Being Outspent

 

Mitt Romney thinks this guy is Kanye West.

I think I’ve donated something like $75 to Barack Obama’s campaign so far, because in spite of his Puritanical stance on marijuana and the fact that his foreign policy involves more Predators than the movie Predators, I still think he’s a pretty swell guy and I’d like to keep him around for another four years. Now that Obama has the coveted Truman Capps endorsement, I imagine the next five months should be pretty smooth sailing.

Part of the online donation process involved me submitting my email address, which is why every morning I check my email and see that I’ve received messages from people like Elizabeth Warren and Michelle Obama, thanking me for my tireless efforts in support of the President and gently requesting that I donate whatever else I can spare.

The Obama campaign is running a number of pretty cool promotions as incentives to get people to donate, but I think I’ve thought of a better one: Donate $1000 or more and they’ll never send you another email. Sure, small ticket donors like me would probably just opt not to donate at all, but I think a scheme like that could really ensnare a lot of the limousine liberals who can’t in good conscience not donate but don’t want to get spammed by a who’s-who of the Democratic Party.

Both the news media and the emails have recently taken on a more and more bleak tone regarding fundraising. The general theme is this: MittRomney is going to outspend Obama in this campaign, which will make Barack Obama the first incumbent in history to be outspent in his reelection campaign. This is bad news, so give us more of your money.

I keep hearing that statistic over and over again, and it’s not striking fear into my heart for three reasons, which I’ll share with you below. If you don’t want to read them, I guess you can stop reading the blog here. I mean, it’s up to you.

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND INANE SPORTSCENTER BULLSHIT

Whenever I watch a football game I’m always kind of shocked at the sheer volume of useless statistics the good people at ESPN have pulled together for the color commentators to say before kickoff and during time outs.

”Well, Oregon has won the coin toss – now, interesting statistic here, in 63% of games in program history, Oregon has gone on to win the game after winning the coin toss. Anybody want to call this one?”

”Weather in Eugene at kickoff is light drizzle and 43 degrees – and it’s interesting to note that since 1977, Oregon has only won three of the eight games where the temperature at kickoff was 43 degrees, so this could be a bad sign for the Ducks today here at Autzen Stadium.”

”Something something time of possession something something.”

I like to think that somewhere in the basement of ESPN headquarters they’ve got Rain Man sitting in a room full of televisions watching every sporting event in history with a plate full of pancakes, and there’s a bunch of interns there taking notes on all the statistics he says, which they then transmit to Lee Corso via satellite.

The fact of the matter is, none of these type of statistics have any more bearing on the outcome of a football game than astrology has on our day-to-day lives.* They’re interesting to think about – depending on your definition of the word interesting – and they prevent dead air, but if you want to accurately predict who’s going to win, you’d be better off analyzing the two squads who are about to play instead of the size and density of their bowel movements the morning of the game.

*Yeah, that’s right, I said it.

Certainly some statistics are well worth analyzing – past performance on turf versus grass, weather conditions, home field advantage, etc – but those generally aren’t determining factors. They just influence the other factors in play.

Assuming that Mitt Romney is going to win because he’s going to be the first guy to outspend an incumbent is like saying that Oregon is going to lose because they’re playing on a grass field and they lost on a grass field at the Rose Bowl in 2009. It’s a point of concern, but it doesn’t deserve the amount of attention it’s getting, particularly because…

CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE NOW, APPARENTLY

Mitt Romney is one of the richest presidential candidates in history and he happens to be in balls-deep with Wall Street, whose residents have literally all money. On top of that, this is the first election where corporations can make unlimited political contributions.

Of-fucking-course Obama’s going to get outspent. That was pretty much a certainty the day Citizens United was decided. It’s the perfect storm – a rich douchebag who happens to be friends with some of the richest other douchebags in America, who have just been told that their multi-billion dollar investment banks can contribute as much money as they want to the original douchebag’s campaign. I’m sure Andrew Breitbart went to his grave with a raging stiffy just having witnessed such an event.

The statistic, “Barack Obama is the first incumbent in history to be outspent in his reelection campaign,” is misleading. It should be, “Barack Obama is the first incumbent in history to be running for reelection after Citizens United.”

Campaign finance is just different now, and what’s happening to Obama is going to happen to every future president who isn’t giving and receiving reacharounds from bankers.

