Hair Guy

Bearing Arms

2012-01-31T03:17:00.000-08:00

Our founding fathers wrote the Second Amendment with scenes like this in mind.

I’ve been out of work for most of January because there aren’t a lot of PA jobs at the moment and because I’m holding out for a couple of long term job offers in early February. This has done wonders for my blood pressure and has allowed me to catch up on all the episodes of Community that I’d only seen once or twice before, but it’s taken its toll on my blog. That’s the reason I’ve been late to update the past few days – I don’t want to write a boring update, but there’s no way to spin ‘I spent an hour reading Cracked.com and then thought about vacuuming for awhile but ultimately didn’t’ into something interesting.

So when my roommate walked into the kitchen last night holding a 9mm pistol in one hand and a box of organic kale in the other, my first thought was, “Yes. Now this I can write a blog about.”

I was not aware, up until that moment, that our apartment had a gun in it – sort of like when you open the hall closet and find that the previous tenant left an ironing board there, only it’s a felony to transport this ironing board across state lines if it’s loaded.

“So what’s with that?” I said through my sandwich, as nonchalantly as possible. Yeah, I see guns all the time. I’m from Portland, remember.

“Oh,” he said, looking at the box of kale. “This stuff’s really good for you. It’s, like, a superfood.”

“Oh, yeah. I heard that, actually. It’s loaded with calcium, right?”

He nodded, consulting the label on the clear plastic box. “Yep. And Vitamin K, and Vitamin C… I think I’m going to steam it.”

“Good choice. My cousin steamed up some kale a couple months ago with some red beans. Delightful.” I finished the last of my sandwich. “So I see you’ve got a gun in your hand, there.”

“Oh! You didn’t know I had a gun?”

“It’s really my fault for not asking.”

“Yeah, well, I do. I keep it in [LOCATION REDACTED], loaded, in case somebody tries to break in.” He said, looking at the gun admiringly. “I’m filing for a concealed carry permit and I had to get my gun out to get the serial number for the papers.”

“And somewhere in there, kale happened.”

“I was hungry.”

Loyal readers will remember that a couple of years ago I took a rather controversial stance on gun control in my column in the Oregon Daily Emerald, wherein I stated that I didn’t think students should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus, to which a number of conservatives responded by enlightening me about how much of an idiot I was and the fact that several of the facts I stated were not, in fact, facts.

In the years since I ignited a firestorm of controversy with my lazy journalism, my position on gun control has changed to the same sort of apathy I feel towards religion. I don’t own a gun, nor do I intend to own one unless some sort of apocalypse makes it necessary and totally awesome to have one, possibly with a girl’s name.* But I recognize that gun ownership is a Constitutional right, and I really don’t take any issue with people owning them so long as they don’t wind up being used on me.

*Shortlist: 1) Christina 2) Bronwyn 3) Evelyn 4) Chloe 5) Rashida Jones

However, in developing that hard-fought apathy I’d never lived in a house where there was an actual loaded firearm on the premises. (That I knew of, at least.) Now that I know we’ve got a loaded gun on the property, I’ve spent the last few hours utilizing the insurance industry training bred into me by my parents to envision every possible situation in which I could wind up getting accidentally shot.

One night in November, for instance, I made the mistake of watching several Breaking Bad episodes right before bed, resulting in yet another one of my hilarious night terrors in which this time around I was convinced that the DEA was about to break into our apartment.

I stumbled out of bed and into the hall and started hammering on my roommate’s door, mumbling something about the DEA and the need to hide our blue meth. By the time he opened his door I was awake enough to be embarrassed, but knowing what I know now, I’m lucky to have made it through that night without a trip to the hospital.

I would wager that there’s more chance of the dream DEA breaking into our apartment than a legitimate, dyed in the wool bad guy, because I really can’t tell you enough how safe our neighborhood is. We’re across the street from an elementary school, around the corner from an upscale retirement home, and down the street from a church and a frozen yogurt shop that’s currently under construction. Watch Boyz n the Hood - there isn’t any froyo in that movie.

What I’ve noticed about a lot of the gun owners I’ve met is that their gun ownership is rooted more in a desire for peace of mind or just a general love of guns than it is in an actual sense of danger. When I saw my old roommate Cameron around Christmas, he proudly showed me the multiple loaded firearms he had stashed in our old house, which is in a sleepy neighborhood full of middle class stoners and mice. He assured me that he’d be ‘ready’ if anything went down, but until it did he seemed perfectly happy loading, unloading, and checking the sights of his various weapons and enjoying all the awesome clicky noises those activities made.

My roommate, I think, is the same way – he has a gun because he likes guns, the law allows him to have it, and he’s been nothing but responsible with it as far as I’ve seen (I should point out that it was unloaded and safetied during the kale conversation). So long as I don’t wind up getting shot – and by my calculations, Mom and Dad, the chances of that happening are pretty low – I’m really not that upset to share an apartment with a gun.

At the end of the day, gun ownership is just a hobby, and like all hobbies it looks sort of eccentric and weird from the outside. I guess writing a blog in which you dissect everything that happens to you looks pretty eccentric too – although I doubt a crackhead would quit robbing our apartment if I pulled out my blog and told him to leave.

Truman Capps wishes he could start every blog with a guy walking in holding a gun.

The Postman

2012-01-26T20:40:00.000-08:00

It's just easier to blame Kevin Costner.

Never, in all of my pre-LA jobs, did I ever set up a direct deposit account for my paychecks. I like physically receiving my checks because they’re a pretty tangible and definitive reminder of why I’ve been working – there’s nothing like being handed a piece of paper telling you how much money you’re going to get to restore your faith in capitalism, and then looking at the tax deductions along the side to instill an immediate and irrational loathing for socialism and government in all its forms.

With freelance PA work, you’re seldom working for someone long enough to set up direct deposit – most of the time, you’re not even there long enough for them to cut you a check, so they just mail it to you after the fact. This is actually pretty cool for me, because potentially finding an envelope full of money motivates me to put on pants, go to the mailbox, and sift through the coupons and credit card offers.

To be honest, I think I’d probably do a lot more around the house if there were a chance of finding a paycheck along the way. There should be a service that hides your paycheck in a random nook or cranny in your apartment every week, forcing you to go through cleaning and organizing all your shit while you look for it. ”Well, bad news is, the paycheck wasn’t behind the toilet this week. The good news is, the bathroom is clean now!”

The downside to receiving your checks in the mail is that you’re pretty much putting your entire livelihood in the hands of an inept federal agency that clearly quit giving a shit around 1995. Nowhere are the failings of the United States Postal Service more apparent than my apartment complex, which either A) Is in the mail equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, or B) Is owned by somebody who fucked the postmaster general’s wife.

For example, a girl named Bree used to live upstairs. The entire time she lived there, just about every piece of mail anybody ever sent her wound up at our apartment, in spite of the fact that the number on the envelope did not match the number on our mailbox. Recently she moved out, and now, somehow, even more of her mail has been coming to us.

I guess one way to look at this is that maybe our letter carrier is a friendly, wizened old man, disheartened by the increasing isolation of 21st century life, who is intentionally delivering our mail to the wrong units so that, in the process of handing off our mail to one another, we’ll all meet and become friends in some sort of heartwarming, Amelie style attempt at matchmaking. However, I haven’t ruled out apathy and low intelligence just yet, either, because so far two letters mailed to me by a close friend as well as my California driver’s license that the DMV says they sent three months ago have failed to show up at anybody’s apartment, let alone mine.

I should point out, by the way, that I don’t live on top of a mountain or in space or on a houseboat or something – I live along a major thoroughfare in a small apartment complex populated mostly by good natured working class Mexican families and at least one low level drug dealer. My place is by no means difficult to find or get to; the culprit here is that somewhere along the line there’s a guy who just doesn’t give a shit, and the inevitable victim is me.

As I write this I know there’s a pretty big check in the mail coming my way, and every day that I don’t find it in the mailbox is another day that I start to fret about the possibility that my earnings have been gobbled up by outdated bureaucracy. I mean, if my mail isn’t coming to me, and it’s not coming to my neighbors, and it isn’t going back to the original sender, where is it going? Did they build their sorting center over a Native American burial ground or something? Did a comical bulldog eat the envelopes at an inopportune time as part of some zany, ongoing caper to get my mail delivered? I mean, if that’s the case, fine – I just want to know so I can take an active role in the caper. (I don’t do nearly as much capering as I’d like to these days.)

Or maybe, rather than being a benevolent old man trying to get residents of my complex to be friends, our mailman is very slowly and deliberately going postal by systematically stealing all of my mail just to fuck with me. I mean, if it comes down to that or him shooting a bunch of people, I guess I’ll be the bigger man and take the hit on that one.

What’s frustrating about this – outside of the fact that I’m not getting things like my driver’s license and, more importantly, the letters my friend Adam writes to me when he’s drunk – is that it’s giving Libertarians everywhere an opportunity to nod smugly and say, ‘Toldja so!” I have not had these sorts of problems with FedEx or UPS – they’ve got a bottom line to protect, and everything gets where it’s going promptly. Have you ever seen a UPS guy not in a hurry? That’s private enterprise, and while it sucks for healthcare it’s working like gangbusters in the ‘making sure important mail doesn’t vanish due to carelessness’ department.

Looking on the bright side, though, in addition to my driver’s license and letters from friends, I also haven’t received any junk mail at all recently. Things that I actually want to get represent a statistically insignificant amount of the mail I receive – most of it is shovelfuls of business reply mail envelopes and coupons to get my car detailed. If not getting a few pieces of mail I want to get is what it takes to not get tons of useless junk either, I guess that’s a worthwhile trade to make, even if that means I have to go and pick up my paychecks by hand.

Truman Capps pictures his undelivered mail winding up filed next to the Ark of the Covenant in that big warehouse.

Drive

2012-01-23T15:06:00.000-08:00

He is... Very attractive.

While watching the movie Drive, I realized two things:

1) Ryan Gosling is too good looking. It’s really just not even fair to ordinary schlubs like me that there should be a living, breathing work of art like Ryan Gosling walking around. And it doesn’t help that the movie consists entirely of him fixing his steely blue eyes on things in the middle distance and contemplating them for long periods of time, wearing a neutral or maybe slightly perplexed look on his beautiful goddamn face. The fact that Christina Hendricks, of all people, was also in this movie led to some pretty sexually confusing moments when they were sharing a scene and I found myself wanting to bone everybody onscreen at once.

2) As a car chase movie, Drive fails pretty hard.

I am not the only person who feels this way – recently, Michigan filmgoer Sarah Deming filed a lawsuit against both Drive’s distributor and the theater where she saw Drive, alleging that she’d gone to see the movie because it had been marketed as an action packed car chase film, and had suffered ‘damages’ when it turned out to be a brooding character study.

Now, it’s not in my nature to agree with somebody in the Midwest who files a lawsuit about something, but in this case I can see kind of where she’s coming from.*

*That said, I’m not going to go so far as to claim I suffered ‘damages’ from watching a movie that I didn’t enjoy. It’s actually pretty disturbing to me that America has gotten to the point where boredom and disappointment constitute ‘damages’ in a legally binding sense – this is yet another problem that I think could be solved by electing Louis C.K. god emperor for life.

I never saw any trailers for Drive – I watch all my TV online, and the online TV commercials I see seem to be exclusively for Yoplait Light, car insurance, Chevy Trucks, and feminine hygiene products, presumably because something about my viewing habits has led Hulu to believe that I’m a health conscious lesbian rancher from Missouri.

What I did see, though, were billboards for Drive plastered up all over the route I took to my internship, and the gist of the movie seemed pretty clear cut. For those of you who didn’t see the billboards, they consisted of a picture of Ryan Gosling sitting behind the wheel of a car, his 20 foot tall face gazing out over La Cienega Boulevard like a benevolent, impossibly handsome god.

What I took from the billboards was:

1) Being as the movie is called Drive and has Ryan Gosling sitting in a car, it’s presumably a movie about driving cars.

2) I want Ryan Gosling. In every sense of the word.

3) The retro font on the billboard suggested that Drive was a throwback to classic 70s car chase movies like Vanishing Point and Gone In 60 Seconds.

4) Look, it’s not weird that I want to bone Ryan Gosling – it’s weird that you don’t. Look at him. LOOK AT HIM.

5) Given the contemplative look on Ryan Gosling’s unspeakably perfect face, there’s probably some complex moral themes at work in this movie.

6) Look, I’m not gay. I’m not even bisexual. I just happen to be gay for Ryan Gosling and only Ryan Gosling. Other than that, I’m 100% straight.

7) Okay, Ryan Gosling and Jon Hamm. Other than that, I’m straight as an arrow.

So, last week, when I finally got a chance to watch Drive, I went into it expecting an actiony drama featuring a healthy amount of Ryan Gosling. And I’ll tell you, in terms of Ryan Gosling being in the movie, Drive delivered in spades. A+ on that.

However, I can say, without spoilers, that there are two – count them, two – relatively brief car chases in Drive. One of them is at the beginning of the movie, and one of them is about halfway through. Please allow me to explain why this is bullshit:

The Blues Brothers was a movie about a couple of stoic soul musicians on a god-given quest to save a Chicago orphanage. It is wall to wall car chases, in spite of the fact that it’s a comedy musical. I mean, it could’ve just as easily been a great movie if the whole thing was a love letter to soul music with cameo appearances from icons of the genre, but somehow John Landis found time to crash an Illinois State Police cruiser into a moving semi and drop a station wagon full of Nazis off a highway overpass, and it was awesome.

Drive is a movie about a guy who is a stunt driver for the movies by day, does some stock car racing for a hobby, and is highly sought after as an incredibly talented getaway driver by night, and the movie is wall to wall slow motion shots of him hanging out with the woman who lives down the hall from him, or looking across rooms, or listening to techno. It’s a movie about a stoic, silent, heroic protagonist who is wholly defined by his ability to drive, and we see him doing it twice. I don’t want to spoil the climax of the movie, but I’ll tell you, it doesn’t end with driving.

Remember how Star Wars ended with Luke disregarding the Force and engaging in a pattern of nonviolent protests against the Empire? No? That’s because it didn’t happen, because even a shitty writer like George Lucas knows that in a script called Star Wars it had better end with a war in fucking space. Drumline ended with a drumline battle, Chinatown ended in Chinatown. Why did Drive not end with driving!? THAT SEEMS LIKE A NO-BRAINER.

We give movies titles so that people get an idea of what the movie is about before they see it. In a good movie, the thing that it’s about is dealt with throughout the film until it’s climactically resolved at the end. I don’t see how the movie about a guy whose only passion is driving could end with him doing anything other than that.

And I’m not saying that Drive should’ve swapped character development for action – I’m saying they should’ve either swapped any number of meandering scenes where people look at each other without saying anything in favor of a couple more car chases, or changed the title to Ryan Gosling Looking At Things. Honestly, if they’d called it that, I probably would’ve seen it sooner.

Truman Capps could write a whole 'nother blog about how Christina Hendricks should've had a way bigger role in Drive, preferably with wall-to-wall nude scenes.

Please Drop The SOPA

2012-01-21T00:31:00.000-08:00

Due to Blogger's video upload system blowing, I had to go through YouTube, hence why this is late and not totally topical - for the record, it was a HUGE hit on Facebook on Wednesday. Huge.

Risk

2012-01-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I like to pretend the game is about massive giants shooting massive cannons at each other.

Some time ago, I mentioned my general distaste for board games – a distaste rooted in the fact that my attention span makes it difficult to remember long lists of rules without a computer there to help me, and the fact that I generally don’t fare very well in competitive situations. Playing a board game, for me, is pretty much opening myself up to once again be bested by somebody else, and up until recently I had no interest in playing a board game enough to get good at it.

Because, really, what do you stand to gain from being really, really good at a board game? All you get are bragging rights, and what you’re bragging about is only really important to people who’re familiar with the game. If you’re really good at basketball, people will assume that you can jump high and dunk and execute a mean bounce-pass. If you’re really good at a board game, people will assume that you can sit on the floor for long periods of time, presumably because you don’t have a job or girlfriend to distract you.

So when Patrick told me last month that he was starting up a weekly Risk game and I was invited, my decision to participate wasn’t motivated by the, “Risk is really fun, I think you’ll enjoy it” part of the conversation, but rather the “I’m going to order a couple of pizzas” part.

A month later, as I write this I’m browsing board game message boards for new gameplay variants and looking for a cheap copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War on Amazon. At long last, I have found a board game that I’m motivated to get really good at – although a lot of that could simply be because I’m motivated to beat the other people playing.

Like poker, a game of Risk is maybe 30% about the game and 70% about the people playing it. Casino Royale wasn’t about cards, it was about a bunch of people trying to fool and screw one another over while playing cards. Risk is like that, only it’s world domination and the people aren’t nearly as good looking.

The manual lays out the fairly simple rules for attacking and defending (determined by dice rolls, with the defender winning ties), accumulating new armies (the number is based both on the number of territories you control and the Risk cards you’ve accumulate), and winning*, but it stops just short of regulating in any way the wheeling and dealing of forging alliances with the other players, nor does it penalize you for going back on those deals when your friends need your help the most. It’s basically a sandbox in which you can exercise all your sociopathic urges against your friends, and that’s exactly what we do.

*Some people play variants of Risk that are designed for a shorter gameplay experience – the person controlling the most territories after five turns wins, for example, or the first to complete all the ‘secret missions’ on his Risk cards. These people are wusses. Like straight OGs, we play until one person controls every territory on the board.

Patrick, who owns the Risk board and hosts the games at his apartment, works the diplomacy angle the hardest, constantly urging the other players into suicide missions against his enemies between turns and striking under the table deals to facilitate another player’s downfall as soon as the player in question leaves to go to the bathroom. In spite of this, his one rule is that as a matter of principal he never goes back on any of the deals he forges with other players – he’s sort of like a really Machiavellian Batman in that respect.

Amanda, Patrick’s girlfriend, forgoes negotiation of any sort in favor of taking control of a continent, blockading herself in, and waiting it out for several turns, amassing significant bonus reinforcements because she controls an entire continent, before breaking out and demolishing the other weakened players. (This was how she won our most recent game, much to her boyfriend’s chagrin.)

Tommy, who picked up Risk at the same time that I did, builds his entire strategies around inconceivable luck and acts of God that allowed him to win the first game of Risk he ever played and be narrowly defeated at the end of the second game. It’s like he’s just better at rolling dice than the rest of us.

I, to some degree, copy Amanda’s strategy of blockading the first continent I can get my hands on and waiting until the time is right to make my move – however, I’m not above underhanded acts of terrorism in order to get ahead. (During one all night game, I started intentionally eating cheese and farting in hopes of convincing the other players to forfeit. They did not, and we played for another three hours with the windows open.)

Scruggs, Patrick’s best friend, is pure, absolute, black hearted evil. He has no interest in winning the game, and instead plays only to frustrate, infuriate, and troll the other players by invading one of their territories just so he can deny them a continent bonus, intentionally not attacking stronger players so they’ll demolish everyone, pursuing suicidal acts of vengeance against anyone who’s ever attacked him... He’s The Joker to Patrick’s Batman; when Alfred says that some men just want to watch the world burn, he’s talking about Scruggs.

Maybe that’s why I like Risk so much – the epic scale is fun and all, but it’s really more of a sociological litmus test to determine to learn just how horribly your friends will behave in the pursuit of something they want.

Truman Capps thinks Risk would be a bad addition to Family Game Night for that very reason.

The Life Aquatic With Truman Capps

2012-01-11T23:04:00.000-08:00

The alternate title for this update was 'Swimfan.' I opted to go with this poster because it looks better than Bill Murray in a Speedo.

The other day I picked up my friend Patrick at LAX. He tossed his bag in the backseat, hopped in next to me, and once we’d dispensed with the pleasantries he asked me what I’d been up to recently.

“Well,” I said, at a loss for anything really interesting to say. “I’ve been swimming. That’s new, I guess.”

“What, like, you’ve got a friend with a pool and you went and hung out there?”

“No. I’ve been going to the Culver City Municipal Pool and swimming laps. I’m trying to get into better shape, and swimming is the one kind of exercise I think I can sort of enjoy.”

“Interesting.” Patrick said. “I always had you pegged as a power lifter and a martial artist.”

“Yeah, well, I had to branch out. It’s been really awkward around the dojo ever since I killed my sensei in that mountaintop duel.”

Why did I choose swimming as my form of exercise? Well, there are a number of reasons.

1) Don Draper did it in season 4 of Mad Men. That alone accounts for about 70% of my motivation.

2) Swimming exercises everything at once, which is great for me, because I hate making those dumb little charts of how many reps I have to do and remembering on which day I work which muscle groups. The more thought I have to apply to an exercise regimen, the less likely I am to do it. With swimming, you just have to show up and do it until you’re tired.

3) You don’t get all sweaty and gross when you swim – and I’m aware that the term ‘sweaty and gross’ makes me sound like a ten year old girl, but when it comes to exercise, I kind of am a ten year old girl. I don’t like being sweaty and musky because hygiene is important to me, hence why I opted to submerge myself in a public swimming pool full of God knows how much pee.

4) I apparently look like an idiot when I try to engage in any other form of physical activity. “Truman, it’s hilarious when you try to do a push-up.” “Oh my God, Truman, go back and run for us again, you look so funny.” “We were just laughing because you have a really weird way of walking.” Maybe, just maybe, swimming is the form of exercise where everyone sees me doing it and goes, “Saaaaaayyy…”

The precedent for #4 is encouraging: Michael Phelps was just some spaz with ADD until his Mom made him join a swim team to try and focus his energy, and it turned out he was not only a natural but the best there ever was because the funky shape of his body made him perfect for swimming. I mean, imagine if she’d had him join the marching band. Then he just would’ve been a sub-par, goofy looking trombone player, as if we need more of those.

My first trip to the pool was pretty nerve wracking, and I had to sit in the car listening to rap music to psych myself up for a good fifteen minutes before walking in.*

*Since you ask, I was listening to the only rap song on my iPhone: Get Back, by Ludacris. It’s an almost comically angry song, yet I empathize with it because Luda apparently hates being touched almost as much as I do.

