Festival of Bands

Above: A festival WITH bands. Very different.

In the course of a season for the Oregon Marching Band, there is one event, usually somewhere in October, which is by far the most stressful performance of the year, even though it involves absolutely zero football and about 57,000 fewer fans. It’s called Festival of Bands, and from the first day of band camp until the end of the performance all it does is make our lives miserable.

There isn’t an awful lot of scrutiny placed on college marching bands because they have the unique distinction, much like wedding bands and The Grateful Dead, of playing to inebriated audiences who as a result aren’t all that critical. I can’t even count how many times the Oregon Marching Band has sweated all week to get a halftime show practiced and ready, only to start performing at halftime and have the students promptly turn around and start booing when they see the police ejecting a drunk fan. At that point, we could all take a collective dump in the center O on the field and nobody would notice.

To some degree this is sad, but it also takes a lot of the pressure off. Even a sober Oregon football fan (if such a thing exists) is unlikely to notice that somebody is in the wrong place on the field or missing his or her stepoffs, and even if said fan did notice, it’s not like he can send a text to the athletic department and get a chance to throw a water balloon at us or something. As such, we tend to not sweat the small stuff, preferring instead to make sure everyone is playing the same song at the same time while wearing their uniform properly, which is a bigger challenge than you’d think.

But then there’s Festival of Bands, the annual high school marching band competition that the University of Oregon hosts. We provide judges and a venue, OMB members work in tickets, concessions, and security, the bands compete, and then afterwards we march in exhibition in hopes of enticing the various nerds in the audience to come join us once they graduate. It’s a pretty effective recruiter – four years of seeing the Oregon Marching Band blow all the high schools out of the water at Festival of Bands was why I came to UO (Lord knows the Journalism School wasn’t that enticing).

The problem with this is that an audience of hopeless band geeks know exactly what we should look like and will be scrutinizing our every form and note for the slightest hint of an error – it’s like if your Beatles cover band is playing for the actual Beatles. Maybe the guys down at the bar didn’t notice when you sang the wrong lyrics for ‘Hey Jude,’ but they will. And then John, Paul, George, and Ringo will be so put off by your lackluster performance that they go join the marching band at Oregon State instead. Game over. That means we have to bust our asses to make sure everything looks and sounds perfect, and who wants to do that?

Of course, if we perform well, it’s the best thing in the world – these kids from tiny, poorly funded marching programs think we’re gods thanks to our high proportion of music majors, six figure budget, and 200+ people on the field. Sure, maybe it’s silly to seek approval from people several years younger than you, some of whom wear fake animal tails and makeup just for the hell of it, but we’re a marching band, for God’s sake. We take appreciation where we can get it.

Yesterday was my last Festival of Bands, ever – between the time I spent attending the competition (and losing, every year) with my high school’s band and the time helping run the competition with the Oregon Marching Band, I’ve been involved with Festival of Bands for eight years. Eight years is a long ass time, basically a decade if you’re fuzzy on the details and bad at math, and when I look back at my life I can’t find an awful lot of things that I’ve spent that much time doing. To be honest, most of my current circle of close friends I’ve only known for roughly half that long.

It’s sad when one of the major elements in your life is built around trying to impress a stadium full of socially awkward high schoolers in the rain. Yet, after eight years, it’s become something as friendly and familiar as going home.

Working in the ticket booth yesterday, for example, was a very fitting way to end my experience with Festival of Bands and marching band competitions in general, because it allowed to me to see pretty much every marching band competition spectator archetype who I’ve come to know over the years.

We were yelled at by band assistants who couldn’t fathom why we wouldn’t give them sets of on-field passes at the price they wanted to pay, chatted to by band moms wearing big buttons with pictures of their children in their band uniforms pinned to their sweaters,* harassed by hyperactive competitors who were no doubt jazzed on PixyStix and Mountain Dew (the crystal meth of the band world), and questioned by unaffiliated passers-by, no doubt confused by the conflagration of school buses and semi trucks, parking lots filled with girls twirling flags, and ATVs pulling xylophones, all set to the beat of a dozen or so drumlines early on a Saturday morning.

*By the way, thanks, Mom, for never doing that.

Looking at the high schoolers running around now, so obsessed with something so pointless as their score in a high school marching band competition, I find it hard to believe that only four years ago that was me, completely committed to trying to win at Festival of Bands, which is arguably the only competition you can win that will actively cockblock you if you mention it to a girl in a bar.*

*Okay, that’s not true. I’m sure winning the Northwest Chloroforming Unsuspecting Women Championship probably isn’t a big turn on either. Nor is getting the blue ribbon for ‘Best Basement Dungeon.’

I guess I’m just surprised about how much has changed in the past four years – it makes me wonder where I’ll be four marching band-free years from now, and whether I’m going to want to untag the 300-odd Facebook pictures of me in my green and yellow OMB tracksuit.

Truman Capps imagines it would’ve been a good idea to make his Halloween update today, which is actually Halloween, as opposed to last week, but he can’t help when inspiration strikes.

