Diet Coke Revisited

As if it wasn't already a girly enough beverage, periodically they put hearts and pretty dresses on the can.

Those of you who’ve known me for awhile are well aware that I’ve been struggling with a Diet Coke habit for most of my life, and before we go any further let’s all stop and laugh at the fact that I actually used the word ‘struggle’ to describe my relationship with a soft drink. ‘Struggle’ probably isn’t the right word, given that at this very moment there are probably a few thousand people in Los Angeles prostituting themselves on Craigslist so they can buy meth – ‘dysfunctional relationship’ might be the best way to describe the situation between me and Diet Coke.

I covered a lot of this background in a blog entry almost a year and a half ago in which I claimed to be done with Diet Coke. Things have changed since then. Allow me to recap our relationship and recycle a lot of jokes from the earlier entry in hopes that you won’t notice:

I started drinking Diet Coke in 5th grade, when I’d come home from a rough day of the lasting psychological damage that only elementary school can provide and console myself with a frosty can from the old refrigerator in our garage. Now that I think about it, this was really great training for my adult life, where I frequently use liquid substances as cheap therapy.

"This is Ketel One and melted blue Otter Pop. Let me know what you think."

Point is, from an early age I got used to drinking a can of Diet Coke every day – it became a habit. I carried it on in middle and high school, because really, why the hell not? Given the fact that a lot of my high school classmates had a friendly relationship with another brand of coke, what I was doing was beyond harmless.

It became sort of my after school ritual, drinking a Diet Coke, and it didn’t take long for me to associate the taste with kicking back after a long day – a sentence that I’m sure gives Coca Cola shareholders a halfie. These were the salad days for Diet Coke and I, an uninhibited bliss the likes of which I know we’ll never see again.

In college, though, things went sour when a woman entered the picture – as usual, am I right, fellas? High five. Just… I’ll high five you next time I see you. Don’t let me forget.

'Scrubs', children, was a TV show that had approximately five brilliant seasons and like 15 horrible ones.

The Ex Girlfriend was a health nut, in addition to being just a garden variety nut, and as our relationship moved from the honeymoon stage to the ‘fight about literally everything’ stage, she went to work trying to break up me and my favorite soft drink, perhaps jealous that that relationship was far healthier than ours.

“Oh my God, Truman,” She whined for the umpteenth time one afternoon as I cracked open a Diet Coke to accompany my post-coital turkey sandwich. “You are, like, addicted to that stuff! It’s so bad for you!”

“Look, I acknowledge that it’s not good for me, but I don’t think it’s explicitly bad for me either when I’m only drinking one can of it a day. If I was drinking it nonstop, that’d be another matter.”

“So you admit that it isn’t good for you but you keep drinking it! Why do you do something that you know isn’t good for you!?”

“Because I enjoy it? Don’t talk to me about doing things that aren’t good for me – you drink alcohol.” (This was back when I was still on my moral high horse as a teetotaler, a horse I promptly dismounted and subsequently shot about six months after this conversation.)

And then this happened. I don't remember how; I was pretty drunk at the time.

“You drink Diet Coke every day. I don’t drink alcohol every day!”

“Yeah, but you drank enough alcohol in one day that a certain someone had to hold your hair back while you vomited red wine, corn chips, and tequila into a popcorn bowl. Diet Coke never made me do that in any quantity.”

“Jesus, Truman. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Nevermind.”

Presently, in spite of my firm stance on not negotiating with terrorists, I gave into The Ex Girlfriend’s demands and started to curtail my Diet Coke consumption. Problem was, that left me with a void – I’d come to assume that there was a time in every day where I drank a tasty sweet beverage. Stupid as it sounded, it was something to look forward to in the middle of the day, my Special Cola Flavored Relaxation Time.

The Ex Girlfriend and I went our separate ways shortly thereafter, and in the emotionally trying couple of months that followed I hated women and Diet Coke in roughly equal measure. My beef with Diet Coke was really more of a self-loathing, though – I desperately wanted The Ex Girlfriend’s claims of my addiction to be as asinine and poorly informed as most of her other thoughts, feelings, and opinions, but the fact that I kept going back proved her right. So I drank my Diet Coke every day, but hated myself for it.

What I'm trying to say is, 'Breaking Bad' was going to be about me, but the suits ruined it with all that meth stuff.

Then came my trip to England, a rainy and prohibitively expensive country where everyone copes with the crappy weather and cost of living by drinking pretty much constantly. Diet Coke was so expensive in England that my own guilt about how much of my family’s money I was spending outweighed my desire for aspartame-sweetened syrup, and within a matter of days I’d broken my habit for the stuff. This was especially satisfying in light of the fact that The Ex Girlfriend was in my study abroad group.

“Would anybody like something to drink?” One of our professors asked our group one evening at a social function at the school. “Soda or something?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

The Ex Girlfriend stared at me icily and addressed me in a cloying, flinty tone: “What – no Diet Coke?”

“Nah,” I said, triumphantly. “You know, that stuff’s apparently pretty bad for you.” I had rebuffed both of my destructive relationships in the same sentence.

“We’ve got some harder stuff too, if you’d like.” The professor continued. “Beer, cider…”

“Ooh!” I exclaimed. “I’d take a Strongbow, if you have one.”

Strongbow is a positively delicious English hard cider. It comes in 16-ounce cans and has an alcohol content of 5.3 percent. It’s sugary and sweet, and by the end of my time in England I was drinking at least one of them a day, which put my alcohol consumption at one of the lowest in the entire United Kingdom.

Scientists have determined that this is the proper amount of Strongbow for you to wake up in jail.

