Camping, Episode I

Film and TV star Henry Winkler, who happens to look EXACTLY like Whitney's Dad.

Thanks to heavy traffic leaving Portland, we arrived at Boardman Marina and RV Park at around 8:00 in the evening as the sun took a nosedive behind the hills. This led a certain frenzied atmosphere to our preparation of the campground – with diminishing light and in some cases nonexistent instructions we put together a jumbled mass of nylon and tent poles to create shelter. All around us, retired couples peered through the windows of their RVs at these five fools trying to set up a tent on a campground and quietly snickered over white wine and JAG reruns.

The Girlfriend and I had gone camping with our friends Whitney and Collin, both of whom were unfortunate enough to be involved with Writers, and Whitney’s father Dave, who you may remember as The Fonz in Happy Days or, more recently, Barry Zuckercorn on Arrested Development.


They’d selected a campsite in Boardman, Oregon, a positively microscopic town of some 1500 people situated about halfway down the Columbia Gorge in Eastern Oregon; a location more commonly known as The Middle Of Nowhere. To give you an example of how isolated we were, on our second day in Boardman we ran out of propane. After trips to both of Boardman’s stores, we found out that the entire town of Boardman was out of propane as well, requiring us to drive for half an hour to a Home Depot in Hermiston. Those of you who aren’t familiar with Oregon may not understand the severity of this situation, but let me be frank: When Hermiston makes the town you’re in look primitive and isolated, you know you’ve definitely fallen off the end of the Earth.

As previously mentioned, I’ve never been camping before, so when we arrived at the campground and were confronted with dwindling daylight, strong winds whipping out of the Gorge, and an army of oncoming mosquitoes, I felt a bit helpless. The people running the campground had seen fit to provide us with a spigot and a picnic table; other than that, all we had was a gravel patch on which to park an RV.* We had to hit the ground running in order to create shelter before we ran out of light, the sort of situation that for me has never been any closer than an episode of Survivorman.

*We were not allowed to pitch our tent on the grass, which was considerably softer than the gravel. The gravel poked through the tent’s thin nylon floor and made it unpleasant to walk around without shoes when inside the tent, and also was a terrible surface to hammer a stake into, to the point that upon returning from Hermiston we found that our tent had blown over and collapsed in on itself, unceremoniously eating our belongings in the process.

Once the tent was constructed, we settled in for an improvised dinner of vegetables dipped in Greek tzatziki yogurt sauce. It was pretty tasty, and the mosquitoes agreed, as a few dozen of them made kamakaze runs into the dip. We lit a bunch of citronella candles to try and ward the mosquitoes off, but all the repellant smoke seemed to do was get them drunk, because not long after we’d set up the candles we had mosquitoes flying headlong into our faces and ears, after which they’d land on the table to crawl around in squiggly circles while calling their ex-girlfriends to demand sex.

Working by the flickering light of our one lantern, we dug out the air mattresses and vacuum pump from the truck, only to discover that the pump’s battery was low and needed to be charged. We plugged it into the electricity hookup that the campground had thoughtfully provided and then dragged our air mattresses out to the pump to be filled up. The vacuum pump, however, was not really jazzed about doing its job until it had a full tank of electricity, so we spent about half an hour pumping the mattresses full with about three farts’ worth of air while mosquitoes crashed into us, giggling and singing “Just A Friend.”

Waking up the following morning was easy for two reasons: The mattresses slowly deflated during the night until at around eight in the morning our spines were flush with the gravel driveway, and the bright shine of the high desert sun turned our tent into a hotbox – not the kind you make when you and all your friends smoke pot in your stepdad’s Acura; the kind they have in prison movies set in the South.

It was yet another blustery day, with stiff winds whipping through the tent, carrying evidence of which RVs needed to empty their waste tanks. For breakfast I was overjoyed to discover a large carton of vanilla yogurt, which I proceeded to calmly work my way through each morning for the rest of the trip. Once we’d eaten, we attempted to set up an awning over the picnic table. At the outset, the task seemed simple enough – we had a bag filled with numbered poles and a canvas to be draped over the pole skeleton, the end result of which would be an awning to give us shade during the heat of the day.

The problem was that the instructions for the awning were nowhere to be found and that the numbers on several of the poles had worn clean off, leaving us with no directions and only half of the poles identified. The missing instructions was definitely a pisser, but the incomplete numbering was really just a case of straight up dickery on Fate’s part – it meant that even with the instructions we’d be screwed, and without them, we were double screwed.

We spent the next hour mixing and matching pole combinations until we finally assembled the skeleton and draped the canvas over it thanks to nothing more than luck and the process of elimination. This, I realized, could be why camping was so popular – it provides a means to assert oneself over the elements or, barring that, shoddy camping equipment.

Truman Capps advises you to tune in for Part 2 on Sunday!

Substitute for another guy.

