Battleship

I feel like this is all one grand joke.

They did it. The crazy bastards finally did it. They made a big budget action movie out of one of the world’s lamest board games.

Why is it that projects like this don’t get caught in Development Hell with all the things I actually want to see? I mean, it’s Battleship, for God’s sake – the game is built around two bored kids reading grid coordinates to each other. How is it that this is on the fast track to theaters but we’re still waiting on season 5 of Mad Men?

That was a hypothetical question: Movies like this get made because the average filmgoer sees maybe one film in a weekend (if he doesn’t just Torrent it) and studios know that he’s more likely to see something that he already knows and presumably kind of likes. This is why we see so many sequels (“You liked X-Men 2, right? Well, you’ll love X-Men 3, except for that it sucks!”) and movies based on comics and toys.

This still doesn’t explain why there’s a Battleship movie, though, because Battleship is a game that absolutely nobody likes.

A lot of critics derided the Transformers series not just because it was trite and stupid but because the whole epic venture was based on toys. What the critics perhaps didn’t realize was that while Transformers were toys, they were awesome toys – kids love cars, and kids love robots, and Transformers were both. The possibilities were limitless.

Battleship, as defined by Wikipedia, is a pen and paper guessing game that predates World War I. You just try to guess where on the 10x10 grid the other guy has put his ships. They’re making a summer blockbuster film adaptation of a game with no strategy and no learning curve – expect to see Rock, Paper, Scissors and Roulette in theaters soon, one or both of which will probably feature a cash strapped Hellen Mirren in a supporting role.

They just recently released the first teaser for Battleship. While most teasers are big on anticipation and short on exposition (see The Dark Knight Rises or the early Inception teasers), the Battleship teaser is two and a half minutes long and sets up the entire first act of the movie – presumably because anything less than that wouldn’t be enough to convince filmgoing audiences that the movie wasn’t just about two disinterested kids playing a board game because they forgot that video games exist.

The teaser for Battleship opens with some guy lying on a beach making out with Brooklyn Decker, which is a striking divergence from the source material – if a standard game of Battleship involved Frenching Brooklyn Decker, I would not be writing this blog, because I would be too busy playing Battleship.

In the next scene, Liam Neeson shows up. To be honest, I’m always kind of surprised to see Liam Neeson in anything - he played the lead role in Schindler’s List, for Christ’s sake, and now he’s in the movie based on little plastic boats? Anyway, he’s mad at the guy who was making out with Brooklyn Decker (his daughter) because presumably he’s some kind of highly talented fuckup the likes of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. *

*Little known fact: Top Gun is actually based on paper airplanes.

And then the titular battleship is out at sea, and one of the handsome square jawed guys onboard spots some weird metal thing floating in the ocean, and The Guy Who Made Out With Brooklyn Decker (I will continue to refer to him as such because that’s by far the most compelling aspect of his character) goes out to check on it. He touches it, it shocks him, it transforms into a giant alien battleship, etc.

Maybe this is just me, but if I see one more fucking movie where the inciting incident is a handsome guy touching a weird looking thing only to have it shock him and then turn into another weird looking thing while making a bunch of throaty, alien, electronic noise, I’m going to take four shits and die. It’s embarrassing enough that you’re making a movie based on a shitty board game; you’re only compounding it when the event that sets the entire $200 million extravaganza in motion is a dude touching a thing.

It makes you wonder how many potentially dangerous alien artifacts there are on Earth that haven’t called down a legion of otherworldly killing machines, just because nobody’s found them and touched them yet.

So the big alien ship thing transforms and makes a giant force field which encapsulates a wide swath of ocean, all while the U.S. Navy very helpfully doesn’t shoot it, and then the camera zooms dramatically up into the stratosphere to show a top-down view of the Navy fleet and the alien fleet on opposite ends of a wide swath of water – a view that looks not unlike a game of Battleship.

In movies based on game or toy franchises, there’s usually at least a scene or two dedicated to paying lip service to fans of the original product. In Transformers, Shia LeBouf unwittingly uses lines from the old Transformers TV show theme song to woo Megan Fox. The movie Doom, based on the pioneering early 90s first person shooter of the same name, was more or less sold on the novelty of several scenes shot from the first person perspective of one of the space marines.

What the aforementioned shot suggests is that Battleship is going to have at least one scene where we watch from above as two fleets randomly fire in the general direction of one another, just to pay homage to the game. This is reinforced by the fact that some incidental dialogue after the appearance of the alien ship reveals that the Navy’s radar is offline.

This is what you can expect if you go see Battleship: A lot of shots of square jawed guys using trial and error to decide which part of the ocean to blow up next. Also, Brooklyn Decker.

Truman Capps wonders why the Navy doesn’t just use their high powered binoculars – because the two fleets don’t really seem that far apart…

In Solitary

Because this picture is funnier than some stock image or ClipArt of a guy in solitary confinement, that's why.

Sunday’s update may have given you a somewhat warped perspective of the life I lead here in Los Angeles. Yes, someone who read that update and only that update would assume that my fast paced Hollywood (rather, Culver City) lifestyle consists entirely of going to clubs, becoming nervous, being Finned* out of a lot of money for crappy booze, and then getting lost trying to walk home. Alas, the reality is not nearly that glamorous.

*Apparently, saying ‘I was gypped out of a lot of money’ is racist against gypsies. This has been brought to my attention repeatedly by various white, politically correct non-gypsies in my life. Anyway, I don’t want to offend any gypsies on the off chance that I ever meet one, so henceforth the word ‘gypped’ in my vocabulary will be replaced with ‘Finned’, which I, as a half Finnish person, am comfortable with. (Nobody else say it, though. It’s kind of ‘our word.’)

