Leave Government Alone!

Welcome to Hair Guy, where the references aren't topical and the points don't matter.

Yesterday at work, as I dashed off the last few words of my blog about hurricanes or whatever the hell I was talking about, we turned on the TV in the writers’ office just in time to see Rick Santorum take the podium to address the Republican National Convention. I then realized that Hell is a very real thing which exists on Earth: It’s being stuck in a room with Rick Santorum, forced to listen to him give a speech so hammy a rabbi couldn’t eat it while everybody around you applauds, and you’re in Florida.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people who want to run the government talk so much shit about the government in one evening. I mean, with all the vitriol Santorum, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin, and Baron Harkonnen were spewing about the evils of the government providing assistance to its citizens, you’d think there was some kind of personal vendetta at work, like maybe the Department of Health and Human Services screwed the Republican Party’s girlfriend or something.

Take, for example, this excerpt from Santorum’s speech, which came after he reminded us that he’d run for president but before he trotted out his developmentally disabled daughter for political karma:

My grandfather, like millions of other immigrants, didn't come here for some government guarantee of income equality or government benefits to take care of his family. In 1923 there were no government benefits for immigrants except one: Freedom!

In case you missed it, the bad guys in that anecdote are equality and providing for needy families. I guess freedom really is all you need – the freedom not to mind that women earn 82 cents for every dollar a man makes (all the more incentive to stay home and give birth to rapist’s baby, I guess!), or the freedom from your children when they die of polio you can’t afford to treat.

If you want to talk about shitty, fiscally irresponsible stuff the United States government does, why not focus on all the fucking wars, maybe? Those wars were way more expensive than feeding hungry children; in fact, a big component of those wars was dropping bombs on hungry children. And as if that weren’t bad enough, those bombs aren’t exactly cheap.

I don’t exactly relish paying taxes or anything, but if I had to choose what they went to, I’d much rather see them go to some family in the projects than a Predator drone that’s going to blow up a wedding party in Pakistan that a suspected terrorist may or may not have been at. Even if the family on welfare isn’t actively looking for work and they’re using the money to buy crack, I’d rather my tax dollars subsidize crackheads than dead innocent people, in a pinch.  

This might just be the fact that I’m an Oregon-raised atheist liberal talking, but in a lot of ways I really don’t see the idea of ‘big government’ as a scary thing. I’m crazy about big government, actually. I’d love it if we had a Veterans’ Administration so huge and well funded that every returning soldier had prompt access to high quality physical and mental care, or some tricked out Pell Grants for needy students, bridges that stay standing, levees that don’t collapse, maybe even a universal healthcare system or something? (I wouldn’t miss the DEA, though. We can cut that!)

In a way, the Republican platform is pushing for big government – it just happens to be exactly the sort of big government that scares me. No, you can’t get married, faggot, because the Constitution says so. You got raped by your Dad? Well, deal with it, you 15 year old girl, you. You want to go to college? Well, you should’ve thought about that before you were poor!

The big government I like opens a lot of doors by giving people options for education and healthcare if they can’t get it themselves; the big government the Republicans are pitching closes a lot of doors to people who aren’t white, Christian males with significant financial means. That doesn’t sound like freedom to me, but according to Rick Santorum that’s basically the one thing America’s got going for it at this point.

That’s not to say I’m completely opposed to privatization, either – I think private industry is going to rejuvenate space exploration, and I've read some compelling arguments that it would probably improve airport security too. The Republicans, though, seem to look at privatization as a magic wand made out of the ground up bones of Ronald Reagan that can make all aspects of government cheaper and more efficient while simultaneously making their friends rich.

The fact is, helping people isn’t profitable – that’s why you don’t see a lot of Red Cross employees driving Lamborghinis. Private enterprise is great for spurring innovation and driving the economy, but when a tornado hits your town, Disney and Viacom aren’t going to be there to help you rebuild, because the margins in rebuilding poor peoples’ houses and issuing grants to help them get back on their feet aren’t so great for the company.

Even when the government is writing checks for private enterprise to do some of these things, it still doesn’t turn out so well, since contractors tend to cut corners in search of profitability.

I see it like this: We’ve got a great thing going with capitalism right now. It’s super. But it tends to leave varying numbers of unlucky people out in the cold from time to time, and that’s why we’ve got government. It’s there to look after people when they’re having a hard time,* no matter how unprofitable it is, so that eventually they can recover and get back to work making money to pay taxes.

