Gym Guy, Part II

To give you an idea of my general level of self confidence, I assume that I look exactly like this at all times.

The Planet Fitness in Inglewood was next door to a Vons supermarket in a relatively new shopping center that was completely encircled by a concrete and wrought iron fence, which offered decent protection from Inglewood’s robust criminal element and excellent protection from zombies, should a Dawn of the Dead situation have occurred while I was at the gym.

Sitting there in the parking lot, staring at the gym, my fears of getting shot in Inglewood subsided and my general gym-related fears returned. It was one thing to decide to go get a gym membership and get buff when I was sitting on my ass at home with pastries well within reach; here in a parking lot that was probably a shooting location for Training Day, it was a horse of a different color (and weight class).  

How can they guarantee that it’s truly a ‘judgment free zone’? What if you go in there and people start judging you anyway, silently? You know what you look like when you exercise. You’d judge you. And you know damn well they probably wouldn’t turn Helpful Dude away if he was willing to pay for a membership – their loyalty is to their shareholders, not dorky guys like you. Look, why don’t you just head into Vons, buy a couple pounds of thick cut bacon, head home, crack open a Strongbow, and just make this Sunday a tight butthole?

Sometimes I think I spend more time sitting in The Mystery Wagon psyching myself up to do things than I do actually driving it.

Since I’d already driven all the way to Inglewood, I reasoned that I’d probably hate myself for about a week if I didn’t go in and at least look at the gym. Of course, I knew I would probably also hate myself if I went in and started exercising only to get a cheerful lesson from The Helpful Dude. I was looking at self loathing no matter what I did, so on an impulse I threw open the door of The Mystery Wagon and started briskly walking towards the door of Planet Fitness – at the very least, I was burning some calories by walking, right?

I stepped inside and found myself in a fairly well appointed, spacious gym, full of incredibly ripped black and Hispanic men running on the treadmills and pumping serious iron on the weight machines.

I stood there on the threshold for longer than I’d like to admit, staring out at this vast room full of exercise equipment being used by minorities who were sculpted to perfection. Not only was I without a doubt the least athletic person there, I was also the only white guy.

Seeing as I’m from Oregon, I’m not used to being in situations where I’m the only white person, and I didn’t want this – me clumsily learning how to get into shape at a gym – to be the first time I had to shoulder the burden of being a minority and representing my race. Because, let’s be honest: I reinforce a lot of negative stereotypes about white people. I’m like the Flavor Flav of white people.

I mean, look at me – I’ve got no sense of style, I can’t dance, I’m weak, I’m awkward, I’m usually having serious anxiety about something, I have a blog, and I’m pretty much one bar mitzvah away from being Jewish. Sheltered white kids in the suburbs assume all black people are like Snoop Dogg; I didn’t want to give these working class urban folks the impression that all white people were like Truman Capps.

I feel like I owe my race more than that. Being white has benefitted me in innumerable ways – it’s kind of my duty as a white person to not fulfill all those stereotypes, but try as I might, I’m at my very whitest when I’m engaging in some sort of physical activity.

Ideally, I’d walk into a bar near some HBCU college campus on trivia night and get drafted onto one of the teams. And even if my team didn’t win, we’d all have a great evening and buy each other drinks and get drunk together and bridge all kinds of cultural gaps.

That’s when I’m at my best – in a bar, drinking, answering questions about pop culture. I do white people proud when I’m in a bar. Not at a gym, though. Never at a gym.

What’s more, I could see other people filling out the membership paperwork, and I started to ask myself if I was really that committed to fitness. Did I really want to get up early every day and add 12 miles to my 40 mile a day commute so I could drive to the ghetto and work out in what is supposedly a judgment free zone just because of my own neuroses?

What I realized, looking at the gym, is that even though it was well suited to my psychological needs on paper, it was still far from the perfect gym for me.

The perfect gym for me, I now realize, is a room with one treadmill and one weight machine, and I am the only member. When I show up, the staff pulls curtains over all the windows, leaves, and locks the door behind them, and then I am exercising completely alone, where nobody can see me and even start to begin to think about how stupid I look, thus freeing me from having to think about how stupid they probably think I look.

“Can I help you, sir?” One of the staff members at the front desk asked, smiling widely.

“Nope!” I said, probably too loud, and all but ran back to my car and my boxes of pastries. 

Truman Capps anticipates the next step in this process being a P90X blog. 

Gym Guy, Part I

I passed this iconic doughnut shop on my way into Inglewood - Buster Bluth was not trying to eat it at the time, and Iron Man was nowhere to be found.

Our new roommate works at a coffee shop in Venice, and on Friday night she came home with three huge boxes of pastries and doughnuts that the shop had baked that day for a catering order that had been canceled at the last minute. The boss had given the excess delicacies to her, which she brought home to us, which is such an incredibly bro move that we’re considering giving her a freebie on next month’s rent.

The presence of three large boxes of pastries in your living room does certain things to your eating habits – I, for example, normally eat three times per day, but since the arrival of the pastries I now eat every time I walk through the living room and see that there are still pastries to be eaten. Also, I now find excuses to walk through the living room more often to check the pastry supply. It’s a vicious cycle that will probably set the landspeed record for getting diabetes.