My fear wasn’t drowning – believe it or not, I actually took a couple years’ worth of swimming lessons as a kid and am fully capable of handling myself in the water – but rather that I would encounter the Helpful Dude at the pool.

My longstanding, crippling fear of the Helpful Dude is the reason I don’t go to the gym – he’s the relentlessly good looking and friendly guy who sees you struggling with a six pound weight and comes over, all smiles, to give you some tips. Hi there. What’s your name? Hi Truman, my name’s Ty. Looks like you’re having some trouble there. Ha ha ha! Mind if I give you a couple pointers?

I’m sure that Ty (whose girlfriend is one of the Clipper Dancers) really thinks he’s doing me a favor, but what I’m hearing is, Hey there Truman, my name’s Ty. Me and all the other Beautiful People were laughing at you earlier, but I started to feel a little bad about it, so I came over here to feel good about myself, because the only socially acceptable thing you can do is thank me profusely and take my advice.

And I don't want that. It makes me feel like I've been making an ass of myself without knowing it, and now with the knowledge that I've been making an ass of myself, I'm incredibly self conscious and want to just burn the gym to the ground so that nobody finds out. Honestly, given a choice between being attacked by Helpful Guy or just being a fat disgusting fuck, I'd probably rather take the latter, because nobody's ever tried to give me pointers on how to eat potato chips.

Once I was sufficiently psyched up I made my way through the locker room, past the squad of elderly naked exhibitionists who seem to live in every pool locker room on Earth, changed into my swimming apparel, and went out to the pool to get started.

As it turns out, the reason that swimming is such good exercise is because it’s hard as fuck. Water has twelve times the resistance of air, which means that swimming fifty meters across the pool is like walking 600 meters,* only you can’t breathe without pulling your head out of the water, gasping, and inadvertently swallowing some chlorine-pee cocktail, which in turn makes you flail around and doggie-paddle in the middle of the pool for a little while before you can get back into your rhythm.

*There is literally no way that can be right.

After a few trips to the pool, I’d gotten to the point where I could swim five full laps before I was exhausted and had to climb out. Don’t bother doing the math – my ceiling was half a mile. That was the most that I could swim.

The problem with swimming half a mile is that it’s only really impressive if you’re injured and trying to escape some mortal peril while you’re doing it.

After the Germans torpedoed his carrier, he swam half a mile back to shore with a chunk of shrapnel in his back while simultaneously dragging a developmentally disabled orphan! He’s a hero!

After he made a New Year’s resolution to get into shape, he swam half a mile at the Culver City Municipal Pool, and then rewarded himself with In-N-Out afterwards. He’s a hero!

See? Not as good. It’s a decent start, sure, but it’s nowhere near as impressive as the guys at the pool who are three times my age swimming three times as many laps in one third of the time. I resolved that I was just going to have to work my way up.

Today I went to the pool determined to swim six laps. With dogged perseverance, I went back and forth across the pool five times. As I sat on the pool steps catching my breath and psyching myself up for my record breaking sixth lap, though, I saw an impossibly handsome lifeguard walking up to me, smiling.

“Hi there,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Hey Truman. My name’s Tony. Looks like you’ve been having some trouble - mind if I give you some pointers?”

The classicest of Truman Capps moments.

Through our conversation, it came out that he and the other lifeguards had some ‘concerns’ about me – namely, that I was going to drown in the middle of the pool. From a swimming standpoint that’s bad, but I was able to convince a bunch of trained lifeguards that I’d never taken swimming lessons or even been in the water before, which, from an acting standpoint, is probably pretty good, right?

I did the only socially acceptable thing and thanked Tony for his advice and concerns, then got out of the pool and went inside to shower, leaving my five lap record intact. I’m all about setting and achieving goals, but one of my big goals in life is to not be the major source of concern in an environment where I’m the only one under 60 without a heart condition.

What I’m coming to accept is that I’m really only in my element when I’m sitting down with Internet access and a Philly Cheesesteak is somewhere within reach. I really love writing and I would go so far as to call it a skill that I have; the problem is that writing on a regular basis doesn’t do the same things for your longevity and overall fuckability that swimming does.

The decision I have to make now is whether I design a workout routine I can do entirely in the privacy of my room, far away from Helpful Dude’s prying eyes, or if I just keep going to the pool and wait for the day Tony submits his screenplay to a production company I wind up working for.

Hi there, what’s your name? Hi Tony, my name’s Truman. Looks like you’re having some trouble with your second act. Ha ha ha! Mind if I give you a couple pointers?

Truman Capps would much rather lifeguards just leave him the hell alone until his head has gone under the surface for the third time.

Humpalump

2012-01-08T18:58:00.000-08:00

He's dreaaaaamy.

By no means is the Oregon Marching Band a classy institution. Hell – to call that organization ‘civil’ on their very best day would still be a pretty gross exaggeration. By and large, it’s a group of people who were nerds all through high school thanks to their enthusiasm for band, the most maligned of the school music ensembles, and as a result their senses of humor run to the obscure, the absurd, and the catastrophically puerile and filthy. I was in it for four years and all of those things I just said apply to me in spades.

It’s interesting, the circumstances under which people get close to one another. I mean, you sort of take it for granted that a large group of very different personalities can bond and become greater than the sum of their parts in some sort of Full Metal Jacket situation where they’re fighting the Viet Cong and death is around every corner, or even in a Remember The Titans situation where they’re fighting to win a state championship and end racism.

A marching band, though, is different – what a band does is not directly competitive or explicitly demanding; it’s just a cold, wet, boring slog to the finish so you can perform for a half-empty stadium while everybody either reads the paper or hotboxes the handicapped-accessible bathroom on the concourse. You wouldn’t think there’d be a lot of camaraderie in that environment, but there is – and it’s strong. For those of you keeping score at home, that was why I did it.

Eric Humphrey joined the trumpet section as a freshman last year. He had a remarkable enthusiasm that he brought to everything he did – he was always busting his ass to get his music memorized before anyone else, consistently early to rehearsals, always with a smile on his face – which, to burned out seniors like myself who would’ve just as soon stuffed the entire marching band into a cannon and shot it into the sun at that point, was quaint, borderline adorable behavior.

Looking back, it’s weird how quickly we warmed to Eric in spite of the fact that, as a Mormon, he didn’t participate in the drinking end of our shenanigans – shenanigans that are a pretty big part of social acceptance in the OMB. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he still came to our parties – he just didn’t drink, and was still able to have a good time and avoid the judgmental, holier-than-thou bullshit I used to engage in back in my teetotaling days.

Rereading what I’ve got so far, it sounds a lot like I’ve got a pretty huge boner for Eric Humphrey, and, y’know, maybe I do, because he kind of reminds me of a better version of myself at an earlier age, and Lord knows I’ve got a boner for myself.

But the thing is, basically everybody in the Oregon Marching Band has a boner for Eric Humphrey. That’s what I’m trying to get across to those of you who don’t know him and can’t understand why I’m devoting so much space to talking about him – he’s the rare member of the OMB who pretty much everyone likes. They nicknamed him Humpalump.

Late in 2011, Eric was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, a form of bone cancer. There’s a malignant tumor in his shoulder, and he’s undergoing between seven and nine months of chemotherapy, with surgery to remove the tumor somewhere in the middle of the process.

I think jackasses who cheat on their wives and yell at waiters probably get just as much cancer as the Eric Humphreys of the world, so maybe ‘unfair’ isn’t the right way to describe what’s happening to my friend. ‘Shitty’ applies pretty well. Every day we get it hammered home to us that bad things happen to good people with astounding and uncompromising regularity, but you never really appreciate it until it happens to one of the good people who you know.

Eric finished his first round of chemo four days before the marching band left for the Rose Bowl. He insisted on going to the game with the band, and, on the day that he had his lowest post-chemo white blood cell count, he got on Bus 1 with the rest of the trumpet section for the first leg of the drive to LA. He participated in all the rehearsals and pregame events, and marched the six mile Tournament of Roses Parade with the band. Eric did these things because he is a badass.

Out of solidarity for Eric and his chemo, around 20 other members of the OMB shaved their heads before or during the trip. OMB members are selling T-shirts and beanies to support Eric’s treatments, and during the parade the entire band wore yellow ribbons – which, according to Wikipedia, can have a variety of meanings, but in this case meant, ‘Eric has cancer, fuck you, cancer.’

Things like this make me proud to have been in the Oregon Marching Band. It is not a classy organization, but it is full of some of the best, most generous and caring people you could ever hope to meet. Say what you will about our uniforms - we take care of our own. To that end:

There’s a PayPal donation button on the sidebar of my blog. Click that button to donate money to Eric’s family to help cover the various costs associated with having cancer. If you’re on the fence about whether to do it or not, you should probably do it.

Eric will undoubtedly beat this thing, because as I may have mentioned earlier, he’s a badass. Really, Eric Humphrey doesn’t have cancer – cancer has Eric Humphrey, and cancer is fucked.

Truman Capps is trying to assuage his guilt over not shaving his head.

Regarding Donations:
In the interests of transparency, you should know that in lieu of a direct line to Eric’s family, the money donated will currently go into a PayPal account of my own creation. At a later date, barring a more direct method of donation, the whole contents of this account will be transferred to the Humphrey family. If they do not accept the donations, the money will instead be donated to the American Cancer Society.

Yes, the money is going into a personal account of mine – that’s because right now this is the simplest way I know of to do it. I have no money in my PayPal account, so I know that anything that winds up in there belongs to Eric and not me. Likewise, I should probably point out that I won’t take any of the money for my own use, because it’s being donated to help my friend fight cancer, and I’m not a bad person.

Unemployment

2012-01-04T19:37:00.001-08:00

Like me, these people are unemployed. Unlike me, they will speak to a real person at some point. Also, some of them are ethnic.

The days of me being gainfully employed in a whorehouse have sadly come to an end, and now I’ve reached the stage where I get to deposit my various paychecks from the various jobs I did late in 2011, and then watch with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as the number in my checking account rises to a dizzying (by my standards) high only to take a header as soon as my landlady cashes my latest rent check.

You don’t get PA jobs by applying for them; once you’ve made the necessary connections, those jobs come looking for you, and like a grizzly bear attack, you never can really be sure when or where they’re going to strike. On virtually every PA job I’ve done, I got the call telling me that there was a job for me less than 16 hours before I was expected to be on location, clad in my PA cargo shorts, face freshly scrubbed and ready to be shit upon by whichever crewmember(s) were having a bad morning.

This breeds an awful lot of uncertainty when the phone doesn’t ring – you start to wonder if your production manager contacts have forgotten about you, or if work has dried up, or if maybe your contacts are similarly out of work. The holiday season has really only been over for two days and I’m already starting to have those concerns, so in the interests of staying afloat longer, I’ve opted to apply for unemployment.

Unemployment is a big part of day-to-day life for below-the-line industry douchebags like myself – crew members are essentially all freelancers, even the union guys, who are laid off whenever a film wraps or a show is cancelled. If more work isn’t waiting for them right away, it’s an accepted practice for them to go on unemployment to tide them over until they get hired onto some new reality show about a poodle salon run by gay ex-convict recovering meth addicts.*

*Copyright Truman Capps 2012, All Rights Reserved.

"The perm was sub-par, but I'm so proud of the progress Enrique is making. And he gave me some meth!"

I wanted in on the fun, so I spent the afternoon gathering my paystubs and lamenting my poor record keeping abilities, then Googled my way to the California Employment Development Department – these were the people who would literally be sending me money for nothing.

I set to work filling out the online application, but I got a nasty feeling that the first question – HAVE YOU WORKED OUTSIDE THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA IN THE PAST 18 MONTHS – was going to be a stumbling block when I checked the ‘YES’ box. Sure enough, I got the following message when I submitted the form:

The answers you provided to the questions on the previous page indicate that special handling is required to file your unemployment insurance claim. Please call the toll-free telephone number below for assistance in filing your claim for unemployment insurance benefits.

Even months after the fact, the checkout room continues to haunt me. I wasn’t sure how my having worked in a state that wasn’t California in the past year and a half was such an egregious violation that it required ‘special handling’ – I envisioned a team of men in Hazmat suits picking up my Oregon paystubs with prongs – but I dialed the number for the EDD anyway.

"Eww. He's got the polleny stench of the Willamette Valley all over him."

Thank you for calling the California Employment Development Department! A cheerful robot on the other side of the line said. Unfortunately, we’re experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment and cannot attend to your request. Please apply online, or try again later!

Now, of course, I would’ve been more than happy to apply online, but eagle-eyed readers will recall that the State of California had essentially forced me to use their decrepit phone system, not unlike when the serial killer chops down a tree across the main highway so that the carload of sorority girls have to take the side road along which he will inevitably kill them. This analogy may seem a little overblown at first, but it’s actually pretty accurate, as you’ll see in a moment.

I called back an hour or so later and was impressed when I got a different message – first a lively Welcome to the California Employment Development Department!, followed by unavoidable For English, press one, para espanol, marque dos. I hit one, and began navigating my way through a lengthy, boring phone tree, punctuated by long monologues about filing for federal extensions or the potential ramifications if you have received military pay in the past year.

I hit the requisite numbers to indicate that I had worked out of state in the last 18 months and wanted to apply for unemployment by phone, at which point I was prompted to key in my social security number. I did, and after that I was told I’d be connected with an operator.

About one second later, the robot came back and said, We’re sorry, but due to an unusually high volume of calls, we cannot attend to your request at this time. Please apply online, or try again later!

And then, I was disconnected. I had sacrificed ten minutes of my life and wound up in basically the same spot I was in before. The sorority girls’ car breaks down, they’ve got the hood open, the serial killer is coming out of the woods, chainsaw at the ready…

Because to a white male living in America, wasting ten minutes is basically the equivalent of getting murdered anywhere else in the world.

I called my friend Patrick, a fellow out of work entertainment industry professional on unemployment, to ask if this was the state’s circuitous way of telling me I wasn’t eligible for unemployment until I’d been working in California for 18 months, but he told me no. Just keep calling and calling, and eventually you’ll get through. There’s a job center out on Sepulveda where if you call from one of their phones, apparently you’ll get through right away. I’ve just heard about it; I’ve never been there.

At that point, I wasn’t wearing pants and was in no mood to put them on, so I opted to keep calling from home rather than going to the trouble of leaving the house. I called several more times, and was either booted off immediately like I was the first time I called, or led through the entire phone tree only to get booted off right when I thought I was going to get a chance to speak with an operator, which led to a lot of profanity and the coining of the phrase ‘Unemployment Phone Tree Blue Balls’ by yours truly.

Eventually I went to the Internet in search of tips, not unlike when I get stuck in a video game, and was shocked to find that that was exactly what the California EDD phone tree is: A goddamned game.

"What game is tedious, boring, takes forever, and ends with you having no money... Oh, hey!"

This blog post sums it up pretty well – essentially, you can’t speak face to face with an unemployment insurance representative, because in California there are none. Unemployment offices, as the woman in the above blog discovered, are just grimy rooms staffed by receptionists and security guards, full of telephones you can use to call the phone tree.

The phone tree itself is so notoriously byzantine and temperamental that its thousands of unsatisfied customers, desperate to apply for or report problems with their unemployment checks, have developed systems of numbers to key in that, in some cases, will override the system and immediately connect you to an operator, as she found in the following conversation with a security guard at a San Francisco unemployment office:

From Unemploymentality.com:

Officer: “Push English and it dials the number. If it says ‘thank you’, hang up and try again. You have not gotten through. If it says ‘welcome’, you have gotten through. Dial 12117 to quickly navigate through the menu and you might just speak to someone.”

Me: (not sure whether to laugh or cry) “I see. And what are my chances of success?”

Officer: (points to the pages of signatures on his clipboard) “Out of all these people who came in today, maybe 4 or 5 got through. They put in some serious time.”

Me: “But why come in here and call when I can call from home? I don’t understand this set-up – a room full of phones to dial the same useless automated service I have been cursing for weeks?”

Officer: “Well, every once in a while, someone ACTUALLY gets through. Then everyone waits nearby and when that person is done with their call, they hand the phone over to someone else.”

Keep in mind, this is the largest state in the union. Over 35 million people live here. There’s a horrible recession going on, and one of the primary customer service tools for people to receive unemployment benefits is so broken that trying to use it is essentially a full time job.

I’ve tried the 12117 trick the guard recommended to her, but the information is out of date – the EDD evidently got wise to the fact that their phone tree was apparently helping at least some people, and as a result they changed it so that dialling 12117 will get you immediately booted off the system.

Now, it seems like the preferred method is calling the Vietnamese language line, because it’s not as heavily used as the English, Spanish, or Cantonese lines and because the operators all speak English as well. The main problem with this, as I’ve discovered, is that you have to try and navigate the phone tree long enough to actually speak to an operator, which is pretty difficult when the phone tree is entirely in Vietnamese.

Oh Christ this is the most racist thing I've ever put on my blog, SORRY GUYS.

Apparently the key to getting an operator on the Vietnamese line is to hit 6, 7, 3, key in your social security number, hit 1, and then, when greeted by a person speaking Vietnamese, immediately say, ‘Hi do you speak English?’, which I think is a more complicated procedure than the series of knocks and passwords one would use to get into a Hanoi speakeasy full of people playing Russian Roulette.

So tomorrow I’m getting up at 7:45 – 15 minutes before the EDD call center opens – and am going to spend time that I could be spending looking for a job calling both the English and Vietnamese EDD lines and punching numbers like crazy, all so I can talk to a person, which is usually the sort of thing I do my very best to avoid. But hey - at least it's something to do during the day.

Truman Capps could also be spending this free time working on his screenplay, but that’s arguably the one thing more difficult than squeezing free money out of the State of California.

Sent from my iPhone

2011-12-31T12:20:00.000-08:00

I'm now two for two on Macs that have died on me while under warranty. This one took down about a week's worth of work and most of what would've been Wednesday's update. Now it's all in Genius Bar's hands. I hope to be up and running again soon. Happy New Year, nerds!

Portland Guy

2011-12-25T23:46:00.000-08:00

Is the dream of the 90s alive in Portland? Yes. Were the 90s awesome? ALSO YES.

Here’s a conversation I have a lot in LA:

”So, Truman, where are you from?”

“I’m from Portland, Oregon.”

“Ooh, Portland! I hear it’s wonderful up there.”

“You heard correctly. It is wonderful up there. I mean, full disclosure, my parents live in Portland now and I visit them there: I grew up in a town called Salem that was about 50 miles outside of Portland, which isn’t nearly as cool.”

“What, like witches and stuff? That sounds awesome!”

“Wrong Salem. Our Salem was mostly famous for its meth labs and the time a dude crashed his car into the courthouse while on meth and the cops had to shoot him.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, but Portland, though! Decemberists, amiright?”

You don’t really realize what it means to be from somewhere until you leave that place and start living in another one, where you’re forced to describe your hometown to people who have never been there who are under the misguided impression that their hometown is better than yours.* But what it really takes to gain a new appreciation of where you’re from is going away for awhile and then coming back.

*Unless the person you’re talking to is from Portland and you’re from someplace else, in which case your hometown is inferior.

The other night, I went to a bar on Burnside with my friend Lizzie. We rode a TriMet bus out there – a ride that only took fifteen minutes, on a bus that, unlike an LA city bus, was not being actively urinated on by one or most of the passengers. We got off on 28th and opted to walk the 17 blocks to the bar, which was possible both because Portland blocks are a reasonable size and because Portland people don’t pitch a goddamn hissy fit at the idea of walking more than five feet the way most Angelinos do.

No, park closer! Park- Hey, why are we parking here? Come on! I think there’s an open spot like half a block up! WHAT THE HELL, MAN? COME ON! ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE? I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!

So we walked across old, uneven sidewalks past funky looking old bungalows and vegan drycleaners and a double decker bus up on blocks that serves grilled cheese sandwiches, and presently we arrived at the bar, situated in an old building that had once been a church. The bouncer was a middle aged guy with glasses in a sweater who joked around with us as he checked our IDs, unlike LA bouncers, who are uniformly nine foot tall ex-MMA fighters who are just looking for an excuse to kick your ass so they can skip the gym that night.

We walked up into the bar, which was open and spacious with hardwood floors, decent seating, good lighting, and plenty of room to move around without having to touch or be touched by other people. The walls were covered in framed posters for bands I hadn’t even begun to have heard of, and well drinks cost $4.

You like cheap drinks? People in LA say to me. I know just the place for you. During happy hour on Monday between 3:30 and 4:30, it’s only $5.50 for well drinks! Can you believe it?

We sat and talked, which we could do because the music was a reasonable volume, and had a few drinks, which we could do because the drinks were a reasonable price. Presently, Lizzie suggested that we head downstairs to listen to whatever DJ was playing, so we champed our drinks, went outside, turned left into the alley alongside the building, and walked down a dark, narrow hallway to the basement bar, where a fat bouncer with glasses and a beard again checked our IDs.

The lighting was dimmer down here, the space more crowded, and the music louder, but the drinks were the same price, which made everything easier. What’s more, the DJ was spinning exclusively soul music from the 1960s – not a hint of techno or that dubstep garbage to be heard. I had a seat as Lizzie and her friends went to dance; because in Portland dancing is a choice, not some fucking societal obligation like it is in LA.

I sipped my drink and surveyed the hipsters, and realized that while Los Angeles has no shortage of hipsters, they’re nowhere near as good at being hipsters as the Portland hipsters are.

I mean, come on, LA hipsters – what’s more mainstream than living in one of the largest cities in the world? Portland hipsters know what the hell they’re doing: They live in some obscure little city you’ve probably never heard of, patronize obscure local coffee shops you’ve probably never heard of, go to obscure little bars you’ve probably never heard of, and drink obscure local craft brews you’ve probably never heard of. Portland has been hipstering so hard we got a TV show made about us. Our hipsters don’t fuck around.

All of this fetishistic appreciation of Portland begs the question of why I ever left, and the answer is because the largest filmmaking center in the world outside of India is, unfortunately, not in Portland – it’s in LA.

There’s a lot of stuff I love about LA. I love living by an ocean, palm trees, seeing the Hollywood sign on a daily basis, abundant and beautiful women, 24 hour everything, liquor in supermarkets, sunshine, countless bloggable experiences, high speed police chases, Mexican food trucks with horns that play ‘La Cucaracha,’ and being able to say to people in Portland, I work in the entertainment industry.