Dear geeks and/or David and Kelsey Capps,

I apologize for the late post. I really do. I had no idea it was Sunday until I sold my seventh Sunday New York Times today at work. I believe that makes me a day late (and undoubtedly a dollar short). Please forgive this trespass. I know Hair Guy followers (Hi David! Hi Kelsey!) get pretty peeved when they don't get their bi-weekly dose of snarky science fiction-related humor. Anyway, if Truman ever asks me to do this again, I promise that I will be on time. Hell, I might even part my hair like a huge dork to prepare for the role.

Anyway, now that you've accepted my apology, I'd like to present you all with some good news. Truman is not only surviving his adventure, he's actually thriving in his new surroundings. He sent me this photo on Friday:

Great shot, Jen!

So you see, he's doing just fine out there in the wilderness. Now, to the blog. I have a confession to make. Although Truman and I are Best Dudes Forever, I rarely ever read his blog. I refrain from reading for the same reason I refrain from boring holes into my forehead with a power drill or taking a cheese grater to my genitals. However, I am roughly familiar with the Truman Capps Method of Humor Writing and Tomfoolery, having read most of his work for the award-winning Oregon Daily Emerald. With that said, I'm afraid I must reject the format with which the 12 of you are familiar and break new ground. I know change can be scary, but think of this like a rebirth, if you will. A baptism by fire. There will be no coherent essay today, friends. No social relevance. No Keith Olbermann impressions and definitely no "the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and we all learned something today!" In short, this is Truman's blog on drugs.

Question:
How many friends do you have? Go ahead and think about it. Got a number? Good. Now, if you answered more than about seven, I'm going to have to call bullshit. Your friends are not your acquaintances. Your friends are the people who you fart in front of on purpose, end of story. Unless, of course, you are of the female persuasion, in which case you are ruled out by scientific evidence published by Stanford's biology department in 1999 confirming what many had already assumed: girls do not have anuses.

Observation:
As a formerly unemployed college graduate and general scumfuck, I have found that the longer one goes without showering, the easier it becomes to continue to not shower. Once you get over the three day hump, the rest is cream cheese until you hit what I like to call "the ten-day paradox." If you hadn't guessed, this involves a lot of wild screaming and throwing of fecal matter coupled with gross self-mutilation. Happy Day 18, everybody!

Recommendation:
Watch the first six Star Trek films. With the exception of the fourth installment, the hexology is one of the more underrated in the history of cinema. Don't believe what anyone says, friends. Wrath of Khan is NOT the only awesome film starring the original cast. Trust me on this one. In two weeks, you're going to be emailing Truman about how awesome The Undiscovered Country was. And no, before you ask, I haven't seen the new film. Pansies.

Half human. Half Vulcan. All sexy.

Question:
Have you ever been in the bathroom getting ready to pee and been terrified for a moment that you'd lost your penis? Let me just say this, friends: it's all fun and games for about 15 seconds. It's amusing that you can't locate that little slot in the front of your boxer briefs because they'd gotten slightly twisted throughout the morning. Then, out of nowhere, absolute terror sets in. Pure panic. I'm not even joking. "OH GOD, DID MY PENIS JUST TURN INVISIBLE??? OH NO, NO NO NO...DID IT...DID IT FALL OFF??? OH NO PLEASE GOD NO NO FUCK FUCK FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK."

Think I'm mad? Just wait till it happens to you.

Observation:
Starbucks Coffee Corporation does not count on its customers being movie dorks. They play a lot of classical music at the store that I work. Most of the time, it works like elevator music. I tune it out and forget that it's even there. But on certain occasions, I will come alive and breech the still waters of my work trance when I recognize a particular tune. Here are the tunes I recognized:

So there I am, all these cronies sipping on their double tall skinny cinnamon dolce flat extra hot lattes like they're something special, and all I can think about is Dr. Lecter painting himself in Sgt. Pembry's blood before slicing off his face and creating an art exhibit with his partner's intestines. Oh, and this:



Well, I'm not much for conclusions, so I guess that's it. You're welcome.

Mike Whitman has found that writing proverbial graffiti on the Truman Capps Wall of Ninny-Words has not helped him conjure up the stolen data tapes, nor has it given him clairvoyance enough to find the rebels' hidden fortress.

Within The Woods

See?

Whenever I find myself traveling deep into the remote wilderness, I can’t help but be reminded of the opening of The Shining, complete with crazy helicopter shots and foreboding music. I guess it’s because I assume that as one goes further from tall buildings and coked-out hobos, there is greater the potential for abject terror. Think about it; there aren’t an awful lot of horror movies about people getting chainsawed to death in downtown highrise penthouses. Serial killers and evil spirits, by their nature, seem to like camping about as much as everybody else.