When I returned to the States, Strongbow wasn’t widely available but I was wary of going back to my old mistress Diet Coke, who I’d so decisively broken up with overseas. I resolved, then, to only drink Diet Coke when I was using it as a mixer, which was how I wound up drinking whiskey and Diet Coke five or more times a week during parts of my senior year of college.

After graduation I knew I had to cool it on the boozing, which was really no sweat once I put about a thousand miles between myself and the alcohol fueled shenanigans of the Oregon Marching Band. For the occasional drink on a weekend evening, I keep a handle of Jack Daniel’s in the house and a case of Diet Coke with which to mix – and that was just fine until, craving something sweet in the afternoons but not wanting to be the college graduate boozing by himself at 2:30, I’d just crack open a Diet Coke and leave Jack on the shelf.

Diet Coke fueled the late nights that led to the completion of my TV spec scripts and the third draft of my screenplay, but then I put my foot down – I’d fallen off the wagon, and I needed to get back on. Last week, at my internship, I made the conscious decision not to have a Diet Coke with my lunch in the employee kitchen. I did just fine without it – and, as a result, my sweet tooth ran wild and I wound up eating half the contents in the candy jar over the course of the rest of the afternoon.

And then, this happened.

A relative of mine used to be pretty fucked up with drugs and alcohol, but he’s been clean and sober for nine years now. One afternoon, I was watching him play Call of Duty: Black Ops - a 45 year old man absolutely dominating the server, demolishing legions of people one third his age.

“Shit, you’re good at this,” I said. “How do you find time to practice with your job and social life and everything?”

“I make time, Truman,” He replied, knifing an opponent in the back and prompting a slew of angry, racially charged profanity. “You don’t really get rid of an addiction. You just replace it with another one.” The round ended and he’d racked up enough points to earn a gold plated AK47, which, in Call of Duty, is apparently a good thing.

I’m not addicted to Diet Coke – I’m addicted to having something that tastes sweet at some point during the day. Compared to all the other sweet things I’ve tried, though, Diet Coke has the fewest total calories and least Surgeon General’s warnings. If I’m going to be an addict, I at least want to be healthy about it.

Truman Capps is desperately seeking out that corporate sponsorship.

Lord Of The Dance

'Humiliate yourself. YOUR ELECTRONIC OVERLORDS COMMAND IT.'

Recently my roommate stuck his head into my room and said:

“Hey, Truman! Want to play Dance Central?”

Dance Central is a game for the XBox 360 which utilizes the Kinect motion controller so that you can dance around in your living room like an idiot in order to score points in a video game.

“Um.” I said, not fully understanding the question – was this a goof of some sort? Maybe, I reasoned, he just hadn’t given me all the details. “Wait – are there girls here or something?”

“Nah, man! I just want to play some Dance Central! C’mon, it’ll be fun!”

“Wow. You really think that, don’t you?” I said, almost more fascinated than anything else.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

I shook my head. “Look, I guess what I mean is, no thanks. I’d rather not play Dance Central.”

“C’mon, man! Why not?”

It’s a testament, I think, to how many different and interesting types of people there are in the world that I had to actually give a specific reason for why I didn’t want to do the Soulja Boy dance in the living room on a Thursday night when there’s a whole YouTube full of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes to watch.

“Well, uh, to be frank, I don’t dance. As a matter of principal.”

“Dude, seriously? Dancing’s the bomb! It’s how you get chicks!” He adopted a more serious tone. “You know, maybe the reason you don’t bring girls home when we go out is because you don’t dance.”

“Yeah.” I said, staring at the Battlestar Galactica poster on my wall. “That’s probably it. Me not dancing. That is the only reasonable answer.”

“Yeah, man! Now c’mon! Let’s play Dance Central!”

I shook my head. “Sorry, man. Not going to happen.”

“Not even one game? Nobody’s going to see you, man. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“I’d see me. And I would have to be embarrassed.”

Now he shook his head. “Alright, you win. But you’ve gotta come out of your shell sometime, man.”

With that, he closed the door, and five minutes later I heard a Ke$ha song playing and the telltale thumping of my roommate flinging himself around the living room per the XBox’s instructions.

I think there’s a significant difference between being in your shell and simply knowing that you don’t fucking want to do something. It’s not like I secretly fantasize about dancing. When I close my eyes, I don’t see myself at the center of the dance floor surrounded by cheering clubgoers, moving as one with the music. I don’t have a copy of Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights hidden under my mattress. Dancing is just something I’m not interested in doing.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – I have a healthy respect for dance as an art form or recreational activity while drunk or sober. I just inherently don’t want to do it with literally every fiber of my being – whenever I find myself in the general vicinity of a dance floor, I can practically feel my muscles locking up, just to ensure that I don’t make any casual motions that could even be mistakenly interpreted as dancing. This is true at nightclubs, it’s true at weddings, and it was true at the Hieronymous Bosch-brand nightmare that was my senior prom.

Is that close minded, to not do things that you’re sure don’t want to do? I know it’s important to have new experiences, but I feel like going to a nightclub and dancing is going to be a bad new experience, and I’ve been trying to have fewer of those (with mixed results.) I mean, say somebody offered me crystal meth and I turned it down, because I don’t want to be a meth addict. Would he tell me I had to come out of my shell, too?

Looking back, it sounds like I was comparing dancing to drug abuse, and that might have been blowing things out of proportion a little bit. Meth is bad for everybody; dancing is not. Dancing is more like V-neck shirts – they work great for a lot of other people, but not for me.