It’s to that end that I started seriously considering the whole ‘go get a gym membership’ issue that I go back and forth on every month or so. When I was unemployed, a gym membership would’ve been lunacy – I needed that money to pay rent, and I consumed so few calories per day from my diet of white rice and soy sauce that I really couldn’t afford to use them doing anything but keeping my body running.

Now, however, my fortunes have changed – both in that I’m making money and that I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to consume 30,000 calories worth of fresh pastries in one weekend. Yesterday, as I shoved some sort of jam-filled delight into my mouth, crumbs cascading onto my unwashed shirt, I made a decision: I have to join a fucking gym.

As loyal readers will remember from my failed experiment with swimming, the main reason I’ve avoided gyms in the past is because of my arch nemesis, Helpful Dude, the friendly Adonis whose life begins and ends with protein shakes and body sculpting, and who posts Facebook status updates like, “UGH i havent been to the gym in like 3 days IM SUCH A FATTY lol :D”

The Helpful Dude is the guy who spots you (me) struggling to lift a ten pound weight, strides over with his perfect fucking smile, claps you (me) on the shoulder in a clear violation of your (my) personal space issues, and says, “Hey there, my name’s Ty. Looks like you’re having some trouble! Mind if I give you a couple pointers?”

It’s that sort of behavior that makes public exercise wholly unappealing for me. I know that I’m not well suited to movement in general – my friends have been quick to point out over the years that I look hilarious when I run, walk, stand up, blink, lift my arm, open garage doors, turn around, or reach for something on a high shelf – so I certainly don’t need some sexy, friendly guy who probably lost his virginity in 7^th grade to tell me how stupid and out of place I look in this environment full of confident, well muscled Greek gods.

However, I had recently seen a commercial for a new gym called Planet Fitness which gave me some hope for potentially finding an environment in which I could sweat without fear of the predatory Helpful Dude. Planet Fitness is all about creating a ‘judgment-free zone’ in which ordinary people and self-loathing Louis C.K. types like myself can get fit without being preyed upon by grunting, squat thrusting lunkheads.

In a pastry-induced haze I stumbled to my computer and Googled for a Planet Fitness location near me. Now, Los Angeles is a gym crazy city, to be sure, but unfortunately most gym-going Angelinos are Helpful Dude types who specifically want a judgment-heavy zone in which to work out and show off, so there were not a lot of Planet Fitness locations to choose from. My options were either to drive 60 miles to a location in Orange County, or about 6 miles to a location in Inglewood.

Now, I knew that Inglewood had a reputation as being a kind of sketchy part of town. That said, I’d never actually been there, and a lot of parts of Los Angeles that had been really sketchy in the early 90s were now gentrifying and becoming fertile breeding grounds for hipsters, which, in my opinion is a slight improvement over crack dealers and drive bys. And even if Inglewood was sketchy, it’d be a small price to pay to be able to get fit without the presence of the Helpful Dude.

So I threw a pair of shorts and an old T-shirt into a gym bag, scarfed down a couple more pastries for good luck, and got in The Mystery Wagon to go check this gym out and maybe sign up for a membership so I could get good and swoll, Ryan Gosling style.

As I pulled off the 405 at the Inglewood exit, the first thing I saw was a homeless crackhead wrapped in a beach towel stumbling across a set of old railroad tracks, fumbling with a bag of Lays potato chips in his shaky hands.

“Well, this is off to a great start.” I sighed.

Inglewood is not gentrifying. It’s the opposite of gentrifying – by which I mean, this city is so completely fucked that you could shoot an 80s postapocalyptic action movie there. At every crosswalk along streets lined with cash advances services and bail bonds offices I halfway expected to see a bunch of mohawked punks in leather jackets with switchblades and Uzis. I didn’t catch sight of any, but maybe they were all hiding inside some of Inglewood’s decaying hundred year old bungalows, all of which were fully enclosed by steel bars, either to keep the meth addicts out or the meth cooks in.

On the plus side, knowing I was going to be getting out of my car in this neighborhood was really getting my adrenaline pumping, which was definitely good cardio.

Truman Capps will return on Wednesday with Part II!

Reefer Discontent

Admittedly, us pro-legalization folk don't have the most credible advocates...

This may come as some surprise to you, but back in middle school, in spite of my liberal politics, I was actually quite the little social conservative. I used to get offended when people made fun of George W. Bush (being president is a hard job!) and was a big believer in abstaining from all sexual activity until marriage, thanks to the squad of churchy high schoolers who taught my abstinence based sex ed classes as well as an unconscious understanding that sex wasn’t going to be something I had to worry about for a very, very long time.

I was also well acquainted with the insidious dangers of marijuana, a gateway drug that was used to fund terrorism in a way that the public service announcements didn’t make entirely clear. However, even in 2002, when my post 9/11 bandwagon patriotism had essentially converted me into a miniature, overweight Sean Hannity with braces, I was still in favor of legalizing marijuana.