Of course, I’m not actually camping at this point; I’m yurting (a verb that I have reluctantly adopted for convenience’s sake). I’m cohabiting a yurt with The Girlfriend, The Girlfriend’s Father, and The Girlfriend’s Father’s Girlfriend (take notes; this will be on the test) in Cape Lookout State Park, and what I’ve learned so far is that while living in a yurt is not necessarily camping, it comes awfully close.

A yurt is a tent with a stronger skeleton – a circular wooden frame over which thick canvas is draped. This creates a space that is luxuriously large by tent standards and cripplingly small by ordinary building standards. When we first pulled up outside the yurt I remember idly hoping that it would turn out to be bigger than it looked, like some sort of Harry Potter-esque creation, but once we got inside my fears were confirmed: It was a bunk bed, a futon, a table with two chairs, and… Well, did I mention the bunk bed?

Most of all, this has been a vacation from privacy. Not just in the sense that the yurt is a single room with nothing to hide behind when you want to change your clothes or masturbate, either – sitting in the yurt with all the doors and windows closed, you can still hear everything going on outside, just as everyone outside can hear everything inside. This is still tough for me to get the hang of, as I was brought up to believe that any structure larger than a tent is a cone of silence of sorts. However, last night, as I lay awake listening to the tent-dwelling couple in the adjoining campsite have sex, I became acutely aware that I was not in the Portland Metro Area anymore.

Cape Lookout State Park is pretty wonderful, as it’s right close to the beach and the bathroom facilities are fairly close to top notch. The problem is that the closest town is Tillamook, which perfectly fits the bill for the xenophobic small town the teenagers in the horror movie pass through on their way to the wilderness where they get killed. To give you an example of the essence of Tillamook, the “Tillamook Restaurant Guide!!” provided by the chamber of commerce listed Papa Murphy’s and McDonald’s as local restaurants visitors should try.

If you like fine cheese, you may well be aware of Tillamook’s existence thanks to Tillamook Cheese, which is undoubtedly the finest cheese on science’s green Earth. The thing is, that old adage “I like my sausage but I don’t want to see how it’s made” applies here as well. Tillamook is a town of about 4400 people and 25,000 cows, which live in the surrounding pastures. I’d venture that these cows spend about 40% of their lives being milked for the purpose of supplying the local Tillamook Cheese Factory and 90% of their lives moving their bowels, because anywhere you go in or around Tillamook smells like the inside of a barn. If you don’t know what the inside of a barn smells like, you should go to Tillamook and find out – keep in mind, however, that you can always walk out of a crumbling, fetid barn, whereas escape from Tillamook is far more difficult.

This is my third stay in the greater Tillamook County area, and thus it has also been my third visit to the Tillamook Cheese Factory, the local tourist attraction. This was something of an awkward visit for me as The Girlfriend is vegan and the entire factory tour is just a big all-American salute to gluttony, complete with free cheese samples and an ice cream bar. She didn’t seem too bothered, though – probably because the sight of armies of morbidly obese geriatrics frantically waddling through the parking lot in hopes of scoring some free cheese curds is as good an argument against excessive dairy consumption as any PETA campaign.

The yurting expedition is really just a training mission of sorts for my upcoming camping adventure with friends in the Columbia Gorge, which begins tomorrow. Many of the elements are the same – the lack of easily accessible toilets, privacy, or Internet* - but there’s still a certain safety net in the form of a rigidly constructed roof and an actual bed. Also, camping will see the addition of a speedboat and innertube, for which no amount of training can prepare me.

*To that end, this week’s Sunday update will be provided by Mike Whitman, Smoker of Cigarettes.

With that, I’m off to roast some tofu over the fire. If I’m not back by next Wednesday, rest assured that the serial killers got me.

Truman Capps imagines he will soon forget what it’s like to shower.

21

No, that's not... It has NOTHING TO DO with that at all, god damn it.

You know what, laws? Fuck you. I’m old enough to drink and I don’t care what you say about it.

Mike called me up a few weeks ago. “Hey, Truman!” He said. “There’s this theater in town called The Laurelhurst where they serve food and show old movies, and this week they’re showing Chinatown!”

And I said, “Holy shit, that’s my favorite movie! We should totally go see it!”

And then Mike, salivating as he anticipated his upcoming feast on my dying dreams, said, “And the best part is, they’re only showing it after 3:00, when no minors are allowed because they’ll be serving beer.”

Now, Mike isn’t what I’d call a regular reader, but if you ever do happen to see this, old chum, mark my words: You’re ugly, and nobody likes you.

Alcohol has been something of a constant in my life. For years, Mom and Dad have designated the hall closet in every house we’ve lived in as a wine cellar, wherein they store cases of wine they buy at Costco and Trader Joe’s (along with our parkas, an environmental factor of the storage which lends to the wine a certain Gore-Tex aftertaste). When we eat at brew pubs, each parent will order a different sort of beer and sample one another’s throughout the meal, commenting on the differences, similarities, and variable “hoppiness.” And every Friday and Saturday night for as far back as I can remember, they’ve made gin martinis (one each) as part of a grander relaxation ritual.