*In a perfect world, that is – one where bureaucracy is streamlined, all the forms can be submitted online, and they have a 99 cent coin for use at Taco Bell and thrift stores.

I’m no economist, and the one political science class I took in college was so boring that I dropped it after the first hour. All this shit about government being some selfless, Batman-style protector of the masses could be even more factually dubious than any given word being said at the RNC.

I just think it’s pretty telling that all the people calling for the end of government benefits in Tampa right now have full time jobs with six figure salaries and top tier healthcare. 

Truman Capps has no idea what he’ll write about after the election.

Isaac

Okay, but seriously, why does his tie match his face?!

I’m sort of ashamed to admit it, but some small part of me envies people who live on the Gulf Coast right now. I don’t envy the heat, or the humidity, or the obesity, or the crime, or the environmental catastrophes, or the bonkers adherence to the more conveniently hateful parts of the Old Testament, and honestly I’m not even crazy about the accents. But damn it, those lucky bastards are getting rain!

I know – Hurricane Isaac has done a lot of damage in the Caribbean and there’s an outside chance it could really mess up New Orleans. It’s a powerful, awesome destructive force of Courtney Love proportions, and much like Courtney Love it isn’t the sort of thing that somebody should want to be close to. I know that rationally, but then I see Shepard Smith on TV getting drenched by waves and driving sideways rain and I start to swoon just a little bit.

I’m experienced with inclement weather the same way a white 13 year old who’s seen 8 Mile a few times is experienced with the thug life. Growing up on the West Coast has sheltered me from all the worst that nature has to offer – sure, back in Oregon I had my fair share of rainy marching band practices and from time to time we had to contend with wet dog smell, but a few ruined sneakers aside we generally got by. One time in high school our storm drain clogged and flooded our driveway. That was our Katrina.

Weather in Oregon was atmospheric at best and inconvenient at worst – never something that could kill you. Really, when I look at other regions of the United States, I don’t get why people live anywhere but the West Coast: In the Midwest you’ve got black spinning air vortexes of death, in the Northeast you’ve got blizzards, and in the Gulf Coast you have severe proximity to Florida, not to mention terrible hurricanes.

Most Americans look at their severe weather as a fact of life; I look at it as a not-so-subtle hint that maybe nature doesn’t want you living there. That said, I usually look at most adversity as a covert hint to give up and do something easier, so my opinion probably doesn’t carry a lot of weight here.

Living in Los Angeles, though, has me so starved weather-wise that I’m desperate for any sort of change, in spite of all the times I got soaked in a spontaneous downpour on my way to class in college and swore that when I moved to LA I’d never miss cold and rain again. 

It hasn’t rained here since April. The air I’m breathing is equal parts dust, smog, and spray-on bronzer. The Mystery Wagon is now less a station wagon and more a rolling hunk of dusty grime with questionable gas mileage. I could wash it, sure, but thanks to my Oregon upbringing I have it hardwired into me that your car gets clean when nature damn well wants it to, and that car washes are an affront to nature invented by Californians.

So when I see images of people in New Orleans scurrying indoors as storm clouds gather, I start to miss driving through puddles on my way home from school, scampering inside the house, and eating pot roast while rain hammers against the windows and the wind smashes our neighbors’ wind chimes against the side of her house. Hurricane Isaac has already killed 24 people, making this perhaps my most insensitive nostalgia yet.

There’s something about crappy weather that brings people together like nothing else can. The murderous weather that the rest of the country experiences brings people together in real, tangible ways as they rebuild homes and house refugees; what I’m more familiar with is the way people act when it’s simply kind of nasty outside.

Shitty weather keeps you indoors and more or less forces you closer to the people you’re with – in college, my roommates and I used several severe rainstorms as excuses to get drunk and watch Death Race. (Admittedly, we used a lot of things as excuses to get drunk and watch Death Race.) It’s also a great excuse for laziness – when you spend all day in bed with your laptop when it’s raining, people say you look cozy; when you spend all day in bed with your laptop and it’s nice outside, people say you’re ‘showing signs of depression.’