I recognized that it was incredibly dangerous, but I knew that plenty of other dangerous drugs like alcohol and cigarettes were legal forms of tax revenue, and I couldn’t see why we weren’t legalizing it so we could at least earn money to pay for the War on Terrorism and control distribution of the drug so terrorists would quit making money off of the stuff.

So, to recap: An ill-informed reactionary twelve year old who couldn’t multiply fucking fractions had a more rational and levelheaded drug policy than the Ivy League-educated 50-year-old with a couple of degrees who is currently President of the United States.

In the intervening years, I’ve learned how wrong I was about basically everything – George W. Bush was, is, and always will be a douchewhale, premarital sex is as awesome as it is rare, and marijuana, like Earth, is mostly harmless.* I mean, duh. (I still cannot multiply fractions.)

*That report I linked to was a government study commissioned by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, which he predictably ignored.

I learned these things by living my life for ten years, which is why I’m surprised that Barack Obama – who has lived longer than I have and is significantly more intelligent than I am – seems committed to seeing the drug banned and its users punished, states’ rights be damned.

I like President Obama a lot. I think he’s an excellent speaker and I’m a fan of healthcare, financial industry regulation, ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and any number of other things he’s done. I think he ran a great campaign in 2008, and 2012 seems poised to top it. And while I’m no sports authority, I’ve seen some pictures of the man playing basketball, and I’m convinced he’s by far the most ballin’ president in American history.

But forgive me if I get a bit snippy when the guy who’s got a brief history of cocaine use and a long history of cigarette use appoints a Bush-era moron to run the DEA, reverses his campaign promise to leave marijuana issues up to the states, and starts cracking down on licensed, tightly regulated, highly profitable dispensaries and grow operations.

I really can’t understand Obama’s position on this issue. I would get it if this was Bush or Clinton – they were both perfectly willing to ignore logic in favor of the status quo. But the reason Obama got my vote in 2008 wasn’t because of hope – it was because of common sense. He was campaigning to invest in American infrastructure, end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and leave marijuana alone, all of which are pretty damn good ideas for running America, if you ask me.

So the fact that in the past few months he’s gone all 1984 with drug raids, refused to discuss the issue with the public, and tabled any discussion of legalization with South American diplomats is really confusing to me, because these strike me as the sort of Republican-style reactionary politics I thought we could count on the executive branch to avoid, at least for four years.

I mean, President Obama is pro-choice, for Christ’s sake. This guy is willing to say he’s okay with giving women the choice to kill their unborn children if they want to – which is enough to get you straight up murdered in a big chunk of America – but he’s suddenly going all Nancy Reagan on businessmen growing marijuana for medical purposes, which is way less controversial.

He fought an incredibly bloody legislative battle to lay a framework for America’s first ever comprehensive healthcare plan in spite of all kinds of outcry, but marijuana legalization, which 50% of Americans support, is just too much to ask.

He’s worked to increase transparency and make government more accessible to Americans, but even when large numbers of us start asking why he’s breaking his own promise and superseding state law to go after people growing a plant that alleviates the pain and suffering of people with all kinds of illnesses, he flatly ignores us.

All I can think is that there’s got to be more to this – he’s playing some kind of Machiavellian, Atreides vs. Harkonnens political long game to sway some moderate Republican anti-pot voting bloc in order to win reelection in November, at which point he’ll quietly ease off on the pot crackdown so chemo patients can, y’know, eat again.

And call me a blind, Obama worshipping idiot, but if that is the case, I’d actually forgive him for it. A few months of ignorant, backwards drug policy is a small price to pay for four years of Mitt Romney not being president – because let’s be honest, if he won the election, marijuana would be the first of many things that would become illegal.

But whatever you do, don’t call this pot crackdown some element of President Obama’s grand, evil scheme to unite the whole world under the banner of socialism and put all of his opponents in front of Death Panels, terrorist fist bumping Michelle the entire time.

Why? Because if Barack Obama wanted to enslave the world, he’d want to ensure that no grass roots movement sprang up trying to stop him – and how better to keep people pacified and uninterested in fighting than by giving them easy access to a drug that makes you want to sit around, eat Doritos, and watch South Park all day?

Truman Capps apologizes if he misused the word ‘ballin’.

Hit And Stay

It was exactly this exciting.

I hit a skateboard-riding hipster with The Mystery Wagon this afternoon. I usually try to think of a snappy or intriguing way to start the blog in order to draw the Facebook crowd to Blogspot, but never before have I had a dynamite hook like this one just drop into my lap. And to think, all I had to do was hit some poor soul with my car to do it!

I’m pretty fond of my apartment complex, all things considered, but my biggest complaint is that the alley behind the units where we all park is a real nightmare – it’s cramped, there aren’t any clearly delineated parking spaces, and it’s always full of the neighbors’ kids scampering around and playing, which is awesome for them* but bad for the guy trying to move his car without inadvertently ruining somebody’s quinceanera.

*I am so fucking jealous of the kids who live in my apartment complex. There’s probably about 20 of them, none of them any older than 13, and every weekend and afternoon after school they’re out there in the alley sprinting around, screaming, shooting each other with squirt guns, playing football… These kids are having literally the perfect childhood. They’re getting exercise, they live on the same block as all their best friends, they’re two miles away from a beach, it basically never rains… Lucky bastards. Some of us had to grow up in Oregon and be fat, but they don’t even know.

