A Walk Around My Neighborhood

Depressed yet?

I’ve spent the past three years living either on campus or so close to campus that I could hear the endless squealing and clapping of sorority girls every year during rush.* Even though my addresses changed from one year to the next, they were all within about a mile of one another. My neighborhood was Campus – real estate prices were low, but public urination rates were concerning, to say the least.

*Which I’m sure is a glorious and time honored tradition, and my ignorance of it is in no way intended to belittle or diminish it. (Thanks again for being on Writers, Molly.)

This year, I’m living in a house nearly two miles away from campus, in a room that, as I’ve already mentioned, is so small that it actually makes me look fatter when I’m in it due to a trick of perspective. This area is so distant from campus that it has the distinction of being home to some actual, real people – as in, non students. People who just live in Eugene for the hell of it. I believe the term they used in the 1970s was ‘Townies’, which is proof that college students have a solid history of being elitist douchetrucks.

After first moving in, I was a little bummed out when I realized that in addition to my daily commute to campus for school, I was also going to have to ride my bike out there every time I needed to get groceries or rent a movie or grab an emergency Hostess Fruit Pie from 7-11.*

*I’m pretty sure a lemon flavored Hostess Fruit Pie can cure cancer. Of course, it’ll also give you Type 2 Diabetes, so…

But then, I made a shocking discovery - there’s a whole freaking town around the University of Oregon. Get this: It’s where all the Townies live! And as it turns out, the Townies have their own supermarkets and video stores and 7-11, and at my place right now, I’m actually closer to most of those establishments than I was when I lived near campus!

I’m still trying to adjust to my new surroundings, though.

7-11

This one’s closer to my place than the campus location was to any of my previous dwellings. Also, they sell movies at this one – there’s a little rack by the door full of DVDs. One that jumped out and caught my eye was There Will Be Blood.

A sticker on the case alerted passers-by that this was an EMPTY DISPLAY COPY – SEE CASHIER FOR DVD, which came as a surprise to me, as I hadn’t pegged Paul Thomas Anderson’s oil-boom epic about obsession, religion, and greed to be a real hot item for the sort of delinquent who would shoplift from a 7-11.

Also, I’m pretty sure the cashier was on crack, because he was having this conversation (or monologue) with another customer, who was trying desperately to leave:

“YeahmanIreallylikebluegrassIusedtoplaywiththisonebluegrassbandinCottageGrovewewereprettytightbutthenwesortofhadafallingoutohmanthere’sthisreallygreatbluegrassbandupinPortlandyouhavetohear…”

McDonald’s and Wendy’s

Great! If I ever want a sub-par burger that probably has somebody’s pubic hair on it, I’m in like flint.

Mulligan’s Irish Pub

I was not aware that there were themed pubs in Eugene. The only two themes I knew of were Student Bar, where the walls are covered in autographed jerseys and you have to shout to be heard over Kayne West, and Trucker Bar, where the clientele glare at and/or murder any students who wander in.

But there’s Mulligan’s – a squat, dark green cinderblock building with no windows to speak of. I think I might become a regular, because on the off chance that there’s a nuclear attack while I’m inside I’ll be so well protected I won’t even know it happened.

Long’s Meat Market

I was not aware that there was still room in the economy for markets specializing in such a specific food item – particularly in Eugene, which has an entrenched and suitably unbearable vegan asshole contingent.

I feel like I want to patronize the crap out of this store, because I’m the sort of guy who would not only attempt but also benefit from an afternoon sampling the finest organic artesian bacons from around the world. However, I’m also the guy who goes to the supermarket and turns up his nose when some flashy all natural company tries to charge more than $4 for a jar of pasta sauce, so I don’t think I’d be willing to spend a lot of money on highfalootin’ meat when I could go to Safeway instead and then use the savings on liquor. Speaking of…

LIQUOR

WOOHOO!

The liquor store ever so close to my house doesn’t appear to have a name, other than LIQUOR, posted in red neon above the door. Floor to ceiling glass windows showcase the goods, as if to say, “Hey. Drink this.”

I haven’t been able to bring myself to go in just yet – not just to this store, but to any liquor store in Oregon. So much of the fun of living in California all summer wasn’t just seeing bottles of hooch lined up next to the Lay’s, but the excitement of examining the price tags and being shocked at how cheap everything was due to the lack of any discernable state taxation.

When I finally do go to LIQUOR (and believe you me, that day will come – probably soon) I’m going to have to take some Kleenex and cue up ‘Always Something There To Remind Me’ on my iPod as I survey the damage that those malevolent fuckshits at the Oregon Liquor Control Commission continue to rain down upon my checking account.

Truman Capps hopes that the anonymous enraged Boise State fans from the weekend’s update don’t use these locations to stake out the neighborhood and kill him.

Why I Hate Boise State - A Treatise

"THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!"

No, before you ask, this isn’t one of my rare sports oriented blogs. Yes, some of the subject matter involves sports, and sports, namely football, ignited and continually stoke the fires of my rage, but to say that me explaining why Boise State sucks is a sports centric update is the epitome of not seeing the forest for the trees.

Hating Boise State isn’t about sports, it’s about common goddamn decency. It’s about not hoisting mediocrity up as excellence. It’s about knowing what fucking color certain things should be, and fighting to preserve those standards.