CMT

See how the letters look all worn out? That's because they're hardworking, honest letters.

Out of all genres, why is country music the only one that gets a basic cable channel? Maybe it’s because it’s a genre of music so heavily tied to a particular lifestyle – after all, the entire discography of all country music ever is basically one big theme song for driving a truck around and steadfastly refusing to move to the city, so why not maximize that audience by creating a TV channel to air ads for newer trucks and albums about not moving to the city?

For years, Country Music Television has been about the same as BET – a channel in my basic cable package that caters to a lifestyle wholly irrelevant to my own. Of course, while BET is produced by and targeted at black people (I know three), Country Music Television is almost exclusively white and I still don’t get most of the stuff I see them do.

I’ve been watching far more CMT than I had ever thought I would in the past few days, due mainly to the fact that I only turn the TV on when I’m exhausted and unwilling to apply any more effort or cognitive ability to anything in my life short of pushing a button. By the time the TV warms up and I realize I’m watching CMT, I’m already sitting down and knee deep in a bowl of white rice, wholly uninterested in picking up the remote again and try to figure out if Man Vs. Food is on (even though it usually is).

The reason that the TV is so often left on CMT is because of the show Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, a reality program about the rigorous selection and training process for the feminine sideline eye-candy who try to make a game built around men grabbing and rubbing against one another a little bit less gay.

My roommates have been following the show religiously because Katelynn Johnson, a former Oregon cheerleader who is mind numbingly gorgeous even by Oregon cheerleading standards, is a contestant. Even though she’s not being actively profiled by the show or anything, they still make a habit of pointing at the screen and shouting “THAT’S KJ! THERE SHE IS!” every time she’s in the background of a shot.*

*As much as I’d like to make fun of them for this, I usually find myself joining them to play the ‘Find KJ’ game. The beauty of the game is that even if you can’t find KJ, you’re still looking at a room full of beautiful, scantly clad dancing women, which, as far as losing games goes, isn’t all that bad.

To be honest, I’m not sure why Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is on CMT – the girls don’t dance to country music, the show takes place in one of the largest metropolitan centers in the United States, and I’m not sure how short skirts and tube tops fit in with the family friendly nature of country music.

Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders has opened the door to various other elements of CMT programming which we wind up watching once the show is over and we’re too tired from playing ‘Find KJ’ to change the channel. World’s Strictest Parents is probably our second most watched CMT product.

World’s Strictest Parents is a reality show wherein petulant spoiled brats from the big city are sent to live with a set of ‘strict’ parents for a week, who, without fail, permanently change a lifetime of disobedience and bad parenting within 22 minutes, usually by way of two big scoldings before the first commercial break and a poignant, tearful revelation before the second.

I find myself enjoying this show a lot because in spite of the fact that it’s lowbrow reality TV on a station named after one of my least favorite genres of music, it’s really fun to sit down at the end of a hard day and watch some pouty, whiny skateboarder get yelled at by a Southern Baptist pig farmer.

And I think that’s why the show is on CMT, too – the spoiled city slicker kids are out of control, swearing at their parents, getting bad grades, and smoking (always smoking), and the only thing that can save them is a trip to a rural locale somewhere in the Deep South where country folk have their way with them. It’s really a lot like Deliverance, when you think about it, only instead of getting raped the city people are transformed into upstanding members of society while a Taylor Swift song plays.

The other show I’ve seen a fair amount of on CMT is The Dukes Of Hazzard, a show which is so aggressively Southern that I feel as though CMT was only created so that they’d have a place to show reruns of it at all hours of the day. Hell, I feel like modern day country music is basically just Dukes Of Hazzard fan fiction set to a twangy beat.

It’s a show about back country farm boys tearassing around county roads in a muscle car named after a Confederate general with a Confederate flag painted on it, constantly outwitting corrupt, bumbling county officials. On some level the show could be seen as a very sophisticated treatise on fundamental conservative philosophies about individual liberties and the wasteful, corrupt nature of government, but on most levels it’s cool to watch sports cars jump over creeks and police cruisers.

So that’s what CMT has to offer me – mindless entertainment involving either women, hillbillies yelling at rich kids, or a 30 year old show about car chases. Basically all of this beats Two and a Half Men.

Truman Capps feels bad making any sort of joke about Taylor Swift after everything she went through at the hands of Kanye West, but he doesn’t know any other country singers.

Halloween

I looked up 'best Halloween costume' on Google Image Search, and I saw a lot of half naked fatties. Please enjoy this image of a pumpkin.

In my experience, holidays take on new meanings as the years go by. Christmas used to be all about the presents, but as I got older and moved out, it’s become less about shameless materialism and more about seeing my family, something I never would have guessed in spite of the fact that that’s the moral of virtually every story ever written about Christmas.

My appreciation of Thanksgiving has increased exponentially with my newfound appreciation of turkey and stuffing over the past five years or so, and my birthday, which had gone through sort of a lull after I turned 18 and could finally buy porn and lottery tickets, was especially enjoyable when I turned 21 last year. But it’s Halloween, more than any other holiday, that I’ve discovered a newfound appreciation for.

