Standing With The Hat

President Richard Lariviere, seen here rescuing the fedora from years of misuse by hipsters.

I first met University of Oregon president Richard Lariviere during my junior year, a few days after he started at UO – he came to visit a freshman honors humanities class for which I was a teaching assistant, and the professor invited him to speak to the class about the ancient Greeks’ artistic approaches to depicting war, which I imagine is the sort of thing most humanities majors desperately wish would happen to them as they make your latte.

President Lariviere chose to discuss a lesser-known Greek epic poem, the bulk of which is dedicated to the intricate and detailed description of a really gory war between two opposing human armies – as he explained, they threw this sort of gratuitous violence into a lot of epic poems back in the day to keep everybody interested; it was the Classical equivalent of a car turning into a robot and blowing up Chicago.

What Lariviere focused on, though, was the last part of the poem, in which the two gods on opposing sides of the struggle surveyed the carnage their armies had wrought against one another and had a frank discussion about the ideological conflict that had led to all this, and ultimately came to realize the futility of war.

By the time he was done describing this poem, President Lariviere was in tears. The professor, also in tears, came to the front of the room and threw an arm around him, thanking him for the lesson.

Kind of an awkward moment for everybody else in the room.

My second, and final, encounter with President Lariviere came a year later, when he was the guest conductor for the Oregon Marching Band during our pregame show. The band administration had had the idea for guest conductors at the beginning of the year – a cue we’d taken from various Big Ten marching bands – and the implementation was fairly simple: Whatever guest the University wanted to honor would stand on the main ladder and wave his hands around in time with the music, while a drum major would stand on a slightly lower ladder just out of sight of the cameras and crowd and do the actual conducting to keep the band in time.

As we spelled out ‘OREGON’ and played the fight song, I glanced up from the real conductor to President Lariviere to see him gleefully waving his arms in a rough approximation of the beat, eyes sparkling, wearing a grin so huge you could probably see it from space. In spite of the rain and cold and general humiliation of being in a marching band, it made me happier to see him up there, even if it didn’t do much for my tempo.

Speaking as somebody who really hasn’t enjoyed a lot of the jobs he’s had, I have a lot of respect for a person who obviously loves doing what he does for a living, and I got that vibe from President Lariviere. He was an eccentric, passionate, intelligent man who treated his job as an actual means to improve the University and not just collect a healthy paycheck and appear at some fundraisers, and yeah since I love him so much maybe I just will marry him, assholes.

President Lariviere was fired today, courtesy of a unanimous vote from the Oregon State Board of Higher Education. The University of Oregon currently has record high enrollment and is leading the Oregon University System in freshman retention and six year graduation rates, but Lariviere was ousted for not being “a team player” – namely because he increased faculty salaries when the state board told him not to, sought to divorce the University from the board, and against the board’s wishes lobbied for a bond proposal to create a massive endowment for the University to keep tuition under control for the next 30 years.

Essentially he was the Dirty Harry of Pacific Northwestern public university administration – the captain was always breathing down his neck for his unorthodox approach to justice, and now, having gone too far, he’s got to turn in his gun and his badge. The difference is that Dirty Harry was a significant liability and PR disaster for the San Francisco Police Department and also sort of a fascist while President Lariviere was fighting to make public education in Oregon better and more affordable.

The faculty raises were financed not with state funds but with surplus tuition funds, and he issued them in order to stem the flow of good professors away from the University of Oregon to other schools that offered more money. His plans to make the University of Oregon more independent from the state board were reflective of the fact that State of Oregon currently funds less than six percent of the University of Oregon’s budget.

Imagine you bought a $1000 car, using $940 that you earned yourself and $60 that your parents gave you, but then your parents expected you to ask their permission every time you took the car out for a drive, and flatly refused your requests to put spinners on the hubcaps and install hydraulics – even though by all accounts those additions would make your car way better – on the grounds that because you’d used an insignificant amount of their money they were entitled to oversee everything you did with your car. Would you put up with that?

The board’s argument against Lariviere’s attempts to improve the University of Oregon seems to be that his actions would give the U of O an unfair advantage over the other seven schools in the system when it came to attracting students:

"Unlike every other university president in the state," Kitzhaber wrote Saturday, "he disregarded my specific direction on holding tight and delaying discussion about retention and equity pay increases until the next biennium to allow for a consistent, system-wide policy on salaries." (OregonLive.com)

Reading this, I became Ron Swanson – if only for a moment.

If the University of Oregon is currently more successful than Oregon’s other six colleges, that’s their fucking problem, not ours. For whatever reason – be it some superior academic programs, excellent marketing, or the greatest football team in the history of the universe – the University of Oregon has risen above the pack. That’s no reason to have our wings (so to speak) clipped; it’s an incentive for all the other schools to start getting better so they can be competitive with us.

