children, it was like the payoff for sitting through the past 90 minutes of their stupidity.

I just can’t shake the impression that the night before shooting, a bunch of chauvinistic men broke into the studio and altered the screenplay so that the ending would say, “Ha! Shame on you, women!” I guess it’s just difficult to make a movie about pregnancy without seeming sexist; Knocked Up was accused of making women look shrewish and shortsighted as well. That being said, pregnant women aren’t really known for being paragons of reason and clear thinking.

My hat goes off to you, Lifetime – in the future, maybe just show Soul Plane instead.

Truman Capps is going to make a documentary about the Oregon Marching Band called The Chlamydia Pact.

Subletting

Life partners.

I’m studying in England during spring term, which I’m sure will be rewarding and life-enriching once I’m there, but has been nothing but trouble so far. Maybe that’s the point of the program – they bury you with red tape and charge an exorbitant amount so that your last memories of America before you leave are of bureaucracy and poverty, and thus when you get to your foreign destination any homesickness or culture shock is overridden by your relief at not having to do any more paperwork or pay any more large nonrefundable application fees.

A lot of people spend a year abroad, but I opted to only go for the spring because that way I wouldn’t have to miss marching band in the fall or basketball band in the winter – so in case you were wondering, yes, nerdy exterior factors do determine literally every facet of my life. This is why I want my first car to be either a DeLorean or the Planet Express ship.

My choice to spend only one term as opposed to three in Merry Old England has thrown an even bigger wrench into the already wrench-laden works of convincing the University of Oregon to let me put a few thousand miles between myself and everyone and everything I know to pump near-worthless American money into a far stronger overseas economy. Namely, this comes in the form of finding somebody to live in my apartment.

My roommates and I took the plunge on the expensive apartment because last year we all lived in considerably less nice places – Jack and I in quads managed by the detestable Capri Apartments and Bret in a 30-year-old firetrap several miles away from literally everything. I’m not even kidding – his place could have been located in the middle of a poorly laid out subdivision at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and it still would have been closer to where everyone else lived, or at least decent seafood.

Those bastards at Von Klein Property Management didn’t want to give me a 7-month lease, so before I leave I need to find somebody to live in my place. This is made particularly difficult by the fact that rent at my apartment is $598 per person, and most of the listings on the “sublets” section of craigslist are for $200, $300, or WILLING TO TRADE HANDMADE JEWELRY FOR RENT!!! :D Granted, my apartment has a great location and is absolutely goddamn beautiful, but it has been my experience that a lot of college students will gladly live in the utmost squalor if it means they can save some beer money.

After my first two listings went unnoticed, I took to trolling the “housing wanted” section in hopes of physically going out and dragging in a potential tenant. However, I was not at all prepared for what I would see.

I, like most college students, am self-centered, and naturally assume that everyone living in Eugene is a college student as well. Imagine my surprise when I saw posts from townies in desperate search of lodging. Some were merely looking for a vacant lot on which to park the trailer they live in, others are single parents of small children, and nearly all of them have pets, some of which are referred to as “life partners.” I understand that if weird shit were gold, craigslist would be Fort Knox – a densely concentrated repository of all the best the Internet has to offer – but even then, life partners?*

*If you die of a heart attack and nobody finds you for a few weeks, that so called “life partner” isn’t going to have too many qualms about chowing down on your corpse once there’s been one too many missed dinners. A real life partner wouldn’t do that – for example, I’m relatively sure Mike would abstain from cannibalism for at least a month.

I’ve entertained the possibility of contacting these desperate people and trying to cut a deal.

“Yeah, Von Klein doesn’t allow pets, but if you’re real good about hiding your (supposedly) domesticated skunk, I think we can work something out.”

“Single father of two, huh? Nah, it’s a pretty big room, I think all three of you could fit in here. Hey, so my roommates are fairly pro-herb – how do your kids feel about that? What? Look, I don’t give a shit if they’re in middle school, I just want to know if I’m going to be subletting to a couple of narcs. I’m trying to be a good roommate here.”

I’ve begun to try and find alternate uses for the room in case I can’t fill it with an actual person. For example, the public storage industry seems to be booming at the moment, and my room has been nothing but successful for storing my own shit. If nobody wants to live here, I can at least charge someone to keep their stuff in a climate controlled room with a lovely view of the alley. Barring that, I could build a still in here and just have Bret and Jack sell bootleg whiskey to pay for my end of the rent.

Yes, it’s illegal, but while crime doesn’t pay, I think it pays one hell of a lot better than shilling out three months’ rent for a beautiful yet empty room.

Truman Capps does not want potential buyers to see this and think that he’s desperate. He’s not. He promises.

Internet Safari

In my travels back and forth across the stormy seas of the Internet, I’ve seen a lot of ridiculous things, and I’ve made a point of screen capturing the best ones until I had enough saved up so that I could cop out of writing a full blog entry. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy. Apologies in advance for poor image quality - this blog isn't called Technologically Savvy Guy for a reason.

That's right, folks. 94%. It's science.

"...So in conclusion, I humbly refute your claim that the series finale of Friends was a cop out."

Only in Springfield. Only ever in Springfield.

Yeah! Fuck you, Mr. Smith!

Here's a hint: When threatening someone on the Internet, any fear you may have instilled in their hearts by saying you're a black belt is quickly undercut when you reveal that you aren't even old enough to qualify for a learner's permit. But wait! There's more!

"Shit just got real."

In this guy's defense, The Incredibles is a pretty good movie.

So, y'know, he seems like a pretty reasonable guy, right? Let's take a look at some of his favorite videos...

Uh...

I rest my case. Goodnight, everybody!

Truman Capps is probably going to end up on a conspiracy theorist watch-list for this.

Two On, Five Off

They ruined it, the bastards!

