Human Jukebox

He has little plastic groupies, too.

Ah, poor Thanksgiving – sandwiched between big consumer holidays Halloween and Christmas, it always gets overlooked in the media frenzy. It’s just not a very easy holiday to promote. How can advertisers put a price tag on a holiday devoted to counting your blessings and appreciating your family? They can’t, because people who are thankful and appreciative can’t be duped into thinking they need to spend $150 on an indoor lawn for lapdogs to shit on or a quick and easy way to get drunk. Thus, Thanksgiving is left in the cold while corporations and their ad men think of the best ways to convince us to turn our house into a frightening demonic horrorfest and then, two months later, a beautiful birthday tribute for Jesus.

The Christmas gift ads have started running already, and just like last year I can’t help but be appalled at the sort of crap they’re trying to get us to buy our kids. This is nothing new – capitalism gone awry chaps my caboose all year round, but a few days ago I saw a commercial that made me realize just how blogworthy this year’s Christmas shopping season is.

Front and center, Pop Tunes Big Rocker Guitar.

There was a time when if you wanted to be a rockstar you’d get a guitar, learn to play it, grab some friends, rehearse in their garage, play in a few bars for about six months, talk about moving to L.A. to try and get things off the ground, never do it, sell your instruments to pay the electric bill, get an associate’s degree in business, and go to work as a mattress salesman, doomed to spend the rest of your days saying words like “Sealy” and “Postur-Pedic” while wistfully wondering why you didn’t try to shoot the moon with your rock band and faintly humming the ballad from that rock opera you sort of wrote while you and your lead singer were drunk in his Mom’s basement. Yeah, it’s a crushing, depressing experience, but at least you sort of learned how to play the guitar!

Kids these days (and by that I mean “People my age”) have cut out the middle man with Guitar Hero and Rockband, games that simulate the experience of playing in a Guns ‘n Roses cover band from the comfort of your own home. Nowadays, rather than dropping out of school or quitting their jobs to play rock music, people are fitting it nicely into the fabric of their social lives by working out those impulses on a video game – and sometimes they aren’t even drunk! The same experience I related in the above Faulkneresque sentence could play out with a copy of Guitar Hero; the only difference being that the hopeless losers in question didn’t even try to dream big in the first place, and in the end they still don’t know how to play guitar. It’s sort of like “The Man” has taken that which he couldn’t conquer and made it “safe” by turning it into a toy.

But Jesus, look at me go on. I certainly don’t have anything against Guitar Hero – it’s pretty fun to play at parties and it’s certainly a lot healthier than the ultraviolent first person shooter games that I tend to play. My problem with Guitar Hero isn’t with the people who play it recreationally, but with the people who treat it like it’s an actual musical instrument; namely the kid who learned how to play the speed metal classic “Through The Fire and the Flames” with 95% accuracy. All the time those people invested in learning to push buttons in the correct order to replicate popular songs written by others could have been invested in something different – something, say, creative rather than imitative? God only knows what would have happened if there had been Harpsichord Hero in Mozart’s day.

But I digress – Pop Tunes Big Rocker Guitar. It’s a plastic toy guitar that, when your kid presses the right buttons, will either make musical note-esque sounds or play one of five predetermined songs, such as “Message in a Bottle”, “Wild Thing”, or “Love Shack”. Yes, that’s right; “Love Shack”, by the B-52s. This toy designed for toddlers and infants plays “Love Shack”.

I mean, “Love Shack” is about an orgy. It’s about a score of big-haired 80s hipsters going to a house in the woods and just fucking each other all damn weekend. It’s a five minute long ode to doin’ it. For crying out loud, one of the lyrics is, “Huggin’ and a kissin’, dancin’ and a lovin’, wearin’ next to nothin’”. There’s no ambiguity as to what that means. There’s no symbolism here. This is not American Pie.*

*This isn’t the first time people have tried to repurpose rock and roll as family friendly. Carnival Cruise Lines steadfastly uses Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” in its commercials about happy families having the time of their life in the Caribbean, despite the fact that it’s a song about being a heroin addict. That being said, I’m sure snorkeling with dolphins is about a thousand times cooler when you’re on heroin.

Now, as a youngster I listened to “Love Shack” a lot – my parents and their oft-played 80s dance mix tape are probably to blame for that, but it didn’t have any negative effects on me (depending, that is, on your definition of the term “20-year-old man”). The fact that 3-year-olds will soon be jamming out to “Love Shack” isn’t what I find so amusing, it’s the fact that we’re essentially training our toddlers for their future Guitar Hero “careers”.

I’m pretty sure I had a toy xylophone when I was a little kid, and there is grainy video evidence to prove that I was fully capable of playing one incredibly annoying note on my plastic recorder. These toys were simple, sure, and they may have gotten on my parents’ nerves some or a lot of the time, but the annoying noises I made with them were mine and mine alone. There wasn’t a button I could push that would make “Comfortably Numb” come out of my recorder; I had no choice but to make unique, original, and usually ear splitting music. The Pop Tunes Big Rocker Guitar embraces some of that Creativity by having a “free play” button, but then it punches the Creativity in the kidneys by turning itself into a radio. As we speak, Creativity is pissing blood while three-year-olds get a head start on pretending they’re Sting.

But on the other hand, my parents gave me toy musical instruments and right now my primary musical outlet is a 200-piece band that plays instrumental covers of rock and pop songs. You know what? Nevermind. Go stock up on Pop Tunes Big Rocker Guitars – even if you don’t have a kid, buy one in case you have a kid later. Hell, buy two.

Truman Capps knows that if he had his chance, that he could make those people dance, and maybe they'd be happy for awhile...

Facebook Psychology

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

It’s a generally accepted social practice that, when someone walks up to you and asks how you’re doing, you always lie to them at least a little. This is because nobody actually wants to know how you’re doing, they just want to show you that they care enough to ask. That’s why you bend – or perhaps break – the truth when you reply by saying that you’re doing pretty well, thanks. When my friends say, “Truman! How’re you doing?” I don’t say, “Well, at the moment I’m really worried that I might have appendicitis. I mean, my appendix doesn’t hurt or anything, but I read on Wikipedia that sometimes appendicitis doesn’t have symptoms, so your appendix just gets bigger and bigger without you knowing until it bursts and you die. So I’m sort of worried about that right now. But how’re you doing?” Sometimes, there are just things we don’t want to know about each other.

On Facebook, however, we do not pay one another same courtesies that we do in real life. For example, outside of Facebook I don’t run around Poking people – if I want to convince someone to have sex with me, I’ll find a more effective method than that. In much the same way, it seems that the time honored “Lie about how you’re really doing” rule does not carry over from real life to Facebook.

One of Facebook’s many features is the “Status” bar, which you can edit to tell the Internet how you’re feeling and what you’re up to. Facebook users find many applications for this tool: some explain what they’re actually doing as though we care, others put up inside jokes, and still others fill this space with song lyrics in an attempt to seem deep and vaguely meaningful. There are a few people in my network, however, who take the Status bar much too seriously. To these people, the prompt “What are you doing right now?” is an honest, caring question from their good friend Facebook, and they answer it truthfully.

“_____ is crying right now because its like drew nods & smiles but just doesnt understand!! :-(”

“_____ just wishes she would GROW UP already i mean jesus”

“_____ really wants sarah to call because he can totally explain it ok??? why do you always just assume stuff about me omg”

Since when did Facebook become a psychiatrist? It’s one thing to update your status to say that you’re feeling down in the dumps, but turning your Status bar into a political attack ad makes it really awkward for everyone else on Facebook who happens to be on the outside of the issue. It’s like going over to a friend’s house for dinner as a child and seeing his or her parents have a noisy argument at the table – you don’t know whether to watch or pretend to not notice, but you do know that it’s an uncomfortable experience you’d just as soon forget.

I’m not trying to tell you what you can and can’t do with your Facebook. All I’m saying is that when you’re angry at someone and are considering turning your profile into a billboard declaring your angst, step back and ask yourself whether you want all of your friends and casual acquaintances to become acquainted with your personal problems as well. In the long run, I think you’ll appreciate the extra second’s thought, and I’m pretty sure your friends will too.

Writers - Episodes 1 and 2

"Aw, come on, Rocko! Any idiot can get on television!" - Heffer, Rocko's Modern Life.

It took us seven months from conception to uploading, but now my aforementioned public access masterpiece is complete. Tonight, please enjoy the first two of our six episodes. Gentlemen... Behold!*

*Women who are nursing or may become pregnant should not view Writers. Do not watch Writers while taking prescription sleepaids or MAO Inhibitors. Side effects of Writers are mostly just diarrhea.

Episode 1



Episode 2



Truman Capps expects you to be so wowed by his TV show that you won't hold him accountable for not actually writing anything tonight.

Ethics of Fandom

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

The start of this article is a lot like an earlier update I made here about football - forgive me, but I was facing a deadline and figured that plagiarizing from myself made a lot more sense than being creative.

College football is an oddly pagan experience. Just about every Saturday, tens of thousands of people fill up a giant stadium for several hours in order to watch two groups of strong men beat one another up to gain possession of a ball that is ostensibly made of a pig’s skin. On the sidelines, women dance suggestively, people prance around in animal costumes, and hundreds of musicians bang on drums and blow horns in support of the whole affair.