I was never totally nuts about candy as a child, so when I did go trick-or-treating it was more out of a sense of social obligation than interest in sweets – if people had been handing out garlic bread or meatloaf on their doorsteps it would’ve been a different story. But still I pressed on, every year struggling to think up a new costume and then trudging from one house to the next, accumulating more candy than I could hope to eat, miserably sleepwalking through a major childhood social function like some pint sized, overweight Jay Gatsby.

I quit Halloween altogether in fourth grade, which at the time was a lot like trying to tell your Southern Baptist friends that you’re gay. “No, guys, I don’t want to run around the neighborhood dressed as Power Rangers, demanding free sweets from adults. I’d rather sit at home and watch Seinfeld.”

I’d turned my back on the holiday pretty much entirely until I got to college, where the band’s annual Halloween costume contest pulled me back into the raucous, child-oriented activity in the way that only the Oregon Marching Band can.

Prizes in the costume contest are awarded for the best single costume and the best section-wide coordinated costume, and traditionally these prizes are awarded based entirely on favoritism, making the promise of an award less a tangible goal and more a good excuse to convince all your friends to dress up like characters from Super Smash Brothers.

The fact that they’re in a marching band is the least nerdy thing about this picture.

After abstaining from the festivities my freshman year, I got my feet wet sophomore year by showing up to the costume contest dressed normally while wearing a novelty arrow through the head.*

*After practice, I wound up leaving the arrow in my then-girlfriend’s dorm room. When we broke up a few weeks later there was a somewhat bittersweet moment when I had to stop by to pick up my stuff from her place and she met me at the door with a Kurt Vonnegut book, my DVD of Dawn of the Dead, and a slapstick comedy prop.

Last year, I cobbled together a suitable Team Zissou uniform as a tribute to The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, which I was very proud of in spite of the fact that absolutely nobody understood it.

From left to right: Long story, Santa, Iron Man, Balloon Boy, Team Zissou.

This year, for the first time in perhaps ever, I’m considering doing multiple costumes, which I think is impressive considering the fact that when I was the intended age for this holiday I found it too stressful to come up with so much as one. Right now I’ve got at least three Halloween parties on tap, which means that I can pull out both David Caruso on CSI Miami as well as Doogie Howser in pretty much the same weekend, plus Kenneth the Page if I can find an NBC tie.

I can’t figure out why I’ve only started embracing the spirit of the holiday now, when I’m well beyond the culturally accepted age for such shenanigans. Maybe it’s because Halloween as my friends and I celebrate it now doesn’t involve trick or treating for candy, but instead trying to one up your friends’ creativity for attention, which is essentially the greatest candy money can buy. Unless we’re counting alcohol as candy.

Incidentally, I would gladly go back to trick or treating if you knocked on doors and people gave you little one shot bottles of Absolut, or just baggies filled with scotch or whatever they happened to have in the liquor cabinet at the time. Admittedly, one night of strangers giving each other free alcohol would probably bring about the downfall of Western society, but I feel like it would be worth it to drink Jack Daniels out of a water balloon.

Truman Capps has really given up on trying to hide his love of booze on his blog – if any potential Hollywood employers reading this have a problem with mind altering substances, judge not lest ye be judged.

Gatorade

Delicious, delicious science.

Have you seen that Gatorade commercial, the one that’s the history of Gatorade? Where they have the two old University of Florida scientists talking about how they invented this revolutionary nutrient-replacing athlete drink, and then one of them drawls, “Naturally we called it Gatoraaaade.” I don’t know if it’s that effective of a sales pitch, because all it makes me do is think of what would have happened if another major university had invented the drink.

Wolverineade – Big seller to X-Men and Red Dawn fans.

Fighting Irishade – They already have it, and it’s called beer.

Spartanade – “I THINK THEY’RE THIRSTY, LADS!”

Trojanade - ”Is It In You?

Having been less than athletic in my childhood, my first real encounter with Gatorade came last year at the Rose Bowl. On the night before the six mile Rose Parade and subsequent football game, the band director issued two bottles of Gatorade to everyone in the band and ordered us to drink them before bed.

“You’ll be working a lot tomorrow,” he shouted to us as the colorful drinks were distributed. “Sweating. This will keep you going, I promise. It’s science.”

This endorsement was coming from a doctor, so I took it pretty seriously. A doctor of music, granted, but a doctor nonetheless – while I wouldn’t consult him for a prostate exam, I’m willing to believe that he did his homework on Gatorade before spending four figures to buy enough of it 200 people two times over.

It was tasty, and as I drank it I couldn’t help but imagine it getting into my bloodstream and making it somehow better. Sure enough, the following day I made it through the whole parade and game with no problem – that might be due to the fact that walking six miles and then standing for a few hours isn’t an especially taxing activity, but I choose to credit Gatorade with my success.