When I was in elementary school, I was a real Mario Kart 64 fiend. I’d race home from school every day, eschewing the childhood social events like sports or playdates that laid the groundwork for many of my classmates to get laid in high school, and boot up my Nintendo 64 to spend hours tearassing around Mario Speedway in hopes of shaving a few seconds off of my best time. Keep in mind that this was in the days before XBox Live and online stat leaderboards – I wasn’t in it for the glory. It was all for the sense of accomplishment.

Some time after I’d played Mario Kart into oblivion, I read about a new game, called Diddy Kong Racing, which took Mario Kart’s basic formula of cartoon animals teaching children defensive driving tactics and took it to the next level by adding airplanes and hovercrafts as available vehicles. I was thrilled by the fun potential this offered, and spent many 4th grade afternoons ignoring the teacher and daydreaming about playing this new game, eschewing the childhood building blocks of multiplication tables and fractions that laid the groundwork for many of my classmates to pass math in high school.

After a few months of anticipation, the game was released and I bought it, then raced home to play it. After an hour, I came to one definite conclusion:

This game sucked balls. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how – let me remind you, this game featured monkeys flying airplanes, so the deck was truly stacked in its favor – but somehow it had found a way to take a delicious pile of lemons and turn them into boringade.

This is the case in 90% of my life – I spend a lot of time anticipating something that by all means should be great, only to have it turn out to be disappointing, if not outright depressing. The Rose Bowl. Dating. The series finale of Battlestar Galactica. The list goes on and on.

Thus, when I was finally able to organize my schedule so that all of my classes fell on Tuesday and Thursday, essentially guaranteeing me a two day on, five day off week, experience taught me to expect that this would suck.

How could it suck? After all, I’ve only been wishing for a nonstop parade of four day weekends since I was old enough to bitch about having to get up early. The thing is, Diddy Kong Racing seemed like the answer to all my prayers as well. In my experience, the great things magically find a way of sucking.

I assumed that having four classes in a row would be so stressful that the rest of my week would be spent dreading the days on which I actually had to go to school. Or that I would have so much homework that I would scarcely be able to complete it all in my seemingly endless weekends, let alone go carouse with my friends.

So imagine my shock when, for two weeks in a row now, my schedule has been absolutely incredible.

Last weekend I got drunk (or, rather, hammarettoed) two nights in a row, and still had a day and a half to not do my homework and then six hours to rush through all of it.* At the end of the weekend I remember thinking, “Damn, this was a great weekend – too bad I’ve got a whole week ahead of me.” And then I realized that the next weekend was just three days away, only two of which would require me to even leave the house.

*This may not sound like much to you, but it was a pretty big deal for me. There just aren’t a lot of opportunities for me to be hedonistic anymore – you can only look at so much bizarre pornography before it gets sort of played, after all.

That this wonderful class schedule should coincide with my being newly 21 is an added bonus. The past two weeks have been a blur of friends’ houses, bars, liquor stores, and, occasionally, my classes, although I’ve been doing as much as possible to keep them from intruding into my five days off as I can.

There it is, though – right now we’re standing on the cusp of Week 3, when shit gets real. This is where the clusterfuck usually begins – classes have been going on long enough for students to have a knowledge base large enough to test, so professors begin tossing out midterms, and when you’re taking four classes like I am, they start to neatly overlap, one or two per week, until the end of the term. Guaranteed.

So really, to say that my schedule is the best in the universe is like calling a ship unsinkable before you ever go blazing through iceberg infested waters. You haven’t really tested it in bad conditions yet. I’m sure your ship is really unsinkable when it’s floating in the harbor, just as my schedule is when my classes consist mostly of syllabi and reading I’m not doing.*

*Except for J371, where I diligently do every scrap of reading. Incidentally, my professor for J371 knows about this blog, so if you see her around, do please give her a warm welcome and tell her how much reading I’m doing.

So maybe by next week this blessing will turn out to be the disappointment in disguise that I’ve been expecting. But if it does, I can always look back fondly on these two great weeks before the wheels began to fall off. This highly anticipated event at least warranted two weeks of joy, which is way more than Diddy Kong Racing ever gave me.

Truman Capps is disappointed that everyone else gets Monday off this week as well, because it makes him feel less special.

Late Night Logjam

Jay Leno doesn't do this.

It always comes as a shock to me that NBC remains America’s Least Popular Network™ in spite of the fact that they run all my favorite shows – evidence once again that I define good taste as “things I like” and bad taste as “Twilight and Sex In The City.” I just have trouble getting my head around the fact that the network that shows 30 Rock, Community, and The Office, three of the funniest shows on TV, could be trailing to CBS, whose entire programming lineup is David Caruso taking off his sunglasses and Charlie Sheen going, “That’s what she said.”

That being said, my preferred late night talk show is The Late Show With David Letterman, if perhaps for no other reason than that the man has been in business for so long that he can say and do basically anything he wants without any sort of repercussions from anyone of consequence. Most nights, I’m pretty sure that Paul Shaffer is drunk (and some nights, maybe Dave is too), but there’s just something fun about watching this golden god of late night television holding court on which baseball players have knocked up which B-list celebrity’s daughters.

I’m also a Conan fan (and how could I not be, since one out of three people I meet tell me that he and I have the same hair), but I don’t watch his show quite as often. When I do, I’m always pleased by the shenanigans I see, but it’s hard enough for me to commit to one late night talk show that conflicts with my rigorous pornography schedule, much less two. I tend to enjoy his clips on Hulu a few days after the fact, when Digg notifies me that some interesting shit went down.

So imagine my shock when Digg recently notified me of the following interesting shit: Jay Leno, who did a great service to American television by quitting The Tonight Show in favor of some 10:00 PM variety crapfest, is having the aforementioned crapfest moved back to 11:35, bumping the following shows back by half an hour and forever upsetting the delicate ecosystem of the late night talk show.