Undertake ambitious fundraising schemes in order to improve facilities and hire more faculty, rebrand your school with a new focus on some outstanding department in order to draw students with similar interests. Be innovative and think outside the box – you’re a goddamn college, aren’t you? That’s what you’re teaching people to do! And by all means, the University of Oregon ought to help the other schools become competitive, perhaps through loaning of resources and professors - because the ultimate goal here is education - but telling us to quit being better just because we are isn't simply unfair; it's aggressively, in-your-face un-American.

I believe that the economy needs oversight and stringent regulation from a number of governing bodies in order to prevent the kind of shit that kicked off a global economic meltdown – absence of regulation there serves to benefit very few people and hurt virtually everyone. But the situation the University of Oregon finds itself in is very different from that. If we’re given the berth to achieve everything we possibly can, there’s two potential outcomes – the other universities rise to the occasion and Oregonians have access to seven outstanding schools, or they don’t, and Oregonians have access to one outstanding school.

With the firing of President Lariviere, the board of higher education seems dead set on ensuring that Oregonians have access to no outstanding schools. Looking on the bright side, the University of Oregon does have an outstanding football team – even if the opposing fans at games in the UC system chant ‘SAFETY SCHOOL!’ when we take the field.

Truman Capps stands firmly with the hat.

Keep Waiting

I've got 700 words of a blog entry about my birthday, and it sucks on toast. I'm going to sleep on it and see what happens tomorrow. Happy birthday to me, amirite?

Save The Receipt

"I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut. I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I give you money and you give me the doughnut. End of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this! I can't imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut to some skeptical friend. 'Don't even act like I didn't get that doughnut - I've got the documentation right here. It's in my file at home. Under D.' - Mitch Hedberg

Until moving to LA, I’d never really appreciated the value that sales receipts seem to hold in our society. Up until now, they’d always just seemed like some thoroughly unwelcome byproduct of consumerism:

“Here’s the thing you bought, and here’s a piece of garbage with what you bought and how much it cost written on it so that you can remember this experience forever. Also, we’ve neglected to put any garbage cans between the door and your car, so you can either be an asshole and litter or just toss it into the passenger seat of your car and let it pile up there with all the other receipts.”

Because when you’re me, you really don’t want to have an easily traceable record of every purchase you make, because it kind of highlights all the sad and pathetic aspects of your life without any real context. The receipts that until a few months ago were piled up in my car painted a pretty bleak picture of my life, because most of them were either for handles of Jack Daniel’s, Philly cheesesteaks, or bulk quantities of snap peas and hummus.

I was always especially indignant about the receipts at restaurants – namely, the ‘CUSTOMER COPY’ that you wind up with. For a long time, a lot of them had ‘RETAIN THIS COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS’ at the bottom, and I loved the idea that the people printing these receipts assumed that a regular cheesesteak and bourbon purchaser such as myself would be well enough organized to have ‘records’ when I have enough trouble cobbling together enough clean clothes to leave the house some days.

For a long time my ‘records’ was my car – I’d toss my receipts in there and forget about them, and then they’d been retained. If you needed to verify that I’d bought something, just run on out to The Truman Capps Preemptive Memorial Archives On Wheels and take a look.

At this stage in my life, I can’t really imagine that there’s much for the IRS to audit me over anyway – and if they did, I don’t think it would take long for them to determine that it was in fact me who’d been buying all those cheesesteaks and all those handles of Jack Daniel’s. They wouldn’t even really need to see receipts or bank statements or anything; all it takes is a look at me, my apartment, and my car to figure out that I’m not some sort of criminal mastermind trying to get one over on the federal government; I’m just too fucking lazy to meticulously preserve and organize a paper trail of my rather embarrassing purchases.

My attitude on receipts, like so many other things, changed when I moved to Los Angeles and started interning and working as a production assistant. A large part of either of these entry level jobs is spending somebody else’s money on stuff that’s necessary for the production – things like a hacksaw, bananas, or 64 cans of black spraypaint.* The thing is, when somebody hands you their credit card or a wad of petty cash and tells you to go get something, they want you to come back with documentation that you spent that money on what they told you to.

*I don’t know if the Home Depot policy is to card everybody who buys spraypaint, or only people who buy more than 50 cans. They either thought I was Banksy or catering for the ultimate paint-huffing party.

So in the past few months I’ve gotten really good at holding onto every receipt I get, and requesting receipts when the cashier forgets to give me one. Once I had to turn around and drive the whole way back to the Ikea in Long Beach because the idiot behind the counter there forgot to give me a receipt for the $480 I’d spent on 39 throw pillows for one of the CODXP lounges – what I’m saying is, don’t doubt my devotion to receipts.

Recently, though, I discovered that there’s a good reason to keep even my own personal receipts. As it turns out, if you’re trying to establish yourself as a writer (like I am), the government will let you write off writing-oriented purchases on your taxes as business expenses.