Oh, how I love it!

More and more it seems as if football is one of our last unifying cultural institutions. Sure, we’ve got movies, TV, and religion, but nothing gets people out of their houses and into the rain and cold like a good game of football. For proof, all you have to do is drive down I-5 on a Saturday. Those hundreds of cars aren’t full of people going to church or to see “Madagascar 2” – they’re going to jostle into an uncomfortable seat, eat expensive food, and take part in the common goal of yelling until their team wins.

As a member of the Oregon Marching Band, I’ve been to every home game for the past two seasons, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that we have some very devoted fans in the student section; devoted, that is, to the art of drinking. Don’t get me wrong: the majority of the fans I see in the student section are really dedicated to the game and support of the team, and whether they’re drunk at the time or not is of little importance. However, I’ve noticed a few things happening during the football games that I consider unacceptable when compared to the general drunken debauchery of an Oregon home game.

I think that the Pac-10 has some of the worst refs in the country. In both football and basketball I’ve routinely watched them make ludicrous and biased calls, time and again, and I’ve never hesitated to shout my opinions about their officiating ability at them in the wake of these errors. I consider it “deconstructive criticism”. But on the rare occasion that they make a call against my team that is justified, I sit on my hands, because for once they’re actually doing their jobs right. This is why I’m dismayed to hear the crowd booing refs for making legitimate calls against the Ducks – no team plays perfectly, so don’t act like we do.

I suppose I can understand the overzealous booing of the referees; after all, we’re eager to support our team. But if that’s the case, I can’t understand why the isles start to fill with departing fans once it becomes clear that the game is, for all intents and purposes, over. Supporting your team is about being there for them until the end, win or lose, rain or shine. That’s what makes the game exciting: knowing that, should we lose, you will face an embarrassing walk past the other team’s jubilant fans, but that, if we win, the subsequent gloating will be all the sweeter for your dedication.

What is most appalling and unacceptable, though, is when I see our fans booing our team for fumbles or poorly executed plays. If you want to boo the refs unilaterally, great. If you want to leave early, there’s nothing stopping you. But if you see your own team falter on the field and start booing them for it in the time that they most need your support, you need to seriously reconsider your motives for going to the football game in the first place. To boo your own team in their home stadium just doesn’t make you look like a two-faced idiot, it makes all of us look like two-faced idiots.

So yes, football is paganistic. But that’s no reason to be a savage.

Barbershop

I was nowhere near awesome enough to get my hair cut here.

Back when I lived in Salem, I would get my hair cut at Don’s Barber Shop, a humble business that made its home in a tiny strip mall across the street from a much larger strip mall. Don’s was a throwback to the classic barbershops of old – there were five worn leather chairs, one wooden bench that was uncomfortable as it was long, and a low table in front of it littered with magazines that featured articles about the best hunting knife with which to skin a deer. Most of the clientele were old, and all of them were male. We patrons of Don’s Barber Shop were a solemn brotherhood of men united by a single goal: Shorter hair.

Seeing as I named my blog after the cult status of my hair, you the reader can surely imagine how highly I value a good barbershop. My hair is unruly – it is thick like molasses, and upon delving into it with scissors and a comb one will be quick to discover a labyrinth of cowlicks and perhaps a family of gnomes. Indeed, while most people need only a mere barber, I require someone who can truly break my hair’s wild nature and tame it; a Hair Whisperer, if you will. These intrepid masters of the craft are not so easy to find. I once made the grave mistake of trusting an Axe-scented, sideways baseball cap wearing, scissor wielding buffoon with the care of my hair, which resulted in me looking like an Eastern European refugee for the next month.

Over the years I discovered a great many Hair Whisperers at Don’s – there was my first barber, Don (yes, that Don) who died of a heart attack, to be followed by Jeremiah, a lanky man with a lazy eyeball who I later found out carried a handgun at all times, and, after I was too scared to go to Jeremiah again, Clive, who was a great barber up until he stole all the money out of the cash register one night and was arrested halfway to Washington. As you can see, cutting my hair takes severe toll on a man.

In Portland, I’ve found a reliable Hair Whisperer in Barber Dan, a former military barber who steadfastly refuses to take my hair’s shit. He is professional and efficient; there is little small talk. To make idle chit-chat with him while he does battle with my hair would be like talking to He-Man while he’s locked in combat with Skeletor, only He-Man doesn’t run the risk of an embarrassingly botched haircut. As great as Barber Dan is, though, I spend most of my time in Eugene, and it’s not even worth trying to find a Hair Whisperer in a city full of hippies who haven’t had a haircut since Cat Stevens converted to Islam.

So usually I just wait until I go home to get a haircut, which tends to get dicey toward the last few weeks of the term. My hair is thick and heavy as it is, and not getting it cut for three months is like walking around with a sack full of doorknobs tied to your head. Also, while my hair starts out looking very clean cut and proper after a trip to the barber shop, it gradually becomes more and more ragged until it looks like a combination of a bowl cut and a mullet.*

*While the mullet is commonly referred to as “business in front, party in back”, I feel like the terrible form my long-uncut hair takes is more “party in front, party in back, both parties suck”.

A few days ago, I was caught in exactly this situation. I hadn’t had my hair cut for an especially long time, and with each passing day I looked less and less like a progressively minded college student and more and more like a guy whose favorite show is Cops because he’s in four episodes. In desperation, I went in search of a barbershop within walking distance of campus. The closest I came was a salon.

What’s the difference between a barbershop and a salon? When you walk into a barbershop, it is dimly lit. Decoration is sparse or nonexistent. The patrons regard you coolly, and one of the barbers grunts at you to indicate that you should write your name up on the white board, take a seat, and start educating yourself as to the best knife with which to skin a dead deer. A salon, on the other hand, is brightly lit and smells strongly of fruity industrial strength hair chemicals. Colorful pictures of beautiful people adorn the walls, as if to suggest that you, too, could be in a giant wall picture if you play your cards right and keep getting your hair cut at this particular establishment. Bouncy, cheerful people greet you enthusiastically while the constant thump of techno echoes from hidden speakers around the room – the salon has consumed you, and now you can hear its heartbeat.

When I first arrived at the salon, I found that aside from the aesthetics the experience is very much the same. I entered, put my name on a waiting list, and then took a seat on a highly uncomfortable bench to wait for my chance to pay $20 for a haircut. The reading selection was limited – ESPN Magazine and Glamour, the two opposite ends of my disinterest spectrum. I first read an article about the Seattle Sonics’ change to the Oklahoma City Thunder, which I followed up with an article about what it’s like to have sex with a male model (apparently, not all that great). The woman who eventually cut my hair had little to say, save for various muttered epithets about how thick my hair was. She did an admirable job – not Hair Whisperer quality, but good enough to keep me looking like I’m not a convicted sex offender for a few more weeks.

I’ve gained some trust in barbers thanks to this experience – up until now I had trained myself to see every new barber as a horrible haircut waiting to happen, but having walked out of the salon with a well trimmed, slightly fruity haircut, I have a little more confidence in barbers other than my own. Also, should I ever need to get highlights, I know exactly where to go.

Truman Capps had taken over a year to write an entire update about his hair despite the title of the blog – it’s all downhill from here, folks.

Knight At Your Service

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

As a dyed-in-the-wool procrastinator, I can proudly say I almost never do my homework while the sun is shining. Indeed, it seems like the only time I can really buckle down and get to work is at night, preferably 12 hours or fewer before the assignment I'm working on is due. Maybe this is because I'm lazy, or maybe I subconsciously enjoy the thrill of racing against the clock to complete my grammar homework before class, like an episode of "24" with gerund phrases. I don't think I'm alone here. I doubt many of my classmates are strangers to the "all-nighter," that fabled nocturnal orgy of academia and Red Bull that often makes up for many weeks of skipped classes and neglected textbooks. Procrastination and late-night cramming sessions may not be the most logical way to approach one's college education, but if all college students incorporated logic and careful consideration into everything they did, there would be no need for a University Health Center or a Department of Public Safety.

Therefore, it's to all our benefits that Knight Library is now open 24 hours a day. The ASUO is funding the library's extended hours on a provisional basis and will analyze the number of students who make use of the library late into the night to determine whether it's worthwhile to keep these hours in the future. Even if the number of students using the library at night doesn't match the daytime numbers, I still feel the extended hours are worthwhile because of what they offer to the University community. Like a 7-11 that sells knowledge or the world's lamest nightclub, the largest library on campus now maintains the same night-owl schedule as most of its patrons.

Granted, I say this as someone who doesn't use the library very much at all. While the library is a great place to do homework and study, I prefer to do these things at my apartment because, unlike the library, my apartment supplies free food and a private bathroom that I know a homeless person hasn't slept in. Furthermore, I have yet to reach the point in my education where my classes require me to use a stronger source of research than Wikipedia, so I don't need the library to make use of its books or archives. Despite this, on the few occasions I've been in the library late at night, I've seen 20 to 30 students hard at work on the first floor alone. If this service remains available, I get the idea that more students will start to take advantage of it, and perhaps feel safer procrastinating more.