I grew up watching this happen and came to believe that all families greeted their weekend with a stiff drink. When in 4^th grade we were tasked with making Christmas cards for our parents, I drew a picture of two martini glasses in front of a Christmas tree accompanied a sentence pointing out that Christmas that year fell on a Friday and was thus “martini night.” I later found out that this gave my teacher the impression that my parents were insufferable boozehounds. I’m pretty sure they aren’t.

And me? As I’ve said before, I don’t really like alcohol. Whenever I drink a rum and Diet Coke, the first thought that pops into my head is, “Damn, this would taste a lot better without rum.” Bailey’s Irish Cream is admittedly delicious, but it’s tough to get really enthusiastic about a drink that half the time will give you explosive diarrhea thanks to lactose intolerance. The closest I’ve come to actual beer is a few sips of Hamm’s that Mike has bullied me into. I’m learning to love it, but there’s clearly still a long road ahead.

Yet I’m not allowed to go into bars or movie theaters showing my favorite movies, and my friends who are over 21 have learned the hard way that they can’t buy alcohol when I’m within sight of the cashier. This is because society, God bless it, believes that if I’m allowed into these places I will in turn deviously get my hands on as much of the stuff as I can and, as a minor who lacks the maturity and wisdom necessary to handle alcohol, will fly into a drunken rage and kill the Pope, perhaps by beating him to death with a flaming orphan.*

*Speaking of alcohol, Flaming Orphan would be a badass name for a drink.

This is what’s so painful about the whole drinking age thing: Society thinks that they can’t cut me any slack because I’ll just get drunk and be corrupted, but in all honesty, if I never had a taste of alcohol again I really wouldn’t feel like I’d lost that much. I might be the only 20 year old who doesn’t want to get his booze on; I just want to be around people while they get their booze on, because that’s always where the fun is.

And I know that everyone points this out, but I think I should too: My Main Guy Alexander* is currently in Afghanistan with the Army. He’s only a few days older than me; thus, it’s legal for the government to send him overseas to kill terrorists and be shot at by them in return (like energy, Alexander cannot be created or destroyed, although he will sometimes make your hair stand on end and your laundry stick together) but if he wants to drink after all that, it’s suddenly not okay.

*Who doesn’t give two fucks about anything, or even one fuck about a lot of things.

At age 18 we get handed a whole bucket filled with rights and privileges, but alcohol, for whatever reason, is conspicuously absent. When I turned 18, I got the right to vote, which I was very happy about, along with four other abilities I wasn’t so thrilled with: The ability to buy cigarettes, the ability to be drafted, the ability to buy pornography-

Well, okay, three other abilities I wasn’t so thrilled with: Cigarettes, draft, the lottery…

Call it two – two abilities I wasn’t so thrilled with. Cigarettes, which are vastly more harmful than alcohol, and the draft, which implies that the government has no qualms about sending me off to my death but can’t get behind letting me see Chinatown while people around me drink beer.

Truman Capps can’t wait to turn 21 so that he can get carded and then triumphantly produce his ID, preferably while yelling, “BOOYAH!”

Toy Stories

In a world...

I realize that I talk about Transformers a lot here. Sure, I don’t dedicate entire updates to conundrums of the series, such as what would happen if you were riding in a Transformer and it transformed with you in it, but I make passing reference to the films and the merchandise on a fairly regular basis. I think that happens a lot because these days I feel as though Transformers is a pretty good way to gauge the stupidity of our times, and how far people are willing to go to pander to it.

From the start, what Transformers was about was selling cheap shit to stupid kids, which is the very textbook definition of ‘advertising.’ Hasbro created a line of toy cars that could be converted into robots and then built an entire animated series around the merchandise to sell it. Years went by and the kids who were targeted grew up; Transformers became less cool. But then, when those kids were in their 20s, Michael Bay went and made a movie about the TV show designed to advertise the toys, which appealed to the same generation’s nostalgia and convinced them to start pumping their money into the same gimmick as before, only this time around it’s got boobs and it runs in slow motion. The movie begat sequels and a new line of toys as well as a new animated series. This is an excellent example of, if I may quote Elton John, “The circle of liiiiiiiiife!”

And all of that is fine – par for the course, really. I fully expected the first movie to suck, and it was actually pretty good in spite of the fact that it was a movie about toys that cost more than the GDP of Iceland to make. The second one apparently sucks, which is no great surprise – after all, Hollywood is not content to simply milk a cash cow; their preferred course of action is to fertilize it with dragon sperm in hopes that it will give birth to a cash dragon/cash cow hybrid that breathes rainbows and cries golden tears when confronted with its hideous dual nature. But even at its stupidest, whoriest point; the Transformers franchise has one thing going for it: It has roots in something with an actual story.