No, most of my days here in beautiful Southern California are dominated entirely by me sitting in front of my computer, sending emails to people who will, in all likelihood, not respond to me. Sometimes I take a break and eat some peanut butter, but I tend to hurry back – after all, I can’t not get responses if I’m not constantly sending out emails, right?

The bulk of this is thanks to my job hunt. Every day, I check a website called entertainmentcareers.net, where production companies post available jobs and internships and invite interested applicants to email them a resume and a cover letter.

So that’s exactly what I do – I work my way down the list of available jobs, identify the ones I think I might be interested in, and dash off a quick email with my cover letter and resume. Sending a cover letter and resume to a potential employer is a lot like falling in love: As you click ‘send’, your heart swells as you imagine the bright future you and this job might have together, until it’s two weeks later and you haven’t heard anything back, so you tell yourself that the job was probably a lesbian to preserve your self esteem and move on to the next one.

This is what my days are like. I wake up, apply for a bunch of jobs, get lonely and angry, watch an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 to center myself, and then get back on that horse in hopes that it’ll crap out a job or an internship somewhere along the way.

The Internet has made the job search so much more convenient – I’ve applied to around 30 jobs and internships in the past five days, and I don’t mind telling you that I did most of that lying in bed in my underwear without having showered.* For all that convenience, though, it’s also sort of lowered my quality of life.

*I’m in your head, ladies.

I live in Los Angeles, for God’s sake – or Culver City if you’re a stickler, but chances are I live closer to Los Angeles than most of my readers, so I’ll take some creative license here – and I’m spending my days shut up in my room in front of my computer? What is this, the previous 21 years, seven months, and three weeks of my life? Sure, it’s great that I don’t have to go out and knock on doors to get my resume out in the world, but on the other hand it’d be nice to get out and see some of the town.

Yes, I know – I could very easily go out and see the sights once I’ve sent out my applications for the day. The problem is that I’m living on a cushion of saved up (and inherited!) cash until I get a paying job, and virtually all the positions I’ve applied for are unpaid internships which, ideally, will lead to jobs in a few months. Point is, my cash flow probably won’t be positive for some time, which means that unless I find a way to start shitting $20 bills (and believe me, I’m trying really hard), I shouldn’t be spending money on anything short of rent and the occasional ten pound sack of white rice. That automatically disqualifies the sights that cost money, and also the sights that would require me to drive my car, which burns costly gasoline (another substance I wish that I could produce with my body but, so far, cannot).

So for entertainment, this leaves me with whatever is in biking distance of Culver City – which is not much, aside from Venice Beach, a location I won’t say anything more about right now because it’s very much deserving of its own blog update. There isn’t necessarily a lot going on in Culver City at 2:30 PM on a Wednesday unless you want to visit a Spanish language video store, either of our gun shops, or the local mosque.

There are a couple of parks within walking distance, though, which I make a point of going to once I’ve been inside for most of the day. My roommates work, you see, and when they come home from a hard day at work and ask what you did that day it’s very humiliating to look them in the eye and say that the closest you got to going outside was looking out the kitchen window while eating a piece of bread with some Western Family peanut butter on it.

So that’s my Hollywood life so far – wake up early, send some emails, eat peanut butter, send more emails, and then force myself to go to the park, where inevitably the only free bench is the one closest to the playground. So there I sit, alone, on a park bench facing the children, wearing Ray Bans, eyes glued to my copy of Dune out of fear that if I look up for even a second I’ll wind up having a very awkward conversation with the LAPD.

Truman Capps glossed over the fact that he’s actually got a couple of interviews coming up because it’s way funnier when he’s miserable, wouldn’t you agree?

Swingers

But no! Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is never playing in the bar, and Heather Graham is never sitting alone, just waiting to get talked to.

I’ve noticed that a recurring theme on this blog is the fact that many things civilized society does for fun are in some way excruciatingly difficult, unpleasant, and/or aggravating for me.

Think about it: Have you ever engaged in a recreational activity that involves crowds, loud noises, inadequate seating, soccer, unsanitary bathrooms, or lines, just to name a few? Chances are, were I there with you, I’d be in a quiet, contemplative state, observing and cataloguing the things I was hating about this experience in preparation for my next blog.

All the negative characteristics I described above apply in triplicate to bars, with my ultimate pet peeve, spending lots of money on stuff that should be cheap, thrown in for good measure. Somehow, though, in one of those great contradictions that presumably make this blog so interesting, I actually like bars.

Well, no – I like the idea of bars. I like the thought of a clean, well lit place, one where you can go and have a few drinks and chat with your friends. Cheers from Cheers comes to mind: A place where everybody has fun and engages in snappy dialogue and hijinx with occasional spinoffs.

If you’ve been to a bar in a big city recently, though, you probably know that my dream died long ago. Oppressively crowded, bereft of seating, music (possibly dubstep*) blasting loud enough to obliterate any chance of conversation or rational thought – this is the bar scene we have today. I mean, it’s really a shock to me that so many people hook up in bars, because it’s basically impossible to communicate in there aside from grunting, pointing, and rubbing your crotch on things.

*In case you were looking for the official Hair Guy verdict on this dubstep thing, here it is: Dubstep sucks. It aggressively, in-your-face sucks in ways that scientists had heretofore not known existed, and in five years the whole of mankind is going to be laughing at you for liking it, because you liked a thing that sucked.

I knew, moving to LA, that the delightful Taco Tuesdays my friends and I had at Taylor’s were a thing of the past. For me and my friends, going to the bar was a fun thing we did to unwind and tell jokes about porn. In LA, going to the bar is an event, one so important that it’s worthy of italics.

My roommates invited me out with them and their friends last night, and, because I like my roommates and wanted to be sociable, I went along. (In a rare burst of social media savvy, I “live Tweeted” the event on my “cellular telephone”, which you can find on my “Twitter feed” here.)