My reasons for wanting the library to stay open all night may not be conventional. I don't have a color printer. The Internet access my apartment complex provides tends to fail at inopportune times. But sometimes, my neighbors party a little too hard and I like to know there's a quiet place to study should I really need it.

need it. The library is the center of knowledge and academe on campus, and as such it should be open to suit the needs of its patrons, many of whom don't necessarily study between 7 a.m. and midnight. This is why the 24-hour library is important to me: While I don't use it all the time, there are occasions when I truly do require its services, and knowing it's open all night gives me a certain sense of security. Armed with the knowledge the library will always be there for me, I'm free to procrastinate to my heart's content - in the long run, it might not be helpful for my study habits, but at the moment it feels like the greatest thing in the world.

Keystone Light

My ire for Time and Space can only be expressed through horrible Photoshop projects.

Every year I worry that maybe I’ve overburdened myself schedule-wise and will be forced to miss out on all the truly great moments of my youth because I’m sitting inside doing homework. This has never happened, because I habitually take easy classes, shirk responsibilities, and mooch off of my study partners in order to reduce the total amount of work I have to do. Furthermore, I never really do anything truly “great” with all the free time I make for myself anyway – if I’m not playing a video game or aimlessly wandering the Internet, I’m probably sitting next to Mike in an editing room, engaged in our unending game of “Find A New And Interesting Way To Imply That The Other Guy Is Into Dudes”.* Still, that’s the sort of time I value, and so ordinarily I take steps to preserve it.

*By the way, Mike: Oreck called – you know, the company that makes the vacuums? Yeah, they want you to come down to their factory and, like, give a seminar on sucking. Because you’re so good at it. The only problem is that your area of expertise is cocks, and, well, why build a vacuum to suck cocks when it’s much cheaper to just call you?

As you may remember, I really feel as though I actually did overburden myself this term. Taking a bunch of classes is one thing – in general, the school has measures in place to ensure that you don’t bite off more academically than you can chew. But when you throw in various extracurricular activities like band, a newspaper column, and a public access TV masterpiece, each with its own demands, things change a lot. The University won’t ever say “Hey, you – too many extracurricular activities!”; at least, not until they send you a grade report full of Fs thanks to your poor time management skills. So going into this term, I wasn’t so much worried about having homework as I was worried about whether my schedule was actually possible given the physical constraints of our dimension. Has anyone ever written, co-produced, and starred in a TV show while also playing in a marching band and building conversational Spanish skills? Andy Griffith was too cool for band and too down-to-Earth to meddle with the innumerable conjugations of gustar. Seriously, there’s literally hundreds of them.

We’ve finished principal photography on Writers, which, if you’re not up with the current public access TV lingo, means that we’re done making people act stupid and read trite dialogue in front of cameras and have now moved on to the part where we sit in a cramped room and edit the stupidity and triteness together while swilling Red Bull and Gummy Frogs.* This was initially a cause for celebration in my eyes, because I’d seen Writers as the biggest timesink out of all the stuff I was doing this term. It was pretty stressful at times, but in the end I made it through the process mostly unscathed without having weathered any major disasters or failed any midterms. My assumption was that life post-Writers would be a walk in the park – albeit a stressful walk, like a walk in a park in a sketchy part of town after dark, but a walk in the park all the same.

*Gummy Frogs are essential to the creation of television. Andy Griffith, in his prime, would just stick a funnel in his mouth and have Ron Howard shovel Gummy Frogs into it. My hand to God – you can Wiki that shit.

What I’ve found after nearly 20 years of being me is that as soon as I start assuming anything will happen, fate will bend over backwards to see that it doesn’t just so I can be wrong. Thus, it is for the good of all mankind that I make a point of being surprised to see the sun rise each morning. The past week since the completion of Writers has not been quite the delicious relaxing pie I had hoped it would be.

Last Sunday I, like all other non-Arizonans, set my clocks back an hour for Daylight Savings. Traditionally, this gives me something of an advantage over my old nemeses, Time and his good for nothing cohort, Space. I’ve spent most of my life running to beat the clock and whatever symbolic piece of imagery represents Space, but for a few days after the start of Daylight Savings Time, I always feel a touch ahead, and had been looking forward to it this past week. No such luck – while I set my clock one hour back, Time and Space had clearly set their clocks two hours ahead, because I spent most of the week scrambling to catch up to my schedule with all the flustered desperation of an overweight tourist running to make his connecting flight to Cleveland. I was late to classes, caught completely off guard for two Spanish pruebitas (“small test” or “destroyer of worlds”), and yesterday almost missed our call time for the football game due to a combination of sleeping through my alarm, missing two different buses, and discovering that several articles of clothing I needed for the day were inexplicably locked in the laundry room. Time made me late while Space came in at the last second with the locked laundry room finishing move – their Saturday combo attack was a Fatality of sorts to my mixed up, hectic week.

All of this stress occurred in a week without Writers. At first I was confused as to how what was supposed to be an easy, more relaxing week turned into such a nightmare, but after reexamining things I think I get it: Writers was my keystone – the one stone in the arch that held all the other ones together (thanks to some physics property I don’t understand). When I had Writers to worry about, I naturally assumed that I would never have an ounce of spare time, and thus I constantly budgeted my time well and refused to procrastinate. In a Writers-less world, I tend to assume “Hey, I can do it tomorrow – after all, I don’t have to worry about Writers anymore!” And then, when things inevitably go differently from how I assume they will, Time and Space have a jolly good laugh at my expense.

Although Truman Capps does believe that two fundamental forces of the Universe are out to get him, he doesn’t consider that a bad attitude.

Change Can Unite Us

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

Here we are, then – after over a year of mudslinging, bile, lies, angry preachers, medical records, secret Muslim ties, POW camps, plumbers, and pit bulls, it’s finally over. No longer will volunteers harass us with voter registration inquiries and we won’t have to see that damn clip of Tina Fey dressed as Sarah Palin holding a flute anymore. With all the class and decorum of a fight in a middle school girls’ bathroom, we the people have exercised the democratic process, and now finally can go back to what we were doing before. Say what you will about England, but they didn’t have to put up with this crap from King George.

Some of you probably won’t be thrilled with the outcome of the election, but at least take solace in the fact that the whole sordid affair is finally behind us. An election, like puberty, is a highly important period of change, and just like puberty, it’s a highly unpleasant experience we’d all prefer to forget once it’s over. It makes sense that this election, which hinged so heavily on change, was a nasty one. There has been little debate that change is necessary; the point of contention has been which candidate is best poised to offer it. To those of you disappointed with this outcome, I have a few words of wisdom for you.

The United States presidency is most definitely a winding road. For the past hundred years or so, the Democrats and Republicans have been passing control of the White House back and forth at roughly ten to twenty year intervals. Knowing this brings a certain fatalistic quality to every election; history has proven that whichever party wins will be unseated in a matter of years, only to return eight to sixteen years after that. That’s the beauty of our two party system: sooner or later, everybody gets a chance to drive the America Bus.

I’m sorry, Republicans. Although I am a bleeding heart liberal, I can sympathize with your cause – my roommate, ex girlfriend, and godparents are all Republicans. Thanks to them, I understand the validity of small government and fiscal responsibility. I feel your pain at having lost such an important election, but in defense of the Democrats, your party has been driving the bus for the past eight years and it’s about time somebody else got a chance to try it. To be honest, Bush hasn’t been driving the America Bus so much as he’s been repeatedly crashing it, and as much as we’d all like to just forget his misrepresentation of the Republican Party and start again with a clean slate, that’s clearly impossible. Your time to shine will come again, and hopefully that guy will represent your party with the intelligence and leadership it deserves. The next Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt could be waiting in the wings to take the GOP’s reins.

What we have to remember is that no one candidate can reunite America alone; we all have to help out. Don’t get off the bus just because you disagree with the driver – wait long enough to see if he’s going where you want to go. Keep this in mind if you’re down in the dumps about what happened yesterday. Whoever won the election has to get the bus up and running again before he starts to drive it, and I think that’s something we can all agree with.

Halloween: A Treatise

I've been a pretty bad Internet Celebrity recently, what with my ever-shortening articles and later and later updates. For that I apologize, and I apologize even further, because this update is going to be pretty short too - it was a bonus column I wrote for the Emerald's Halloween page. The fact is, I spent 14 hours hosting a marching band competition today and I have to get up in a few short hours to clean crap out of the stadium we hosted it in, so I'm going to take the coward's way out and just paste in something previously written. This is a lot like a celebrity chef serving Kraft macaroni, I know, but bear with me - I'll try to make this up to you guys.

Crowd of girls walks by
One is “Sexy John McCain”
What the HELL, people?