The other night, I was at a jazz club with a couple of friends and a funk band was playing. Halfway through their set, right before they took a break, they played a snappy cover of ‘Pick Up The Pieces’ by Average White Band that more or less brought the house down – beautiful hipsters flooded the dance floor to cut a collective rug, eyes closed, all smiles, looking for all the world like a bunch of suave young people having the time of their lives.

One positively gorgeous girl who probably loved The Smiths was dancing with her boyfriend not too far away from me – subtlety shaking her ass for him, occasionally drawing her hands up her thighs to raise the hem of her dress ever-so-slightly, looking over her shoulder at him and batting her eyes while running a hand through her long auburn hair. He twirled her around and they shared a long kiss, bodies still moving against one another in time with the song for the last few measures. When the song ended, the couple promptly left to have what was probably the best sex any two people have ever had.

Ten minutes later, the band was back and the dance floor was empty. As they got into an original upbeat instrumental, a lanky, awkward looking guy in an XKCD T-shirt, perhaps energized by the reaction to the previous song, jumped up and started dancing, alone on the small dance floor.

Right away you could tell this guy didn’t have any dance training or experience – he was just letting the music flow through him, completely uninhibited by any social constraints whatsoever, and so naturally he looked like a guy on a bad drug trip having a seizure. Periodically he’d dance his way over to women at the edges of the dance floor to try and entice them to join him, and they’d politely ignore him for as long as it took, and then he’d dance his way back out alone and resume his agonizingly public social suicide, arms swinging and hips thrusting the whole way, essentially holding the dance floor hostage until he finally sat down

That’s the kind of dancing I’d do, and that’s the kind of reaction I’d get. This guy wasn’t dancing out of love or passion for rhythm; he was dancing because for years people had been telling him that it would make him cool, and he’d finally gotten drunk and desperate enough to give it a try. If that’s what it looks like to come out of your shell, I’m perfectly happy in here, thanks.

Truman Capps wants to star in a Dirty Dancing spinoff about a guy who stands by the bar and makes fun of all the people dancing.

Perspective

"This is generic soda water, not Perrier! UNACCEPTABLE!"

Recently I was working as a production assistant at a party attended by a lot of rich Hollywood industry types. The party was in a seriously remote and inconvenient location with very little parking and was so far removed from a main road that the 150+ guests had to park a few miles away and be chauffeured from their cars to the party in a number of 15 passenger vans. This wasn’t too big of an ordeal as people slowly started to arrive, but I could tell right away that this was going to turn into a disaster once the party ended and everyone wanted to leave at the same time but had to wait for vans to truck them away.

Sure enough, it did – once festivities began to wind down, a large mob of wealthy, tuxedoed, drunk people were standing by the loading zone for the 15 passenger vans and creating a very unruly last chopper out of Saigon situation, provided that the helicopters are vans, Saigon is a lavish industry party, the Vietnamese are industry movers and shakers, and I’m the Marines trying to keep them from swamping the helicopter vans in their desperation to get out.

Needless to say, once the number of people waiting for a ride outstripped the ability of the vans to make it to and from the isolated venue in a timely fashion, things got ugly quick.

“This is unacceptable!” A woman in an evening gown screamed, not long after I arrived. “We have been waiting up here for forty-five minutes! You need to get more vans up here, and faster!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling myself away from my walkie talkie long enough to try and keep her from going all 28 Days Later on me. “We’re doing the best we can.”

She snorted and threw up her hands, tears brimming in her eyes. “No you’re not!”

I just looked at her blankly, having never heard such an immature comment from somebody that old and not in Congress. She just glared back at me, defiantly, as if to say I stand by my profoundly retarded statement

An older couple approached some of us PAs a moment later.

“Hello. We were just wondering, is there any way we can get more vans coming up here?”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “The road is really narrow, so we can only get one van coming up to the location at a time. There isn’t room for two vans to pass one another going opposite directions, and there’s barely enough room for the one van to turn around.”

The wife pursed her lips. “Okay. It’s just, we’ve been waiting for a really long time. You know, we work for [NAME OF MEDIA CONGLOMERATE REDACTED]. We just wanted to see if there was any way we could get more vans running faster.”

I couldn’t think of a way to convey to her that the width of the road was in no way affected by what company she worked for, so I just shook my head apologetically, and she led her husband away, grumbling about what an idiot I was.

Before long, another woman was right up in my face, whispering, voice trembling as she struggled to keep her boundless rage under control.

“Who is your boss.” (Statement, not a question.)

I told her my boss’s first name.

“Good. What’s her last name?”

“I don’t…. I don’t know. I got hired twelve hours ago. I’ve seen my boss two times all day.”

“I want to see her. She and I need to have a discussion about how this event is being run. My husband and I have been waiting nearly an hour for a van.”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am.” I said, for what would not be the last time that night. “But my boss is back at headquarters trying her best to make the vans run faster. So if I bring her out here to talk to you, it’s probably just going to slow things down more.”

That – my tacit suggestion that she act like an adult – was her breaking point.

“This is unacceptable!” She shouted. “You have no right to do this!”

What I wanted more than anything was for Louis C.K. to be there with me, because I get the idea he’d set every one of these assholes straight. Maybe Ron Swanson could be backup. Without them, though, all I could do was think of what I would’ve said if I’d wanted to destroy any chance I had of a Hollywood career.