If it were anyone else rocking the boat, it probably wouldn’t be as frustrating. If it was The Neil Patrick Harris Show or Ten PM With Zooey Deschanel or The Teddy Roosevelt Comedy Hour, I would dismiss all of this as a bunch of hoopla. It is, after all, only a half hour. Maybe we’re taking this too seriously. After all, at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of old guys making jokes about how stupid Sarah Palin is.

But Jay Leno? Him?

To see a legitimately talented individual like Conan O’Brien lose out to a talentless jerk like Jay Leno is just one big slap in the face to people everywhere who like good things. It’s like if you entered a talent show and were doing a really great job and everyone was loving you, and then the judges turned around and gave the prize to Jay Leno because he’d have a TV show for a long time.

I’ll admit, I didn’t put a lot of thought into that analogy, but this shit is hardly fair to Conan.

In every Leno interview I’ve seen, he talks to his guests like there’s a big glass wall in between them. There’s just a certain disconnect – he seems somehow disinterested, as though he’d rather be fucking around with some old car than talking to this particular celebrity. And hey, who can blame him – there’s a fair number of celebrities I’d rather not talk to. But the thing is, sometimes I don’t want to go to marching band practice. But I still go, because it’s what I do. Likewise, interviewing celebrities is what Jay Leno does. He has no excuse to suck at it. The man’s entire job is to sit at a desk and ask beautiful people what’s going on in their lives.

Furthermore, one of his most famous segments – Jaywalking – consists entirely of tightly edited clips of him asking people on the street simple questions and laughing at them when they get them wrong. Is it bad that people don’t know who Hillary Clinton is? Yeah, probably. But even though they signed the releases and agreed to be interviewed, I feel like it’s kind of unfair to put their stupidity out there for the world to laugh at, as though we’re better than they are. If a stupid person gains a national platform, like Sarah Palin, then it’s open season, but when a big-chinned douche with a microphone approaches some innocent stupid person minding his or her own business, I can’t help but feel differently. Maybe some stupid people should just be left alone.

One of Conan’s most memorable sketches, on the other hand, is about a dancing guy with bulletproof legs who repeatedly gets shot in the chest. It’s high concept and doesn’t offend anyone – except for perhaps gay rights advocates, who said that the sketch promoted violence against gays and got it discontinued.

All I’m saying is that NBC is dead last in the ratings right now, and shaking up their late night lineup and abusing their talent is probably not a good way to get ahead. Conan O’Brien is like the smart, sexy girl NBC took to the dance, but right now they’re neglecting her in favor of some cheap slut who they know will put out. It’s straight up dick behavior.

Truman Capps doesn’t give a fuck about Carson Daily.

P90X

Man, ClipArt standards are just in the toilet these days.

Another thing that sucked about the Rose Bowl was how-

Oh, wait, I’m not doing that anymore.

Out of all the things that physical education represented to me back during my K-12 days, one thing I never associated it with was actual physical fitness. If anything, PE struck me as more a test of mental fitness, as it required the strength of character to run endless laps of the gym without committing suicide, survive dodgeball without acquiring PTSD, and then brave the inevitable accusations of homosexuality in the locker room.*

*On the off chance that my old nemesis Donovan is reading this, it’s been over five years since sophomore year and I still haven’t put anybody’s dick in my mouth, so I really have to disagree with the statements you made on November the 19th, 2004.

PE for me was like a game. The game was called, “How Little Physical Activity Can I Get Away With?” If by the end of one 80-minute period of PE you had not so much as broken a sweat, you had won. This was pretty easy to do if you played to win.

For example, when playing PE softball in middle school, one of my most cherished tactics was to wait at the absolute end of the batting order and stare at my watch, trying to will time to move faster. As people rotated through the batting order, I let them cut ahead of me in line, so that I could oftentimes get through an entire inning without having to swing wildly at a ball and then miss it. When the teams changed places, I would pick a random spot in the outfield and stare longingly at the chain link fence separating the field from the subdivision next door, and dream that perhaps everyone would forget I was there and I could climb the fence and run away. But not too quickly, lest I work up a sweat and lose the game.

Watching the jocks wholeheartedly excel at everything we did, I came to assume that I was the odd man out for hating basically every physical activity they tried to force down our throats. In all honesty, I probably would still be the same fat kid I was in elementary school had my growth spurt not given me suitable height to match my girth. Exercise just seemed like one big, unpleasant waste of time to me, which I thought put me in the minority as throughout high school I watched my classmates voraciously sign up for weight training classes.

The more television I watch, though, the more I realize that people who actually want to spend time exerting themselves and sweating are in the minority in America. Watch a full episode of Montel or Ellen* and you’ll be more or less cockslapped by commercials advertising easy ways to get thin without having to exercise.

*Shut up, Donovan! I’m not gay!

First off are the dietary supplements, which promise to employ all kinds of crazy science to make you thin. What’s more, they assure viewers that they can lose all this weight while eating whatever they want, without exercising (at about this point the screen is more or less flooded with footnote text explaining the highly specific conditions under which any of this information could be true).

However, when the dietary supplements have failed, then come the ads for exercise equipment. These ads make the grudging admission that there is no pill to make you lose 50 pounds while eating bacon with every meal. These commercials present the cold hard truth: To lose weight, you will have to exercise. Yet they are quick to point out that while yes, you do have to exercise, it can be quick and easy and involve little to no effort, although you might have to check dignity at the door. To wit:

It appears that everybody else hates the same things I do about exercise – it takes a long time and is often unpleasant. Yet at the same time, everybody wants to look good, so there’s a huge market for shortcuts. And as a fully-fledged lover of shortcuts, I can appreciate that, but at the same time, I understand that you can’t get anything good without doing something at least relatively unpleasant. I mean, does anybody actually enjoy drinking tequila?