Since quitting soft drinks six months ago, I’ve sticking mainly to water as a beverage because I’m more willing to deprive myself of high fructose corn syrup than I am to buy a pair of gym shorts. For most of that time, my go-to logic was that if a drink had flavor, it was probably there thanks to roughly the same number of chemicals as there are in the stuff I spray on ant infestations around the house.

During the more sweltering part of the late summer, though, Gatorade and I bumped into each other again when my friends picked a bunch up to stay hydrated through a 90 degree band practice. It dawned on me that Gatorade was refreshing, flavorful, and basically clinically proven to keep you from dying* - being as I’m a huge fan of refreshment, flavor, and life, I picked up several bottles as well and began my flirtation with becoming a regular Gatorade drinker.

*As opposed to soft drinks, most of which, I hear, are clinically proven to make you die.

It’s a stupid thing, drinking Gatorade casually as a beverage, rather than for its nutritional value – this is probably why you don’t see it served in a lot of restaurants. It’s not something you get at a coffee shop. Gatorade is a specialized tool for athletes – I’ve always seen drinking Gatorade just for the taste as akin to wearing a cup all the time because you like what it does to your inseam.

So in order to keep from being what I’d always relentlessly mocked, I found myself starting to create a false need for Gatorade in my life.

“Oh, man, Truman, you were sweating a little bit on the bike ride home today. You should probably hit up 7-11 and get some Gatorade. No, water won’t cut it. Dehydration is serious business.”

“Damn, man, you walked up three flights of stairs! Better go grab a Gatorade – electrolytes don’t just grow on trees, you know.”

“Wow, looks like it’s going to get up to 70 degrees next week. I’d better crack open a preemptive Gatorade. Better safe than sorry.”

My cousin, who is nine years clean and sober, once told me that people don’t really kick addictions so much as they just find new ones. Gatorade, I knew deep inside my very well hydrated conscious, was just my way of finding excuses to drink something sweet on a regular basis again.

What shocked me back to reality was when I was at 7-11 stocking up and spotted Gatorade G2, the low calorie calorie replacement drink. Apparently I wasn’t the only person drinking Gatorade recreationally, and the fine folks in charge of the company had seen fit to respond to complaints from fat Gatorade fans, concerned about how many calories the drink was replenishing, by releasing a new version with diminished nutritional value for sedentary people who just want to drink expensive fruit punch. At that point they may as well just call it ‘Brokenade.’

I’m off Gatorade now and looking to find some new addiction to fill the gap soft drinks left in my life. I’ve been trying real hard to make it something constructive, like getting better at cooking or seeing how many fresh vegetables I can eat in one sitting, but one of my friends just loaned me Halo: Reach and I feel like that’s going to be it for the time being.

Truman Capps didn’t write about a scenario where Oregon State University scientists invented Gatorade, because that would be a far too easy joke to make.

On Video

Happiness. Musty, unrewound, slightly sticky happiness.

As much as I love my new neighborhood, the one place where it does suffer is in its lack of a good video store. Or any video store, for that matter. There used to be a Hollywood Video, wedged in between LIQUOR and the nail salon outside the Market of Choice, but it recently closed, and is now just an empty storefront, haunted by the ghosts of a thousand 12-year-olds trying to discreetly rent Showgirls.*

*I watched some of Showgirls on Pay-Per-View in the hotel room in Spokane, and maybe it was the absinthe I’d just drank, but it was sort of amazing. A guy bones a chick in a swimming pool, and he makes it look both feasible and enjoyable. If I owned a company that installed pools, that would be our commercial – just the pool sex scene and then our phone number.

Chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about, because Hollywood Video is closing up shop all over the place. The Internet’s relentless march of destruction has already singlehandedly destroyed print journalism and the professional pornography business, and now video stores are next to be thrown into the dustbin of history.

I mean, it makes sense. Video stores are just buildings full of things to look at while you sit on your ass doing nothing for two hours – the only problem was that you had to get off your ass to go to the video store in the first place, and now Netflix has eliminated that step. If necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is totally the father (and I assume, given his slothful nature, that he’s behind on his child support payments).

I’m particularly fond of Netflix Live Streaming at the moment because they haven’t gone through all the legal hurdles to get exclusively good, famous movies on there, so there’s still an awful lot of obscure arthouse stuff and mindless trash being made widely available to bored people with too much time on their hands. Protip: Stay away from Antichrist unless you want to see Willem Dafoe ejaculate blood.

But for all its convenience, Netflix will never be able to recreate for me the very experience of going to a video store. There’s a sort of excitement about it, being able to see all the titles around you, being able to meander through the store if you don’t know what you want to watch or hurrying to grab a new release before they run out of copies.

When I was 9, I went down to American Family Video and grabbed the last copy of Beetle Adventure Racing for the Nintendo 64 a split second before some other kid. He pouted as I strutted up to the counter to pay, vindicated, having won a race before even plugging the game in. That’s the sort of thing Netflix can’t give you – scarcity, competition, making children cry…

Incidentally, kid, if you’re out there, Beetle Adventure Racing sucked, so… You’re welcome, I guess.