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a step back from this situation for a moment. All of you have just attended a fancy party. You ate a free meal, took full advantage of an open bar, and from the smell of things at least a few of you got stoned behind the catering truck. Now, you have to wait longer than you’d like for a chauffeured van to take you back to your cars, so you can drive back to the homes that you own, so you can go to sleep and, on Monday, go to work at the high paying jobs that you have. That’s inconvenient, and again, I’m sorry that it’s inconvenient, but I didn’t pick the location for this party, nor did I tell the Works Progress Administration to build such a narrow road up this hill 80-odd years ago. So until the next van arrives, I’d ask you all to calm down for a moment. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, four women get raped every five minutes. You all have to stay at a lovely garden party for a little longer than you’d like. If this is the low point of your weekend, you’re some of the luckiest people in the whole course of human history.

I’m not suggesting that as Americans we shouldn’t complain about things or be unsatisfied with the degree of luxury we live in, because even White People Problems are still problems that need to be dealt with and bitched about. What I’m saying is that there are very few situations in which it’s okay to be a complete douche to a stranger – go ahead and do it if, say, your life savings are obliterated by corporate greed or when you find out one of your family members was killed in a gang related shooting.

Feel free to complain about having to be patient, but don’t use it as an excuse to go nuclear on the nearest minimum wage earner. It’s not that big a deal.

(In other news, after I clocked off, I found that my Ray Bans had been stolen from the production office and spent the next two days on the verge of a nervous breakdown.)

Truman Capps is still hoping that they might get mailed to him with his paycheck.

Hubris

Somebody thought this script was amazing. And, I mean, it was, but not for the reasons he thought it was.

I’ve been reading a lot of really bad scripts recently. Between my internship and a work-from-home job I recently took in which I read and write coverage for $10 per screenplay, I spend a fair amount of my life wading through asinine bank heists rife with poorly spelled profanity, horror movies about horny college students that alternate between torture porn and just regular porn, and sappy romances where I’ve seen the line ‘a Taylor Swift song starts to play’ written into the script more than once.

In just about every bad script I read, there comes a point when something so mind bendingly stupid happens that I have to just step away from the computer and laugh, because the only alternative is crying. During that time, I usually wind up fantasizing about yelling at the person who wrote the script.

”Wait, so all of a sudden Otto and Roman switch bodies? Why the hell do you introduce this more than halfway into the movie!? It doesn’t make any sense! You can’t have your movie start out being about one thing and then have it turn into another thing! Also, being as this is a movie about the Holocaust, I think it’s in pretty poor taste to go all The Change Up on your audience. That’s got to be a hate crime or something!

Usually I start feeling guilty about halfway through my fantasy, though, because in all likelihood the writer in question probably didn’t set out intending to write a crappy movie – he just did it by accident because he thought that writing a screenplay was as simple as writing down every cool thing you can think of, throwing in a few awkward sex scenes (standing up the whole time, naturally), ending on a poop joke, and typing FADE OUT.

It happens every day, with horrifying results.

No matter how bad of a script I’m reading, though, it does wonders for my smug sense of superiority – with every bad script that I read, I subconsciously begin to feel more and more bulletproof writing-wise. Just like how ancient cultures would consume animal testicles to gain their virility, I’ll picture myself consuming bad screenplay testicles to gain immunity against crappy dialogue and a stagnating second act.

Unfortunately for my smug sense of superiority, I’ve just completed the most recent draft of a script Mike from Writers and I have been working on for awhile – some extremely late night writing sessions were a lot of the reason for there not being an update yesterday, for those of you who’re keeping score at home. The point is, it’s really easy for me to talk shit about how other people are crappy writers when I’m not putting any of my own stuff out there either.

The thing about writing a script is it’s a lot like having a child. Now, unlike everyone else who I went to high school with, I don’t have any children, but what I assume from Everybody Loves Raymond is that it’s a really difficult and often thankless task in which you somehow inexplicably love the little brats who make your life so difficult. This is presumably because the more time and effort you put into a thing, the more attached you grow to it and the more likely you are to ignore its flaws and think it’s perfect, hence why so many parents raise shitty children.

To be fair, sometimes they're shitty parents, too.

Mike and I have been working on our script for around 18 months at this point, which is an awfully long commitment for a couple of profoundly lazy people. We’ve put more effort and soul into this script than we’ve put into most jobs or relationships we’ve had, and after all that output I’m afraid we’ve kind of lost perspective. We’ve fallen into the trap that makes grade inflation possible: The assumption that if you work really hard at something, it’s automatically great.

As I proofread our script in advance of sending it out, though, I’m starting to see more and more elements in it that might be less funny or compelling than we think they are. It’s like I’m about to send my kid to his first day of school, and I already know that he’s going to get picked on because, well, he’s related to me, but right as he gets on the school bus I see that his fly is down.

Because I know how script readers work. I know that they swap stories about the worst scripts they’ve read, and I know that I’m not the only person who fantasizes about yelling at writers for writing crappy scripts. Here at the 11th hour, I’m worried that maybe my script is just as bad as some of the ones that I’ve read – maybe the stuff that I thought was so interesting in my script was only interesting because I find everything I do inherently interesting.

I care about my script, and I don’t like the idea that people might read it and hate it the same way I read scripts and hate them. Also, I care about my (currently and perhaps forever nonexistent) reputation as a writer, and I don’t want to sully it by putting out a script that’s crappy. And on top of that, I feel a certain sort of kinship with scriptreaders everywhere, and I’d really hate to contribute to their misery by sending them another script they have to slog through and hate – in a perfect world, my script would have the same effect on its reader as Ralphie’s fantasy-theme does on the teacher in A Christmas Story.

Ultimately, though, I guess the only way to tell if your script sucks or not is to send it out and let the world be the judge. I can only imagine how many truly terrible scripts are still sitting in the sock drawers of writers who, quite wisely, are too scared to send them out – maybe a few elusive good scripts are out there, too.