And before I moved here I never realized how much shitty weather does to improve smalltalk. Let me tell you, when I run into a coworker in the break room at work, I’ve got nothing to say short of asking about their weekend plans – and if you do that too much you turn into the creepy nosy guy (or so I’ve been told). Without weather, the next best thing to make small talk over in LA is traffic, and since I ride my bike to work now I’m up shit creek there, too.

I bet right now a lot of people in the Gulf probably envy LA’s absence of weather as much as I inexplicably envy their presence of weather – but in both cases it’s probably a grass is greener thing. People who grew up with annual hurricanes presumably have some of the same nostalgia for sandbags and boarded up windows that I have for wet dog smell and fashioning crude rain hats out of copies of the Oregon Daily Emerald.

For as exotic as it looks on the news, though, I doubt I’d last very long in New Orleans right about now. I lose my enthusiasm for rain pretty quickly once my feet get wet, and all the shrimp in the world won’t make Shep Smith’s fake tan any less terrifying.

Truman Capps is going to delete this update with extreme prejudice if the levees break.

Akin

I'm reasonably sure he thinks this is an integral part of human reproduction.

When I read about what yet another in a long line of inbred criminally stupid fuckwits from the great state of Missouri said last week, I was reminded of a quote from Louis CK. Admittedly, virtually everything reminds me of a quote from Louis CK, but here’s the quote anyway so we can get on with this thing:

”They definitely gave the pussy to the right sex. Because women take care of things…. If guys had vaginas, they would be so gross! You’d always find things in there, like dice and stuff, and little salt packets from McDonalds… Receipts from a gas station three months ago…"

Keep that quote in mind when you read the comment that landed Todd Akin in hot water:

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

For the same reason men would make terrible vagina owners, they make terrible legislators on vagina-related issues, because most of us have no idea how anything down there works.

Ways to shut that whole thing down – Akin is talking about a woman’s private parts like they’re a partially classified failsafe measure in a nuclear power plant, not something you can figure out if you spend a couple of minutes with a junior high health class textbook. Keep in mind, this guy is married to a woman, and he made use of her “female body” to produce two children, who are also female.

His house is 75% women. He is beset on all sides by female genitalia – a veritable rogues’ gallery of cervixes, uterine walls, ovaries, and up to three feet of fallopian tubes. You’d think he would’ve picked up some level of comfort or familiarity with female reproductive health simply by fucking osmosis, if nothing else.

By no means am I trying to position myself as the end-all, be-all authority on lady parts – I’m no gynecologist, nor do I play one on TV. However, I’ve got a pretty solid understanding of how a pregnancy works, and enough common sense to figure that an egg doesn’t discriminate between consensual or nonconsensual sperm and decide to become fertilized or not as a result.

Above all, though, I’ve got enough common sense not to try to legislate something that I don’t know anything about, which would put me at odds with a big chunk of the Republican Party.

In 1988, Stephen Freind, a Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, claimed that being raped causes women to, “…secrete a certain secretion” that kills sperm, making the odds of a pregnancy from rape, “one in millions and millions and millions.” In 1995, North Carolina State Representative Henry Aldridge said, “The facts show that women who are raped – who are truly raped – the juices don’t flow, the bodily functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant. Medical authorities agree this is a rarity, if ever.”

These opinions suggest that there’s a contingent of old Republican men who truly believe that women have some sort of mysterious, preternatural, Bene Gesserit-style control of their entire bodies in ways that have yet to be fully explained by science.

And if that’s the case, I don’t get why Republicans seem to be hell bent on marginalizing and denigrating these magical creatures whose vaginas have built in defense mechanisms. If Republican assumptions about the various abilities of the female body are true, we probably shouldn’t be pissing them off – for all we know they could have telepathy and pyrokinesis hidden in there too.

While women’s ability to automatically lock down their reproductive organs at the first sign of attack hasn’t been proven (it’s actually the opposite!), they do have a very well documented ability to vote, and recently they’ve been using it against the Republicans in greater and greater numbers.

As much as I’m enjoying the fact that the Republican Party seems to have forgotten that people have to like you in order to win an election, I’m kind of dismayed that this is what political discourse in our country has come to. Like most young people who’ve skimmed the first page of an opinion feature from The Atlantic, I agree that the two party system isn’t doing America any favors, but right now we don’t even have two parties – we’ve got one, and it’s the Democrats.