Fear is a big part of American culture – all year round, not just on Halloween. It seems like every day there’s a brand new predator Chris Hansen has yet to catch or a new toxic substance hidden in products manufactured in China. The media keeps us up to date on all the latest global pandemics, while the “Saw” movies remind us that, should we have the audacity to leave our houses, we will most certainly be abducted and then tortured to death in a series of sadistic Rube Goldberg machines.
What’s with that Jigsaw guy, anyway? Did he get a master’s in Deathtrapology from MIT? You never see him calling tech support because his room full of mechanically operated rusty steak knives breaks down.
Wait, what was I talking about?
Right. Fear. It’s everywhere. There’s a good chance you live in a house with an alarm system – God knows I do. I insist on walking my female friends home when it’s dark out. And as you may have read, I have so little trust in my fellow man that I’m unwilling to even let my bike out of my sight. Now more than ever, we have come to accept the fact that every passing stranger either wants to rob us, molest us, or teach us the value of life by forcing us to chop off our own limbs.
So what do we do? We retreat into our houses, triple bolt the doors, and clean our guns while Dateline NBC tells us what we should be ready to shoot at. That’s the best way to not get killed by our incredibly scary world.
But there’s one night, every year, when we cast our paranoia to the winds and freely open our doors for any stranger with a hankering for candy. On Halloween, people everywhere leave most of their fears at home and wander the streets, mingling with folks they’ve never met and generally having a good time. What’s so ironic about this is that Halloween is also the one night of the year that it’s socially acceptable to pretend you’re a monster or a serial killer (or, for college students, a sexy monster or sexy serial killer). It’s as though on one magical night, we’re suddenly willing to look everything that scares us in the eye and give it a fun-sized Snickers.
Happy Halloween, everybody! Check your candy for razor blades and don’t leave your drinks unattended.

Midterm Mayhem

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

Every time I compile my schedule for the coming term, I always spend a moment or two looking at it on DuckWeb and wringing my hands. A schedule looks so harmless on the Internet, all laid out in text – Spanish at 9:00, Humanities at 12:00, Grammar at 2:00, marching band at 3:00. But I wring my hands anyway, and fret that perhaps this will be the term that finally does me in. Basking in the glow of my laptop, I futilely remind myself that there’s no way one of these classes will provide a workload so great that one night my head will explode, killing me and probably voiding the rental agreement on my apartment.

It’s at about this point every term, Week 5, that I realize how close I am to that inevitable explosion. The classes aren’t much harder than I’d expected, but if the classes were the only thing I had going on, this would be a walk in the park. If I had trained monkeys to do all the other, non-school related tasks in my life, I have no doubt that I’d be able to achieve fluency in Spanish, a mastery of classic literature, and perhaps a basic grasp of what the hell a verbal is. But alas, once again my life suffers for lack of monkeys. There’s laundry to do and groceries to buy and from time to time I have to use the bathroom – these activities cut into my study time and make what would have been an easy schedule considerably less easy.

These things never show up on a class schedule. On Thursday evenings I don’t have 23 minutes blocked out for “Go Through All The Cupboards Looking For Something To Eat, Then Give Up And Have Pop Tarts For Dinner”. My schedule doesn’t tell me that on Friday night I have an hour and a half long lecture called “Impromptu Halo Deathmatch With Roommates”. I receive no school credit for “Girlfriend” (a class that meets just about every day) and I don’t think she’s getting any credit for it either. I have no way of predicting what’s going to pop into my life and forcibly put my coursework on the back burner. These little interruptions are why it can take me all weekend to do an assignment that ought to take 15 minutes. I tend to get a bit resentful about my troublesome social life when I’m staying up two hours past my desired bedtime to finish an essay. If not for life, I’d be sleeping more, eating right, and probably not chewing my fingernails quite as much.

On the other hand, without these interruptions to the deluge of work, there’s an even greater chance that my head would explode. Unexpected interruptions are like mini-weekends, vacations from work intended to remind you that there’s a few other things going on in the world besides academia. So even though I might wind up working longer and later because of the unrelenting presence of chores and friends, I’m okay with it in the long run. While interruptions may put me behind schedule, they also help me hold onto my sanity, which I find much more valuable than sleep.

But I'm A Cheerleader

I’ve always been rather mystified by the fact that the good folks at the Oregon Daily Emerald hired me as an opinion columnist when nearly all of the things I write never offer any sort of opinion. The other four opinion columnists are all accomplished, talented writers, and every last one of them is absolutely bristling with opinions about stuff. Every week, their columns advocate or impugn social or political issues. Research is done. Sources are cited. Sometimes, after reading one of their articles, I need a glass of water. Their stuff is intense, relevant, and hard hitting.

So I feel out of place following up the Tuesday article about the GOP’s role in our current financial crisis with an impassioned treatise about my bike. Sure, it’s funny, but there isn’t an opinion there; the only opinion you could hope to find in my body of work is “Things that happen to me are amusing upon analysis”. Generally, my blog updates and columns are less a tour-de-force and more a roller coaster ride: There’s a few bumps, a few laughs, a few thills, and then you’re back where you started, and maybe somebody has thrown up. My coworkers are four Edward R. Murrows, sticking it to the man with every article, whereas I am Garrison Keillor; talented and a national treasure, yes, but also just a guy who tells funny stories.

I’m very opinionated. For example, you will notice that I frequently have very few good things to say about our current government. However, I tend not to make these opinions the center of what I’m writing about because I go to the University of Oregon, and writing an opinion article here about hating the Bush Administration is about as groundbreaking and innovative as writing an article about how much you want the football team to win the next game. As an arch-liberal, my opinions are those of the masses in my environment, and if I were to write my opinions down and publish them in a paper circulated only in this highly liberal environment, I wouldn’t be writing an opinion column, but a propaganda column. Allow me to explain: As a proponent of gun control, I am a huge fan of Bowling For Columbine, with full knowledge that a good chunk of the facts stated in the film are, for lack of a better term, hella fallacious. The reason I enjoy it is because I like to forget about the other side’s feelings for an hour and a half and just get fired up about how supposedly right I am for agreeing with the filmmaker. People like Michael Moore* and Keith Olbermann** are basically ideological cheerleaders*** – they just pump up the liberals in the stands with carefully selected facts, hyperbole, and flashy editing. While I enjoy cheerleaders, I’m not sure if I want to be one just yet. As much as I’d like for my columns to foster intelligent debate about The Issues™, I feel that in the Oregon Daily Emerald they would be little more than “Rah rah impeachment, sis boom campaign finance reform!”

*Despite my thoughts on Bowling For Columbine, I hate Michael Moore. I think he’s condescending and kind of a weasel.

**Despite my words about ideological cheerleaders, I really like Keith Olbermann. He seems like a stand-up guy, the sort of liberal cheerleader I would want to ask to homecoming.

***Despite the seeming harshness of my words about ideological cheerleading, I mean absolutely no offense to my fellow writers at the Emerald. For one, many of them write about social issues or local events over which the campus community is considerably more divided. Also, ideological cheerleaders are essential – they give ordinary people the courage to be outspoken about their views, even when they’re not surrounded by their own fans.

That being said, you’ll notice that last week’s update from my column was a blistering critique of Sarah Palin’s statements about “the best of America” and the candidates’ insistence on their small-town simplicity as evidence of their trustworthiness. It was undoubtedly a piece of cheerleading, but I was proud to grab some pom-poms and don a pleated skirt because the very fact that an imbecile like Sarah Palin is allowed to waste our time with such carelessly inflammatory language offends me on a very deep level that transcends politics. So I wrote my column, saw it run in the paper, and was a little surprised to receive the following piece of hate mail on the Oregon Daily Emerald’s website.

A dramatic reading

As you will notice, I did “post him back”, dismantling his argument like a 250 pound bodybuilder stepping on the neck of a petulant six year old with polio. I think that, given the circumstances, I did an excellent job of defending myself, although there were a couple of other rebuttals I had in mind that were maybe a tad closer to his level of intellect.



In the end, though, I feel like this was a pretty valuable experience for me. As much as I’d like to say that the only reason I didn’t write opinion articles before now was because I didn’t want to pee into an ocean of similar opinions, the main reason was because I was scared of getting shouted down by detractors. Even though the University of Oregon is a liberal school, we do have our conservative community, and they are an awfully tenacious bunch given the fact that they’re so heavily outnumbered. My primary fear had been that I’d make an offhand statement I believed to be true, only to have it thoroughly disproved in front of everyone by a conservative reader who had done his homework. Hate mail gets a lot less scary when you realize that not all the people contesting your opinions are well informed and intelligent – some, like Jake Walker, are total fucking morons. Jake Walker, you are a total fucking moron.

Furthermore, I learned that I like cheerleading a whole hell of a lot more than I’d thought I would. For the first time, I was able to look at my article in the paper and actually feel like a halfway decent journalist, not just some wayward creative writing major who had been shuffled into the Opinion Desk amongst four professionals. I don’t know if I’m going to make a habit of liberal sideline dancing or not, but I have been watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann recently…

Truman Capps hopes he doesn't lose his job over any of this.

Size Doesn't Matter

Hello, folks - my editors have mandated that all opinion articles be roughly 500 words, so these updates are now a tad shorter than usual. If I weren't so busy, I'd find a way to make it up to you, but to be honest I think worse things will happen to you than having a little less Hair Guy to read every week.

Also, a special message to Sasha - in the interests of our continued friendship, maybe you shouldn't read this update.

***

“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit… [These] Pro America areas of this great nation.” – Former Miss Alaska runner up Sarah Palin, Greensboro, N.C., October 16th, 2008.

We have a little saying around my house – “God, I HATE Sarah Palin!” And if you wonder why my roommates and I are so harsh on such a cute, homey, seemingly friendly mother of 5, it’s because of this sort of thing.