Recently, though, a workout routine known as the P90X has gained a lot of popularity, and unlike most things sold on daytime television, it appears to actually work. I suppose the people marketing the routine decided that they’d forego finding a badass name like most daytime TV products and instead focus on results – this explains both why the name sounds more like the designation for an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and why YouTube is full of before and after videos of bookish anime fans with twelve-packs.*

*As a point of clarification, I’m referring to their abs, and not Mountain Dew Code Red.

The P90X promises its users a more or less perfect physique after three months of daily one-hour workouts, which incorporate cardio, weight lifting, yoga, nutrition, chainsaw juggling, and penis fencing as part of a fitness repertoire known as “muscle confusion.” At the moment, I would say “muscle confusion” is tied with “Book of Secrets” for the title of Stupidest Name (Object or Ambiguous Concept).

What this means is that now there is a certifiable method to become classically, traditionally good looking. No longer is it just the idea that one must “eat right and exercise” – now you just do these strenuous exercises every day, the way that you’re told to, and you’ll be all set. It isn’t a crapshoot anymore.

Before you ask, no – I’m not dropping a bunch of money I don’t have on exercise tapes that I won’t use so that I can get an impressive physique that I don’t need. It’s 2010, for God’s sake – sure, we don’t have robots doing all our heavy lifting yet, but there’s plenty of disenfranchised minorities who do more or less the same thing. The only reason a guy like me would invest three months of his life into such an endeavor would be to use his newfound fabulous body to pick up women, and the fact is, no matter how good I look I would still eventually have to talk, at which point I’d surely shove a toned and well muscled foot into my sculpted, ripped mouth.

I don’t know about you, but I think that me walking around with that sort of physique would really just be false advertising. Even after the P90X, I’m sure I still wouldn’t like exercising, but I’d have to exercise rigorously to keep up the new image that I’d made for myself. The thing is, a buff guy, by the very nature of being buff, suggests that he’s very interested in that sort of thing, whether he actually is or not.

I feel as though a thin guy in mediocre physical condition with abnormally thick hair doesn’t really lend himself easily to classification, and I guess I like that better.

Truman Capps will renege on all of this once his youthful metabolism gives out and he can no longer eat pasta every day and weigh 170 pounds.

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 5

Part 5: Wrapping Up The Suck

Blarg.

Worst trip ever?

Well, that’s really a matter of perspective. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States government more or less death marched tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands in the Deep South to what is now Oklahoma, an exodus that would come to be known as the Trail of Tears. That trip was probably worse than the Rose Bowl, as most trips to Oklahoma are. Rampant death due to starvation, dehydration, and heat exhaustion was probably also a factor.

Worst trip of my life?

Well, the camping trip to Eastern Oregon over the summer was pretty bad, although that was more due to rapidly deteriorating conditions between The Ex Girlfriend and myself than any negative aspects of the atmosphere, our chosen activities, or the fine, proud people of Boardman, Oregon. All excuses aside, in Pasadena there were no shrewish jabs at my failures as a boyfriend and a lot more hygienic places to poop.

Worst bowl trip ever?

Yeah.

Longtime readers (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!) will remember the many months I spent ranting about the band’s 2007 trip to El Paso two years ago. Our voyage to Texas was similar to the trip to Pasadena in many ways – we stayed in a hotel that was in the middle of nowhere, entertainment opportunities were lacking, and nobody was happy. At the outset, it would appear that Pasadena this year had quite a lot going for it compared to El Paso.

Keep in mind, this is what our uniforms USED to look like.

However, that’s just it – we went to El Paso knowing that we were going to El Paso. It’s tough to get your hopes up when your destination’s claim to fame is that it’s the front line of an increasingly bloody drug war. We expected a bad trip, we got a bad trip, won a football game, and came home.

We had nothing but the highest hopes for Pasadena. I mean, they call this game The Grandaddy of Them All. It gets higher ratings than the BCS Championship. Plus, they’d already done it 95 other times. With that much repetition, we figured they’d had the time to figure out how to make it fun for everybody – team, cheerleaders, marching band, and whatever poor souls come lower in the Oregon athletic pecking order than the marching band.

So maybe it was really just a mediocre bowl trip, but our hopes had further to fall because we’d expected the very best. I will say this – in El Paso, when we’d travel by bus from one gig to the next, we would look out the windows and think, “Good lord, I’m glad we’re not stopping here.” In Pasadena, we drove by an endless parade of awesome places where we wanted to stop and have fun, but couldn’t, because the trip dictated that we had to spend an hour sitting on the bus before going to do something not fun.

I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that this was anybody’s fault – everybody in the band’s staff did the best they could to make this a good time for us, but it sucked anyway. The matter was beyond their control. Sometimes a thing just sucks, and the Rose Bowl was one of those things.

Above: Another one of those things.

Were there good things? Of course – there were three of them. And in one way or another, these things made the trip bearable. Not great, but bearable. Observe:

Booze

They sell hard alcohol in supermarkets in California. I don’t think I should really have to say anything else – you can walk into a Safeway in El Segundo and just grab a bottle of Smirnoff from their impressive selection of fine spirits. And, due to the absence of a liquor tax, it’s a damnsight cheaper than it is here, too.

Oregon is the greatest place in the universe (and believe me, I’d know), but they’re really dropping the ball on this one. Oregon is supposed to be the land of hedonism, where people can pick up a bag of medicinal marijuana from a 12 year old prostitute, all while on their way to get an assisted suicide from a doctor who just happens to be totally gay! And yet the Oregon Liquor Control Commission seems to think it’s in the state’s best interests to tell people they can’t buy a fifth of Everclear from the same place they get their frozen waffle fries.

In-N-Out

Yeah, I don’t get it either – they print Bible verses on the shake cups, but the restaurant is named after sex. I guess it’s some sort of weird California thing.