For example, I go on a lot of runs in my car for my internship – if I hold onto those gas receipts, I can write the gas off as an expense of my trying to become a writer. My Hulu Plus membership? That’s research for being a TV writer, so I can write it off. My copy of FinalDraft is essential for my career as a writer, so it’s a $99 writeoff.

I can keep writing off writing expenses for up to three years – at that point, if I’ve not made any money from writing, I can’t write off my expenses anymore because clearly I’m not cut out to be a writer. It’s sort of comforting that the IRS has its own clearly defined, legal rubric for whether you’re a failure or not.

Receipts, which I once saw as garbage, now have a purpose – they’re essentially little tickets that are redeemable for money back from the government. Knowing that, now I’ve started to try and find a way to tie every purchase I make back to my writing career.

Because, when you think about it, technically everything influences my writing because I write about whatever is going on in my life on a biweekly basis. Remember all those references I made to Jack Daniel’s and Philly cheesesteaks earlier? I feel like that qualifies me to write off several years’ worth of whiskey and junk food as business expenses – I was just doing research for my blog! I blogged about XBox Live once, so why not write that off too? I’m still debating whether I should start saving the receipts from my mind bendingly expensive LA haircuts – if anybody at the IRS wants to argue that maintenance and upkeep of my hair isn’t a business expense, I could just direct them to the name of my blog.

But I’m not going to do that, even though I’m sure I could completely get away with it because nobody’s ever tried it before. It’s because trying to steal money from the government right now is like trying to take money from a completely paraplegic homeless guy who’s also kind of slow in the head. I mean, really, who needs the money more right now – me, the guy with a kind of stable monthly income, some savings in the bank, and no debt, or the entity that owes an almost inconceivable amount of money to China, can barely pay most of its staff, and thinks pizza is a vegetable?

Truman Capps would put his receipts in a file cabinet, but buying a file cabinet feels kind of like just giving up on life and saying, ‘Come at me, middle age!’

Hot Fuzz

We as a nation have learned one hell of a lot about pepper spray recently, wouldn't you say?

Back when I worked at Mike’s Drive In a few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to see Portland police officers come in for a burger and a milkshake – usually after arresting somebody from the public housing project across the street, whose residents were responsible for roughly 40 percent of all Olde English consumption in Oregon.

One night, after I’d handed a pair of Portland’s Finest their order and watched them leave, I heard a snort from one of the fry cooks in the back – a kid about my age (19 at the time) and ethnicity (white, then and now) whose mullet and general abuse of the English language suggested that he lived somewhere in Clackamas.

Seeing that his snort had attracted my attention, he eagerly said, “I hate fuckin’ cops.”

“Oh.” I said.

“All cops should fuckin’ hang themselves,” he added, perhaps thinking that he’d lost me with the subtlety of his previous statement.

I’ve always remembered this exchange because it, like most conversations I had with white kids yelling ‘fuck the police’ in college, made me want to roll my eyes while making the jerking off motion with my hand.

Statistics show that there is definitely some inherent injustice at work in law enforcement today, and that it’s very explicitly not affecting white people. And that’s not to say that white people shouldn’t be upset about racial profiling, but most of the people I heard saying ‘fuck the police’ in school weren’t saying it because they were outraged at the most recent case of overzealous police brutality: They were saying it because they got an MIP or a noise violation or a speeding ticket. They’d gotten caught breaking the law by the people we pay to enforce the law. That’s the system working.

Perhaps it’s because there’s a 45-year-old Republican man living inside my fairly liberal 22-year-old body, but I’ve always generally liked cops. A lot of this is probably because familiarity breeds contempt, and I’ve never really had any dealings with the police, save for the time that they chased down and arrested the hobo who was hammering on our door in the middle of the night this past spring. I’m not saying I don’t commit crimes; I just happen to have the good fortune not to get caught.

I fully recognize that cops have a well earned reputation of being assholes – in fact, in my one other dealing with the Eugene Police Department, the cop in question casually shined a flashlight on my incredibly drunk, possibly alcohol poisoned friend who I was trying to escort home, then glared at me and said, “When she sobers up you tell her if I ever catch her like this again I’m going to throw her in the drunk tank and let her dry out with all the vagrants pissing on the floor,” before getting back in his car and driving away without really doing anything to help the obviously unwell citizen in front of him.

I don’t let that sour my impression of cops in general, though, because I get that they’re not necessarily assholes because they’re power tripping; they’re assholes because they have to be in order to do their job.

Watch an episode of Cops, preferably one of the ones from the early 90s back during the crack epidemic – you realize pretty quick that maybe 60 percent of a policeman’s job is trying to serve as a dispute mediator for hillbillies, having arrived late to the party with no reliable (or sober) source to give them the straight facts. The only way they can even hope to be effective in those situations is to be an asshole to everybody until they can figure out who the guilty party is and take him away. Keeping the peace means being an asshole a lot of the time; and frankly, I’m willing to have somebody be an asshole to me if that’s the same guy who’ll chase the hobos away from my door, because I don’t want to do that shit myself.