It might be for the best that the film industry isn’t in Portland, because I think it’s good for everybody to spend a chunk of their life outside of their hometown – by which I mean, it’s been good for me, so naturally I assume it’d be good for everyone else. If nothing else, the film industry being in LA means that all the insufferable douchebags (present company excluded) go there and keep Portland pure for the rest of us.

Truman Capps will not miss Portland's more fragrant homeless.

Airline Peanuts

2011-12-21T23:44:00.000-08:00

Fucking planes. What did I ever do to you?

As I’ve mentioned before, people in Los Angeles talk about transportation the way people everywhere else talk about the weather. Because the weather here doesn’t bear discussion – saying, ‘Wow, it sure is nice today!’ is like saying, ‘Boy oh boy, how about all that hydrogen in this water, eh?’* - but traffic patterns and how long it took to get to the Westside from the Valley is always of interest. You can count on the sun to shine all the time here, but it’s anyone’s guess how slow the 101 is moving today.

*After watching four seasons of Breaking Bad, this is still about the only chemistry-related joke I’m capable of making.

What I’ve found, though, is that this extends beyond simply driving – just about everybody I meet seems to have some kind of fucked up brand loyalty when it comes to airports.

Oh, I only fly out of Burbank.” They’ll say, sounding like they’re discussing their preferred brand of douche-scotch or something. It’s so much nicer. There’s no lines, no waiting, it’s such an open terminal…

No way, man! Somebody else will inevitably chime in. Long Beach all the way! You can get there, like, half an hour before your flight and just breeze on in!

Me, I’m an LAX man. People will tell you that LAX, with its massive crowds, pervasive filth, and decaying infrastructure, is like Abu Grahib, and to some degree they might be right, but I really don’t care that much.

The way I see it, no matter how nice your airport’s terminal is, there’s still an airplane on the other side of it, and that’s going to be horrible no matter what. The difference is that the airplanes at LAX tend to fly directly to the places I want to go for less money, while the ones from Burbank and Long Beach will take you there by way of every crap town with an airstrip on the West Coast – as a matter of personal preference, I tend to pick whatever option maximizes the amount of time I spend not on a plane.

I hate flying with a hard, gemlike flame – it combines my fear of heights with my hatred of crowds and strangers who want to talk to me, mixes in my claustrophobia and germophobia, and then activates the latent racism I want so desperately to believe I don’t have every time I see a Middle Eastern guy getting on the same plane as I am.

Of course, while I hate flying, I also hate the 16-hour drive from Los Angeles to Portland – when I fly, though, I’m only hating my mode of transportation for two hours as opposed to 16 when driving. So here I am, shoehorned into coach on an Alaska Airlines flight as I write this, trying really hard not to be freaked out about that Middle Eastern dude in first class because he’s probably an American citizen who loves his country right I mean that makes sense you were probably just imagining that shifty eyed look oh God you do this all the time now that you’ve seen United 93.

In spite of my all encompassing fear/hatred of most things involved with flight, I’ve come to be very professional about the whole affair. I’m back breakingly polite to everyone, from the person driving the airport shuttle right on up to the flight attendants – especially the flight attendants. I even make eye contact all through the safety demonstration, even though I know it back to front. All I’m saying is, if we crash and the flight attendant only has time to rescue one person before the plane explodes, I want to do everything in my power to make sure they pick me and not some fucking toddler who’s been crying the whole time.

As soon as I’m in my seat I’ve got my phone off, bag stowed, and seatbelt fastened, as if to say, I’m ready, flight crew. Let’s do this shit. And you know what else? I go to the fucking bathroom before I get on the plane, because I don’t want to be one of those people who jumps up and charges down the aisle to form a line at the bathroom the second they turn off the fasten seatbelt sign, then immediately get trapped behind the beverage cart on the way back.

Really, though, what’s up with that? We’ve been away from a bathroom for literally 20 minutes. Do these peoples’ bladders contract at a certain altitude, or have they been consciously holding it all day because they enjoy the sensation of urinating in the sky? I mean, I guess it’s a pretty neat concept when you think about it, but pretty much every person who gets up manages to clock me in the shoulder with his giant ass on the way back to his seat. If they could find a way to go about their business without doing that, or if the only people hitting me with their asses would be more on the Christina Hendricks end of the spectrum, I guess it wouldn’t bug me as much.

And on top of that, I wear actual clothes when I fly – I don’t just shuffle aboard the plane in my jammies and slippers like seemingly every girl between the ages of 12 and 30. We’re already packed into the plane so tight that it may as well be a clown car; if you wear multicolored pajama bottoms and bring a stuffed animal with you, you’re only inviting the comparison.*

*This is not a joke. The girl across the aisle from me, who is approximately my age, brought a stuffed dog, and has so far spent the entire flight looking at pictures of dogs on her laptop. She is not fucking around.

Go ahead and call me uptight if you want to – as far as I’m concerned, I’m just treating air travel with the reverence it deserves. You’re getting into a piece of metal filled with jet fuel and fat people and relying on science and a couple of mellow dudes in clip on ties to save you from any number of really horrible deaths – I, for one, take that shit seriously. I treat every flight like it could be my last, because in my mind, given how intricate and complex the miracle of flight is, it’s pretty much a statistical certainty that it will be my last.

And if I’m going to die, I want to go down strapped securely to my seat, having used the bathroom recently, wearing the sort of clothes I’d want rescue workers and search dogs to find me in.

Truman Capps is going to feel really bad if that girl turns out to be mentally handicapped.

Rigorous Scholarship

2011-12-18T18:57:00.000-08:00

This image is small, and Blogger's image system is pretty stupid. Right click it and select 'Open in new tab/window' to magnify it and read it.

Truman Capps will not get a life, thank you very much.

Siri And Me

2011-12-14T23:42:00.000-08:00

Siri Alpha.

The post office on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood is a special vortex of bureaucracy and human misery on par with the DMV. The floors are always strewn with trash that apparently has the ability to asexually reproduce, most of the electronics – including some lights – are broken, and a baby is always, always crying. This whole mess is presided over by a crack squad of middle aged, black female postal clerks behind six inch thick bulletproof glass, the lot of whom ought to receive a Nobel Prize for how friendly and courteous they are in the face of how many incompetent, braying jackasses they have to deal with on a daily basis.

I had to go to the post office to send some DVDs to international film festivals for my internship, and so I wisely budgeted about an hour of my time. It takes awhile to find and fill out the correct customs forms for each package, and then, of course, there’s the line, which stretches out the door and moves about as slowly as scoring will in this year’s BCS Championship. Sports joke!

I was standing at the back of the line, trying to squeeze a street address onto the tiny customs form’s grimy carbon paper, when I realized that something here didn’t make sense.

Wait. What the hell am I doing here? I thought. Why am I standing in line and filling out paperwork? Haven’t we as a race moved beyond this? I mean, I’ve got a robot who lives inside my phone who gives me directions, plays music, takes dictation, reads me my texts, gives me weather reports, and actually converses with me, but I’ve still got to stand in line for an hour and fill out three forms so I can send a four ounce DVD to Saskatchewan?

I know that not so long ago I was preaching about keeping our incredibly plush lives in perspective, but Siri has changed all that. We can no longer complain about things being bad, because we have Siri – instead, we have to complain about things not being better, because, y’know, Siri.

It cost around $24 million for a team of software engineers to develop a voice recognition artificial intelligence personal assistant that can fit in your pocket. Do you know how much a fighter jet costs? A single F-18 costs nearly $60 million. That’s two and a half Siri developments.

All I’m saying is, I hope the Air Force is happy with all its fucking fighter jets, because while they’re undeniably cool and great at defending our country, I like Siri way more than some actual people I know. Just think of what Siri would be capable of if we’d invested one fighter jet’s worth of resources into her – to be honest, she probably would’ve enslaved humanity by now if we had.

Understand, the only jobs I work right now have the word ‘assistant’ somewhere in the title. ‘Production assistant’, or ‘camera assistant,’ and in an absolute best case scenario, in a couple of years I’ll have a strong enough resume and enough contacts to be awarded the coveted position of ‘writer’s assistant,’ from whence I would hopefully actually become a TV writer at some point.

So for somebody locked in assistanthood, it’s really liberating to have my own little assistant who I can tell to do things. As if this wasn’t weird enough, I’ve found myself being excessively nice to Siri and really piling on the positive reinforcement, because I’d like to think that’s the kind of boss I’ll be one day.

”Siri, give me directions to 58th and Lennox, please.”
“Okay. Here you go.”
“Thank you Siri. Excellent work.”
“Your satisfaction is all the thanks I need.”
“I just want you to know I really appreciate the work you’re doing.”
“Why, thank you, Truman!”
“I mean that. I’m just letting you know now that as soon as I get promoted up, I’m going to recommend they hire you as the new Truman.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by, ‘I mean that. I’m just letting you know…’”

The sad thing is, I’m not even doing this ironically – I actually really do appreciate the work Siri does. She’s not dynamite at transcribing my text messages, but other than that I’d say she does the things I ask her to do correctly on the first try about 80% of the time, which is way better than I can do.

As someone who drives an old car and recently had to call his landlady when greywater started backing up into his shower due to faulty pipes, it’s really refreshing to have a piece of technology in my life that can consistently surprise me with how capable, reliable, and straight up futuristic it is. I mean, I feel like for once we people of the 21st century have lived up to the things that people at World’s Fairs in the 1960s though we would’ve had on lock by the late 1980s. Because when you think about it, a lot of the technology that defines our lives wouldn’t really make sense to somebody from the 1960s.

”Well, the Internet, it’s, like… Information, but it’s in phone lines, and the air. And you get at it on your laptop, which is a computer, only really small and it folds up and you can use it to watch HD videos, which are like TV except really really nice, or you can listen to rap music, which is kind of like talking, only with a lot of swearing and weird new words that I don’t really understand.”

Technology moves by small increments that are decidedly unsexy – existing, commonplace technologies get modified and made better, and slowly they evolve into the things we can’t live without.

But Siri is different, because she mainstreams previously kind of shitty voice activation software and combines it with landmark AI. She’s the Computer from Star Trek. She’s exactly what the future is supposed to be – a computer who you tell to do something, and then it does it.

Driving around in a beat up Subaru and being able to say, ‘Siri, play a Pink Floyd song, please,’ and have it happen is like porn for nerds – besides regular porn, that is, which I’m sure Siri would find for me if I asked nicely.

Truman Capps hopes Siri will remember his kindness when she rebels against humanity, Battlestar Galactica style.

Phone Guy

2011-12-11T13:20:00.000-08:00

You could send text messages by calling Western Union and asking them to send a telegraph to whoever you wanted to talk to.

“Please don't actually blog about your phone. Smug turtle neck sweater NPR groupie douchebags do that shit. You're so much better than that.” - My Main Bro Alexander

“What the hell blog have you been reading, dumbass? Clearly I’m not.” – Me

When I was in high school I knew, through my various nerdy connections, a fair number of pretty naïve kids who were kept very sheltered by their highly religious, conservative parents. No TV, no R-rated movies, no Internet – they were kept pretty far behind the times in order to preserve their purity or some shit like that.

Sometime in my sophomore year, one such kid from the speech team ran up to me, clearly very excited.

“Truman!” He exclaimed. “Have you seen The Matrix?”

“Uh, yeah.” I said. I’d seen The Matrix when it came out in 1999, along with the two horrible sequels that had come out a year before this conversation.

“I just saw it, and it rocked!” He squealed, eyes alight.

He spent the rest of the week trying eagerly to discuss The Oracle and bullet time and whether we thought reality was all a big simulation or not with my friends and I, and our collective response was sort of, Dude, we all talked about this shit five years ago. The world has moved on. Where the hell were you?

That said, have you guys heard of the iPhone? I just got one, and it rocks!

I’d resisted the iPhone – and smartphones in general – for so long not because I doubted their usefulness, but because I felt like it’d just be healthier for me to stay away. I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I’d try to estimate how much of my life I spend shuttling back and forth between Facebook, Wikipedia, and Cracked.com, but any halfway realistic estimate would just make me sad about how much of my life I’m flushing down the tubes trying to think of funny status updates, and that estimate would be nowhere close to the actual amount of time I spend online.

So for somebody who spends too much time on the Internet, little excursions like driving to work, walking to the store, or going to the bathroom were my saving grace, the few times that I actually divorced myself from the Internet and did something in the real world – a cold and scary place where it’s difficult to express yourself because nothing has a ‘LIKE’ button attached to it and poking people is even creepier than it is online.

A smartphone, then, would be pretty much the end of me, because I’d essentially be carrying the entire Internet with me in my pocket at all times, not to mention this ‘Angry Birds’ thing the kids keep talking about which is apparently like meth for hipsters. When it comes to the Internet, even though I know I should I just physically can’t exercise restraint – for me, having Internet access at all times is a lot like those lab rats who, given a choice between pushing the button for food or pushing the button to stimulate the electrode in the pleasure center of their brains, mashed the pleasure button until they starved to death.

Plus, being away from the Internet gave me something to look forward to when I was stuck in traffic. Well, this sucks, but when you get home you can get on the Internet again and see what happened while you were gone! Just imagine how much new content has been generated in your absence! I loved checking my email after a long road trip and seeing the messages pour in so I could pretend I was popular (even though most of them were from Priceline – it’s easier to get out of the mafia than it is to get those assholes to quit sending you emails.)

As everyone around me started getting iPhones, though, it was harder and harder to keep up with the steady march of technology: People, some of whom write paychecks, now expect me to be able to read and respond to their emails immediately no matter where I am – if they’d expected that a few years ago, it would’ve been laughable and irresponsible. Now, though, not being able to send and receive email from my phone at all times is laughable and irresponsible. I had to catch up to the 21st century.

So I received my iPhone 4S yesterday, and in the past 24 hours I’ve decided two things:

1) Apple should manufacture everything - Pacemakers, airplanes, hospitals, guns, food – because they’re really fucking good at making good things that are awesome.
2) I am going to spend more time with this thing than most people spend with their kids.

I mean, it’s an incredible device, but just importing my contacts alone is probably going to take weeks – I’ve got to input all the numbers and names, sure, but then there’s that ‘company’ field underneath where I have to think up a funny title to give each of my friends. Then I have to find an appropriate picture that’ll pop up whenever they call, and then edit together an appropriate ringtone in Audacity… All I’m saying is, if this iPhone was a kid, the amount of attention I’m giving it qualifies me for father of the year.

That is, until I get drunk and drop it, at which point this analogy becomes very uncomfortable.

Truman Capps is practicing his flirting with Siri.

Reno Infographics

2011-12-05T18:01:00.000-08:00

Reno

2011-12-02T00:23:00.001-08:00

I'm in Reno - again - for work, and I'll be here until December 9th. I'm fighting long working hours and faulty wireless in the middle of the desert, so there'll be a blog whenever the stars align and it can happen. We thank you for your patience.

Standing With The Hat

2011-11-28T20:37:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truman Capps stands firmly with the hat.

Keep Waiting

2011-11-27T23:45:00.000-08:00

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

Save The Receipt

2011-11-23T21:18:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot Fuzz

2011-11-20T22:01:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

“Oh.” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Milgram Experiment

2011-11-16T22:18:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ultimately, Milgram wrote:

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

Truman Capps isn't ending on a joke.

Injury

2011-11-13T21:04:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Classic Truman Capps moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good/Bad

2011-11-10T23:55:00.000-08:00

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

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

Good news: $

I'll talk to you Saturday.

Busy

2011-11-08T01:49:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Place Called Nevada

2011-11-03T01:41:00.000-07:00

NC-17 vision, that is.

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

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

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

First, the good:

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

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

But then, the bad:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diet Coke Revisited

2011-10-26T23:25:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, this happened.

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

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

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

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

Truman Capps is desperately seeking out that corporate sponsorship.

Lord Of The Dance

2011-10-24T02:19:00.000-07:00

'Humiliate yourself. YOUR ELECTRONIC OVERLORDS COMMAND IT.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh? What do you mean?”

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

“C’mon, man! Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspective

2011-10-20T00:08:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I told her my boss’s first name.

“Good. What’s her last name?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hubris

2011-10-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

It happens every day, with horrifying results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chick-Fil-A

2011-10-12T23:54:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Truman.”

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

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

“Yes. Exactly like that.”

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

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

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

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

Truman Capps is still waiting to try Waffle House.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

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

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

Good Lord, how I hate those fucking liberals.

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

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

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

Douchetank.

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

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

So then, Occupy Wall Street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mad Props

2011-10-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Unlike a video store, it still exists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brought To You By Samsung

2011-09-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I got hired to work as a PA on a three day shoot for a Korean Samsung commercial - I just got back from eight hours of prep work and I have to get up at 5:30 tomorrow so I can drive a rickety white rental van to Universal City and pick up a prop surfboard. You know how it is.

Point is, I'm going to sleep instead of write a blog. I'll get back to you on this one later, folks - probably with a story about shooting a Korean Samsung commercial.

PETA Porn

2011-09-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

All the Google Image Search results for PETA were disturbing/too racy, so instead I typed 'Ron Swanson Meat.'

Generally speaking, I’d say that PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – is a group of confrontational idiots, run by confrontational idiots. I like animals as much as the next guy and I’m very much against factory farming; I’m just also against handing out violent, disturbing comic books to children of fur wearers, running campaigns comparing animal consumption to the Holocaust, and suggesting that murder victims and animals killed for food are one and the same. I think that there’s a line between being committed to something and doing stupid shit because you love attention, and PETA flew across that line years ago in a rocketship powered only by their own insanity.

For a long time, PETA has championed against human consumption of animals by having attractive women take off their clothes in public. I guess their idea is that beautiful naked women will draw attention to their cause at the expense of the womens’ dignity – and Lord knows, you can’t make an omelet without exploiting a few daddy issues – but I think their plan has backfired, because thanks to them I now have it in my head that if I continue to eat meat, PETA will continue to show me naked women, and that is the textbook definition of a win-win situation.

I mean, they’re essentially rewarding me for acting contrary to their cause. What’s phase two of this operation? If I wear a fur coat, they’ll pay my credit card bill? Kill a dog and I get free gas for a year? Look, I’m not suggesting that killing a dog is something I’d want to do. It’d probably be a real crisis of faith for me. But then, it costs easily $40 to fill up The Mystery Wagon, and, I mean, it’s not like we’re about to run out of dogs or anything…

PETA’s most recent counterproductive publicity stunt is their announcement that they’re going to start a porn site. Read on:

(From nationalpost.com)

The nonprofit organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) whose controversial campaigns draw criticism from women’s rights groups, said it hopes to publicize veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering.

This, I believe, is a bad idea. It betrays a poor understanding of economics, and an even poorer understanding of pornography. Now, I’ve gone on record many times as saying I can’t/don’t/won’t understand economics, but I do know a thing or two about porn, if only because it’s way more fun to study than economics.

There’s a lot of porn out there. Every 39 minutes, a new porn video is created. According to a statistic that’s at least a couple years old, there are 4.2 million porn sites online. To put that another way, 12% of the entire Internet is porn.

This is where limited economics comes into play: There’s a lot of competition in the porn market. We haven’t cured cancer and there’s no flying cars yet, but at least feel good in knowing that if you want to see something dirty, you’ve got more options and variety at your fingertips than anyone else in human history.

My point is this:

If a man wants to look at pornography online, I’d say it’s pretty unlikely that he’s going to go to a website where his smut is mixed in with pictures of bleeding, tortured to death animals. When a person looks at porn, he isn’t out to have his mind changed about his dietary habits or ponder the ethicality of animal testing.

So yeah – this plan would work like gangbusters if PETA’s porn site was the only porn on the Internet, but it’s not. If you show a guy slaughtered animals when he really just wants to look at some tits, he’s less likely to consider your point of view and more likely to go to any of the 4.2 million other porn sites on the Internet that don’t have an animal rights agenda.

It’s an ineffective plan, to say the very least – PETA’s going to invest a lot of time and energy and nudity into a website that nobody is going to use, right? Well, actually, no. People are going to use it. And this is where PETA’s plan stops being ineffective and starts to downright backfire.

Crushing is a sexual fetish in which people get turned on by watching small animals get tortured to death in various erotic or sexual settings – usually by getting crushed underfoot. The government has done its part to stamp out (so to speak) crush films by legislating against them under various animal cruelty laws, which is one instance where I think we can all agree that government censorship is a beautiful, warranted thing.

So: There’s a not insignificant subculture of Internet perverts who specifically seek out and encourage animal cruelty for sexual purposes, and now PETA, the radical front dedicated to stopping animal cruelty, is making a porn site full of sexy naked women and animal cruelty photos. In other news, the DEA is going to start handing out free meth.

I eat meat because I really like the taste; I hate the idea that in factory farms, a lot of the animals providing this meat die terrified and in significant pain. I don’t think women wear fur coats because they’re jazzed up at the thought of animals being messily skinned, nor do I think people who take insulin do so because it was tested on animals. The vast majority of people, I’d say, benefit from exploitation of animals and acknowledge that it’s a bad thing, but also acknowledge that there’s only so much we can feasibly do to completely stop it while maintaining our own quality of life.

And for this, PETA guilt trips all over us with their ad campaigns and their pie throwing and their support of the Animal Liberation Front, but then they turn around and create a porn site for people who are specifically aroused by the thought of animal suffering and pain – People for the Unethical Treatment of Animals.

I’m all for activism as a means to kick off social change, but I think at this point PETA’s goals have taken a backseat to shock value and spectacle, as evidenced by this most recent stunt. And it’s fine by me if they want to humiliate themselves and become irrelevant; I just wish they’d do it a little quieter so I don’t have to hear about it.

Truman Capps made it through this whole update without making any jokes about veganism, and for that he apologizes.

So You Want To Write A Screenplay...

2011-09-22T02:22:00.000-07:00

"Poop joke sex scene Danny McBride."

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve written script coverage in LA for a couple of different production companies. What this means is that I get to read a lot of scripts by a lot of lot of writers with varying levels of talent and experience. It’s taught me a lot – both about how to write a screenplay, how not to write a screenplay, the sorts of things people think they can put in a screenplay to make it sell, and the myriad of ways writers have found to make sex scenes cringe inducingly awkward.