Particularly treacherous are the narrow easements between the building that allow access between the alley and the street. Not only has the challenge of making the tight, blind turn into a narrow easement resulted in several people scraping up their cars (myself included), but when it spits you out at the street you’ve got basically no idea who’s coming up the sidewalk because you’re hemmed in by buildings on both sides. My solution is usually to go really slowly and think happy thoughts, which had been working like gangbusters until today.

I was inching out from between the buildings at about two miles an hour, looking first to the left to see if there was anybody coming up the sidewalk from that direction. Fortunately, there wasn’t – unfortunately, a couple of 20something hipsters on longboards were zooming up the sidewalk from the right, not paying attention, and I only saw them when they were right in front of me.

They saw me at the same time that I saw them, and we all three shat bricks. I jammed on the brakes to slow my two miles per hour of momentum, and one of the two hipsters hopped off of his skateboard, scrambling out of the way. I’m not sure whether the other just fell off of his skateboard in fright or if the bumper of my car actually nudged him off – the point is, I watched a guy collapse against the hood of my car and then slide out of view, which is a pretty disturbing thing to see on a Sunday afternoon when you’re trying to go to the mall.

The hipster who’d recovered gaped at me and I gaped back.

Holy shit! I thought. This is so going in the blog!

Here’s how shitty of a person I am: For about a tenth of a second, I found myself just sitting there in the car, running through my escape options. Worst case scenario, I had slightly nudged a guy who whizzed out in front of my car, and my immediate reaction was to fret about how long it would take me to grab my passport before hitting the 405 South towards Mexico and get a job as an emcee at a donkey show in Tijuana or something. Basically, I don’t so much have a ‘fight or flight’ reflex as I have a ‘flight, possibly while screaming’ reflex.

But I overpowerd my fear, shut off the car, and hopped out, spouting all the post-accident bullshit I could think of, most of which included the word ‘sorry.’

The hipster who’d gone down was lying on his back on the sidewalk, eyes shut, taking some deep breaths. His friend and I probably didn’t do him too many favors by hovering over him and saying, “Are you okay? Are you okay? Should we call 911? Are you okay?”

Presently, he sat up. “I’m good, man, don’t worry. I should’ve been looking.” He turned to his friend. “Dude, give me a beer.”

His friend produced a beer from his pocket – a useful friend indeed – and handed it to him. “Beer makes everything better,” he grinned.

Even though it wasn’t my fault, I still felt bad. These guys were both being really friendly about the whole thing and appropriately self-medicating with beer, and I felt bad that I’d been a party to their otherwise awesome Sunday getting suddenly more complicated and painful. Plus, how the hell do you leave a situation where you’ve almost run somebody over?

”Well, uh, sorry about the whole ‘almost ran you over’ thing. I guess be more careful next time? So, uh… Bye! Good luck not getting hit by any more cars!

“Hey,” I said as the fallen hipster got to his feet and took a long pull on the beer. “I’ve got some more beer inside. Let me grab you one; it’s the least I can do.”

Both of these guys weren’t going to turn down beer, so I scampered back into my apartment and threw open the fridge. In there we had one of those huge bottles of some craft brewed Porter that one of our friends had bought and left at the house weeks ago. I grabbed it and ran back outside, where both hipsters were getting ready to remount their boards, seemingly no worse for wear.

“Here’s this.” I said, handing them the beer. “It’s a Porter, so… Yeah.”

They were both impressed at the quality of the beer and thanked me several times as I headed back to my car. Before I got in, the dude I’d almost hit/slightly nudged shook my hand.

“Sorry again.” I said. “Enjoy the beer.”

He laughed. “It’s cool. Don’t trip.”

I got back into the car, congratulating myself on yet another successful human interaction. “Y’know, I won’t trip! Have a great day!”

So I drove off to the mall, windows down and fresh sea hair blowing through The Mystery Wagon, watching in my rear view mirror as the two hipsters made their way down the sidewalk again, passing the bottle back and forth.

I hit a guy with my car and then used craft brewed beer to smooth things over. I solve my problems Portland style.

Truman Capps is still not a beer drinker, but he appreciates its use in diplomacy.

The Sweet Genius Of Workaholics

From left to right: Me, Other Friend Brent, Main Bro Alexander.

If you were to go through the massive ‘Stories’ folder on my hard drive wherein I have a digital copy of every piece of fiction I’ve written or attempted to write since I was 13, you would see a lot of fascinating things. You would see a large amount of Mary Sue-style fan fiction from my middle school years, innumerable halfassed screenplays that are bad in ways not previously thought possible by science, and more than a few attempts from my early college years to condense my high school life and experiences into a poignant and funny novel. (The last thing you would see would be me running up behind you with an axe to kill you in order to preserve the secrets of just how embarrassingly horrible 90% of my creative output really is.)