Here’s what I’m saying: Boise State, you’re damn lucky there’s a fourth Indiana Jones movie and the University of Washington in the world, because if not, you would top out my list of most hated things. But keep up this behavior and hey, who knows? Maybe you’ll climb the ladder a bit.

Item 1: Your Field Is A Catastrophe Wrapped In An Abortion

Look, I don’t have any problem with the color blue, in and of itself. It’s a friendly looking color. Water is blue, and anything that keeps me from dying of dehydration is A-OK in my book (except orange Gatorade, which I could do without).

But you see, football fields are green.

Football fields have an illustrious history of being green – back in the pre-AstroTurf days, football was played on grass, which tends to be greenish in color. Then, when artificial turf fields were invented, they made them in various shades of green, so that when people watched a football game it looked like they were watching a game being played on grass.

I suppose this all seems a bit obvious and on the nose, but I feel like it’s something I need to explain slowly since clearly some people don’t understand, as Boise State plays all their football games on a field that looks like a fucking swimming pool with yardlines on it surrounded by a red clay track, just like the one that surrounded the (green) football field at my high school.

Just because the NCAA doesn’t prevent you from doing something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should do it. The only reason this travesty exists is because in the mid 1980s Boise State’s athletic director replaced the green turf with blue in an attempt to, and this is a direct quote, “give the school some notoriety.”

When I was in kindergarten, there was a kid who sat next to me who once wet his pants in a desperate cry for attention. The only difference I see between that kid and Boise State is that Kirk Herbstreit didn’t claim his piss-stained jeans were a BCS contender.

Item 2: Big Fish, Small Pond Full Of Small Fish Who Can’t Play Football

Here’s Boise State’s football schedule for last year’s season, when they went undefeated:

Oregon - 19-8 W
Miami (Ohio) - 48-0 W
Fresno State – 51-34 W
Bowling Green – 49-14 W
UC Davis – 34-16 W
Tulsa – 28-21 W
Hawaii – 54-9 W
San Jose State – 45-7 W
Louisiana Tech 45-35 W
Idaho – 63-25 W
Utah State – 52-21 W
Nevada – 44-33 W
New Mexico State – 42-7 W

Look, to be honest, I didn’t even know some of these schools existed until I looked at this schedule, which, after game one, looks like a list of ‘Potential Safety Schools’ posted in a guidance counselor’s office. I mean, what the hell, people – Bowling Green? That sounds more like a lesbian alternative rock duo than a school, and from a look at the scores for some of these games it seems like two lesbians with acoustic guitars would mount a far more robust offense than some of these schools’ football programs.

You know, I wish my life was more like Boise State’s football schedule: I wish I only had to do one difficult thing every year, and then could just spend the rest of my time eating nachos and masturbating. I mean, yeah, I’d have to apply myself briefly for as long as it took to restore that 18th century armoire or whatever, but then I’d be done, nachos all heating up in the oven, Spice Channel membership all paid up and ready to go.

The thing is, if that was my life, I wouldn’t demand recognition and respect for my ability to restore armoires.* I wouldn’t claim that I had been passed over for praise and awards because of some sort of bias. I’d recognize that if I wanted recognition as a world class armoire restorer, I’d need to start restoring more than one armoire every year.

*I would, however, demand respect for my nacho cooking and masturbational abilities, both of which I imagine would be top notch after all that practice.

The same goes for football. Yes, Boise State manages to beat their one real opponent every year, but that’s all they ever have to prepare for, isn’t it? Football is about quantity, not quality – and yet for some reason, there’s this entrenched, stupid minority which believes that Boise State’s ability to play a real football team once per season entitles them to go to the BCS Championship.

Item 3: Cowboy Up!

So after Boise State had heard my argument about the weakness of their conference enough, they grumbled a bunch and announced that they were looking to change conferences.

Great! We all thought. Boise State will come on over to the Pac-10 and play some real teams on a regular basis and promptly be exposed for the slightly above average team that they are.

And then it was announced – Boise State will be moving from the WAC to the Mountain West. And my reaction was, “What, there’s another shitty conference on the West Coast?”

As it turns out, the Mountain West is generally considered a stronger conference than the WAC due to the presence of stronger football programs like Utah and Colorado. Of course, as of next year, Utah and Colorado will be joining the Pac-10 to create the Pac-12, leaving the Mountain West with powerhouses like UNLV (5-7 in 2009) and University of New Mexico, which has such a strong defense that they only allowed a 72 point shutout in their season opener against Oregon.

The only school even remotely worth it’s salt in the Mountain West is Brigham Young, thanks to a squad of larger-than-average football players who delayed college by a couple of years for their mission trips and a coaching staff that probably doesn’t have to spend a lot of time trying to keep their players away from bars, drugs, and loose, chokeable women.

So after all this noise, Boise State changes conferences, and effective next year they’ll start playing two good teams every year instead of just one.

Maybe in 100 years or so they’ll have eased themselves, good opponent by good opponent, into a legitimate football schedule. And when that day comes, if they’re able to contend with the sort of weekly play that basically every other school has since Earnest T. Football invented the sport back in 768 AD, they just might get bumped off my shit list.

But only if they change that fucking turf.

