Game Day

Even our mascot wants to heckle! Look at him go!

College football is an oddly pagan experience. Every Saturday, tens of thousands of people get up, drink various foul smelling tonics with exotic names like “Busch”, and then flock to a gigantic concrete and steel circle to watch two groups of burly men beat the everloving fuck out of each other in pursuit of a small object that is ostensibly made out of a pig’s skin. Meanwhile, beautiful women dance suggestively, people dress up like animals, and ordinarily respectable musicians throw all sense of proper playing and common decency out the window in favor of making as much noise as possible and being total dicks to the other team. Keep in mind, all of this happens on the campus of an organization devoted to enhancing human knowledge.

Home games are a pretty exciting time at the University of Oregon, as I guess they probably are at just about every school in the country save for the University of Self Loathing (which, of course, is in El Paso). They offer the student body a chance to get drunk; this isn’t special in and of itself, because the average college student sees every occasion in life (funerals, weddings, baptisms, traffic court appearances, AA meetings) as an opportunity to get trashed just waiting to happen, but at a football game there’s the lucrative nature of The First Law Of Conservation Of Drunk Assholes, a fascinating mob mentality wherein thousands of inebriated people unite behind a common goal. The First Law has been the cause of several major world events, such as Stonehenge and all of Irish history.*

*Yeah, I did just reinforce a negative stereotype about Irish-Americans. Thing is, even though I’m not Irish, I feel like I’m entitled to say this sort of crap, because if there’s one type of politically correct discrimination we Anglo-Americans of European descent are entitled to anymore, it’s discrimination against other Anglo-Americans of European descent. I’m sure my Irish friends will agree with me, and as we speak they are no doubt cooking up some really blistering jokes about Finland.

At the heart of The First Law is the timeless, ageless principle of “Fuck those guys!”, which itself is a simplified version of Newton’s Second Law Of I Hate Everyone Who Isn’t Me. To embrace the philosophy of “Fuck those guys!” is to look into your heart and recognize that Those Guys suck, and that the only way to prove to them how much they suck is to beat them at organized sports and/or a drinking contest.

If you’ve ever been to a college football game, you’ll notice that the announcer refers to the opposing team as “Our guests”. However, while the announcer will take pains to refer to the other team diplomatically and thank them for accepting the home team’s invitation to play, the students at the game will treat the other team’s players and fans as one would a burglar who breaks into his or her house, sets the cat on fire, and subscribes to a bunch of junk mailing lists using that address. I’ve seen all kinds of things – tailgaters from one team casting nasty looks toward the tailgaters from another team, shouting matches between fans using adjacent urinals, the occasional full on fistfight… Last year, I watched as all 5000 18 to 22 year olds in the student section jumped to their feet and booed a passing 10 year old in a Cal sweatshirt. They all seemed really pleased with themselves afterwards – and hey, who wouldn’t be? I mean, that kid went running.

Yesterday, U of O played Boise State, and we lost. There isn’t much more to say about the game than that – I think the only way we really could have won was if we’d scored more points than they did, and that clearly didn’t happen. In the fourth quarter, as it became obvious that we weren’t going to win, the stands began to get mysteriously empty as our fans skipped out on the last of the game rather than see things through to their horribly depressing conclusion. What this proves is that the “Fuck those guys” mentality only lasts as long as our team is winning – when we start to lose, the motto quickly becomes, “I strongly disagree with the fact that your team has the gaul to try and score more points than my team, and I would love to discuss this with you but I think I hear my Mom calling so I’d better get going.”

On the walk home from the stadium, I passed by a group of Oregon fans wearing handmade T-shirts that read, “I JUST FARTED… AND IT SMELLED LIKE BOISE STATE!” Sure, these guys may have been about as creative as a sack full of hammers in terms of T shirt slogans,* but let’s at least applaud them for 1) Staying for the entire game, and B) Wearing those shirts all the way home. It takes true courage to admit that your team received a serious whooping from an opponent that, by your own definition, smells like farts.

*“Win Or Lose… At Least I Don’t Have To Go Home To Idaho!”
“Boise Isn’t A State – Dur-Hey!”
“[Picture of an Elmer’s Glue bottle with the Boise State Broncos on it]”
“Idaho – Oregon’s New Jersey!”
All of these are just off the top of my head. Come on, guys. Don’t hide behind flatulence.

Critical as I may be of the classless elements of college football, I can’t help but love it. There are few people in the world more foul than the Oregon trumpets – during basketball games, I’ve screamed things at USC’s players that would make George Carlin weep tears of blood – and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every minute of earning college credit for being a highly obnoxious and abrasive fan with a loud instrument clutched in my right hand (keeping my left free for whatever rude gestures the situation may call for). Sure, maybe it was uncivilized of me to start a Facebook group branding Cal’s mascot as a pedophile. Maybe it was not proper social decorum for me to say that all of Oregon State’s sports teams were fathered by drunk farmers and sheep. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t PC for me to call the University of Washington an overrated excuse for a two-bit community college. But that’s okay – it’s sports!

In ancient Rome, people got together in huge stadiums and watched gladiators beat the everloving fuck out of one another. Football is very much the same thing – it’s a violent and highly competitive sport, only this one doesn’t involve Russel Crowe. Back then, the Romans blew off steam by watching people kill one another, nowadays we blow off steam in a pretty similar way. So what if we go a little overboard in our response? It’s healthy to sacrifice manners every once and awhile – all the better that you should do it in a large crowd when alcohol is within reach.

Truman Capps hates Boise State and their highfalutin’ blue turf.

My Apartment: A Treatise

Soviet Union, or college?

Listen:

College and Communism have two things in common: Both have a lot to do with parties, and both involve a lot of standing in line and waiting for simple things. This sort of crap starts as early as freshman orientation, most of which is spent waiting in line to fill out new and interesting forms and insurance releases, and continues until graduation, when you stand in line with everyone else in your class and wait your turn to walk across the stage. The Communism parallels go even deeper if you’re in a marching band – you stand in line twice as much as usual so you can get basic necessities like food, shoes, and the exact same clothes as everyone else.

As you may recall, I’ve elected to move out of the odious black hole of the dormitories and into the odious black hole of off campus housing. My intrepid roommates, Jeff and Josh, and myself had thought we’d beat the system by finding an apartment complex that was newly remodeled, cheap, and close to campus. However, there is always trouble in paradise, even if your paradise is a tiny room in which the toilet is uncomfortably close to the bed. The company in charge of my apartment sent out an email to all of the people who had signed a lease with them and told us that we’d need to come to the rental office on September 15th with a check for the first month’s rent, and only then would we be allowed to pick up our keys and move in. The cheap solution here is to use a crowbar to smash the door open and move in without keys, but seeing as I didn’t have a crowbar and didn’t want to mess up the beautiful, richly aged faux-wood of our new doors, I decided to gain entry to my apartment through the normal channels instead.

September 15th, as it happens, was the first day of band camp,* which is traditionally the most line-happy of marching band oriented days. There’s the line to sign in, the line to check out an instrument, the line to get each different part of your uniform, the line for auditions, the line for the single bathroom provided in our rehearsal space… It’s like the bank meets Disneyland, only instead of someone waiting to give you cash or let you go on a roller coaster, you’re waiting to get a garishly colored uniform with a gigantic “O” on it. I was fortunate to have a three-hour break between the initial spate of standing in line and the subsequent hours of marching in lines, so I took that opportunity to walk a mile and a half from registration at the stadium to my apartment complex so I could pick up my key.

*Having read this, you’ve probably smiled to yourself and gleefully said, “This one time, at band camp!” to no one in particular. If so, I’d encourage you beat yourself over the head with a sack of Valencia oranges until all the stupid is purified out of you by stinging, acidic citrus. I’d do it myself, but I’m really busy these days.

Looking back, I don’t know exactly what I’d expected to happen: September 15th was the day for everyone with a lease at this company to pick up their keys, regardless of what complex their apartment was in, and everyone had been told to come to the same place to do it. I should have been able to see the inevitable outcome, but I suppose I hadn’t thought it through very well. Evidently, the apartment managers didn’t either, because there were approximately six people on staff to process the approximately literally hundreds of tenants who showed up that day, checks in hand, ready to make a few signatures and get their flashy new keys. The result was a line that stretched from the rental office, down the hall, down a staircase, across the sidewalk, and practically into the street. Yes, this was a line of Disneyworld proportions. However, I don’t think they’re ever going to make “Finalizing The Lease Papers And Paying Your First Month’s Rent - The Ride”, because I doubt that a very slow three hour long ride that ends with you giving a complete stranger $400 would be really popular. Judging by Disney’s creativity as of late, though, they’d probably make a movie out of the ride anyway.

Hours later, I finally obtained my key and was able to personally get to know my room for the first time. The experience was a little less exciting than I’d expected. The demo unit that had won Jeff, Josh, and myself over in the spring was beautifully furnished with mirrors, towels, and fake framed pictures, while the room I walked into was bare and desolate and had a toilet that was still covered in fresh drywall. At the time, I’d assumed that this was the contractor’s fault – the idiots had forgotten to install the Charm! I was so convinced that my apartment was unlivable that I opted to stay at a friend’s house for a few more nights rather than sleep in an apartment so lacking in the homey-yet-suave furnished beauty I’d been promised. Today, though, when I stopped by and peeked in to see if any Charm had arrived, I noticed that Josh had been in and set up all his stuff in his room before heading back to Reedsport for a few more days. It was then, seeing his bedspread and kitchen appliances in a room that had been blank yesterday, when I remembered that while we’d ordered a furnished unit, Charm was nowhere on the list of provided items – we had to bring that on our own. My apartment will only start to feel like home once I actually start putting my stuff in there; until then it’s just a big empty room with a bed, the sort of place a mild mannered serial killer might inhabit.

After figuring this out, I dropped by a nearby store to buy toilet paper, because I think the first step toward a livable apartment is knowing that you’ll be covered if your food starts to disagree with you. I wound up caught in a checkout line behind four other people, carrying just an armload of TP. This was yet another line that didn’t have anything fun or exciting at the end (unless you consider hygiene to be the ultimate thrill ride), but it felt worth it to me. For one thing, it was bringing my home-away-from-home that much closer to being a “home” in any sense of the word, and for another, it’s just begging for trouble to have a fully functioning bathroom but no toilet paper. Real Ben Stiller quality stuff.


Truman Capps has never had to pay for his own toilet paper before – it’s a strange feeling, given the intended use of the product.

More Letters To People

You tell 'em, Mexico.

As you may recall, I periodically run across people in my life who, in my opinion, could benefit from a nice long fireside chat with yours truly, but seldom have the time or ability to tell them what’s on my mind. It’s my last night in Portland before I begin the two-week long hazing marathon otherwise known as Oregon Marching Band camp, therefore I figure I should nip some of these loose ends in the bud while I still can.

To Everyone Who Thought I Was Going To Keep Doing Video Updates
Aww. You actually thought I was going to keep going to the effort of reading, shooting, and editing my blogs with music? That is adorable. Really, though, I do appreciate your optimism, but I’m not the sort of guy who does a regular video blog, because a regular video blog is impossible to do well, unless you’re zefrank or have tits. For one thing, it is, as I’ve said, a lot of work, and between 16 credits, a marching band, a newspaper column, and my own TV show, I doubt I’ll even have time to go to the bathroom on a regular basis, much less add more steps to the completion of my blog. Also, despite the fact that I’m devastatingly handsome and have a voice that makes statues weep tears of bacon, I think I come across better in text than on video. The highly tangential nature of my work doesn’t lend itself well to being read in front of a camera, and I’m not ready to sacrifice my tried and true routine in favor of a cheap gimmick until the cheap gimmick actually becomes easier than what I usually do. That being said, I may sprinkle in a video update here or there in the future when I deem the subject matter worthy of a cheap gimmick to distract from poor scripting.

To Sarah Palin
Miss, I am sick and tired of you and the disgusting lies your Republican cronies on all the major news networks are cramming down our throats. It’s an absolute insult to the electoral process and I won’t stand for it any longer – you are not all that cute. Alright? You are not a VPCILF (Vice Presidential Candidate I’d Like To…). I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks so, I’m just the only one with the steel cajones to come out and say it. Sure, you’re better looking than Chester Arthur and Dick Cheney, but so is Steve Buscemi. You want to know what a hot woman in politics looks like? She looks like Elizabeth Kucinich. Yeah, that’s right, she’s married to Dennis Kucinich, who, if Congress were Lord of the Rings, would be Gimli, both for his political tenacity and for the fact that he’s small enough to sleep in a violin case. Had he won the nomination and the election, his wife would have become a royal FLILF (First Lady I’d Like To…). So when people wax on about which female political figure is the cutest, I will always be forced to compare their choice to the leggy 31-year-old redhead from Cleveland. Sure, she may not hold an actual political title, and sure, she may not be a hockey mom/pit bull, but I don’t care – she’s a hopeful reminder that sometimes even total foxes will get desperate and marry a guy for his zany philosophies instead of his looks.

To Chris Summers, Kicker For Purdue University’s Football Team
Hey there. So, I don’t know if you noticed, but yesterday your football team lost to the Oregon Ducks in double overtime, an instance that could have been avoided had two of your attempted field goal kicks not missed the goalposts. Now, let me be the first to say that I’m not mad about what happened – mainly because I go to the University of Oregon, and I’m really happy that I got to watch us win in double overtime. Also, you shouldn’t feel bad about it; the loss yesterday wasn’t a result of just your mistakes, but the mistakes of the whole team. That being said, from the looks of things on TV, your fellow students at Purdue don’t share in my feelings, and it may be a very long time until you once again know the gentle warmth of a woman’s embrace. I’m just here to tell you that, as time goes on, the loneliness won’t bother you as much. I find that it’s best to channel the frustration caused by lack of female companionship into creative pursuits, like drawing, or knitting, or a blog. Sure, the pleasant memories of days gone by may drift through your subconscious, causing you to wake up crying in the middle of the night, but in time you’ll learn to love these late night breakdowns. If all else fails, I’m sure there are plenty of Oregon fans willing to bang you.

To Reader’s Digest
Stop trying to scam my grandmother with your nickel-and-diming “Book Of The Month Club” pyramid schemes and subscription based lottery sweepstakes, or I’m going to start using your Business Reply Mail envelopes to mail you bricks and bags full of washers that you’ll have to foot the bill for. You’re a bunch of fucking crooks, Reader’s Digest.

To People Who Spontaneously Dance In Crowded Restaurants
I’ve dealt with this both at Carl’s and Bella Fresca, and I have a shocking revelation for you: We, the wait staff, do not think you are cute and free spirited. When you see us piling up nearby and watching you twirling your girlfriend around in all her low rider jeaned, muffin-topped glory, we are not thinking, “Wow! This guy is teaching his girlfriend to tango in the middle of a fast food restaurant! He’s so fearless and silly!” We are all wondering how much longer you’re going to try to be the center of the attention of the entire restaurant, how much longer you’re going to try to live out your fantasy of being the male lead in a quirky romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and featuring the new hit single by Faith Hill, how much longer we have to watch you two hornily stumble around and prevent us from doing our jobs.