Mitt Romney is going to spend over a billion dollars to try and defeat Barack Obama, and none of that means a damn to me because…

NO AMOUNT OF MONEY WILL MAKE ANYBODY IN THE WORLD LIKE MITT ROMNEY – EVEN FOR A SECOND

Nobody likes Mitt Romney. He is an unlikeable, shitty dude. If he was an ice cream flavor, he’d be pralines and dick. These are immutable facts, and we all know I’m fucking right.

It’s been a red-letter year for Obama – he tied up gays and Latinos pretty handily, he’s still got black people, and sometime in March the GOP just decided to up and hand him women as well. His party loves him, celebrities love him, people my age love him. He’s a great public speaker and he’s got swagger for days.

Who does Mitt Rommey have? Well, he’s got old white people. But not all of them, since a sizable contingent of Evangelical Christians have decided that his religion is too weird for their blood and are just going towrite in ‘Jesus’ on the ballots instead. So he’s got some old white people.

You can run all the slick campaign ads you want, but they won’t make up for the fact that Romney’s party and policies have alienated a huge chunk of the electorate and that the man himself has all the charisma of a character in The Polar Express.

AAAAAAHHHHHH!

The Obama campaign has to play this thing up and be worried, because if they let Democrats get complacent then they’ll lose momentum and maybe the election. I get it. I wouldn’t have it any other way, honestly, because I want Obama to win so very badly.

But this isn’t what I’m worried about. The Supreme Court healthcare verdict, on the other hand, is giving me an ulcer that I may not be able to afford treatment for in the morning.

Truman Capps knows how you feel, Republicans - his name was John Kerry, and he sucked on toast.

Kim Kardashian Free iPad Miami Heat

With that title and a cat picture, I estimate everyone on the Internet will have visited this page by next week.

Widespread fame and record breaking numbers of pageviews were never my intention when I started writing this blog. I’m not saying that I’d turn those things down if they were offered to me, but since day one I’ve been pretty sure that this blog isn’t going to become an Internet sensation, because every update is a massive block of text containing many big words and very few pictures, none of which feature anime characters doing it, and on the Internet that combination is practically a big sign that says, “MOVE ALONG – NOTHING TO SEE HERE.”

If I wanted to be popular the changes are obvious – write shorter, list-based updates more frequently and post funny videos and images – but that would do fuck-all for my growth as a writer and alienate the 15 diligent souls who’ve been following me for as long as I’ve been doing this.

Because let’s face it: Right now I’m pretty much the NBC of the Internet. NBC, as an NBC employee I went on one date with and never saw again explained it to me, is ‘the most popular network with people who don’t really watch TV.’

The most successful TV programs are either glorified talent shows, good looking detectives scrutinizing semen, or doctors and nurses bumping uglies in hospital supply closets. NBC’s Thursday lineup, which over the past several years has been as close as I’m ever going to get to religious devotion, includes none of those things, which is why it’s scarcely watched in spite of its critical acclaim.

I by no means am trying to imply that my blog is as good as 30 Rock, or that shorter blogs designed to attract more views are necessarily bad – I’m just saying that it takes a special sort of person to get all amped up about sitting down to read a thousand or more words as I meander my way toward a point, much in the same way that it takes a special sort of person to get wrapped up in a show like Community or Parks and Recreation, and those sorts of people are in short supply, which explains why those shows don’t get big ratings and my blog doesn’t get big hits.

Honestly, though, I like it that way. Obscurity protects me from the scrutiny of the collective sociopathic middle school that is the Internet and allows me to fuck around and experiment with my writing in front of a small, safe audience of friends and family like a kid doing tricks on his skateboard in the driveway. Sure, sooner or later I’ll have to expose myself to a wider audience who’ll presumably take me to task for my run on sentences and gross overuse of semicolons and dashes, but hopefully by the time that happens my writing will be a full time job with a robust salary that allows me to order guacamole at Mexican restaurants without caring that it costs extra.*

*What’s that old saying? ‘Guac at Del Taco is the best revenge?’ Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.    

About six weeks ago, Blogspot made a pretty huge update to their interface – if you want to know specifically when, look back at my past updates and make a note of when the font went from the friendly, demure old version I liked so much to this new, overlarge monstrosity I’m writing in now.