From the get go I knew this thing was fucked since Jumpstreet. We were young people going to a bar in Los Angeles, probably the trendiest, most pretentious city in the world after Portland – this is generally not a recipe for Truman having a great time.

The line for the bar snaked out the door, down the stairs, through a plaza full of closed boutique shops, and out to the street. The people in line were clad in designer jeans and Ed Hardy shirts; gel had been employed to make their hair pointier. My party waited amicably, inching closer and closer to the door to the bar – a gaping portal into an ominous, black void, punctuated by purple strobe lights and accompanied by a constant thumping beat.

Presently, my roommates disappeared. As I found out from them the next morning, they had goneto the front of the line and cozied up to some of the women there or slipped past the bouncers in order to get into the bar right away. This, apparently, is common practice on the LA bar scene. Try it at Space Mountain and you’ll get shitrocked by an overweight CPA from Terre Haute.

My roommates’ friends ultimately gave up on this bar and struck out in favor of another place down the street, and I – faced with the option of waiting in line alone to descend into my own personal Hell or go with other people to find a different personal Hell – went with them. We settled on an Irish pub called O’Brien’s, and as an ardent Team Coco member, I went in.

Everything was relatively dandy. Sure, it was crowded, but it wasn’t too noisy, and if you stood near the bar it was easy enough to get a drink without having to wait forever. I had some enlightening conversation with my roommates’ friends and had two drinks that cost a combined total of $21, because even though the liquor at stores is cheaper in California, the drinks cost more, perhaps because I’m being Punk’d or something.

By 1:00 AM, though, I decided that I was pretty wiped and wanted to go home. However, my roommates’ friends wanted to stay and my roommates – the ones who had driven me – were still in the other bar. So, thanks in part to $21 worth of alcohol, I decided that I’d just walk home.

My reasoning was this: I walked home from bars all the time in Eugene, and I knew that we were in Santa Monica, which is right next to Culver City. My reasoning was flawed because Los Angeles is somewhat larger than Eugene, and also is mostly unfamiliar to me. And as I found out, while Santa Monica is indeed right next to Culver City, that distance looks way more walkable on a map.

I marched off in what I thought was the direction of my apartment, planning to find a cross street I recognized and walk down it until I was home. Half an hour later I found myself trudging up a deserted suburban street, passing cross street I didn’t recognize after cross street I didn’t recognize.

Culver City is not a dangerous place. If you wanted to get murdered here, you’d have to call a murderer in Compton and pay him gas money to drive out here and kill you. That being said, wandering down deserted streets with no idea where I was, all I could think about was what the description of my death would look like on a serial killer’s Wikipedia page:

Stephens’ eighth victim, Truman Capps (22), had left a bar alone and gotten lost while trying to walk home. His body parts were found in the following counties…

Fearful of this outcome, I began “live Tweeting” my location every couple of blocks and left a voicemail message stating my whereabouts to a friend, just so the police would have something to work with in the event that I did get serial killed. Instead, I called a cab and a mute, humorless taxi driver picked me up and drove me home – as it turns out, I was exactly $15 away from my apartment.

I’m glad that I went out last night – I met some cool people and, equally importantly, I gave the trendy bar scene a shot rather than just avoiding it altogether based on my preconceived notions. Experience proves that my preconceived notions were correct, but hey – at least I got a blog update out of the deal.

Truman Capps considers getting lost in the suburbs to be his own personal ‘127 Hours’.

Begging And Choosing

I Google image searched 'begging' and got lots of disturbing pictures of toothless, one armed old men in Calcutta. Please enjoy this kitten instead.

If you asked me six months ago if I had a job lined up in LA, chances are I said, “Not necessarily, but I’m sure I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me four months ago, I probably said, “Not necessarily, but I’m 80% sure I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me two months ago, I most likely said, “Not necessarily, but it’s a toss up whether I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me last week, I think I said, “No – and quit fucking asking, would you?”

For those of you who are new to the blog, last summer I worked at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment, a post production house for a raft of reality TV shows. Roundhouse Kick had so much content in need of editing that the office was open 24 hours – the day shift edited from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and the night shift edited from 7:00 PM to 5:00 AM.

As the new guy, I was assigned the position of night shift assistant editor on a ghost hunting show. Every week or so, the production crew would mail us their DV tapes from the ghost hunts they were doing in the Midwest. My job was to upload the footage to the servers and then spend the entire night watching hours of raw footage of ghost hunts, placing markers in the footage whenever something relevant happened, so that the actual editor could skip right to the good parts and not have to do the shit I was doing.

I quit at the end of the summer to go back to Oregon, get a journalism degree, and impress girls at Taylor’s by telling them that I’d had a career in television,* the whole time with the understanding that if I wanted the job back next summer when I returned, it would be mine.

*”Hey, I, uh… Edited a reality TV show. No, not Jersey Shore. What, that other guy you’re talking to plays sports? Shit, I can’t top that. Run along and have sex, you two.”

As I got closer to coming back down here, though, my friends at Roundhouse Kick became less and less certain that my job would be available – other people had been hired, some had been fired, and ten months is one hell of a long time to keep a job position open for someone, especially in an industry full of qualified people looking for work.

I panicked a bit, because the time that I found out that I didn’t have surefire employment in LA was roughly the same time that I put down my security deposit and first month’s rent on my apartment here. Picking up everything and moving to LA was suddenly one hell of a lot scarier when there wasn’t a job waiting for me. I mean, why go at all, otherwise?

So I started emailing other contacts and looking for work elsewhere. The search was more fruitful than I expected, and as of today I have some promising meetings set up with people for next week, not to mention a potential line on a production assistant job for an upcoming reality TV show produced by a different company. In other news, there hasn’t been a joke in two paragraphs, so here’s a funny scene from the 1980 film Caddyshack:

Out of the blue today, though, one of my Roundhouse Kick contacts called me and told me that he’d talked to the boss and there was a spot open for me – I could start tonight, if I wanted. Assistant editor credit on IMDb, on the job training in AVID editing software, $500 a week, and more free bagels in the break room than I knew what to do with.