The Republicans are now less a party and more of a general, spiteful, gleefully ignorant ideology which, thanks to the Tea Party, has picked up all manner of bottom feeding crazies like a Swiffer broom picks up dust bunnies and pubic hair off a hardwood floor. Hell, sometimes I wonder if the Democrats only look like they’ve got their shit together because their competition is such a disaster that FEMA needs to start handing out blankets and bottled water.

What I’d really like was if I could disagree with the Republican Party purely on economic and foreign policy issues, and if they’d articulate themselves on those issues in such a way that I wouldn’t disagree with them by yelling at the TV and throttling an imaginary GOP Congressman. Sure, Barry Goldwater probably would’ve started a nuclear war, but at least he would’ve started it for purely secular reasons – and while I wouldn’t agree with that decision, I could at least respect it.

The obvious benefit to Akin’s comments is that he’s easily derailed Republican efforts to retake the Senate, and given the Obama campaign yet another boost on top of the Romney campaign’s nonstop gaffe parade. Better yet, as the bulk of the Republican establishment distance themselves from his statement (even though they pretty much agree with it), a number of Republicans have come out in support of him, led by Mike ‘August 1^st is Chick-Fil-A Day’ Huckabee.

In an email today, Huckabee talked about the support he’s rallying behind Akin. “There is a vast, but mostly quiet army of people who have an innate sense of fairness and don't like to see a fellow political pilgrim bullied…” I don’t know what ‘fairness’ has to do with an ignorant old man using pseudoscience to trivialize rape, but that’s neither here nor there.

What I want more than anything is for this vast, quiet army to come forward and make themselves known so that the women of America can lay waste to them with their supernaturally powered vaginas – or simply vote them right the fuck out of office. Either one is good.

Truman Capps has made a marked departure from reading smutty literature into his webcam.

50 Shades Of Grey

Logistical Issues

I've had one hell of a time getting my hands on a copy of 50 Shades of Grey. Hopefully I'll have the video online tomorrow evening.

The Sushi Closet

This amount of sushi costs more than my car. 

On a scale of ‘Not flaky’ to ‘The flakiest’, people in LA tend to fall more on the croissant and pie crust side. I’m not saying that everyone in LA is a flake – hell, I’m not even saying that the flakes are bad people – but only in LA have I spent an entire hour alone in a bar waiting for someone to show up, or been stuck in traffic on my way to meet someone when they text me and cancel our plans a full 15 minutes before we were supposed to get together. That’s just how it is – a lot of people here are like the crust on Hot Pockets. They’re like Kellogg’s cereal. They were made with a lot of grated butter mixed with flour. Do you get it? Do you get the jokes?  

There is one thing I’ve found, though, that no young LA professional will flake out on. It’s an expensive, sometimes pungent substance, oftentimes green in color, and it’s thoroughly ingrained in the culture of Southern California. Yes, that’s right – I’m talking about sushi.*

*This double entendre would probably work better if sushi wasn’t in the title of the update.

People in LA will be habitually late and crap out on plans at the drop of a hat unless your plans involve the consumption of sushi, in which case you can count on your companion being well ahead of schedule and dressed to the nines, eagerly rubbing his or her chopsticks together in anticipation and muttering the names of the various rolls on the menu with the manic intensity of a bit player on The Wire.

At work, for example, we have this thing called Sushi Friday, where everybody goes out and gets sushi on Friday. But this isn’t just some halfassed tradition – it’s basically law. Friday is the day that we eat sushi, and it’s so heavily ingrained in company culture that people actually strategize and discuss their hour lunch break up to three days in advance.

One time, everybody was jonesing so hard for sushi that we did Sushi Friday on a Wednesday. And then we did it again on Friday. I’m pretty sure this is exactly what LA ad agencies were like in the 1980s, only it was cocaine.

Honestly, though, I really don’t get what all the fuss is about.

To be clear, this isn’t like Dubstep, where I both don’t get what all the fuss is about and also view it as a cancer upon our society that needs to be wiped out in order for humanity to progress. I enjoy sushi – I think it’s tasty. One of my friends is having a birthday party at a sushi place tomorrow and I’m really excited to go eat some sushi and have a good time. I’ve got no problem whatsoever with sushi or the consumption thereof.