Transformers has unfortunately set the precedent that a movie based on anything currently rotting at the bottom of most 20somethings’ closets is a surefire hit.* G.I. Joe was one thing, but as studios begin to run through all the toy lines with actual stories, we can predict a real tidal wave of terrible entertainment on the horizon.

*Pornography: Rise of Carmen Electra, coming soon to a theater near you.

For example, it’s confirmed that a Stretch Armstrong movie is in the works. Now, Stretch Armstrong was a little before my time, but as I recall (and Wikipedia confirms), he was “…a well muscled blonde man wearing a pair of swimming trunks. Its most notable feature was that its arms and legs could stretch outwards, presumably without breaking.” That’s it. The rest of the Wikipedia page is all about cultural references and the description of his accessories. So, in case you’re keeping score, the plot of your movie is: A well muscled blonde man in swim trunks can stretch his body really far.*

*Pornography 2: Whiplash Wang

Now, I might be old fashioned, but I feel like a movie needs a little more than that to have half a shot at not sucking. A stretchy blonde guy in swim trunks isn’t a movie; it’s not even a YouTube video. At best it’s a photograph, and not a very interesting one at that.

Maybe you’re saying “This gives the screenwriters a blank slate – they get to give Stretch Armstrong a voice and a backstory he never had! It’s creativity, stupid!” However, I’ve got to disagree – no matter how blank your slate is in this situation, you’re still trying to write a summer blockbuster around a blonde stretchy dude in swim trunks; at best this is fan fiction, and as someone who spent most of middle school writing fan fiction, I can assure you that it’s going to suck. If you really want a blank slate, maybe do away with Stretch Armstrong entirely and just write an original movie straight from your own head.

And so long as we’re talking about originality, I may as well mention that a Lego movie has been greenlit. This is arguably the only toy to movie conversion more obscure and stupid than Stretch Armstrong.* Legos did have some overarching themes, which give them a leg up on Stretch, but those themes were things like, “Cowboys,” “Pirates,” and “Space,” all of which Hollywood has tested with varying degrees of success.

*Scratch that – Play-Dough and Pet Rock have the lead.

That aside, the real reason I can’t see any good coming from a Lego movie is the fact that Legos really didn’t need much story; they literally were a blank slate for every elementary schooler who was bored on a Saturday afternoon and had the artistic vision of a spaceship on wagon wheels flying the jolly roger covered in tiny yellow plastic pizzas. What did it all mean? That was for the kid to decide. My Lego cowboys orchestrated heists, chases, and shootouts that raged for days between the living room, the hallway, my room, and the bathroom (where the last of the bandits drowned after the sheriff shot a hole in their rowboat while they tried to escape across the sink).

Just because a toy was popular doesn’t mean it’ll make a popular movie; a movie needs a story, a toy does not. Kids give toys their own stories. Hollywood should look somewhere else.

Truman Capps recently found out that The English Patient was in fact based on a popular line of brooding, melancholy action figures with emotionally charged backgrounds.

Glenn Beck Is A Bad Journalist And An Asshat

"Latent racism combined with black president make Glenn Beck something-something."
"Go crazy?"
"DON'T MIND IF I DO! BWALALALALALALA!"

I don’t have a problem with Republicans, in and of themselves. There’s nothing wrong with wanting minimal government intervention in your life or being in favor of fiscal responsibility and states’ rights and all that. To be honest, that’s all fairly reasonable stuff to want. I’m personally a big fan of fiscal responsibility myself – a little bit of fiscal responsibility would have gone a long way toward keeping Wall Street from burning down, falling over, and sinking into the swamp.

My problem with the current incarnation of the Republican Party is that over the last 30 years or so they’ve fallen in with the “family values” crowd, and now a lot of big Republican talking points are things like outlawing gay marriage and abortion, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, seeing as the government dictating who can and can’t get married and what women can and can’t do with their bodies is hella intervention in day to day life. It’s this sort of hypocrisy that gets me: I didn’t see an awful lot of fiscal responsibility during the last eight years of Republican rule, as evidenced by the war over nonexistent weapons and the fact that Wall Street did burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp. Furthermore, a lot of the same senators who are so up on family values are the ones who usually get caught in airport bathrooms or are flying to Argentina for booty calls on the state’s dime.

But then, there’s the conservative pundits. And I think they’re just about the scariest thing on Earth. Sure, hypocritical family-values Republicans who want to impose their so called morality on the rest of the country are no good, but they tend to self destruct pretty quickly because it only takes one minor infraction to destroy their credibility.

Look at Bill ‘O Reilly. Everybody hates him. Hitler would think he was a prick. And that’s not just because of his bullying, tantrum-prone antics on his show or the fact that he sends camera crews out to ambush his opponents. He and Fox News paid a hefty settlement to a female staffer on his show after she sued him for sexual harassment, citing a conversation where he proposed they hop in the shower and rub one another with loofas and falafels.