I still think that our script is going to stand out from the crowd, though: The movie is about one thing, the only sex scene takes place in a bed, and all of the words are spelled and punctuated correctly. You have no idea how few scripts can pull off that last one in a country with a 97% adult literacy rate.

Truman Capps has to read and cover two more scripts before he goes to bed tonight.

Chick-Fil-A

Back in high school, my main bro Alexander took a trip with his family to visit relatives in the Deep South, and he returned bursting with fun stories about rap music, humidity, and casual racism.

“And here’s another thing,” he said after explaining about sweet tea. “They had these fast food places all over the place called Chickafilla.”

“What the fuck is a Chickafilla?” I asked.

“I don’t know! We never stopped at one. It’s a mystery!”

That night, I went home and Googled Chickafilla in hopes of finding out what this mystery establishment was. I don’t remember precisely what I found back then, but when I Googled Chickafilla just now I found the profile for a girl in Chicago on an online dating site that matches people based on what books they like. (She liked Animal Farm a lot.)

Point is, Chickafilla was a mystery to me for a long time – a little slice of Southern Mysticism dropped into our dreary Pacific Northwestern lives.

Years down the road, I discovered that there’s an immensely popular Southern fast food chain called Chick-Fil-A, and deduced that there was no mystery to be had here: Alexander had simply fucked up the name in true Alexander fashion.*

*This could also be the result of Alexander’s Hannibal Lecter-style fondness for byzantine wordplay. Examples include habeeb instead of believe, Sakala instead of Alaska (it’s an anagram), and Parah Salin instead of Sarah Palin, which, when spoken aloud, sounds exactly like “Parasailin’.” He’s difficult to be bros with.

I have a certain fascination with regional fast food chains, to the point that when I meet somebody from a different part of the United States, I invariably wind up talking to them about their regional food chain before I ask them about their hometown. In a country where morbid obesity is kind of our thing, I think you can learn a lot about the character of a region by the way they set themselves up for heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Initially, Chick-Fil-A struck me as emblematic of a lot of the things I like to make fun of the South for – their ad campaign is kind of folksy, they’re so extremely religious that they don’t open on Sunday, and they’ve got a spotty gay rights record. What’s more, Chick-Fil-A promotional materials make the bold claim that they ‘invented the chicken sandwich.’

This seems like an almost foolishly bold thing to say, because I tend to believe that the chicken sandwich was invented five minutes after chickens and bread were in the same place at the same time, and that was probably well before Chick-Fil-A hit the scene. It was this sort of hubris that made me wary when Chick-Fil-A opened its first Southern California location in Hollywood last month.

I was finally persuaded try the place by my Southern friends, who assured me that the food there tastes like Christmas, and by the fact that Neil Patrick Harris tweeted about how amazing the meal he ate there was. Not only did that assuage any guilt I might’ve had over eating at a relatively gay-unfriendly establishment, but it also gave me hope that I might bump into Neil Patrick Harris while I was there.

(I didn’t, by the way; so don’t get your hopes up for this update getting any more interesting in the next couple of paragraphs.)

I hit up the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru for lunch last week, and when my car finally pulled up to the menu I was shocked to find that instead of a simple, unintelligible loudspeaker, the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru ordering system has an actual live video feed of the person in the restaurant taking your order – you can see them, and they can see you.

This, I feel, eliminates a lot of the mystery and fun of the drive-thru. When all you do is yell your order into a microphone, you’re taking a leap of faith – it could be anybody preparing your food, and you have no idea how clean or bronchial they actually are until you pull around and collect your order, which may or may not have been filled correctly. This sort of anonymity and danger was as close as I was ever going to get to airport restroom hookups, and those damn moral crusaders at Chick-Fil-A took it away from me.

“Hello there, and welcome to Chick-Fil-A!” The beaming talking head on the video screen chirped. “How may we serve you this afternoon?”

As much as I appreciated the Southern hospitality, I felt like they were laying it on a little thick here – I’m not the King of France; I’m an unemployed writer trying to order a chicken sandwich. Let’s keep things in perspective.

“Uh, wow, thank you. Food is the only service I need today – could I get a number four combo please? Large?”

“Great!” I watched her record this order on her computer, which felt oddly voyeuristic. “And what’s your name?”

“Truman.”

She looked up at the camera with a somehow broader smile. “Oh, cool! Like The Truman Show!”

I was going to make some pithy remark about how often I hear that, but then I realized that she’d made that comment while watching me on a television screen, meaning she was arguably the first person in history to legitimately make that reference.

“Yes. Exactly like that.”

When I pulled around to the window, another woman was already waiting for my credit card.

“Here you go, Truman!” She said, handing me a semi-translucent paper bag full of chicken sandwich. “Is there anything else we can do for you today?”

Am I missing something here? I was under the impression that Chick-Fil-A was a restaurant, but the employees keep making these very broad offers like How may I serve you? and Is there anything else we can do for you? Do they offer life help in addition to food? If so, then I’ll take a #7 combo with a side of paying job in the entertainment industry and an extra large Obama 2012. Otherwise, just the sandwich will be fine.

Back at the office, I ate what turned out to be a pretty tasty chicken sandwich. But at the end of the day, much to the chagrin of the cows in Chick-Fil-A’s commercials, I just don’t like chicken as much as beef. Even with God and Neil Patrick Harris on their side, Chickafilla can’t compete with that.

Truman Capps is still waiting to try Waffle House.

More Dog Stories

This isn't the exact breed I'm dealing with, but I imagine they're equally annoying.