But before the whole axe thing, if you looked closely at the stories and screenplays I tried to write about high school and adolescence, you’d see that they all started with some approximation of, “So there are these three dudes, and they’ve been best friends forever.” (Another prevalent theme was, “So there are these zombies and we have to kill or hide from them,” and “So there was this video game and here are some stories I made up about the characters in it.”)

I kept revisiting the ‘three dudes’ trope for a couple of reasons – for one, it makes it pretty easy to tell a funny story with snappy, character driven comedy. It’s not hard to create three distinct, well fleshed out characters, and three dudes as opposed to two allows for two of them to be able to team up and isolate the other when the occasion calls for it, which is a good conflict.

However, more than all that stuff – most of which I thought up three minutes ago – I found myself unconsciously gravitating to stories about three dudes because most of what I write about is inspired by things that happen to me, and most of the things that happened to me in high school happened in the context of me and two other dudes; namely, My Main Bro Alexander and our Other Friend Brent. We called ourselves the Flying All Star Trio, and no, since you’re asking, most of our adventures together didn’t involve women.

As much as I eschew most traditional masculinity by not playing sports, referring to myself as a feminist, or using words like ‘eschew’, I’m a big fan of male bonding and bromance, largely due to my bromantic experiences in high school. It’s why I’m a fan of movies like Superbad - they’re about guys who, despite all their failings and lameness and assholery, really love one another beyond reason. There’s an understated sweetness in blind, unconditional friendship.

That is why I believe that Workaholics, the character driven slacker sitcom on Comedy Central, is probably one of the greatest shows on television at the moment. At the very least, it’s a lot better than The Office, and their first season was arguably more consistently hilarious than this season of Community, at least so far.

The show’s premise is this: There are these three dudes and they’ve been best friends forever, and having recently graduated from college they now live together in Rancho Cucamonga, California, working 9-5 in a dead end job as telemarketers and spending most of their time outside of work doing their best to forget that they’re supposed to act like adults now. Most episodes revolve around the trio’s farcical adventures at the office or at home as they try to either avoid work without getting fired or reclaim some semblance of the coolness and social status they’d had in college.

It would be really easy for this show about three young white males partying and being irresponsible to turn into some shitty, American Pie Presents: The Workaholics! travesty, but thanks to the considerable talent of the show’s writers, who are also its stars, most of the comedy is character and dialogue driven, and I’d wager they’re sober for at least three quarters of the writing process. The scripts are pretty tightly structured and almost always build to an unexpected and funny conclusion, which is really saying something when you remember that in the second episode of the series, one of the protagonists inadvertently exposes himself to a child while wearing a coat that looks like a grizzly bear.

The characters, despite their general laziness and misanthropy, are way sweeter and more redeemable than those on other slacker comedies like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia because through thick and thin, these guys love each other and frequently go to great, illegal, and sometimes disgusting lengths to show it. What’s more, like the guys in Superbad, it’s easy to find one of them whose personality you identify with, which makes it far easier to get invested in the three dudes and what happens to them. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a phenomenal show in its own right, but it’s more of a freak safari through the darkest parts of human nature than a show with protagonists who you want to succeed.

At the risk of getting too up my own ass with analytical bullshit, I think Workaholics is, perhaps unintentionally, probably more in touch with my generation and the kind of shit we’re dealing with than any other show I’m aware of.

Much like me and many of my friends, the three dudes on Workaholics all grew up in suburban, upper-middle class environments and were raised to understand that they would definitely attend college after high school because, with college degrees, they would definitely get good jobs and be successful.

Like many of my friends (and me for the six months before I got lucky and stumbled into an advertising job), they graduated to find a dismal job market where the best their degrees could get them was shitty work for shitty pay and no benefits.

Everything they’d been taught about how to be a grown up turned out to be wrong, and in response they smoke weed on their roof, form a wizard themed rap group, go on an all-night bender with their boss’s autistic younger brother, and generally reject adulthood and all its trappings. I mean, can you blame them?

It's just a refreshing counterpoint to a show like How I Met Your Mother, in which all the of the 20something protagonists are successful enough right out of college to afford spacious Manhattan apartments and multiple cab rides per night. While that, too, is a great show, it can be kind of stressful to watch people in roughly your age group going to bars and fancy parties all the time when you're facing the prospect of eating white rice and ketchup for your next ten meals.

In those moments, aimless and unemployed Millennials can look to the reassuring glow of Workaholics and know adulthood isn't going anywhere, so we and our bros can take our time getting there if need be.

Truman Capps has probably alienated most of his readers by suggesting that anything is funnier than Community.

People Living In Competition

"[expletive deleted]"

I hang out with my Oregon friends Dylan and Holly two or three times a week. On Monday nights we download and watch the latest episode of Mad Men from iTunes because we don’t have cable, on Tuesdays we go to one of the several Mexican restaurants in our part of town for cheap tacos, and usually at least one evening out of the weekend is spent together in close proximity to pizza and alcohol. This, kids, is what happens after you graduate from college and move away: Now that you no longer live within walking distance of 30 drinking buddies, you begin to get very close to the friends you have, whether they want you in their life that much or not.