So know where I’m coming from when I say that I’m just as pissed off about these fucking pigs at Cal and UC Davis as anybody else is – these fat fucking donut eaters casually strolling around spraying chemical weapons or beating the shit out of some nonviolent professors and philosophy majors. Keeping the peace means being an asshole sometimes – beating up a former poet laureate and his wife because they set up a tent isn’t being an asshole, it’s being a goddamn sociopath.

But let’s think about where we need to direct our rage:

These cops weren’t beating up kids pro-bono. They didn’t show up at the quad in riot gear because they simply wanted to. The administration at these universities sent them there to roust nonviolent protestors whose crimes amounted to blocking pedestrian paths and setting up some tents – this is particularly heinous when you remember that UC Berkeley seems so proud of its history of student activism, so long as it stays safely in the past. University administrators unleashed the dogs, and for their part and motives they should bear a lot of the blame.

The police in these situations have at last given white people a reason to say ‘fuck the police’ – but let’s remember that the dirty cops we’ve seen at these protests as well as in New York, Oakland, and elsewhere represent the entrenched minority of fuckwits who exist in pretty much every workplace setting. Just because a few teachers verbally abuse special needs students doesn’t mean all teachers do. Some accountants cook the books for major corporations; others just do peoples’ taxes. Not all assistant coaches rape children.

Speaking of, the reason that assistant coach in question isn’t raping children anymore is because of a three year investigation conducted by police officers. The reason there’s a Wall Street to peacefully occupy is because the New York Police Department has been there protecting it and its residents from terrorists and the general freakery of New York.

"Much of the NYPD are really on our side. We need to stay away from negative media influence and stay supportive and respectful of their difficult job. Many of the officers I spoke to are supportive of this movement and gratefully acknowledged the peaceful efforts of the protesters." - Girl in the picture ('Photon Frequency')

It doesn’t excuse these recent abuses, but I think it makes a fairly convincing argument against the ‘all cops should hang themselves’ platform.

Truman Capps awaits your allegations that he’s an ‘apologist’.

The Milgram Experiment

Okay – it’s been a weird couple of weeks, I think we can all agree. Current events have proven that there’s clearly some inconsistencies in peoples’ perceptions of propriety and good behavior. I get it. We’re all from different backgrounds, and we all react to things differently. That’s cool. In the interests of averting any further drama, though, I think it’s best that I state publicly my position on these issues, just so everybody knows where I’m coming from if we run into these problems in the future:

1) If I ever catch any of you raping a child, I’m going to first physically stop you, then ensure that the child is okay, and then call the police. In that order.

2) Having alerted the authorities, I will keep a close eye on you until you’ve been taken into custody, ensuring that you stay well away from children.

3) If, having alerted law enforcement, I don’t notice a prompt and sufficient response, I’ll re-alert law enforcement and remind them about the whole rape thing, potentially mixing it up by calling different jurisdictions or county/statewide organizations in hopes of circumventing any corruption.

4) I won’t quit harassing law enforcement until you’re in jail.

5) My reaction to your pedophilia will be in no way be affected by our friendship, your stature within the community, or your job prowess. I have a unilateral policy of police calling on child rapists.

6) I can’t guarantee it, but we probably won’t be friends anymore afterwards. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh. In my defense, you’ll probably be pretty angry at me for getting you thrown in jail.

I know it’s awkward to talk about these things, and in no way do I mean to suggest that any of you are child molesters – given the recent events at Penn State and the subsequent investigation, though, it seems like there’s a lot of disagreement on how best to respond to finding one of your friends and colleagues raping a child.

So I’m just letting all of you know that, should I catch you raping a child, that’s exactly what I’ll do. So don’t let me catch you raping any kids. In fact, maybe you should just not rape kids in general. That seems like the safest course of action.

I wrote a draft of this update about a week ago in a somewhat less stable emotional state, and ultimately decided it wasn’t quite ready to be posted – I don’t want to talk about what I wrote in too much detail, but the title was ‘Fuck You, Joe Paterno!’, so I think you can kind of get an idea of where I stand on the whole thing. I’ve calmed down a bit since then, but I more or less stand by my original sentiment – now I’d just broaden it to, ‘Fuck You, Penn State Administration!’

It’s really a waste of breath to say that Jerry Sandusky is a monster – sure, as some donors to his defense fund will point out, we haven’t heard his side of the story and he ought to have his day in court, but the discovery of a massive coverup resulting in the firing of the University president and an enormously popular and successful football coach isn’t doing a lot to make him look innocent. All I’m saying is, if Dick Cheney wants to fly one last American citizen to a CIA black site and waterboard him, just for the hell of it, I think we as a nation would be willing to look the other way just this once if he chose Jerry Sandusky.