Since when is it a crime to not be from a small town? It seems that a recurring theme in this election has been the common, salt of the Earth goodness of small town Americans. For the past few months, the GOP candidates have been attempting to appeal to the masses by touting their rural backgrounds in contrast to their Democratic opponents, who they uniformly paint as hedonistic city slickers with no morals and an all-encompassing hatred of kittens. In retaliation, the Democrats have dredged up their own small town street cred, and what had once been an election has now become a heated debate over whose hometown has fewer traffic lights.

You know who was born in a small town? Ted Bundy, infamous serial killer. Timothy McVeigh called a small town in upstate New York his home. Hitler was from a town of less than 16,000 people – of course, that town wasn’t in America, so perhaps that’s why he went astray. I could keep going; there are lots of small towns, and I guarantee you that every one of them has produced at least a few stinkers. Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, and Jesus were also from small towns – this disparity suggests that judging people by the size of the town they were born in makes about as much sense as judging them based on the color of their skin.

I grew up in Salem, a town of 150,000 – perhaps not a small town by all definitions, but Sarah Palin referred to Greensboro, home to some 250,000 people, as small, so I imagine that I’m even more Pro-America than everyone she was talking to that day. This is interesting, given that I am an anti-war atheist who frequently refers to our commander in chief as a “motherfucker”. My friend Mike, who has refused to vote in previous elections due to his outright lack of faith in all candidates, is even more Pro-America than I am, because he’s from Medford, population 75,000. His girlfriend, who frequently smokes an herbal substance classified as illegal by our government, is the most Pro-America of all of us, because she’s from Grants Pass, home to 30,000 of the most patriotic small town folks you’ll ever meet.

I don’t think that the best of America is in the small towns. I also don’t think the best of America is in the big cities. I think that the best of America is in America. And I think that a candidate seeking to reunite a country ideologically divided by eight years of mismanagement would do well to stop playing its citizens against one another.

Things I Will Be Thinking About At 7:54 AM

This shall do perfectly.

Oh, shit.

Oh, balls.

Why are you awake right now? Why did you wake up right now? You’ve got a whole six minutes before your alarm goes off. You need that sleep. You should just go back to sleep. If you close your eyes right now, you can go back to sleep before you remember the fact that you’re shooting Episode 5 of Writers today.

Shit.

Well, wait, look at the clock again. Maybe it’s one of those things where you glance at the clock really quickly, and then when you look back and actually look, it turns out that it’s like 5:54 and you’ve got two more hours of sleep. You probably saw the wrong time! You’ve probably got two more hours before you have to get up and make your TV show!

Shit. It’s 7:55.

It’s Sunday morning and you’re getting up at 8:00. I guarantee you, you’ve got to be the only person in town to be awake at this hour on this day. Everybody else is sleeping in until noon, just like you used to.

Everyone except Irene, your production assistant. She’s probably been up for two hours getting props and costumes together for the shoot today. And she’s only doing this because you had to go and make a TV show. And she’s not even getting paid. Way to go, jerface. Some sweet innocent girl is getting up early on Sundays and sacrificing her social life all because you had to go and create a TV show. It’d be one thing if you were ruining your own life, but you shouldn’t pull Irene down with you. Who died and made you Aaron Sorkin? You should buy her some sort of gift, when this is all over. Alcohol, for instance. Oh, man, but one bottle of $7 gin isn’t going to be enough after all she’s put up with. After this you’re going to need to sign her up for the Prescription Painkiller of the Month Club.

Oh Jesus this is Episode 5, this is the one with all those extras in it! This is the one where you called in favors on every sucker you knew to get them to show up today in the J-school to stand around in the background while you make your show. This means you’ve got to be on schedule - totally, 100% on schedule – or else you’ll be wasting all your friends’ time. And then, for that, they will hate you. They will burn you in effigy, because you wasted a couple hours of their Sunday – weekends are so short, you can’t afford to just blow a couple hours like that – and then you’ll have no friends all because of your goddamn TV show!

I’m going to turn my face toward the wall and pull the covers over my head. That usually makes things better. Maybe I’ll just stay like this all day. “Where’s Truman?” Everyone will ask. “We have to do all these important things that require him to be responsible and leaderly!” And Mike will have to tell them, “Sorry, Truman is facing the wall and he’s got the covers pulled up over his head – we’re just going to have to do without him today.” And, I mean, who’s going to argue with that? Turning to face the wall by your bed and pulling the covers over your head is about as close to being dead as you’ll ever get. And they wouldn’t make a dead guy run a TV show, would they?

God, why did you do this? Why did you let Mike talk you into this show? Sure, you always wanted to make your own TV show, but the understanding was that that dream was about as realistic as your dreams of becoming a secret agent in 4th grade! In 4th grade you never snuck around the school gathering secrets and slitting hall monitors’ throats before they could sound the alarm, so why are you masquerading as a TV producer now?

Oh, so sleepy. You were up too late working on the blog.

You can’t bail on today, though. This is Episode 5. This is the funniest of all episodes. You have to be there today. This is the episode that separates the men from the boys. This is the episode that has to look good the whole time, start to finish, no questions asked. This episode could determine whether you get hired by a major television network or not. If not, then Irene got up this morning in vain. Are you going to do that to Irene? Are you going to make her get up this morning so she can help you make a sub-par show? You cannot do that! You have got to make this worth everyone’s while! Otherwise, you’re going to be a crappy friend and an even crappier producer.

Is this it? Is this what following your dreams is? Lying in bed, staring at the wall, willing time and space to come to a halt so you don’t have to face the possibility that what you’ve poured so much hype and effort into is little more than when you and your friends used to fool around with your Dad’s video camera? Worrying that, even if you successfully shoot the episode, it might turn out to look like shit anyway? Trying to keep up with my schedule in addition to this damn show? Is this what following your dreams is? Is this why so many people live droll, unhappy lives – because following your dreams kind of sucks a lot of the time?

You’ve got enough money to buy a decent – okay, sort of crappy – motorcycle. You could get up right now and take a bus to the cycle shop downtown, buy a bike, gas it up, and just start riding. Kiss the school, the column, the show, the fucking blog goodbye and just ride. There aren’t any responsibilities when you’re riding your motorcycle across the country; all you have to do is not crash. I feel like I could handle that amount of responsibility. I’d just ride as far as the money took me, and then I’d start working for gas and food. I could be someone totally different! I could be Gus. I could be Gus Rodriguez. Gus Rodriguez doesn’t have a grammar test on Friday, nor does he have to get up at 8:00 to shoot his TV show. Gus Rodriguez works at a gas station in Saginaw, Michigan – at least, he does until he’s got enough money to fill the tank on his bike and blast out of town. After that, who knows where he’s going? Nobody! Not even Gus! That’s who I could be. I’d be free as the freest of birds. And I’d have a CD player, a cheap one, and a mix CD with only three songs on it – Baba O’Riley, Sweet Child of Mine, and The Boys Are Back In Town, and those would be the only songs I’d need, because Gus Rodriguez knows what the three best road trip songs in the world are. And then, once I got to the east coast, I could sell my bike for a boat ticket to Europe, and-

Oh, shit. There’s the alarm.

Truman Capps can scarcely ride a bicycle.

The (Potential) Bicycle Thief

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

I, like many other students, walk to all of my classes. Healthy as that may be, it takes a little longer than I’d like it to. Many times I’ve wished for the ability to leap miles in a single bound; not only would I be able to clear the entire campus in a matter of seconds, but it would also be a pretty good icebreaker with women.

Try as I might over the summer, I was unable to develop superpowers of that nature, so I went for the next best thing and bought a bike. The bike I bought was brand new – in retrospect, I probably should have bought a used one from CraigsList, but I have a certain aversion to buying expensive items from the same site where people try to arrange anonymous sex hookups. Instead, I made my purchase at The Bike Gallery in Portland, a reliable and well-managed store where to my knowledge no one has ever tried to organize a threesome.

I worked two jobs this summer and thus had a considerable amount of money to spend, so I went to town customizing my bike with fenders, flashing head and taillights, rear view mirror, self-heating seat, power steering, four cupholders, and OnStar support. By the time I was finished, what had once been a simple means of transportation was now the two-wheeled equivalent of a Cadillac Escalade. If Snoop Dogg rode a bike in one of his videos, it would be just like mine. I love my bike dearly, and I get the idea that had I bought a heart for it, my bike would love me back.

As I walked my heavily modified monstrosity toward the door, my salesman asked me what I was planning on using it for. I started to explain that I was going to ride it to class, but no sooner I spoken the words “University of Oregon” than the salesman’s eyes widened with fear. A frigid, bitter wind swept through the suburban bicycle shop as he pulled me close with the sudden urgency of a man attempting to prevent a disaster of unspeakable proportions.

“You can’t take a bike like that to Eugene. Thieves will tear it apart in seconds. It’s like ‘Mad Max’ down there.”

Struggling in his uncomfortable embrace, I tried to explain that I had bought a Kryptonite Lock, which I thought was enough to protect my new purchase in the hive of scum and villainy where I go to school. The salesman pointed out how wrong I was by telling me tales of bike thieves armed with pickup trucks and bolt cutters, ruthless street urchins who leave only the twisted remains of once proud bikes in their path. After hearing several stories about bikes considerably less nice than my own getting stolen, I realized that leaving my bike unattended on campus would be a lot like the scene in ‘Jurassic Park’ where they put the cow into the velociraptor pen.