Can you imagine what this sort of thing would do to a politician’s career? He’d be run out of town on a rail. But Bill O Reilly wasn’t elected. Much like genital warts and diarrhea, Bill O Reilly just kind of showed up, and he won’t go away until he’s good and ready. Negative publicity can kill a politician, but not a pundit – like the robots in The Matrix, they feed off our hate and turn it into ad revenue.

A lot of people pull out Ann Coulter as an example of a conservative pundit they hate, but that’s never made a lot of sense to me. Ann Coulter describes herself as a polemicist, which is literally defined as somebody who says crazy shit to get attention. Her whole game is saying outlandish and offensive things in order to piss people off to the point that they buy her books just to see what crazy thing she’s going to say next. I doubt that she actually thinks that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, much in the same way I doubt that clowns actually think that tiny cars and huge shoes are effective means of transportation and dress. They don’t really buy into it; they do it because they’re good at it and it makes them money.

The reason that I hate Glenn Beck so much is because he isn’t that.

When my parents were childless yuppies living in Seattle in the mid 1980s, they would pass by a homeless man who stood on a downtown corner on their way home. He would pontificate to the passing commuters, without notes, for hours on end about a wide variety of topics, namely the evils of “symptom causing nerve gas and organized religion!” As Mom has described it, he didn’t look out of the ordinary, and if you listened to him for a short period of time he might even seem like a fairly normal guy. But then, if you stopped and listened for a few minutes or more, it would become rapidly apparent that this man was in fact totally batshit insane.

To me, Glenn Beck is that guy, the only difference being that he’s got a big platform and a wide audience that seems to believe what he says. People latch on to his trumped up 9/12 project, in spite of the fact that he publicly criticized the families of 9/11 victims in the past. People nod their heads when he goes on air and agrees that Al Queda should attack America again. People listen when he says Barack Obama hates white people, in spite of the fact that his own goddamn mother is white.

If it was Ann Coulter saying this, I’d be slapping my knee and laughing, toasting her with my Diet Coke, saying, “Oh, Ann – Alec Baldwin is going to pitch such a fit about that on The Huffington Post tomorrow.” But Glenn Beck is Ann Coulter crazy with Bill O Reilly conviction – he says things that have no bearing in common sense and believes in them completely.

Happy ending: Three of Glenn Beck’s sponsors, among them Progressive Auto Insurance and Proctor and Gamble, have pulled their ads from his program thanks to a petition from colorofchange.org. It’s just proof that sooner or later the true crazies will snuff themselves out when people quit throwing change into their hats.

Truman Capps hates that Glenn Beck named his TV show Glenn Beck, because if that sort of thing is okay now he may as well just call his blog Truman Capps.

Signs Of The Times

Pic unrelated.

Like I said last week, I’ve been coming to Lummi Island with my family for years upon years, as far back as I can remember. And like I said last week, the ride up to Lummi changed a lot from one trip to the next. However, having spent a few days here now, I’m struck by the things that have changed on the island as well.

When I was a little kid, I positively loved it up here (which isn’t to say I don’t now – I just get antsy being this close to Canada) and whenever I wasn’t here, I usually wanted to be. When I’d watch Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego, a children’s geography quiz show where winners received a free trip anywhere in North America, I was consistently shocked and appalled that when the winners gleefully showed the card on which they’d written their desired destination, it never read “LUMMI ISLAND, WASHINGTON.” Those morons, I had thought, are going to have a terrible time in New York City or Orlando! It never entered my mind that everyone in the world didn’t know about the tiny, isolated island where my family spent our vacations, nor the fact that maybe people wouldn’t want to blow their free trip anywhere on a jaunt to an island where the primary activities are reading or picking up slimy rocks at low tide and seeing what’s underneath. Back then, I really wished that everybody could know what a great, hidden gem Lummi Island actually was.

Well, 14 years later and my wish came true, only the people showing up at Lummi Island aren’t eight year olds with a preternatural knowledge of geography but instead rich people, who are, in my estimate, far less desirable. On my last regular trip to the island, back in 2002, cell phone reception was spotty, television was a luxury, and if you wanted Internet you had to go out into the woods with a pitchfork and shovel and dig for hours until you hit a vein. Back then, throwing dried branches on the fire in the stove and watching how they burned was my Gears of War 2.

But since then, the rich people found Lummi Island and realized that it was peaceful and secluded, and in their efforts to acclimate it to their lifestyle completely trashed all that. There are now about a dozen McMansions spread across the island like a herpes infection that promises to get much worse if not burned to the ground. Old houses facing the San Juan Islands across Legoe Bay have been bought and remodeled into mission style villas the likes of which you’d see in Southern California, completely out of place with the pleasantly ramshackle fishermen’s houses and rusting dinghies in the area. What’s worst, however, is The Asshole.