That said, maybe I’m missing something, because I really can’t understand why people are so fanatical about it. I mean, people are militant about sushi. I know minimum wage earners who won’t bat an eye at dropping $20 on a sushi lunch. People here talk about sushi the way Paul Ryan talks about Ayn Rand, or the way I talk about boobs: With immeasurable, almost creepy enthusiasm.

I always feel sort of behind the curve when I go get sushi with the office guys, because sushi consumption has about as complex a preparation ritual as heroin injection* – right away everybody is pouring soy sauce into their personalized dish and mixing in wasabi and rubbing themselves down with hot towels like on an airplane, and I’m still trying to figure out how to use chopsticks.**

*I only know that from the scene in Pulp Fiction, Mom.

**Look, with all due respect to Japan and sushi, forks are far better eating tools than chopsticks. You don’t see me using a VCR just because I want to watch Swingers. Whatever. Not the point.

I don’t know – is there something I’m missing? Quality of sushi certainly isn’t an issue; we routinely partake in some of the finest sushi that Burbank has to offer, and again, it’s certainly tasty, but it’s not something that I fantasize about in my spare time.

On the other hand, I don’t get why people aren’t as obsessed with Indian food as I am – particularly the ubiquitous $8 all you can eat Indian lunch buffet, which is 100% guaranteed to have you in a food coma before you’re even back to the office. All the elements of a true American culinary phenomenon are there: A low price (way lower than sushi!), an unlimited amount of food (way more unlimited than sushi!), a buffet (I’ve never heard of a sushi buffet, which is probably a good thing)… I guess the only stumbling block is that there’s no beef, but lamb is a kickass replacement – it’s The Other Red Meat. 

Every time I try to pitch Masala Mondays, or Tandoori Thursdays, or The Five Day Saag Paneer-aganza, though, it gets shot down – India, for its 1.2 billion people and its colorful, goofy film industry, just can’t seem to get a leg up on Japan.

Maybe it’s just differing tastes – or maybe there’s something wrong with me. Much like sushi, I like The Beatles, but I’m not fanatical about them the way everyone else is,* nor is everyone fanatical about Pink Floyd the way I am. I like Star Wars, but not as much as Battlestar Galactica; the rest of the world feels differently. And as long as we’re making confessions, I wasn’t crazy about Inception, either.

*That said, I totally get the fanaticism surrounding The Beatles.

I go to great lengths to not be perceived as a hipster, so having these feelings inside of me is kind of difficult – I don’t want to suddenly look like I’m too cool for the current hip food in America. So I remain in the sushi closet – save for the part where I just posted about it in great detail on the Internet – and cross my fingers that either I’ll start loving sushi, my coworkers will start loving Indian food, or sushi places will at least start putting forks out on the table so I can quit fiddling around with those fucking chopsticks.

Truman Capps totally loves Forrest Gump, though.

50 Shades Of White

Above: A white person.

1)   I’m from Oregon.

2)   I drive a Subaru station wagon.  

3)   When I was 16 and my grandmother asked me what my dream car was, my immediate response was, “Whatever has the best gas mileage.” 

4)   In high school, I was elected student treasurer of the band program. 

5)   I put this on my resume for years afterward. 

6)   I have consumed at least a dozen cans of peach flavored Fresca in my life. 

7)   I keep two bags of trail mix in the center console of The Mystery Wagon at all times, just in case the car breaks down and I need a snack while I wait for the tow truck. 

8)   I bought a pair of Ray Ban Wayfarers. When they were stolen, I bought a pair of $10 knockoff Wayfarers at Venice Beach. For Christmas, my parents got me a replacement pair of Ray Ban Wayfarers. I will only allow my eyes to be shaded by vaguely square-shaped lenses. 

9)   Not only do I wear a helmet when I ride my bike, but I also signal all my turns with my left arm – straight out to my side for left turns, cocked 90 degrees upward at the elbow for right turns. (I seem to be the only person in Los Angeles who does this, so I imagine drivers think I’m either trying to gain lift and take off or do a really clumsy sig heil.) 

10) I sometimes eat Clif bars for breakfast. 

11) Whenever I talk about how much I love Ghostbusters, I feel obligated to mention what a shame it is that Winston never gets to do anything, just so I don’t seem racist. 

12) I once saw Chicago live in concert. 

13) When in a situation where I’m being forced to dance, my go-to move is to put my hands in my pockets and sway awkwardly back and forth while looking for an escape route and trying desperately to think of an excuse to leave. 