Newsflash, girls I go out with: I don’t care about your dog. I suppose maybe I’m sending mixed signals – I do, after all, say ‘Oh, what breed is it?’ – but that’s because I’m trying to be nice and make conversation, not because I want you to pull out your iPhone and show me all 368 pictures of your dog accompanied by 368 stories about how smart he is and how he’s so protective but oh don’t worry he’ll probably warm up to you pretty quick.

Second, followup newsflash: He won’t warm up to me pretty quick, if at all. Dogs and I seem to have this understanding – I am civil and relatively friendly in spite of the fact that I generally don’t like them, and they, in return, shit in my house. I don’t care how smart or sweet or housebroken your dog is; the second we’re alone together, it’s going to take a steaming dump on the carpet and then look at me, head cocked as if to say, This is how it’s going to be, motherfucker.

When this happened with Indy, my old roommates’ dog, I chalked it up to a side effect of his being emotionally disturbed and just generally retarded, mixed in with a hint of animosity for me, the one roommate who didn’t play with him or coo to him or generally put up with his dog bullshit. It was just sort of the special relationship we had – he would soil the house when it was just the two of us there, forcing me to clean it up, and I, as I cleaned it up, would tell him in great detail about how easy it would be for me to kill him, bury the body, and then tell my roommates that he’d run away. Nobody would ever find out.

"Well, hot diggity dog. Yeah, but seriously, we're not going to investigate this case. Dog murder isn't our thing."

But at the moment, my roommate’s sister’s dog is staying with us, and in a few short days she’s proven to me that there seems to exist a state of open warfare between me and every dog on Earth. The primary weapons in this war are my profanity and the dogs’ bowels.

My roommate’s sister is a somewhat well-to-do young woman from Long Beach, so naturally her dog is a tiny fluffy white yappy terrier, small enough to hold in one hand or fit into a purse. The dog’s name is Bella.

I’m cohabiting with a small, annoying animal with a Twilight name. It’s like The Perfect Storm, except instead of a perfect storm it’s a cute little dog, which I guess makes it more like Marley and Me, only the dog and I have pretty open animosity for one another, so it’s got more of a Turner and Hooch meets Wilfred vibe, and I’m played by Jesse Eisenberg.

And then it becomes this, but it's more of a scary hotel like in 'The Shining.'

Every encounter with this creature sharpens my definition of the term ‘good for nothing.’ Bella is literally useless. She serves no purpose. There is no reason for her to be alive. If we humans were not here to take care of her, she would be dead in less than four seconds, and it’s a tossup as to whether she’d be dead from exposure, attack from other animals, or her own crippling stupidity. The only thing she can do is act cute – she’s essentially been trained to do it, because every time she does a cute thing, everybody fawns over her and gives her treats.

There were a lot of kids in elementary and middle school who reminded me of Bella – kids who were cute, and who had captivated their family with precocious babytalk, wide eyed thumb sucking, and replacing the ‘R’ sound in words with a ‘W.’ As they got older, a lot of them tried to continue this racket for as long as they could, which got pretty embarrassing for everybody once puberty started to set in.* Now all of them work in various tattoo parlors and supermarkets in Salem, and if I could send Bella to work at the Walgreens on Lancaster Boulevard, you damn bet I would.

*I had the benefit of being fat and awkward looking in my youth, which I feel was essential for my growth into an awkward looking adult.

Bella’s antics work wonders on my roommates and their friends, but recently she’s discovered that when they’re gone and it’s just me, her cuteness doesn’t go very far. Just like the 13 year olds in my math class who couldn’t talk their way out of detention by saying “Pweeeeease?”, Bella skipping around in circles and jumping up on my ankles only succeeds in pissing me off.

After my fourth or fifth ‘Get the hell off me, goddamn it, you little worthless shit!’, Bella clearly knew it was time to get tough. When I woke up the following morning, I turned on the lights in the bathroom to see several dog turds waiting for me on the bathmat. Wordlessly, I turned and looked at Bella, who was scampering back and forth in the hallway, her dark eyes gleaming.

Yeah, bitch, that’s how we do it in Long Beach! You notice how big those turds are in relation to my body? That doesn’t happen by not trying. What now!? 310 represent!

Today, hearing her incessant scampering and whining outside my room, I decided, ‘Fuck it’, and went in search of her leash* so I could take her outside just long enough to get her to shit out anything that could be used against me later.

*Bella’s leash is hot pink, which is great for me, because instead of going to the trouble of emasculating myself by not liking beer or unconsciously playing with my hair, I can just walk a tiny fluffy dog on a pink leash and get it over with quickly.

It would look exactly like this. No detail would be different except for the leash.

“Sit.” I said, holding the leash and waiting for her to be still enough so I could affix it to her collar.

Bella sat. As I knelt down to attach the leash to her, she promptly jumped up and started scampering around.

“No! Sit! Stay!”

Bella sat. I knelt down again, and again she jumped up and started prancing around. Rinse and repeat six times.

“You goddamned worthless animal!” I shouted, throwing the leash across the room as Bella continued to caper at my feet. “You know what? You win. I’m going to go in my room, shut the door, and listen to Pink Floyd until my roommate comes home to clean up your mess. So long as you don’t get your shit in my rice cooker or in my Jack Daniel’s, go nuts.”

Having just delivered an angry monologue to a small animal, I flipped her off and sequestered myself in my room. I didn’t see this as forfeiture so much as a tactical retreat – best case scenario, Bella would do so much territorial urinating on our carpet that she’d get dehydrated and die, and then I would be the winner.

The carpets have absorbed the bulk of the urine and my roommate diligently follows Bella around cleaning up that which she shreds or drags around. I ignore her and she ignores me, and I look forward to Thursday when she finally returns from whence she came.