As I write this, my bike is sitting behind me in the corner of my apartment. Oh, sure, there are bike lockups outside in the courtyard of my complex, but I don’t trust them. Sure, a brightly lit, fenced in compound well removed from the street may be safe enough for other bikes, but certainly not for mine. As I see it, the siren song of my bike is strong enough to draw criminals from miles around, and not just your ordinary criminals – the genius, ‘Ocean’s 11’ type of criminals, ready and willing to subvert any and all security measures in the pursuit of the big payoff. Come to think of it, my bike probably isn’t even safe in my apartment. I should buy a gun.

My bike has scarcely been out of my apartment since I got here. Sure, I ride it every once and awhile, but only when I’m going somewhere where I know I won’t have to let it out of my sight, and even then I worry that a crack squad of ninja bike thieves will steal it out from under me as I pedal. So every day I walk to class, and the bike I bought to speed up my life cowers safely under lock and key. Is it hypocritical to not ride my bike out of fear that it will get stolen and I won’t be able to use it anymore? Of course not.

This way, at least I get to look at it.

On Grammar

Ugh.

As those of you who know me personally can attest, I frequently mention that I was almost an English major. By all means, I should have been – I’m pretentious as all get out and I’ve used the phrase “economy of prose” more than once in an attempt to impress women – but when it came down to me filling out my registration paperwork at the University of Oregon, I was somehow driven to put “Pre-Journalism” instead of “English” in the INTENDED MAJOR box.

My reasons for doing this were twofold: 1) If you play it right, a Journalism degree is basically an English degree with job security (making $4.00 an hour as a jester at a renaissance faire does not count as a job, English majors), and 2) The English curriculum here appears to be heavily based in reading than in writing, which is more my area of interest. Yes, I know – if I want to be a good writer, I should be a good reader. I’m just sort of banking on maybe being the exception to the rule. “If you want to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader – unless you’re Truman Capps, he’s a great writer but all he reads is Vonnegut and Stephen King. It’s really wild, he’s just… Naturally good, y’know? Damndest thing. Otherwise, though, you’ve got to be a good reader.”

By and large, I feel that my selection of Journalism as a major was a good choice, right up until I have to do any sort of work that displeases me, at which point I instantly start bemoaning my pursuit of job security and avoidance of literature. Case in point: Prerequisites. To get into the School of Journalism and Communication, you need to take five prerequisite classes, each of which pertains to a different area of journalism, each sucking in its own unique, beautiful way. In J201, I sat in a lecture hall with more people than there are in the marching band and learned the history of mass media (basically – everything was going nicely until TV fucked it all up, and things had only just got back to normal when the Internet fucked it all up again, and we still don’t know what’s going on there). In J204, I was shoehorned into learning how to use InDesign and Photoshop, skills that I have now completely forgotten and hope to never learn again. Next term I will take J202, a class commonly referred to as “Info Hell”, because it consists of a single, 100-page long research paper to be completed of the course of ten weeks. Do you see what I’m talking about? Info Hell! It’s like Hell, only you’re getting burned by knowledge itself! I prefer to take a hands-off approach toward knowledge, staying far enough back that I don’t have to breathe any smoke but close enough so that I can roast a weenie or two over its crackling orange flames.

At the moment, though, I’m fighting my way through J101, Grammar for Journalists, and if the past two weeks have been any indication, it seems that my weenie has caught fire and there aren’t any other ones left in the bag, so I’m pretty much stuck with it. Despite my experience as a writer, I’ve always had the same attitude towards grammar that Huckleberry Finn did toward Widow Douglass’ attempts to “sivilize” him – I’ve been having a grand old time running free and unwashed through the fertile countryside of Language, scattering commas like breadcrumbs and dangling my participles as I please, and I’m highly resistant of any attempts to wash my writing off, put it in a suit, and make it go to church on Sundays. My style of writing is highly individual – I have yet to meet anyone else who is able to cajole words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs in quite the same way that I do. Grammar – a codex of rules and regulations, meant to clarify thoughts and unify styles of writing – is my natural enemy. Look at how long my sentences are, or how many dashes I use – I fully recognize that this flies in the face of proper grammar, but as far as I’m concerned, grammar can get its own damn blog.

What bugs me most about grammar is that it takes writing, which I love, and turns it into math, which I hate. Up until grammar comes into play, writing is free and organic, but once you start tossing words like “gerund” and “subordinating conjunction” around I start to get the feeling that I’ll need to pull out my graphing calculator. I’ve never seen sentences as clusters of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns that form phrases and clauses. I seen them as the space between periods, into which I can cram as many interesting words as I want, provided I break up the action with a comma every now and then. It’s like if someone started harshly regulating how you played with your Legos as a kid. “No, you can’t build a house with red bricks – that’s Not Right. You have to use four black bricks, a brown brick, and this plastic Lego pizza; only then will you be Right.”

I’m not saying that the rules and regulations of grammar are bad – I’m not a Grammarchist. Grammar is very useful, to a point. I appreciate knowing where my apostrophes are appropriate and mastering my subject/verb agreements in a way many Southerners cannot. And under the right circumstances, the uniformity grammar imposes on language is invaluable. What tweaks me are the mindless Nazis that grammar creates; marching in lockstep together with smug grins spread across their faces and copies of The Elements Of Style tucked safely under one arm, glibly correcting passers-by on their use of “I” versus “Me” or “who” and “whom” – who do you guys think you’re fooling? We might need you when we’re writing newspaper articles and business documents, but not when we’re talking to our friends or writing in our blogs. Your boss doesn’t follow you home on the weekends (I hope), so please don’t follow our words home.

My professor’s reasoning is that we have to know the rules of grammar in order to break them. I disagree – I think that we have to know the rules of grammar to know that we’re breaking them. Ignorance, as far as I’m concerned, is bliss.

Truman Capps doesn’t get to say “weenie” enough.

Off Campus Life: A Treatise

As seen in the Oregon Daily Emerald!

As my time in the dorms last year drew to a close, my friends and I eagerly speculated about how nice it would be to live off campus, where there were no meddlesome RAs and we wouldn’t have to share the same six toilets with 40 other people. Off campus life, we decided, was the true college experience: complete independence without the school looking over our shoulders every five minutes to make sure we hadn’t died of alcohol poisoning. As this year started, we moved into our apartment expecting to live like kings – mature, independent kings with no need for supervision from University Housing.

Reality struck a few hours later, when my roommates and I became hungry. Last year, when we got hungry, we’d go to Fire and Spice, or Carson, or Dux, or any of the other places where the University provided pseudo-free food for its freshmen. A lot of the fondest memories I have from my freshman year involved eating in one way or another – late night drunk people watching in Common Grounds, blistering my tongue on molten cheese from Carson calzones, eating dinner at 4:30 to avoid the line at Fire & Spice… When we were freshmen, eating was an event, a grand occasion occurring three (sometimes five) times a day that was usually the impetus for a flurry of phone calls and text messages attempting to wrangle more friends into the festivities. “Hey! Have you eaten yet? Do you want to eat again? Well, we’re eating now! Come watch us eat! We’re eating!”

But now we live off campus, and the freely-available food honeymoon is over. Two weeks ago, my roommates and I collectively spent over $600 on groceries and basic supplies for living: soy sauce, bread, Xbox 360 controllers, milk, et cetera. Already we have to go shopping again as we’re fresh out of yogurt and have reached the strategic reserves of our Eggo waffle supply. It’s been a shocking change to us three sheltered middle class suburbanites. We’ve always understood that food in stores and restaurants costs money, and we’ve known from an early age that if you don’t want to spend any money, then you eat the food at home. However, this is the first time we’ve actually been in charge of the food at home, and only now do we realize that things like peanut butter in the pantry and popsicles in the freezer do not just grow there. They, too, must be bought, only now it’s no longer Mom’s responsibility.

There’s so much planning to be done – it’s not just a matter of what you want for dinner tonight, it’s what you want tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. A chunk of a given day now has to be blocked out for shopping, and the shopping itself requires all sorts of thinking. How much Ramen is too much? My roommates eat Skippy yet I am a Jif man – what kind of peanut butter do we buy? What’s the ideal amount of pulp for our orange juice? Once you’ve bought everything, then there’s still the matter of actually preparing it once you’re hungry and not burning anything down in the process. In the dorms, eating was a party. Off campus, it’s practically homework.

The other night, desperate for food with nary a chicken pesto sandwich in sight, my roommates and I took a quick inventory of what food we had left in the house and did our best to cobble together something resembling a complete meal. My roommates set to deciphering the instructions on the sides of our last two boxes of frozen pizza while I brewed up a pot of rice, and half an hour later we were sitting down to relatively nutritious dinner, by college standards. There were plates and silverware, too, and we actually ate at a table instead of just shoving food into our mouths over the counter. Once we were finished, we all did the dishes together and then watched “88 Minutes”, which was without a doubt the worst part of the evening. Maybe this doesn’t mean much to you, that three adult males were capable of successfully feeding themselves, but it was an achievement for us. For three busy students to collaborate on the preparation of a meal and subsequently sit down and eat together is a heartwarming milestone in the vein of a Hallmark Channel Original Movie. It was something we’d never done before, and something we certainly wouldn’t have done had we been in the dorms with no kitchen and free prepared meals a single card swipe away.