To The Heavily Botoxed Woman In Bella Fresca Last Night
Hi there. Do you remember me? You were pretty drunk last night, and you’re also profoundly stupid, but if you search through your memory banks you might just recall some blurry visions of a guy with poofy hair in a black apron and polo shirt, standing by your table while you blathered and dickered at him. Allow me to explain. I have worked at Bella Fresca for some two and a half months, and I have seen all sorts of nights. I’ve seen slow nights, and I’ve seen busy nights. However, last night, my final night at Bella Fresca for the summer, was arguably the busiest night in the history of fine dining – you might have noticed that every table was full, that my superiors were barking orders at me like sergeants in a war movie, that water glasses were empty and tables needed to be bussed and Cthulhu himself had risen from R’lyeh and was actively harvesting motherfucking souls. However, despite all of this, when I attempted to pick up your plate with two bites of pasta left on it, you said, “Ooh, no, actually, I think I’m still eating that.” When I set it down and started to step away, you chirped, “Actually, nevermind – I’m finished!” I stepped back to the table to pick it up, but no sooner had my hand touched ceramic than you were saying, “No, nevermind, I do want to finish.” And then, as I walked away, you called me back and asked, in a roundabout fashion that took a solid 15 years, if I could put your four ounces of penne into a box for you to take home. Let me just say this: I can tell from your bleached blonde hair and your stretched, pseudo-plastic 52 year old features that you have spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to convince men my age to sleep with you. As a man my age, let me say this: It’s not going to happen. Honestly, if you want all that plastic surgery to start paying for itself, you’d best head to Purdue University and look for their kicker.

Truman Capps feels manlier and manlier every time he says double overtime, for it is one of the 4 sporting terms that he learned without Wikipedia.

All About Vaginas

There's about two minutes of dead air on the end of this video - if it weren't 4:30 AM, I'd really care about figuring out why. When the screen goes black with no text left on it, that's the end - there's no hidden surprise in the next two minutes.

The Pseudoscience Of Sleep

I know that this runs contrary to a point I make early on, but I never find images that tie into my topic this well.

Perhaps you’re such an obsessive fan of my blog that, every time you finish an article, you lament that you’ll have to wait another 2/3 days to read run-on sentences and overly verbose descriptions of vulgar things. Perhaps, in this post-reading desperation, you start scouring my update for anything else to read from which you can glean some sort of humor or insight on my life. Perhaps, while doing this, you notice that my update was posted at an obscenely early hour of the morning. So if you’ve ever been wondering why that is, Mom and Dad, do please allow me to explain by way of run-on sentences and overly verbose descriptions of vulgar things.

I hate the thought of calling myself a ‘night owl’* because I have it in my head that anybody who self applies a cliché term like that is trying to posture his or herself as suave and alternative, and is thus a tool. Also, the term, clichéd as it is, tends to describe somebody who is out all night dancing it up at nightclubs and hitting all the trendy bars – so, y’know, a tool – and those are most certainly not things that I do when I’m staying up late. My late nights usually consist of me in front of the computer exploring the Internet (there’s this great new site out of Mexico where they do webcam broadcasts of donkey shows as they happen) or laboriously adding on to the now 450 page monstrosity that is my novel. Sometimes, hummus is involved. ‘Night owls’ do not do these things. The term that best describes me after dark is ‘Late Night Loser’.

*Unless I’m comparing myself to the lovelorn alternate-1985 Batman parallel Night Owl 2 from Watchmen, that is! Please allow me to congratulate the three other hopeless nerds who got that joke as I slowly alienate the rest of my considerably cooler fanbase.

There was a time when I considered staying up until midnight to be really late. Eighth grade has come and gone, however, and now I consider going to bed at or before midnight to be a bizarre and alien ritual. As I progressed through high school, I further pushed the boundaries of when I deemed it necessary to go to bed – 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 3:00 AM… 3:15 is about my limit now, but I have been known to go to 3:30. Of course, I only stay up this late when I don’t have any pressing engagements or classes the following morning – on those nights, I’m definitely in bed by 2:00.

I don’t want to be this way. I don’t think anybody really does - there’s no pride to be taken in staying up really late doing nothing in particular. I didn’t put it on my resume – “Surfed Newgrounds.com until 3:00 AM the day before a final exam” – and I don’t think I’d win a medal for it. But the point is, even as I’m sitting up late, reading the latest biased election news on Digg or learning about bizarre and fascinating serial killers on Wikipedia, I’m thinking, “This is getting you nowhere. You’d be better off sleeping. You’re bored anyway – just go to sleep!” But no matter how hard I try to stop reading about the Zodiac Killer and go to bed, it never seems to work. It’s like I’m addicted to not sleeping, only I don’t think you can be addicted to the absence of something. Every single day of my life I’ve not done a line of cocaine – am I addicted to anti-cocaine?

What’s more likely is that my brain is addicted to thinking*. When I’m asleep, I’m not thinking, and my brain just won’t tolerate that, so it prods me into staying up late by making it physically impossible to step away from the Internet – which, if things to think about are drugs, is the ghetto. For instance, even as I write this I’m cruising through the intersection of Wikipedia Boulevard and Penny Arcade Lane in hopes of finding my dealer.

*Sometimes, I consider making T-shirts with lines from my blog on them, and “My brain is addicted to thinking” would probably be the first one. Honestly, having just written the words “My brain is addicted to thinking”, I feel as though my life has taken a turn of sorts. Not necessarily in the right direction.

The side effect of staying up so late is that I usually sleep in until noon or so, which makes me feel like something of a spoiled debutante when I come downstairs for breakfast only to find out that breakfast is lunch, and I missed lunch. As I stand over the counter eating my midday meal (which usually consists of peanut butter and bread, not necessarily in that order), I resolve to go to start going to bed earlier so that I can get up earlier and not miss out on as much of my day.

But, just like my plan to microwave a cold stick of butter to soften it up, this fails catastrophically. Even if I can raise myself from my desk chair and get into bed at a reasonable hour, the simple fact is that I only really woke up 11 hours ago and won’t be tired for another four. So then I just lie in bed, in the dark, thinking – and thinking will totally cockblock sleep, every time – until I run out of things to think about and am just a bored, very awake person in the dark, at which point I go to the computer for another four hour long fix.

The logical way to solve this problem is to set my alarm clock for an early hour and get up at that hour, regardless of how tired I am, and then go about my day so that I’ll be sufficiently tired to fall asleep at a normal hour, thus getting myself back onto a normal sleeping schedule and gradually recovering a shred of my long lost humanity. However, this is tough to do, because when my alarm wakes me up at 9:00 AM, I’ve had four hours of sleep, and I don’t have an expensive and possibly educational class to go to, I cross everything off of my morning agenda and replace it with “Get more sleep – starting NOW”.

There have been a few, ever so precious mornings when I’ve been able to rouse myself early, shake off the urge to go back to sleep, and start going about my business for the day. I can’t distinctly remember these mornings, though, because they were incredibly boring. My first instinct, with the entire day stretching out ahead of me, is to call my friends and see if we can get together and do something. However, at 9:00 AM a lot of my friends who aren’t at work are still sleeping, because most of them are Late Night Losers too. Desperate not to go back to sleep but with nobody to occupy my attention, I head for my computer and start surfing the Internet or plugging away at the ‘ol novel.

When I do those things in the middle of the night I’m not nearly as sleepy.

Truman Capps reminds you that non-losers do anti-cocaine.

Hair Guy Back To School Special

Maybe you did this, but I was playing Bioshock.

September has begun, and with it have begun all the typical back-to-school rituals. Marts of both the Wal and K variety are airing slick ads for the latest ludicrous school fashions, teachers are refilling their hip flasks, and flute players across the country are already creating and spreading the rumors and gossip that will inevitably lead to the standard quota of brooding, pouting, crying, and tantrums that define a typical season in a high school marching band. The time for fun is over, and Mother Nature agrees – in the coming weeks, my part of the country will turn from a sunny, pleasant Garden of Eden to a grim and stormy nightmare not unlike the end of Jurassic Park (without the dinosaurs. Hopefully.)

All throughout school, I was always just as stoked as everyone else for classes to end for the summer. I’d eagerly anticipate summer vacation until I could stand it no longer, and when school finally did let out I was always overcome with nearly incomprehensible joy at the prospect of not having to use the thought centers of my brain for a full three months. Every June, I’d leave school saying to myself, “This is gonna be the best summer ever!”, and nearly every fall I’d come back a broken boy, wondering how the time had passed so quickly. My problem wasn’t that summer came to an end – linear progression of time is a feisty bitch, and I’ve always accepted this – but that I had done nothing particularly memorable during my summer. Of course, it’s tough to really seize the day when most of your interests and hobbies take place indoors in front of a television or computer, but I’ve always been driven to strive for greatness because twice in the past I’d actually achieved summers that were, for lack of a better word, perfect:

1) I will always have joyful memories of the summer between 5th and 6th grade, because that was the summer in which Perfect Dark, arguably one of the best games ever made for the Nintendo 64, came out. That’s it. That’s pretty much the only reason. I spent the entire summer playing a video game, as usual, but that summer it was one of the greatest video games I’ve ever wasted a summer on.

2) Between my junior and senior year of high school, I didn’t have a job. I instead elected to wile away my days playing Resident Evil 4, arguably one of the best games ever made for the Playstation 2, and my evenings spending time with a particularly attractive young lady, arguably one of the best games ever made for a 17 year old with wandering hands.

Sure, there have been other great video games, and sure, there have been a paltry few other women, but never at the same time, and certainly never during the summer. This is why, every June, I wonder if the summer I’m about to embark on will be anywhere near as fulfilling and entertaining as these last two, and almost every September I ruefully admit that, no, it wasn’t.

Living in Portland now, with all of my old high school friends 50 miles away and most of my Portland-area college friends living across the Multnomah Triangle in Beaverton, I hadn’t expected this summer to be one of the landmark few that I would remember forever. That was why I took two jobs and also why I was so dead set on getting an Xbox 360 – the jobs would keep me occupied and financially secure, and the Xbox would keep in line with my summer tradition of wasting my summer. So far, my prediction has been correct; there have been no excellent video games and women, nor has my life taken a turn for the Dawson’s Creek with late night bonfire parties and road trips.

This doesn’t bother me as much as it would were I still enrolled at that disease ridden Black Hole of Calcutta otherwise known as Sprague High School. During my public school days, the school year wasn’t all that different from the summer, save for the fact that the weather sucked and every day I had to get up early and waste seven hours of my day with 1600 other people, most of whom I wasn’t too jazzed about seeing. College, as I have always said, is so very different because unlike high school, it doesn’t blow. The thought of going back to high school always was a downer because it wasn’t particularly fun or educational – college, on the other hand, has tons of fun and a bit of education too.

For the first time in my life, I’m almost more excited to go to school than I was to get out of school. Summer, while pleasant, has been pretty boring. I’ve done more or less the same thing every day, and I’m here to tell you that while playing video games all day and then working a few hours every evening may seem like paradise, it does start to wear thin after awhile. I bet that island Tom Hanks was on in Cast Away looked like paradise at first, but if you go for too long without changing up your routine, pretty soon you wind up talking to a volleyball and yelling at the moon. Fortunately, thanks to my rather sedentary lifestyle, there isn’t a lot of sports equipment around here for me to form a friendship with – however, I feel like the moon is trying to start some shit.

Going back to UO means a change of surroundings, both physically (the toilet in my new apartment is much closer to my bed than I’m comfortable with, but oh well) and socially (I’ve been in Portland so long I’ve almost forgotten what marijuana smells like). I’m glad that’s happening, because those are entertaining surroundings to return to after a few months in my current surroundings. This is not to impugn the state of the surroundings here, Mom and Dad – they are excellent surroundings, some of the best I’ve ever been surrounded by, but any surroundings, no matter how nice, get old after awhile. I guarantee you, come the end of Fall Term I’ll be sick and tired of my Eugene surroundings and dying to get back to my Portland surroundings. There’s no such thing as a surroundings for all seasons: Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and at the moment I’m fond of the thought of being at the heart of a much younger social scene, getting back to the independence one enjoys when he lives on his own, and taking part in the four months of crass debauchery and dick jokes otherwise known as the Oregon Marching Band trumpet section.

As I start packing for my trip back down to Eugene, I can’t help but think that this is gonna be the best school year ever! If my friends, classes, and the band don’t make that statement true, well, Resident Evil 5 comes out in March. There’s no way I can lose.

Truman Capps will probably start hating his surroundings the second he gets his first homework assignment.

Truman Vs. The Poster For Nim's Island

You brought this on yourself, poster.

There’s a Hollywood Video a few blocks away from my house, and I go there often to rent video games and DVDs. Hollywood Video, like most other video stores, advertises new releases by way of gigantic posters in their windows. This is fine by me – advertising is advertising, after all – but for pretty much the entire summer, one poster has dominated the window that I must walk past to enter the building. It’s the poster for Nim’s Island, a children’s fantasy movie that was ever so briefly in theaters and has now been deposited on the filthy doorstep of the home video industry. Indeed, I feel like the poster has been up in the window for longer than Nim’s Island was in theaters at all, because I’ve been walking past it for weeks upon weeks. I can only assume that the producers of Nim’s Island are trying to make me care about Nim’s Island, something that I resolved I would never do. But alas, my utter disdain for this movie’s poster has finally spilled over, so I hope you’ll join me for the next 1200 or so words as I dissect everything I dislike about the poster for Nim’s Island

Let me begin by saying that this poster is just too damn silly. I understand that this is a children’s movie – I know that nobody went into this expecting to win an Oscar, and that the screenwriter(s) probably didn’t bring their A-game on the dialogue as this film’s target audience seldom sits still for more than 5 minutes unless they’ve been medicated. That being said, I think that children – noisy, detestable little urchins though they may be – still deserve a somewhat greater level of respect than this poster is giving them. This poster attempts to pander to the young child’s love of silliness, but it tries so hard that it goes way, way overboard, and the result is a poster positively dripping with silly, which is about as enjoyable as eating a sandwich positively dripping with Dijon mustard. Please do follow my numbered talking points as I attempt to support my thesis:

Yes, I know this image is hella pixelated, but there's only so much I can do. Feel free to consult the original image.

EXHIBIT 1: LIZARD WEARING SOMBRERO RIDING OTHER LIZARD

So what the hell is going on here, exactly? What I’m seeing is a lizard astride another lizard, riding it as one would a horse, and the equestrian lizard is wearing a sombrero. Now, I can’t imagine why a lizard would want to wear a sombrero, as a sombrero is a hat designed to keep the sun off of the wearer, and the lizard is an animal that relies on the sun for energy. The fact that the lizard, by wearing the sombrero, is depriving himself of energy, explains why he has to ride another lizard to get around, but it doesn’t explain why the other lizard appears to be a beast of burden. This question is a lot like the age old puzzle of, “Why, if Pluto and Goofy are both dogs, does Pluto have to live in a dog house and eat dog food while Goofy gets to act like a person and talk to the other characters?” It implies that there is some sort of lizard hierarchy at work here, that the horse lizard is at the bottom of it, and that the riding lizard is at the top – a member of the lizard bourgeoisie, perhaps, with such an easy life that he can afford to wear a hat that saps his energy. Is this really the sort of thing you want your kids to watch?