But Jerry Sandusky was a sick and ultimately pretty damn evil guy. What gets me is that the people around him who covered for his actions – who for nine years after either personally witnessing or hearing from a trusted source that Sandusky was raping kids in the locker rooms did nothing and allowed him to keep running a charitable organization for children – are not, I would assume, evil people.

They were a bunch of upstanding, hardworking, normal Americans who found out that one of their colleagues was a child molester and simply reported the information to their immediate superiors and then apparently did their best to forget that they’d ever heard of it. Nine years between McQueary witnessing the rape in the locker room and Sandusky’s arrest – that’s an awful long time for nobody around the water cooler to cock his head and say:

“Hey, whatever happened to that whole ‘We saw Jerry raping a kid’ thing? I mean, he’s still free, and he’s still running that charity for little kids, and Mike definitely saw him raping a little kid, so… I mean, do you think we should do, like, a followup?”

Something that a lot of Paterno’s supporters have brought up is that neither he nor anybody else at Penn State was legally required to report the alleged abuses beyond notifying their immediate superiors, which all of them did. I can’t possibly convey how balls-out retarded the Pennsylvania child abuse reporting statutes are any better than this line from The Intelligencer:

“McQueary didn't have to report what he saw since the child didn't report the abuse to him in his capacity as a graduate assistant for the university.”

I’d make a joke, but then I’d be making a joke about how terrible legislation and a corrupt state university created arguably the perfect environment in which to do irreparable harm to children.

Of course, why does anybody need a set of laws governing whether they should or shouldn’t report child abuse? How could McQueary, Paterno, et al. sleep at night for nine years after having done the bare minimum to report Sandusky’s actions and seeing him go unpunished?

I don’t think that there was anybody at the top forcing the staff to keep their mouths shut. I think those people felt compelled to stay quiet in defense of the program’s legacy as well as Sandusky’s and Paterno’s, and that poorly written legislation requiring them merely pass their knowledge on to superiors was what it took for them to rationalize their inaction. Given the student body’s deplorable response to Paterno’s ouster, I get the idea the climate at Penn State wasn’t one that would encourage a whistleblower threatening to topple the program.

The best answer I can come up with for how good men could stand idly by and let a staggering amount of evil happen right under their noses comes from The Milgram Experiment.

At Yale in 1961, psychology professor Stanley Milgram set out to test his theory that good people can be relatively easily coerced into doing awful things. He set up an experiment in which test subjects were encouraged to press a button which, they were led to believe, administered increasingly painful electric shocks to a test subject in an adjoining room. As the shocks got more powerful and the person in the other room began to pound on the wall in faux-pain, many of the subjects expressed doubt about what they were doing, but at the test administrator’s insistence roughly 65% of test subjects continued to deliver what they thought were 450 volt shocks, even though many of them were visibly uncomfortable about doing it.

Ultimately, Milgram wrote:

"Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”




Truman Capps isn't ending on a joke.

Injury

He just... It's... I just want to hold him, y'know? And just tell him that it's all going to be okay. He's got a big happy life of kangarooing ahead of him. Right? Oh my God why did I pick this picture it's just making me sad...

I was herding a pack of models into a minivan in Hermosa Beach – like you do when you’re a production assistant – when one of them handed me a tube of lip gloss she’d borrowed from the unit production manager and asked if I could give it back to her. I said I would, turned, and saw the unit production manager in question hustling away, around a corner.

Now, the logical thing for me to do would’ve been to call out her name and get her to stop, but the problem was that I’d forgotten her name less than a second after she’d told me what it was, like I do with everyone I’ve ever met because I honestly don’t give two shits what your name is. My options were to either shout, “HEY LADY! YOU, WITH THE… FACE!”, thereby betraying the fact that I was an inconsiderate moron, or run after her, which would conceal the fact that I’d forgotten her name and help to burn off the complimentary pork sliders I’d eaten at the crew lunch.

So I started off running after the unit production manager, lip gloss clutched in hand, when all of a sudden I jammed my toe against something and I was stumbling, out of control, arms flailing, the hard concrete parking lot rushing up at me in slow motion.

Just once in my life, I’d like for something good to happen to me in slow motion. I don’t have any intensely detailed slow motion memories of getting checks in the mail or getting retweeted or finding out that Boise State lost because my brain only seems to want my life to go into The Matrix mode when it’ll be to elongate a terrible moment that I want to be over as quickly as possible – in this case, falling flat on my face in front of a vanload of models.

Classic Truman Capps moment.