Come to think of it, I’ve got all kinds of fond memories of American Family Video. I was a fat kid, and the half-mile walk to that video store was about the only exercise I ever willingly attempted.

Alexander and I had probably spent a combined total of well over a day just wandering up and down the aisles, arguing about what French kung-fu movie we were going to get or daring one another to rent Legends of the Kama Sutra. The staff never seemed to care – even then there was so little business that they didn’t mind the two seemingly homosexual 12-year-olds running around quoting The Fifth Element.

I remember the clunky old plastic VHS cases – blue for new releases, vomit orange for older titles. When DVDs first arrived on the scene, American Family set aside one shelf for them – the DVD section, comedies, dramas, and horror movies all mixing together. Over the years, the DVD section grew like a cancer throughout the entire store and then killed it shortly before I went to college.

When the store closed, they had a huge sale to get rid of their stock – I picked up Punch Drunk Love and Road to Perdition for something like $6 total. They were even selling the shelves for $20; clearly the owners were still sort of bitter about the whole venture and wanted to get rid of anything that would remind them of the fact that they’d spent the last 25 odd years running a video store.

Now the same thing has happened with Hollywood Video, which will leave Blockbuster as the last man standing until the rental industry finally goes completely under. It’s like the Titanic – the band kept on playing right until the end, and I’m sure if anybody wanted to rent a DVD of Hitch to watch on the long wait in the lifeboat there would be a guy in a blue shirt and khakis waiting to give him a copy.

It was one of the great disappointments of my life that I never worked at American Family Video – or any video store, for that matter. I’d always assumed that I’d wind up working there, based on my love of movies and the fact that I pretty much grew up in that place.

American Family Video was the childhood sweetheart who I intended to marry but never did, and then when I come back to town years later and try to look her up, it turns out she’s dead.

Man, that sounds kind of like a country song.

…Yeah, I’m going to open up GarageBand. Something’s happening here.

Truman Capps thinks ‘Piano Man’ would’ve worked equally well if it were written about a video store.

That Guy

This guy is That Guy.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to either go big or go home. And most of the time, I prefer to go home – while home may have a bit of an ant problem, it’s still a comfortable place with a big TV and cabinets well stocked with liquor and Pop Tarts. If going big can’t provide those same amenities, it really doesn’t offer that much to me in the first place.

The reason I even bring this up is because the month long XBox Live subscription that had been gifted to me after my return from Hollywood recently ran out, and my life is such a low stakes game that the choice between paying money to get murdered by racist Southern 13 year olds online or not constitutes a ‘go big or go home’ moment.

Going big, in this case, would be to bite the bullet and drop $50 on a year’s worth of XBox Live. Going home would be to return to my old habit of sitting around investing 75-odd hours into Fallout 3, which is slightly more depressing than doing the same in Modern Warfare 2 because at least when you pour your life into an online game you’re squandering your best years with other people.

I was reluctant to go big because I truly hate spending money, in spite of how often I do it. When I spend money, I like it to go towards something tangible – a Philly Cheesesteak I can eat, a Mrs. Beer I can drink, an escort service with some sort of AAA certification. Buying XBox Live is like paying for the Internet, which is A) Intangible and 2) Something I already pay for.

Also, I’ve always been reluctant to subscribe to XBox Live because you’re paying for a big block of time, instead of per use. I was in no hurry to spend a bunch of money on something and then potentially not get my money’s worth if I’m not actively using it. I’m big on getting my money’s worth – this is why, when I go to Red Robin, I make a point of eating every last scrap of that $12 hamburger,* because by God, I paid for it.

*Coincidentally, this practice usually leads me to use their bathrooms, which, as they’re reserved for paying customers only, is yet another thing I feel my $12 entitles me to do.

Every minute I’m not on XBox Live, I can hear my $50 investment dribbling away, 13 cents every day getting funneled into Bill Gates’ pocket, him cackling as I pay for services he hasn’t rendered. When you buy a gym membership, the thought of the money you don’t want to waste will ideally inspire you to go work out. With XBox Live, the thought of the money you don’t want to waste inspires you to sit on your ass and play more video games. So really, nobody wins except Microsoft and the cholesterol building a pillow fort in your arteries.

That’s really what XBox Live is – it’s a gym membership for inactive people. You don’t work your muscles; you work your Kill/Death ratio. Instead of building up your own personal appearance, you build up your online avatar’s appearance, earning new military rankings and logos for people to look at after you kill them. All the time you invest in a game like Modern Warfare 2 goes toward impressing people online but doesn’t do much for you in real life, likewise, being strong in real life doesn’t carry a lot of weight on XBox Live (I can’t tell you how many falsetto-voiced opponents have told me they’re black belts and threatened to beat me up).

As much as I never wanted to be That Guy at the gym with his oddly tight shorts or his special protein bars that for some reason don’t involve bacon, I also never wanted to be That Guy with the Live subscription and the party chat headset, deeming weapons ‘noob cannons’ depending on how recently I’ve been killed by one. There’s nothing wrong with being That Guy – lord knows a lot of my friends are – but it’s just not the guy that I thought I was.