I told him that I really appreciated the offer, but that I was going to have to decline the job.

Do you remember at the end of Spider Man, when Kirsten Dunst totally wants Toby Maguire’s sauce but he says no? It was like that, if I was him and Kirsten Dunst was Roundhouse Kick. Well, I mean, I hadn’t been in love with Roundhouse Kick Entertainment for my entire life, nor was I turning them down because I wanted to protect them from supervillains, but what’s important to remember is that in this situation, I am Spider Man.

Roundhouse Kick Entertainment was a fucking great place to work. The pay was good, the management was friendly, my coworkers kicked ass, and I can’t stress enough how great the free bagel situation was. This has nothing to do with Roundhouse Kick Entertainment – it’s not them, it’s me.

For how great of a workplace it was, though, my job was essentially video editing. I’m probably underqualified for that sort of job in FinalCut Pro, the system I just spent a year learning – when it comes to using AVID, I’d have more luck playing pickup sticks with my butt cheeks.

I was being grandfathered into a job for which I was not properly qualified, and sooner or later that would hurt the company – for all I know, there’s a hotkey command in AVID that fills all the servers with saltwater taffy, and God knows I’d probably wind up hitting it by accident and ruining all our data. (On the plus side, though – free taffy!)

I’m trying to make myself sound really gallant here, but the primary reason I said ‘No’ was because it’s just not a job I’m interested in doing. I don’t want to spend my days (or nights, as it were) glued to a computer screen, wrestling with finicky editing software. I want to live the glamorous life of a production assistant – coffee runs, getting yelled at by producers, disposing of the dead hooker in the star’s hotel room, etc. Sure, it’s all Kenneth The Page grunt work, but there’s variation to it, you meet lots of people, and better than that, it’s actually something I’m interested in with opportunities for advancement into other areas I’m interested in.

Part of me feels pretty stupid for turning down a job when I’m unemployed and living off savings. But the fact is, I came down here to do what I’ve always wanted to do – if I wanted to do something that didn’t interest me, I could’ve just as soon stayed in Portland and gotten a job as a journalist. Like I mentioned last week, now is the best time for me to fuck up and not hurt anybody but myself.

So here I go, boldly fucking up where no man has fucked up before. If worse comes to worse and I can’t get a job, at least I know I’ve got bodily fluids (and one spare kidney!) that I can sell.

Truman Capps has discovered that even a change of state still makes it hard for him to post on time.

Making Movies, On Location

As you can see, my transition to coked out LA greaseball is complete.

On Friday I went to see Mike’s band play at a bar in Old Town called the Ash Street Saloon. When I got there, a pop punk trio was up onstage – two heavily tattooed, almost certainly lesbian girls clawing away at electric guitars and a more ordinary looking male drummer who seemed almost shocked and confused about where he was and what he was doing.

The girls were screaming out a brash cover of Joan Jett’s cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ ‘Crimson and Clover.’ The crowd – a dozen or so classic punk types with mohawks, tattoos, and sleeveless leather jackets, along with one guy in black skinny jeans, tuxedo top, and a bowler hat – were listlessly swaying and flailing their arms to the music in an oh-so-cool fashion. Voodoo Doughnut was right around the corner, and some of the punks were munching on bacon maple bars.

I realize now that in a few days, when I tell people I’m from Portland, Oregon, they’re going to think that every night of my life was exactly like this.

I’ve lived in Oregon for my entire life – save for an embarrassing six year stint in Washington which we will not discuss – and all of a sudden I’ve been getting my head around the idea that for the first time ever I’m going to be living in a place where everyone around me doesn’t know who John Kitzhaber is or why this picture is laughable and makes no damn sense.

A couple of days ago I was talking on the phone to someone from LA who had never been to Oregon. We were making small talk:

“The A/C at my office went out this week, and it’s been super hot down here so we’re all dying.” She sighed.

“God, that probably sucks. Yeah, it’s been really hot in Portland all week too – I guess it’s just hot all up and down the West Coast.” I replied.

“Really?” She asked, before saying, in all seriousness: “It’s hot in Portland? I figured it’d be cool and rainy up there or something.”

And I caught myself laughing. Because pretty much everybody I talk to on a regular basis knows that Oregon is three-quarters desert, and all of them have experienced one of those terrible midsummer weeks where it’s 300 degrees in the shade and there’s more pollen in the air than air – although I knew that lots of people thought that Oregon was just trees, rain, and assisted suicide, this was my first time meeting one.

Nothing better cements the idea that you’re leaving home than the acute understanding that your home is a place that most other people have, at best, a cursory knowledge of. Most Angelinos probably know about as much about Oregon as they do about New Hampshire, and I don’t know about you, but I’d forgotten that New Hampshire existed until I wrote this sentence. Is Oregon equally forgettable?

Oregon, home of the Oregon State Fair. The checkout room. Alexander coming to school dressed as Chewbacca. Duck football. The Prom Night Disaster. Writers. The state solo contest. Getting home from LA last September and seeing my new roommates sprint out of the house to group hug me. Speech and debate championships. Cape Lookout with The Ex Girlfriend. Spanish. Yelling at the dog. Girlfriend Is Better, not. The Oregon Daily Emerald. Cleaning up dog piss. Thinking I had meningitis. Fred Meyer. My funeral party. Mice. Thinking I had appendicitis. J331. Getting lost in Beaverton. These experiences and about a billion others made up my life in Oregon, a place that I’m leaving behind in approximately twelve hours.

Mom came in as I was writing this and we had the sort of tearful, emotionally charged hug that happens when a gigantic mama’s boy is about to leave home.

“Sad, or excited?” I asked her.