The fact is, I got free In-N-Out twice on this trip, and while that doesn’t even begin to make up for a lot of the suck, I got the best damn fast food burger and fries money can buy, but I didn’t have to buy it with my money. After the parade, there was a whole box filled with extra In-N-Out burgers. I wanted to steal it and take it home with me and stick it in the freezer, rationing the burgers to myself one by one whenever I’d had a bad day.

Man, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about – if you want to steal it and keep it in your fridge, it always sounds creepy.

The Rose Parade

I know, right? Why would walking six miles be one of the high points of Truman’s trip? Doesn’t he, like, hate all physical activity? I hear he sleeps in a vat filled with bacon grease.

Marching band is a pretty stupid hobby when you get right down to it – you invest crazy amounts of time in the cold and rain learning and rehearsing a performance which is often ignored by your audience and openly mocked by opposing fans. You receive little credit for your work, save for the occasional offhand mention at an alumni event or a quick human interest story in the local paper. And at the end of the day, no matter how much of yourself you put into this activity, people tell you that what you do is easy and then make a joke about American Pie.

During the Rose Parade, the sidewalks were jam-packed with legions of people who were screaming and cheering for us, dancing along to the music we played, and generally singing our praises – some of them were even wearing Ohio State colors. For as long as we were in front of the people watching us, we were center stage – the main event. Marching bands are part of the reason people go to the Rose Parade, and we were what they wanted to see.

And that’s why I love marching band. That’s what the people who aren’t in it – the people who call it a faggy activity for overweight nerds – will never understand. It’s about performing. That’s why I keep coming back, even after rehearsals in the rain and Midwestern slander and trips to Pullman and El Paso and Pasadena.

So yes, the Rose Bowl sucked. It was the Star Wars Episode 1 of bowl trips. But it was not without its minor perks.

Truman Capps fulfilled his sentimentality quota for 2010 way too early.

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 4

Part 4: The Suck Bowl

This picture makes it look way better than it actually was.

A lot of sucky things happened between Disneyland and the day of the Rose Bowl, our last day in Pasadena. We spent three hours being bussed to and from Santa Monica pier, where we played Mighty Oregon twice for a bunch of Oregon donors in the midst of a driving rainstorm, and then stood idly by while Supwitchugirl performed “I Love My Ducks,” and discovered that 70% of the people at this pep rally were over the age of 50 and, thus, were not aware of why these three gentlemen were famous, nor were amused by their antics. The following day I spent several hours hurrying up and waiting with members of the Yellow Garter Band, an experience made far worse by the presence of one Chelsea Fujitani, who specifically requested that I not include her in this series.

Damn you, Chelsea Fujitani, and the horse you rode in on.

But the fact is, there’s only so many ways I can say, “We were told to hurry, and then we waited for a long time” and have it be funny. But that’s really what the first three days of the trip were – hurrying, followed by waiting, accompanied by a great deal of fatigue. Rather than describe all of this, I’m just going to jump ahead to the last day of our trip – the day that we rose at 3:00 AM to march six miles down Colorado Avenue, play at the Rose Bowl, and then finally go home.

Let me begin by saying this: The Oregon Marching Band is, musically speaking, one of the finest marching bands in the country. Where other bands coerce 300 people into playing as loud as possible for as long as possible, we prefer to play a balanced, in-tune sound, which resonates more clearly and is louder than an unfocused one. It’s science. It was about the only thing I learned in Physics 152, mainly because when the professor said it, I thought, “Oh! Scientific proof as to why the Oregon Marching Band is so damn good.”

The thing is, in the Rose Bowl, we were going up against Ohio State University’s marching band, which is widely known as The Best Damn Band In The Land. That name is not to be taken lightly – they pretty much are. Ohio State’s band benefits from its placement in the Midwest, where Big Ten football fanaticism breeds similar enthusiasm for football programs at the high school level, which in turn results in more people willing to participate in high school marching bands, who in turn want to participate in college bands, Ohio State’s in particular.

"HAAAAAANG ON SLOOPY, SLOOPY HANG ON! O! H! I! O!"

Ohio State is the largest school in the country and has had a solid football program for some 50 years. Their band has been right there alongside the football program since before the Spanish-American war, building traditions and rapport with fans. Over time, they’ve become the most famous marching band in the world. Kids in Ohio learn how to play the tuba in elementary school just so they can one day have the chance of dotting the ‘i’ in Script Ohio with Ohio State’s marching band. Every year the band holds auditions from an applicant pool in the hundreds to determine which 225 lucky people will be included in the band. Out of this 225, only 192 march on the field at pregame and halftime – the others are alternates, who, on a weekly basis aggressively challenge other members of the band on the basis of musical knowledge and drill precision in hopes of earning the right to perform on Saturday.

The Oregon Marching Band takes everyone who shows up and knows how to play an instrument.

It’s like we were Flight of the Conchords and they were Bruce Springsteen – Flight of the Conchords are highly talented and fun, and a lot of people love them, but Bruce Springsteen is an American goddamn icon. It’s practically unfair to compare them.

And yet, both in the Rose Parade and at halftime, there we were. Their band had rigidly straight lines and every single member in step, wearing crisp black uniforms with double Windsor knotted ties. We were clad in Nike’s unconventional uniforms and playing the crap out of a show that was musically deep and challenging. However unfair, fans made the comparison, and the result has been a lot of trash talk on YouTube from mouth breathing Midwesterners trying to tell us that we’re no good at what we do.

These people are idiots, and they have no idea what’s going on – after all, they choose to live several thousand miles from the nearest ocean, in a region that is prone to blizzards and droughts and apparently has crappy weed. They also elected Bush a second time.*

*That being said, everybody I met from Ohio State’s band was nothing but polite and courteous. This is in stark contrast to the Oregon Marching Band, where we are proud to be assholes.