Besides completely fucking up the look of my blog, though, they also added a tool that allows you to track how many hits individual updates get. The results, like most things in my life, started off confusing and ultimately led to disappointment:

You’ll notice that older updates seem to have more hits than the newer ones, which I imagine is a result of everybody getting sick of my constantly blown deadlines and just stopping by once and a while to catch up on everything they’ve missed. However, some updates have fared significantly better than others – my update ‘Money’, for example, has been viewed 10,651 times, while my update about the gay marriage debate has only been viewed 90 times.

At first I was giddy that the equivalent of a small town in a John Mellencamp song had read one of my updates, until I got suspicious and started looking at the referral pages. As it turns out, most of those 10,651 visitors were people who had done a Google Image Search for the word ‘money’ and found my blog because the first result was a picture of money that I’d uploaded. Samesies for the 2473 people who viewed my update about Workaholics, or the 2157 strangers who showed up to read about Risk.

Yes, it turns out that for all of my lofty talk about text and building a small, committed, literate reader base, you guys are a statistically insignificant percentage of my readership compared to the folks who show up in droves via Google to right click and save a couple of images I posted on a couple of blogs that happened to have frequently searched titles.

I wear my ignorance of search engine optimization as a badge of honor, but I am kind of kicking myself for not figuring this sort of stuff out sooner – if I’d taken advantage of some of Blogspot’s monetization options I probably could’ve made some decent cheesesteak money off of the ten thousand people who showed up last month to steal my picture of money (which I, in turn, stole from another website).

So today is the start of an experiment: We’ll see how many hits this update gets with its provocative title and popular image, and if it’s impressive, well… I mean, they show ads during 30 Rock and nobody accuses Tina Fey of selling out, am I right?

Truman Capps hopes that this is the last time he gives press to Kim Kardashian. 

Funny Women

If only.

I didn’t even know that Adam Corolla said what he did until days after the fact, when I got clued into it by all the Adam Corolla jokes coming from the female comedians in my Twitter feed. At first I couldn’t believe that I’d missed something so big, but then I remembered that it was Adam Corolla who said it, and since I watch lots of popular TV shows , look at funny internet videos, and listen to hilarious comedians, I obviously have no way of knowing what that guy is doing.

I mean, shit, what is Adam Corolla doing? My last memory of him was when a stoner in my 11^th grade math class said that his three month long talk show was ‘totally groundbreaking.’ What was he doing in the seven year gap between then and him telling the New York Post that women aren’t funny? For some reason I’m picturing him working at an Outback Steakhouse in Bloomington, Indiana – although the Bloomington part might just be because I’m thinking of a Bloomin’ Onion.  

Are women funny? Of course they are, you fucking idiot.* Anybody who says that women aren’t funny obviously hasn’t met my mother.

*Critical responses like this don’t carry the same weight when you’re answering a rhetorical question you just asked yourself.

This is my mother wearing a Viking hat.

My Mom is arguably the funniest person I’ve ever met. She’s witty, irreverent, cerebral, and totally unafraid to be completely vulgar and make dildo jokes if the situation calls for it (which it often does in the Capps household). If not for my mother, this blog would be about fiscal policy analysis and black and white historical photographs of bridges instead of dick jokes and profanity. You can decide for yourself which one is a better use of my time.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily disprove Carolla’s argument – as he puts it, in his 50’s greaser lingo*, “When it comes to comedy, of course there’s Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Kathy Griffin — super-funny chicks. But if you’re playing the odds? No… The reason why you know more funny dudes than funny chicks is that dudes are funnier than chicks.”

*I realize that I use the term ‘chicks’ occasionally to refer to women, but after seeing Adam Carolla’s heavy use of it I’m going to quit. That douchewaffle ruined the word for all of us.

Now, I believe that Adam Carolla’s observation – that there are more men who are successful comedians or just ‘funny’ in general than there are women – is, in a way, correct. Unlike Adam Carolla, I don’t believe that it has anything to do with some sort of hardwired genetic predisposition, probably because, unlike Adam Carolla, I’m at least reasonably intelligent.

The fact remains, though – when I list off friends of mine who crack me up on a regular basis, I find myself listing more men than women. What this comes down to isn’t the fact that with a vagina comes the inability to tell jokes; it’s that on a cultural level I don’t think young girls get as much encouragement to be funny as young boys do.