“Yes.” She said.

“Yeah, me too.”

I’m sad because I’m leaving a state that scientists agree is better than all other states anywhere else – especially Idaho. I’m sad because I hate pumping my own gas. I’m sad because I’ll miss Burgerville. I’m sad because I’m leaving behind a raft of friends, family, bandmates, artists, musicians, writers, Airsoft sharpshooters, gingers, Jewish people, architects, and future presidents, among others.

If you believe nothing else I’ve ever written in my life, at least believe this: I would rather be with you people than the finest people on Earth.

I’m excited because everything that’s ever inspired or interested me in my life is common to the point of being boring in Los Angeles. I’ve wanted to write stories since I was four. I’ve wanted to write movies since I saw Fargo in eighth grade. And now I’m moving to a city built on stories and movies. Also, Christina Hendricks lives there.

If ever I’ve said a scornful thing about people who graduate from college and live in their hometown for years despite dreaming about something bigger, I apologize – this shit is hard for me on an emotional, logistical, and physical level, and I’m a white upper middle class 22 year old man with no family to support. Venturing into the world to make a name for yourself looks glamorous on paper and in Star Wars, but in reality it’s an unpleasant, awkward, and at times heartbreaking experience to start that journey.

I’m not going through all this because I’m especially tough or courageous or any more ambitious than the next person. I’m doing it because with the exception of methamphetamines or an unprotected sex tour of Sub-Saharan Africa, I’d much rather regret doing something than not doing something, and this is the one time in my life when I really have the opportunity to completely fuck this thing up and only wind up hurting myself. (I don’t plan on having that happen.)

It’s difficult to come up with an appropriately climactic ending for this, but the fact is that tonight really isn’t the end of anything, nor is it the beginning of anything else. It’s just another Sunday in America, and I look forward to talking to all of you on Wednesday.

Truman Capps directs you here.

Nike Employee Store

$10 says these cost more than my car.

After ten minutes I reached the head of the line, and a young receptionist in a grey T-shirt with ‘RUNNING SUCKS’ emblazoned across it waved me up to her desk.

“Welcome to the Nike Employee Store!” She chirped. “How can I help you?”

“Um.” I said.

Her question struck me as odd: The only way to get into the Nike Employee Store was to wait in line for a receptionist to verify that you were either a Nike employee or a guest of a Nike employee. The only help I needed was help getting into the store without being tased by security.

“My name is Truman Capps,” I ventured, handing her my driver’s license. “I’m on the guest list.”

“Great!” She chirped – and yes, I know I said chirped earlier, but this woman was chirping all over the place. As she went about processing my guest pass, she looked up and chirped, “Have you ever been to the employee store before?”

“Nope.” I said.

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, wow! Are you excited?”

And for a second, I thought she was joking, and a laugh got halfway up my throat before I saw the committed glee on her face and realized that, no, this person was dead serious. She thought that going shopping for shoes was the high point of my day. She was not aware, obviously, that I find the pursuit of shoes to be about one of the most boring and perverse endeavors in the fashion world, which I consider to be pretty damn boring and perverse to begin with.

I don’t care about shoes. If you asked me to make a list of things I cared about, shoes would beat out yoga and Puerto Rico to sit pretty at the absolute end of the list. I don’t see the point in putting a great deal of personal and financial investment in the article of clothing that, statistically speaking, runs the highest risk of getting covered in dogshit in day to day life.

So no, I was not excited to visit the Nike Employee Store. It wasn’t Conan O’Brien’s house. It wasn’t the Redding Liquor Barn. It wasn’t Build-A-Battlestar workshop. It was a big room full of shoes – goofy looking, brightly colored shoes optimized for athletes, a caste of our society to which I do not belong. Unless there was a brand of Nikes in the store that were filled with Jack Daniel’s or could make Christina Hendricks stop being married, I didn’t regard this opportunity with a particular amount of merriment.

But, since I didn’t want to be a dick to the nice lady, I said, “Yeah! Sure!”

A friend of my parents’ worked at Nike for long enough to retain her Employee Store privileges after she retired, meaning she could still get her non-former employee friends into the store, giving them access to essentially a warehouse full of discount top of the line sporting apparel. She offered me a guest pass so I could pick up some good shoes before my departure, and I took it, because as much as I hate it, I do need shoes, if only to provide a buffer from the sun baked, dirty needle laden streets of Los Angeles.

It mystifies me that one of my roommates had between half a dozen and a dozen pairs of Nikes. My philosophy on shoe shopping is this: Your old shoes have fallen apart, so you go to the mall, find the cheapest pair of sneakers you can, pay for them, and then leave the store, because you now have a new pair of shoes and mercifully don’t have to waste any more of your life thinking about shoes.

My current shoe shopping landspeed record* is six minutes from the time I walked into the store to when I walked out with a $45 pair of white New Balance sneakers, which all of my friends told me looked like the sort of thing their grandparents wore when they went mallwalking.

*Depending on your definition of ‘shoe shopping’, I shattered my own record when I wrote one of my roommates a check for a pair of his Nikes when the New Balance wore out and I didn’t want to go to the mall.

At the Nike store, though, I made a point of trying to study on every shoe very carefully and think my purchases through. Some of this was because I was trying to lay in a supply of good sneakers for the foreseeable future in hopes of not having to buy shoes with sales tax in California, and some of it was because I was aware that passage into the Nike Employee Store was somehow akin to being allowed to roam around that warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, as such, was not to be taken lightly.

This just in: Most Nikes look pretty fucking terrible on me. I have clownishly large feet; I’d rather not draw attention to them with lime green accents or neon laces. I don’t want to make a bold fashion statement with my shoes – I want them to be just good enough so that they’re not noticeably bad, but not noticeably good, either. I want my shoes to be as inconspicuous as possible, so people don’t notice my shoes and assume that I’m the sort of guy who cares enough about shoes to put a great deal of time and energy into picking trendy ones that look super cool.