It didn’t help that the team didn’t fare so well either – it’s one thing to get shown up at halftime, but when your team gets pretty soundly beaten, especially after 75% of the country expected them to win, you really don’t have anything to say to the Buckeye hecklers.

I mean, what happened this year, Pac-10? This was supposed to be the year that we dethroned USC and showed the aforementioned Midwestern mouthbreathers and porch sitting, banjo playing, Downs-syndrome having SEC folk that people west of the Mississippi knew how to play football.

Tim Tebow.

Instead, we turned right around and acted like we didn’t know how to play football, going 2-5 in bowl games against out of conference opponents. I mean, really, Arizona? Losing is one thing, but a shut out? Maybe that used to fly back when you were in the WAC in the 1970s, but this is the Pac 10. If you want to go back to the WAC, be our guest – word of warning: nowadays they call it The Boise State Show.

I know I haven’t really given any specific concrete event that shows why the day of the Rose Bowl sucked, but I’m trying instead to paint a more emotional picture that shows where my mind was on the first day of 2010. The marching band I love went up against the one band in the world that is quantifiably better than we are, while the team that I love (and the conference that I support in spite of its constant abuse) lost out bigtime. Keep in mind, by the time we’d lost the Rose Bowl, everyone in the OMB had already been up for 15 hours and walked the equivalent of ten miles. How would you feel?

We loaded the buses, dejected and worn out, sat in the parking lot for the customary hour, and then set off for LAX and our flight home. When we arrived, we were issued our boarding passes on the curb and found that the security line stretched out the terminal and down the sidewalk as far as the eye could see. We trudged down to the end of the line (which was in Malibu) and spent an hour and a half waiting to be screened for explosive underwear before boarding our flight.

One of the interesting things about fatigue is that it fucks up your head. While I was standing in line, my friend Darren came up and started talking to me. Looking at him, I knew who he was – I knew that I’d known him since I was a freshman, I knew he played clarinet and that he went to high school in Keizer – but I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. I had to discreetly check his luggage tag to figure out just who the hell I was talking to. Even more sad was the fact that if, at that moment, you had asked me the names of all twelve Cylons on Battlestar Galactica, I probably would’ve remembered at least six.

Oh yeah, like you'd forget HER name.

Sorry Darren – it wasn’t you, it was me.

Another funny thing about fatigue is that once you’ve gone four days on perhaps twelve hours’ sleep, you start to fall asleep without even knowing you’re falling asleep. As the trip wore on, I discovered that if I sat still without actively engaging my mind for a few seconds, my next sensation would be waking up several minutes later – to my knowledge, nobody stole any of my internal organs during one of these lapses in consciousness, but for all I know I could be unwittingly running on one kidney.

This proved troublesome on the plane. Shortly after the pilot announced that we would be landing in Eugene in about twenty minutes, I made the mistake of not thinking about anything for a few seconds. A moment later, I was jolted awake as the plane shook violently, the engines screaming and roaring in my ears. Something had gone wrong – they always say the most dangerous part of a flight is right before landing, right? – and I was going to die. I could hear the news reports already:

A plane carrying the Oregon cheerleaders exploded earlier today in the skies over Eugene, killing everyone onboard. A candlelight vigil for the fallen cheerleaders is being held outside of Autzen Stadium. In lighter news, the Oregon Marching Band was also on the plane! Hey, how about those uniforms, am I right?

One hand shot out and clutched my seatmate’s arm in a death grip, while the other wrapped itself protectively around my face. I desperately hoped that if, after my death, I encountered God, he wouldn’t be a prick about the whole life of atheism thing.

“Truman,” my seatmate, Jefe, said to me, putting his hand on my arm. “It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

Fool! I thought to myself. We’re all going to die, can’t you see that!? I turned and looked out the window, expecting to see pristine Oregon farmland growing larger and larger as the plane hurdled towards it.

Instead, I saw the Eugene Airport terminal and other runways, which is apparently a common sight when the plane lands.

Yes, that’s right – I had fallen asleep for a full 20 minutes, only waking up during the commotion of the plane’s totally safe landing, and had made the, in my mind, highly logical assumption that the time to kiss my ass goodbye was at hand.

Rolling up to the gate amid the laughter of my peers, I knew two things: 1) This was so going in the blog, and 2) This had been the worst trip ever.

Tune in tomorrow for the wrap up in Part 5!

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 3

Part 3: The Happiest Place On Suck

We departed for Disneyland straight from our rehearsal site on the same day that we got to L.A. – this was before we’d even so much as seen our hotel. While blazing down the highway en route to Anaheim, the staff member on our bus informed us that CNN was at Disneyland and would be taping our scheduled performance, but because we had fallen behind schedule we had to get off the buses in uniform and ready to go, like a crack squad of Airborne Rangers who know the Thriller dance.

In Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt makes a point of explaining the many disadvantages of fighting in a basement.

”You know, fightin’ in a basement offers a lot of difficulties. Number one being, you’re fightin’ in a basement!”

Changing on a moving bus presents similar difficulties, especially when everyone else around you is changing as well. Forget shame or dignity – we are, after all, a marching band, and have precious little of both to begin with. Logistically speaking, the act of changing involves a lot of flailing around and awkward movement, and when a busload of 40 or so people all do it at once while the bus is traveling quickly over California’s somewhat poorly maintained highways, the result is an orgy of half naked people elbowing one another in the ribs while trying to pull on yellow and green spandex.

But we hurried to get dressed, and in record time the entire band was in uniform and ready to go. After another half hour in transit, we reached Disneyland, where we were herded off of the buses like cattle and aggressively prodded into pulling out our instruments and warming up as quickly as possible. And then we were off, running at a good clip through Disneyland’s backstage, a vast expanse of warehouses and prefabricated trailers, most of which smelled like reindeer poop as a biproduct of the recent Christmas festivities (seeing as Disney has made its entire fortune on gigantic animals, I wasn’t surprised to find that at least one part of the park smelled like shit).