In spite of all these reasons that I didn’t want to go big, I did – I went big in a big way. I picked up a used copy of Modern Warfare 2 and bought a Live subscription on the same day – that’s nearly $100 I’ve invested in a game that will be obsolete when the new installment comes out next month.

I bought a Live subscription because I’m addicted. XBox Live is like crack. Playing XBox Live with my three roommates, our clan doing battle with the prepubescent foul mouthed homophobes of the Internet, is, if possible, better than crack. It’s like a crack flavored Hostess Fruit Pie. As much as I wanted to pretend to be above all of this, I’m not. Were it not for the fact that I had to write this blog and then do a week’s worth of homework for one of my classes in 24 hours, I’d be playing right now.

Hopefully one day I’ll get addicted to a healthy pastime, like swimming or fresh vegetable eating contests. Until then, my GamerTag is ThriftyHair Guy – feel free to be impressed by how cool my online avatar guy looks.

Truman Capps encourages the Boise State and Washington State fans who hate him so much to seek him out on Live and settle this like men – immature, bitchy men.

Damn You, Cougars, And The Horse You Rode In On!

If you squint, unfocus your eyes, and get drunk, this symbol might begin to resemble the letters W, S, and U.

So I just got back from Pullman, and let’s be honest – it wasn’t the Worst Trip Ever. I didn’t go into it expecting it to be anything great; I’ve been to Pullman before so I knew what to expect. There’s a nine hour bus ride through the blasted, post apocalyptic landscape known as ‘Eastern Washington,’ a boring football game very close to the border with Idaho, everybody spends what little per diem they receive and we all go home confident that we’ve wasted a weekend.

That was what I was expecting, and somehow I’m still disappointed.

Fuck you, Pullman. And more importantly, fuck you, Washington State University.

Compliment sandwich:

Spokane, where we stayed, is a beautiful city in spite of its unfortunate location in the state of Washington, and I would love to go there sometime again in the future.

Our hotel was kind of a disaster.

The nachos in the hotel bar weren’t necessarily great, but at least they gave you a whole lot of nachos for your $7 investment.

I once read that the human gastrointestinal tract, if it were stretched out to its full length instead of coiled up like it is, would stretch for two miles. Our hotel was the same way – it had the same capacity as an ordinary 7-story hotel, yet it was only two stories and stretched endlessly through suburban Spokane like a long, uncoiled intestine. Also like an uncoiled intestine, it was full of shit.

After picking up our keys in the lobby, we quite honestly had to walk through about a quarter mile’s worth of identical, twisting, turning hallways to get to our room, rather than just use an elevator or jaunt up a flight of stairs. As a result, walking from our room to the dining room became an honest to goodness commute, the sort of thing where you have to pee ahead of time because you’re going to be on the road for so long.

But then we went to the game, and here’s the thing I don’t get:

We’ve had fans treat us like shit a lot. Oregon State’s fans threw paint on us at the Civil War two years ago. Ohio State frat boys jeered us as we left the stadium after the Rose Bowl. Husky fans asked us, “Why do you have zeros on your uniforms?”*

*The correct response is, “Hey, why do you have zeros on your scoreboard?”

And I understood all that, because the Beavers and the Buckeyes are good teams, the teams with solid winning records about which one can feel comfortable talking some smack, and Washington fans are stupid because they go to the University of Washington.

But we got some of the worst treatment from the Washington State fans at this game – and if anything, one would hope that a school that’s been dead last in the Pac-10 for the past decade or so would know a little bit of humility. I mean, people who live in glass houses have every right to live there if they just want to have an excuse to get drunk on a Saturday afternoon, but as soon as they start throwing stones they just become tools.

One thing that we have trouble with at away games is spectators trying to cut through the band’s section of the stands, rather than going up an aisle and down around the other side. We can’t have complete strangers walking through our ranks because we’ve got all kinds of expensive, stealable material lying around, so whenever it happens we ask them to turn around and go back out.

At the Washington State game, one drunk Cougar started sidling through the band until a beefier trumpet player stepped in front of him and told him he’d have to turn around. The fan’s response was to start screaming in his face about what a fucking travesty his having to turn and walk the other direction was before stomping off. Not long after, another drunk fan started pushing and shoving clarinet players aside as he barreled through our section. One of our staff members, who happened to have her infant child in her arms, was in his path, and he shoved this woman, who might I remind you was plainly carrying a fucking human baby, out of the way, flipped us all off, and departed.

I don’t get why Cougars were so eager to cut through the band in the first place. I mean, it’s a tiny little high school stadium anyway, so going around the band isn’t a major detour, and what was their rush? If they were trying to get back to their seats it wasn’t like they were missing any spectacular football, and if they were trying to leave I guarantee you there wasn’t anything exciting happening in Pullman without them.

After the game, a drunk fan jumped onto one of our motor coaches and demanded that we drive him home. When we explained that, no, chauffeuring douchebags around was not part of the Oregon Marching Band’s mission statement, he stormed off the bus and punched out the rear view mirror of one of our equipment trucks, shattering it and leaving a trail of blood as he ran off, police in pursuit.