A sense of humor isn’t something you just decide to have – it’s developed over the course of a lifetime, starting when you’re a kid. With little boys, it starts out with talking about forbidden topics, like farts and wieners, to make other kids laugh, because farts and wieners are and always will be funny.

Those are really the only things little kids can make jokes about – for one, vulgarity is the easiest comic territory, and two, with relatively little life experience, understanding of social norms, or mastery of language, about the only way you can make other kids laugh is by talking about the stuff that comes out of your butt.

For the most part, parents accept and tolerate some amount of this under the ‘boys will be boys’ clause, but girls aren’t so lucky. Even in the 21^st century, the majority of girls are taught from an early age to be proper and ladylike, qualities that explicitly forbid rewording nursery rhymes to talk about Disney characters drinking pee.

Things like this have longstanding ramifications: Boys grow up encouraged, or at least allowed, to crack jokes and hone a sense of humor, while girls are steered away from it. Even girls with progressively minded feminist parents still have to go through the shark tank of being a teenaged girl trying to be popular in high school – and adolescent female social cliques don’t really value humor unless it’s being used to make fun of somebody else. (I would know – I was usually the one being made fun of.)

So it’s not that women aren’t funny, it’s that society has been telling them that they shouldn’t be funny since pretty much day one. How can you fucking blame them? You go out and overcome a lifetime of social conditioning and then hone a skill that the other half of the planet has been encouraged to have since birth and tell me how easy it is!

Women like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Kathy Griffin, Rachel Bloom, Aubrey Plaza, Ellen DeGeneres, my mother, my friends Kristin, Holly, Amelia, Lizzie, Allison, other Lizzie, Katie, Molly, Kristen, other Holly, Sarah, Bri, Chloe, Sonia, Emily, Danielle, Shelly, and the tens of millions of other funny women in this country aren’t mutants who won the genetic lottery and magically gained the ability to have tits and be funny at the same time – they’re funny people who gave a hearty ‘fuck you’ to social norms dictating that jokes aren’t okay for girls.

And to any of you who are raising daughters, let me say this: For Christ’s sake, encourage them to funny. Force them to tell you jokes at the dinner table – even bad ones. If they want to keep the funny on the DL during high school, that’s alright, but you let them know that in the real world there isn’t a single guy who’s ever said, “I was talking to this awesome girl the other night, but then she made me laugh. Huge turn off.”

Hell, it’s a source of constant frustration to me that Louis C.K.’s oldest daughter is still something like 11 years younger than I am. Because I guarantee you, both of his daughters are going to grow up to be the funniest, most well adjusted women in history, and if by some wild luck I were to start dating one of them once she was of legal age, Louis C.K. would devote the rest of his career to talking about the poofy haired old creep who was fucking his hilarious daughter.

Truman Capps acknowledges that this whole fracas was obviously Adam Carolla desperately clutching at publicity.

Lord Of The Fleas

Everywhere.

If you want my opinion, I think it’s a pretty bad idea calling them ‘flea markets’. What you’re referring to is a loosely regulated Calcutta-style market full of people hawking old stuff they found in the deepest recesses of their garages and attics. When I’m buying something three times my age from a complete stranger, the last thing I want to think about are fleas or any other potential vermin who might have laid eggs in that old ammo box full of glass Coca Cola bottles.

My friends Dylan and Holly – or, put more bluntly, all of my friends – have been cruising LA area flea markets pretty regularly for the past few months, and as I’ve expanded into my own space and developed a more pressing need for décor, I’ve started tagging along.

I don’t really know what it is I’m looking for from a flea market, but whatever it is, I certainly haven’t found it yet. I think I should just resign myself to the fact that flea markets aren’t where I’m going to find a Nazi combat knife* or a first edition workprint from Star Wars with a bunch of heretofore unknown deleted scenes.

*As awesome as it would be to find Nazi war memorabilia at a flea market, I have to stop and wonder what the hell I’d do with it. I don’t know that I’d want to have something with a swastika on it mounted above my TV for all my guests to look at. Check it out, I got Hitler’s knife! Woah, no, calm down, it’s not like I agree with him or anything! I’m basically president of the Jewish people fan club. But still, Nazi stuff, right? It’s like the History Channel on my wall! Don’t tell Israel.