Let me tell you, nobody backstage at Disneyland looks even remotely happy. Most of them look like janitors on their lunch break – and in many cases, they were. I suppose whether you’re in a bad mood or not, you’d be inclined to frown a lot on your lunch break at Disneyland, just to get it out of your system before you went back to work eagerly informing tourists of the intergalactic safety regulations all lifeforms must obey on Space Mountain.

They rushed us into a small open area behind a large gate and strictly informed us that we were now “on stage” and needed to be quiet. We heeded this advice and got ready to make Disneyland more magical in the way that only an overdose of school spirit can.

We waited, “on stage,” speaking in hushed tones, for a full half hour. By that time, we had gotten an idea of what kind of trip this was going to be, and had dubbed ourselves the Oregon Standing Around Waiting To Do Stuff Band (or OSAWTDSB). Finally, roughly an hour after being told that we had a very tight window to make everything work, we went out in front of Cindarella’s castle, played a ten minute set, marched a short parade down Main Street USA, and were finished.

Then, we were free to hang out in Disneyland for four hours.

Now, let me say this before I say anything else: Disneyland is the greatest amusement park in the world, hands down. They take their job more seriously than anyone else in the business – they are the New York Times of feeding corn dogs to fat people from Indiana and then putting them on machines designed to make them vomit.

All that being said, I just don’t enjoy amusement parks, so while the four hours at Disneyland were the high point of the trip for most of the band, for me it was more of the suck.

I wish that I did like amusement parks, but roller coasters are a pretty big no-go for me. My life is scary enough without them – getting on an airplane puts the very fear of God in me (as my seatmates on the trip found out) and I’m also prone to night terrors (as my roommates on the trip found out). External forces in my life make me want to scream enough as it is; I don’t need a machine to give me more reasons to do so.

I also have difficulties with crowds, and it just so happened that we were visiting Disneyland during their busiest time of year. I got shoulder slammed by several French-speaking tourists, which struck me as remarkably ungrateful after everything my people did for them in World War II, and more than one plastic-lightsaber wielding child hit me in the back of the knee like I’d just walked onto the set of an episode of The Sopranos.

However, life had given me garbanzo beans, so I did my best to make hummus. I went on the rides I had enjoyed when I went to Disneyland in elementary school to see if I could recapture some of the magic of my youth. Pirates of the Caribbean had more or less turned into Johnny Depp – The Ride, but I was pleased to see that Star Tours had not incorporated anything from the new movies, in a rare case of George Lucas making a choice that wasn’t a creative disaster.

We returned to the hotel and went to bed roughly 22 hours after we had woken up. Fortunately, we were able to snag a full four hours of sleep before we had to get up for rehearsal the next day.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 4!

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 2

Part 2: Speed: The Suckening

Last year we went to the Holiday Bowl, which differed significantly from this trip both in that we took a bus instead of a plane and in that the trip was more fun and relaxing and less like that scene from Platoon. You know the scene I’m talking about. The one where nobody is enjoying themselves at any time. Here, let me help you out:

However, even though we spent 20 hours on buses going to and from San Diego, I’d venture that we probably spent more time on buses this year traveling back and forth across a much shorter distance.

Everything in Southern California is at least 45 minutes away from everything else, and that’s if you’re lucky. Maybe this is not the case for everyone – maybe it was just the case for us.

You see, we had been booked into a hotel in Manhattan Beach, near LAX. This had seemed nice at first because the name Manhattan Beach, California suggests a stiff drink and, more importantly, proximity to a beach. Once we arrived at the hotel, though, we realized that the name fell somewhere between a misnomer and an outright bald faced fucking lie, because the Manhattan Beach Marriot was a full five miles away from the nearest beach. Of course, I guess a lot of people probably wouldn’t stay in the Shitty Office Plaza and Strip Mall Marriot, so it behooves them to use a misleading name.

“But,” we thought, “That’s cool. This hotel may not be in a cool place, but it may be close to the other places we need to go during the trip.”

Nope!

We went to California to march in the Tournament of Roses parade and play at the 96th Citibank Rose Bowl, both of which take place in Pasadena. Now, of course, I wouldn’t want the athletic department to go making half-cocked assumptions before all the facts were in, but being as the parade and the game both took place in Pasadena, I would certainly assume that we would be spending a lot of time there. I would not book us into a hotel that is literally on the other side of the city.

To be fair, our rehearsal site was only nine miles away from the hotel. However, Google Maps was quick to point out that with traffic it can take 40 minutes to travel nine miles. And oh yes, dear readers, there was definitely traffic.

No, not like... Oh, fuck it.

But maybe they booked us into a hotel in Manhattan Beach because it was closer to Disneyland, where we were scheduled to perform on the first day.

Nope!

Disneyland is some 30 odd miles away from Manhattan Beach, a trip that can take well over an hour in traffic. And trust me, it did.

It’s not like I expect every single aspect of a bowl game to run smoothly or anything, but all I’m saying is that they could have booked us into a hotel on the Moon under constant siege by flaming nuclear alligators and it still would have been easier for us to make it to all of our destinations in a timely fashion.

You may remember how in the last update I mentioned that we spent a lot of time sitting on the bus waiting for it to move. We had all figured that maybe it was just some weird Oregon bus driver thing. Well, as it turns out, California bus drivers have as much potential for sadism as anyone else.

Every time we left any location on the bowl trip we spent at least one God damned mother fucking hour sitting on the bus, staring out the windows, and definitely not moving. Just sitting. Just sitting on the bus, breathing the same stale B.O. perfumed air as everyone else, waiting for some grander force in the universe to decide it would be okay for us move.

“Ticking away, the minutes that make up a dull day,
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way!”