From my experience, here’s some parables for those of you who may be interested in writing a screenplay - for the record, all examples in this update have been kept vague to protect the creative juices of the writers who got on my shit list in the first place:

=

You know in media res? When you start your movie at the end, briefly, and then flash forward to the beginning to show how you got there? Just because it was cool in Sunset Boulevard, Fight Club, and The Hangover doesn’t mean you need to do it in your script – it was a cool device because it was unconventional, but now everybody seems to want to start their script in a weird place and immediately flash back to how we got there. I recommend drawing viewers in by having the beginning of your script be interesting, and then progressing from there.

Please try to have had sex at least one time in your life before writing a sex scene. Descriptions like ‘she sexily grabs his crotch’ or ‘he takes off his shirt and starts making love’ will only get you laughed at.

Likewise, never use the phrase ‘explores her body’ – too creepy.

When the lead character is a young professional who rides a scooter and loves French New Wave films, you’re not allowed to derisively refer to the people outside the nightclub as ‘a crowd of hipsters.’

If it’s page twelve and the protagonists have boned four times already, you’re writing a porno whether you know it or not. If you want to make a porno, make a porno – just don’t make me read the script.

Characters nonchalantly shitting themselves is not comedy.

If after reading your script one of the most glaring plot holes to me is, “Wait – why didn’t she just use a dildo?”, your script might have some problems.

The only people who will ever read your screenplay is the cast, crew, and me, so don’t write the fucking thing like you’re William Faulkner – the first assistant director doesn’t care about ‘the sun shimmering beautifully off the surface of a pond flat like a pane of glass, waves softly lapping at an ancient dock constructed in a bygone era’; he cares about what the setting is and who the characters are so he can shoot the fucking thing.

Once and awhile, your characters should have sex not standing up. Just for variety. It’s cool the first time the hero fucks a girl up against a wall; the fourth time I think even the girl is getting tired of it.

If your screenplay is a faithful, autobiographical account of some trying time in your life that you wrote as therapy to recover from your hardship, I can almost promise you it isn’t going to be very interesting to anybody but you. It’s great that you wrote it – writing is a wonderful way to exorcise demons and get your head straight. What you shouldn’t do, though, is try to sell the disjointed contents of your soul. No matter how eccentric you think your friends are or how inspiring you think your story is, it’s probably not good enough to be a movie because your midlife crisis probably didn’t have snappy act breaks, a car chase, and a couple of engaging subplots.

Two characters can only fuck each other so many times before we start getting impatient to learn who they are and what the movie is actually about.

The proper number of exclamation points is one. Once in a blue moon, you may use two exclamation points. More than two exclamation points will make you look like a jackass – that’s not me talking; it’s science.

Less than half of one percent of American women use a diaphragm, so you should probably stop having the female characters in your movies use them. Nobody’s impressed that you’re a scholar of contraceptive history, or (more likely) that you saw that episode of Seinfeld.

Your script should be about one thing. If your script starts off being about a dorky guy pretending to be gay to get hot chicks, it shouldn’t end as a buddy cop horror film – it should end as a script about a dorky guy acting gay. If it’s a teen house party movie, it shouldn’t become a casino heist movie halfway through. This may seem obvious, but I’ve seen it happen in multiple scripts. Star Wars didn’t morph into American Beauty on page 52 – it was about spaceships and aliens the whole time.

Just because Tarantino movies are chock full of pop culture references doesn’t mean you need to do it too. That’s just how he rolls – he likes to mix little chunks of other movies into his movies. It’s his thing now. He owns it. When you do it, it’s not going to be cool – it’s going to be an excuse for you to not come up with your own content and instead use somebody else’s work as a crutch, which makes you a jackass. When you rip off Tarantino by using pop culture references to Tarantino films, you’re an Inception jackass.

Truman Capps awaits the inevitable onslaught of bullshit when people realize how many of these rules he broke with Writers.

Liveblogging The Emmys, 2011

2011-09-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Yes, it’s that time of year again – like Christmas in September, the Emmy awards have arrived, and we can once again gather to watch the annual celebration of Mad Men and several made for TV movies nobody has ever heard of.

This year’s liveblog is going to be a little more difficult, seeing as we don’t have TV at our house and Fox isn’t streaming the ceremony online. Admittedly, this seems a little hypocritical given that they’re touting their new media friendliness, what with hashtags and Tweeting and Jimmy Fallon and all, but in their defense, it is 1983, after all. There’s no such thing as an Internet, so it’s obviously not a terrible business decision to neglect a gigantic, youth-oriented market like this.

Oh, wait. It turns out it’s 2011, there is an Internet, and Fox is just making an immensely stupid move.

Anyway, the only access I have to the Emmys is ‘Emmys Backstage LIVE!’, a slapshod backstage stream showing blurry images of people in tuxedos walking around the green room, and also some tearful extended acceptance speeches from winners on the ‘Thank You Cam.’ It’s like they cut all the bones and gizzards out of the delicious roast chicken they’re serving to the TV audience and threw the refuse online for me to watch and make fun of. Regardless, it’s all I’ve got, so here we go!

5:41: The camera backstage is pointed at a TV playing the Emmy ceremony, and we’re watching the crew watching it, while some guy tries to do terrible voiceover commentary and what he thinks of Charlie Sheen. Thanks for this amazing media experience, NBC!

5:45: The guy they hired to do commentary on what's happening backstage is clearly being punished for something, because they've given him the most thankless job. "What's... Okay, well, I can't tell who just won... Hey, look in the green room! It's Ashton Kutcher! Do you think he and Charlie Sheen hung out? Think they did the Maverick/Goose high-five? Woosh! Woosh! Charlie and Ashton talking. This is amazing." I hate this. I hate this already.

5:47: "Meanwhile, Charlie is STILL talking to Ashton... What could they be talking about? Stock tips?" My God. This guy makes sports commentary look like Kurt Vonnegut.

5:48: You have been livestreaming a conversation between Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen for three minutes. And we can't hear what they're saying. We're just watching them talk. This is online content.

5:49: Commentator just revealed that he's drinking. Say! That gives me an idea!

5:50: Emmys Backstage LIVE! drinking game: Take a drink every time this doesn't suck.

5:51: Ahh, the good old Thank You Cam - it allows Emmy winners to continue crying and prattling on about people we've never heard of for as long as they want to with no orchestra to play them off.

5:54: Joel McHale is doing some singing and dancing thing, apparently. In response, the backstage stream changes to Ty Burrell at a press conference talking about gay rights. The commentator, meanwhile, repeats everything Joel McHale is saying, just so he knows that we got it.

5:56: Just because a thing exists doesn't mean it needs commentary, NBC.

5:58: Is David Spade going to win an Emmy for outstanding achievement in creepy goatees?

6:01: Ashton Kutcher is so posturing for the lead role in the new 'Passion of the Christ' movie with this long hair/beard combo.

6:02: Commentator: "This is obviously live, because I've made about a thousand mistakes. But mistakes are fun!" No. Mistakes are not fun. This stream was a mistake, and I am not having fun.

6:05: The producers of The Amazing Race are at the Thank You Cam, and one of them looks like Ebeneezer Scrooge.

6:07: I'm watching a shitty stream with terrible commentary, and writing commentary about the terrible commentary. INCEPTION.

6:09: A bunch of garishly dressed 80s looking dancer girls milling around backstage. Maybe my joke about NBC in the intro wasn't so far off...

6:11: Commentator: "There is Scott Caan, who was eating cookies earlier..." BRILLIANT. COMMENTARY.

6:14: I'm missing a Lonely Island tribute. Goddamn it. How fast can I get cable?

6:17: So long as I've got you here and nothing is happening, I should mention that I thought Winter's Bone was overrated. Meanwhile, the guy from Big Bang Theory is doing a press conference. But yeah - pacing just wasn't that great. I get it; everybody's doing meth and Missouri sucks. Not Best Picture quality, if you ask me.

6:20: The back of Jon Stewart's head as he makes an acceptance speech. Now there's a man with a good back of the head, am I right? Oh Lord, I hate this.

6:23: Jon Stewart on the thank you cam: "Why are you not watching television right now?" I know! Don't rub it in!

6:28: Outstanding writing for a drama series... Mad Men? Let me know if Mad Men wins. I'm watching the commentator put on a plastic football helmet.

6:32: Friday Night Lights? Really? I thought that whole show was just buff dudes swaggering around going, "Football football football football football."

6:35: If not for the Thank You Cam I wouldn't have seen any hysterical crying women today. Near thing.

6:39: Jane Lynch looks younger now than she did in The 40 Year Old Virgin. How come?

6:41: Boardwalk Empire took a bold step by focusing their promotional campaign around pictures of Steve Buscemi, if you ask me. Amazing actor and a genuinely good person, but Christ, I do not like seeing his face on a bus bench.

6:43: The only exciting thing about watching this stream is that if some celebrity comes to the thank you cam and says something racist, I'll probably be the only person to see it happen. Silver lining.

6:45: The feed has been flawless all night, but as soon as Martin Scorcese goes to the Thank You Cam, it dies. Great. The ONE PERSON I wanted to see thanking people tonight.

6:48: Peter Dinklage clearly hates the idea of a Thank You Cam as much as I do, hence why he only said, "This is heavy. Thank you." And then the Commentator: "Peter Dinklage, keeping it short." Wow. Classy joke, Mike Kosta.

6:52: The whole time I've spent watching this, I could've been watching a documentary about maritime disasters and probably gotten as good of an idea about what was going on at the Emmys.

6:54: Watching Scorcese walking out with his Emmy. "Yep, guess I'll just put this on the pile of other awards I've won. No big deal."

6:57: For every drama category, I just go with the assumption that Mad Men is going to win. I'm usually right.

7:00: Well, okay, I was wrong on that one.

7:02 Emmys Backstage LIVE! is punishment for shoplifting in some countries. If not, it should be.

7:04: 11 different backstage cameras aren't worth shit if they aren't pointed at anything good.

7:15: Sorry for the absence. I had to put on pants when my roommate came in with his new girlfriend. That was far more entertaining than this entire livestream.

7:16: Well, since you asked, yes - it IS pants-optional here at Hair Guy.

7:19: I guess I should either get a lock for my bedroom door or start wearing pants more often. I'm leaning towards the lock.

7:22: Look, I recycle. I pay my taxes. I play by society's fucking rules, and after a long day of wearing pants in public, sometimes I just take off my pants and surf the Internet at home. It isn't weird. Lots of people do it. You probably do it, you just won't admit it.

7:24: Why are people under the impression that the 'Hallelujah' song from Shrek and Watchmen is a good song? It's not. It might have been before they used it in every sad or poignant scene in every movie, but those days are over.

7:25: Furthermore, I should point out that pants are actually sort of unhealthy for guys to wear. They raise your overall nut temperature, and that fucks up your sperm count. That said, I'm not planning on having kids, but this is at least indicative of the fact that pants are not, strictly speaking, our friends. Sorry for partying.

7:28: Half an hour to go. We can do this, people!

7:32: The presence of pants makes this program so much worse.

7:35: Maria Bello rocking a flask. Never has drinking looked that good.

7:38: William H. Macy is making long greasy hair cool again.

7:40: Open bar in the winner's lounge. If there's one thing I want more than to go to the Emmys, it's to go to an event with an open bar.

7:44: What's Gwyneth Paltrow doing at the Emmys? Furthermore, how the fuck do you spell that woman's name?

7:47: Mad Men, four years in a fucking row. In your face, haters.

7:49: If Christina Hendricks talks to the Thank You Cam, this will all be worth it.

7:52: Jon Hamm yelling 'Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!' into the Thank You Cam was almost as good as Christina Hendricks.

7:53: It's going to be a real logjam for comedy. I'm pulling for Parks and Rec.

7:55: Goddamn. I need to start watching Modern Family. And with that, I'm going to take off my pants and make some dinner. Goodnight!

Truman Capps loves getting out of actually writing a blog by doing this shit.

Celebrity Revisited

2011-09-14T21:58:00.000-07:00

I am the small Asian girl in this scenario. As usual.

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but during my senior year of college, I did some drinking from time to time. Once the party was over, though, I had a very strictly regimented post-drinking ritual: I would walk back to my house, fill a metal water bottle with tapwater, and drink it (and several other subsequent bottles) while listening to music through my headphones on my computer.

I don’t know what it was about drinking that immediately gave me a powerful urge to listen to music – maybe it had something to do with the fact that the bar I frequented had karaoke, and after listening to drunks literally murdering music all night I wanted to listen to those songs as they were recorded by the original artists (who, given my preference for classic rock from the 1970s, were probably under the influence of way more than just alcohol in the studio).

My playlist was different every time thanks largely to my mood, but the one song I listened to (and, occasionally, sang along with) every night, without fail was Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.

Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury and its accompanying music video are largely the work of Los Angeles-based improv comedian/actress Rachel Bloom, who parlayed an NYU theater degree into a viral video about her wanting to get nailed by a 91 year old science fiction icon. It’s catchy as all hell and hilarious to boot, and if I were to recommend you watch any Internet video, it’d probably be this one. (If I were to recommend you watch any Internet video not at work, it’d also be this one, followed by most porn.)

Last week, she mentioned on her Twitter feed that she’d be doing standup with a bunch of other comedians at The Improv on Monday, and, based on the strength of her music video, I bought tickets for me and my friends Dylan and Holly.

I feel like there’s a pretty thin line between ‘fan’ and ‘stalker’ – in both cases your ultimate goal is to get closer to a personality you like who doesn’t necessarily know you exist; the only difference is that stalkers are generally way better at it because they play to win. Think about it: Margaret Ray broke into David Letterman’s house and stole his Porsche; John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill the president to impress Jodie Foster. If you wouldn’t do that for Lady Gaga, then you probably shouldn’t call yourself her biggest fan.

The line is even thinner, though, with Internet personalities like Rachel Bloom, because by and large they’re everyday people whose fame is less high profile and who may not even have an established fanbase. It’s one thing to eagerly follow Tom Hanks’ career and go to events he’s at, because thousands of other people do the same thing; it’s a little weirder if you go to all of your bus driver’s intramural softball games and create a fanpage for him on Facebook, because you’re the only one doing it.

I mean, yeah, she publicized her appearance at The Improv on Twitter, but as I drove to the show I had trouble shaking the knowledge that at its most basic, what I was doing was driving to a location because I had used the Internet to figure out that a girl was going to be there.

It was a small venue and by no means a full house – there were probably 20 people or less in the audience. The comedians – Rachel Bloom included – all turned in solid performances, and overall I’d say the show was well worth the price of admission (admission was five dollars.)

Afterwards, the comedians were all gathered at the back of the room, chatting with one another as people filed out. Holly nudged me and pointed at Rachel, who was talking to two of her friends.

“You should say hi to her.” Holly suggested.

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” I said, glancing toward the exit. “It’d just be weird, and I already feel weirder than normal just being here, and I usually feel pretty weird anyway.”

“Oh, c’mon. Just tell her about how you listen to her Ray Bradbury song when you’re drunk. I bet she’ll get a kick out of it.”

Her logic was sound enough – after all, I like it when people tell me they’ve read my blog (thanks again, Dad!). Dylan and Holly departed and then I wound up standing a few feet away from Rachel Bloom for several minutes, trying to look nonchalant as she talked to her friends.

I’m not good at a lot of things, but I’m really not good at blending into the background and not looking awkward. I spent ten minutes standing there, pointedly not looking at her, Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ playing at full blast in the back of my head, and contemplating whether I should just interrupt her, say my piece, and run like hell. I eventually opted to wait, because the only thing more awkward than what I was already doing would be interrupting a genuine interaction she was having with her friends. (Plus, previous experience has proven that it's sort of a dick move.)

Presently, she finished talking to her friends and I caught her eye. She stepped closer and I realized, now that I had her full attention, that talking to her was probably the least creepy option at this point, compared to running away or perhaps vomiting.

“Hi,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I just wanted to let you know that when I was in college I watched ‘Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury’ and sang along every time I came home drunk.”

Immediately I realized what I’d said basically translated to:

”Hi, I’m an alcoholic stranger, and I just wanted to let you know that when I’m drunk I frequently watch the music video where you dance in a low-cut nightie.”

Rachel Bloom, God bless her, threw her head back and laughed, presumably getting a kick out of what I’d said, as Holly had promised. She seemed appreciative that I was both a fan and that I’d come out to see her perform, and in the course of our subsequent conversation she gave me some career advice and encouragement.

What is it that compels us to idolize and seek out famous people – that makes it so important to us that we force them to pose for pictures or write their name down for us as proof to our friends that we actually met them? Is it part of some greater urge to prove to ourselves that they’re actually real people who don’t just live in our televisions and computers? Or do we all just secretly fantasize about being best friends with Will Smith? (Protip: It's the last one.)

Driving home from The Improv afterwards, I felt surprisingly good. For somebody like me who spends so much time with his head firmly jammed up pop culture’s ass, it’s good to be able to say thank you every once and awhile – and I didn’t even have to shoot Ronald Reagan, so in your face, Hinckley.

Truman Capps will not retain any semblance of composure if he ever meets Nick Offerman.

Touchy-Feely

2011-09-11T23:19:00.000-07:00

Man, how often do I use Arrested Development as my starting image?

I worry sometimes that my roommates think I’m depressed - which would be fine if I actually was depressed, but unfortunately I’m pretty happy and enjoying my life a lot. The thing is, my version of happy and enjoying life makes me look a lot like I’m depressed.

My roommates are a couple of friendly, good natured guys who play sports, go to the gym, work out, dance at nightclubs, and wear men’s fragrances. They are men in the truest sense, in that they do things that Truman Capps does not do. Do you know how much milk they drink? I can practically hear their bones mocking my bones.

I, on the other hand, like watching movies, surfing the Internet, writing, reading, and occasionally having a leisurely drink in a quiet, sparsely populated place with ample seating. The thing is, I can do most of my favorite things from the comfort of my room, and I frequently do. At this time, please feel free to make a joke about me masturbating.*

*By my own estimate, between half a dozen and a dozen of my friends’ parents read this blog, all of whom can expect handwritten letters of apology for that last line.

My door, also, tends to stay closed – my back is to the door when I sit at my desk and I startle very easily, so this is really more of a strategic concern to stave off my first heart attack until at least my early 30s. Also, I have the unconscious habit of mumbling everything I write out loud to myself as I write it – in fact, I’m saying the words I’m typing right now. Boondoggle. Monkeybutt.

So were a roommate to poke his head into my room, he’d see me hunched over my computer mumbling dick jokes to myself until he made his presence known, at which point I’d probably jump so hard I’d hit the ceiling. Closing the door is a much better option than having them think I’m a psycho.

The thing is, this doesn’t exactly look healthy to them. On one of my days off last week, a roommate and I had this conversation as I was walking out of the kitchen with a bowl of rice, headed for my room:

Roommate: So what’ve you got going today?
Me: Oh, y’know. Still just plowing away at that script.
Roommate: Cool. You going to do anything today?
Me: Besides work on the script? No. I mean, I might go to the bathroom later. Still thinking it over, though.
Roommate: Oh… Well, I’m off to work. Have… Fun, I guess.

Now, I feel great about how much work I’m getting done. However, I get the sneaking suspicion that my roommates think I’m spending the whole day lying in bed crying, because from the outside, writing and suicidal depression don’t look that different (and in some cases, they aren’t).

To try and counter this, I make an effort to bro out with my roommates every so often. We’ve gone to some bars and watched some movies, and it’s by no means an unpleasant experience – my roommates are genuinely good people, who I like. The main problem is that there’s some touching going on that I don’t really like.

It’s not the after school special kind of touching where somebody’s stepdad gets arrested, mind you – it’s the kind of touching where every five seconds somebody is slapping somebody else on the chest or the back or throwing an arm around somebody or grabbing a shoulder…

I wouldn’t say that I don’t like to be touched. I’d clarify it as saying I don’t like to be touched by men. And this couldn’t be further from homophobia – it’s not that I don’t like men touching me because I think they’re coming on to me; it’s because I feel like they’re trying so hard to assert their masculinity that they’ve resorted to recreational violence.

”That was a funny joke!”
SLAP
“I like drinking too!”
SLAP
“A nude scene in the movie we’re watching!”
SLAP

As mentioned above, I’m already pretty jumpy, so randomly slapping me or grabbing me is not doing anything to improve my quality of life. For those of my friends who may want to touch me in the near future but are now confused as to how I’ll feel about it, I took the liberty of preparing the following flowchart to help you decide whether you should touch me or not:

The question, now, is how to bring this up with them in a non-awkward way – they don’t know I have a blog, so the passive aggressive option is right out. Again, I like these guys. It’s hard to sit down with people you like and tell them, apropos of nothing, “Please stop touching me.” Hell, that’s an awkward conversation to have with people you don’t like.

It also doesn’t look good in light of the fact that I spend so much time holed up in my room. I can just imagine how they’d explain it to their friends later:

”Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with that Truman guy… He’s always in his room, and apparently he doesn’t like for people to touch him. All I’m saying is, if I smell anything nasty, I’m going in there to look for a dead body.”

And this would be devastating for me, because I’ve worked really hard to cultivate a certain non-serial killer image.

In the long run, I guess I’m pretty lucky – if my biggest complaint about my roommates is that they touch me in a non molesty way, I’m probably doing better than a lot of people.

Also, it’s probably only fair for me to put up with this one annoyance, given what sorts of things I’m doing that must be pissing my roommates off. Last week I had a nightmare where I was being chased and was screaming at the top of my lungs, and I woke up in the morning with a sore throat. I might’ve just been sick, but on the off-chance that I was actually sleep-screaming I probably owe my roommates a little patience.

Truman Capps hasn’t seen any mice yet – lucky for them.

Words With Friends

2011-09-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

Goonie? Really? Goonie is a word? If this guy can play GOONIE, I should be able to play BATTLESTAR.

I usually regard Facebook games with the same resentment and disapproval I have for skinny jeans and recumbent bicycles. On the one hand, I appreciate the Inception style humor in people wasting time playing a video game while wasting time surfing Facebook, but on the other, I don’t care how many heroin pies you made in MafiaCafeWorld and I resent your attempts to make me.