But by far the worst show of Cougar spirit came during the game, when Oregon tailback Kenjon Barner got more or less knocked out by a Washington State safety who was leading with his helmet. For the ten minutes that Barner was lying on the field, surrounded by medical staff and family members, about half the people in Washington State’s ‘stadium’ refused to sit down, and then began chanting “GO COUGS!” as they loaded him into the horse drawn ambulance to be taken to Pullman’s only hospital so that they could rub Bibles on him until he got better.

That’s not okay, Cougar fans. I’m honestly sort of having trouble making a joke out of how not okay that is – because I’ve never seen Oregon fans, even at their most crass, disrespect a seriously injured player like that. Let’s just say it made me feel really good to watch us spend the rest of the game raping your two-bit backwoods safety school up and down the gridiron as payback.

Now hear this: Boise State, you’re off the shit list in favor of the Cougars, who are just barely tailing the Huskies. Here’s hoping this year’s Apple Cup is a scoreless tie with a lot of career-ending injuries.

Truman Capps promises he’ll stop writing about college football rivalries soon.

Helmets

Another totally awesome helmet.

Living two miles away from campus, I wind up riding my bike to class just about every day. This is a great thing and I’m really happy to be doing it – it gives me a chance to get more use out of my awesome bike, the commute is incredibly cyclist friendly what with this being Eugene, and the fact that I manage to get a four mile bike ride most days helps me to justify my eating habits, which, while healthier than some, go to shit as soon as there’s a good deal on tacos or I become aware of a Philly Cheesesteak available somewhere in my general vicinity.

Only in Denmark have I seen people as enthusiastic about the bike commute as at the University of Oregon. The bike lanes, while never quite congested, are always well trafficked by legions of professors on tricked out mountain bikes, students on hand-me-down beaters, douchebags on fixed gears, and talkative, insufferable engineers on recumbent bikes.*

*One of the biggest fuckwits I knew in high school, and arguably one of the biggest of all time, rode a recumbent bike for a while. So adamant was he about the superiority of its design that he refused to refer to it as a ‘bike’ but a ‘recumbent’, and instead of saying ‘I biked over there’ would say ‘I recumbed over there,’ a sentence which has no business being spoken outside of a porno shoot.

Riding a bike in Eugene feels right and natural, like eating something deep fried on a stick at a state fair. However, in typical Truman Capps fashion, I still manage to stand out from the crowd in a way that makes me look like a dork: I wear a helmet.

Helmets aren’t cool, because they are one of the few fashion accessories to say, “I have so little confidence in my ability to ride this thing that I’m willing to wear this ugly hat on the off chance that I fuck up.”

Essentially none of the other student bicyclists on campus wear helmets – professors, on the other hand, go full bore, wearing helmets with built in rear view mirrors and taillights, along with a reflective jacket and presumably a bulletproof vest on the off chance they ride through a bad neighborhood.

In an attempt to try and make my safety-motivated decision look cooler, I try to refer to my helmet as a ‘crash helmet’ in conversation whenever possible – because the only time helmets are cool is when you couple them with a slick adjective or noun to create terms like ‘football helmet’ or ‘Army helmet’. Other good words to add to ‘helmet’: “Viking,” “Skydiving,” “Sex.”

As much as I want to cast throw caution to the wind and join the other students in their easygoing, helmet free commute, I pretty much can’t, recognizing full well that this fashion choice means I probably won’t be in the market for a sex helmet anytime soon.

You see, as I’ve mentioned before, I come from an insurance family. Some families all wind up being cops or firemen drug dealers, but not mine – we’re insurance people. My father has worked in insurance for well over 20 years, my mother for 10, along with most of their friends. Throughout my childhood, virtually every adult I spent any amount of time with was more than capable of identifying every potential disaster within a 10 mile radius.

And so they passed the power to say, “Oh, that’s going to end badly,” on to me, which I do, whether I want to or not, at pretty much all times. And let me tell you, riding a bike – even in Eugene – is one big catastrophe waiting to happen.

Eugene’s streets are in terrible condition, so bad that drivers actively complain about them, and they’re not the ones whose balls are smacking against a hard leather seat every time they go over a pothole, nor are they in quite the same precarious balance situation.

Add onto that the fact that it rains a lot here, making these already treacherous streets slick.

Add onto that the fact that the University and its surrounding neighborhoods are populated by an uncommonly high number of young people from California, who while in cars have no regard for human life or traffic laws and while out of their cars see nothing wrong with blindly stepping off a curb into a bike lane and assuming that the laws of physics will work in their favor.

To me, these aren’t chances – these are facts of life. Were I to venture out on my bike without my helmet and have an unwanted encounter with pavement, a car, or a texting blonde anorexic with zero spatial awareness, I know that there would be sympathy for me at home, but underneath it there would be an undercurrent of, “Told you so!” from my family and all of their friends.