The Asshole bought the plot of land next door to that of my uncle, who lives on the island, and one door down from The Green Cabin, where my parents and I used to stay when we came up here. The Asshole, a real estate developer, demolished the old house on the property and built a sprawling three story dwelling with multiple peaked rooftops and siding that looks enough like logs to make passers by think, “Wow – this person has enough money to buy fake wood to make their house look like it’s an authentic log cabin with a satellite dish and Traeger grill!”

My uncle had a handshake contract with his old neighbor that they could both use the neighbor’s driveway to clear the 20 or so feet from the road to where the houses lay, even though the driveway was entirely on the neighbor’s property. Once The Asshole bought that piece of property, however, he informed my uncle that he would not be allowed to use the driveway anymore, forcing my uncle to construct his own. Next, he cut down a lot of the trees on the property that he felt interfered with his view.

And most recently, he’s been trying to exploit an error in a land use contract signed between the original owners of both plots that will make the beach in front of my uncle’s house his property, giving him the right to restrict access to the beach that my family has been using for multiple decades. Keep in mind that The Asshole has been coming to the island for a couple years, as opposed to my uncle, who has been living here for well over ten years.

Rich people like The Asshole have pumped up the island’s economy, too – both restaurants have gone a little more upscale, and we’ve got a winery now, which is as surefire a sign of classiness as you’ll ever get. Wireless Internet is abundant – I’m using it right now – and cell service is strong. That’s the thing about modern amenities; they’re expensive, so they almost always follow the people who can pay for them, and an influx of people usually tears apart the individual character of what was there before.

Today we visited The Green Cabin, and made a point of poking around on the beach in front of The Asshole’s house for a long time, much to his poodle’s dismay.

Truman Capps thinks that those who live in glass houses near beaches full of stones would do well to check themselves before they wreck themselves.

On The Road

I'm in there somewhere, hating life.

I’ve never liked driving, most likely due to the fact that I’ve never felt the need for speed – nor, in fact, even a strong desire for it. At first I was receptive enough to the idea of learning how to move a large piece of machinery over a great amount of space, but the good folks at my high school saw fit to try and scare us into driving safely with lots of sad stories and pictures of teens who had died in their prime because they’d gone 35 in a school zone.* While most of my classmates disregarded what they’d been taught and drove recklessly anyway, I took it all to heart, to the point that I came to see driving as more dangerous than smoking and far less cool.

*Out of everything I heard over the course of two health courses, the scariest thing I remember is the trauma nurse from Salem Hospital who told us that when paramedics respond to a car accident, standard operating procedure is to give all unconscious victims a catheter, whether they need it or not. The thought of bumping my head on my steering wheel and waking up with a tube in my wang has horrified me into years of signaling before I leave the curb and stopping for yellow lights.

I don’t have my car at school, which means that nine months out of the year I’m not driving, which is fine by me. However, during the summer I’ve got to drive occasionally, and it’s usually a somewhat frantic experience because I’ve been out of practice for the entirety of the school year. Surface streets in Sellwood are bad, downtown Portland is worse, and the Interstate is like a really boring video game which only gets exciting right before you die (or so I’ve heard).

Yesterday, my parents, The Girlfriend, and myself all left off for Lummi Island, my family’s occasional vacation retreat in Northern Washington. Seeing as The Girlfriend’s presence meant more luggage which wouldn’t fit in our Prius, we opted to take two cars, which resulted in me spending the entire day driving through Washington on the Interstate. For the record, as I write this I have no tubes in my wang – at least, not to my knowledge.

My parents and I have been making the drive from Oregon to Lummi Island for a lot of my life – a couple times a year when I was in elementary and middle school, mostly during the summer. It was a lot of fun up there for a little kid – the island was close to an Indian reservation where they sold illegal fireworks at bargain basement prices all year round, so every trip brought with it the promise of the potential to set oneself on fire or at least blow off a limb. When I was in middle school, my aunt who owned the family cabin on the island died, and afterwards we didn’t go up as often.

What in some ways is more memorable than the island is the drive up. A six hour trek up the I-5 corridor through just about every backwater hillbilly town in Washington – Centralia, Maytown, Everett, Seattle – that eventually leads to the ferry that takes drivers to Lummi Island. We’ve been taking the same route for my entire life, so I’m used to seeing all the same landmarks, but this was the first time I’ve made the drive myself.

It’s strange to go back and take a spin through a childhood tradition as an adult – I learned this the hard way when I got thrown out of Discovery Zone last year. But driving to Lummi Island is unique because not only did it put me behind the wheel for longer than I’d ever driven before, but also because none of it was new. It’s like watching a movie you haven’t seen in years, only now you’re in the title role and have the ability to spin off the road and wind up in a ditch if you so choose.

Maybe it was the fact that I was in the driver’s seat or maybe it was the fact that the last time I made this trip I wasn’t as aware of my surroundings, but I picked up on a lot more of the nuances of the ride. The redneck message board outside Centralia was even more offensive than usual (“WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE??” was the neocon message du jour) and I was more aware of the poor condition of the Interstate highway when I was white knuckling steering wheel, feeling teeth rattle out of my head thanks to poor resurfacing.