Eventually, though, I settled on two pairs of shoes that I felt worked for me. On my way to the cash register with them, I glanced at the price tags out of morbid curiosity and just about puked – one of the pairs cost $60, the other one cost $85. Flight of the Conchords materialized in my head:

They’re turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers,
But what’s the real cost?
‘cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper…

Not only had these shoes been manufactured by Indonesian toddlers, as is the Nike way, but I was getting them at the lowest price humanly possible – and all this in the same week that I’d spent three figures on fucking sunglasses. I’ve already become a name brand wearing, spendthrift LA doucheburger and I’m not even there yet.

Gazing sullenly at the price stickers on my shoes while waiting in the checkout line, I noticed something else. Off to the side of the sticker, in small print, was the suggested price for each shoe. The suggested retail price for the $60 sneakers was $130; the price for the $85 shoes was $180.

Does that make me feel better about spending what I did on those shoes? No. Honestly, it makes me feel worse about mankind to know that people in this world spend $180 on goddamn shoes.

Truman Capps hopes to counteract any douche-cred he’s earned with recent purchases by continuing to drive The Mystery Wagon.

Shades Guy

If this picture doesn't make you want to put on a pair of sunglasses, you're a goddamn Communist.

As I’ve mentioned before, if there’s one thing I really hate that isn’t soccer or Washington, it’s spending money. God only knows why – at the moment I’m sitting relatively pretty between what I made in the checkout room, graduation gift checks, and some inheritance.

Maybe it’s because I’m not 100% certain about my employment in LA just yet. Every time I spend any amount of money, I see a brief flash of myself broke and destitute, starving to death on the streets of LA. ”If only… I had… Eight… More… Dollars… I wish… I hadn’t… Gone… To Chipotle… On July 3rd 2011…”

That is the one exception that I make: Food. I’m more than willing to spend my money on food, because I genuinely consider myself something of a foodie. Plus, spending money at a restaurant gets you real estate in addition to food; you paid good money for that table, so you’re entitled to sit there as long as you damn well please and enjoy the atmosphere. This is a great way to get waiters to hate you.

Anything else, though, and I’m inclined to save, save, save. I wear a $19 watch from Walmart, I buy bulk socks at Costco, and I don’t have a smartphone. In fact, I’d say my phone – which barely takes low res pictures and doesn’t have a customizable background – would qualify for the short bus, were there such a thing for phones. This same spirit applies to my sunglasses.

I heard today that Oregonians buy sunglasses more frequently than anyone in the country, because every year we buy a pair for when it gets hot and sunny, then promptly lose them two weeks later when the monsoon season restarts and then go through the same process again the following year. Part of the reason it’s so funny is because it’s true.

Every summer when my participation in nerdy outdoor activities made eye protection necessary, I would search up and down for last year’s pair of sunglasses, not find them, and then head on down to Safeway wherein I would immediately grab the cheapest pair within reach and call it good. This was how I wound up spending three months wearing official NASCAR shades with little skulls on the frames.

This shit will not fly in LA. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, it is located in a desert next to a beach, so there’s a fair amount of sunlight. Also, many buildings are white or tope, which is probably meant to reflect heat from the interior but also does a bang up job of reflecting light into everyone’s eyes. The Walt Disney Concert Hall was either built by a sadist or somebody who was fucking an optometrist, because the entire building is made of chrome, and to stand within three blocks of it is like having somebody shine a Maglite in your face.

Under these circumstances, virtually everyone in the city wears sunglasses. Celebrities, poor people, Gary Busey, cops, rabbis, the blind – hell, even the marching band at the school that isn’t going to a bowl game this season wears them. It’s as much a part of the city’s culture as the film industry or breast implants.

Breast implants would be of little practical use to me, though, so instead I recently decided that I needed to get a really good pair of sunglasses – a pair that I would not lose. Spending a lot of money on sunglasses in Oregon is really kind of stupid because you never need them for very long; on the other hand, the weather here necessitates a high quality parka, and people spend accordingly. Good sunglasses are the LA equivalent of a good parka – the only difference is that nobody has ever looked cool in a parka.

A lot of sunglasses on the market today are targeted at people who want to give the impression of being athletic, outdoorsy men on the go. Naturally, these shades would look about as natural on me as breast implants, so I’ve stayed well away.

The only kind of sunglasses that I think ‘work’ for me are Ray Ban Wayfarers. While Oakleys say, ‘Yeah, bro, sun’s pretty bright up at the top of this mountain I’m about to BASE jump off of’, Wayfarers say, ‘I put these on because I wanted to drink Jack Daniels in the sun but it’s too fucking bright out here, goddamn it.’ This is a problem that I often have, which is why today I went to Sunglass Hut and bought a pair of Ray Bans.

A basic pair of Wayfarers cost $169. That is a lot of money for anyone, and especially a lot of money for me – I might spend $170 on the greatest meal of my life, but I’m pretty sure Ray Bans aren’t edible. Actually, hang on a second.

Yes, Ray Bans are definitely inedible. Moving on!

In this case, the logical course of action for me would be to get a pair of knockoffs; given how popular the Wayfarer look is, there are $25 knockoffs available just about everywhere. My roommates had several pairs of Ray Ban knockoffs with the 76 logo on them that they picked up at the Pac-10 championship.

There are two reasons I conquered my stinginess and shelled out the big bucks for a pair of authentic Ray Bans:

1) I probably would’ve felt roughly the same amount of guilt spending $20 on some shitty Ray Ban knockoffs with faulty UV protection as I do for spending $170 on the genuine article – the difference is that at least for the amount of money and guilt I’ve invested in my Ray Bans, I know I’ve got something good.