That’s “Time”, by Pink Floyd, and it was without a doubt the theme song for the entire Rose Bowl trip, unless somebody wrote a song called “Rose Bowl? Can’t You Just Fuck Me In The Ass Instead?”

To quote Jimmy Eat World, “It just takes some time”, and I get that, I really do. I get that the Oregon Marching Band is big, and that there’s a lot of equipment to load and move around. I understand this information. But this is my third year in the band and the second road trip I’ve taken with them this year, and while in the past we’ve had to wait a while to leave our destinations, we’ve certainly never had to wait an entire hour every single time. That’s just ludicrous.

Speaking of ludicrous, Ludacris wrote a song called “Move Bitch.” That would also be a great theme song for the Rose Bowl.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 3!

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part One

I'm going to be doing something a little different this time. There's an awful lot of stuff that needs to be said about the past week of my life, so in an unprecedented Hair Guy event, I'll be updating this multiple part series daily until I'm good and done with it. Watch this space, and please enjoy...

GRANDADDY OF THE SUCK:

Or,

How the Oregon Marching Band Learned that a Higher Ranked Bowl Game Does Not Necessarily Equate to More Fun

Ever since I was a little kid, I always remember seeing commercials for the McRib sandwich at McDonald’s. It was always mysterious and fascinating to me – how, for example, could somebody eat a rack of ribs on a sandwich? What was that sauce it was dipped in? Were the bones edible? However, what elevated the McRib to mythic proportions in my mind was its rarity – it was only around for a few months out of the year, and whenever it was, McDonald’s hyped it up big time with an ad campaign showing mobs of people all but killing one another to get a McRib.

My family did not eat a lot of fast food during my childhood, so I never got a chance to try one of these mysterious sandwiches, and as I got older I avoided McDonald’s entirely. About a year ago, though, I happened to be at McDonald’s with friends when I saw that the McRib was available. I eagerly ordered one, took it home, and unwrapped it, excited to see what all the fuss was about.

In the end, it was a pretty mediocre sandwich that failed to live up to any of my expectations, and it also gave me some of the worst gas of my life.

The Rose Bowl was exactly like that.

Part One: Getting There Is Half The Suck

We were sent an itinerary a week or so before the trip which informed us that the buses would leave Autzen Stadium for Portland International Airport at 4:00 AM. Accordingly, the entire marching band was there at 3:00 AM, allowing us plenty of time to load all of our stuff, get onto the buses, and hit the road.

So, once everything was loaded, we all sat there, buses running, for about half an hour. There was no clear reason for it – it was just kind of something we were doing. Maybe the bus drivers were pulling a prank on us and waiting to see how long they could sit in the dark with the engines running before somebody told them to move. If this was the case, the bus drivers had clearly underestimated the ability of the Oregon Marching Band to sit around with our thumbs up our collective butts and waste away our precious youth, because eventually they gave up and the buses lurched forward and we were on the way.

And then, after ten feet, the buses stopped again for another 15 minutes or so as kind of a parting “fuck you” to our schedule.

Entertainment.

We were just on the outskirts of the airport when the buses pulled over and we were informed that our plane had been delayed by a few hours, and that if we wanted breakfast we should utilize a nearby Sharis. We did, and two hours later we left for the airport once again.

Along the way, somebody on my bus went into the bathroom and violently puked up the fine Sharis cuisine he’d just ingested. This did not do much for the smell of the bus. However, I took solace in the fact that we had reached the airport, and as we rolled onto the tarmac I, in my childish naïveté, assumed that we would be boarding a non-vomity plane shortly.

So we sat on the tarmac, in the buses, for a couple more hours until Delta brought in a plane from Detroit that we could use. Later, I learned that our original plane had been having “technical difficulties” the night before that Delta had been unable to repair in time – all of this makes sense, I guess, save for why they didn’t send for a replacement fucking airplane 12 hours before 250 people on a tight schedule showed up.

What was worst about it was that they made us wait in the buses on the tarmac, so we could watch all the other planes taking off and contemplate how we weren’t on them. No, we couldn’t have gone into the terminal or something, where there was more space and perhaps no stench of half-digested Sharis eggs benedict – we just sat there on the tarmac, watching other planes take off, contemplating the fact that most of us had got up at around 2:30 AM and we probably weren’t going to leave Portland until noon.

When the plane finally did arrive, it pulled up near us on the tarmac and the flight crew began to prep it by loading it with airline food and wheeling a big staircase up next to the door. This, naturally, took about an hour, during which time we sat there and watched it all happen.

Finally, the buses pulled around to the plane one by one, where we unloaded and stood in line to be screened by a team of TSA agents with metal detector wands and short tempers. The temperature on the tarmac at this point was about 20 degrees, but with wind chill it was absolute zero. Naturally, this line moved as slowly as possible.

Once we made it up to the security agents, each member of the band was forced to remove his or her jacket and shoes and stand there in their flimsy Oregon Marching Band polo shirt and black slacks, arms out, in front of everyone else while they were wanded. I get the idea that this procedure was less to facilitate security and more to judge which members of the OMB nipped out the most prolifically. Incidentally, congratulations to Jerome.

Then we got on the plane, where the flight attendants forced us to strip naked and made us run down the aisles to our seats while they whipped our asses with bamboo canes and stubbed out cigarettes on our genitalia. We had the choice between two in flight movies – one was a slow motion highlight reel of each person’s own most embarrassing moments with an accompanying laugh track and commentary by Lee Corso, and the other was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

But then, once the plane got off the ground, our luck changed for the better. Part of the meal service was this absolutely delicious sausage cheese and biscuit sandwich – it may sound gross, and it honestly even looked gross, but basically the entire band agreed that that sandwich picked up our spirits and signaled a bold change in our fortunes. Life was good again.

Until we got to Los Angeles, at which point it immediately turned to shit.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2!