EXHIBIT 2: SEAL CARRYING BINOCULARS

Let’s forget about wondering where he even found binoculars in the first place. Let’s not ask how he manages to grip them using only his wet, smooth flippers. Let’s take it on faith that he’s found some way to adjust the focus using those big, floppy appendages of his. What I want to know is this: What does a seal need with a pair of binoculars? What possible position in life, even in a magical fantasy world such as the setting of this film, could a seal be in that would require him or her to own and operate a pair of binoculars? A seal is a water dwelling creature; it eats lots of fish. Binoculars don’t help it find fish because fish are almost always underwater, and binoculars aren’t much good down there.

EXHIBIT 3: SEAGULL WEARING FLIGHT GOGGLES

Flight goggles? Okay, I will admit that they’re fairly practical for a seagull (certainly moreso than a pair of freaking binoculars), but it makes me worry that, if one seagull needs to wear eye protection when it flies, maybe all other seagulls need eye protection too, but simply don’t have access to it. Are their eyes getting all dried out while they fly around? Suddenly I want to start a trust fund to buy flight goggles for underprivileged seagulls, which is far from the intended purpose of this poster.

EXHIBIT 4: STACK OF TURTLES

Why are they doing that? What does it mean? Why are they stacked up like that? Is that a thing they do in the film, or did the design team just whip that up in PhotoShop to create something good and silly for the poster, so all the kids would badger their parents into seeing the turtle stacking movie, perhaps under the misconception that it was related to the Dr. Seuss book that dealt with similar subject matter. Also, I’d like to point out that at this point, all the elements I’ve criticized have been animals standing on one another. The movie could just as well be called Island Of Anthropomorphic Animals Standing On Top Of Other Anthropomorphic Animals.

EXHIBIT 5: GERARD BUTLER

Pardon me Gerard, or should I say King Leonidus, but what exactly are you doing to your career? You were pretty much the baddest motherfucker on Earth in 300 - the John Shaft of ancient Greece, if I do say so myself. All my friends and I, man, we worshipped you in that movie. And all the girls I know? They wanted you! In all sorts of nasty, obscure ways! And then you turn right around and make P.S – I Love You, and now you’re sharing space with a stack of turtles and a seal with binoculars? It’s like the captain of the football team joining the swing choir and starting the Tolkien Club.

EXHIBIT 5.1: ABIGAIL BRESLIN

Pretty much the same thing here. You started really strong with Little Miss Sunshine, and then you did No Reservations, which I hear they’re permanently screening in Hell, and now you’re starring in this? You’re aiding and abetting Gerard Butler’s downfall, not to mention hastening your own, and I don’t like it one bit.

EXHIBIT 6: JODIE FOSTER

This isn’t a complaint – I just wanted to say, Ms. Foster, that you’ve aged really well. This lady got nominated for her first Oscar when my parents were getting married, folks. Let’s give her a big hand! I mean, shame on you for being in this movie, but still – your bright smile and thoughtful eyes are by far my favorite part of this poster.

EXHIBIT 7: NAME ARRANGEMENT

You’ve got the names of the film’s stars at the top of the poster, and you’ve got all three stars below the names – I see little reason to not put each name above the relevant actor. There’s no joke here. This is just a guy pointing out principles of freaking design.

EXHIBIT 8: MISSING COMMA

There ought to be a comma after “Media”, so that the reader gets a second to breathe. As it is right now, I feel sort of like the poster is so eager to mention that these are the same people that made Charlotte’s Web that they’re rushing their words, shouting to you like a greedy hobo trying to get your attention before you get on the bus. “Hey! We made Charlotte’s Web, so this movie is going to be really good too! Hey! Buy this movie! Where are you going? No! Listen!”

Now, I’m not making any comment on the quality of the movie itself (although, from the Wikipedia summary, it looks like a mess) but I’ve got to say that the poster isn’t doing Nim’s Island any favors. It’s so dedicated to conveying a sense of whimsy and silliness that it becomes visually busy to the point that it’s distracting – so distracting that I could write an entire blog entry about core elements of the poster without even knowing what the movie is about. Compare this to the posters for excellent children’s movies and you’ll see that they all convey a similar sense of lighthearted fun, but without contributing to the ADD nature of our media.

So are you satisfied, Hollywood Video? That’s what I think of the poster. Feel free to take it down now.

Truman Capps apologizes for writing a blog about such a narrow subject, but that poster had been challenging him every day, and he will not back down when faced with a picture of a stack of turtles.

I Want To Ride It Where I Like

"Paint my chopper-bicycle green, please!"
"What shade of green?"
"LIME green!"

As a child, I was slow to do just about everything. For instance, I took my sweet time learning how to crawl: According to my mother, in my pre-crawling days I simply dragged myself around on my stomach using my arms – any upper body strength this action potentially gave me quickly melted away after I discovered television. I was slow to talk, as well - I didn’t learn to speak for a good long time, which gave my parents cause to wonder if I had some sort of brain damage, and then, when I finally did start talking, they knew for sure. But the delays in those areas weren’t especially out of the ordinary – worrisome, sure, but I was only late by a matter of months in each category. The fact that it took me 19 years to learn how to ride a bike, however, is a little more troubling.

I was not the five year old whose knees were always banged up and who was always covered in mud. I was almost painstakingly cautious in everything I did, and I washed my hands whenever I even suspected that I had dirt on them. I was like the Adrian Monk of my kindergarten class, and I mean that right on down to my social skills. The point is, I had a really strong sense of self-preservation back then. If I sensed that something would hurt me, my response was to stay as far away from it as I could, because back then I could see no way in which a thing that hurt me could do me any good whatsoever. Take, for example, my chicken pox vaccination. Yeah, I knew that I didn’t want to get the chicken pox, because it sounded like a horrible, horrible sickness. However, I also didn’t want to get pricked in the arm, because as far as I was concerned, the cure was worse than the disease – if I didn’t get the shot, my arm wouldn’t hurt and there was a good chance I wouldn’t get chicken pox. However, if I did get the shot, there was a 100% chance that my arm would hurt, and I didn’t like those odds one bit.

So take that kid and tell him to sit astride a two-wheeled machine that requires 1) Physical coordination and B) Speed to balance, and just see how enthusiastic he is about your proposition. More likely than not, he’s going to politely excuse himself and go watch The Brave Little Toaster.

It didn’t help anything that all my friends were learning to ride bikes at this point, and they had spectacular cuts, bruises, and casts to show for their efforts. With the benefit of hindsight I realize that most of my friends were pretty big fuckups anyway, but at the time my impression was that grievous injury was just as much a part of learning to ride a bike as vomiting is a part of the college party life. It’s like the scene in the Vietnam War movie where the new recruit gets off the plane at the air base in Saigon and sees a bunch of body bags and guys with their arms and legs cut off getting on the plane to go back home, only for me that scene lasted for about seven years, and the dead bodies and horribly injured veterans are laughing at the new guy for not wanting to learn to ride a bike. Or, I mean, go get shot in the jungle. Shit. Let’s move on.

There came a point in high school where I realized that learning how to ride a bike probably wasn’t as dangerous as I thought. This was most likely in those magical years before I had my driver’s license, when I was eager to find any form of transportation that didn’t involve my mother* in some way. It was then that I started reconsidering the whole bike proposition and weighing the benefits of finally doing what countless people one-third my age were doing.

*No offense Mom – it’s just that I’m still haunted by memories of the time you had to drive that poor girl and me on my first date. You didn’t do anything embarrassing, but… But you were there. And you were my Mom. And it was a date. I… I just can’t talk about it right now.

At that point, though, the problem lay not with my fear of learning to ride a bike but my fear of being seen learning to ride a bike. The thing is, everyone looks just about the same when they learn to balance on two wheels. They start out wobbly and scared, and then gradually they get their balance, and next thing you know they’re grinning broadly and riding down the street, and Mom and Dad are standing a few yards back, arm in arm, Mom wiping away tears and Dad firing up his pipe. And all that is fine if you’re six, but at the time that I was getting over my fear of bicycling I had been shaving for a few years. These sorts of heartwarming scenes do not work well with teenagers – teenagers are clumsy and oafish, and seeing them attempting to do things that are heartwarming for youngsters gives the impression that they had been really cute as a kid and aren’t cute anymore, but are still trying to capitalize on some former cuteness. I didn’t want to be seen as one of those guys, so I simply continued to not learn how to ride a bike, waiting until such time as I had a private gym in which to learn, where nobody could watch my relentlessly heartwarming coming of age story.

Now that I’m living off campus next year, though, I really can’t afford to find excuses not to ride a bike anymore. This was why, a few days ago, my parents and I took one of our bikes and went out behind a nearby middle school where there was a gentle asphalt slope, and I spent the next 20 minutes or so coasting down the slope on the bike before eventually working up my nerve to start pedaling, grinning broadly and riding down the street, Mom and Dad standing a few yards back, etc, etc. It was undoubtedly one of the most heartwarming things to ever happen behind a middle school, and fortunately the only people besides my parents who had to bear witness to this disgustingly precious affair were two nine-year-old girls who watched quietly the whole time, and afterwards mentioned offhandedly that they’d learned to ride when they were four.

A lot of my self-preservation instincts remain – for example, I’m still absolutely terrified of needles. I was so keyed up about my tetanus booster shot that after giving it to me, the nurse made me keep lying down for another 10 minutes because she thought I was going to pass out. But, looking back, the whole thing was pretty stupid, because I got really worked up and anxious over something unpleasant that took, at best, maybe 15 seconds. I can say the same for bicycling – I was scared of it, for one reason or another, for 19 years, and when I finally decided to sack up and just do it it was really nothing at all.

The sad thing is that I find that I actually kind of enjoy bicycling; this is great on its own, but most of my friends have known how much fun biking is for a good 15 years, and so at this point me trying to talk to them about how cool it is to ride a bike is like me asking if they’ve seen Toy Story yet.

Truman Capps had two options for the title of this update: "Bicycle Race", by Queen, or that stupid, overly literate hip hop song about riding your bike with no handlebars. He feels he made the right choice.

Greyhound 2: Tokyo Drift

Why can't Greyhound be like this? Yeah, I know what you're saying - "BLARG THAT'S A PARTY BUS GREYHOUND CAN'T DO THAT". I humbly disagree, for I believe that a party can happen anywhere. Even on an inter-city bus. Inter-city buses are where they need parties the most.

I’d like to formally apologize for last week’s update. If you’re thinking, “Good – it wasn’t particularly funny and had very little of the form or structure that makes your blog The Greatest Non-Pornographic Thing On The Internet”, then you’re wrong, because I’m not apologizing for that. I’d had perhaps 4 hours of sleep in the past 24 at the time that I wrote that update – four hours of sleep on a friend’s lumpy green couch in the slums of Eugene whilst he engaged in delights unimaginable at his girlfriend’s house across town, the sort of soiree to which I had not been invited, the strength of our friendship notwithstanding. I’d had a long day after my long night, and so when I returned to the apartment at 1:00 AM, the last thing I’d wanted to do was write a blog entry about my experiences on the Greyhound coming to Eugene. It’s really hard to be witty and verbose when you can barely stay awake; this is why most comedy writers abuse amphetamines instead of sedatives.

But I digress – that’s not what I’m apologizing for.

Last week’s update wasn’t just mediocre, it was an outright slap in the face to what little journalistic integrity I pretend to have. It wasn’t hard hitting and it wasn’t of any use to you, the reader – for that I apologize. Last week’s update was a Friday insert in the Flihova County High School Newspaper, a tongue in cheek essay about the eccentricities of bus travel that, in some circles, could be seen as an advertisement for Greyhound. Nowhere in my update did I attempt to smack the reader in the face with the slimy dead salmon of The Truth; nowhere did I dig deep into the Subject Matter soil with my Word Shovel and painstakingly excavate the much heralded Story Behind The Story, nowhere did I grasp that glistening, ambiguous mass and hold it upward toward the light for all to behold. You must accept my apologies for subjecting you to such one dimensional, lazy, I Love The 80s Strikes Back material. I hope that I can somehow remedy the situation by finishing today the job I started this past Wednesday. Allow me to open with a joke:

The Greyhound Bus Company walks into a bar. The bartender says,

“Hey! We’ve got a drink named after you!”

The Greyhound Bus Company says,

“Wow! You’ve got a drink named ‘Bunch Of Good-For-Nothing, Limp-Dick, Pissant Motherfuckers’!?”

“Ho ho,” You chortle to yourself. “Truman’s using hyperbole once again to prove his mild dissatisfaction with Greyhound.” No, sorry, that’s not it at all. I choose my words carefully (not enough people say pissant anymore, wouldn’t you agree?) and I mean every one of them – Greyhound is a wholeheartedly corrupt entity which ought to be destroyed for the good of all mankind, preferably by sending a couple of pro wrestlers to infiltrate their headquarters and blow shit up a la They Live.

Maybe my understanding of capitalism is flawed. I will admit that I’m not good at economics, but I thought that it was reasonable for me to expect that, when I spend $24 on a bus ticket from Eugene to Portland on August 20th, 2008, departure time 6:20 PM, that I can expect to end my day on a Greyhound bus heading north. That’s how I think it works. I didn’t spend $24 to not ride a Greyhound, and yet, that is exactly the experience Greyhound provided me with. So maybe that’s what they’re doing now; maybe, instead of being a company that gives people rides on buses, Greyhound is a company that doesn’t give people rides on buses. Maybe that’s their thing. Perhaps Greyhound just really likes dicking good people over, and when there are no good people left to dick over, then they dick people like me over. I suppose that business plan has some merit – God knows it works for Wal*Mart.

My friend dropped me off at the Eugene Greyhound station at 5:00 PM, well over an hour before my bus was due to leave, as the pissants at Greyhound advised. Things got off to a bad start right away when I saw a sign explaining that the 6:20 Greyhound to Portland was going to be two hours late. And yeah, that sucked – it sucked like a chest wound inflicted by a gun that shoots black holes – but I realized that complaining loudly to everyone in the bus station about it would do nothing to get the bus there any faster. Thereafter, when I complained loudly to everyone in the bus station, I did it purely for my own entertainment.

I sat in the Greyhound station for an hour and a half until the ticket agent received a phone call and announced to us that our bus had stopped in Medford – a full two hours away – and the driver was refusing to go any further, saying that there was something wrong with his bus. Now, I’ve got to agree with the bus driver, because there was something wrong with his bus: It was being operated by Greyhound. Never before have I encountered a company this old that still sucks as badly at what it does. I mean, I’m not going to go and say that it’s easy to run a bus line, but I imagine that after doing it for 93 chuffing years I’d have most of the kinks worked out.

So, at this point, Greyhound has made a pretty big fumble. They’re operating a bus with mechanical problems driven by an employee lacking the suitable Man Parts™ to shepherd his malfunctioning eight-ton rolling freakshow through the rest of his route – clearly, affirmative action has forced Greyhound to start hiring mega-weenies. Sometimes the cooling unit in the soft-serve machine breaks, but do I stop making milkshakes? No! I sack up and I do my fucking job!

Greyhound went for damage control, and shortly thereafter we were informed that a replacement bus was being sent out. However, since the Oregon Greyhound headquarters is in Portland and the malfunctioning bus (and its passengers) was in Medford, some 273 miles away, the replacement bus would have to travel south all the way across the state to Medford, pick up the abandoned passengers there, and then resume the route all the way back up to Portland. The ticket agent helpfully told us that this would mean our bus would be here in “about eight hours, at 3:00 AM”, and then reminded us that the bus station closed at 9:00 PM, so we’d have to wait outside.

And, oh yes, it was raining.