Truman Capps made it through this whole update without saying anything derisive about Idaho. Perhaps he’s losing his touch.

Infestation

If the explosions were made of sugar, this would be totally accurate.

Yeah, I’ll admit it – I’m scared of spiders. And fuck you for thinking that it isn’t very masculine to be scared of something tiny. Chlamydia is way smaller than spiders, but you’re scared of that, aren’t you? At least spiders have fangs and the ability to bite, not to mention the fact that they show up regardless of whether you’ve been having unprotected sex.

The number of bugs in a given living space is my number one concern before moving in. I’m not necessarily a tidy person, but I’ve got a major carrot up my ass about keeping my surroundings clean, and a place so dirty that it can sustain a minor civilization of insects doesn’t fit my definition of clean. Call me selfish, but as a general rule I prefer to share my living space only with people who can pay rent.

To be honest, though, even if a spider had the financial means and cognitive understanding of capitalism to pay me rent, I probably still wouldn’t want to room with it – and if that makes me a racist, so be it. Fuck all spiders, everywhere. They’re terrible drivers and I don’t want them going anywhere near Ground Zero.

I’ve been pretty lucky to have lived in some pretty bug free student housing over the past few years, but my current house out near Amazon Park in Eugene is older and a touch more rural, which increases the chances of insect infestation considerably.

It also doesn’t help that my Roommates are slobs. And hey, nobody’s perfect – we’ve all got our faults. For example, my fault is that I’m really terrible at parallel parking. My Roommates’ fault is that they’re physically incapable of taking a dirty dish and placing it in the dishwasher instead of leaving it in the sink long enough for the A-1 sauce to harden into a paste resilient enough to build a battlestar out of.*

*Due diligence; it’s band camp, so we’re all busy, and two thirds of them have pitched in on cleaning a couple of times. But I wanted to make pasta tonight and the sink was too full to strain it, so I’m calling them out on the Internet. I had to settle for peanut butter for dinner. Again. I mean, it was still delicious, but it’s the principle of the thing.

This behavior, coupled with their tendency to take crumbly, sugary snack foods to their rooms while drunk and then lose them in dark corners, brought about a considerable ant infestation in short time, which is pretty much the sum of all fears for me. All you had to do was look at the hardwood floors in our living room and you’d see dozens of the little scavengers parading this way and that. The baseboards in our hallway were a veritable ant 405, a thick trail of them marching off to snack on what The Roommates had been too drunk to finish.

The problem intensified after a recent party, where every female in attendance managed to spill at least half of her sugar-rich Mike’s Hard Lemonade onto the floor, and one of my friends’ wife somehow left an entire kebab behind our motherfucking television.*

*Don’t ask how she did this. I think the better question is why. Because this sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. You have to want to put a perfectly good piece of food – on a paper plate, mind you – in the dark recesses behind a 62 inch TV.

It was like a horror movie in the morning. Everything you looked at crawled. Opening the pantry for a snack, I saw a line of ants running down the back wall, going in and out of poorly sealed boxes of my Roommates’ cereal and cookies.

Even though my room had been spared the infestation, every time my foot itched or I saw a shadow move on the wall I freaked out, assuming that the bastards had now invaded my one refuge, the place where I sleep.

Enough was enough. I had had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane, if you catch my drift.

We went to the store and I dropped $20 on some of the best chemical warfare money could buy. We already had a tub of indoor-safe insect repellant, which I sprayed around every baseboard in the house in hopes of cutting off the escape routes.

I had The Roommates pull all their food out of the pantry, examine it for signs of infestation, and throw the clean food into a big plastic bag, the contaminated in the garbage (which we promptly emptied into the container outside the house). When we were done, all that remained in the pantry was canned food, which I sprayed down with an (all natural) insect killer to destroy the stragglers before deploying a Berro ant trap to catch anybody who came back looking for seconds.

My Roommates set more traps in their rooms, we Swiffered the floor, wiped down the countertops and beer pong table with vinegar (to throw off the ants’ scent – it’s science), and essentially nuked the Zerg hive swarming the kebab behind our TV with the all natural insect killer. By the end, The Roommates were calling me General MacArthur, although I prefer to be referred to as Sergeant Zim, the ultimate bug killer of all time.

It’s not a Hair Guy update if there isn’t at least one Starship Troopers reference.

Winning was easy – ants have numbers, but they have yet to figure out that the oh-so-delicious smelling food in those traps is actually poison that they’re taking back to the hive. The problem is maintaining control in the postwar period – washing the dishes every night and wiping down countertops, jobs that are not necessarily as glorious as ant battle but every bit as important.

Regardless, I believe this ant insurgency is in its last throes.

Truman Capps doesn’t want to think about how many dead ants are in the walls of our house right now.

In The Closet

My room is not this big.

Going to Ikea is always a fun experience because it gives me the opportunity to see what sort of inhumanely tiny faux apartments those crazy Scandinavians have made to appear completely livable thanks to cheap, efficient design.

Walking through an Ikea, you move through smaller and smaller apartment style showrooms, all of them seemingly spacious and luxurious due to liberal use of Ikea products throughout. By the time you’re done you’re standing in a room the size of a dog kennel, but since there’s some modular cabinets and a framed picture of a fake family in there it feels like a suite at the Bellagio.