So sure, maybe eating has become a homework assignment, but like any good homework assignment, we’ve learned something from it. And in the end, I guess learning new things is what college is really about.

Pullman

Only in Pullman!

Listen:

The Oregon Marching Band is the best marching band in the Pac-10. Cal’s band puts in a good effort but their musicality suffers, Stanford’s makes babies die in childbirth, and USC’s band can take their one repetitive song and go suck a dick, preferably a big one after yesterday’s game. I don’t consider myself an expert in a lot of fields, but if there’s one area of study in which I can thoroughly beat you over the head with the Rusty Tire Iron Of Knowledge, it’s useless college marching band trivia, and my status as a college marching band aficionado* means that when I say a band is good, my opinion is about as close to right as you can get.

*My hetero writing partner Mike is no doubt shaking his head with disdain right now, already dreaming up another of his world-famous dismissive replies to my blog. Well, you know what, Mike? You’re a pro wrestling aficionado. And sure, my thing involves people in brightly colored uniforms acting like idiots and disregarding musicality in favor of volume, but yours involves scantly clad, sweaty men. Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones – they should also get good real estate agents, because there’s no way a glass house is going to sell in today’s market.

So the Oregon Marching Band is spectacularly great at what it does. Sadly, our budget isn’t quite as great as we are, thus while other, inferior college marching bands get to travel with the football team, we only make one trip to an away game every year. Also, our budget is so small that we can’t even travel outside the Pacific Northwest. This would be fine if any of the Washington teams were worth a damn, but sadly, they aren’t. Thus, when all 200 people in the Oregon Marching Band traveled to Pullman, Washington last week for the game against Washington State, we weren’t so much going to rally our team and fans against a worthy adversary as we were going to provide the soundtrack to a slaughter.

In case you were wondering, the exact terms of the slaughter were 14 to 63, Oregon’s favor.

The last time I traveled with the marching band, we went to El Paso, Texas for the Sun Bowl. Things were different then – I had only just started my blog, and at the time I didn’t know about El Paso. I mean, I knew that it existed, I just didn’t know that it was the municipal equivalent of a dump truck load of flaming manure with Hitler, Saddam, and Bush toasting marshmallows over it. Going to Pullman, however, everyone knew from the start that the trip was going to suck, because most of us have been to Pullman before in one capacity or another and we’re well aware of what it’s like there. Also, my blog is now very popular in the band, and throughout the trip many of my fellow members of the OMB told me (in varying states of sobriety) that they were looking forward to my inevitable blog about their escapades. So while going to El Paso was a naïve trip into the heart of darkness, the journey to Pullman with all eyes on me for a rousing blog about the experience was more like a piece of Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism, perhaps warranting the Fear And Loathing prefix that I’ve already overused.

So, having been there, what do I think of Pullman? Well, I mean, what’s there to say? It’s a crappy little town that’s really close to Idaho. It certainly isn’t worse than El Paso, if that’s what you’re after. By and large the strongest feeling I had while in Pullman was a desire to leave. In El Paso, on the other hand, I was fighting the overwhelming urge to burn the entire city to the ground and then leave.

Pullman is the sort of town where, in movies, horrible things happen. Despicable, disgusting, gut wrenching, terrifying things. Dark, lonely, two lane highways snake for miles away from the town through endless, uninhabited rolling hills. As the home to a major state university, it’s only reasonable to expect that dozens if not hundreds of beautiful, well endowed coeds have fallen prey to serial killers and radioactive inbred mutants along these desolate stretches of asphalt. Or perhaps the terror will take root inside the town itself – for reasons unknown, Pullman’s dead begin to rise and hunt the living, or maybe carnivorous subterranean monsters start prowling beneath the streets. It’s exactly the sort of quaint, folksy place that Hollywood loves to destroy. I’ve been on the Universal Studios Backlot Tour and I’ve been through downtown Pullman, and the only difference is that the food in Pullman is cheaper.

The only really gory death in Pullman, however, was that of Washington State’s football team, as we all had expected. They seemed a bit resentful of our presence, though – everyone had known from the beginning that they were going to get absolutely dominated, so I guess for the University of Oregon to send a marching band along with its bloodthirsty football team was sort of like adding insult to injury. We wound up sitting on the turf, just behind one of the field goals, and the Washington State players demonstrated their disdain for us by spending the first half hour before the game kicking practice field goals at us. This turned marching band into an extreme sport – one minute you’re watching the conductor, minding your own business and playing “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire, and the next minute somebody is screaming, “HEADS UP!” and you’re diving for cover from a volley of footballs. Interestingly enough, this didn’t seem to bother our band director, who, should a soccer ball from the adjoining field roll onto ours during a rehearsal, will loudly belittle the soccer team for endangering our safety.

Now that I have the reputation as the guy who writes scornful blog updates about most of the things that happen to him, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when people expect me to be scornful about a given experience. The thing is, Pullman just doesn’t have a lot for me to be scornful about. It’s a small town, sure, but most towns in the world are, and as much as I’d love to look down my nose at most of the towns on Earth, I really can’t bring myself to quite that level of elitism just yet. El Paso has earned my ire because it has all the small town disadvantages – boring, no cultural opportunities – with all the big city crappiness – sprawl, traffic, nonstop ugly suburbs. There is no excuse for making close to a million people suffer in that sort of environment, which is why El Paso irks me so. Pullman, on the other hand, is just a small town. It doesn’t really provoke scorn in me. It scarcely provokes anything in me, save for the fear that somewhere in the nearby countryside there’s a hillbilly with a chainsaw. Waiting.

Truman Capps means no offense to chainsaw wielding hillbillies.

Ghost Campus

Woah... Holy shit!

On behalf of the Oregon Daily Emerald, or at least on behalf of myself, welcome back to the University of Oregon. How was your summer? Did you work, or just take it easy? Were you one of those people who went off to be a camp counselor, or did you go door-to-door selling textbooks in South Dakota? Don’t bother answering me; I won’t be able to hear what you say unless I happen to be sitting next to you while you read this article. Feel free to check if the person you’re sitting next to is me, but there’s a pretty good chance it probably isn’t.

My summer ended about two weeks earlier than most of your summers did, as I am a member of the Oregon Marching Band, and we start practicing about two weeks before the beginning of the school year. I’m from Portland, and usually when there are no classes to take here I’m up at home, eating my parents’ food and driving their car without paying for gas. So the past two weeks have been rather unique for me, as I’ve had a chance to be on campus as the students gradually come back like the party-loving swallows returning to Capistrano.

Campus is a pretty strange place during the summer, when most students have gone away and only a few classes are being taught. It’s rather eerie to walk down Alder Street and not hear hip-hop music blasting from boom boxes or to pass through the amphitheater without being offered a free hug. Empty beer cans and half-crushed red plastic cups are a lot harder to find, the clouds of marijuana smoke are considerably smaller, and there are no angry street preachers to tell us that we’re all going to hell for not believing in God, or not believing in the right God, or not believing in God the right way. Without students, the University of Oregon is an architecturally mismatched ghost town.

My apartment complex is right across the street from campus, and when I signed the lease I did so with the expectation that every night I would fall asleep to melodious echo of drunken partygoers belching in my alley and the baseline of “Get Low” rattling my windows. This sort of thing doesn’t really bother me all that much, seeing as I lived in the dorms – forgive me, residence halls – last year. On the contrary, I’m almost addicted to the alcohol-infused catcalls and loudly amplified urban lyrics of the University’s party scene. After nine months living smack in the middle of campus, the sounds of my classmates having a good time have almost become a lullaby to me. If ever those sounds were to stop, I’d take it as a sign that some disaster had occurred, something terrible like a nuclear war or a zombie plague which had forced revelers to stop their revelry and run for fallout shelters or defend themselves from zombies in search of delicious, delicious brains.

But when I moved into my apartment on the 15th, nobody was around to party me to sleep. In fact, most of my complex was completely empty at the time, and even my roommates hadn’t arrived yet. For a few lonely nights, I lay awake for hours on the slab of stone – forgive me, mattress – that the rental company had furnished, unable to sleep without the sound of Eugene’s nightlife to remind me that the world was A-OK and zombie-free. Walking around the catwalks of my silent building at night I couldn’t help feeling like I was reenacting various scenes from The Shining, and would at any moment bump into a posse of ghosts intent on driving me insane. But perhaps I had already gone insane: after all, I wasn’t able to sleep because of the absence of disruptions.

It was last Thursday that something wonderful happened: my new neighbor got drunk, locked herself out, and punched through a window with her bare fist to get back into her apartment. Two panes of glass. Bare fist. I live next door to the Terminator. Don’t worry – her friends rushed her to the hospital right away and I understand that in addition to making a full recovery she’s learned the value of keeping a spare key under the welcome mat. However unpleasant the experience may have been for her, though, that night was the first night I slept soundly. Now, more than a week after my neighbor’s trip to the emergency room, everyone is back and the parties are in full swing. The University of Oregon is back to its ordinary, bustling, slightly drunk self, and I couldn’t be happier.