14)  In college, I once got sent out to the store to pick up some soda to use as a mixer. Indignant at being the soda bitch, I found a 24 pack of Tab and brought it back out of spite. I tried a can out of curiosity and then drank Tab quite regularly for the next several months. 

15)  I always use my turn signal. 

16)  Back when I was trying to swim for exercise, I bought a waterproof shirt because it was an outdoor pool and I was scared I’d get skin cancer spending that much time in the sun.

17)  It pisses me off when people refer to themselves as ‘McGuyvering’ something, because any idiot knows that his name was spelled ‘MacGyver’. 

18)  I watched MacGyver regularly.

19)  In elementary school I was an avid Frasier fan even though I usually didn’t understand what was going on – I just liked the way everyone talked. 

20)  I own a pair of cargo shorts. 

21)  I wear slippers around my apartment, and I take them with me whenever I go somewhere for more than 24 hours.  

22)  The custodian at our office is a black guy who shows up around 6:00 every day – so at 5:45 I start trying to think of stuff for us to banter about when he shows up so I don’t seem awkward and silent and come off as racist. 

23)   I eat HealthyChoice frozen dinners because they’ve got less sodium than the competition. 

24)  When someone offers me a dessert, my immediate response is always, “Oh, God, I shouldn’t.” 

25)  After saying, “Oh, God, I shouldn’t,” I invariably go ahead and eat whatever they were offering me. 

26)  Whenever someone asks if they can have some of my fries, my immediate response is always, “By all means! Save me from myself.” 

27)  I admire Snoop Dogg’s freewheeling, devil-may-care attitude, but I don’t listen to any of his music. 

28)  People have assumed I was Jewish for months at a time. 

29)   Hair. 

30)   Whenever someone refers to the Ewoks attacking the Stormtroopers on Endor, I always point out that that battle actually took place on Endor’s forest moon. 

31)  I wore a silver Timex wristwatch all through college. 

32)  Whenever I see that somebody has gum, I always immediately ask if I can have some. 

33)  Whenever I throw away a junk mail credit card offer or an old bank statement I always meticulously tear it up into dozens of small pieces and throw it out in two separate garbage cans, which I empty at different times, because identity thieves are desperate to get their hands on my information. 

34)  I never hit the back of the ketchup bottle, but instead tap on the neck, because when I was a kid somebody told me one time that that was a more effective way to get the ketchup to come out and I immediately convinced myself it was true. 

35)  I cry at the end of Terminator 2. 

36)  I saw Baby Mama in theaters. 

37)  When I was a senior in high school, I went to an informational interview with a professor at the University of Oregon wearing a polo shirt tucked into a pair of khaki slacks with brown loafers and argyle socks. 

38)  I like Steely Dan. 

39)  I dated a vegan for seven months and frequently said things like, “I don’t know why Obama hasn’t cracked down on factory farming,” or “These vegan cupcakes are delicious!” in order to get laid. 

40)  I own a pair of padded, fingerless bicycle gloves. 

41)  When someone asks me if I’ve heard of a rapper I always say, “Yeah, I think so,” and I’m always lying, because I’ve never heard of any rappers. 

42)  When it rains, I’m the first one to say, “Hey, look on the bright side – it’s like a free car wash!” 

43)   I read The New Yorker, and I leave them conspicuously lying around my apartment so visitors will know that I read The New Yorker. 

44)  I get irritable if I’m without Internet access for more than 45 seconds. 

45)  I’m on Reddit. 

46)  If I swear and then notice that a child is anywhere nearby, I immediately want to apologize profusely and start a college fund for him. 

47)  I dedicate a significant portion of my day to feeling guilty about not reading more. Never has it occurred to me to use this time to read. 

48)  On more than one occasion I have gone to the grocery store specifically to buy a wedge of brie to eat all by myself. 

49)  I laugh at Aflac commercials. Especially this one. 

50)  I have a blog.

As Seen On TV

Everybody knows my name at Chipotle, I guess...

Sometimes I sit and fantasize about how normal and well adjusted I’d be if not for TV. I mean, just imagine if I’d been one of those weird kids whose parents didn’t even have a TV, and all I ever did was read books, frolic in the trees, and churn butter or whatever the hell people without TV do when the rest of us were watching Wheel Of Fortune.