I wouldn’t take most of the stuff that I see at flea markets even if it was free. Turn of the century farm style dressers with fading turquoise paint just don’t make my balls tingle the way they do everybody else’s, I guess. Still, I enjoy going because it gets me thinking about why and how people sell the shit that they sell.

Magazines, for instance – I can see the reasoning behind buying an issue of LIFE magazine from Pearl Harbor or the day of the Kennedy Assassination, but why the hell are so many people trying to sell me issues of TV Guide from 1986? If I want to read a breathless preview for the second season of MacGyver, I’ll do it on the Internet, thank you very much.

Or the beads and jewelry! I’m not quite sure how one person selling homemade bead necklaces can set up shop next door to another person selling identical homemade bead necklaces and yet somehow the two of them both turn a profit. I mean, how are you competitive at that point? What do your bead necklaces offer that the other bead necklaces don’t have?

Colored glass dishes are the best example, though. If you want to know why, Google for your nearest flea market and go there. I don’t care where in the country you live - you’re going to spend most of your time walking past card table after card table loaded with glass dishes of all shapes, sizes, and colors, the likes of which your grandmother used to store hard candies in.

What aspect of American life in the 1930s and 40s necessitated the production quintillions of colorful little glass dishes? Was there just more little shit to keep track of back then? Did they pay day laborers in tiny ball bearings during the Great Depression? Or was it just a cultural thing that’s gone by the wayside now – was a little blue dish where you kept all your favorite racist newspaper cartoons and nasty unsent letters to Herbert Hoover?

In the 21^st century, demand is definitely not keeping up with supply – I imagine that’s why everybody seems to have a few crates of these dishes to get rid of and why you ever see anybody buying them. I mean, I see people buying lots of weird shit at flea markets, but so far I haven’t seen any soccer moms haggling over a little orange glass dish.

”Wow, this just really speaks to me, y’know? This dish would finally make my house a home. It’s really sort of an emergency, too – I’ve got so much hard candy just lying around, but nothing to put it in! Are you sure you can’t go below $1.50 for this?”

On rare occasions, though, I do find things that I like. Today I bought some old movie posters for Chinatown and The Shining - because no living space is complete without a young Jack Nicholson leering at you from two different locations – and at the truly gargantuan Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena I stumbled upon a number of mid-century couches and chairs in one sun baked corner of the parking lot that really knocked my socks off.

Of course, I didn’t buy any of the couches or chairs – some of them cost upwards of $700, and who the hell takes $700 in cash to a flea market, along with a truck big enough to lug a couch home? Complications like these limit my flea market purchases to anything less than $40 and small enough to fit in my car, and most flea market items that meet those benchmarks are either creepy old dolls or colorful glass dishes.

I wonder what flea markets are going to look like in 75 years, when all the things we hold dear are just clutter in our grandchildrens’ basements that they’re desperately trying to pawn off on the antique crowd. I can only imagine that the smartass bloggers of the future are going to be bitching about how every table at every flea market is loaded with dusty old flash drives and iPod Nanos.

Truman Capps would browse more stuff if the damn vendors would quit desperately trying to talk him into a purchase.

My Drunk Ikea

(Note: The host of My Drunk Kitchen is an adorably quirky lesbian lady. It'll make sense why I'm clarifying this once you watch the video.)

Truman vs Drain

It's a lot like this. Too soon?

I am no stranger to clogged drains. Regular readers will remember that I have a somewhat thick head of hair – true adherents will notice that the blog is actually named for my hair – and one of the downsides to that is that shower drains and I generally don’t get along so well. (I also wilt pretty quickly in humid climates, but that’s another update.)

The best example of this was the Super Bowl during my senior year of college, when the sink, the shower, and the toilet all backed up on the same day at the same time when we had about 30 people crammed into our house. Since I was the one responsible for the sink and the shower clogs*, it was I who had to run to the store for an emergency bottle of Drano.

*The toilet clog had nothing to do with my hair, but it was still indirectly my fault – I’d whipped up a huge batch of Battledip Galactica, which contains about four full jars of Tostitos liquid cheese dip, and by halftime most of the guests had put our toilet through the paces.

I dumped half of the Drano down the sink, then turned on the hot water at full blast to flush out the drain as directed and ran back to the living room to watch the game. As it turned out, half a gallon of extra strength Drano was no match for my hair, and the sink promptly overflowed and flooded the bathroom with a mixture that was part water, part corrosive acid, and part clumps of hair. (The smell was still an improvement over the backed up toilet.)