I imagine it’s the same response I would get if I’d tried to climb Mt. Everest wearing only my underwear. If there’s one thing my parents have beaten into me, it’s that you’ve got to take the proper precautions, no matter how quickly it shunts you into the friend zone with every woman who sees you.

But let’s not focus on how stupid I look wearing a helmet – let’s focus on how great it is that I’m willing to contend with all these factors while wearing only a helmet and not the Iron Man suit.

Truman Capps would totally just use the Iron Man suit to fly to class.

Jersey Shore

This is the only image I could find for 'Jersey Shore' that had nothing to do with 'Jersey Shore.' You're welcome.

Up until now I had prided myself on not having watched an episode of the show Jersey Shore, a piece of reality programming so mainstream and white trash that I feel it barely deserves the italicized HTML coding I just gave it. As of this writing, my bio on Facebook simply consists of, ‘No, I don’t watch Jersey Shore.”

It may seem like a stupid thing to list as your Facebook bio, but I think that says a lot about a person – to declare that you don’t watch Jersey Shore means that you are more or less purposefully excluding yourself from a major part of American college culture. You’re abstaining from following the exploits of a group of 20something spraytanned blowjobs and their exploits in a world where MTV pays their rent and the cover charges for the various clubs they go to and start fights at.

Without having seen the show, my impression of Jersey Shore was the same as my impression of any other given reality show – MTV puts a bunch of attention whores into an enclosed space with nothing to do except drink and waits for the inevitable hormonal explosion, which they then videotape and throw on national television in between commercials and the occasional music video.

And I consider that to be cheap. It’s almost like cheating, to be honest, because everybody who has ever lived with anybody else knows that there’s going to be at least one filmable moment when somebody eats the other person’s Oreos for the umpteenth time. If nothing else, Jersey Shore is the epitome of Jean-Paule Sarte’s quote ‘Hell is other people’ from his play No Exit, and because this sentence reeks of egocentric English major bullshit, I’ll also go on record as saying that the 2008 Jason Statham film Death Race was seriously underrated.

So that’s why I was diligently avoiding Jersey Shore in the same way that I avoid Survivor, Big Brother, and C-SPAN – it’s a bunch of people I don’t particularly like running around and talking shit behind one another’s backs while being followed by a camera crew. Only for whatever reason, everybody I know can’t stop talking about Jersey Shore, as though the fact that the performers were tanner and more ethnic somehow made the show better.

Imagine my disdain when I came out of my room this morning in the early afternoon, still worn out after spending 17 hours in Autzen Stadium yesterday, to find my roommates watching Jersey Shore reruns. I was essentially trapped – I had already left my room, and due to a combination of physical exhaustion, muscle ache, and residual swamp ass from the day before I was unwilling to turn around and walk back when there was a perfectly inviting seat on the couch in front of our 62 inch TV waiting for me.

So I sat and watched Jersey Shore. I’m not proud of it, but I did it.

And let me tell you, folks, it was stressful as hell. The whole show is based on ugly, oversexed attention whores fucking and yelling at each other. It’s a show built around drama.*

*Drama is a word derived from the Greek word drao, or ‘to do’, and is a genre based on interpersonal conflict that has permeated human entertainment from Oedipus to Hamlet. Now, the word is most commonly used to describe screechy feuds between immature girls over who freakdanced on whose boyfriend at prom. Way to totally shit on linguistic, theatrical, and literary history, America.

I was surprised to see that in spite of the title Jersey Shore, the show appeared to be set in Miami, which, to my knowledge, is in the state of Florida. Maybe this was an artistic choice – after all, Chinatown mostly took place outside of Chinatown. Maybe the real Jersey Shore is less a location and more a state of mind. Or maybe the producers wanted to brand the show as different without altering anything about the tried and tested formula. Either or.

As I saw it, the show consisted of the interactions between groups of people wearing a few million dead lab rats’ worth of cosmetics – these interactions were limited to screaming, punching, or a bizarre sort of dancing that incorporates both fake screaming and fake punching.

On the episode I saw, two girls got into a fight in the kitchen, spilling food everywhere (no doubt attracting so many ants) before wandering off to their respective bedrooms to bitch to the camera crew about one another. Not long after, everybody went out to a nightclub and got drunk.

The reason I can’t find a show about a close knit group of alcoholics constantly fucking and fighting is because that’s my life already. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this at all on this blog, but I’m in the fucking Oregon Marching Band. That’s all we do. I can’t kick back and enjoy a bunch of stupid people yelling at one another for trivial reasons, because I already deal with that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 3:20 until 6:00, and also on select Saturdays throughout the fall.

I can’t watch Jersey Shore for the same reason ice road truckers probably can’t watch Ice Road Truckers - when I get home, I don’t want to relive the same stupid bullshit I deal with on a daily basis. If I’m going to watch a group of people backstabbing each other and passing around sexual partners, it had better either be in space or the early 1960s. Anything else is too close to home.

Truman Capps thinks a reality show about the Oregon Marching Band would be awesome – something he’s only saying because he wants MTV to foot the bill on Taco Tuesday.