2) I am well aware that Ray Ban Wayfarers are the de facto shades of hipsters everywhere. The thing is, most hipsters I’ve seen wear knockoffs: Um, these aren’t Ray Bans. They’re English Laundry. Ray Bans are so over, Truman. I’m wearing an immensely popular name brand that I only recently got interested in because I saw other people wearing them. If you think that makes me a hipster, then we need to consult UrbanDictionary.

Truman Capps will commit seppuku if he loses these fucking shades.

Going Away Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Because 'Leaving In The Mystery Wagon' was a shitty song.

You will no doubt be shocked to find out that I’m moving to Los Angeles in 12 days. Yes, I know, this comes out of left field – up until now I’ve made no mention of it, and I’m sure the news is completely blindsiding you. In the future, I’ll try and find a more eloquent way to let people know what’s going on, perhaps by making an endless parade of blog updates about every facet of my preparations for the upcoming trip, continuing long after everyone has quit caring. Obviously, though, that is not the case right now, and for that I apologize.

Right. Well, anyway…

This is the last long stretch of time I’ll be spending in Oregon for the foreseeable future, and as a result I’ve been trying to put it to good use seeing friends and classmates before I leave. To that end, I just recently took a four-day stroll down Memory Lane in Salem, and, like most lanes, streets, and boulevards in Salem, it was lined with shuttered businesses and meth addicts asking for spare change. (Some friends from high school were in there, too.)

It was great to see the Salem people who I’d missed, but at the end of each of our little reunions – and, really, most meetings I’ve had with friends since graduation – there was always an awkward moment that played out something like this:

Classmate: “So… Am I ever going to see you again?”
Me: “Oh… Yeah, sure! I’ll be in and out. Christmas. You know how it is.”

It’s difficult to stand in an Applebee’s parking lot and predict the future with any degree of certainty, unless you’re trying to predict whether you’re going to go to Applebee’s again in your life, in which case the answer is clearly ‘No.’ Moreover, having someone flat out ask you if this is the last time they’ll see you is unnerving under all conditions.

Will I see you again? I can say with a lot of certainty that I would like to see you again, yes – I’m thankful to have as many great friends as I do, both because of their endless support and because they serve as something of a forge in which the inspiration for new blog updates is created, giving me raw material which I can take back to my computer and smelt into comedy, sort of like I’m doing now.

But the hard answer that I’m reluctant to give in public – and that I feel like a douchetruck for saying on my blog, even – is that in many cases, the answer might be ‘probably not.’

I don’t say that out of any sort of malice or lack of interest or desire to break with my old Oregon connections as I start my new life – I say it because if I learned one thing while failing to produce an independent film this past term, it’s that logistics and coordinating people is a bitch when everybody lives in the same city over a long period of time. When you’re dealing with geographically disparate friends for a weeklong period on and around the single biggest family holiday in the Western hemisphere, it’s about as easy as chopping down a tree with your wang.

I know this to be true, and I like to think of myself as a somewhat straightforward person, but when one of your friends asks if they’re ever going to see you again, you’ve got to be a ‘David Caruso in Jade’ quality asshole to look them dead in the face and say, “No.”

Really, the proper reply is “I don’t know” – because I don’t. Maybe we’ll both be in the same place at the same time and we’ll be able to make something happen. Or maybe I’ll be with my family and you’ll be at church or in Michigan or whatever other people do for Christmas.

“I don’t know” is the most truthful answer, but it still sounds like a purposefully indifferent David Caruso response to a friend who’s concerned that this is your last face-to-face meeting. “I guess time will tell” might work a little better, but only so long as you’re not standing near the body of somebody who was murdered with a clock, in which case you’ve once again strayed into Caruso territory.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

In a few days I’m going to a wedding that will be attended by virtually my entire social circle from the past four years and will undoubtedly be the last time I see a lot of them. I’m still trying to figure out how emotional that experience is going to be – the presence of alcohol will definitely influence the outcome, as will the ever-tantalizing opportunity to steal attention from the bride and groom on the most important day of their lives.

When I watched the (fantastic) episode of The Office where Michael leaves Dunder Mifflin, I thought it was a typically stupid Michael Scott decision for him to secretly leave the day before his going away party. Now, though, I kind of get it. Saying goodbye is exhausting. Sneaking out the backdoor, though, is the coward’s way out, and even David Caruso in Jade wouldn’t do that.

Truman Capps is sure that David Caruso is probably a very friendly guy in real life, but his career sure does a great job of making him look like a cock.

Fireworks

I did not see Katy Perry on the shelves at the fireworks store, and I was understandably disappointed.

Alexander pulled up outside my house in Portland an hour before he’d said he would and bounded up to the doorstep with Brent and his sister Olivia in tow. Once I’d let him in and we’d dispensed with the bro grabs, he stuck his hands in his pockets and said, “So, we’re gonna hit Voodoo Doughnuts and then head to Vancouver and buy some illegal fireworks. You in?”

As I mentioned, Alexander had arrived an hour early – but I should’ve been ready for this. Having known Alexander for ten years now I’ve become accustomed to his scattershot approach to punctuality: He may be there an hour early because he was bored, or three hours late because he forgot what day it was.

But I wasn’t ready, meaning I hadn’t had a chance to shower or change out of yesterday’s clothes. And normally I’m pretty stringent about being clean and shaven with my hair freshly gelled before I leave the house to go about any errands, but I figured that given the clientele at Voodoo Doughnuts and Washington parking lot fireworks markets I could probably go with a dead skunk tied around my neck and still be one of the classier people they’d seen that day.

Oregon law prohibits any firework that travels more than six feet along the ground or twelve inches into the air; these fireworks are commonly known as, “The Only Good Ones.” Thanks to this law, there are massive tents in supermarket parking lots in the early summer that only sell snakes, party poppers, and fifteen different varieties of sparklers. Those are inadequate supplies to celebrate the birthday of the country that invented injectable butter.