So while I’m useless in most tasks relating to home improvement, such as assembling Ikea furniture or buying the right sized replacement lightbulb on the first try, I’ve got a good amount of experience with clearing plugged up drains. Of course, it helps that the preferred method for dealing with drain clogs is removing the cap from a bottle, turning it upside down, and letting gravity take over, but I like to think I’m pretty damn good at it.

The drain in my new apartment has a real beast of a clog in it. Since moving in last Friday, I’ve taken exactly one shower where water hasn’t pooled up above my ankles, and that was the inaugural shower the night I moved in. Since then, every shower has gradually turned into a footbath.

I didn’t deal with the problem right away, due largely to my own laziness – the nearest Ralphs is several blocks away, and the clogged drain wasn’t appreciably affecting my quality of life. I mean, my feet are going to get wet in the shower either way, right? So what if they wind up fully submerged in the dirty water running off of my body? They’re just going to be getting sweaty and gross in my shoes all day, anyway.

After a few days, though, enough was enough, so I picked up a $2.99 bottle of off-brand drain cleaner, brought it home, and dumped it down the drain to work its magic. During my shower the next morning, though, I discovered that CVS brand drain cleaner is apparently about as acidic as a glass of horchata* and my drain was just as blocked as ever. Having underestimated my opponent, I decided to up the ante and splashed out $8.99 on a huge bottle of Drano.

*If I had to pick a way to die, it would be drowning in horchata. I can’t get enough of that stuff. I feel like we could solve anti immigration issues if we just gave every racist a glass of horchata and told them who invented it.

I should point out that for the entire time that a bottle of Drano is in my possession, some small part of my brain is thinking of ways that I could wind up inadvertently drinking it and dying a horrible death, because apparently some small part of my brain thinks I’m a two year old. I even turn my head away from the bottle as I open it, as if I’m expecting a tsunami of poisonous drain cleaner to leap out of the bottle and down my throat the second I give it an opportunity.

So, with one arm across my mouth for protection against predatory drain cleaner, I dumped the Drano down and let it work its significantly more expensive magic. At this point I was getting kind of nervous, because if Drano didn’t work I really had no idea what the next step in the process was.

The next morning, I discovered that either my hair is stronger than the Space Shuttle or the previous tenant had been using concrete for shampoo, because the drain remains just as clogged as ever. At this point I’ve got three options: Spend a lot of money on a plumber, stick my hand down into the hair and poisonous cleaner filled drain to unclog the blockage manually, or just let the drain clog win.

So, somewhat predictably, I’ve decided to let the drain clog win this one. It’s clearly got more willpower than I do.

As I’ve discovered in the past couple days since the truce, the drain clog is actually improving my quality of life by reducing my water consumption.

My former roommates can attest that I tend to take pretty long showers – and remarkably, it’s not even because I’m doing anything smutty, but just because I like hot water and general cleanliness. Remember that Seinfeld episode where Kramer starts living in his shower? That’s the dream for me.

With the clog, though, I’ve got five minutes tops before the tub completely fills and overflows into the bathroom. It turns my showers into sort of a game – a fast paced race against the clock to get clean and shut off the water before I flood my apartment. It’s like a very hygienic 24.

Truman Capps apologizes if you pictured him in the shower at any point during this update.

The Couch

THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!

 

This is the first time in my life I’ve truly been on my own. For my entire life, I’ve always been sharing my living space – whether it’s with my parents, roommates, or about 50 Bay Area stoners with questionable hygiene practices during my freshman year in the dorms. Now that I’m in a one bedroom that’s all mine, I’m starting to realize the benefits and disadvantages of getting exactly what I’ve been fantasizing about for years.

The good news? Nobody else lives in my apartment. I know – I’ve made that clear already, but I can’t emphasize enough how nice it is to not have to deal with anybody else’s bullshit, be it physical, emotional, or dog. Dealing with my own bullshit is pretty much a full-time job, and I’m glad that I finally have ample space and privacy to focus on it, in the nude if I so choose.

The bad news is that furnishing an apartment from the ground up turns out to be quite difficult. In all of my previous situations, each roommate simply brought what furnishings and decorations he already owned, and between the three or four of us we’d buy what we didn’t have to fill out the apartment, albeit with a decidedly mix-and-match décor.