I cashed in my ticket for a refund, used the money to buy a ticket on the 5:30 AM Amtrak train to Portland the next morning, and then walked 12 blocks in the rain to a Courtesy Inn near the train station and, thanks to my parents’ willingness to part with $60.00, got a room for the night. The next morning I walked through downtown Eugene at 5:00 AM to the train station, and was mercifully not eaten by hobos. The train arrived right on time, there was plenty of space, and nobody had vomited/urinated/given birth in my seat within at least the last month. While I arrived in Portland well on time, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the other Greyhound passengers in the station are still waiting for their bus to show up.

Here’s the moral of the story: Greyhound is absolutely the worst way to get anywhere. If you have a choice between taking a Greyhound to your destination or riding a unicycle made out of flaming velociraptors, I’d advise you to think carefully – both options have significant drawbacks, but I have yet to post an update deriding unicycles, velociraptors, or fire. Simply put, Greyhound will not get you where you want to go in a timely fashion; in some cases, it won’t even get you where you want to go.

Here’s a fine alternative for you: Use Amtrak. The only reason I wasn’t using Amtrak in the first place was because none of their trains or buses ran at convenient times for me. At first I was pissed at Amtrak for forcing to ride Greyhound because they’d scheduled all of their trips for the late afternoon on the day that I wanted to arrive early, or the early morning on the day I wanted to leave late, but in light of my recent experiences I’m actually okay with what they did. I’ve come to accept that, if you choose to travel somewhere, you’re basically asking to get dicked by a corporation at some point. Airlines dick you with security, car travel dicks you with fuel prices, and Greyhound dicks you with false advertising. Amtrak, however, dicks you with inconvenient scheduling, and while this still constitutes being dicked, I find it the most preferable way to be dicked in the travel process. Amtrak does not force you through draconian security measures or cost you an arm and a leg, and in my experience it’s been pretty clean and reliable, unlike Greyhound. Yes, they do schedule their trains and buses at times that aren’t necessarily convenient for me, but I can deal with that. It’s not a last minute surprise dicking that leaves me stranded in Eugene for the night – it’s the sort of dicking that I can anticipate and have time to prepare for, and if you’ve got to get dicked, that’s the best way to have it happen.

So that’s what I think of Greyhound.

Truman Capps will admit that Amtrak also dicked him with a $2.00 bagel.

Greyhound

These guys are never late.

Why does the Greyhound bus line call itself Greyhound? If you’ve ever ridden a Greyhound bus, I think you can agree with me that the name is not only highly inaccurate, but also a major insult to greyhounds everywhere. A greyhound dog is a slender, oddly beautiful creature that moves with incredible swiftness and grace. A Greyhound bus is a giant, unsanitary monstrosity that moves about as fast as Congress and is always chock full of angry, mentally unstable people – once again, a lot like Congress.

The problem with Eugene – home of the University of Oregon – is that it isn’t in Portland – home of Truman Capps, Internet Celebrity – and thus when I want to go from my home to my college I’ve got to travel for two hours. Since I hate driving and I can’t find a Pegasus to ride, my only real choice is to take a bus to and from school. If you’ve never traveled by bus before, everything you’ve heard about it is true. Everything.

The simple fact is that a Greyhound bus is the cheapest way to get from point A to point B short of jumping into a passing boxcar, which means that everybody else on the bus is either going to be a cheapskate college student or (infinitely more likely) someone who is dead set on saving the rest of their money to buy crack. You may think I’m exaggerating, but you don’t hear about people getting beheaded on a train, now, do you? That’s because train tickets are more expensive, and the sort of guy who will just as soon cut off your head as look at you is inclined to be thrifty about his travel arrangements.

This is the main reason that, when I’m looking into a bus ticket, I usually look for a bus operated by Amtrak. Despite Amtrak bus tickets being identical in price to Greyhound tickets, the other passengers are almost always a lot less colorful, and by “less colorful” I mean to say that nobody has ever tried to cut my god damned head off. Whenever possible, I try to buy Amtrak tickets, both because I appreciate the cleanliness and overall sanity of the Amtrak experience and because I appreciate not using the preferred transit system of psychopaths.

However, it’s not always possible for me to ride Amtrak. Recently, I needed to book a ticket to Eugene and found that all the Amtrak buses were full up. Reluctantly, I bought a seat on a Greyhound, and the next day I cautiously entered the Portland Greyhound Station, hoping that perhaps Greyhound had stopped being disgusting of its own accord since my last experience with the company.

Yeah, well, not so much.

I’ve got to say that I really applaud Greyhound for their commitment to lateness. With other services, be they air, train, or sea, you get the idea that maybe falling behind schedule is just sort of an accident. But I can only assume that Greyhound employees are loving students of the art of being late for things, as evidenced by the fact that my bus arrived at the Portland station on time, but then proceeded to sit there, unattended, for 15 minutes before we were allowed to board, and then another 10 minutes once everyone had been loaded. Sure, you can go ahead and take Greyhound’s side and argue that they were probably busy doing very important bus driver things while we were all waiting to get on the road, but I think it’s quite clear that Greyhound assumes that its riders, by deciding to travel by bus, are too stupid to see anything wrong with spending a full 25 minutes waiting for nothing, and thus they get away with it. Judging by some of my fellow busmates, I’ve got to say that Greyhound knows their clientele really well. Regardless of the reason for it, the delay gave me a lot of time to observe my surroundings.

I don’t know if any of you have been on a Greyhound recently, but have you noticed that the driver’s seat is now surrounded by plexiglass? I’m not kidding. He’s all enclosed, save for a door that opens in such a way that it blocks the passenger isle so that the driver can get out first. When I noticed this, I was suddenly afraid that I’d accidentally boarded some sort of prison bus in a situation reminiscent of Con Air. Not long after, an infinitely more terrifying thought occurred – what if the driver was the crazy one, and the plexiglass was there for our protection?

“Bus 56? Oh, yeah, Crazy Duane’s drivin’ that one. He decapitated a kid back in ’87 – looked a lot like you; hair’n everything! – but he’s never been late to a stop, so we kept him on, provided he stays in his little pen in the driver’s seat there. Don’t tap on the glass.”

Presently we got underway, and Crazy Duane mumbled a brief itinerary into the P.A. system, summarizing the bus’s upcoming stops in towns like “Woodbrn”, “Saluhm”, “U-Geen”, “Wheed”, and “Sagamendo”. That or he could have just been coughing and wheezing – it’s tough to tell with Crazy Duane. I suppose that’s what makes him so crazy; that and the decapitations, of course.

In Salem, we picked up a young guy in a flannel shirt with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and a garbage bag filled with all of his worldly possessions. Because the bus was full up he had a seat in the isle a little ways behind me, and proceeded to explain to his neighbors the circumstances that brought him to this particular Greyhound. Since this man was an Asshole in the highest degree, he did his explaining very loudly, and so the entire bus got to hear about how he stole a car two years ago and did time in some of the roughest prisons in Oregon and just got released yesterday and was still a bit drunk but really had to get down to Klamath Falls to see his family and how most judges will give a guy two days in jail and three years community service except when they saw him coming, and then it’s always the toughest sentence possible, because the world is so very, very, very cruel.

In Corvallis my seat partner got off and was replaced by a young man with a finance book who clearly wanted to have a long conversation. Our relationship got off to a rocky start:

“Hey,” He said, removing one of his earphones as I looked up from my book. “Do you ever watch the roasts on Comedy Central?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Oh.” He said, putting his earphones back on.

As we pulled into Eugene, a few more fetid gobbets of conversation came dribbling out of him:

“You ever hear a song called Short Skirt, Long Jacket, by Cake?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Oh.” He said, disappointment written across his face in 32 point Comic Sans font. “It’s a song about the perfect woman. You should listen to it.”

With that, I got off the bus, having reached my destination. There are few things I find creepier than having a complete stranger try to recommend me music. How would you feel if some guy in the elevator tried to convince you that Crest was a much better toothpaste than Aim? It would be weird, wouldn’t it? Now imagine he’s trying to explain that Crest is the toothpaste that describes the perfect woman, and for some reason is very interested in what you think of it.

As I walked through the filthy bus station (AIDS originated in the Eugene Greyhound Station’s bathroom, in case you didn’t know) toward the street, I realized that the plexiglass wasn’t there because the driver was afraid of psychopaths, or because the driver himself was a psychopath – it was there because the People in Charge of Greyhound not only know their clientele, they’re scared of them too.

I have to say, I see where they’re coming from.

Truman Capps also doesn't quite know what the deal is with airline peanuts - but that's a story for another day.

My Incredibly Successful Friends - A Treatise

This is Robert G. Ingersoll, a 19th century orator best known for his quote, "Happiness is the only good." But, I don't know... Does he really look all that happy?

Every so often, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and start to fantasize about my 10-year high school reunion. I think that the 10-year-reunion was invented by geeks like myself as a means to finally stick it to all the people they hated, to shout, “Haha, Biff Eagleton! Sure, you may have been banging cheerleaders while I was running the Dungeons and Dragons Club, but now I’m a millionaire comic book dealer and you still work at your Dad’s dealership! Suck on that!” What makes this fantasy difficult for me is that it has two phases: 1) Being a geek in high school (Mission Accomplished!) and 2) Actually becoming successful in real life as opposed to just fantasizing about it (Not So Much).

This past weekend, I made the perilous trek to Salem for an informal one-year high school reunion of sorts. This reunion didn’t really satisfy my fantasies, though, because I liked everyone there and didn’t feel a pressing need to rub my meager accomplishments (“You damn bet I’ve got a blog!”) in their faces. In fact, you could almost consider it the antithesis of a standard high school reunion, because most of my friends (who had been considerably more popular and considerably less in the marching band than I was) have done wonderful and life affirming things in the past year that made my life look lame, instead of the other way around. Yes, I know it’s not hard to feel lame when your typical Friday night consists of coming home from work and catching half an episode of What Not To Wear with Mom and Dad, but my friends have done some strikingly awesome stuff.

I think the main lesson I learned from reconnecting with my high school pals is that I screwed up big time by being bad at math and science, because apparently that’s where all the money is these days. One of my friends, a civil engineering major at Oregon State University, is making $15.07 an hour working full time this summer for the Oregon Department of Transportation. And that’s impressive enough on its own, but it turns out that there’s so little work for him to do that he spends roughly half of his time either teaching himself how to play the guitar or catching up on sleep. He gets overtime (which comes to about $22 an hour), he has authority over people more than twice his age, and he gets to drive one of those pickup trucks with a flashing light on top.

It really breaks my heart to write that last part down, that part about the truck with the flashing light on it. You see, most of my idle daydreams somehow involve me being behind the wheel of a car with a flashing light on it, because in my estimate there are few things cooler than driving a vehicle with a doohickey on top that basically says, “Get the fuck out of my way, I’m more important than you”. It’s arguably the only car that accurately conveys my feelings toward the rest of the world without the use of a large billboard. I would pay good money to drive one of those trucks for a day, and here’s one of my friends, a guy I talk to, who’s actually getting paid to drive around in one of those wonderful, wonderful machines for months at a time. He could drive around in his flashing light truck for just a little more than two hours and make more than I do in an entire night of milkshakery at Carl’s. The only way I could stop being seriously green with envy is if it turns out that my friend hates driving the flashing light truck and secretly longs to make milkshakes for cranky retirees. But no, of course, there’s no way that can be the case. The only way the deal could get sweeter for him is if the flashing light truck has a tip jar, and at the rate his luck is going I’m pretty sure it does.

Not present at the party was another one of my scientifically gifted friends, Michael Snively. Now, the very fact that he’s going to MIT is enough to make my college experience pale in comparison, but the reason he wasn’t at the party is because he’s too busy following his dreams by taking part in a competitive summer internship at Hasbro’s world headquarters in Rhode Island. I remind you, I’m making milkshakes at the moment, except when I take a couple days off to pour water instead, and in neither one of my jobs am I making as much as the guy who gets paid to drive around in a flashing light truck, nor am I following any particular dream. Michael Snively, it seems, is seizing his summer – every day he commutes across state lines and does what he’s wanted to do for years, whereas I cut across a middle school soccer field and find new and exciting ways to combine dairy products. Might I add that I’m lactose intolerant.

And then, of course, there were the “Through the grape vine” stories of the other people I’d known in high school. There was The Drama Guy who is currently with a traveling theater troupe somewhere on the East Coast, or The Math Whiz who is being aggressively courted by Ford, or That Girl Who Really Liked Horses who is currently reigning as the Linn County Rodeo Queen. All of these people are my age, and they all just hit the ground running and haven’t looked back. As I play my Xbox 360 and bemoan the gradual descent of my talent as a musician, it’s tough to look at my overtime-earning, dream-chasing, rodeo royalty friends and not feel a bit depressed.

But I keep it in perspective by remembering that, while I may not have a high paying job or rodeo aristocracy (sorry, Nicole, but I’m probably going to make fun of that forever – perhaps until the cows come home, if you know what I’m saying?), I do have one thing in common with the rest of my friends: I, too, am happy. Sure, maybe not when I’m sweating out 100-degree heat and mopping up the kitchen at Bella Fresca, but when I’m hammering away at the blog or writing scripts for campus TV or parading around in a yellow and green jumpsuit in front of thousands of drunk people, I’m about as happy as the proverbial pig in shit, and let me tell you, that’s pretty happy.

I really do hope that I’m successful in life, and making a lot of money would sure be fine too, but in the end, if I can work out an arrangement in which I have consistent happiness for the rest of my days, I think I’ll be in pretty good shape. To quote my friend Alexander (who has been invited to attend West Point, yet another school that is considerably better than the one I’m going to), “Being happy is my favorite.” And, as much as I’d like to have flashy accomplishments and happiness, I suppose just happiness will do in a pinch.

Truman Capps hopes that his very dear friend The Conspiring Leader is catching onto all this “don’t worry, be happy” bullshit – you see, she just recently turned down a job at a large accounting firm when she realized, after two years as an accounting major, that she hates accounting, and is currently under a bit of duress to figure out what she’s going to do with her senior year of college. Truman is sure we can all agree, regardless of what happens next, that she made the right choice. Also, since this stinger hasn’t been all that funny: UNDERPANTS.

R.I.P. Creativity

That shit's creative, yo.

I started on the long, downhill slope of writing early in elementary school, when I would spend most of my class time idly daydreaming about Nintendo characters reenacting plots from various James Bond movies I’d seen. Each day I would run home and try to put all the fabulous stories I’d made up onto paper, and since writing by hand was a very laborious and painful process for me, I would pretty much just try to draw all my stories instead. When we moved last year, I discovered a box in the attic full of confusing, crudely drawn pictures of Yoshi firing a machine gun at Russian terrorists, accompanied by misspelling-laden captions attempting to connect all the pictures into a cohesive storyline (most likely The Living Daylights). For a second, I thought I’d stumbled onto the magnum opus of some highly disturbed, culturally backward autistic savant – a moment later I remembered with some disappointment that, no, I had dreamed all of that up while my classmates were learning how to do fractions.

I did a lot of the same stuff in middle school, writing what they call “fan fiction”, wherein I took characters from popular video games that I was a fan of and writing fictional stories about them. Sure, it was a cut above the people who write erotic stories about Star Wars, but I was still just playing around with pre-developed characters and settings, which is sort of like playing with Barbie dolls in a really time consuming, lonely way. On the Internet. And you’re a 14-year-old boy. It’s sort of embarrassing when I look back and realize that all that time I’d spent feeling so creative was really just time spent rehashing stuff I’d already seen. Of course, I’ve grown out of all that, and now I’ve written 400 or so pages of a novel that, if not good, is at least original.