Yeah, you think, planning out a future in which every furnishing in your house has a quaint name with an umlaut in it. Clean, spare, and efficient. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

Then you go to the Ikea warehouse and realize that in order to fill one room you’d need to spend at least a thousand dollars, and so instead you spend the day on Craigslist and cobble together a mismatched living room set for $45 which includes an ottoman that somebody’s dog got pregnant on.

Now, I find myself in the sort of situation that is Ikea’s bread and lingonberry butter – while I was in England and Hollywood, my roommates moved into our new place and discovered that instead of the four bedroom unit we’d been promised, it was a three bedroom unit with a glorified 10x10 closet. Since I wasn’t around to answer first when my roommates played a game of ‘One, Two, Three, Not It’ for the closet, it is now where I live like a lonely, jaded Harry Potter.

Admittedly, my closet has a window and a heat register and a smaller closet inside of it. It’s a ground floor room, the window is at eye level with no curtains, and the door doesn’t lock. It’s less a dwelling space and more a special tiny chamber designed by the Catholic church specifically to prevent masturbation from happening.

I’ve just reached a point where I’ve been able to successfully stow all my cardboard boxes full of stuff in my closet or under my desk, and I’m afraid that’s where they’re going to have to stay, because if I went so far as to unpack anything I really don’t think I have enough surfaces on which to put the things I’d taken out of the box.

Since getting back from LA I’ve just been pulling clean shirts and underwear out of my suitcase, but today I did laundry for the first time and I’m not sure where to put all my clean, folded clothes. The best idea I’ve had so far is to put it on my three tiered bedside table, which is the closest thing I have to a dresser. The advantage to that would be that I could get dressed without having to get out of bed, but since getting dressed is only something I do when I’m planning on getting out of bed anyway, it’s sort of a moot point.

Also, a room this small tends to get cluttered pretty quickly – all you have to do is set one thing down on the floor and right away 30% of the room is a complete mess. Since I tend to make a mess whenever I’m looking for something in my boxes and am always too lazy to pick it all up, my plan now is to simply mooch off my roommates whenever I need something rather than get it myself, because the very act of opening a box and taking two things out of it will make my room into an instant pigsty.

Today the good people at Sleep Country USA delivered the twin bed that I’d bought, which has done a lot to make my room look less like a slob lives there. Until then I’d been sleeping in a sleeping bag on a queen sized air mattress on the floor, which not only took up a lot of space but also put me far closer to the dusty, hairball and Astroturf laden hardwood floors than I wanted to be after a full day of band camp.

I’m sleeping in a twin bed in a tiny room. This takes me back to freshman year in the dorms, only there isn’t free food provided and at 2.1 miles from campus my house now is slightly closer to my classes than the Bean Complex was. Also, to my knowledge nobody here is crapping in a garbage can rather than walk to the bathroom, which is certainly one step above the dorms.

Truman Capps thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to write shorter updates during band camp.

Fall Television Preview

Now if you want to talk about a show they SHOULD remake...

Hawaii Five-O

This is a remake of a show that was popular in the 1970s. Remakes are popular with studios because it’s a formula that’s been proven to work in the past. So naturally this show should work, right? I mean, people have the same attitudes and sensibilities as they had 40 years ago, and plenty of folks in the coveted 18-to-35 age group advertisers shoot for grew up watching the show, so there’ll be that connection, right?

Oh, wait. I guess not. Well, still, it’s a cop show, so at least there isn’t a whole lot of competition.

Oh, wait. Well, uh… At least it’s set in the one place in America where they haven’t already had either a CSI or a Law and Order.

Shit My Dad Says

Am I the only one who’s a little bit bothered by the fact that they made a TV show about a Twitter feed? I mean, really? That’s 140 characters or less per update. Three years now I’ve been cranking out an average of 2000 words per week, and as I’ve mentioned many times before, nobody has given me a fucking TV show yet. I had to go out and make my own, and it got about one trillionth of the hits that that guy’s Twitter feed did.

How’s about this for a show - Shit That Happens To Truman. Every week it’s a new 22 minute long peek into my ongoing and bloody war with the modern world. Spoiler alert: Not a lot of sex on this show.

Mike & Molly

It’s a sitcom about two fat people, which I suppose is reflective of networks assuming that couch potatoes watching their shows want to see similarly proportioned characters on TV. I’ve got to call shenanigans on this one, because all three of my roommates are fat and they spend between 70 and 100 percent of their time talking about what thin blonde woman on TV is hottest.

Regardless, according to the show’s synopsis on Wikipedia, the titular Mike and Molly “…will have to deal with the comments, jokes, and criticism from Mike's fast-talking [coworker] Carl McMillan; Molly's slim sister Victoria, and her mother Joyce.”

Outside of the fact that Mike and Molly meet at an overeaters’ anonymous group, this is all the description they give, which leads me to believe that the show is nothing beyond a weekly chain of fat jokes, which was a viable concept when The Drew Carey Show pioneered it but doesn’t work quite as well anymore.

The Walking Dead

It’s a serialized TV show about the zombie apocalypse being produced by AMC, which has recently been giving HBO a run for its money with Breaking Bad and that show about people smoking in the past. Angry Dudes, I think it’s called.