It seemed like in every situation I moved into I was joining up with a guy who already owned a crapload of inherited furniture and also had access to a pickup truck to move it, and by the time I got to the apartment with my paltry Subaru load of belongings the place already would pretty much look like a home: A bright green, ramshackle hand-me-down couch that one of my roommates had no doubt been conceived on, mismatched pots and pans in the kitchen, the obligatory Boondock Saints poster… Most of my stuff just stayed in my bedroom, along with me, most of the time.

Since I never had a need to buy any of these things for myself, the past five days in my new apartment have been as close to camping as I’ve gotten in the past three years. I’m sleeping surrounded by cardboard boxes on an air mattress, which I’m keeping in the living room so I can sit on the edge of it to play video games on my PS3, perched with my television in a small Ikea entertainment center that is currently the only piece of furniture in the entire living room. Up until today there was no refrigerator, so I had to catch all my meals (normally by flagging down a waitress at Denny’s), and my shower drain remains so stubbornly clogged that every shower almost immediately has me ankle deep in dirty water, like I’m fording the Willamette at the end of the Oregon Trail.

This is a bit taxing for somebody as frugal as I am. I spent around $320 today on things that I had never even considered that I’d need to buy – a bathmat, a toilet scrubber, plates – plates! In every other apartment I’ve lived in, there’s been a five-foot tall stack of multicolored Formica plates in the cupboard, kept company by seven pint glasses from various breweries, 23 mildewy solo cups that my roommates for whatever reason held onto, and the obligatory Portland Trailblazers commemorative glass from the mid 1990s.

I haven’t even bought furniture yet – today was all about necessities and groceries. I’m holding off on buying the ungodly amount of shelving and tables I’ll need to hold all my stuff until next week because of work, but the upcoming furniture purchase that’s weighing heaviest on my mind is the couch.

We’ve been over and over the fact that I hate spending money, which is why the couch is such a big thing for me. I know there’s no way I’m getting out of this cheap: Couches are expensive if you’re buying them new, and I’ve seen enough shit happen on couches in college to know that I don’t want to buy a used one – especially now that I live in the San Fernando Valley, the porn capital of the United States.

I’ve fallen in love with a couch at a nearby mid-century boutique furniture shop run by a couple of aggressively gay dudes. The model in the shop is a shade of green that doesn’t quite suit my apartment, but the owners can get me one in charcoal that, like The Dude’s rug, would really bring the room together.

On three, let's all sing the Mad Men theme.

This couch doesn’t fuck around with cupholders or extending footrests. It doesn’t need that shit, because it’s classy and comfortable as the dickens. Edward R. Murrow probably had a couch like this in his house. This couch drives a 1965 Ford Galaxie to work and drinks rye whiskey at lunch. This couch will set the tone and style for my apartment, and will determine the look of the other furnishings I buy for the rest of the place.

The price of this couch is pretty reasonable, I guess, given that I consider it to be Nirvana with cushions, and my parents have told me that a couch of a similar design would cost a lot more at a store in a mall. However, this couch is still expensive enough that I will probably vomit after I pay for it, because it will be probably the biggest single purchase I’ve made in my life so far.

I’m kind of surprised that I’ve even gotten this close to the purchase without backing out. The thing is, now that I have an apartment to myself, I want to stay true to the philosophy of Jurassic Park and spare no expense in making it my own. A couch, after all, is an investment – it’s something you’ll use virtually every day, and it’s all but essential if you ever want to have friends over.

It means even more to me, though, because as somebody who’s moved a number of couches, both on the clock as a PA and off the clock as a dutiful friend helping somebody move, I know that once you get one of those motherfuckers in your house you’re pretty much staying. You can’t move a couch without a van, and it guarantees that when you do move you’re going to need somebody else to help. For a lazy person like me, that’s a pretty binding commitment to make to a piece of rental property.

But I feel like I’m ready for a commitment. With no roommates to get under my skin, the only person who could fuck up my living situation right now is me. (And that’s not entirely unlikely.)

Truman Capps has been fantasizing about getting a liquor cabinet, but that’s probably asking for trouble.  

Hair Guy: Mobile Edition

Holy shit! I didn't realize until now that my iPhone didn't even do me the service of putting in the line breaks that I thought I'd entered. I think I'll just remove this ugly event in Hair Guy history...