This is one of the many reasons that I am infinitely better at everything in life than the tank full of horny, violence crazed sea cucumbers otherwise known as Hollywood. Let’s take a look at some of the new shows debuting in the coming TV season:

Kath and Kim is a new comedy on NBC about a family of self absorbed suburbanites who get into various compromising situations as a result of their own character flaws. This may sound like a fairly bland, stereotypical idea at first, but here’s the hook: It’s the American version of a very popular Australian show. Yes, God forbid we should think of our own shows – creativity is a lot of hard work best left to foreigners. That’s the sort of arrangement we have going in America today – we send our jobs overseas in exchange for their television shows. Big Brother, Survivor, ABC’s upcoming Life on Mars, and considerably more shows that I don’t particularly want to look up were all created out of the country and bought by American producers after they proved themselves popular. The problem with this is that foreign television audiences seem considerably more mature than their American counterparts, so in a lot of cases, buying a popular foreign show and attempting to broadcast it in the US with American actors is like responding to Oscar buzz by staging an elementary school theater production of There Will Be Blood.

The Cleveland Show gains points from me for not being a cheap foreign transplant, but then it loses them again for being a spin-off, and then it loses all possible points for being a spin-off of Family Guy. Now, I make no secret of the fact that I think Family Guy has set sitcom writing back 10 years by lending credence to the idea that you can cobble together 30 or so dirty jokes and maybe the occasional ridiculously long set piece and call it an episode. With a spin-off created by the same production company, I can only expect more of the same – it’s like the guy who punches you in the throat every day just had a kid, and now the kid is going to punch you in the balls every day, and as you massage your sore throat and balls, you slowly start to realize that this sort of thing is going to catch on, and soon there’ll be thousands of unoriginal little tykes coming out of the woodwork to punch you whenever you let your guard down. Sleeping, you realize, will be very difficult. I’d say that The Cleveland Show has no chance, because Cleveland is pretty much a one dimensional character, but then every character on Family Guy is one dimensional, so I’m sure the show will do fine for as long as the writers can keep up a steady stream of gags starting with “This is almost as bad as the time…”

Knight Rider is the worst of the bunch, though, because it’s a remake. I feel that remakes are both an insult to audiences, because they attempt to sell them a story they’ve already seen in a slightly newer package, and also an insult to the creator of the original product. Imagine that you’ve just made a remarkably tasty ham sandwich for your best friend, but then somebody else comes along and says, “What, you call that a ham sandwich?”, and then proceeds to make a new one on ciabatta bread with avocado and Shia LeBouf. Wouldn’t you feel bad? You poured a lot of yourself into that ham sandwich, but then some interloper comes along and starts using your ingredients to make his own kind of sandwich, and… Well, okay, I guess the original creators usually get a pretty healthy royalty check for the use of their characters, and I don’t suppose anybody can really claim to be the original creator of the ham sandwich, but… Look, I just really like using the sandwich metaphor, okay? The point is, when you’re watching Knight Rider, you’re going to be watching a show that had a full broadcast run and was eventually cancelled due to a decline in ratings - the only reason it’s back is because Hollywood has run out of foreign, spin-off, or (God forbid) original cash cows and is now rooting through its own garbage can in search of the fabled “candy bracelet with a little candy left on it, Mom why did you throw that away there was still candy on it”. In fact, Hollywood has gone Dumpster diving three times before now, resurrecting Knight Rider in two movies and another short lived TV show. Perhaps Knight Rider isn’t so much a candy bracelet in the garbage as it is a broken Pez Dispenser: Hollywood keeps shaking it in hopes that a few more bits of chalky, vaguely bitter hard candy will fall out. So don’t get your hopes up, KITT – Hollywood doesn’t really love you again, it’s just rattling you around to see if you’ve got any more candy in you. Yeah, I think the candy metaphor works a lot better than sandwiches.

I can already hear the telltale rustling of my readership putting on their Angry Pants and preparing to debate me into submission, and I’ll beat you all to the punch by saying that there are most definitely some excellent foreign transplants, spinoffs, and remakes. I love The Office in both its British and American incarnations, I think Fraiser is genius without ever having watched Cheers, and I positively worship the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. The problem, of course, is that for all these good examples there are always quite a few more failures. And to be honest, I have a certain kind of respect for a sucky show that is bold enough to suck in an original way where no sucky show has sucked before as opposed to a show that sucks while riding on the coattails of another show’s success, be it a show from overseas, a show featuring some of the same characters, or a show from the past.

Even a show like The Pitts, which many critics consider one of the worst sitcoms of all time, holds a special place in my heart, because it was its own kind of lame and unfunny, not someone else’s. We can't give the creators of The Pitts credit for making something good, but let's at least give them credit for making something original. The Pitts wasn't a foreign transplant or a spin-off or a remake - it was a 100% unique crappy show. The producers were trying to do something new; they risked it all by not following in the footsteps of some previous show and, in the end, wound up becoming the laughing stock of the television community. But it's okay, because bad original shows like The Pitts are the necessary byproduct of a creative process that has led to amazing original shows like Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, 30 Rock, and, (say it with me, folks), Firefly.

So, should I ever find an ending for my novel, and should I ever be able to find a publisher stupid enough to distribute it, I will have already won. Sure, the critics may pan it, but so what? No other creative achievement will suck quite like mine, and that’s one thing I’ll always have over Hollywood.

Truman Capps will beat you with a sack of Valencia oranges if you try to argue that Family’s Guy’s ADD scripting is in some way original, because really all it’s doing is taking chunks of 80s pop culture and throwing them into a script like so many marshmallows in a disgustingly juvenile carton of Rocky Road.

Memo To Hair Guy Staff

Hair Guy Writers' Meeting, June 2008

From: Truman Capps (the Hair Guy)

To: Staff writers for Hair Guy (Bizarro Hemingway, Robo Faulkner, Zombie Fitzgerald, Toni “The Hammer” Morrison, Truman Clones 1-4)

Subject: Possible content adjustment?

Hey gang,

First of all, I’d just like to tell you that you’re doing a fabulous job. I imagine it’s not easy cranking out two updates a week, but you guys deliver, time and again. Looking at some of the stuff you’re writing, I can’t believe I used to do all that myself, back before the rigors of maintaining the Hair Guy brand name took up so much of my time. Point is, I’m damn glad I hired you. You’ve all shown remarkable growth, both in your writing style and in your ability to overcome the crippling genetic defects caused by the highly illegal and dangerous Brazillian cloning operation that created you (I’m looking at you, Truman Clones 1 and 3 – reading your work, sometimes I forget that you’ve got feet growing out of your shoulders). So before I say anything else, I want all of you to take a minute and pat yourselves on the back. Truman Clone 2, I understand that the flippers make the act of patting somewhat difficult, so instead, maybe just rub your flippers together. Until further notice, that’ll just be your own special way to pat yourself on the back.

Now that the backs have been appropriately patted and the flippers well and truly rubbed, I figure we should talk some business. Let me start by saying that I hate coming down here to tell you guys how to write the blog. I mean, hey, I used to write this stuff myself, and it was hard, and back then nothing would have chapped my caboose more than some astonishingly successful internet celebrity coming along and telling me how to do my job. You guys are the writers, and your job is to write the blog for me; I’m the name on the blog, and my job is to manage the considerable cult of personality that has sprung up around that follicle Xanadu otherwise known as my hair. This system has worked well for us for a good long time. Remember all the posts on the comment page where people told me I was hilarious? Or all those people who’d say, “Oh, and your blog last night was pretty okay” at the end of a conversation? Or the half dozen or so raving fans at Sprague High School? Those were the fruits of our labor: Sweet, delicious attention, all for me, and nobody else.

However, those were the good times; our salad days, as the culinarily gifted might put it. Back then, Hair Guy was wildly popular. It was insane. No, I’m serious – I would literally just sit there looking at the hit counter and say, “Wow. This must be what it’s like to be insane.” Hell, who can forget those days, just a few short months ago, when we’d clock in at, like, 90 hits on update days! Do you guys remember when you wrote that thing about Cosmopolitan and we got something like 100 hits in one day? That was just… I mean, eat your heart out, Huffington Post! Y’know? And then I bought you guys that keg to celebrate, and Poe 2.0 had a little too much, and then he said he was cool to drive home, and…

Well, okay, maybe that’s our problem. Maybe we got a little too cocky. We got too big too fast. It was like the roaring 20s (are you with me, Zombie Fitzgerald?) – we were steppin’ large and laughin’ easy, but then out of nowhere the bubble bursts. In the 20s it was the stock market or some lame crap like that, and for us it was the cops calling at 4:00 AM to tell me that a drunken cyborg poet had just wrapped his Honda around a tree and that he wasn’t going to pull through.

The saddest thing about that whole mess is that Poe 2.0 will never be able to realize his dream of finding out what love is.

We can all agree that things have gone downhill since then. Sure, the quality has been the same, but our readership has been steadily decreasing. And hey, I’d love to blame it all on losing Poe 2.0, because between his poetry and his attempts to destroy humanity he generated a lot of publicity that eventually made it back to the blog. But it’s not just that. For some reason, even though we’re keeping up the high quality content, we’re getting fewer and fewer hits every week. Fewer and fewer people that want to read about my delusions of grandeur as a Milkshake Technician or my open letters to various celebrities and government agencies. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I think that stuff relating to me is about the most interesting stuff in the world, and ordinarily I’d say that anyone who doesn’t share in that opinion is probably too stupid to read in the first place, but… Well, we got 60 hits on the day of the last update, and about 25 of them were people who’d Googled terms like “Hair tips for guys” or “Guy hair color” or “Hairy guys”. Something has got to change.

We need to market ourselves to a hipper and younger audience. I’ve got some pretty interesting ideas on my end – for example, I might rename the blog Baseball Cap Turned Backwards Guy, because I hear that sort of shit is really popular with the kids these days. Thing is, if I’m going to change our image, the content is going to have to change with it. So I’m going to need you guys to start writing about more interesting things – yes I know, more interesting than me, is that even possible? I’m going to push you guys further than you’ve ever been pushed before. So I want you all to start thinking about topics that would really pull the readers in – real juicy stuff, stuff that jumps right off the Internet and gets all up in people’s bidness. I was thinking that maybe we should start doing more pictures in the updates – everybody likes pictures, right? And maybe the pictures should be of boobs, regardless of what the update is about. Like, it could be an update about the Magna Carta, but we could just spruce it up with boob pictures. That being said, maybe we should do a regular update where it’s just talking about boobs the whole time.* Like, Wednesdays. We’d call them Boobnesdays. I dunno, it’s just an idea, but I think it’d look great on a T-shirt.

*If any of you think this is tacky, you can go right ahead and quit. It’s a scientifically proven fact that boobs create instant publicity – this isn’t chauvinism, it’s advertising that capitalizes on chauvinism, which I’m pretty sure is OK. If you’re squeamish or awkward about this, just get over it; keep in mind that you all spent a good deal of time with boobs in your infancy (except for the Truman Clones – you guys only nursed at the cold, unfeeling teat of Science).

Now, some of you might be resistant to the thought of seemingly “cheapening” this blog by adding gimmicks to draw in readers. Admittedly, I was too, at first. I mean, it makes you start to wonder why I’m even doing this in the first place. Here at Hair Guy are we writing for the readers, or are we writing for ourselves? The proper answer, the one that I always fantasize about giving if I get interviewed by Rolling Stone or, better yet, NPR, is that I only do this blog thing to please myself, and the fact that other people like to watch me please myself is just a happy accident. But that’s simply not the case – as much as I enjoy doing what I do, the fact is that having an audience makes it that much more exciting. There’s the pressure to put on a good show lest you let everyone down; it’s exhilarating and it’s high pressure and it’s a wonderful excuse to use heroin. We’ve had a taste of the spotlight on those 100 hit days – it’s a good feeling, and I’m hooked, and I’m willing to do anything to get that feeling back, as heroin sure as hell isn’t doing the trick.

Frankly, if I were only doing this for my own benefit, I would never have got a blog in the first place – I’d just write all this crap myself and then save it on my computer. But no; deep down, it’s really about making people laugh, and I want to make more people laugh. So while you’re thinking about ways to make this blog popular, keep our nonstop quest for humor in mind. Don’t be afraid to try new, different, or even absurd sorts of updates – eventually we’ll find something that’ll catch on, and before we know it we’ll be riding high again.

Just remember Poe 2.0, and learn from his mistakes.

Sincerely yours,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps would like to remind you that Hair Guy Take Your Daughter To Work Day is next Friday.

007 Grows Up

Ladies, are your hearts racing? Gentlemen, do you feel inadequate? Then he has done his job.

Quick flashes of improbable stunts in British-manufactured sports cars while an overly bombastic and brassy theme plays? Yes, children, it’s that time of year again – they’ve released the teaser trailer for the new James Bond movie, and it follows the formula perfectly. 85% explosions and fight sequences, 10% sex, and 5% vague and ominous voiceover hinting at the inevitable fact that James Bond will once again fuck y’all’s shit up. Oh, it’s all there. Is there a plot? Who the hell cares! It’s a big budget, well photographed movie, and, why look! It’s Daniel Craig, all muscular and Aryan and eager to be forgiven for his part in The Golden Compass. Are you getting pumped up? Because I’m sort of pumped up.

You may think I’m being-

Oh, actually, let’s put this on pause for a second just so I can go on record and say Yes, that was a diss on The Golden Compass, and No, I don’t want to argue about it with you in the comments section. Yes, I know, I alluded in an earlier, terribly unfunny update that I was eager to see the movie based on the fact that it was perceived as atheist propaganda, but if that’s the best we atheists can do then I’m going to cash in my chips and find a religion that knows a thing or two about filmmaking. All I’m saying is that if a movie featuring a race of armored warrior bears can still find a way to be boring despite the gallons of inherent liquid Awesome at hand, there must be something seriously wrong with it. No, for your information, I didn’t read the book, but I doubt that reading the book is going to change my opinion of a movie that could have been two hours of awesome armored bear fights but was instead not two hours of awesome armored bear fights. Good day, sir.

Anyway,

You may think I’m being sarcastic in my analysis of the new James Bond trailer, but to be honest, I am truthfully quite pumped up. Ordinarily, action movie trailers of this sort don’t have much effect on me, because I’ve seen enough crappy movies with awesome trailers to fill a Hollywood Video and at this point I know to look past the glitz and explosions for the characteristics that really matter, like story and boobs. However, the James Bond franchise and I have sort of an agreement: They release a trailer, I think it’s awesome, I see the movie, and I may or may not be satisfied. But that’s cool, that’s cool, because at the very least there will be explosions and boobs.

As a kid I was a raving James Bond fanatic. The first movie that I ever remember calling my Favorite Movie Ever was Goldfinger - I’d seen that movie hundreds of times before I reached an age at which I could understand why a name like Pussy Galore always made my Dad snicker under his breath. My fanaticism continued throughout elementary school as I devoured as many of the films as my parents deemed appropriate for my young eyes (to this day I have not seen Octopussy). There was one week in fourth grade when I rented The Living Daylights on Monday, and then proceeded to watch it after school, every day, until the five day rental period was up. I have no idea why I decided to watch the same movie five times in as many days, but I do know that by Wednesday the act of coming home and chilling out with Timothy Dalton for two hours was more a matter of habit than choice. Picasso had his Blue Period, I had my The Living Daylights Period – both were major turning points in the cultural landscape of the 20th century.