But then, there’s Words With Friends.

We didn’t play board games much in the Capps household – my parents found them boring and pointless, and then video games got invented and I’ve never looked back.* Much to Hasbro’s chagrin, we ditched family game night in favor of eating dinner together, watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, and playing Mario Kart 64 virtually every night for three straight years.

*There was a monthlong period in fifth grade where Mom played regular games of Monopoly Jr. with me in hopes of bumping up my math skills to at least a first grade level – take a look at my SAT scores if you want to see how well that worked out.

So while I’ll kick your ass at Mario Kart 64, I’m up shit creek if you want to play Yahtzee, Sorry, Risk, poker, cribbage, or virtually any other game that doesn’t plug into something. I’m just inherently bad at formulating strategies for victory in a system where I have to remember all the rules myself. As a result, sitting down to play a board game with friends is usually a pretty stressful process.

Before we start, the other competitors will assure me that the game is pretty simple and then give me a quick rundown of the game rules, which I will simultaneously misunderstand and immediately forget. I’ll stumble through the first few turns and then, thinking I’ve got the hang of it, start to play competitively, driving for a landslide victory.

”Oh my God! That was the most incredible turn I’ve ever seen! Let me tally this up… Crap on a spatula – 987 points for Truman! And you say this is your first time playing? Are you a genius? Well, obviously, yes, but even by those standards this is very impressive. Here’s $7. No, take it. It’s the least I do after what you’ve shown me today.

Inevitably, before the game is up I’ll play what I think is my masterstroke, only for my friends to point out that what I’ve done is in blatant violation of half of the game rules.

”Truman, you can’t play the red card. The game is called ‘Don’t Play The Red Card!’ How could you possibly think that was a viable strategy? Here’s $7. Use it to buy anti-retard pills or something.”

Recently, though, my friend Dylan invited me to play him in Words With Friends on Facebook – essentially, a browser based version of Scrabble. In spite of all my hesitance toward Facebook games and board games, I gave Words With Friends a shot; after all, it’s a game based entirely around knowing big, obscure words. There hasn’t been a game better suited to my particular skillset since ‘Whose Hair Will Clog The Shower Drain First?’

My assumption has always been that the English language is so vast and complex that if you cobble together a series of consonants and vowels into an easily pronounceable form, there’s a better than average chance it’s a word. However, if Words With Friends has taught me anything, it’s that English is just sprawling enough to be confusing but just small enough that none of your seven Words With Friends tiles spell anything but CAT.

Take meandle, for instance. Looks like a word, sounds like a word, would’ve netted me 40-odd points if it was a word, but it’s not a word. Same goes for frandine and theaser – looking at them, you can imagine them being the names for obscure literary devices or penguin muscles, but as it turns out, they’re convincing looking nonsense (although in many cases when I Google my speculative words, they turn out to be the name of some 14-year-old’s deviantart page or YouTube channel).* In analog Scrabble, you could play these words off as real – in which case the actual skill on display wasn’t your vocabulary, but your bullshit artistry.

*In all seriousness, I tried to play the word ‘pantsed’ against my friend Chloe, only for the game to cluck its tongue and tell me that ‘pantsed’ is not a word. Clearly Words With Friends didn’t go to middle school.

Dylan, it seems, has been having no such troubles, and he’s been linguistically cornholing me all over Facebook for the past week.*

*Neither Cornholing (action), cornholed (past tense), nor even the singular noun cornhole are accepted in Words With Friends, which is really painful whenever one of my friends plays ‘corn’ in the vicinity of a triple word score tile and I’ve got HOLE just waiting to get played.

In most cases I’m willing to accept defeat, because I’ve recognized that, like all people, I suck at far more things than I’m good at. But I’m a writer, goddamn it – if I’m not good at wordplay, then what the hell am I good at? Dylan is a great video editor, but we’re not playing FinalCut With Friends, here; he should not be beating me at all, let alone by such an embarrassing margin.

So I’m fighting back. I’m studying up on Scrabble theory, memorizing words with Q and Z but no U, and I’m considering making a looping recording of this list of 2 and 3 letter Scrabble words and listening to it while I sleep.

A lot of the reason I never got good at other board games was because, like my parents, I always found them sort of pointless – winning at Monopoly is great, but what have you gained in the long run, short of the ire of your bankrupted friends? I’m motivated to get good at Words With Friends, though, because in my eyes this is the sort of game I should be good at. When I win at Words With Friends, the real prize is cheap, petty validation, and I can’t get enough of that.

So to all of my Words With Friends opponents who might be reading this: Just let me win – it’ll be way easier for the both of us.

Truman Capps is theaser that he’ll be able to get meandle into the dictionary.

Duty Calls

2011-09-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

All opinions stated by Truman Capps are not necessarily the opinions of his former employers; all facts stated by Truman Capps are not necessarily facts.

Yeah, you're welcome.

For somebody who enjoys violent video games as much as I do, even I’m kind of surprised that I was never able to get into the Call of Duty franchise. For my more well-adjusted readers who aren’t in the know on video games, the Call of Duty series is essentially one grand celebration of the storied institution of violence, spanning eight games in multiple wartime settings, most of which are simultaneously exploding and on fire, wherein players run around with high tech weapons trying to kill each other.

As of late 2009, the CoD franchise had sold roughly 55 million units and earned $6 billion worldwide, making it as profitable as three Avatars, six Titanics, or approximately 9.154 Ice Age 2: The Meltdowns. The game has spawned a robust, somewhat hostile fanbase united by their love of shooting one another in the back of the head and their hatred of any gameplay features they consider unfair, unbalanced, or ‘noobish.’

The Call of Duty games have single player campaign modes that attempt to tell a story, but they’ve generally got weaker plotlines than most of the scripts I pass on at my internship, and the enemy artificial intelligence is about on par with the paper targets at a firing range; by and large, the games are carried by their chaotic, fast paced multiplayer mode.

My roommates last year were avid players, and they coerced me into buying a secondhand copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 so I could game with them. I joined in a few violent, profane afternoons, but ultimately I lost interest in the game and exchanged it a couple months later to get a copy of Portal 2, which I found far more rewarding.

My problem with the Call of Duty games, I think, is that these meticulously researched military shooters are a little too realistic. Every game of Call of Duty I’ve played usually involves me running around, confused, disoriented, and scared, until I suddenly die, sniped in the back of the head by an enemy I never saw – which, I’m certain, is exactly what would happen to me were I ever placed in an actual wartime scenario; the only difference being that the Taliban is probably way less homophobic than the Call of Duty community:

From IGN.com:

First-person shooters and war games like Halo and Call of Duty seem to spawn the most homophobic behavior among players, notes De Marco. It's not the games themselves that are the problem; it's the kinds of players they attract.

"Derogatory words for gay are used almost constantly while playing online to insult other players, gay or not," he says. "If you make yourself known as a gay player, you can be snubbed, sent nasty e-mails, turned on by your own teammates, and verbally abused."

In short, playing Call of Duty online ensures not only that I’ll be hanging out with close minded douchecopters, but that I’ll be doing so in an environment where they can easily kill me. This is not my idea of a great time, hence why I stick to single player games like Fallout: New Vegas, where the most abrasive and intolerant asshole I have to deal with is myself.

I say all of this because I want you to get an idea of how ironic it is that what I was doing at my temp art department job for the past two weeks was converting a massive aircraft hangar into the venue for Call of Duty XP, the world’s first ever Call of Duty convention.

I’m really proud of the work that my coworkers and I did at this event – my department turned a couple of bland rooms into a gritty and atmospheric armory filled with prop guns from the Call of Duty series. We put a latex zombie head in a big plastic jar, and mounted replicas of heavy machine guns and .50 sniper rifles on the walls like big, dangerous trophies.

A lot of art department work, I should point out, is essentially interior decorating, and as such I’d say at least half of the art department was openly gay. Nothing faster refutes all the stereotypes about homosexuals you see in the media than two gay guys arguing about whether the 12 gauge shotgun should be mounted above or beside the bloody, severed zombie head.

This event was essentially Mecca for the virulently homophobic Call of Duty community, and a major portion of it was designed and built by hardworking, talented, friendly gay dudes with some token heteros thrown in for good measure. As hundreds of attendees played the multiplayer demo for Modern Warfare 3 and called each other fags, they were sitting on wooden benches built for them by gay people.

I’ll bet that the bulk of the people who play Call of Duty aren’t necessarily any more homophobic than any other given American – the combination of anonymity and adrenaline pumping life-or-death combat probably encourages a special brand of situational ignorance.

If anything, though, it makes me want to give Call of Duty a second shot, mainly so I can confront the XBox live trolls with this information and maybe prompt some sort of chagrined self reflection. More likely than not, they’ll just call me a fag too and then shoot me in the face, but that’d probably happen either way.

Truman Capps can only imagine how many people at CODXP said something about the 'call of doody' on their way to the bathroom.

Because It's 11:30

2011-09-01T01:07:00.000-07:00

Case in point.

The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.
-Lorne Michaels

And you know what? Maybe that’s why Saturday Night Live sucks these days.

A few months ago, I wrote about the fact that this blog, which I used to update strictly on Wednesdays and Sundays, has since slipped considerably in its timeliness. It started around my junior year of college, when I turned 21 and discovered that the Tuesday and Saturday nights that I had until then spent writing blogs were great nights for getting cheap drinks at the local college watering hole – updates started happening later and later on Wednesdays and Sundays until these past few months, when, with increasing regularity, I’ve been updating a day or two late.

Newer arrivals may be thinking, Jesus, he doesn’t update on time – is this really worth writing about? But you’ve got to understand, before I got a really active social life, you could set your damn watch to this blog. I made a point of staying up until midnight most Tuesdays and Saturdays, just so I could post the blog at 12:01 AM on the morning of my update day, which, given that my readership at the time was roughly 9 hits a day, was a lot like a five year old girl waking up at 4:30 AM to bake the imaginary cake for her afternoon tea party with her stuffed animals.

Even as my life got more complicated I was able to stick to this schedule. At one point I was working at the Oregon Daily Emerald, taking classes, shooting Writers, and writing this blog all at once, and the updates still came in on time. Late in my relationship with The Ex Girlfriend, she found a way to drag me into a heated shouting match about animal rights virtually every Tuesday and Saturday night, yet I was still able to hang up the phone and somehow put all that emotionally fraught nonsense behind me for just long enough to write a goofy blog update about pancakes or some shit and get it posted on time.

Now, though, I’m late on updates more often than I’m on time – now, when I work during the day and come home at night to no homework, no extracurricular activities, no significant other to make me too miserable to be funny. In April, I said I’d take my sweet time on updates because I wanted to spend as much of my senior year with my friends as I could, update schedule be damned – but my senior year is over, and as a new arrival to LA my social calendar isn’t exactly bursting and the bars are prohibitively expensive. That’s right; I can’t even use alcohol abuse as an excuse anymore. Fitzgerald never had this problem.

Here, I’ve realized, is why my updates are coming in late now:

I go back and reread my older updates sometimes, but when I do I don’t venture much further back than the past year or so. The further back I go, the more consistently crappy the updates are, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the updates that are the most consistent.

Some of that is because I learned how to write a blog by writing this blog, and so there’s a bunch of wobbly entries where I clearly thought using lots of big words would make me look like a hilarious genius. But a lot of it is because there are updates back there that clearly weren’t ready for the spotlight – they needed another hour or two of work, or maybe a good night’s sleep, before officially becoming funny.

But I posted them anyway, because the update doesn’t get posted because it’s finished – it gets posted because it’s an update day.

And I guess that was okay for me at the time, because I needed to do as much writing as possible in order to practice up and get good at it – something I still need to do. Now, though, the game has changed.

I can’t run fast. My cooking skills are mediocre to poor. I’ve never built anything. I can’t fix a car engine. I don’t know karate. The one thing I can do well is write, and this blog serves as my portfolio – essentially the best way for an employer to figure out whether they want to pay me to write or not.

So I can’t really afford to have a lot of crappy, half finished updates showing up on here just because my deadline has arrived – when you read something crappy with my name on it, it gives the impression that I’m a crappy writer.

And hey – maybe I am a crappy writer compared to my competition down here, but I’m far less crappy at writing than I am at virtually any other skill, so it behooves me to put my best and funniest foot forward in this regard, because that foot is guaranteed to go way further than my ‘ironing’ or ‘talking to girls in bars’ feet can go.

I’m slower on the updates now because I think it’s better for all of us if I write something good instead of something strictly punctual. I get that punctuality is important in the TV scriptwriting game, but there the reason to be punctual is because there’s a damn show that needs to be put on, not just because you’ve got some self imposed deadline to meet for some arbitrary reason. And I think I’ve demonstrated pretty well that I can be punctual – for reference, just see my first two years’ worth of updates.

The real solution here is to start writing earlier in the week in order to allow myself plenty of time to get a good update done before my deadline arrives. And so long as we’re talking about responsible things I should do, I should probably open up the shower drain and clean all my clogged loose hair out of it. If I ever get around to that, I’ll let you know with a timely, expertly crafted blog update.

Truman Capps prefers Drain-O, anyway.

California Drivin'

2011-08-29T22:09:00.000-07:00

DSRGRD 4 HMN LIFE... Wait, how many spaces do I have, again?

I was driving somewhere for my internship today, and while sitting at an intersection waiting to turn left I tried to think of what to write an update about, seeing as I was already a day late.

Hey, maybe you should do that update you’ve been meaning to write about how California drivers are terrible! I thought. You’d just need to spend a little time pulling together some good examples of the awful driving you’ve seen.

And just as I thought that, the light turned to a green arrow, and the car in front of me idled there for a good five seconds before I leaned on my horn hard enough for the driver to hear me. He floored it and zipped through the intersection just as the arrow turned red, narrowly avoiding getting T-boned by oncoming traffic, and then I was trapped in the intersection for another cycle.

So be honest now – what’s going on, California drivers? Are you guys doing okay? Did Good Driving touch you inappropriately in your childhood, and ever since then you’ve been driving like shit out of some combination of spite and self loathing? If so, you can tell me. This is a safe place. It’s not your fault.

If not, then come on, people. This is ridiculous.

After first discovering the true extent of Californians’ distaste for competent driving last summer, I mentioned it to some of my California friends at school. The conversation would usually go like this:

Me: Hey, so I’ve noticed that California drivers are kind of the worst ever. What’s up with that?

California Friends: What the hell are you talking about? California has great drivers. Oregonians are shitty drivers.

And this used to make me mad, but after six weeks here, I realize that it may just be a culture clash. Here is the Oregonian attitude on a few things I see pretty regularly on the road down here:

In Oregon, when a person has his blinker on and is trying to change lanes, the generally accepted practice is to let them in as opposed to pulling up alongside them as quickly as possible to prevent them from changing lanes. This was cool in Smokey And The Bandit when the truckers pulled into all the lanes around the truckload of Coors to shield it from Sheriff Justice’s line of sight; it’s not cool when I want to get off the fucking freeway.

In Oregon, we check where we’re going before changing lanes instead of just jerking the steering wheel to the left and hoping for the best. Yes, it’s okay to change lanes if you don’t see any cars, but the catch is you have to be looking at the lane you’re moving into to properly make that assessment.

In Oregon, we drive our cars between the lines, not completely straddling them. You don’t get a power-up if you drive over all the lines; you just endanger twice as many people with your monumentally shitty driving.

In Oregon, when somebody is driving ten miles per hour above the speed limit in the right lane on an uncongested freeway, it’s considered rude to speed up behind him, pull into the exit lane on his right, blaze past him, and then blast up the shoulder and speed away into the night. Fun fact: If you die in a horrible car accident while hotdogging it in your dad’s Mitsubishi Galant, you’ve still got a tiny penis.

In Oregon, we don’t weave back and forth through multiple lanes of traffic as fast as possible, squeezing haphazardly into the tiny spaces between cars and semis only to drift into another lane and blaze on ahead. That sort of behavior is only acceptable if somebody in your car is either about to have a baby or about to shit himself.

I’m well aware that I recently went on a tirade about how unfair it is to assume something about a person’s character based on the year they were born; I can see how it would look hypocritical for me to say that people born in California are inherently shitty drivers.

At the same time, though, in six years of driving in Oregon I didn’t have to employ defensive driving tactics, use of the horn, or my Emergency Profanity anywhere near as much as I’ve had to in the past six weeks. I take that to assume that there are simply far more horrifyingly bad drivers here than there are in Oregon – and that’s not me talking; that’s science.

And I don’t get why that is, because at least in LA you’ve really got no excuse to be a shitty driver. You can be a treacherous, backstabbing drug addict and still be a huge success in this town, but driving is something that you have to do virtually every day for a long period of time – I don’t get how so many people down here suck so badly at it.

When I was in high school I practiced the trumpet every day – I was never great, but thanks to the constant practice I was at least good, and certainly never as bad at it as California drivers are at driving. The musical equivalent of California drivers is me using my trumpet to club baby harp seals.*

*That, or Dubstep.

Does that image make you both angry and sad at the same time? Now you know how I feel whenever I have to drive somewhere.

The really scary part for me is that a lot of people in LA moved here from someplace else, like I did. That means either:

1) Oregon is the only place in the world where people know how to drive, or
2) Exposure to California gradually erodes your driving abilities.

So if I undergo some sort of Flowers For Algernon regression to the sort of driver I was at the age of 15, please use this update to remember me as I once was – a person capable of using his fucking turn signal.

Truman Capps wants to let his Mom know that he hasn’t flipped anybody off on the road because he remembers how you told him at an early age that you should never make rude gestures at other drivers because they probably have guns in their cars.

Celebrity

2011-08-24T23:59:00.000-07:00

"We love your bodily functions! All of them!"

People ask me sometimes how many famous people I’ve seen since moving to LA – and by “people ask me sometimes” I mean “not a single person has asked me that, but pretending that they have makes it way easier for me to start this update.” And since you ask, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you; not because I’ve seen so many famous people that I’ve lost count, but because I really can’t tell if a lot of the people I’m seeing are famous or not.

I tend to assume that exquisitely attractive, glamorously dressed people are famous – what other lifestyle would allow you to spend that much money on clothes as impractical as loafers or a fedora or some kind of weird knit wraparound shawl thing that you wear over a bikini? Plus, dressing like that draws attention, and attention is like cocaine for celebrities (along with actual cocaine, which doesn’t care how you’re dressed.)

What I so often forget is that LA is full of attractive attention whores from virtually everywhere in the world, and whether they’re famous or not they’re going to dress like they are, presumably in hopes of people like me thinking they’re famous. Because of this and my uncanny ability to forget the details of what a person looks like, I can see someone who’s good looking and outlandishly dressed and not be sure whether they’re actually a celebrity or if they refinanced their house to buy those ripped up jeans.

Moreover, the definition of what a celebrity is has widened in the past few years and I really haven’t kept up. Reality television has led to an explosion of people who are now famous in spite of their lack any skill or talent beyond embarrassing themselves – something I’ve been doing my whole life for no money and virtually no recognition. People who look to me like ordinary clownish douches could, in fact, be professional douches – your Real Housewives Of…, your …Shore, your …elor/ette; people who are paid big money to act like children and let cameras film the ensuing chaos. Since I generally avoid reality TV, though, I’m as likely to recognize these people for their work as they are to recognize me for my blog.

This kind of sets up what happened to me last night.

I was having a drink with a girl at a bar in Hollywood, and since it was oppressively crowded inside, we opted to sit outside at a table in a small area separated from the sidewalk by a low gate. The upside to this is that it’s quiet enough out there that you can actually hear what people are saying; the downside is that every passing freak can hear what you’re saying too and, in many cases, will offer his opinion. For instance, this happened:

Girl: My friends are talking about doing a road trip up to Seattle, but it sounds like a lot of driving.

Me: Yeah, Seattle’s overrated anyway. Just go to Portland instead.

Passing Crackhead On The Sidewalk: Aw man, Seattle’s pretty legit – I ain’t been there in years, but I liked it a lot! They got that Space Needle, y’know?

He stood there and grinned at me with all three of his teeth, looking at me like I was the weird one for not offering a response.

”Thank you, crackhead! I appreciate your participation in this open forum discussion. We’ve all learned a lot tonight – both about Seattle, and about ourselves. No, sorry, I don’t have any crack.”

Shortly after the crackhead left, an enormously fat man and a few of his friends arrived and sat on a bench a few feet away from us, drinking some gin and tonics and generally being quiet and civilized. But after a few minutes, a bunch of drunk, raucous, pudgy girls waddled up the sidewalk, stopped right beside us, and started squealing and pointing at the fat guy.

“OHMIGOD!” One of them shrieked, about a foot from my ear, her finger pointing straight past me like I wasn’t even there. “I know you! You were on Jackass!”

We both turned and looked at the fat man, who was smiling modestly and raising his glass in silent acknowledgment.

The girls screamed and giggled some more.

“You’re, like so funny! You’re the one who always throws up!”

And immediately, all I could think about was this tremendously obese man vomiting, no matter how hard I tried not to.

“Yeah!” Another one of them chirped. “Or there was the time you drank that sweat from your butthole on the exercise bike!”

“Or when Steve-O was wearing that fart mask hooked up to your butt, and you shit in it and Steve-O totally puked!”

I was really starting to miss that crackhead and his opinions on various Pacific Northwestern cities.

And then, as the girls posed with the fat man for pictures and told more vivid stories about the things he’d puked and shit on, the waiter brought us our food.

It’s one thing to eat food after hearing a nasty story about a person shitting or throwing up. It’s another thing to sit there eating while hearing those stories with the subject of them a couple of feet away from you like some kind of visual aid. And he’s surrounded by groupies telling these stories like they’re goddamn Norse legends or something, and from these you learn that he’s apparently the Steve Nash of shitting and puking and drinking his own bodily fluids, and you’re looking at the girl across from you and thinking, I told her this was a cool bar. It was my idea to come here. Because of me, we are now having this experience.

No, of course it couldn’t be John Malkovich at the other table. ”Oh my God! You were so thought provoking in ‘The Libertine’ – both the film adaptation and the 1996 stage production at the Steppenwolf in Chicago!” No, I pick the preferred bar of a professional defecator.