For one, this blog would probably just be about interesting wildflowers I’d picked recently and recaps of heated games of pinochle with my parents. Also, I’d probably be a lot happier.

For the past few weeks I’ve been going back and forth over whether my move to North Hollywood was a good idea or not. Regular readers will remember that I wrote a fairly extensive blog shortly after signing the lease in which I explained my hesitance regarding the San Fernando Valley and the distance the move would put between me and my friends, but ultimately decided that it made sense because it would put me closer to my job.

I’m not good at many things, but I’m great at doing something and then convincing myself afterward that I made the best possible decision. In 6^th grade I asked for and received a Nintendo Gamecube for Christmas, and it immediately proved to be by far the worst of the video game systems available at the time. I, however, became a fully fledged Nintendo fanboy, spending hours on the school bus and the Internet desperately and futilely defending the Gamecube as the greatest game system ever.

Of course, it wasn’t, but it was far easier for me to lie to myself and tell me I was happy than it was to confront the ugly truth that I had squandered my one big ticket gift of the year on a purple box that came with Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure as a launch title.

North Hollywood is nowhere near as big of a blunder as my Gamecube – I can ride my bike to work instead of driving 20 miles each way and paying over $4 a gallon for gas, whereas all the Gamecube ever did for me was give me an opportunity to play Crazy Taxi without having to go to a movie theater arcade – but when I’m not on my bike I find myself counting the months until my lease is up.

The fact is, while I can ride my bike to work, I have to spend half an hour in the car to go see most of my friends, and that sucks like nine different kinds of dick. Getting caught in traffic on the 405 and being late to the office means I miss out on some work; when I’m late to hang out with my friends, I’m missing valuable 20something shenanigans, and unlike work, those won’t be around forever.

I wind up spending a lot of time alone – which was something that I was really excited about pre-move, but I guess I’m not as antisocial as I’d thought. For all the frustrations of roommates – and trust me, I have not forgotten about them – there’s still nothing quite like coming home on a Wednesday to discover your roommates getting drunk on the back porch because they’re bored and then immediately joining them.

So I guess my big gripes are that I have to drive to see my friends, I’m only really social on the weekends, and most of my weeknight evenings are me in bed getting straight up crazy with some Netflix.

I’ve got great financial security, zero debt, my apartment complex is very well managed, and I’m white, so the only way I’m getting arrested is if I actually do something wrong. I’m currently better off than a sizable number of people my age – or people in general – but I’m miserable because I’m slightly bored.

Why is that?

Television. That’s why.

Never in my life have I been more like a character on the sitcoms I grew up watching. I’m a young guy in the big city with a little disposable income in his pocket at long last – according to Cheers and Seinfeld, I ought to be spending every spare moment in either a bar or a coffee shop with my best friends, having witty banter and generating sexual tension. Sure, Frasier eventually moved far away from all his friends, but his condo was always full of eccentric people doing crazy things and having even more sexual tension.

Of course, I know these shows are all bullshit – nobody really spends all their time having a ball with their conveniently located friends, making great memories and occasionally learning lessons about stuff. But for most of my formative years, those shows were my sole impression of what young, single adulthood was, and it’s tough to undo that damage.

So if I’d grown up without TV, I’d probably be a lot happier right now (nevermind the fact that TV was the only reason I moved to LA in the first place). I’d be content to play solitaire and see my friends on the weekends, and just accept the leisurely pace that life was doling out.

But because TV ingrained in me an impossible standard for my social life, I’m not satisfied, and I’m doing my damndest to improve it. For the past week now I’ve been fighting past the social anxiety that has been a hallmark of this blog and actively making plans with people to get out and do things, every night. I went to three different bars with work friends on weeknights and spent Christ knows how much on non-well drinks, just like a grown up on TV. 

The Gamecube was a bad choice, and I covered for it by lying to myself. North Hollywood was a questionable choice, and I guess I’m going to cover for it by trying to turn it into an outright good one. Sure, I may not be able to spend every night in a bar having witty banter and sexual tension, but even three nights a week with some halfway decent banter would be a vast improvement over where I am now. And sexual tension with anyone would be welcome – right now I’ve only got sexual tension with myself, and that never lasts too long because I’m kind of a slut.

Truman Capps wasn’t really into Metroid, hence his tepid memories of the Gamecube.