Fortunately, as far as fireworks are concerned, Washington is about as lawless and deregulated as Somalia or Wall Street, so any Oregonians looking to celebrate the Fourth the right way need only drive up to Vancouver and reap the harvest of lax pyrotechnic legislation.

We arrived at a fireworks tent literally within view of the Interstate Bridge and immediately deferred to Alexander to figure out which fireworks to buy. Alexander is in the Army; moreover, he’s a mortarman in the Army, so if anybody was going to be dictating the explosives with which we endangered our lives, it ought to be him.

Alexander strode through the tent with cold, ruthless efficiency, grabbing boxes of fireworks off the shelves and tossing them to me or Brent to carry while he sought out new purchases. I was struggling under an armload of buy one, get one free roman candles when Alexander came to a stop in front of a tall, flashy package with a cellophane window in the front showing off a twelve inch tall mortar tube.

‘THE DESTROYER’ was emblazoned across the front of the black package in the sort of big, macho letters that you could imagine smoking cigarettes in the bathroom during letter middle school and fucking other letters’ girlfriends when they were bored.

“Oh, yeah.” A passing salesman said when he saw Alexander standing, entranced, before the Destroyers. “That’s probably the best thing we’re selling. Loud as hell.”

Immediately, Alexander reached out and grabbed one of the boxes – which, I should add, were clearly labeled as costing $80 apiece – tucked it under his arm, and then grabbed a second Destroyer, presumably to keep the first company, before heading for the cashier.

“Wait, Alexander!” Brent caught up to him, looking incredulous. “Why the hell do you need two of those things? You realize you’re spending $160, right?”

Alexander shoved the Destroyers off to his sister and took Brent by the shoulders.

“Brent,” he said, emphatically. “The time for bullshit is over. I’m buying these.”

That night we were back in Oregon, way out in the boonies of Marion County where Alexander lived, with nearly $200 worth of very high profile contraband. As Alexander set up the mortar tube, I was worried.

Part of this is because I tend to get a little worried when anybody - especially Alexander – lights something filled with gunpowder on fire. I am convinced that if not for the Fourth of July and its penchant for putting high explosives in the hands of unlicensed and unsober people on a yearly basis, there would be probably twice as many Americans as there are today. The celebration of our country’s independence is also its primary method of population control.

And then there were the legal concerns. It’s illegal to smoke marijuana or drink before you’re 21, but the benefit of those illegal activities is that you can be discreet about them in order to avoid getting your shit arrested. Fireworks, by their very nature, are meant to be loud and draw attention – you can’t pull all the blinds and set off fireworks in the privacy of your own home; if you do, I imagine you’ll very quickly have bigger problems than police attention.

Alexander lit the fuse on the first charge and bounded away, throwing himself to the ground in an Army roll once he got to the minimum safe distance. I got behind Brent, crouched, and covered my ears.

The charge blasted out of the mortar with a thumping PHWOOMPH noise and sailed up into the sky, leaving a coiling trail of twinkling yellow sparks. Watching the small red orb sail upwards, I thought, Hey. This isn’t so bad. It doesn’t seem very dangerous, and I don’t think anybody’s going to call the poli-

And then the orb exploded into a thousand smaller ones, exactly like the professional grade fireworks you see on TV, with a blast so loud that it honestly felt like we were getting punched in the head by sound itself. The echoes of the explosion rumbled up and down the valley like thunderclaps until long after the sparks from the firework had died out.

Holy Christ. I thought. Somehow, we got a hold of the shit they set off at Disneyland. Every cop for 30 miles probably heard that. There’s no way we can set off another-

Alexander went barreling back to the mortar tube, hooting and laughing, and dropped in another charge. “Again! Again! FIRE IN THE HOLE!”

He lit the charge and we all took cover, knowing now just how insanely overpowered this firework was. Ears covered, eyes locked on the mortar, we watched as the flame burned its way up the fuse and into the tube.

And for four very long seconds, nothing happened.

Alexander stood up. “I think that one was a dud.”

And then, the firework exploded in the mortar tube.

You know what fireworks look like when they blow up? It was like this:

…only it was at ground level, 20 feet away from me.

Amid the shower of colorful sparks, I could just see Alexander diving face first onto the ground, head covered, before I did the same. Green streamers cut corkscrew patterns through the air mere feet above our heads. Fireballs landed on the green, mostly inflammable grass and smoldered out, contributing to a haze that filled the backyard.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I get pretty tired of fireworks shows pretty quick. Whenever we watch the Fourth of July display that they set off at Oaks Park, I usually get bored and want to go home about a minute into the 20 minute show.

The problem is that you’re dealing in an art form which consists of shooting shit into the sky and having it blow up into massive, colorful shrapnel. It’s very difficult to top that, short of having it happen again in a different color, and as a result it gets repetitive quick.

The excitement of buying one’s own fireworks, in my eyes, comes not from watching your purchase blow up in the sky, but rather the more ominous questions surrounding what you’re doing. Did those sparks just land on the neighbor’s roof? Did I just hear a siren? Is this going to be the last night of my life?

When I walk away from an evening of shooting off illegal fireworks, I’m just exhilarated to be alive, not in jail, and not rapidly trying to think up an excuse for why everything around me is on fire. Fireworks are like Tyler Durden in a cheap Chinese package – they’ll make you appreciate your life (and all ten of your fingers) damn quick.

After the charge exploded in the tube, we all got to our feet, miraculously unscathed, and went to examine the mortar. It was half burned to hell and we had to empty the old charge out of it, but it’d retained its shape just fine and still pointed straight upwards. This was evidently enough for Alexander.

“Again! Again!” He shouted, diving back into the box for a new charge. “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”

Truman Capps shouldn’t shit talk Alexander’s punctuality when he keeps updating late like this.