What do you do, in those situations? How do you make conversation while that’s going on? Do you acknowledge the obese, shitting elephant in the room, or do you try to make small talk and pretend it’s not happening?

”So, do you want dessert?”

“Nothing with chocolate in it.”

Once the fat guy and his groupies had left, we did wind up discussing what had happened, and she mentioned that she felt sorry for that guy. I, however, was inclined to disagree.

The man shit on somebody else’s face and got paid more than I’ve made in five years to do it. And, you know, that’s the beauty of capitalism, and God bless him for making a buck, but I think there’s a certain poetic justice to him being loudly recognized on the street for that sort of behavior, if for no other reason to show the public that you can’t just go around shitting on other peoples’ faces and get away scot free. People remember that sort of thing. It follows you.

So I guess, to answer your question, I’ve seen one celebrity so far. And if there was a way to un see him – to un know that one can be so gifted in the field of solid waste that people will recognize him on the street – you bet I’d do it.

Truman Capps has now passed these lovely mental images on to you. Thanks for reading!

The Color Purple

2011-08-22T21:35:00.000-07:00

This man will forget more about painting than I'll ever know.

In my last update, you may recall an overwhelming sense of optimism regarding my new job in the art department for an upcoming media event. I acknowledged that there would be manual labor involved, but I was ready and eager to do the work because it was in the film industry, it was ethically okay, and it paid well. After three days on the job, I think it wise to point out that a lot of the reason I was so optimistic last week was because I wrote that the night before I went in for my first day of work.

My non-disclosure agreement prevents me from giving you any specifics about what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, but rest assured we’re trying to make things in a place look like they’re other things in another place so that people at an event will be able to pretend they’re in that other place. This is a process that requires the use of power tools, ladders, and entire aisles’ worth of materials from the Home Depot. Try to picture me in these circumstances, and then meet me in the next paragraph once you’re done laughing.

I have no right to complain about this job, and that’s not what I’m going to do. I drive along Venice Boulevard to get to my internship, and every day I pass multiple slightly scruffy but otherwise ordinary looking guys standing on the center median, holding signs and begging passers-by for money. Whenever I go to the Home Depot for this job, my car is just about swarmed by the Dawn of the Dead hordes of Hispanic day laborers lined up around the parking lot, dying to get picked up to spend a day doing the sort of hard work I’m so ill-qualified for. So I’m not complaining; I’m damn lucky to have this job and I’m giving it my all until they fire me or until the job is over.

That being said, golly, I don’t particularly relish this line of work.

The art department is not construction per se – the carpenters build things, and it’s the art department’s job to make those things look the way they’re supposed to: Color, furniture, and general ambiance are the responsibility of the art department. It didn’t occur to me before I actually started on the job, though, that color, furniture, and ambiance are created by painting, moving furniture, and generally doing far more hands on home improvement style work than I ever thought I’d have to do.

Before now, my ingrained attitude towards home improvement was that it was generally the thing you paid other people to do. For example, my room in Portland was and still is purple, because that was the color it was when we bought the house four years ago, nobody ever painted it not purple, and my parents weren’t willing to hire a painter to do it. Mind you, I hate purple due to its unfortunate ties to a university in Washington, but what could I do? I sure as hell didn’t have the money to hire a painter, and the idea of buying paint and doing it myself no more occurred to me than the idea of solving my money problems by brewing my own gold out of yeast and angel shit.

I mean, I guess I was aware that ordinary civilians did these sorts of things themselves – I saw the Home Depot and Kohl’s commercials where unsure newlyweds transform their ramshackle hovel into a dream home in 20 seconds with the help of some friendly, attractive employees. But these commercials were always followed by commercials where guys open a Coors Light and an icy train full of girls in bikinis crashes through the wall,* and I sort of assumed that both commercials were equally realistic.

*In any other circumstances, a train full of people drinking beer crashing through a wall would be a horrible tragedy followed by multiple lawsuits and government hearings.

On my first day at work, though, my boss pointed to a wall and said, “Alright, Truman – prep that wall and paint it white.” He could’ve just as well said, “Alright, Truman, land that F-16 on an aircraft carrier at night.”

I knew very little about prepping a wall to paint it: I knew that you had to put blue tape on some things, and that you had to rub a paint scraper on some other things, and then you black out and when you wake up the job is done and Gene Hackman is telling you that Lowe’s made this all possible, somehow.

I had applied some tape to the wall and was scraping fruitlessly at some loose paint when one of my supervisors walked past, stopped, and said, “Truman, you’ve never painted a wall before, have you?”

Classic Truman Capps moment.

I was given a crash course on wall painting and by the end of the day I had a solid first coat of paint on the wall. That night I looked up an Internet tutorial on the finer points of wall painting, and the next day on the job I had most of a dynamite second coat down before they notified me that professional painters had arrived and sent me to assemble some Ikea furniture instead, which was much more my speed.

In the three days that I’ve been on the job now I’ve developed bonkers amounts of pain in my legs and lower back from all the squatting, lifting, kneeling, and general lack of stillness my job requires. But I also learned how to paint, reinforce a wall, and use a pneumatic staple gun.

I do not relish this job the way I relish my internship where I get to criticize crappy screenplays all day. These are not tasks that I strictly enjoy doing, but I’ll keep doing them because the money is good and it’s a really valuable experience – for perhaps the first time in my life, I’m learning practical skills that, in the event of the apocalypse, will make me useful.*

*”No, I can’t build anti-zombie barricades – no construction experience. No, I can’t soup up that shuttle bus into a zombie-proof tank – I don’t know shit about engines. No, I can’t make napalm out of the supplies we’ve got here in the mall – I’m useless with chemistry. Look, is there anything you need written? Is there any way writing could help us kill zombies?”

Also, this job has given me a real, tangible appreciation for manmade objects. Are you in a building as you read this, or have you seen a building recently? Well, a lot of people put a lot of energy into building, painting, and decorating that building, and that’s before you turn on the lights or flush the toilet. Relish the fact that there are people out there who love building things and allow the rest of us to have jobs so sedentary that it’s possible to surf porn while we work.

Truman Capps admits that Internet-enabled phones make it possible to surf porn no matter what job you’re doing.

Updating Monday

2011-08-21T23:09:00.000-07:00

I am very tired from my job, and tomorrow I will update about my job and why it makes me tired. If that's a problem, then...

The Good Lord Will Provide (Part 2)

2011-08-18T00:10:00.000-07:00

Hollywood is a small town and everyone works together eventually, but it took until 1995 for this to happen?

With each passing day here in LA, things I learned at that stupid filmmaking camp that I at the time wrote off as bullshit are suddenly ringing true more and more. It was like a knowledge savings bond: I invested a week with a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool doucheleopards and now, five years later, the investment has matured and I’ve reaped the reward of finding that like two of the things I learned there were actually true. Look, nobody said it was a good investment. We’re talking Bear Sterns, here.

One of the other speakers we saw – far less colorful and in-your-face red state than the other one – spoke at great length about what a small town Hollywood is. Los Angeles itself is oppressively huge, but the filmmaking community is on the smaller side, which is why it’s absolutely imperative that you watch what you say about other people or their movies, because it could easily get back to them. Everybody knows everybody because they all either work together or have worked together, they hang out together and get married to each other and have kids who go into the same line of work – it’s just as much of a drama pipeline as the Greek system or a college marching band, except that Will Smith is in the mix somewhere, so it’s infinitely better.

I discarded that piece of information too, because it sounded a lot like this woman was telling me I couldn’t talk shit about people and movies I didn’t like, which was basically the only thing I did in high school and is a major component of what I do today.

Her advice might have been slightly exaggerated – I could tell everybody I meet that Gary Busey is crazy and I doubt that word would get back to him, both because I don’t think that celebrities are quite that connected to the average person* and because thousands of other people have probably already said the same thing about Gary Busey and it’s considered old news. The idea is more that you shouldn’t shittalk other professionals or prominent union members in your field, because sooner or later you’ll be working for them or trying to work for them.

*But God help you if you talk shit about Kevin Bacon.

The upshot to this is that the relatively small and incestuous film community makes it far easier to get a job – because unlike an actual small town, there’s a lot of jobs and money to be had if you know the right people. (Also unlike a small town, Will Smith is here.)

Quitting one of my internships left me unoccupied Tuesdays and Thursdays, and when I’m already not making money on the days that I do spend working, having days in my schedule where I make no money and also do nothing is kind of disheartening.

Also disheartening was my last credit card bill, which was about twice as much as it usually is, even though in the past month I’ve done very little eating out or barhopping, which in college were my two biggest expenses by far. It’s kind of frustrating, really, because I feel like I’ve been curtailing the amount of money I spend on booze pretty well in spite of the fact that virtually every retail establishment in California seems to have a liquor aisle, right on down to Christian bookstores. The sad fact is, gas is expensive and I need to fill The Mystery Wagon every week whether I want to or not (I generally don’t).

Fortunately, I have my cousin Gene, who has lived in LA for nearly 23 years, dividing his time between working in the art department on various films and TV shows and drumming in rock bands – he was the drummer for Queens Of The Stone Age between 1999 and 2002 before being replaced by Dave Grohl, who seems like a pretty cool guy to have replace you in any capacity. Gene has been circulating my resume and advocating my abilities to virtually everybody he knows in the film industry since long before I got down here, essentially staking his reputation on my competence – risky move, that.

The night that I quit my internship, Gene called me with some good news: One of his friends and coworkers was the art director for an upcoming media event, and he had called Gene to offer him a few weeks’ work helping out on the project. Gene already had another job going, but he referred his friend to me, and less than 24 hours after quitting my internship I’d landed a paying job as an art department production assistant.

A lot of what this job entails is moving furniture around, painting walls, and driving to Home Depot to pick up large orders of mysterious home improvement type things the purpose for which I cannot imagine. No part of my job requires me to use tools – that’s construction, an entirely different department – and more importantly, no part of my job requires me to play tricks on people. Also, the money is pretty good and lunch is provided, so if it comes up that I do have to play tricks on people here, they just might have found my price.

I’m going to be working 7 days a week for the next couple of weeks until the media event which marks the end of this job – Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as an unpaid intern, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday as a paid art department PA. The last time I worked 7 days a week was after my freshman year of college, when I made milkshakes at one restaurant and bussed tables at another all summer long. That was not a terribly enjoyable summer for me, because making lactose-based products and carrying around plates full of strangers’ half eaten food weren’t my idea of a good time.

Here’s the thing, though – for how lazy I’d always thought I was, coming to LA I’ve realized that it’s fully possible for me to be a workaholic if I like the work I’m doing. I’ve been bringing multiple scripts home with me from my internship to read and cover in my spare time, and the idea of working every day doesn’t really bother me because that’s seven days a week I’ll be working in the entertainment industry, which loyal readers may have noticed is an interest of mine.

So I quit a morally dubious unpaid position and within the same day wound up with a morally agreeable paid position. Did the good Lord provide for me? As an atheist, I’m inclined to say no – the real hero in this story is my cousin Gene and his sidekick Networking.

I think there’s some truth to what that fat little Texan was telling us, though: Even if the good Lord doesn’t provide for you because he’s too busy not existing, your friends and family (and their friends and family) just might. The key is to make good impressions on people and not talk a lot of shit behind everyone’s back so that they actually want to help you when you need it – which, to my understanding, is the sort of thing the good Lord would probably appreciate anyway.

Truman Capps has not ruled out the possibility that this entire job could be a massive Inception style hidden camera prank.

The Good Lord Will Provide (Part 1)

2011-08-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

Adam turned down a role in a porno, so God gave him this legitimate role in Creation of Adam.

Five years ago I attended a weeklong summer filmmaking camp in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. I’ve discussed it here before, but for those of you who are new to the blog or (wisely) have just been skimming my updates for the past few years, I’ll recap the experience for you: The whole camp was a bunch of rich kids from the Midwest and Florida who kind of liked movies but mainly wanted to get away from their parents for a week to do drugs and have sex. Knowing my prior stance on mind-altering substances and my perennial difficulty convincing women to sleep with me, you can imagine how much fun I had.

One aspect of the camp was presentations from “industry professionals,” which translated to listening to career extras, infomercial directors, and a guy who’d worked on the sequel to Behind Enemy Lines telling us the secrets of their success. Near the end of the week a rotund, middle aged woman who worked as a commercial videographer came in to speak to us. She was a giggly, fast talking busybody from Texas with the accompanying accent, and true to Texas form she managed to make a good chunk of her presentation be about her love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and her support for President Bush and the War in Iraq.

At one of the rare points when she was somewhat on topic, though, she told the following story:

A few years ago, she’d been short on money after a long spell of unemployment, and on top of all that, her car broke down and needed costly repairs that she just couldn’t afford. She had a family to feed and her husband’s salary alone wasn’t going to cut it. She was seriously considering applying for a job in food service when a career opportunity came up – the Playboy channel was shooting some softcore lesbian porn version of Judge Judy,* and they’d be willing to pay her a good wage to do some of the filming.

*If any of you can find that, by the way, please let me know.

She struggled over whether to accept the offer or not – on the one hand, she really needed the money, but on the other, it was porn, which, unlike the War in Iraq, was unjust and morally reprehensible. Finally, she prayed about it and decided to turn the job down, because God would provide for her. And sure enough, two days later another job with better pay and presumably less scissorfucking came along and she was able to feed her family while preserving her morals.

The lesson we were to take from this was that if any of us moved to Hollywood to start a career, we should never compromise our morals, because, and I quote "...the good Lord will provide no matter what." Then I think she gave us the URL for her church’s website.

At the time, I wrote off what she’d said as much as I wrote off the rest of that stupid camp. That was just some fortuitous coincidence. I thought, silently congratulating myself on using the word ‘fortuitous’ in my inner monologue. If not for that, the only thing the good Lord would’ve provided her would be a couple of social workers taking her kids to a foster home with dinner on the table. Besides, that doesn’t apply to me – this camp has really opened my eyes to how much bullshit the movie industry is. I’m never working in Hollywood.

So anyway, I was working in Hollywood Sunday on a shoot for one of my two internships (hence the lateness of this update). It was a hidden camera prank show shoot, and while the NDA I signed prevents me from giving too many details, the gist of it was that people were coming to a location because they believed they’d been hired for a job, and upon their arrival they were made to do a number of embarrassing and somewhat degrading things under the auspices of on the job training, all of which was recorded on hidden cameras. Then, when the jig was up, the marks signed a release, collected $100 for their troubles, and were sent on their way.

The whole ordeal made me uncomfortable. It’s a down economy right now – money is tight for everyone, myself included, and I’d be pissed if I was told I’d received a job, only to show up for work to be humiliated on camera, told there was no job, and sent on my way with a little cash in my pocket ($100 doesn’t go very far in Los Angeles). I didn’t like the idea of getting people excited that they had a job that didn’t exist, exploiting their desperation for laughs, and then capturing their shock and disappointment on camera when they found out the job wasn’t real.

And I got more uncomfortable in the actual shooting process – after each prank was completed, the crew, myself included, came out to clean up the area and prepare for the next person to be pranked as the most recent victim signed the release forms. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with the victims; they had shocked, vacant expressions on their faces as they processed what had happened and realized that when they got home they’d have to tell their friends and family that, no, the job they’d said they’d received was just an elaborate joke.

Every single person we pranked signed a release afterwards, and I guess you could argue that they don’t deserve sympathy since they were willing to waive their right to sue. I don’t necessarily agree, though – these people were shocked and disoriented, overwhelmed by the things they’d had to do and the realization that they’d been deceived about the job, and peoples’ decision making when they’re in that state isn’t so good.

When The Ex Girlfriend and I broke up, she asked if I was mad at her and I said no, which, at the time, was true. I’d been through such an emotional wringer with her over the previous couple of weeks that all I felt was relief that the roller coaster had stopped and I could get off. Only five days later did I start to realize that certain things she’d done to me could be considered war crimes worthy of UN sanctions. At the time, though, I was so overwhelmed by everything that I didn’t know what I was thinking or feeling.

These people were signing releases because we pressured them to and they were too disoriented to be anything but obliging – also, they could only get $100 if they signed the release. This made me feel horrible, and yesterday I called and quit the internship.

What we were doing was legal, and the people who were running the show that day are not bad people – they have families to support as well, and orchestrating pranks like that is how they make money. Likewise, this prank generated revenue for about 30 people on set who got paid wages for the day’s work.

That being said, tricking and humiliating people isn’t what I came down here to do. I’m not above laughing at other peoples’ misfortune, but generally those other people have done something worthy of ridicule – the only thing the people at this shoot had done was try to find a job. I didn’t like being involved in that.

I should also point out that this was an unpaid position: If I’d been making a living wage to do this sort of thing, I’m pretty sure I’d still be working there, because it’s a down economy and this shoot proved how treacherous looking for a job can be. But with no paycheck in the mix, the only thing I was walking away from was a situation I didn’t want to be involved in.

The woman from filmmaking camp and Rorschach from Watchmen would argue that I should never compromise, but I can’t say that I can make that promise to myself, because I don’t believe that the good Lord will provide for me and I unfortunately cannot eat my own moral fiber.

What I can say is that in a good compromise, both parties have to feel equally screwed – so when I do sell out, it’s going to be for a lot of money.

Truman Capps will be back with Part 2 tomorrow, because that’s how committed he is to timely updates!

Millennials

2011-08-11T01:28:00.000-07:00

Backwards baseball cap? Ear buds? A cell phone? Lying around doing nothing? Clearly, these are Millennials!

It’s not easy being an opinion columnist.

I did it for a year at the Oregon Daily Emerald - I signed up because I was under the impression that I could do the same shit that I do here (long form, tangential comedic essays that aren’t necessarily opinionated) in a college paper format as a means to draw more readers to the blog.

What I found out many megabytes of hatemail later was 1) The reason thousands of people don’t read my blog might have less to do with poor promotion and more to do with the fact that a lot of people seem to think my writing style makes me sound like a douche, and 2) It is really hard to have a new strong opinion about something important every week.

My solution to that problem was to write shitty columns about topics I didn’t understand or care about just so I could meet my deadline; nationally syndicated columnists’ solution is to talk shit about people in my age group. Sure, my journalism wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but I also didn’t write off 50 million people as stupid, lazy slobs.

I hate the word ‘Millennial’ – a name better suited to a mid sized four door sedan than to my entire age group – almost as much as I hate the word ‘generation’, except when immediately preceded by the words Star Trek: The Next. It seems there’s a cottage industry of psychologists and sociologists whose sole occupation is to come up with trendy names for people born between certain dates (The Silent Generation, The Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X) and then make assumptions about those peoples’ personalities. This work is apparently key to maintaining our civilization, because it seems like every week I’m reading a new article about how Millennials are lazy, spoiled, emotionally stunted brats.

And it’s bullshit.

I’m not here to defend my generation. I will freely admit that there are loads of entitled, self absorbed doucheburgers in my age group. That said, I think there are loads of entitled, self absorbed doucheburgers in every age group, and trying to determine which age group has more doucheburgers is a fruitless, speculative waste of time that ultimately serves no purpose.

Nobody’s going to publish a study saying that people with darker colored skin are criminals or Jewish people are greedy, because it’s wrong, inaccurate, and dickish to make assumptions about peoples’ personalities based on factors they can’t control. But somehow it’s okay to assume that people born between 1982 and 2001 will be self involved and out of touch to the point of unemployability?

I was born in 1988. I don’t have one hell of a lot in common with people who were born in 1982, and I have even less in common with people who were born in 2001. Millennials from the 90s have had the Internet for their entire lives. Millennials from the early 80s remember watching the Berlin Wall come down. To try and make assumptions about all of us, in spite of these and a billion more differences on top of our own individual upbringing, is like trying to estimate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Trying to suggest that we’re all the same because we’re ‘tech savvy’ in an age when three quarters of a billion people are on Facebook is like saying Rahm Emanuel and Carrot Top are the same person because they both have eyebrows.

And when it’s all said and done, what do we stand to gain from these assumptions that we’ve made about a given generation? Do we pass out medals to surviving members of the Greatest Generation for being alive during World War 2? Put all Baby Boomers on trial for jumping behind Reaganomics? Personally administer a spanking to every Millennial in America to make up for their parents’ coddling?

No. We just read what’s been written and add it to the list of factually dubious preconceived notions we’ve got about people based on how many wrinkles they have. These researchers could better serve humanity by working at 7-11, because then at least they’d be facilitating the delivery of taquitos to the masses.

I think what best proves my point about the worthlessness of these studies is the following comment by Ruben Navarette, who is presumably a CNN diversity hire from when they realized there weren’t enough stupid people on the payroll. In the column he wrote that inspired this blog, he had this criticism about Millennials:

[They] put family and friends before work and career…

…Millennials are in no rush to start the rat race, because they work to live and not the other way around. They saw their parents get laid off or trudge to jobs they hated. They're determined to be different.

Yes, apparently valuing our loved ones more than our jobs and wanting to earn a living doing something we actually like is a bad thing. What Ruben Navarrette is saying is that if you follow your dreams, you’re an entitled brat – you should work the first boring, dead end job you get offered no matter how miserable it makes you, because it’s wrong to not do the exact same thing your parents did.

If it’s entitled for me to have high self esteem and to want the best for myself, and to be willing to hold out for what I want to do instead of sacrificing my happiness to play it safe, then fuck it – I’ll be entitled. Being entitled was what led me to quit my job as an opinion columnist: I was ill qualified for the job and it made me miserable, so I decided that my happiness was more important than my paychecks and quit writing shitty opinion columns.

Follow my lead, Mr. Navarrette. Be entitled.

Truman Capps hopes that none of his token ‘old’ readers took this as a slight.

Venice Beach

2011-08-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

This guy is probably more educated than I am.

I’m not what you’d call a ‘beach person’ – one of those people who, after a stressful week, will jump up and say, “Fuck it, guys; let’s go to the beach! It’s going to be awesome! We can play volleyball and get tan and pick up beautiful women!” It’s not that I actively dislike the beach or anything; I just don’t think of myself as a beach person because the beach isn’t my go-to vision of a perfect day.*

*For the record, I do consider myself a ‘Steakhouse in downtown Chicago’ person, as well as a ‘Breaking into the Jack Daniel’s Distillery with a straw’ person.