Every few years, much to my childish delight, they’d release a new James Bond movie, and I’d eagerly badger my parents to take me to see it with all the ferocity of a crackhead who has just found out that his dealer is having an all-you-can-smoke crack buffet. Two Bond movies came out during the height of my craze - Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough. Now, while Tomorrow Never Dies didn’t gain quite the same fanbase as its superb predecessor, Goldeneye, I still considered it to be a thoroughly entertaining movie, and between 4th and 5th grade I watched it with the same zeal with which I’d approached The Living Daylights. It had explosions and gunfights and all the things I liked; I felt at the time that it could’ve done without all the sappy romance stuff, and looking back I think I really didn’t understand the plot too thoroughly either, but that was okay – it had the explosions and gunfights, and as we all know, a spoonful of violence makes the medicine go down.

However, after I saw The World Is Not Enough, something strange happened that I had never experienced before: I realized that I’d just watched a really sucky James Bond movie. Imagine, Christians, if archaeologists unearthed a new gospel belonging to The New Testament, and it was verified as 100% legitimate, and you, having devoted your life to Christ, were understandably eager to find out what else old J.C. had to say. But then imagine, having read it, that it was really boring and had terrible dialogue and was hokey to the point of being melodramatic. How would you feel at that point? Well, that was pretty much how I felt. It was almost as though my childhood ended on the sorrowful day that I watched a movie featuring a female lead named Christmas Jones,* a role that was apparently far too deep for Denise Richards to play convincingly. After The World Is Not Enough, I wisely decided to start growing out of James Bond, lest he break my heart again.

*Really? Christmas Jones? Come on. I know you’re out there, whoever wrote this festering turd of a movie, and I want you to know that I really, really hate you for that. It’s a time honored tradition of the James Bond franchise that the women have ridiculous names; however, they’re supposed to be weirdly suggestive, not weirdly stupid. But look at you – you mashed the name of a major holiday together with a bland, common last name, and then you took another hit of whatever drug turns people into horrible, horrible writers. How hard could it have been to think up a name that wasn’t just ludicrous but also suggestive? How about Lady Jameswill-Havesexwith? I came up with that right off the top of my head. Come on, people. She could be, like, British aristocracy, or something. They always have weird last names.

And then a few years later, came Die Another Day, and, enticed by the trailer, I cautiously let James Bond back into my life once again. I was treated to a film that begins with James Bond surfing into a North Korean military base completely undetected and just goes straight downhill from there until he’s parasailing across ice floes while being chased by a giant diamond-powered laser beam. I was 13 years old at the time and I considered that movie an insult to my intelligence; perhaps the target audience was people with ADD, or masochists. As I left the theater, I turned over my shoulder and sullenly bade a final farewell to James Bond. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Theme song by Madonna, you should be put on trial for war crimes.”

James Bond and I didn’t speak to one another for a good four years after that. It was early in my senior year of high school when I saw the trailer for Casino Royale and fell right back into the franchise’s metaphorical arms as placidly as the literally hundreds of women James Bond has taken to bed. The filmmakers had finally struck the perfect balance – a movie with all kinds of explosions and gunfights that also gives us credit for our intelligence and provides with James Bond more depth than just a walking penis with a gun.

This sort of thing has been happening a lot recently – a respectable, time-honored series goes on for too many installments and becomes embarrassingly silly and overblown, and finally somebody with considerable talent comes in and reboots the franchise in such a way that you don’t have to remove your brain and put it in a Mason jar just to sit through the entire film anymore. The other franchise to do this that comes to mind is Batman, which Christopher Nolan turned around by rebooting the series, adding realism, and subtracting nipples from the Batsuit. And yes, in case you were looking for my opinion, I have seen The Dark Knight, and it is decidedly groovy-pants.

Realism seems to be the key to success these days. Nobody wants to watch movies about James Bond coolly surfing into a warzone or a caricatured, fanfiful, nipple-y Batman – they want gritty, raw stuff that’s packed full of character development, movies where James Bond shows vulnerability and Batman has to deal with stuff like identity, ethos, and the greatest film villain in recent memory. And of course I use the term “realism” lightly, because in Casino Royale James Bond runs through a wall completely unharmed and in Batman Begins the Gotham City Police are somehow completely fooled when Batman turns off the headlights on the Batmobile, but these are acceptable discrepancies in the name of Awesomeness.

So I hope you’ll join in my excitement for Quantum of Solace - yes, the title may be kind of silly, but it certainly doesn’t suggest a woman with eight vaginas.

Truman Capps shamelessly stole the phrase “groovy-pants” from Zero Punctuation, hence why it was funnier than everything else in this update.

Fear and Loathing At The Flugtag

This can would probably fly further than a lot of the Flugtag entries.

From time to time it’s comforting to have a reminder that, no matter what happens, you’re still gravity’s bitch. Oh, sure, it’d be plenty handy to just turn gravity off whenever you want to make a slam dunk or seriously mess with the kids down at the skate park, but, for better or worse, that’s not your decision to make. Nope, gravity’s been chugging right along for literally hundreds of years, keeping us pasted to the ground and making car chases considerably less awesome than they could be, and it shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. I learned yesterday that there is no better way to celebrate gravity’s complete stranglehold on our lives than by dressing up like idiots and riding slapshod flying machines into a heavily polluted body of water in front of 40,000 people.

I speak, of course, of the Red Bull Flugtag (German for “airshow”) that took place in Portland yesterday, a yearly event in which contestants build and decorate human powered “flying” machines and attempt to launch them off of a large ramp over water. Now, I put The Quotation Marks of Incredulity around the word “flying” because the Flugtag is not especially concerned with flight, as evidenced by the fact that the first three contestants in yesterday’s matchup were a cardboard faux Lego spaceship, a particle board Winnebago, and a giant beaver on wheels. Oh, sure, there were a few contestants who had spent a great deal of time and money on aerodynamic contraptions that actually did glide for awhile, but the general consensus was that these guys had sort of missed the point of the whole thing. The Flugtag isn’t so much about flight as it is about looking silly while you crash into the water. Besting all of the competition by building an aesthetically unappealing machine that actually does fly is like playing a game of Candyland with a no-holds-barred, cutthroat attitude: You win, but you wind up looking like a glory-obsessed tool in the process. The general atmosphere was one of light hearted fun and games, and even I, the angry liberal who never trusts major corporations, enjoyed myself as a major corporation encouraged its loyal customers to jump into dirty, cold water from a great height.

Overall, the Flugtag was a very entertaining event. It didn’t cost anything, and you got to see things crashing – my only complaint was that nothing exploded, and perhaps that there weren’t free donuts. I wasn’t the only one who thought from the outset that the Flugtag sounded entertaining, though, because as I previously mentioned, 40,000 Portlanders all jostled their way onto the waterfront to watch the proceedings. I feel like this was the event’s greatest failure – the sheer amount of publicity it attracted. When you mash 40,000 people together in one place, an afternoon of simple fun and games and costumed swimming will inevitably become political.

These days it seems that a gathering of more than two people is easy pickins’ for any yokel with a clipboard and a cause. Proponents of all sorts of political agendas floated through the mobs around the waterfront yesterday, searching for petition signatures with the same sort of tenacity that my dog used to show when she’d look for fresh raccoon crap to roll in. The tactics, however, vary depending on the cause being promoted. For a cause that has very little chance of ever gaining momentum, such as an act of Congress that would make it legal to sell marijuana in liquor stores, the signature collectors tend to forego all tact and simply start throwing words at you, hoping that your disgust at their lip ring and your desire for them to go away will motivate you to sign their petition that much faster. On the other hand, more legitimate causes such as voter registration have employed the time-honored tactic of using attractive women to make men jump through hoops. I was approached by several cute girls yesterday, all of them smiling and eager to know how I was enjoying the Flugtag. This is always a wonderful and captivating experience; however, within less than 30 seconds the relationship always takes a turn for the worse when the girl starts asking really serious questions like “Do you agree that President Bush should be impeached?” or “What county are you registered to vote in?” My answer to both questions is yes, but what offends me about it is that the signature collector seems to think that I’m stupid enough to believe that she wants me for anything besides my ability to sign my name. It’s considerably harder to enjoy slapstick flying accidents when you have to keep being polite and pseudo flirtatious to nonstop waves of cute activists feigning interest in your life.

I think that the Flugtag is a pretty interesting promotion, because Red Bull’s slogan is “It gives you wings”, and yet they sponsor a competition based entirely around conspicuously not flying. Perhaps the Flugtag is meant as a cautionary event – “These people didn’t drink Red Bull”, the event organizers are saying, “And if you do you’ll be much better at not falling into the river than they are.” Regardless of what the company’s intentions were, the event was a big hit, and they sold quite a bit of Red Bull from kiosks placed around the park. However, what the event organizers didn’t seem to understand was that selling high octane energy drinks to people packed together so tightly that they could barely move was not a good idea for overall public safety.

When everyone is trying to find The Perfect Spot from which to watch everything go down, emotions tend to run a little high, and when a lot of them are wired on an intense mixture of sugar and caffeine, well, emotions run a little higher. There were plenty of nasty looks exchanged as the throngs attempted to find a suitable space with a commanding view of the event, but by and large everyone handled themselves with a suitable amount of decorum. However, there was one point during the day when things looked a bit ugly, and when I say things looked a bit ugly, I mean that I was very nearly at the epicenter of a race riot. The matter started when a large black lady in her late 50s muscled past a group of skinny white teenaged girls, no doubt well-to-do visitors from Lake Oswego. The black lady shoved the girls aside, grumbling that they needed to hurry up or get right out of the way. In the black lady’s defense, I agree – people really should hurry up or get out of the way; in fact, I may well adopt that as my motto. But on the other hand, the teenaged girls were moving at about the same speed as everyone else, so maybe what the black lady meant was that everyone should hurry up or get out of the way, which, once again, is an opinion I often share while stuck in traffic or waiting in line. In any sense, things escalated quickly.

“You bitch!” One of the girls shouted.

The black lady whirled around, and suddenly her eyes were the size of cue balls and her face was contorted into a leathery mask of rage. Thunder rumbled in the distance and I’m pretty sure one of her arms turned into a laser gatling gun.

“What didyou call me!? WHAT DIDYOU CALL ME!?” She screamed, stalking back toward the girls.

It was at this point that I realized I was standing practically in between the woman and her opponent, and at that moment the space between the angry black lady and those teenagers was officially The Worst Place In The Universe™. I dove into the crowd (I would have dove into a volcano to get out of that situation) and hastened away from the scene of the shouting match, but as I left I was distinctly aware that the teenaged girl had shrunk down to about the size of a quark and that the black lady turned back around with a satisfied “Yeeah.”

Red Bull – it gives you balls.

Truman Capps has used the “Fear and Loathing” title twice in one month – this is a surefire sign that he’s slipping.

Things I Thought About At Work Today

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters", by Francisco Goya. I was having a hard time finding an image for this post, so I decided to just try and impress you with my knowledge of art history.

Carl's Drive In, Night Shift, 5:30-9:30

5:26 PM: Man, why is it that I’m not allowed to clock in before my shift begins? If they’re going to be all uptight about us showing up five minutes early, we should at least get paid for it. Instead I just have to stand here like an idiot for four minutes, staring at the clock, waiting to punch in at EXACTLY 5:30. Bunch of cheap bastards. How much would I earn in four minutes? That’s like eight bucks an hour, divided by 60…

5:28 PM: …Wait, okay, maybe I multiply eight bucks by four, since I’m working four hours, and then I divide it by 60, but… No, that doesn’t make any sense. Four minutes is, like, four percent of an hour, right? So what’s four percent of eight? I need some paper…

5:30 PM: …So 60 times 100 is 6000, and then I divide that by 4000, and that gets me 1.5. No, no, that’s probably not right…

5:31 PM: …Hey, wait, I’ve got a calculator on my cell phone! I could just use this to- Oh, piss, now I’m late!

5:48 PM: Man alive, we need to start playing a new radio station in the dining room, because I’ve had it up to here with the John Tesh Radio Show and its infernal “Best soft rock of the 80s, 90s, and today!” I mean, it’s like he only plays five songs, and three of them are “Jack and Diane”. I guess “Jack and Diane” is a good enough song, but only in the right place and time – namely, the Washington Park High School prom in Racine, Wisconsin, in May of 1983. It’s the last song of the night, and Vanessa Jerzyck is crying in the corner because her date is dancing with that slut Shelly Williamson, and she just wanted this night to be so gosh darn special.

6:01 PM: Hey, somebody filled out a job application and left it over by the heat lamp. Let’s see here… “QUALIFICATIONS: I am nice and can do things quickly.” Oh, wow, bravo, “Dan”, that’s some really poetic shit right there. I think my favorite part is when you played up your ability to do things quickly – that’s some hard-hitting stuff. I think I’m feeling tears. Maybe you should have mentioned how you went to the State Doing Things Championship last year. Or how you got the blue ribbon for being really nice. Jesus, I hope you get hired. If you get hired, I’m going to do this to you every day. Dan Miller, I am going to give you the business on a regular basis, and- Oh, crap, gotta make a milkshake.

6:26 PM: What’s that? You want me to look through the garbage for our reusable plastic burger baskets before I throw it out? Yeah, I don’t see that happening. As I recall, the main reason I got a job was so I wouldn’t have to root through the trash. Give me $12.50 an hour and then we’ll talk.

6:33 PM: Order coming up on the screen… What, this guy wants… He wants a hot fudge banana milkshake, made with hard chocolate ice cream (not Soft-Serv, oh no), and he wants it extra thick? Glory be! It appears that I am now making a milkshake for THE KING OF THE JACKASSES!

6:35 PM: And why the hell would you want an extra thick milkshake, anyway? It’s just going to be that much harder to drink. A milkshake is a beverage, intended to be drank through a straw. If you’ve got such a hard on for thickness, why not just eat a cup full of ice cream and save me the hassle?

6:36 PM: Okay, spooning in the hot fudge now from that giant steaming cauldron in the back – got to be careful that I don’t spill any on my han- FUCK OW

6:38 PM: Jesus, blend, would you? C’mon, how much longer is this going to take? Oh, okay, great, you know what, chocolate ice cream? Just keep on spilling out of the cup like that. I don’t even care. I wanted to scoop more ice cream anyway.

6:44 PM: Oh, what? What!? He’s sending it back? Not thick enough, he says!? Well, maybe he doesn’t understand that a hot fudge banana milkshake can only be so thick! The hot fudge melts the ice cream and the whipped up banana turns into a fluid, hence thinning the milkshake! Take it from me, asshole, science and cooking have conspired to make your dream impossible! So hows about you just drink your damn milkshake before I decide to shit on something you hold dear?

6:45 PM: Woohoo! Break time!

6:55 PM: Well, that’s the end of that.

7:12 PM: What was that thing I saw on Nova a couple weeks ago – it was that thing about that teenager who was a dwarf, but he’d just got his black belt in karate. He was like two feet tall, but he could probably kick my ass. I bet that would be a humbling experience, getting beat up by a guy who’s shorter than some breeds of dog. What they should do is find a really cocky tall guy who can’t fight, and then have the dwarf guy come beat the crap out of him. It’d be like David and Goliath! I’d pay good money to see that.