I was never the kid with a raft of broken bones and scabby knees – not because I was blessed with any great amount of coordination or balance, but because I actively shied away from any activity I deemed likely to cause me pain in any way. My main bro Alexander would often show up to school with various half healed cuts or missing limbs that, it seemed, he hadn’t even noticed until somebody pointed them out to him, whereas if I got scratched by a rose bush on my way into somebody’s backyard that was pretty much a season ending injury, because that shit stings.

Needless to say, even with the benefit of slow motion my mind, untrained in split second feats of injury-preventing dexterity, floundered to think of a way to minimize damage to myself:

OH SHIT OH SHIT FALLING okay think Truman you’ve got the slow motion thing going on you can use that to your advantage OH SHIT GROUND GETTING CLOSER okay I’m falling I’m falling how do I keep from hitting the ground STOP FALLING no can’t stop falling FALL UPWARDS no can’t do that either GROUND GETTING CLOSER OH SHIT OH SHIT maybe I should put out my hands YEAH PUT YOUR HANDS OUT AND YOU CAN JUST SPRING LIGHTLY OFF THE GROUND LIKE A FUCKING GAZELLE YOU IDIOT okay cool yeah I’ll do that gazelle thing that sounds pretty cool GOD NO THAT WAS SARCASM YOU’RE GOING TO FUCK UP YOUR HANDS oh shit you’re right well here’s the ground!

I hit the ground with my right hand out, scraping the bejeezus out of my palm and spraining the bejeezus out of my wrist, then managed to bang my knee, shoulder, and chin as I hit the ground. Somewhere in the process I also managed to scrape the shit out of my left palm and jam my left thumb.

”MOOSEFUCKER!” I instinctively yelled – I’d seen a billboard with a moose on it on my way to work that morning and the image had lingered in my head until choosing this moment to make its debut, as though placed there by some divine power.

The unit production manager and several other PAs crowded around me as the models watched with the same bemused disinterest most women have for everything I do.

“Are you okay!? Do you need us to call an ambulance?” The unit production manager, ‘ol whatshername, gasped as she knelt over me.

I shook my head and handed her the lip gloss. “Cheyanne wanted me to give this to you. I’m fine. Hey, and this is super embarrassing, but what was your name again?”

Somewhere in the process of taking me back to the production office and getting me set up with bandages and antiseptic she told me her name again, which I promptly forgot again.

The problem with these injuries is that while they’re not especially serious, they’ve rendered me somehow more useless than I normally am. On my best day I can’t change a tire, throw a ball, hammer a nail, or drink milk, but with both hands missing a bunch of skin, one sprained wrist, and one severely jammed thumb, I actually had to ask somebody to help me seal a Ziplock bag. When you can do as few things as I can, it really hurts to have that number reduced so sharply, so quickly, in front of so many beautiful women.

The next day I was talking to my parents, phone pressed feebly to my face with the couple of functional fingers I had left, and I mentioned the injury in hopes of picking up some sympathy.

“So, wait,” Dad said, once I’d recounted what had happened. “When you fell, did you ninja roll?”

I sighed – my parents have been singing the praises of the ninja roll (tucking your arms and rolling into the fall to absorb the shock) for years, and I’d always been sort of ignoring them because I never planned on falling over again.

“No.” I muttered. “I didn’t ninja roll.”

“Well, see, there’s your problem,” Mom said. “You should’ve ninja rolled.”

“I know, okay? I know. Nobody is more aware of the benefits of the ninja roll right now than me.”

“At least you learned something.” Dad pointed out.

I think it was Kanye West who said, “That which does not kill me can only make me stronger,” and I guess I can see how that’s true, but I think the quote stops short of being accurate. Let’s try: “That which does not kill me can only make me stronger, after an intermittent period of being far weaker than before.”

Truman Capps wants all the haters to click here before they misinterpret comedy for me being a bigger idiot than usual.

Good/Bad

Good news: I got hired as a PA on Wednesday, hence why I didn't update that night - I had to get home, crank out two newsletters for the competition, and then try to grab as much sleep as I could before 7:00 AM call in Torrance.

Bad news: They want me to come in tomorrow too and I only got home tonight at 9:00, giving me enough time to crank out a newsletter and do laundry before having to go to bed in advance of tomorrow's balls early call time.

Good news: $

I'll talk to you Saturday.

Busy

My definition of the term ‘busy’ has changed a lot in the past eight or so years. I mean, not to the point that I now use it interchangeably with the word ‘socket wrench’ or something, but rather how much I have to be doing to consider myself busy.

Take high school, for example – looking back, I have no idea how I pulled that off. Each morning I’d get up at something like 6 for jazz band and then spend seven or eight hours in that concrete and asbestos soul crushing labyrinth, or more, depending on if there was a rehearsal after school. On weekends there was a pretty good chance I’d have a band competition or speech and debate tournament, and let’s not forget about homework. What I’m describing here was just an ordinary week, with midterms/finals far out of sight. I mean, I couldn’t even make the claim that I was ‘too busy’ for a girlfriend, because people far more involved than I still found the time to bone and experiment with drugs between AP study sessions.