I can’t tell you how excited I am for this show – not just because it’s the union of the two things I love most (zombies and television’s ability to tell epic stories) but because this is the sort of thing my main bro Alexander and I have been talking about wanting to see for the past ten years or more. It’s good to know that somebody’s finally listening.

Secret Millionaire

It’s a reality show about undercover rich people going into the projects, living like poor people for between a week and ten days, and then dramatically revealing their wealth to their salt of the Earth Bruce Springsteen friends and rewarding them with large amounts of money. Presumably, this solves all of society’s problems.

I don’t know if you heard, but I worked in reality television, and I’ll tell you this right now – if you’re making a TV show about something, people know. Snappy editing (some of which I was responsible for) obscures a lot of this, but the creation of a reality TV show requires at least two cameramen, a dedicated sound crew, a crack squad of producers, and at least $15,000 worth of equipment.

The presence of all these people tends to disrupt the very reality that’s trying to be conveyed in such a way that bystanders tend to notice. And no matter what alibi the camera crew gives the poor people around the secret millionaires, I’m pretty sure in an era of constant reality TV show pranks and inversions (Intervention, Undercover Boss, Dame Edna’s Neighborhood Watch) just about anyone – even poor people! - will be able to connect the dots between the presence of a camera crew and forthcoming good fortune.

Outsourced

Last year, Parks and Recreation really screwed with my Thursday night NBC schedule. Things started off strong with the shining brilliance of Community, but then, in the half hour before 9:00 when The Office and 30 Rock took up the comedy reins, there was Parks and Recreation.

I don’t want to slander any of the writers for that show, because they were doing the best they could with a concept that was basically, “Do The Office, only Michael Scott is a lady.” But it wasn’t a great show, plain and simple. It was a buzzkill between Community and The Office. In protest, my friends and I would actually turn off the television and just talk to each other for half an hour until The Office came on.

So that’s why I’m glad Outsourced, a strikingly original concept for an office comedy (in spite of being a spinoff of a movie) coming to NBC’s dynamite Thursday night lineup. Good or bad (I think it’ll be good), it’ll be rocking/sucking in a bold new way, which at the very least is worth some brownie points.

Conan

Whenever I got sad or lonely in England, I would pull up old YouTube videos from Late Night With Conan O’Brien or the magical seven month window then The Tonight Show didn’t suck and let Coco’s antics remind me that my friendly homeland with its rich, exploitable pop culture was waiting for me.

I am going to watch the fuck out of this show.

Truman Capps thinks that watching TV on his roommates’ 62 inch television will be akin to watching NBC’s Thursday night lineup in an IMAX theater.

XBox Live

"You're a camping faggot, Dad!"

As much as I enjoy the song ‘American Pie’, I’ve always wanted to write a version more relevant to my life. ‘American Pie’ was all about Don McLean lamenting the shift in American pop music from danceable tunes the likes of Buddy Holly to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, bands that, while great, were better to do drugs to than to dance to.

I don’t have quite as strong an opinion about music, but video games? Man, I could write a song about what’s been going on with video games for the past decade or so, no sweat – the only thing holding me back is my inability to rhyme the whole thing and think up cryptic metaphors.

I grew up playing Goldeneye 64, which revolutionized console multiplayer gaming by making it quick and easy for four friends to get together, huddle around a TV, and have an epic movie quality shootout. Goldeneye took wanton murder, previously only the preferred pastime of the Manson Family and various pro athletes, and made it a cheap and harmless hobby for millions of people.

What was great about this system was that it made video games, which until then had been an activity primarily directed at pathetic, antisocial nerds, and made it an activity that could be enjoyed by pathetic, social nerds, the likes of whom would invite all their friends over to play industry standards like Perfect Dark, Halo, or Super Smash Brothers. All you needed to throw a successful party was one copy of the game in question, four controllers, and one or more friends who lived nearby. Still, this was difficult for me during elementary school.

As time went by, though, things couldn’t stay the same. The Internet came to console gaming in a big way, with XBox Live making it possible to hook your console up to an international network and play against other Asperger’s sufferers in other mother’s basements around the world. Within a matter of years, gaming had gone from a social phenomenon back to people sitting alone in the dark staring at a screen, which is pretty much one step above pornography.

What’s really terrible about online console gaming, though, is that it’s kneecapped the fun of split screen multiplayer. XBox Live killed the Goldeneye star, you could say. Now that online gaming is so big, many developers have started releasing games that only support two player split screen instead of four – some games don’t allow split screen multiplayer at all. Yes, that’s right – if you and your friends want to play Crackdown 2, you need four XBoxes and four copies of the game, not to mention four XBox live subscriptions.

Almost all of the games I play on my XBox are single player only. I never bought an XBox live subscription and when I do play a game with a multiplayer option, I leave it alone on the main menu to gather dust. I do this for two reasons:

1) I don’t want to play ball with the game developers and Microsoft, because the game is basically Rape Ball, and they invented all the rules and created an environment in which it was acceptable to win at the game every time. If in 1999 you released a game that didn’t let four friends plonk down in front of one TV and play together, it was fucking broken, and that was that. Now, if I want to play a game with friends, I’m expected to buy a $60 a year XBox live subscription – and that’s provided that they have XBoxes and copies of the game too.
2) XBox Live has a near intergalactic reputation for being a haven for angry prepubescent middle schoolers with all the decorum of angry, prepubescent middle schoolers. Not only are they better at every game than you are, but they’ll let you know it, squealing insults over voice chat and calling you a faggot in spite of the fact that their user name is JUSTINBEIBER9.