Dylan and Holly are a power couple – they started dating in December of our freshman year at the University of Oregon, making their relationship roughly as old as this blog (although far more consistent in terms of quality.) I, with my somewhat spotty dating record, can scarcely wrap my head around the concept of having a significant other in your life for that long without them donating your DVDs to charity or humiliating you at your senior prom or revealing that they’ve had a secret boyfriend at the US Naval Academy for the duration of your relationship (all true stories!), but I think Dylan and Holly have made it all these years for two reasons:

1) Both of them are significantly more mature than I am, and
2) They work out any latent aggression toward one another through relentless, brutal, unending competition.

Both Dylan and Holly played sports in high school and, in college, each tried to outdo the other with extracurricular activities and classes. On top of all that, there’s the constant games – in virtually every competitive board or video game, these two are constantly going head to head, working out whatever subconscious frustrations they may have with one another by aggressively trash talking and trying to drive the other to ruin in a friendly game of Bananagrams.

This usually spells disaster for me, because a sibling-free childhood and an adolescence full of arts rather than sports has made me a fairly noncompetitive person. I do not have an unending thirst for victory in all things. In most games I play I lack the willingness to give it all up for the big win because I simply don’t care enough – Coach Bombay would not be pleased, at least in the first 80 minutes of The Mighty Ducks.

It’s good that I don’t care if I win or lose, because I lose a lot when I play against Dylan and Holly, whose entire lives together have essentially been a grueling, four year crucible of competitive things. When I join in any of their reindeer games, the best I can usually hope for is third place – and I’m okay with that.

That all ended two weeks ago when, after watching Mad Men, Dylan said, “Oh, yeah, we downloaded Mario Kart 64 on the Wii. You want to play a round?”

Long dormant fires ignited deep within me. I nodded curtly, grabbed the Gamecube-style controller, and began flexing my thumbs.

As I’ve mentioned before, my parents and I played Mario Kart 64 every night for a good five to seven years of my childhood. After awhile, we didn’t even call it Mario Kart. We just called it Kickin’ Butt. It would always start after dinner.

So, Dad would say, folding his napkin. Who wants to get their butt kicked?

And away we’d go to the gentle curves of Luigi Raceway, the snowman-littered peril of Frappe Snowland, or the sulfur-scented shitstorm of Bowser’s Castle, with its fucking Thwomps and 90 degree turns and narrow rope bridges over lava, trading PG-13 trash talk all the way.

Again, this was virtually every night for years of my impressionable youth. None of us knew back then that Mario Kart 64 would stand the test of time so well, and that it would forevermore be a staple of drunken college shenanigans. My parents were not aware that these nightly sessions were slowly but surely turning their young son into a seasoned Mario Kart master at an early age. I was like one of those Asian cello prodigies whose parents force them to practice for hours every day from an early age, except unlike them my skill is completely awesome.

This was where I forged a competitive spirit.

That ‘one round’ of Mario Kart we were going to play that night, when it was already late and all three of us had work in the morning, quickly turned into us playing every single level in the game until well after midnight as soon as Dylan and Holly noticed that my skillset and competitive spirit in this particular game was significantly higher than in any other facet of my life, which, in turn, made them more competitive.

Dylan and Holly are Mario Kart masters in their own right – before they were even dating they would regularly play against one another in the dorms, sprinting to the N64 and tackling one another to try and be the first to pick Yoshi and potentially cop a feel on the way – so for arguably the first time in our friendship, we were playing a game where we were evenly matched and similarly fanatical about winning. That led to unprecedented levels of trash talk.

On that first night, Holly clocked me with a red shell within inches of the finish line, opening up the win for Dylan instead of me. I sort of blacked out for a moment, and when I came to I was in the midst of saying several things to her so offensive that they’d make Rush Limbaugh blush.

To Holly’s credit, she was unfazed, and proceeded to fling most of that language back at me in the next race.

What I learned that night, and in the two dozen or so Mario Kart games we’ve played since that night, is that this game, which was designed for children, brings out some of the filthiest, foulest, rudest language and behavior among adult friends.

That, I guess, is the nature of competition – wanting that arbitrary goal so badly that at a moment’s notice your mouth can open and all kinds of potentially friendship-ending language can pour out. Maybe that’s what scared me away from competition before – in sports, in academics, in most other games.

But not in Mario Kart 64, where my parents unwittingly have turned me into a monster of 150cc Bowser proportions.

Truman Capps hates Rainbow Road so much.

In Defense Of Advertising

See, how could advertising be bad when... Wait, shit, I got the wrong 60s throwback TV show.

Recently, a stupid person wrote a profane, inflammatory, ill-informed screed on the Internet, and for maybe the first time ever, it wasn’t me. Then, in response to a profane counterpoint that I consider well-informed because I agreed with it, he did it again. The gist of it is, Hamilton Nolan over at Gawker says that creative people should not go into advertising because it’s essentially allowing corporations to buy our creativity and use it for evil.

Nolan’s comments remind me of the worldview of a number of students in my journalism classes at the University of Oregon. One branch of the journalism school was an advertising program, and in class discussions about ethics some of the more self-righteous ‘true journalist’ types would make a lot of bold statements about how advertising was an evil, corrupting influence because its sole purpose was to convince people to give money to big faceless corporations. Most of the students making these arguments were wearing clothes from Urban Outfitters or American Apparel and usually within reach of a Starbuck’s cup.