I guess I’m just shocked that I didn’t bitch about it more – I mean, trust me, I did bitch about high school a lot, but in retrospect the amount of bitching I did was nowhere near proportional to the amount of work there was to bitch about. And bitching is kind of my thing; I take it pretty seriously. For reference, please see everything I’ve ever written on here. Maybe I just couldn’t see the activity forest for the stress trees.

Because if I learned one thing in the course of my educational career, it’s that I hate being constantly occupied. A lot of my friends were very much the opposite – they’d load up on academic and extracurricular commitments to the point of mental breakdown come finals week, because, in their own (paraphrased and poorly remembered) words, “I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m unoccupied.”

Whenever I heard that line I’d always catch myself wondering if these friends knew about alcohol and video games, or if these were some sort of secret between me and other proud slackers the world over. Either way, what I came to realize in school was that if I couldn’t spend at least 40% of my day farting around and accomplishing nothing of any use to anyone, I’d start to get a little cranky.

The story was the same in college – even when my workload was significantly less than that of some of my friends, I still found myself burning out quickly. I remember winter term of my senior year as a haze of video editing, checkout room idiots, and spinning Mac OSX pinwheels occupying seemingly every moment of my spare time, the looming prospect of a nervous breakdown held at bay by cheap whiskey and 7-11 taquitos – and that was the term that I took 16 credits, otherwise known as the average number of credits taken by University of Oregon students. Me being relieved and eager for a break at graduation was the academic equivalent of a fat man sweating bullets and wheezing as he reaches the top of a short staircase, eager for his next cheeseburger.

In the past ten days, I’ve driven to and from Reno, cranked out newsletters continuously for the screenplay competition I’m working for, PA’d on a no-budget indie film shoot in Orange County, and maintained my usual three day a week internship schedule – which, now that I look at it on the page, doesn’t seem like that much, but it sure feels like it, at least given the typical slovenly pace at which I live my life.

What’s surprising to me is that in spite of the fact that I’ve been going with essentially no break for so long (by my standards), I don’t really feel all that burned out. I mean, sure, I’ve been sacrificing sleep and timely blog updates, and sure, I’ve been keeping my wits about me with slightly more expensive whiskey and 7-11 taquitos, but this is really the first time I can remember that I don’t strictly consider stress to be a bad thing. I’m actually sort of enjoying being constantly occupied.

I think the answer is that I just really didn’t like school. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all the awesome stuff that came with school (friends, football, 50 cent tacos), and if I got a cosmic do-over on my life I’d do it all again, but by and large the school parts of school just weren’t for me. I’m not a fan of the classroom; I don’t consider myself an academia nut.*

*The more lame puns I make, the less you’ll miss my blog the next time I’m late.

And I don’t want to sound like one of those douchebags who excuses his ignorance by adjusting his wide brimmed Yankees cap and saying, ‘Yeah, I learn by doing’, because I don’t even really consider what I’m doing right now to be learning – if anything, I’ve quit learning in favor of doing, and I like that a lot better because personally I feel more productive when I’m out doing things instead of just learning how to do them.

And then I also don’t want to sound like I’m coming out against learning, because I’m not – I recognize that I am learning things every day through small samplings of trial and gigantic amounts of error – it’s just that I’ve never been the guy who got all jazzed about learning things just for the sake of knowing them, hence why if I meet a Spanish speaking geologist I’ll be completely unable to understand him no matter what language he’s talking in.

They say that if you do something you love for a living you’ll never work a day in your life. By that logic I’ve definitely been working these past few days, but I think what makes it enjoyable is that it gives me a chance to watch people who actually are doing what they love, which helps me remember that it’s possible, even for those of us who opted out of AP classes in favor of more Grand Theft Auto time.

Truman Capps hasn't washed his socks in God knows how long.

A Place Called Nevada

NC-17 vision, that is.

When I was a sophomore in high school, our marching band took a big road trip to Reno to participate in a marching band competition at the University of Nevada. From the second we got off the buses at the suburban high school where we were staying, we could tell something was wrong with this place – the air smelled like sewage, the water tasted like the air smelled, and the bathrooms had foregone toilet paper in favor of a small napkin dispenser full of little paper napkins bolted to the wall of the stall, which made for one of my least satisfactory bowel movements of 2004.

Once we’d competed, picked up our small plastic trophy, and departed, we agreed pretty much unanimously that Reno was a terrible place – and that means something coming from a bunch of people who lived in Salem, Oregon. What we didn’t know, though, was that by staying on the outskirts of town we’d only scratched the creepy, sewery surface of Reno and Nevada in general.