7:34 PM: Y’know, really, I think a dwarf black belt is a lot more dangerous than a run of the mill, normal-size black belt. See, because even if the normal black belt is really good, the dwarf black belt is two feet tall, so all those kicks are going to be going over his head, and the normal black belt is going to have to crouch to chop the dwarf, and if the dwarf moves fast, well, he’s unstoppable! Even if the tall, cocky guy was a karate master, he’d still be screwed! It’s like playing Oddjob in Goldeneye - you’re such a small target that it’s practically cheating.

7:53 PM: That had better not be “Jack and Diane” coming from the dining room. Oh… Oh, yeah, okay, it is. Seriously, John Tesh? Why are you famous? What gives you the right to subject me to this? I know you were on Entertainment Tonight, but, I mean, c’mon. What have you done for me recently, Tesh?

8:02 PM: Okay, so they’re making me clean out the bathrooms – look on the bright side! Maybe, when I’m cleaning the women’s bathroom, that fox over at table 12 will walk in, and then she’ll lock the door and we’ll make out or something. That would be five flavors of legit.

8:12 PM: Aw, fiddlesticks. Well, maybe it’ll happen tomorrow.

8:39 PM: A pineapple, banana, marshmallow shake? You have got to be kidding. There is no way someone just ordered that.

8:42 PM: Okay, I’ve got the chopped up banana in the bottom, poured in the soft serve on top of that, ladled in two scoops of pineapple, added the milk, and topped it off with a hearty squirt of creamy, gooey marshmallow topping. I’m getting Type 2 Diabetes just looking at this thing. God, the cup is practically overflowing already and I haven’t even tried to blend it all together yet. This is either going to go perfectly, or it’s going to be like Milkshake Hiroshima up in this piece.

8:43 PM: OH SHI-

8:52 PM: Hey, would you look at that, there’s another piece of banana in my hair. And I wonder why I don’t have a girlfriend…

9:02 PM: Wow, what is that? Is that a whole two bucks in the tip jar? My cup runneth over, and not with hot fudge or pineapple this time.

9:15 PM: Okay, 15 minutes ‘till my shift ends. So help me, if a bunch of people come in right before I’m supposed to go home, I will find a way to destroy the universe. It’ll be me and a clone army of black belt dwarves, and everybody else will be running for their lives!

9:19 PM: “Don’t Stop Believin’”, eh, Tesh? Your Journey to Mellencamp ratio still isn’t where it should be, but this is certainly an improvement. Now if you can finish out my shift strong – maybe hit me with some Styx, or some Steely Dan if you’re up for it – you just might have climbed off of my shit list.

9:23 PM: Aaaand you’re playing “The Sweet Escape”. Great stuff, John Tesh, really freakin’ great, tacking some Gwen Stefani on the end of “Don’t Stop Believin’”. Sometime soon, Tesh, there’s going to be a knock on your front door, and when you open it, I’ll be there, and standing just in front of me will be a two foot tall karate master, and then you’re going to get karate chopped right in the balls.

9:28 PM: Come on, come on… Everything’s cleaned, the garbage has been taken out, I’ve swept and mopped, the dishes are done, the Soft-Serv machine is all filled up, there’s plenty of ice in the ice machine, now just let me go before more people come in and want me to make shakes!

9:29 PM: No! No! Don’t come in here, old woman! Don’t you even dare! Go someplace else! Go to Dairy Queen! Go to hell, for that matter! You have no business eating right now! You should be asleep, or watching Matlock! Why did you have to get hungry right before I’m supposed to go home!? You’re going to hobble on up to the cashier and ask in that frail old voice of yours for an extra large hot fudge strawberry banana bacon milkshake with whip cream, and by the time I’ve made that for you there’s going to be 12 more people in here who want shakes, and then I’ll be in this place for another hour until we close!

9:30 PM: Oh. Oh, thank Jesus, all she wants is a vanilla ice cream cone. That’s easy, that doesn’t make any mess… Okay, let’s just do this. One more cone! One cone and you’re out, Truman!

9:31 PM: Going home on time! All riiiight! I’m gonna grab some dinner, check the old email, and then get my Grand Theft Auto on for a few hours until… Wait. Shit, I have to write a blog tonight, don’t I?

Truman Capps probably talks about work too much.

Summer Eatin'

We don't do this yet at Carl's, but I can foresee a time when we'll offer to deep fry people's children for an extra $1.40.

Lunch is a funny sort of meal for me. Since I usually get up somewhere between 10:00 AM and noon, lunch is really more of my breakfast. Dinner, also, is screwed up, because comes at whatever time my manager at work decides to give me a break, and then, depending on whether I’m working at Bella Fresca or Carl’s, it can either consist of sautéed halibut or beer battered red meat. Because I tend to sleep in so late, I don’t go to bed until it’s pretty late as well, and so Dinner2 comes at around 1:30 AM when I get hungry enough to sneak down to the refrigerator for a late night hummus binge.

Since lunch has to pull double duty as both lunch and breakfast, I ordinarily go for a more ambiguous combination of the two when I take this meal at home. Usually, this winds up being my time-honored favorite: two or three pieces of sourdough bread with peanut butter spread very thickly on them. Inevitably, I wind up clutching the counter with one hand and massaging my esophagus with the other, praying that the chunk of peanut buttery, yeasty goo will slide into my stomach before my windpipe is completely sealed off and I suffocate. It’s decidedly unhealthy to stare delicious, legume-derived death in the face every morning, especially when you can look back on dozens of previous occasions on which you have almost died under these same circumstances and wonder why you haven’t learned your lesson yet.

Since peanut butter is so bad for me (both in that it’s fattening and in that it could undoubtedly asphyxiate me) I sometimes try to seek out alternate breakfast/lunch choices. Since I’m far too lazy to undertake any sort of food preparation more complex than unwrapping a loaf of bread and screwing the lid off a jar, I tend to go out for lunch when I want a little variety. There are two fast food restaurants close to my house: One is Carl’s, where I have a 30% employee discount, and the other is Subway. I tend to frequent Subway, because I’ve noticed that a great many people who frequent Carl’s are so large that they have their own gravitational pull.

During my senior year of high school, I sat next to my friend Matt in Art History, and every morning he would say one of two things: “Truman, I smoked too much weed last night”, or “Truman, I hate working at Subway.” He came to school once with a giant burn on his hand from a mishap with a bag of molten sauce and often told me horror stories about the unsanitary preparation rituals for tuna salad and the meatballs that, while ball-shaped, were most certainly not meat. After hearing these stories, I decided that henceforth I would be a Quiznos man. However, while Quiznos may have all natural ingredients and considerably foxier employees, Subway, both at school and at home, is always closer to where I’m living. Also, they offer the Five Dollar Footlong.*

*I guarantee you, this is the name of a Taiwanese porn movie. I don’t know for sure, and I’m certainly not going to go looking, but I’ll give you better than average odds that such a movie definitely exists, possibly with a dozen or more sequels.

I tend not to go crazy over discounts or sales, but the simple fact is that paying $5 for 12 inches of uninterrupted sandwich is a really, really, really good deal. Then, on top of that, is the fact that what you’re getting is ostensibly healthy, which in and of itself is worth another $3 right there. Eating at Subway sort of gives me the moral high ground in everything else I do during the day. Sure, I haven’t been working out like I promised myself I was going to, but I did eat at Subway before playing Bioshock for 3 hours, so, I mean, it’s a start. When you think about it, walking to Subway and then eating there is pretty much all Jared ever did, at least as far as the commercials are concerned.

There’s a sign on the door of my Subway that says, in big, exciting, happy letters, “ENTER FOR A CHANCE TO APPEAR WITH JARED ON A SUBWAY COMMERCIAL!!” And, I mean, that’s fine – it’s their corporation, they can advertise whatever the hell promotion they want to – but when I look at the list of Things I Want To Achieve, I don’t see “Meet Subway’s Jared” anywhere on there. I mean no disrespect, because he seems like a really nice guy. He looks like the sort of guy who would offer you a ride home for spring break, and then when he drops you off at your house and you go to pull out some gas money he’d say “Ah, don’t worry about it.” That being said, I know four or five of those people already, and I don’t think I have room in my mooching schedule for one more. As a promotional tool, Jared seems to be doing great things for Subway, but as a charismatic celebrity who everyone wants to meet, well, he has yet to ascend the throne of the Taco Bell Chihuahua.

In my estimate, Jared got so popular not because of any overabundance of charisma or charm, but because he symbolized The American Dream; that is, to lose a lot of weight without doing a lot of work. That an ordinary person like Jared could drop a few hundred pounds by walking and eating sub sandwiches did something for Subway that the Taco Bell Chihuahua never could. By selecting the nutritionally sound menu options at Subway and doing a lot of walking, you too could conceivably become slim and trim; however no amount of Gordidas will turn you into a streetwise talking dog. Question for class discussion: If Gordidas could turn you into a talking dog, would you eat them?

As much as Subway claims to be committed to healthy food, though, I can’t help but call bullshit on some of the things they do. Sure, most sandwiches at Subway are a lot healthier than any given menu item at Carl’s, where they would deep fry water if it was scientifically possible, but it’s still easy to make a sandwich that’s just as bad for you as a burger. There’s nothing stopping you from building a sub at Subway that consists of bacon, cheese, and mayonnaise, and if you get a footlong then there’s probably more unhealthy stuff there than in a hamburger. Say what you will about the health value of a hunk of cow between two condiment-rich pieces of bread, at least it stops after a few inches. An unhealthy sub sandwich, however, just keeps going and going like a fat and cholesterol highway.

So far this summer I’ve lost a few pounds without really exercising besides walking to work, and I think the secret to my success doesn’t involve the footlong chicken breast sandwich (one of Jared’s favorites, so the menu tells me). I think my secret is just that I eat when I’m hungry, and since we don’t really have a lot of snack foods in the house I usually resort to pitabread and hummus, which is sort of the cornerstone on which all health food is built. If there’s no pitabread and hummus to be had, I’m lazy to the point that I’ll actually reevaluate my overall hunger against my willingness to go to the effort of seeking out food, and often wind up not eating until a mealtime. In the end, I suppose it’s Sloth that saves me from Gluttony.

Truman Capps understands that there are a litany of factors affecting weight gain and loss that he can’t hope to comprehend, and is willing to admit that his recent loss of weight is probably less the result of good eating habits and more the result of some horrible wasting disease he has yet to be diagnosed with.

Working For The Nonexistent Weekend

"Wait- WHAT?"

There were many days when I would return home from high school, listlessly toss my 7000 pound backpack onto the floor, and go straight for the kitchen pantry, more specifically, the peanut butter. Peanut butter is right up there with Diet Coke on the list of Truman’s Incredibly Lame Vices, and during high school a long cherished ritual for me was to spread gallons of Jif on a few measly crusts of bread and try to drown the day’s sorrows in enough peanut butter to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool. Let’s just say I got really good at giving myself the Heimlich maneuver. However, there were some days in high school, particularly my senior year, where I’d dive right into the peanut butter without even bothering with the silly formality of bread. Those were generally the bad, soul sucking, life hating days of my educational experience. Those were the days, sitting on the floor of the kitchen, covered in peanut butter and ransacking the fridge for Diet Coke, that I would say, “I’ve had it with learning! I’m going to drop out and go work 12 hours a day in a cannery, and I’m going to like it, and every student, teacher, and administrator at Charles A. Sprague High School can just go fuck a buffalo!”

Please note the sickeningly optimistic speech I gave at commencement.

In high school they were quick to remind us that the only way to avoid a life of nonstop drudgery and toil was by putting up with the drudgery and toil of high school and the subsequent drudgery and toil of a college education/a career. Only after mind boggling amounts of drudgery and toil would we find a few years of peace in our old age. Those who dropped out of high school, our steadfast teachers reminded us, would spend their entire lives working two part time service industry jobs, and then get eaten by velociraptors on their 50th birthday. However, some mornings I would walk up the hill to that ugly concrete citadel, a full day’s busywork ahead of me, and I’d start to warm up to the notion of getting eaten by velociraptors. It is a scientifically proven fact that no one who has been eaten by a velociraptor ever had to do homework afterwards. This was, and still is, what I find most lucrative about raptorcide.

Of course, I never dropped out, and instead I coasted through high school on a tidal wave of peanut butter, aspartame, and nonstop bitching. I was accepted to a highly selective university*, completed my freshman year without dying, and now, a third of the way through my summer, I find myself working two part time service industry jobs. I get all the drawbacks of being a dropout without any of the enjoyment of not having to complete high school. I am now ever watchful for velociraptors.

*The University of Oregon accepts roughly 90% of its applicants, but I’m sure to the other 10% it seems like a pretty selective school.

I put in 20 hours a week at Carl’s and 12 hours a week at Bella Fresca, and the two days I work at Bella Fresca are consistently the two days I don’t work at Carl’s, so I’ve essentially been going for about two weeks now without a day that I haven’t either made someone a milkshake or poured them a glass of water. I don’t suppose I should be complaining, because both jobs are great and at the absolute most I work six hours out of my day, but there’s something about knowing you have to go to work at 5:30 that makes you view the rest of the day through crap tinted glasses. 1:00 PM isn’t 1:00 PM anymore, it’s EXACTLY FOUR AND A HALF HOURS BEFORE YOU HAVE TO GO TO WORK. And then suddenly I’m second-guessing everything I do.

Xbox 360, really? My Subconscious is asking. Is that really how you want to spend your four and a half hours of freedom?

“Well, maybe it is. I like video games! I should do things I want to do in my free time.”

Look at you! You’re in the prime of your life and you’re sitting there killing virtual hookers. Whatever happened to living each day like it was your last one on Earth?

“Well, that just isn’t feasible, Subconscious! If it were my last day on Earth, I’d go find the guy who cancelled Firefly and beat him to death with his own bad taste, but I’d probably get sent to prison, and what’s worse, I’d have to go to California to find the guy, so I think killing a bunch of virtual hookers is a very realistic goal for my day.”

Why don’t you read instead? Didn’t you say you wanted to read more this summer?

“Well…”

Or how about writing? You’ve got the blog to write tonight, and the ‘ol adventure novel won’t write itself, after all.

“But… But that requires so much effort…”

Fine then! It’s your life. But in case you were wondering, this little debate has taken five minutes, and now you only have EXACTLY FOUR HOURS AND 25 MINUTES BEFORE YOU HAVE TO GO TO WORK, minus the five minutes it’ll take you to walk there, and minus another 10 minutes before that that it’ll take you to get ready for work, and then, well, you were going to practice the trumpet today, weren’t you? So that’s another 45 minutes, and… Wow, do you even have time to play your XBox anymore?

It’s these sorts of things that turn what would otherwise be an ordinary summer day into a pile of dread wrapped in a thin layer of wasted opportunities – this, dear readers, is a burrito that no amount of chipotle can make palatable.