Why, yes, since you asked – under the right circumstances, I would get a dog. Were I under house arrest at a large ranch in Vermont, I would get a Bull Terrier. Bull Terriers are good natured and resourceful animals who scientists have proven are smarter than most three year olds and virtually all business majors. If I had a large outdoorsy space and nothing to do but hang out with that dog, that’s exactly what I’d do.

If your dog doesn't look like this, you've bought the wrong type of dog.

Until then, though, I’ve decided that I’m pretty unenthusiastic about sharing my living space with any other animal, because at this point in my life the benefits of dog ownership are greatly outweighed by my unwillingness to live in or around excrement. I mean, if I really wanted to take care of another defenseless living creature with questionable bathroom habits, I’d just get a girl pregnant so I could snag a tax break and some free cigars.

Truman Capps is very much pro-dogs when he’s encountering the dogs in a neutral zone where it’s clear that the burden of the poop cleanup won’t fall on him.

Occupy Wall Street

The problem with promising to write a two-parter blog is that sometimes, between part one and part two, a current event happens that you’re way more interested in making a comment on. Hopefully none of you were dying to hear more loosely connected ramblings about the stresses and injustices of making a TV commercial.

Based on these signs, this could be a rally for like three or four different things.

Good Lord, how I hate those fucking liberals.

Now, to clarify, I consider myself a liberal. I’m all in favor of gay people being able to get married and women being allowed to have as many abortions as they want. What’s more, to some degree I genuinely support the idea of a big government – particularly one with a large and very well funded Department of Education and Veterans’ Administration (and healthcare, while we’re at it.) I drive a Subaru; I want to drive a Prius.

But I feel like as a liberal my views on certain other liberals are pretty similar to Chris Rock’s views on certain other black people. Namely, every time I turn on the TV there’s some attention mongering Code Pink assholes pitching a hissy fit about a Marine recruiting station, every time I get near a Whole Foods there’s some Henna tattooed philosophy major with an iPhone trying to get me to sign some anti-capitalism petition, and in college I took a class where the professor and virtually all the students engaged in daily, hourlong class discussions in which the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘Nazi’ were used interchangeably.

Point is, there’s a great number of liberals who are calm, well reasoned, rational people who support progressive causes and an intelligent dialogue, and then there’s liberals who love buzzwords, drum circles, and yelling so loud that the opposition doesn’t have a chance to speak. As I’ve said time and again, rhetoric and fundamentalism are the two things that are really wrong with this country, and they happen on both sides of the aisle. It just pisses me off more when liberals do it because I hate seeing my team acting like douchetanks.

Douchetank.

It’s these liberals who are usually the ones holding noisy, poorly thought out protests and ultimately wind up getting pepper sprayed, much to my delight – that’s what you get for making my political views look stupid, hippies. In most cases, I’m of the opinion that running around in the street chanting is a good way to get attention and a bad way to enact real change* – remember all those Iraq War protests? How well did those work out?

*The Civil Rights Movement is an obvious exception to this rule.

So then, Occupy Wall Street.

I hate the finance industry too, obviously – everybody does. As Rolling Stone put it, they stole more money than most people can rationally conceive of in a few blinks of an eye, then went to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it. And none of them got punished for it; rather, they got their money back at taxpayer expense, which is basically anti punishment. In the interests of preserving the shitstained tatters of our economy, the TARP bailouts were a good idea, sure, but it’s still sort of offensive to those of us who live by the ‘What Would Batman Do’ credo.

The answer, as usual, is 'punch a dog in the face.'

In all seriousness, if I found out that some of these bankers had been killed or grievously wounded, I’d react about the same way as I did when I found out Osama Bin Laden died. Not to defend Bin Laden or anything, but he did heinous, terrible shit because he had a twisted ideology saying it was okay – the Wall Street people did heinous, terrible shit because they, some of the richest people on Earth, wanted to make more money.

So Occupy Wall Street is really a meeting of two groups I’m not so fond of – attention seeking ass clowns with dreadlocks on one side and human garbage wearing suits on the other. But here, I’m siding with the ass clowns – no contest.

I’ve been following Occupy Wall Street and I have to say, I’ve been fairly impressed – despite their appearance, there seem to be a few pretty intelligent, rational types at work there, and on a base, instinctive level I love the idea of regular people rising up against Wall Street’s excesses, my distaste for protests be damned. What’s more, the movement has been gaining mainstream support from celebrities and labor unions, which gives it a chance of being one of the few protests that actually accomplishes something, provided everyone plays their cards right.

But for Occupy Wall Street to play its cards right, they need to settle on a cohesive fucking message, already. How long has this thing been going on for and they still can’t say specifically and more or less unilaterally how they want Wall Street to change? The whole world is watching, but they’re not going to be watching for very long – if I can’t figure out what the protagonist in a script is fighting for, I lose interest pretty damn quick.

Right now, the closest thing Occupy Wall Street has to a message is, “Wall Street is corrupt and needs to change.” I think this video shows how well that’s working out:

What I see in this video is a bunch of angry people marching around and yelling, and then the camera pans up to a bunch of suits on a balcony, watching with disinterest. Until Occupy Wall Street organize all their power and anger behind one specific goal, the protest is going to be exactly as effective as it looks in this video: The protestors will make noise and the bad guys will watch.

All the yelling and drumming and ideology in the world can’t and won’t stop these fucking crooks from doing what they’re doing and getting rich at it. An agenda, on the other hand, is a stepping stone to change, because it gives people something to yell at their Congressmen about. Occupy Wall Street needs one of these, and fast – soon it will start to snow in Manhattan, and the occupation will be effectively over.