The retort I always wanted to make but never did for fear of jeopardizing my already low chances of sleeping with any of the more self-righteous girls in the class was, “Okay. We’ll get rid of all advertising everywhere because it’s so evil. Then what?”

What would happen, of course, is that the economy would tank, thousands of creative professionals would lose their jobs, and television and magazines, which primarily exist as vehicles to show people advertisements, would cease to exist, throwing anywhere between a few hundred thousand a few million people out of work, depending on the breaks.

I’m not saying that advertising is universally good. Advertising as a whole, when compared to the Red Cross, high school science teachers, and the US Navy SEALs, comes up dead last. Advertising isn’t particularly altruistic, outside of some public service announcements (which often serve as something of a backdoor promotion of the agency’s creative talent), and exists largely to make money. It’s not a global force for good. (That title rests with the Navy, who paid the Campbell-Ewald agency around $800 million for the new slogan, campaign, and overall rebranding.)

But advertising also isn’t evil. Trust me, it’s got its negative elements. I’d say the fact that virtually every teenaged girl in America has an unhealthy obsession with her weight is probably a frontrunner for the most negative. But advertising is a business, like any other business, and most businesses have negative aspects.

Both of my parents work for insurance companies. Insurance companies are really good at denying coverage to sick people, but I never heard anybody in my classes calling the very idea of insurance evil. I’m not aware of a general disdain for hydroelectric power, even though the St. Francis dam collapse was the second-greatest loss of life in California history.

Advertising is a part of capitalism, plain and simple – companies can build as much shit as they want, but if nobody knows that the product is out there, what it does, or why they should buy it, the company may as well not have made anything in the first place.

A lot of Nolan’s argument, though, is specifically that creative people shouldn’t get into advertising, because they’re somehow cheating themselves by making a living off of their creativity. Here’s a quote:

”Do not go into advertising. Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you.”

Damn, really? God, if only I’d known that when I wrote my rent check the other day!

Yeah, but in all seriousness, I wonder if Mr. Nolan knows who pays the lucky creative types who don’t go into advertising and instead are able to sell their novel or screenplay or sign their band to a record contract. It’s a big, faceless corporation like Viacom or Disney, who is paying you because they want to take the product of your creativity and use it to make a huge amount of money.

In order for a creative person to truly keep from disgracing himself in Hamilton Nolan’s eyes, he or she would have to refrain from pretty much every opportunity to make a steady living off of their work, because if you work in a creative field you’re all but certain to wind up in the man’s employ at some point, since faceless corporations tend to be the only entities with enough money to finance the extravagance of film production or printing hundreds of thousands of books or getting a roadie to take the fall for the cocaine they found in your lead guitarist’s carry-on bag.

Yes, unless you’re playing guitar in the subway for pocket change, selling copies of your self-published fantasy novel at a Renaissance fair, or toiling away at a job you hate and being creative in your spare time solely for your own enjoyment, Hamilton Nolan thinks you’re a sellout and a dupe. Remember, if your creativity benefits you in any tangible way, you’re doing something wrong and should stop immediately.

I’ve loved writing for as long as I can remember. It’s basically my favorite thing, and probably one of the only things I’m good at. And let me tell you something: The past month I’ve been working in advertising has been hands down the best time I’ve had since moving to LA, and by far the most creatively fruitful.

When I was a production assistant, I took orders, brown nosed producers, and moved furniture, tasks which were in no way creatively stimulating and did nothing to enhance my writing abilities, for about $100-$125 a day in a city where gas costs $4.30 a gallon.

At the ad agency, I work with a bunch of other writers on a daily basis, brainstorming and collaborating. Many of the writers I’m working with have written in the entertainment industry before and still have contacts there, unlike any of the PAs I worked with. My coworkers respect me and appreciate my work, and I’m paid very well. And, on top of all that, this job makes me incredibly happy.

Is that really so offensive to you, Mr. Nolan – that I’m happy and financially stable? That I’m growing creatively, and doing more writing on a daily basis than I ever could have in virtually any other field?

Because if it does, well, I guess you’re entitled to your opinion. But my opinion is that you’re just kind of a shitty person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Well, no – maybe that’s an unfair characterization. You might’ve just been facing a deadline and desperately wrote the first thing you could think of, regardless of whether you agreed with what you were saying or not. I guess that’s the sort of thing that happens when you sell your soul and get paid to write a blog. I wouldn’t know, of course – I do this shit for free.

Truman Capps dreads the day when one of the public figures he insults on the Internet actually buys a plane ticket and kicks him in the nuts.

The Obama Economics Lesson

"Man, they didn't have chalkboards like this back in Kenya, where I was bor- Wait! Shit! No!"

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a student before, but had recently failed an entire class. Now, ordinarily a statement like this would raise a few eyebrows, because one has to expect that in the course of his career any self-respecting college professor would hand out at least a few Fs to people who never showed up to class or slept through the final, but this was a tenured professor with a fairly serious alcohol problem, and the administration at Local College University figured it was just less of a hassle to keep him on the payroll.