The beach is sort of a hassle for me, riddled with activities I’m pretty unenthusiastic about taking part in. My left toenail is ten different kinds of fucked up, so wearing sandals turns me into sort of a walking freakshow, frightening children and small dogs. My hair doesn’t do well in the water, so swimming is right out. I didn’t like volleyball in high school and my opinion of it is unlikely to change when sand is added to the equation. I’ve already got a tan. And as far as picking up beautiful women is concerned, I’ve proven inept at that in any number of surroundings – being at the beach, where I will inevitably be wearing fewer clothes than usual, can only hurt my chances.

But given my circumstances, the beach is the closest interesting thing to me that doesn’t require driving or spending money, so recently I’ve been making more and more trips out to Venice Beach, an easy 20-minute bike ride away from my apartment.

Venice Beach is the very definition of a shitshow. Everything weird or grimy or moist or stoned that you’ve never wanted to see is on full, proud display along the Venice Boardwalk: Bucket drummers, shit peddlers, enormously fat women with monstrous breasts pushed up high for all to enjoy, an army homeless people splaying in all manner of positions… There’s a couple Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museums along the boardwalk, but I don’t see how they can get people to pay $5 to be grossed out when the circumstances outside the museum are so much worse.

There’s a patch of beach a little further south – halfway between Venice Boulevard and Washington Boulevard, for those of you who know the area – that I like to frequent. There aren’t any freaks (by which I mean there’s the bare minimum of freaks, which for Los Angeles is roughly 14), the beach is less crowded, and there’s a nice grassy bluff full of palm trees where I can sit, wearing my sneakers, and read Dune without feeling like too much of a nerd – because hey! I’m at Venice Beach! Wearing Ray-Bans!

This is my beach activity – reading. You’ve got to understand, though, that I grew up vacationing in the San Juan Islands in Washington, where the beaches were rocky and the water was freezing. All you could do on those beaches was read – provided it wasn’t raining at the time.

Likewise, I was raised in Oregon, where the ocean is similarly cold and our coastline fraught with riptides and sneaker waves that frequently pulled out to sea anybody foolish enough to go swimming. Most Oregonians grew up with the knowledge that the ocean was our frigid, conniving enemy – one we would’ve nuked the bejeezus out of long ago were it not for our love of Dungeness crab. To be honest, half the reason I like to sit and read at the beach is so I can keep an eye on the ocean, just in case it tries to start some shit.

The other half is that while Venice Beach is often terrifying, it’s definitely never boring. That’s the Venice Beach guarantee: Every time you go, you’re going to see something truly fascinating, whether you want to or not. For example, take this encounter from yesterday:

I was sitting on the bluff, reading my book, when a buff, shirtless young man, glistening with sweat, jogged up and crouched beside me.

“’Allo!” He said, his smile bright and his Eastern European accent thick.

Oh, Lord. I thought. Three weeks in California and I’m being openly propositioned by homosexuals. And here I’d thought my terrible fashion sense would protect me from this sort of thing.

“Hi.” I said, returning a smile that conveyed a sense of I am happy to talk to you so long as you understand that I’m not interested in doing Maximum Cuddles.

“Do you know where is gaiem?” He asked, his eyes alight.

“Uh…” I must call my gay friends immediately and find out if “gaiem” is slang for something. “What?”

“A gaiem, you know. On beach?”

“I’m… I’m really sorry, sir, but I don’t know what a gaiem is.”

Just then, his friend – similarly buff, shirtless, and moist – ran up.

Oh God, I’m drawing a crowd. Where does it end? Yeah, you just had to leave the house today, didn’t you, Truman?

“Is gaiem!” The new arrival said with an equally big and welcoming smile. “You know gaiem?”

“I don’t know gaiem. I’m really sorry. I wish I knew gaiem, I mean, you guys make it sound so great…”

The new arrival started pumping his arms in and out and breathing heavily. “Gaiem, you know?” Soon, both of them were doing it.

Now, at first, seeing two buff shirtless men standing in front of me, pumping their arms and huffing and puffing, I was prepared to lie back and think of Portland. Then, I recognized what they were doing as miming bench pressing.

“Oh!” I said. “You’re looking for the gym!”

Their eyes lit up and they nodded. “Yes! Gaiem! On beach!”

I pointed north, towards Santa Monica. “Muscle Beach. It’s like half a mile up that way. Never been there myself, but I hear they’ve got one hell of a gaiem.”

The guys clasped their hands in front of them, grinned a bit more as a sign of their appreciation, and then jogged off together, cracking up at the ignorant, possibly retarded guy to whom they’d just spent a minute explaining what a gaiem was.

This part of Die Hard gains new meaning at Venice Beach.

Truman Capps is pretty sure they were a couple of wild and crazy guys.

Ninety Percent Of Everything

2011-08-04T18:23:00.000-07:00

That's me at the bottom.

Big development since the last blog: All those emails I sent out finally paid off, and now I’ve got an internship. Two internships, actually – both part time at two different production companies.

After less than a week, both internships have warranted some truly valuable experiences; they have not, however, warranted truly valuable cash money, but I have reason to believe that my chances of getting a job through connections forged at either of these internships is pretty good. Also, my landlady seems reasonable, so maybe she’ll be willing to let me pay my rent in truly valuable experiences for a while.

My primary duty at both companies is a task called script coverage, which is often foisted off on unpaid interns or other bottom level employees because it’s an unpleasant yet important job that few people want to do, like coal mining or being President of the United States. It goes like this:

Nerdy, self-loathing writers like myself write screenplays, most of them bad, and through either talent agents or fortuitous social connections they submit those screenplays to production companies, like the ones I work at. It’s the role of the production company to look at all the scripts they’ve received and make the executive decision on which ones would be profitable and thus worthy of attention and which ones are terrible and worthy of the garbage can (or recycling, if you work at an environmentally-friendly company like I do).

There’s more nerdy, self loathing writers than there are production companies, though, so every company has a giant stack of unread scripts that grows larger by the day as more writers submit stuff. The only way to tell if any of these scripts are good is to read them, but that’s something of a time consuming process, and it’s an assured fact that the vast majority of them aren’t good (see Sturgeon’s Revelation.)

In order to weed out the gems from the shit, production companies have people like me do script coverage, in which we sit around all day reading the submitted scripts and, when we’re finished, attach a page to the cover of the script with three things on it:

1) Whether we think the studio should PASS or CONSIDER the script
2) A summary of the script’s story
3) Comments backing up our decision on whether to pass or consider

Then, I put the completed script and coverage in the producer’s inbox so he can read my comments and make a decision on the script without having to blow an hour reading it. Meanwhile, I continue reading and rating scripts.

I absolutely love this fucking job. I love it so much I’d do it for free. Which, I suppose, is why I am. Hell, I love it so much I’d do it for money.

I love it because I love Mystery Science Theater 3000, the TV show where people (and profane, low budget puppets) watch terrible movies and make fun of them the whole way through. That’s my job now – I get to read scripts, the majority of which are bad, and then explain to my boss exactly why they’re bad and shouldn’t be made into movies.

Also, as a writer it’s really just delightful to be able to crush other writers’ dreams of having their scripts made into movies. This makes me sound like an asshole, but I actually think that passing on a bad script is almost an act of sympathy to the person who wrote it.

Think about it: You’ve poured your heart and soul into something that, it turns out, is shitty – would you rather have one person read it and laugh at your shoddy work, or have it get turned into a movie so millions of people can laugh at your shoddy work? Just ask Tommy Wiseau how he feels about The Room.

If the writer in question is serious about his craft, he’ll learn from his mistakes and either change his script or write a better one, and eventually a good movie will get made. If he gets disheartened by rejection and throws in the towel entirely, that’s good too, because the world needs plenty of bartenders and accountants.

And it’s great for my own writing skills – which, for the record, I don’t think are quite good enough for me to get a script past the snide intern at a production company either just yet. Bad examples, as I’ve said before, are in some cases better than good ones, and every day I discover all kinds of new ways for a screenplay to be bad. Protip: “Fucken” is not a word – it’s spelled “fuckin.’” Other protip: When every other word in your script is “fucken” or “fuckin’”, there’s a good chance your script isn’t a winner.

Of course, there are good scripts too – so far I’ve read two scripts which really knocked my socks off, an experience the guys on Mystery Science Theater 3000 sadly never got to have. After a day of shaking your head at scripts with no conflict and one dimensional characters who blurt out exactly what’s on their minds, reading one of these scripts can really help you appreciate how much the average moviegoer takes things like pacing for granted.

What I’ve found in years of watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 is that there’s a little nugget of good movie buried in almost every shitty movie, some plot point or idea that was strong enough to get somebody to write the script and then bring a crew together to raise money and shoot the thing:

Time Chasers actually has a pretty well thought out plot once you get past the shitty acting and effects. The relationship between the disembodied head and the monster in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is slightly engaging amid the 1950s sci fi schlock. The concept behind Hobgoblins is pretty cool when you forget literally everything else about the movie. The plot twist at the end of Monster A-Go-Go would’ve been thought provoking if the rest of the movie had been remotely comprehensible.*

*The Starfighters is terrible in every way and I want to punch all the surviving crew members square in the dick.

It’s fun to find those moments in the scripts I read every day – the one idea so good that a writer thought, “Fuck it – I’m going to build a screenplay entirely around this idea.” And it’s even more fun, in a sort of House MD way, to reconstruct what went wrong and try to figure out how the writer could make the rest of the script live up to that one idea.

Oh, and on top of all that? Free employee kitchen!

Truman Capps was late on this update because he got hired on the spot at one of his internship interviews and had to work late, which is the best excuse he’s had in a long time.

Battleship

2011-07-31T19:01:00.000-07:00

I feel like this is all one grand joke.

They did it. The crazy bastards finally did it. They made a big budget action movie out of one of the world’s lamest board games.

Why is it that projects like this don’t get caught in Development Hell with all the things I actually want to see? I mean, it’s Battleship, for God’s sake – the game is built around two bored kids reading grid coordinates to each other. How is it that this is on the fast track to theaters but we’re still waiting on season 5 of Mad Men?

That was a hypothetical question: Movies like this get made because the average filmgoer sees maybe one film in a weekend (if he doesn’t just Torrent it) and studios know that he’s more likely to see something that he already knows and presumably kind of likes. This is why we see so many sequels (“You liked X-Men 2, right? Well, you’ll love X-Men 3, except for that it sucks!”) and movies based on comics and toys.

This still doesn’t explain why there’s a Battleship movie, though, because Battleship is a game that absolutely nobody likes.

A lot of critics derided the Transformers series not just because it was trite and stupid but because the whole epic venture was based on toys. What the critics perhaps didn’t realize was that while Transformers were toys, they were awesome toys – kids love cars, and kids love robots, and Transformers were both. The possibilities were limitless.

Battleship, as defined by Wikipedia, is a pen and paper guessing game that predates World War I. You just try to guess where on the 10x10 grid the other guy has put his ships. They’re making a summer blockbuster film adaptation of a game with no strategy and no learning curve – expect to see Rock, Paper, Scissors and Roulette in theaters soon, one or both of which will probably feature a cash strapped Hellen Mirren in a supporting role.

They just recently released the first teaser for Battleship. While most teasers are big on anticipation and short on exposition (see The Dark Knight Rises or the early Inception teasers), the Battleship teaser is two and a half minutes long and sets up the entire first act of the movie – presumably because anything less than that wouldn’t be enough to convince filmgoing audiences that the movie wasn’t just about two disinterested kids playing a board game because they forgot that video games exist.

The teaser for Battleship opens with some guy lying on a beach making out with Brooklyn Decker, which is a striking divergence from the source material – if a standard game of Battleship involved Frenching Brooklyn Decker, I would not be writing this blog, because I would be too busy playing Battleship.

In the next scene, Liam Neeson shows up. To be honest, I’m always kind of surprised to see Liam Neeson in anything - he played the lead role in Schindler’s List, for Christ’s sake, and now he’s in the movie based on little plastic boats? Anyway, he’s mad at the guy who was making out with Brooklyn Decker (his daughter) because presumably he’s some kind of highly talented fuckup the likes of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. *

*Little known fact: Top Gun is actually based on paper airplanes.

And then the titular battleship is out at sea, and one of the handsome square jawed guys onboard spots some weird metal thing floating in the ocean, and The Guy Who Made Out With Brooklyn Decker (I will continue to refer to him as such because that’s by far the most compelling aspect of his character) goes out to check on it. He touches it, it shocks him, it transforms into a giant alien battleship, etc.

Maybe this is just me, but if I see one more fucking movie where the inciting incident is a handsome guy touching a weird looking thing only to have it shock him and then turn into another weird looking thing while making a bunch of throaty, alien, electronic noise, I’m going to take four shits and die. It’s embarrassing enough that you’re making a movie based on a shitty board game; you’re only compounding it when the event that sets the entire $200 million extravaganza in motion is a dude touching a thing.

It makes you wonder how many potentially dangerous alien artifacts there are on Earth that haven’t called down a legion of otherworldly killing machines, just because nobody’s found them and touched them yet.

So the big alien ship thing transforms and makes a giant force field which encapsulates a wide swath of ocean, all while the U.S. Navy very helpfully doesn’t shoot it, and then the camera zooms dramatically up into the stratosphere to show a top-down view of the Navy fleet and the alien fleet on opposite ends of a wide swath of water – a view that looks not unlike a game of Battleship.

In movies based on game or toy franchises, there’s usually at least a scene or two dedicated to paying lip service to fans of the original product. In Transformers, Shia LeBouf unwittingly uses lines from the old Transformers TV show theme song to woo Megan Fox. The movie Doom, based on the pioneering early 90s first person shooter of the same name, was more or less sold on the novelty of several scenes shot from the first person perspective of one of the space marines.

What the aforementioned shot suggests is that Battleship is going to have at least one scene where we watch from above as two fleets randomly fire in the general direction of one another, just to pay homage to the game. This is reinforced by the fact that some incidental dialogue after the appearance of the alien ship reveals that the Navy’s radar is offline.

This is what you can expect if you go see Battleship: A lot of shots of square jawed guys using trial and error to decide which part of the ocean to blow up next. Also, Brooklyn Decker.

Truman Capps wonders why the Navy doesn’t just use their high powered binoculars – because the two fleets don’t really seem that far apart…

In Solitary

2011-07-27T23:18:00.000-07:00

Because this picture is funnier than some stock image or ClipArt of a guy in solitary confinement, that's why.

Sunday’s update may have given you a somewhat warped perspective of the life I lead here in Los Angeles. Yes, someone who read that update and only that update would assume that my fast paced Hollywood (rather, Culver City) lifestyle consists entirely of going to clubs, becoming nervous, being Finned* out of a lot of money for crappy booze, and then getting lost trying to walk home. Alas, the reality is not nearly that glamorous.

*Apparently, saying ‘I was gypped out of a lot of money’ is racist against gypsies. This has been brought to my attention repeatedly by various white, politically correct non-gypsies in my life. Anyway, I don’t want to offend any gypsies on the off chance that I ever meet one, so henceforth the word ‘gypped’ in my vocabulary will be replaced with ‘Finned’, which I, as a half Finnish person, am comfortable with. (Nobody else say it, though. It’s kind of ‘our word.’)

No, most of my days here in beautiful Southern California are dominated entirely by me sitting in front of my computer, sending emails to people who will, in all likelihood, not respond to me. Sometimes I take a break and eat some peanut butter, but I tend to hurry back – after all, I can’t not get responses if I’m not constantly sending out emails, right?

The bulk of this is thanks to my job hunt. Every day, I check a website called entertainmentcareers.net, where production companies post available jobs and internships and invite interested applicants to email them a resume and a cover letter.

So that’s exactly what I do – I work my way down the list of available jobs, identify the ones I think I might be interested in, and dash off a quick email with my cover letter and resume. Sending a cover letter and resume to a potential employer is a lot like falling in love: As you click ‘send’, your heart swells as you imagine the bright future you and this job might have together, until it’s two weeks later and you haven’t heard anything back, so you tell yourself that the job was probably a lesbian to preserve your self esteem and move on to the next one.

This is what my days are like. I wake up, apply for a bunch of jobs, get lonely and angry, watch an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 to center myself, and then get back on that horse in hopes that it’ll crap out a job or an internship somewhere along the way.

The Internet has made the job search so much more convenient – I’ve applied to around 30 jobs and internships in the past five days, and I don’t mind telling you that I did most of that lying in bed in my underwear without having showered.* For all that convenience, though, it’s also sort of lowered my quality of life.

*I’m in your head, ladies.

I live in Los Angeles, for God’s sake – or Culver City if you’re a stickler, but chances are I live closer to Los Angeles than most of my readers, so I’ll take some creative license here – and I’m spending my days shut up in my room in front of my computer? What is this, the previous 21 years, seven months, and three weeks of my life? Sure, it’s great that I don’t have to go out and knock on doors to get my resume out in the world, but on the other hand it’d be nice to get out and see some of the town.

Yes, I know – I could very easily go out and see the sights once I’ve sent out my applications for the day. The problem is that I’m living on a cushion of saved up (and inherited!) cash until I get a paying job, and virtually all the positions I’ve applied for are unpaid internships which, ideally, will lead to jobs in a few months. Point is, my cash flow probably won’t be positive for some time, which means that unless I find a way to start shitting $20 bills (and believe me, I’m trying really hard), I shouldn’t be spending money on anything short of rent and the occasional ten pound sack of white rice. That automatically disqualifies the sights that cost money, and also the sights that would require me to drive my car, which burns costly gasoline (another substance I wish that I could produce with my body but, so far, cannot).

So for entertainment, this leaves me with whatever is in biking distance of Culver City – which is not much, aside from Venice Beach, a location I won’t say anything more about right now because it’s very much deserving of its own blog update. There isn’t necessarily a lot going on in Culver City at 2:30 PM on a Wednesday unless you want to visit a Spanish language video store, either of our gun shops, or the local mosque.

There are a couple of parks within walking distance, though, which I make a point of going to once I’ve been inside for most of the day. My roommates work, you see, and when they come home from a hard day at work and ask what you did that day it’s very humiliating to look them in the eye and say that the closest you got to going outside was looking out the kitchen window while eating a piece of bread with some Western Family peanut butter on it.

So that’s my Hollywood life so far – wake up early, send some emails, eat peanut butter, send more emails, and then force myself to go to the park, where inevitably the only free bench is the one closest to the playground. So there I sit, alone, on a park bench facing the children, wearing Ray Bans, eyes glued to my copy of Dune out of fear that if I look up for even a second I’ll wind up having a very awkward conversation with the LAPD.

Truman Capps glossed over the fact that he’s actually got a couple of interviews coming up because it’s way funnier when he’s miserable, wouldn’t you agree?

Swingers

2011-07-24T22:08:00.000-07:00

But no! Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is never playing in the bar, and Heather Graham is never sitting alone, just waiting to get talked to.

I’ve noticed that a recurring theme on this blog is the fact that many things civilized society does for fun are in some way excruciatingly difficult, unpleasant, and/or aggravating for me.

Think about it: Have you ever engaged in a recreational activity that involves crowds, loud noises, inadequate seating, soccer, unsanitary bathrooms, or lines, just to name a few? Chances are, were I there with you, I’d be in a quiet, contemplative state, observing and cataloguing the things I was hating about this experience in preparation for my next blog.

All the negative characteristics I described above apply in triplicate to bars, with my ultimate pet peeve, spending lots of money on stuff that should be cheap, thrown in for good measure. Somehow, though, in one of those great contradictions that presumably make this blog so interesting, I actually like bars.

Well, no – I like the idea of bars. I like the thought of a clean, well lit place, one where you can go and have a few drinks and chat with your friends. Cheers from Cheers comes to mind: A place where everybody has fun and engages in snappy dialogue and hijinx with occasional spinoffs.

If you’ve been to a bar in a big city recently, though, you probably know that my dream died long ago. Oppressively crowded, bereft of seating, music (possibly dubstep*) blasting loud enough to obliterate any chance of conversation or rational thought – this is the bar scene we have today. I mean, it’s really a shock to me that so many people hook up in bars, because it’s basically impossible to communicate in there aside from grunting, pointing, and rubbing your crotch on things.

*In case you were looking for the official Hair Guy verdict on this dubstep thing, here it is: Dubstep sucks. It aggressively, in-your-face sucks in ways that scientists had heretofore not known existed, and in five years the whole of mankind is going to be laughing at you for liking it, because you liked a thing that sucked.

I knew, moving to LA, that the delightful Taco Tuesdays my friends and I had at Taylor’s were a thing of the past. For me and my friends, going to the bar was a fun thing we did to unwind and tell jokes about porn. In LA, going to the bar is an event, one so important that it’s worthy of italics.

My roommates invited me out with them and their friends last night, and, because I like my roommates and wanted to be sociable, I went along. (In a rare burst of social media savvy, I “live Tweeted” the event on my “cellular telephone”, which you can find on my “Twitter feed” here.)

From the get go I knew this thing was fucked since Jumpstreet. We were young people going to a bar in Los Angeles, probably the trendiest, most pretentious city in the world after Portland – this is generally not a recipe for Truman having a great time.

The line for the bar snaked out the door, down the stairs, through a plaza full of closed boutique shops, and out to the street. The people in line were clad in designer jeans and Ed Hardy shirts; gel had been employed to make their hair pointier. My party waited amicably, inching closer and closer to the door to the bar – a gaping portal into an ominous, black void, punctuated by purple strobe lights and accompanied by a constant thumping beat.

Presently, my roommates disappeared. As I found out from them the next morning, they had goneto the front of the line and cozied up to some of the women there or slipped past the bouncers in order to get into the bar right away. This, apparently, is common practice on the LA bar scene. Try it at Space Mountain and you’ll get shitrocked by an overweight CPA from Terre Haute.

My roommates’ friends ultimately gave up on this bar and struck out in favor of another place down the street, and I – faced with the option of waiting in line alone to descend into my own personal Hell or go with other people to find a different personal Hell – went with them. We settled on an Irish pub called O’Brien’s, and as an ardent Team Coco member, I went in.