It’s sort of tough for me to distinguish where I am in the week now, because while during the school year I, along with the rest of America, actively counted down until the weekend, now that I work every day I’ve lost my compass and am hopelessly adrift in a sea of milkshakes and ice water. It seems that days off were really the only things holding together my very conception of time as we know it. It’s not so much that I’m burned out, because I have plenty of time to relax before and after I spend a few hours working, but it’s that every day consists of almost exactly the same routine now. The weeks have begun to blend together as each day is now equal parts leisure and work. If this goes on much longer, I may forget what year it is. I may forget where I live. I could well forget my own name – because at Carl’s and Bella Fresca I have no name; I am merely Guy Doing Nonsexual Task For Money. And so long as we’re talking about money, I am proud to report that I am making wicked mad fliff from working 7 days a week; however I have sacrificed the sturdy pillars on which I built my world.

I suppose the value in staying in school is that this sort of thing will end in the fall, and that presumably, in summers to come, I’ll have internships instead of jobs, wherein I’ll work longer hours for no pay.

Wait, no, that’s not quite the moral I was looking for….

I suppose the value in working my not-as-muscular-as-I-wish-they-were buttocks off over the summer is that I don’t take the thought of working these sorts of jobs lightly. Sure, it was easy in high school – three girlfriends ago, 250,000 cans of Diet Coke ago, 3000 quarts of peanut butter ago – to dismiss the value of my education in a fit of hormones and math-related confusion, but now that I’ve actually been working for some time in the sorts of professions that some people are forced to have as careers, it’s all the more motivation to study hard, even if I have to take another economics class. Because even when I’m toiling in school and then in my future career (provided that I ever find one), at least there’ll be weekends. And a future with weekends is a bright one indeed.

Truman Capps means no offense to buffalo, but much offense to certain Sprague High School administrators.

Superhero Update

Best. Superhero. Ever.

For the past few days, nearly everyone I know on Facebook has updated their status to some combination of the words “The Dark Knight”, “saw” and “fucking awesome”. This makes me feel all the more left out for not having seen it yet, but as I work 7 evenings a week, it’s really tough for me to get out to the theater. Sure, I could go watch a matinee, but I feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong about watching a movie called The Dark Knight at 1:40 on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. When I leave the theater after seeing The Dark Knight, I want to be afraid that Batman will swoop out of the darkness and hit me with one of his Bat-somethings. For me, that’s part of the movie experience. That’s what I’m paying for – being scared shitless of Batman. And Batman doesn’t do stuff during the day, because it seems that Gotham City is either located somewhere in the Artic Circle or has a strict daytime curfew for everyone, because all really memorable Batman moments take place when the sun has gone down, presumably so it can hide from Batman.

A lot of people who study pop culture have opined that superheroes are the gods of modern America – I myself always thought that God was the god of modern America, but then again, he doesn’t have the Batmobile, so I guess we know who’s cooler. I’m just about as knowledgeable about our world saving, Justice League member gods as I am about our world creating, long white robe wearing God. It’s sort of embarrassing at geeky social events – everybody starts going on about the latest issue of Spider Man and I’m suddenly out of my element, for the only thing I know about Spider Man is that he does whatever a spider can (which, honestly, is pretty freaking obvious given the fact that his name is Spider Man – if he did whatever a mongoose could, that would be pretty impressive; both because it would be unexpected and because I really don’t know what a mongoose can do). I’m a frequent victim of That Guy, the one who reminds you that you’re stupid for liking the movie because the comic book was way better, the one who says, “It’s not a comic book, it’s a graphic novel!”, the one who will give a 15 minute lecture about Wolverine’s gradual development as a character after you mention that your family was mauled by a pack of rabid wolverines. For whatever reason, I just can’t bring myself to religiously follow comic books.

It just seems like an awful lot of work to me – a whole canon to familiarize oneself with, remember, and then keep up with on a regular basis. Characters duck and weave in and out of storylines, love interests die or turn evil, and planets seem to explode on a regular basis. So that’s complicated enough on its own, but it turns out that by the mid 1980s, DC Comics had created four separate Earths – one in which Batman was perpetually young, one where superheroes aged normally, a pseudo “real” world, and of course the requisite Bizarro World, all of which inexplicably converged in the mid 1980s. It’s like if there was the normal Bible where Jesus is the son of God, and then there was a Bible where Barry is the son of God, and a Bible where Jesus knows ju-jitsu, and a Bible where Bizarro Jesus is the son of Anti-God, and then to clarify things Barry and the other Jesuses all fight to the death on Noah’s Ark. The whole thing requires a lot more mental processes than I want to be using during my leisure time, and for the record, my money is on the Jesus that knows ju-jitsu.

I’ve done a bit more reading in the mysterious, pseudo legitimate world of the graphic novel, which attempts to separate the men from the boys with darker plotlines and more complex characters, despite the fact that they’re still essentially picture books that feature large breasted, scantily clad women. A good example of this are the Sin City comics, wherein all the men are steadfastly dedicated to gruesomely murdering one another in new and exciting ways, and all the women are steadfastly dedicated to being naked and gruesomely murdering one another in new and exciting ways. Maybe my inability to enjoy this sort of thing is why I’m not really cut out to be a fan of this medium – for the record, That Guy, I didn’t like the movie either. To be honest, it makes me sort of uncomfortable when the most level-headed character in a story is the guy that nearly drowns a criminal in his own piss. That’s just really not my thing.

Now, there was graphic novel that I enjoyed immensely – Watchmen, the trailer for which you were probably confused by before The Dark Knight. Watchmen answered the question I’d always been asking, which was “What if superheroes were burned out, morally bankrupt, sexually confused, and occasionally insane losers?”, and it managed to answer it with just enough violence to keep me entertained but not so much that I had to get up on my high horse like I did with Sin City in the previous paragraph. However, Watchmen is all contained in one volume; it features a cast of original characters and was humble enough to make do with only one Earth. I guess my feeling is that maybe all the best stories have a clear and definite ending – if things keep going on forever, then you have to start creating bizarro worlds just to cover your own tracks.

My other problem with comic books is that I find it hard to identify with superheroes on a long term basis. It’s not because I think they’re infallible or anything – Batman is, after all, sort of a nutcase, and Spider Man has women, money, and “I killed my best friend’s dad” troubles. It’s because, when blessed with such incredible powers as they’ve got, these superheroes actually go to the trouble of using them for good. That’s something I just can’t see myself doing. I mean, if I had super powers I wouldn’t necessarily use them for evil – I’d just use them for fun and, if possible, profit. If I could turn invisible I’d get my own reality TV show and put David Blaine out of business, if I had claws that came out of my hands I’d use them to scare the crap out of customers at work who don’t say “please” or “thank you”, and if I could fly I probably wouldn’t, because I’ve got vertigo. But no matter what power I had, I can’t envision myself taking on the considerable physical and psychological burden of cleaning up the mean streets of Portland. I mean, that’s a whole lot of work. Like, a lot a lot of work, for which I’m getting nothing in return – no money, certainly, and I doubt that there’s any college credit available for that sort of thing. So despite all their faults, the fact that the superheroes in these comic books would willingly put themselves through thankless hell all in the pursuit of justice makes them hard for me to see eye to eye with. Such a deep seated, selfless quest for the greater good is the sort of thing that I don’t think I or a lot of people I know would ever be capable of. So I guess that for me, what’s really super about superheroes isn’t so much that they possess superior powers, but that they possess the perseverance and brass cajones to keep using them to fight crime rather than just fly places to bypass traffic or turn invisible to spy on Jessica Alba in the shower.

All that being said, I really do love superhero movies. Batman Begins, Spider-Man 1&2, X-Men 1&2 – I’m a big fan of all of them, and not just because Kirsten Dunst looks good in the rain or because I like seeing Magneto pull all the iron out of a guy’s body through his skin. The stories told in these superhero movies are pretty well trimmed – they don’t grow to be so huge that they flop over and start spewing out alternate universes like in the comic books; they present one story, tell it really well, and then get the hell out of there. In a short span like that, I don’t really have to worry about identifying with the hero – I can just enjoy the fact that he relentlessly beats the living crap out of the bad guys. Sometimes, when you go to the movies, that’s all you want to see.

Truman Capps is your worst nightmare.

The Five Commandments Of Food Service

Hair Guy - Gettin' Biblical!

I’ve been working at Carl’s for nearly four weeks now, and I’ve learned quite a bit in that time. I’ve learned that our marionberry milkshake is really just a blackberry milkshake, I’ve learned that Reuben sandwiches are disgusting to look at but a pseudo religious experience to eat, and I’ve learned that Carl’s seems to have been built over an ancient Native American burial ground for jerks, because poltergeists make all of our customers act like complete asshats.

Or there is the other, more terrifying option: Maybe these people, these Royal Asshats, are humans just like you and I, save for the fact that we bathe on occasion. If that is so, then it seems that a whole lot of people have lost track of common sense and human decency, both of which are pretty handy when it comes to living in a civilized society and ordering the occasional pastrami burger. If what I’ve seen at Carl’s is at all indicative of what the rest of you have been up to when you’re dining out, humanity is in deep ca-ca. Therefore, in order to reform the asshats and generally make my working environment more pleasant, I’m going to take a page from God’s book (The Bible) and present you with The Five Commandments Of Fast Food.

V – THOU SHALT NOT GET ALL UP IN MY KOOL-AID
The other day I was delivering two milkshakes to a husband and wife with two small children. They had also ordered two Soft-Serv cones for their kids, but seeing as I was inconsiderate enough to only have two hands, I’d left the cones back in the kitchen and was delivering the milkshakes first.

“Where are they!?” The woman demanded as I set the milkshakes down.

“Excuse me?”

“The little Licky-Cones! For my kids!”

She had no sooner uttered the words ‘Licky Cones’ than I truly realized the depths of my hatred for everything on Earth. It’s one thing to make sure that the server has remembered your entire order; it’s another thing to start interrogating him the second he arrives as though he’s trying to starve your kids to death, and to do so using a phrase so egregiously wrong as ‘Licky Cone’. There is no such thing anywhere in the world as a Licky Cone, nor will there ever be so long as I have any say in the matter. If you want to make sure your kid gets his ice cream cone, don’t call it a Licky Cone, call it an ice cream cone, because that’s what it is. This commandment could just as easily be “THOU SHALT CALL THINGS WHAT THEY ARE”. Licky Cones. I wish I was kidding.

IV – THOU SHALT EITHER TRIM THINE FINGERNAILS OR PROCURE ROBOT HANDS; EITHER ONE IS COOL WITH ME
Once I’ve made the milkshake I have to take it out to the person who ordered it and hand it to them. Regrettably, this means human physical contact, but I try to manage as best I can. However, you, as the customer, can do a lot to make the experience more pleasant for both of us.

The best example of this is Rob, one of our daily customers. Every day he comes in and orders a small chocolate milkshake, and every day he has long, yellow fingernails. You know the mutant in X Men 2 who had the Wolverine-style blades that came out of her fingertips? Well, imagine if instead of being hot and awesome, she was old and male and creepy, and every day you had to risk getting touched by those brittle, amber shaded keratin blades of his. The result is me standing there and smiling nervously as I try to touch as little of the cup as possible while Rob “Yellownail” McGee wraps his leathery, blistery, oh-so-yellowy hands around the delicacy I worked so hard to create. It’s arguably one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen, and I once visited a hobby shop on “Free RPG Day”.

If you’ve got really long, gross fingernails, please trim them before you come in to collect your food from me. If you don’t want to part with your nails but you still want your food, just send your army of trained rats in to pick it up for you. If you’re too sentimental about your yellowed, rotting fingernails to cut them, then I’m sure you’re the sort of person who would have an army of rats on hand.

III – THOU SHALT GRAB YOUR FOOD WHEN I SAY ITS NAME
When you order a whole lot of food in a giant party of, say, eight or more, you can expect that your server is going to come out with all your food on a tray. And he’s probably going to set the tray down on the table and start saying the names of all the food items on that tray. That’s your cue to grab your food; if he points to the grilled cheese sandwich and says, “Grilled cheese sandwich”, he isn’t playing a rousing game of “Spot the Sandwich”, he’s telling you that you should pick up your grilled cheese sandwich. The server is in a hurry, because he needs to take that tray back to the kitchen because he has a lot of other food to prepare and other creepy customers to not touch.

This doesn’t seem to be so clear to the people at Carl’s. I’ll set the tray down and stand there saying the names of the food on it, and the people will just sit there looking at me, smiling intently, evidently believing that they’re eating at Benihana and this is all part of the show; they assume my special trick is saying the name of the food they’re about to eat. This would be fine if they tipped me for my performance, or at least clapped afterwards, but instead we just wind up staring at each other, and that tray isn’t getting cleared off, so I wind up saying all the names again, and the show just really doesn’t stand up to repeat performances.

II – THOU SHALT CLEARLY DISPLAY YOUR NUMBER
When you go to Carl’s and decide to eat in our dining room as opposed to clogging your arteries at home, the cashier gives you a little plastic square with a number on it. Let’s just clarify that interaction: The plastic square isn’t a gift. It’s not some sort of incentive so you’ll say, “Hey, kids, let’s go to Carl’s and eat in their dining room – we’ll get one of the plastic squares!” No, no, that’s not it at all; I’m afraid you misunderstand the deeper purpose of the plastic square.

The plastic square with the number on it corresponds to your order number, so that when the server picks up your food from the kitchen, he or she will know that order number 17 goes to table number 17. It’s one of the few truly brilliant systems in common use that doesn’t rely on vacuum tubes or midget boxing, and it would work just fine if you bunch of idiots could stop treating your plastic square like it’s a brand new Game Boy.

I’ll be walking through the dining room, precariously balancing baskets full of hamburgers with fried eggs on them (no joke) and steak sandwiches with pizza for bread (joke), the whole while looking for Table 17. I’m kind of in a hurry to offload my fatty payload, as you would be if you were only one misstep away from the most deliciously unhealthy accident in your soon to be short life. However, I have to make multiple passes through the dining room, because I can’t for the life of me find a Table 17. Finally, I have to resort to going from one table to the next to ask each party if their table is Table 17, interrupting everyone’s dinner like some sort of telemarketer trying to give away free cholesterol. After receiving terse negative answers from several people, I’ll stumble upon Table 17 – it’s the table full of morons, one of whom is idly flipping the plastic square with “17” written on it around in his hands, as opposed to displaying it somewhere where the person in charge of bringing him food can see it.

There is no great mystery to the plastic square – it’s not a puzzle or a challenge, it’s a square with a number on it. Just leave it alone and it will do its job. It does not need your help. In fact, you’re only making things worse. In a perfect world, there would be no customers at Carl’s: Just hundreds and hundreds of plastic squares. Food would be delivered swiftly and efficiently, and bugger all if nobody ate it – that’s not my problem. I just deliver the food to its designated square.

I – PLAY NICE
Every day I catch a real attitude off the people I’m serving. I don’t get a “Thank you” for preparing and delivering their milkshakes, they leave their trash all over the dining room without making the slightest effort to pick it up, and they make a point of bitching at us if they feel that we aren’t treating them properly.

Here’s a wise piece of advice I learned that I think we all ought to live by, in both our fast food and non-fast food related endeavors: No one should be a cock to a stranger, ever!

It’s surprisingly easy to not be a cock to servers in restaurants – all you have to do is show a little gratitude and a little respect. If you can’t muster that much, just keep in mind that we control your food before it gets to you, and who knows how much of that strawberry banana hot fudge Oreo milkshake you’ll drink before you realize there’s a lock of my hair in it?

Truman Capps will smash this Word document and stick the pieces in an Arc of some sort if he finds you all worshipping a golden calf in a few months’ time.