So welcome back, everybody. I’m really glad you’re here.

A Roast of the Author

I’m in Pullman, Washington at the moment with the Oregon Marching Band, helping to pep up the fans as we trounce Washington State, whose football team couldn’t successfully take on a leper colony. This puts me in an awkward position for updating, so I’ve asked my oft-mentioned friend, The Aspiring Leader to take over the reigns for this week’s entry. Please think of her as the cool substitute teacher who everyone always likes having – she’s in no way even close to being better than the teacher you have, but she’s a refreshing change of pace every once in a while. If you find that you like her change of pace, please do keep reading her blog, and if you don’t, well, I’ll be back on Wednesday. So without any further ado, go team business major!

It's like this, only without the exotic spit-tender and the actual fire. The pig is pretty spot on.

When HairGuy asked me to write a guest column, my first response was, “No way, you asshat. You constantly berate my work in a public forum, hang up on me when you’re in front of your friends, and have now sworn to have zero free time this year with which to shower attention upon me.”

But then I thought twice. With adversity comes opportunity, and the Pink Unicorn of Atheism knows that T and I have been nothing but adversaries since the day we met. Nothing short of a grease fire in my eye sockets could keep me from mocking his iniquity in the dating world, and only Inara Serra holding a meatloaf and wearing a marching band helmet could distract him from mocking my affiliation with the craft of business.

The good news for our friendship is that deep down, beneath the layers of blithe condescension and thinly-veiled ridiculing, we’re really the same creative genius. He simply executes his talents in more blatantly creative ways. We have a deal, actually. He promises to remain my friend until fame and fortune flow unto him like so many concubines at the foot of Xerxes, and I promise to let him crash on my couch when he resorts to burning blog posts for heat in the meantime. I’m banking on the fact that being a friend of “that funny guy who writes that one show I watch once in a while” will eventually pay for the extra hummus and diet coke rations.

Not only do I see future gain from my friendship with T, but there are plenty of immediate perks as well. Anytime I come over to his parents’ town home for a play date, I am fed delicious food and imbued with spirits of all kinds*, not to mention delighted with scintillating conversation that usual revolves around mocking their only child. However, the Capps clan is not to be mistaken for a peaceful tribe. I have fallen victim to their nefarious plots for dinner table domination many a time. One night, over bowls of cioppino and glasses of red wine, they played a secret game (at least unbeknownst to me) of Make Dinner Come Out Kristin’s Nose. After a particularly valiant attempt that resulted in a fair amount of coughing on my end, I put on a brave face and postulated that, “It’s not the worst thing I’ve had come out of my nose.” Quick as a fouled-mouthed whip, I heard, “Was it the Holocaust? Did the Holocaust come out your nose?” Never have I known T to pass up a chance to insult an endlessly persecuted religion (or Christianity, whichever be more convenient at the time).

*By the by, his hair only gets softer and shinier with every sip of cognac one takes. Future wife of Truman: do bear this in mind.

The first time I saw the preview for the Patrick Dempsey flick Made of Honor, I bounced gleefully in my seat while repeatedly smacking T on the arm and whisper-yelling, “That is SO going to be us! You HAVE to be my maid of honor!” to which he either exploded in fury and then immediately reassembled or simply sat in silent rage. If Buddha and the Dalai Lama ever did go ice skating in hell and T did fill a primary organizing role at my wedding, I foresee plenty of bite-sized peanut butter sandwiches, a DJ who’s a diehard fan of the Rushmore soundtrack, and dice on every table for the guests to roll their fancy dessert bonuses.

From a mutual hatred of organized athletics to differing opinions on the societal benefits of Sex and the City, our friendship is built on a foundation of metaphorical volcanic magma: when free time for lunch abounds and he’s batting greater than 50% on pickup attempts, the interactions are solid and the living is easy. And, when a butterfly flaps its wings in Malaysia, we have a bitch fight that ends in words like, “That? Oh, that’s what you want to go with? This coming from the guy (girl) who liked (hated) Punch Drunk Love.”

At the end of the day, I’m pretty certain I can say it’s worth it. I’ve managed to mooch the entire series of Firefly, most of Freaks and Geeks, and more MST3K than I can shake a stick at, and he’s gotten…well, I’m sure he’s told you about that.

Drop It Like It's Hot

I dropped history like one of these.

My dear friend The Aspiring Leader and I have a longstanding tradition: At the beginning of every term, she excitedly reads to me the list of all 43 classes and extracurricular activities she’s taking (for a grand total of 4000 credit hours per term), and I say, “Wow, that’s an awful lot of work, are you sure you have time for all that?” And she says, “Oh, it’s really not that much!” And then, nine weeks later during finals, I have to drop everything and talk her down from suicide as she tries to prepare for 17 exams, 4 speeches, and the final presentation for Grizzly Bear Deathmatch 301. Somewhere in this process, she utters the words, “I took too many classes!”, and then I utter the words, “I told you so!”, and then she utters the words, “Truman, you’re a horrible person who no one will ever love!”, and I utter the words, “That’s about right.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I feel a certain smug superiority that I don’t need to be occupied to be happy. People like The Aspiring Leader seem to thrive when they’re so busy that amphetamines are a legitimate study aid, whereas I tend to work best in situations that can be either postponed or forgotten entirely should something good happen to come on TV. This is why I never joined the National Honor Society at my high school – I mean, come on! Community service? Screw that! These YouTube videos won’t watch themselves, and even if they could, I wouldn’t trust them to do it as well as I can. I value my leisure time, and when it’s taken away from me I usually react poorly.

So here I am, then, staring the first week of school in the face with a courseload consisting of Spanish, Journalism, Humanities, and United States History, along with the marching band, my column in the paper, and writing/co-directing/costarring in my own TV show. I look at this schedule and I see frightening visions of the future in which there is no part of my life that belongs to me, rather than the school. In the future I see, the University of Oregon has electrodes hooked up to my balls and is forcing me to stand naked on one foot, wearing a black hood, and it is taking pictures of me and laughing. This is not the college experience that people tell fond stories of later in life, unless it happens as part of a fraternity initiation, in which case I suppose it’s A-OK.

This is unusual for me, because a schedule this tight requires me to be a lot more responsible than I’m used to being. Ordinarily, I’d flip off a whole busload of nuns if it meant I’d have the least responsibilities possible, because to me, responsibilities are the explosive speedbumps on the deadly postapocalyptic freeway of life – they are to be avoided at all costs. My previous experiences with responsibility have proven this to be a good strategy; when I was given the seemingly innocuous responsibility of leading the eight-person trumpet section in my high school’s marching band, the result was ten dead, fourteen wounded, and the near-destruction of the state of Israel.* Now I’ve got articles to write and actors to manage and drill and music to learn, not to mention some classes on top of all that if I’ve got the time (and for those of you playing at home, I definitely won’t have the time), and the only possible outcome I can foresee of a situation where there are so many “ifs” riding on my abilities is one with a lot of fire and people screaming.

*And, one more time, I’m really sorry about that, Israel. It won’t happen again.

As with most situations that worry me, the method I’ve been using to cope with my anxiety over my schedule is a healthy combination of losing sleep and nervously asking my friends what they think. The response I usually get is, “Wow, you’re going to be pretty busy!”, which doesn’t do a whole lot besides worry me more, which in turn leads me to lose more sleep and ask more friends, thus perpetuating the cycle. The real answer I want is either, “No, you’ll be fine” or “Yes, that’s too much” – essentially I want somebody to tell me what to do, because even being in command of my own fate is a little more responsibility than I need at this point.

Today, after some soul searching and premonitions of a bleak future with no time for peanut butter or Diet Coke, I made the executive decision to drop my US History class. Having done so, I guess I should feel better, but I can’t help feeling like a slacker. The course registration system at the University of Oregon has an oddly judgmental interface – once it had processed my dropping history, its response (“Class dropped”) felt oddly snarky. “Oh, congratulations,” It was saying. “You’re not even going to try, are you? You’re not even going to go to class for the first week before dropping it? Well, well – it looks like StudentID 950934549 is majoring in Quitting, with a minor in Sloth and maybe Music if there’s time.”

In the end, I guess that dropping my history class was the best choice. For one thing, it means that my head won’t explode, which works out pretty well for me seeing as I really enjoy having a head, and it also works out well for you, because without a head my hair would be pretty much homeless. What’s more, this is good news to the people affiliated with the other classes and activities that I didn’t get rid of, because now there will be marginally more Truman time available to them. But I think what’s best is that I chose to sacrifice a class instead of an elective. Getting rid of a class is one thing – there are plenty of classes to take, and I’ll always have to take them. However, electives are my own interests and passions – be they putting stupid jokes in the once-respectable school newspaper or playing a thinly veiled version of myself on public access TV – and I’m glad that when the time came to put something on the chopping block that I decided not to put aside my true interests in favor of busywork meant to help me attain a piece of paper that certifies me as Officially Smart.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I bear a fond farewell to my professor and classmates from History 352 – I’ve never met any of you because classes haven’t started yet, but I’m sure I would have either liked or disliked you all. If any of the women in this class are in the market for a boyfriend, please don’t let my absence from the class hurt my chances with you.

Truman Capps is counting the days until his creativity well runs dry, and worrying about the impending doom when that finally happens.