Everything was relatively dandy. Sure, it was crowded, but it wasn’t too noisy, and if you stood near the bar it was easy enough to get a drink without having to wait forever. I had some enlightening conversation with my roommates’ friends and had two drinks that cost a combined total of $21, because even though the liquor at stores is cheaper in California, the drinks cost more, perhaps because I’m being Punk’d or something.

By 1:00 AM, though, I decided that I was pretty wiped and wanted to go home. However, my roommates’ friends wanted to stay and my roommates – the ones who had driven me – were still in the other bar. So, thanks in part to $21 worth of alcohol, I decided that I’d just walk home.

My reasoning was this: I walked home from bars all the time in Eugene, and I knew that we were in Santa Monica, which is right next to Culver City. My reasoning was flawed because Los Angeles is somewhat larger than Eugene, and also is mostly unfamiliar to me. And as I found out, while Santa Monica is indeed right next to Culver City, that distance looks way more walkable on a map.

I marched off in what I thought was the direction of my apartment, planning to find a cross street I recognized and walk down it until I was home. Half an hour later I found myself trudging up a deserted suburban street, passing cross street I didn’t recognize after cross street I didn’t recognize.

Culver City is not a dangerous place. If you wanted to get murdered here, you’d have to call a murderer in Compton and pay him gas money to drive out here and kill you. That being said, wandering down deserted streets with no idea where I was, all I could think about was what the description of my death would look like on a serial killer’s Wikipedia page:

Stephens’ eighth victim, Truman Capps (22), had left a bar alone and gotten lost while trying to walk home. His body parts were found in the following counties…

Fearful of this outcome, I began “live Tweeting” my location every couple of blocks and left a voicemail message stating my whereabouts to a friend, just so the police would have something to work with in the event that I did get serial killed. Instead, I called a cab and a mute, humorless taxi driver picked me up and drove me home – as it turns out, I was exactly $15 away from my apartment.

I’m glad that I went out last night – I met some cool people and, equally importantly, I gave the trendy bar scene a shot rather than just avoiding it altogether based on my preconceived notions. Experience proves that my preconceived notions were correct, but hey – at least I got a blog update out of the deal.

Truman Capps considers getting lost in the suburbs to be his own personal ‘127 Hours’.

Begging And Choosing

2011-07-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

I Google image searched 'begging' and got lots of disturbing pictures of toothless, one armed old men in Calcutta. Please enjoy this kitten instead.

If you asked me six months ago if I had a job lined up in LA, chances are I said, “Not necessarily, but I’m sure I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me four months ago, I probably said, “Not necessarily, but I’m 80% sure I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me two months ago, I most likely said, “Not necessarily, but it’s a toss up whether I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me last week, I think I said, “No – and quit fucking asking, would you?”

For those of you who are new to the blog, last summer I worked at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment, a post production house for a raft of reality TV shows. Roundhouse Kick had so much content in need of editing that the office was open 24 hours – the day shift edited from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and the night shift edited from 7:00 PM to 5:00 AM.

As the new guy, I was assigned the position of night shift assistant editor on a ghost hunting show. Every week or so, the production crew would mail us their DV tapes from the ghost hunts they were doing in the Midwest. My job was to upload the footage to the servers and then spend the entire night watching hours of raw footage of ghost hunts, placing markers in the footage whenever something relevant happened, so that the actual editor could skip right to the good parts and not have to do the shit I was doing.

I quit at the end of the summer to go back to Oregon, get a journalism degree, and impress girls at Taylor’s by telling them that I’d had a career in television,* the whole time with the understanding that if I wanted the job back next summer when I returned, it would be mine.

*”Hey, I, uh… Edited a reality TV show. No, not Jersey Shore. What, that other guy you’re talking to plays sports? Shit, I can’t top that. Run along and have sex, you two.”

As I got closer to coming back down here, though, my friends at Roundhouse Kick became less and less certain that my job would be available – other people had been hired, some had been fired, and ten months is one hell of a long time to keep a job position open for someone, especially in an industry full of qualified people looking for work.

I panicked a bit, because the time that I found out that I didn’t have surefire employment in LA was roughly the same time that I put down my security deposit and first month’s rent on my apartment here. Picking up everything and moving to LA was suddenly one hell of a lot scarier when there wasn’t a job waiting for me. I mean, why go at all, otherwise?

So I started emailing other contacts and looking for work elsewhere. The search was more fruitful than I expected, and as of today I have some promising meetings set up with people for next week, not to mention a potential line on a production assistant job for an upcoming reality TV show produced by a different company. In other news, there hasn’t been a joke in two paragraphs, so here’s a funny scene from the 1980 film Caddyshack:

Out of the blue today, though, one of my Roundhouse Kick contacts called me and told me that he’d talked to the boss and there was a spot open for me – I could start tonight, if I wanted. Assistant editor credit on IMDb, on the job training in AVID editing software, $500 a week, and more free bagels in the break room than I knew what to do with.

I told him that I really appreciated the offer, but that I was going to have to decline the job.

Do you remember at the end of Spider Man, when Kirsten Dunst totally wants Toby Maguire’s sauce but he says no? It was like that, if I was him and Kirsten Dunst was Roundhouse Kick. Well, I mean, I hadn’t been in love with Roundhouse Kick Entertainment for my entire life, nor was I turning them down because I wanted to protect them from supervillains, but what’s important to remember is that in this situation, I am Spider Man.

Roundhouse Kick Entertainment was a fucking great place to work. The pay was good, the management was friendly, my coworkers kicked ass, and I can’t stress enough how great the free bagel situation was. This has nothing to do with Roundhouse Kick Entertainment – it’s not them, it’s me.

For how great of a workplace it was, though, my job was essentially video editing. I’m probably underqualified for that sort of job in FinalCut Pro, the system I just spent a year learning – when it comes to using AVID, I’d have more luck playing pickup sticks with my butt cheeks.

I was being grandfathered into a job for which I was not properly qualified, and sooner or later that would hurt the company – for all I know, there’s a hotkey command in AVID that fills all the servers with saltwater taffy, and God knows I’d probably wind up hitting it by accident and ruining all our data. (On the plus side, though – free taffy!)

I’m trying to make myself sound really gallant here, but the primary reason I said ‘No’ was because it’s just not a job I’m interested in doing. I don’t want to spend my days (or nights, as it were) glued to a computer screen, wrestling with finicky editing software. I want to live the glamorous life of a production assistant – coffee runs, getting yelled at by producers, disposing of the dead hooker in the star’s hotel room, etc. Sure, it’s all Kenneth The Page grunt work, but there’s variation to it, you meet lots of people, and better than that, it’s actually something I’m interested in with opportunities for advancement into other areas I’m interested in.

Part of me feels pretty stupid for turning down a job when I’m unemployed and living off savings. But the fact is, I came down here to do what I’ve always wanted to do – if I wanted to do something that didn’t interest me, I could’ve just as soon stayed in Portland and gotten a job as a journalist. Like I mentioned last week, now is the best time for me to fuck up and not hurt anybody but myself.

So here I go, boldly fucking up where no man has fucked up before. If worse comes to worse and I can’t get a job, at least I know I’ve got bodily fluids (and one spare kidney!) that I can sell.

Truman Capps has discovered that even a change of state still makes it hard for him to post on time.

Making Movies, On Location

2011-07-17T23:53:00.000-07:00

As you can see, my transition to coked out LA greaseball is complete.

On Friday I went to see Mike’s band play at a bar in Old Town called the Ash Street Saloon. When I got there, a pop punk trio was up onstage – two heavily tattooed, almost certainly lesbian girls clawing away at electric guitars and a more ordinary looking male drummer who seemed almost shocked and confused about where he was and what he was doing.

The girls were screaming out a brash cover of Joan Jett’s cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ ‘Crimson and Clover.’ The crowd – a dozen or so classic punk types with mohawks, tattoos, and sleeveless leather jackets, along with one guy in black skinny jeans, tuxedo top, and a bowler hat – were listlessly swaying and flailing their arms to the music in an oh-so-cool fashion. Voodoo Doughnut was right around the corner, and some of the punks were munching on bacon maple bars.

I realize now that in a few days, when I tell people I’m from Portland, Oregon, they’re going to think that every night of my life was exactly like this.

I’ve lived in Oregon for my entire life – save for an embarrassing six year stint in Washington which we will not discuss – and all of a sudden I’ve been getting my head around the idea that for the first time ever I’m going to be living in a place where everyone around me doesn’t know who John Kitzhaber is or why this picture is laughable and makes no damn sense.

A couple of days ago I was talking on the phone to someone from LA who had never been to Oregon. We were making small talk:

“The A/C at my office went out this week, and it’s been super hot down here so we’re all dying.” She sighed.

“God, that probably sucks. Yeah, it’s been really hot in Portland all week too – I guess it’s just hot all up and down the West Coast.” I replied.

“Really?” She asked, before saying, in all seriousness: “It’s hot in Portland? I figured it’d be cool and rainy up there or something.”

And I caught myself laughing. Because pretty much everybody I talk to on a regular basis knows that Oregon is three-quarters desert, and all of them have experienced one of those terrible midsummer weeks where it’s 300 degrees in the shade and there’s more pollen in the air than air – although I knew that lots of people thought that Oregon was just trees, rain, and assisted suicide, this was my first time meeting one.

Nothing better cements the idea that you’re leaving home than the acute understanding that your home is a place that most other people have, at best, a cursory knowledge of. Most Angelinos probably know about as much about Oregon as they do about New Hampshire, and I don’t know about you, but I’d forgotten that New Hampshire existed until I wrote this sentence. Is Oregon equally forgettable?

Oregon, home of the Oregon State Fair. The checkout room. Alexander coming to school dressed as Chewbacca. Duck football. The Prom Night Disaster. Writers. The state solo contest. Getting home from LA last September and seeing my new roommates sprint out of the house to group hug me. Speech and debate championships. Cape Lookout with The Ex Girlfriend. Spanish. Yelling at the dog. Girlfriend Is Better, not. The Oregon Daily Emerald. Cleaning up dog piss. Thinking I had meningitis. Fred Meyer. My funeral party. Mice. Thinking I had appendicitis. J331. Getting lost in Beaverton. These experiences and about a billion others made up my life in Oregon, a place that I’m leaving behind in approximately twelve hours.

Mom came in as I was writing this and we had the sort of tearful, emotionally charged hug that happens when a gigantic mama’s boy is about to leave home.

“Sad, or excited?” I asked her.

“Yes.” She said.

“Yeah, me too.”

I’m sad because I’m leaving a state that scientists agree is better than all other states anywhere else – especially Idaho. I’m sad because I hate pumping my own gas. I’m sad because I’ll miss Burgerville. I’m sad because I’m leaving behind a raft of friends, family, bandmates, artists, musicians, writers, Airsoft sharpshooters, gingers, Jewish people, architects, and future presidents, among others.

If you believe nothing else I’ve ever written in my life, at least believe this: I would rather be with you people than the finest people on Earth.

I’m excited because everything that’s ever inspired or interested me in my life is common to the point of being boring in Los Angeles. I’ve wanted to write stories since I was four. I’ve wanted to write movies since I saw Fargo in eighth grade. And now I’m moving to a city built on stories and movies. Also, Christina Hendricks lives there.

If ever I’ve said a scornful thing about people who graduate from college and live in their hometown for years despite dreaming about something bigger, I apologize – this shit is hard for me on an emotional, logistical, and physical level, and I’m a white upper middle class 22 year old man with no family to support. Venturing into the world to make a name for yourself looks glamorous on paper and in Star Wars, but in reality it’s an unpleasant, awkward, and at times heartbreaking experience to start that journey.

I’m not going through all this because I’m especially tough or courageous or any more ambitious than the next person. I’m doing it because with the exception of methamphetamines or an unprotected sex tour of Sub-Saharan Africa, I’d much rather regret doing something than not doing something, and this is the one time in my life when I really have the opportunity to completely fuck this thing up and only wind up hurting myself. (I don’t plan on having that happen.)

It’s difficult to come up with an appropriately climactic ending for this, but the fact is that tonight really isn’t the end of anything, nor is it the beginning of anything else. It’s just another Sunday in America, and I look forward to talking to all of you on Wednesday.

Truman Capps directs you here.

Nike Employee Store

2011-07-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

$10 says these cost more than my car.

After ten minutes I reached the head of the line, and a young receptionist in a grey T-shirt with ‘RUNNING SUCKS’ emblazoned across it waved me up to her desk.

“Welcome to the Nike Employee Store!” She chirped. “How can I help you?”

“Um.” I said.

Her question struck me as odd: The only way to get into the Nike Employee Store was to wait in line for a receptionist to verify that you were either a Nike employee or a guest of a Nike employee. The only help I needed was help getting into the store without being tased by security.

“My name is Truman Capps,” I ventured, handing her my driver’s license. “I’m on the guest list.”

“Great!” She chirped – and yes, I know I said chirped earlier, but this woman was chirping all over the place. As she went about processing my guest pass, she looked up and chirped, “Have you ever been to the employee store before?”

“Nope.” I said.

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, wow! Are you excited?”

And for a second, I thought she was joking, and a laugh got halfway up my throat before I saw the committed glee on her face and realized that, no, this person was dead serious. She thought that going shopping for shoes was the high point of my day. She was not aware, obviously, that I find the pursuit of shoes to be about one of the most boring and perverse endeavors in the fashion world, which I consider to be pretty damn boring and perverse to begin with.

I don’t care about shoes. If you asked me to make a list of things I cared about, shoes would beat out yoga and Puerto Rico to sit pretty at the absolute end of the list. I don’t see the point in putting a great deal of personal and financial investment in the article of clothing that, statistically speaking, runs the highest risk of getting covered in dogshit in day to day life.

So no, I was not excited to visit the Nike Employee Store. It wasn’t Conan O’Brien’s house. It wasn’t the Redding Liquor Barn. It wasn’t Build-A-Battlestar workshop. It was a big room full of shoes – goofy looking, brightly colored shoes optimized for athletes, a caste of our society to which I do not belong. Unless there was a brand of Nikes in the store that were filled with Jack Daniel’s or could make Christina Hendricks stop being married, I didn’t regard this opportunity with a particular amount of merriment.

But, since I didn’t want to be a dick to the nice lady, I said, “Yeah! Sure!”

A friend of my parents’ worked at Nike for long enough to retain her Employee Store privileges after she retired, meaning she could still get her non-former employee friends into the store, giving them access to essentially a warehouse full of discount top of the line sporting apparel. She offered me a guest pass so I could pick up some good shoes before my departure, and I took it, because as much as I hate it, I do need shoes, if only to provide a buffer from the sun baked, dirty needle laden streets of Los Angeles.

It mystifies me that one of my roommates had between half a dozen and a dozen pairs of Nikes. My philosophy on shoe shopping is this: Your old shoes have fallen apart, so you go to the mall, find the cheapest pair of sneakers you can, pay for them, and then leave the store, because you now have a new pair of shoes and mercifully don’t have to waste any more of your life thinking about shoes.

My current shoe shopping landspeed record* is six minutes from the time I walked into the store to when I walked out with a $45 pair of white New Balance sneakers, which all of my friends told me looked like the sort of thing their grandparents wore when they went mallwalking.

*Depending on your definition of ‘shoe shopping’, I shattered my own record when I wrote one of my roommates a check for a pair of his Nikes when the New Balance wore out and I didn’t want to go to the mall.

At the Nike store, though, I made a point of trying to study on every shoe very carefully and think my purchases through. Some of this was because I was trying to lay in a supply of good sneakers for the foreseeable future in hopes of not having to buy shoes with sales tax in California, and some of it was because I was aware that passage into the Nike Employee Store was somehow akin to being allowed to roam around that warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, as such, was not to be taken lightly.

This just in: Most Nikes look pretty fucking terrible on me. I have clownishly large feet; I’d rather not draw attention to them with lime green accents or neon laces. I don’t want to make a bold fashion statement with my shoes – I want them to be just good enough so that they’re not noticeably bad, but not noticeably good, either. I want my shoes to be as inconspicuous as possible, so people don’t notice my shoes and assume that I’m the sort of guy who cares enough about shoes to put a great deal of time and energy into picking trendy ones that look super cool.

Eventually, though, I settled on two pairs of shoes that I felt worked for me. On my way to the cash register with them, I glanced at the price tags out of morbid curiosity and just about puked – one of the pairs cost $60, the other one cost $85. Flight of the Conchords materialized in my head:

They’re turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers,
But what’s the real cost?
‘cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper…

Not only had these shoes been manufactured by Indonesian toddlers, as is the Nike way, but I was getting them at the lowest price humanly possible – and all this in the same week that I’d spent three figures on fucking sunglasses. I’ve already become a name brand wearing, spendthrift LA doucheburger and I’m not even there yet.

Gazing sullenly at the price stickers on my shoes while waiting in the checkout line, I noticed something else. Off to the side of the sticker, in small print, was the suggested price for each shoe. The suggested retail price for the $60 sneakers was $130; the price for the $85 shoes was $180.

Does that make me feel better about spending what I did on those shoes? No. Honestly, it makes me feel worse about mankind to know that people in this world spend $180 on goddamn shoes.

Truman Capps hopes to counteract any douche-cred he’s earned with recent purchases by continuing to drive The Mystery Wagon.

Shades Guy

2011-07-10T20:28:00.001-07:00

If this picture doesn't make you want to put on a pair of sunglasses, you're a goddamn Communist.

As I’ve mentioned before, if there’s one thing I really hate that isn’t soccer or Washington, it’s spending money. God only knows why – at the moment I’m sitting relatively pretty between what I made in the checkout room, graduation gift checks, and some inheritance.

Maybe it’s because I’m not 100% certain about my employment in LA just yet. Every time I spend any amount of money, I see a brief flash of myself broke and destitute, starving to death on the streets of LA. ”If only… I had… Eight… More… Dollars… I wish… I hadn’t… Gone… To Chipotle… On July 3rd 2011…”

That is the one exception that I make: Food. I’m more than willing to spend my money on food, because I genuinely consider myself something of a foodie. Plus, spending money at a restaurant gets you real estate in addition to food; you paid good money for that table, so you’re entitled to sit there as long as you damn well please and enjoy the atmosphere. This is a great way to get waiters to hate you.

Anything else, though, and I’m inclined to save, save, save. I wear a $19 watch from Walmart, I buy bulk socks at Costco, and I don’t have a smartphone. In fact, I’d say my phone – which barely takes low res pictures and doesn’t have a customizable background – would qualify for the short bus, were there such a thing for phones. This same spirit applies to my sunglasses.

I heard today that Oregonians buy sunglasses more frequently than anyone in the country, because every year we buy a pair for when it gets hot and sunny, then promptly lose them two weeks later when the monsoon season restarts and then go through the same process again the following year. Part of the reason it’s so funny is because it’s true.

Every summer when my participation in nerdy outdoor activities made eye protection necessary, I would search up and down for last year’s pair of sunglasses, not find them, and then head on down to Safeway wherein I would immediately grab the cheapest pair within reach and call it good. This was how I wound up spending three months wearing official NASCAR shades with little skulls on the frames.

This shit will not fly in LA. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, it is located in a desert next to a beach, so there’s a fair amount of sunlight. Also, many buildings are white or tope, which is probably meant to reflect heat from the interior but also does a bang up job of reflecting light into everyone’s eyes. The Walt Disney Concert Hall was either built by a sadist or somebody who was fucking an optometrist, because the entire building is made of chrome, and to stand within three blocks of it is like having somebody shine a Maglite in your face.

Under these circumstances, virtually everyone in the city wears sunglasses. Celebrities, poor people, Gary Busey, cops, rabbis, the blind – hell, even the marching band at the school that isn’t going to a bowl game this season wears them. It’s as much a part of the city’s culture as the film industry or breast implants.

Breast implants would be of little practical use to me, though, so instead I recently decided that I needed to get a really good pair of sunglasses – a pair that I would not lose. Spending a lot of money on sunglasses in Oregon is really kind of stupid because you never need them for very long; on the other hand, the weather here necessitates a high quality parka, and people spend accordingly. Good sunglasses are the LA equivalent of a good parka – the only difference is that nobody has ever looked cool in a parka.

A lot of sunglasses on the market today are targeted at people who want to give the impression of being athletic, outdoorsy men on the go. Naturally, these shades would look about as natural on me as breast implants, so I’ve stayed well away.

The only kind of sunglasses that I think ‘work’ for me are Ray Ban Wayfarers. While Oakleys say, ‘Yeah, bro, sun’s pretty bright up at the top of this mountain I’m about to BASE jump off of’, Wayfarers say, ‘I put these on because I wanted to drink Jack Daniels in the sun but it’s too fucking bright out here, goddamn it.’ This is a problem that I often have, which is why today I went to Sunglass Hut and bought a pair of Ray Bans.

A basic pair of Wayfarers cost $169. That is a lot of money for anyone, and especially a lot of money for me – I might spend $170 on the greatest meal of my life, but I’m pretty sure Ray Bans aren’t edible. Actually, hang on a second.

Yes, Ray Bans are definitely inedible. Moving on!

In this case, the logical course of action for me would be to get a pair of knockoffs; given how popular the Wayfarer look is, there are $25 knockoffs available just about everywhere. My roommates had several pairs of Ray Ban knockoffs with the 76 logo on them that they picked up at the Pac-10 championship.

There are two reasons I conquered my stinginess and shelled out the big bucks for a pair of authentic Ray Bans:

1) I probably would’ve felt roughly the same amount of guilt spending $20 on some shitty Ray Ban knockoffs with faulty UV protection as I do for spending $170 on the genuine article – the difference is that at least for the amount of money and guilt I’ve invested in my Ray Bans, I know I’ve got something good.

2) I am well aware that Ray Ban Wayfarers are the de facto shades of hipsters everywhere. The thing is, most hipsters I’ve seen wear knockoffs: Um, these aren’t Ray Bans. They’re English Laundry. Ray Bans are so over, Truman. I’m wearing an immensely popular name brand that I only recently got interested in because I saw other people wearing them. If you think that makes me a hipster, then we need to consult UrbanDictionary.

Truman Capps will commit seppuku if he loses these fucking shades.