I’m intentionally staying in the past – sort of like the guy who refuses to get a cell phone, except I’m not going bald and driving a convertible Mustang. However, the future catches up with all of us, whether we like it or not, and it’s happened to me too.

My new roommates are all XBox owners, and devotees of the religion known as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game so fast paced and hyperactive that just watching it puts you at risk of contracting ADHD. While the most popular game mode is a team deathmatch, the title is sort of a misnomer, because in Modern Warfare 2 you don’t so much have a team as a bunch of people who aren’t trying to kill you. Any sort of actual teamplay is nonexistent – everyone charges into the breach independent of one another, desperate to score as many kills as they can in hopes of gaining the most points and bolstering their kill to death ratio (the number of people they kill compared to the number of times they die, which is ranked on the international leaderboards and is just as big a chick magnet as this blog is for me).

My roommates want me to jump headfirst into this violent, angry, hyperactive mosh pit, just like they did, and to entice me they’ve gone so far as to buy me a month’s subscription to XBox Live. I was reluctant at first, but I decided to humor them – these are the same people who introduced me to drinking, and that’s been working out pretty well for me so far.

I’ve been playing for a few days, and I’m slowly but surely mastering the breakneck pace of Modern Warfare 2. It’s not enjoyable yet to repeatedly spawn and be killed by an 11-year-old potty mouth sharpshooter from the other side of the map, but I’m pushing through it because we’ve got a 62-inch TV.

What’s great about this TV isn’t just that it’s absolutely gigantic, but that it’s possible to divide (or, I don’t know split) the screen down the middle and do two different things at once – you can watch two different channels, or watch a DVD and play an XBox game, or have two XBoxes going at once. Using this last option, we’ve been able to huddle together in front of the same TV and fight together. When my other two roommates are playing from their rooms only a few feet away and we’re all screaming abuse at each other, it starts to remind me a little of my Goldeneye days.

So I guess I’m willing to play ball with Microsoft when I’m able to play at least a little bit on my terms – a task that required me to find not only three friends with XBoxes and copies of Modern Warfare 2, but also a gigantic TV and a house to keep it all in. It might be more expensive in the long run, but I tell you, I did miss that old-timey ultraviolence.

Truman Capps knew that if he had his chance that he could make those people dance.

A Look At My Road Trip Playlist

Ugh... Sorry I'm late, guys. Driving 450 miles and having a welcome home party right after will make that happen.

My version had less nudity, but probably a much better soundtrack.

Dire Straits, “Sultans of Swing” – There are guys who listen to Dire Straits and guys who don’t listen to Dire Straits, and I’m a guy who doesn’t listen to Dire Straits. However, my father is (clearly it’s not an inherited characteristic) and has been for some time, and “Sultans of Swing” has been a part of his road trip mix since the pre compact disc era, when if you wanted to listen to a song in the car you had to actually hire Dire Straits (or an equally good cover band) to come along and play it while you drove, and then give them cab fare to get home. Regardless, I heard so much of this song on family road trips growing up that I now can’t drive across state lines without listening to it.

Cheap Trick, “Surrender” – Is “Surrender” a great road trip song because its driving tempo just makes you feel like going somewhere, or because I and all fellow nerds associate it with Conan O’Brien sprinting from New York to Los Angeles to host The Tonight Show?

Guns N’ Roses, “November Rain” – In the summer of 1992, everyone who lost their virginity in or around a car did so while this song was playing.

Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir” – Kashmir might be a great road trip song because Robert Plant first got inspired to write the song while on a road trip through a flat, boring, seemingly endless stretch of highway – which, if you’re on a long drive anywhere in the United States, you’re bound to encounter eventually (up yours, Nebraska). Incidentally, for any of you who spend a lot of time driving to Northern California from Oregon, I recommend listening to Kashmir as you come out of the Siskiyous and approach Mt. Shasta in the distance, right after customs. I can’t really make a joke about that. Just do it. You’ll shit bricks.

Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon” – For all I know, this could be crappy road music, but it’s my favorite album so I’m inclined to recommend it. I had all of the songs in my road trip playlist in order when I drove down, but coming back I hit ‘Random’, which mixed them up in a way that, while jarring to a snotty Pink Floyd fan like myself, made for an interesting segue when the mellow, drugged out instrumental “Any Colour You Like” led right into “Hey Ya” by Outkast.

John Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane” – I really like John Mellencamp – not in the sense that I like his music, because I’m not a huge fan, but because he’s got basically my politics but the popularity and talent to be able to write successful songs about how much Reaganomics sucks. Also, in spite of his fame and fortune, he still lives in his home state of Indiana, which I respect, in a mansion with his supermodel wife, which I respect even more. Look, some people write fan letters, some people pray, and I occasionally listen to a song about poor white trash, even though I don’t like it that much.