The class he’d failed, though, had roiled him out of his booze-induced indolence by insisting that Obama’s socialism worked and that nobody would be poor and nobody would be rich, a great equalizer. The students were either stupid or just really bad at keeping up on current events, as Obama’s 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would make him arguably one of the worst socialist conspirators of all time. However, Local College University was not known for the intelligence of its student body or the factuality of the statements made by its professors – it was, however, remarkable in its ability to fill classes with students who all unanimously supported radical agendas with no internal dissent.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.” (Substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all.)

Some of the students in class were unaware of what ‘Obama’s plan’ was, having never heard anything about some radical wealth-redistribution agenda from the guy who could barely get Congress to agree on a budget to run the country. The professor, you see, was referring to House Resolution 3798, or the Take All The Money From Rich White Republicans, Use It To Build A Gigantic Spaceborne Electromagnet Which, When Turned On, Will Remove Everyone’s Guns From Their Homes, And Then Give The Remaining Money To Black People And Abortion Doctors Act of 2012, which was introduced in a double super ultra maxi top secret session of Congress by Barney Frank and Dennis Kucinich, both of whom were completely stoned on medical marijuana at the time.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. At no point did any of the students who studied hard think to tell the administration that one of the professors was endangering the academic standing of a large number of students in order to prove a political point.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. Antisemetic graffiti began to appear on the walls between classes. Desks were overturned and set on fire. A bunch of Chinese exchange students started cooking meth and selling it during class, but one day they cooked a bad batch by accident and this one girl OD’d and had to go to the hospital, but by the time she got there she was braindead, so her boyfriend (who was on the Local College University football team) got a bunch of his friends and went to beat up the Chinese kids, but one of them, thinking ahead, had bought a Glock from some dude selling them out of the trunk of his car out on County Road 9, so when the football players showed up there was this huge bloodbath and the courts spent like five years trying to straighten the whole thing out, eventually agreeing that all this strife could be tied back to the class’s enthusiastic support of Barack Obama’s socialist agenda.

To the class’s great surprise, EVERYBODY FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that. Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections. He then listed the following points:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

One of the remaining students who had not been killed or driven mad by the effects of Obama’s socialism raised his hand. He was an atheist with great hair, and had skipped all of the previous classes because he was taking the class pass/no pass and just needed a C- or above on the final to get a P.

“Question.” He said. “If socialism will ultimately fail, how do you account for countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland? The governments there – which are some of the least corrupt in the world – provide a wide range of social services, ranging from full healthcare to college tuition and rent assistance, and citizens there are considered some of the happiest, most contented people on Earth. I mean, I visited Denmark, and it seemed great – their public infrastructure greatly outpaced that of America’s, everyone seemed pretty happy, and the women were uniformly gorgeous! I mean, there were clearly some people who had more money than others, but nobody was going around trying to redistribute it and enforce some sort of government mandated equality – the high tax rates funded a higher standard of living for everybody, and the money they spent in taxes was money that they would’ve spent on healthcare or other things the government provided.

“Furthermore,” he said, brushing his hair out of his face as was his nervous habit. “Are you really trying to tell us that there’s somebody running against President Obama in 2012 who can fix the economy? Are you saying Mitt Romney, a serial liar, is going to look out for the little guy if he gets elected? Or Newt Gingrich, who sucks so hard that he was more or less forcibly removed from the government in the mid 1990s? And, I mean, does Rick Santorum even have economic policy? I think his entire stimulus plan consists of putting half the country to work printing Bibles and the other half to work making bricks to throw at gay people.

“Hey, I’ve got a brilliant fucking idea, you stupid goddamn hypothetical cocksucker,” he shouted, adding profanity to get his putrid liberal agenda across. “If you want to make an argument against the president’s economic policy, how about taking a fucking fact based approach instead of throwing around fucking buzzwords like ‘socialism’ and hoping that enough limp dick chowderheads realize that it’s the same word as the second ‘S’ in USSR and vote for whoever will ensure that they don’t see a horrifying 3% tax hike, you fear mongering, ill informed cun-“

Before he could finish, a MARINE who had served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan punched him in the face. The atheist tumbled to the floor, visibly shaken, and exclaimed, “Why did you do that?”

The MARINE calmly replied, “God was too busy taking care of America’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid shit and act like an asshole, so he sent me instead.”

“Psst!” The professor whispered. “I think you’re in the wrong story. The atheist professor asking God to knock him off his podium is down the hall.”

“Oops!” The MARINE said, and hustled out of the room.

Meanwhile, at the back of the classroom, two self styled libertarians who got most of their talking points from South Park and Pen and Teller were eagerly watching the proceedings.

“Oh man,” One of them, whose parents were paying for his college tuition and living expenses, grinned. “That socialist just got told!”

The other, a 25-year-old whose recent appendectomy had been paid for by his parents' insurance per the Obamacare extension, nodded and said, “I’m SO posting this on Facebook with a picture of Obama standing in front of a chalkboard.”

Truman Capps is sick of your bullshit, America.