I spent this past weekend working as a production assistant at a small ranch outside Reno where men legally pay women to have sex with them. (There is also a four star restaurant and motocross track.) The experiences I had this weekend could fill multiple completely awesome books, but the circumstances of my non-disclosure agreement prevent me from discussing much of it in detail. That said, my five days in Nevada gave me a lot of opportunities to reflect on what a goddamn bizarre state Oregon and California share a border with.

First, the good:

1) On November 26th, 2010, the University of Nevada handed Boise State their first loss in 24 consecutive games when Boise State kicker Kyle Brotzman missed two consecutive field goals, crushing the Broncos’ hopes of attaining any sort of relevance by going to the BCS Championship. This day was henceforth known as Football Christmas.

2) In Nevada, gambling is legal statewide, prostitution is legal in most counties, and alcohol sales are permitted 24 hours a day. Let me go on the record as saying, here and now, that I think this should be the case in the rest of the United States, because I’m of the firm belief that the government has no fucking business legislating morality, and in Nevada they clearly agree. When these sorts of activities are properly licensed and regulated, I think they do one hell of a lot more good than the financial industry – the brothel I stayed at generates the vast majority of the revenue in the county, and so far none of the working girls there have orchestrated a worldwide economic meltdown.

But then, the bad:

1) The University of Nevada didn’t so much win that game as Boise State lost it.

2) I’d encourage anybody on the fence about my pseudo-libertarian philosophy on vice legislation to not visit Nevada – I believe it’s fully possible for a place to have legalized gambling and prostitution without being all skeevy and weird; Nevada just happens to be all skeevy and weird on its own.

On Halloween – our last night in town – a bunch of us decided to leave the rural brothel and drive the 20-odd miles into Reno for a drink and something to eat. Imagine our surprise when we arrived in downtown Reno to discover that the city seemingly exists in a vortex where it’s perpetually 1986 and ground zero for the crack epidemic. Drunks and tweakers stumbled the mostly empty streets, lit by faded neon lights on the few downtown casinos that hadn’t closed. A billboard on a strip club advertised a ‘$5.99 PRIME RIB!!!’, along with a picture of easily the least appetizing cut of meat I’d ever seen. Photoshop, Nevada. Photoshop.

Nevada, I’d say, is the equivalent of a kid I knew and disliked in high school named Dan – so desperate to be liked and accepted by others that it engages in outlandish activity in hopes of attracting attention and friends. In the early 1900s, when the Silver Rush died down and the people living in Nevada started to realize that there was no reason to live in the desert anymore, the state legislature started legalizing every vice they could think of in hopes of keeping the population they had and drawing some more back. Likewise, Dan wore outlandishly colored contact lenses and openly bragged on his direct relation to a Nazi war criminal.* The difference here is that Nevada is now among the fastest growing states in America, whereas Dan still has no friends.

*I think Dan saw this as a calculated risk because there are only seven Jewish people in Oregon at any given time, but that still doesn’t make it okay.

The reason I’m turning around and criticizing Nevada’s lax vice laws after praising them earlier is because they’re so inconsistent – in Nevada, a minor caught in possession of any amount of marijuana is looking at between one and four years in prison and a $5000 fine. I mean, screw inconsistent – inviting somebody to your state to gamble and pay for sex and then not letting them herb up afterwards is practically criminal. When you think about it, that really makes Nevada kind of a tease. They want to act like some kind of Libertarian paradise, but they’re not prepared to go all the way.

During the shoot, we took a trip to Carson City, Nevada’s tiny capital city, to film the annual Nevada Day parade. Nevada Day – the anniversary of Nevada’s statehood – is such a huge deal in Nevada that everybody gets the day off from work, which explains why seemingly the entire state had gathered in this small town to watch a whole bunch of floats, horses, and classic cars inch down a mile of Carson Street. One of the camera guys and I ran ahead in hopes of getting some good B-roll but were stymied by the crowds of proud Nevadans lining the streets, blocking our shots.

We spotted a second floor balcony on a local law firm, and I ducked inside to ask some of the employees lounging around if we could get up there to use it as a vantage point to film the parade.

“Hi there,” I said to the handsome middle-aged lawyer who the employees told me ran the place. “My name’s Truman. I’m here with [production company] and we’re shooting a documentary about [brothel] – is there any chance we could get up on your balcony to film their float in the parade?”

He flashed me the warmest, brightest, most blinding smile in the universe. “Sure! Head on up there. Door’s on your right. You want a doughnut? Have a doughnut. We’ve got too many. Just take one.”

This is why I can’t fault Nevada completely – everybody I met there who wasn’t a meth addict or one remarkably dour waitress in Reno was overpoweringly nice in a good natured, happy-go-lucky, small town Americana kind of way; sex workers included. As it turns out, nice people can and do live in a creepy, awkward place – even Dan had a couple of cool hangers on from time to time.

Truman Capps can’t stress enough that he doesn’t consider himself a Libertarian – he just hates getting kicked out of bars at 2:00 AM.