B-52s, “Rock Lobster” – The B-52s are such a guilty pleasure for so many people that they’ve earned this reputation as a ‘party band’ – you play their music at parties, because then everybody has alcohol as an excuse to dance and sing along with all the completely ludicrous lyrics. Being in a car on the highway is the next best thing: As far as everybody else on the road knows, you’re belting the lyrics and doing the robot to “Candle in the Wind” or something more respectable than a song consisting almost entirely of double entendres about marine life.

Steely Dan, “My Old School” – This is yet another song that, thanks to hearing it on my parents’ road trip mix tapes every summer throughout the early 1990s, I now associate with being in a car full of bags and using rest stops that smelled like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar” – For the 1998 Super Bowl, Pepsi released a commercial where a CGI fly drinks some Pepsi and then is inspired to start dancing around with a matchstick, singing the chorus to “Brown Sugar” in an annoying falsetto voice while the original recording of the Stones backs him up. I was nine at the time and I thought the song was catchy, and for a few weeks I’d walk around humming or singing the snippet that I’d heard in the commercial. “Brown Sugar! What makes you taste so good? I say yeah, yeah, yeah, woo!” I figured that the Rolling Stones had loved pouring brown sugar on their oatmeal so much that they up and wrote a song about it – and hey, I could relate, because that shit was and is delicious.

Imagine my surprise when I first listened to the whole song, shortly before making my road trip mix. It turns out this song that I had been cheerily humming along to for a good chunk of fourth grade was actually about white plantation owners buying slave women at auction and pretty much raping them all night long.

This doesn’t explain why I listen to the song while I’m driving, but I hope it helps you understand why I don’t like Pepsi.

Truman Capps has never heard a song with content as filthy as ‘Brown Sugar’ – which is saying something, because he’s listened to, like, five rap songs.

In-N-Out

He's like ":)" and his colon is like ":(".

I leave Los Angeles for Oregon on Tuesday morning. Accordingly, I’ve been trying to pack all the Southern California that I can into these last few days so that I have some mementos when I return to far superior state to the North. Accordingly, in the past few days I’ve bought vodka at an Albertson’s, spent hours driving around with the air conditioning on at full blast, and had multiple animated conversations with people about traffic.*

*Everywhere else, people talk about the weather, but since Los Angeles doesn’t have weather in the conventional sense, people talk at great length about traffic. “God, I tell you what, the 101 was ten different kinds of fucked up today – it took me like 20 minutes to go two miles! But then as soon as I got on the 405 it was totally clear and easy for a change, right up until about a mile before the off ramp for the 90, when it got fucked up again. Hell of crazy, dogg!”

More than anything else, though, I’ve been partaking of a good amount of In-N-Out. I’m hoping to one day have ‘enough’ In-N-Out, but I get the idea that In-N-Out Burger, like money and Firefly, is something you can never quite get enough of.

You have to admire the relatively large balls it takes for In-N-Out, in an era where the McDonald’s menu features coffee and frappes and Jack In The Box serves quesadillas, to continue to diligently serve only three things – burgers, fries, and shakes, of which there are only three flavors. There’s never been a chicken sandwich, or a special peppermint shake at Christmas – hell, they don’t even put bacon on their burgers, which is really saying something in this day and age when bacon has started showing up in mayonnaise, chocolate ice cream, and probably income tax returns.

They don’t even do sizes. On one of my first trips to In-N-Out down here I asked the girl taking my order for a burger and a small side of fries, to which she shifted her weight nervously and said, “Sir, uh… We don’t have sizes.”

Idiot. I could hear her thinking. You can either eat fries or you can not eat fries. Make up your mind. You can’t split the difference.

In-N-Out has been serving the exact same food for something like half a century with virtually no changes. Since when has staying firmly rooted in the past like this ever actually worked out well for anyone? As we all remember from Drumline, the moral parable for our times, that one marching band didn’t play hip hop music like all the other bands, preferring to stick to songs from its heydey in the 1970s, but then thanks to Nick Cannon they started playing modern music and won the competition, and everybody learns a valuable lesson about teamwork.

The generally held idea is that if you want to be successful you need to evolve and adapt, but on any given night there’s a line of cars around the block at In-N-Out, the evolutionary dead end, while McDonald’s is, as ever, filled with worn out parents too tired to resist their children’s demands any longer.*

*Given that In-N-Out prints Bible verses on their cups and bags, maybe they’re not big fans of evolution in the first place.

People who live in an In-N-Out state don’t know how good they have it, and I’ve seen conversations like this happen many a time at work:

“Hey, what did you do for lunch?”
“I went to In-N-Out.”
“Oh. Hey, how about that traffic, huh?”

If an Oregonian were part of the conversation, it would look more like this:

“Hey, what did you do for lunch?”
“I went to In-N-Out.”
“[Eyes pop out of head, jaw inexplicably lengthens and crashes onto the floor, person levitates and begins hitting self in head with frying pan. For reference, see all cartoons ever.]”

To Oregonians, saying you had In-N-Out for lunch is a lot like saying that you boned Megan Fox for lunch, or beat Indiana Jones at air hockey for lunch. No longer is it small talk; it’s you intricately describing a religious experience. Hell, even after being down here for two months I still get the urge to elbow the guy next to me in line at In-N-Out and go, “Hey! Do you see this shit? In-N-Out Burger, man! It’s really happening!”