Truman Capps is unlikely to participate in the Los Angeles occupation because it combines his two least favorite things: Crowds and outside.

Mad Props

Naturally, we didn't need to get THIS prop. (Which I'm positive is fully functional and fully awesome.)

One thing that a lot of actors fear is being typecast – that is, playing a particular character or role so many times that they become so identified with that role that those are the only parts that they ever get offered. Typecasting is why John Wayne was always a cowboy, why Jason Statham is always an angry guy driving a car, and why Leonard Nimoy is the saddest rich person on Earth.

What I discovered in the past few days, though, is that low level production assistants can get typecast as well. Last month I worked for nine days as an art department production assistant for the Call of Duty convention – a job consisting largely of manual labor and the use of power tools, tasks I was ill-qualified for, to say the least.

Regardless, I did the work, picked up a couple of skills, met a lot of really friendly gay dudes, and then deposited a large paycheck that essentially bought me three more months in Los Angeles (or 56 handles of Jack Daniel’s – I tend to measure wealth in how much whiskey it could bring me at any given time.)

Art department PA work isn’t really the sort of work I want to be doing – it doesn’t offer me a lot of connections in the writing department, and sweating all day doing backbreaking labor so I can take home a paycheck to provide for myself is a little too Bruce Springsteeny for the life I ideally want to live. I’d much rather be working as a pre-production PA, because it’s an office job that would put me in contact with writers, directors, and producers, or as a general production PA, because that job is mostly guarding the craft table and bossing extras around, and I’ll never pass up the opportunity to talk down to actors.

On Wednesday, though, I was at my internship when I got a call from a production manager I’d submitted my resume to for an upcoming commercial shoot – the art department needed another PA, and since my resume indicated that I had art department experience, she wanted me for the job.

Naturally, I took the job in a heartbeat, because money is money, but as I drove to the production office I realized that now I would have two art department PA jobs on my resume, which would only build my reputation as an art department PA until those were the only jobs I was getting offered, in spite of no real skill or inclination towards that field. Moving heavy props around would be my Star Trek.

Part of my job on this shoot was helping the art director secure props for the commercial – among them four surf boards, six incredibly heavy oil drums, and some retro looking chrome stools, along with a box of tiny perfume bottles. To carry all these props, they had me to go a nearby rental car company to pick up a cargo van.

Interestingly enough, it came with a bag of free candy!

The white, windowless monstrosity they gave me at the rental lot was the sort of vehicle you’d see parked under a barren tree near the Interstate somewhere on the outskirts of St. Louis. People might label it a pedophile van, but I think that’s narrow minded – there was enough room for easily five homeless dudes to smoke crack in there.

However well suited it might have been for child molestation or drugs, the van was shit for driving. It had more blind spots than Stevie Wonder and equally good shocks, which made for a nerve wracking and bumpy ride to the prop warehouse at Universal Studios, where the art director and I went about collecting the necessary props for the shoot.

On the productions I worked on in Eugene, we usually got our props from Goodwill, or any other musty smelling thrift store filled with weird, grimy 80s crap that nobody wanted anymore. Going to the multi-story Universal prop warehouse, the largest in the industry, I was expecting a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style stroll through movie memorabilia, like giant Styrofoam boulders and the fake glass bottles you can break on peoples’ heads without hurting them.

As it turns out, the Universal prop warehouse is essentially a five story Goodwill that just happens to be on the lot of a major motion picture studio – everything is equally grimy and musty and has the feeling of being something that was donated because a small child vomited on it at some point. There’s shelves upon shelves of board games in crusty, deteriorating boxes, garish plastic faux-crystal glasses from the 1970s, dilapidated printers from every era… As I wandered around the warehouse, grabbing the items the art director told me to grab, I wondered if any of the props I was so carefully avoiding contact with had been in the background of any of my favorite movies.

The prop warehouse is like a video store, in that you browse through it, make your selections, and then take them to the front desk to rent them out for a specific period of time.* The front desk was staffed by a profoundly grumpy minimum wage earner who had absolutely no patience or sympathy for the fact that I had no previous experience with the checkout system and thus was making mistakes on the paperwork I had to fill out.

*Unlike a video store, it still exists.

“Wait,” I said, at one point. “I need to sign every page, or just initial everything after the first page?”

He sighed heavily. “You initial. And hurry up – it’s after 5:00, so you’re wasting my time now.”

I wanted to put the pen down and give him some tough love.

”Look here, fuckstick.,” I would’ve said. ”I’ve been on your side of the checkout desk. I know how much it sucks back there. I know that being a dick to renters is about the only perk to your job. But you’ve got to draw some battle lines for that shit, and right now I haven’t crossed any of them. I’m not some PR major trying to scam restricted equipment off you. I didn’t come in here reeking of American Spirits and B.O. And I sure as shit didn’t start out conversation off with, ‘Is this the prop warehouse?’ So until I do any of those things, I recommend you treat me just like I used to treat any given one of my old customers: Only subtle disdain and sarcasm until they cross the line. Go ahead and make a Facebook update about me. I want to see your weenie ass try some shit.

Of course, as I well knew, the person checking out items holds all the power in these situations – if I’m a dick to him, he has every right to just not give me the stuff I need. If he’s a dick to me, I have to either put up with it or go to the other Universal Studios prop warehouse. (There isn’t one.)

So I navigated the troll’s maze of bureaucracy and wheeled my rented props out to the pedophile van. Step one of my job – get the props – was complete. Step two – move those props around for arbitrary reasons – lay ahead.

Truman Capps will cover step two in part two, in case you didn’t catch that.