Of course, nobody here cares, because nobody here knows the pain of watching In-N-Out expand to Utah and Texas while casually snubbing their home state. It’s like the prettiest girl at the dance only wants to dance with the insensitive and morbidly obese kids.

A lot of my friends argue that Burgerville, the Pacific Northwest only fast food chain with the menu full of seasonal all natural ingredients, trumps In-N-Out. While I love Burgerville, I’m reluctant to say that it’s better. Of course, that may well just be because I’ve been going to Burgerville my whole life – stopping at the Burgerville in Centralia on family road trips to Northern Washington or having celebratory onion rings after the Solo and Ensemble competition in Monmouth. The food it just as good, but it doesn’t have that sultry, forbidden allure of In-N-Out.*

*Oh, Jesus, I just sexualized fast food. This is a new low.

Maybe California people go to Burgerville and feel the urge to elbow strangers and say, “Look at us, man! Fucking Burgerville!” On second thought, they probably don’t – they’re too busy talking about how smooth traffic was on I-5.

Truman Capps found it a lot easier to openly mock California when he didn’t live there also.

RIP Digg

I miss you already.

A lot of my friends are StumbleUpon addicts, but no sir, not me.

StumbleUpon, for those of you who have not been desperate for entertainment during an endless general education lecture, is essentially a toolbar in your browser that, when activated, will take you to a website that it has determined that you will find interesting based on preferences you set when you downloaded the service, and then drops you off there to explore, like a Mom leaving her kid at Discovery Zone.

Of course, it’s tempting for me to have the ability to turn the information superhighway into some sort of court jester, bringing me things it believes I will find entertaining, but I stay strong. For one thing, I get precious little accomplished as it is without a quick and easy way to distract myself, and also… Well, this next one probably requires a new paragraph.

And also, using the Internet is already probably one of the more passive activities out there, which is probably why I spend most of my life on the Internet. You just sit around thinking of stuff you want to know more about, and then typing that stuff into Google or Wikipedia, a process that in turn will lead to more stuff you find interesting. You’re just drifting along in a digital innertube down a peaceful river of information, catching the occasional glimpse of some pornography just below the surface – and yeah, if you want to cast your line out and try to catch some of it, that’s fine, so long as there’s nobody on the riverbank watching you.*

*Speaking of, have they got StumbleUpon for pornography yet? Because I feel like that would be the world’s greatest invention for perverts with ADHD. “I want lesbians! Click Now midgets! Click Now anime! Click Now for some horses!”

StumbleUpon, through, has accomplished the seemingly impossible task of making Internet use even more passive than ever before – it provides you with a button essentially labeled ‘USE INTERNET’, which you push, and then you are using the Internet. It’s like wanting to float around on your innertube but being too lazy to leave the house, so you hire someone to do it for you and provide you with pictures of the best parts and a cooler full of the fresh porn he caught along the way. I imagine StumbleUpon 2.0 will probably read the webpages out loud to you while you sleep, and maybe order you a pizza for when you wake up.

The thing is, I’m not without sin in this regard, because I have found a means to filter the vastness of the Internet down to a few relevant and interesting chunks, and that means is a website called Digg, where users submit webpages and vote on their relative goodness, and the ones with the most votes are presented to the visitor in one big, constantly scrolling sort of top ten list. Clicking a link listed on Digg is like reading a good review of a movie and going to see it, only the review only consists of ‘WE FIND THIS INTERESTING AND SO SHOULD YOU’, and if you don’t like it you aren’t out $15.

What I like about Digg is that since it isn’t tailored to my specific interests but is rather governed by the collective nerd groupthink of the Internet, I’m occasionally exposed to new, fascinating things I’ve never looked at before. Of course, the majority of Digg lines up perfectly with my interests anyway, seeing as the collective nerd groupthink of the Internet also loves science fiction, Cracked.com, and bacon.

The thing about Digg, though, is that there is a complicated hierarchy with regard to how sites are voted on, whose votes are more powerful, and how many votes it takes to get a site listed on Digg’s front page. For the most part, I’m oblivious to this – I don’t comment or vote on submitted sites and I only joined Digg so that I could submit Writers, in hopes that it would wind up on the front page and go viral (instead, Mike and I each gave it one Digg and then it died).

Recently, Digg has gone into an uproar for reasons I can’t fully understand – the development team released a new version which apparently kills small children and doesn’t like Firefly, to hear Digg’s enraged users tell it, and in protest the community which until now had trolled the Internet for new content to submit and vote on has now more or less gone on strike, opening the door to new users who have hijacked the site and started voting lame, low quality articles onto the front page. Don’t believe me?

This is currently the #3 highest voted item on Digg today.

While the Digg higher ups battle it out with the striking community, it’s lazy people like me who stand to suffer. After so many years of having my Internet prepackaged for me into easily digestible chunks, being left without Digg is like being thrown into the deep end of the pool. Now when I’m bored I can’t fall back on Digg to find interesting things – I either have to find them myself or stop using the Internet.

It’s times like these that StumbleUpon, run by algorithms with no need for an unpredictable human community, looks pretty damn attractive…

Truman Capps will never use Reddit, out of solidarity to Digg.