Making it to Lummi in one piece added a sense of accomplishment to the jubilation at completing the six-hour journey. It’s like making your own ham sandwich instead of having one made for you – it’s basically the same sandwich, but you feel like you earned the one you made for yourself. It’s the same thing with driving to your vacation location as opposed to being driven there – having spent all day doing something I hated, I feel like I’ve earned my week of leisure.

Because this summer of unemployment has just been taking the piss out of me.

Truman Capps is considering asking The Girlfriend to drive home.

Postscript

...get it?

Listen:

I know two things. I know that honey mustard is delicious, and that I hate flogging a dead horse. Now, of course, there are exceptions in both cases – sometimes I’m in more of a spicy Dijon mood, and I’m perfectly willing to flog dead horses like Fox or the city of El Paso when they’ve worked their way under my skin enough. But even then, those are mere passing references. I’d like to think that I’m not the sort of guy who would jerk his (small) fanbase around by writing multiple updates about the same thing within a short timespan. But, to be honest, I know three things:

I know that honey mustard is delicious, I know that I hate flogging a dead horse, and I know that I really hate Sarah Palin and everything that she stands for. And I thought that her resignation announcement would be her last word on the issue, so I wrote the blog about that a while ago and called it good.

But then she went and started talking again, and what kind of man would I be if I didn’t address what is without a doubt one of her least comprehensible speeches yet?

What an absolutely beautiful day it is, and it is my honor to speak to all Alaskans, to our Alaskan family this last time as your governor. And it is always great to be in Fairbanks. The rugged hardy people that live up here and some of the most patriotic people whom you will ever know live here, and one thing that you are known for is your steadfast support of our military community up here and I thank you for that and thank you United States military for protecting the greatest nation on Earth. Together we stand.

“Honestly, folks – the asses here in Fairbanks are without a doubt the finest asses I have had the pleasure of kissing.”

And getting up here I say it is the best road trip in America soaring through nature's finest show.

I’m sorry, but I believe Meerkat Mansion is nature’s finest show.

Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it's the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn't it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins.

If I put this in an English textbook I guarantee you I could convince a bunch of 10th graders that it was stream-of-consciousness transcendentalist poetry as opposed to political posturing.

It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future. That is what we get to see every day.

“From our helicopters, as we reload.”

And it is our men and women in uniform securing it, and we are facing tough challenges in America with some seeming to just be Hell bent maybe on tearing down our nation, perpetuating some pessimism, and suggesting American apologetics, suggesting perhaps that our best days were yesterdays. But as other people have asked, "How can that pessimism be, when proof of our greatness, our pride today is that we produce the great proud volunteers who sacrifice everything for country?" Now this week alone, Sean Parnell and I we're on the, um, on Ft. Rich the base there, the army chapel, and we heard the last roll call, and the sounding of Taps for three very brave, very young Alaskan soldiers who just gave their all for all of us. Together we do stand with gratitude for our troops who protect all of our cherished freedoms, including our freedom of speech which, par for the course, I'm going to exercise.

David Letterman and the Internet, on the other hand, do not have this luxury.

And first, some straight talk for some, just some in the media because another right protected for all of us is freedom of the press, and you all have such important jobs reporting facts and informing the electorate, and exerting power to influence. You represent what could and should be a respected honest profession that could and should be the cornerstone of our democracy. Democracy depends on you, and that is why, that's why our troops are willing to die for you. So, how 'bout in honor of the American soldier, ya quite makin' things up. And don't underestimate the wisdom of the people, and one other thing for the media, our new governor has a very nice family too, so leave his kids alone.

Somebody should tell that to Alex Rodriguez – I hear he knocked up both of Parnell’s kids, made the dog watch, then ran off with his wife. And Parnell has a tiny penis.

OK, today is a beautiful day and today as we swear in Sean Parnell, no one will be happier than I to witness by God's grace Alaskans with strength of character advancing our beloved state. Sean has that. Craig Campbell has that. I remember on that December day, we took the oath to uphold our state constitution, and it was written right here in Fairbanks by very wise pioneers. We shared the vision for government that they ground in that document. Our founders wrote "all political power is inherent in the people. All government originates with the people. It's founded upon their will only and it's instituted for the good of the people as a whole." Their remarkably succinct words guided us in all of our efforts in serving you and putting you first, and we have done our best to fulfill promises that I made on Alaska Day, 2005, when I first asked for the honor of serving you.

Don’t call your job an honor when you hate it so much that you quit halfway through your term. If you’re honored to be doing something, it’s implied that you want to be doing it. Nobody’s ever been honored to do something they hate. “Well, it’s been a real honor being the chief Dogshit Eater for these past six months, but I’m afraid I must resign. And leave my replacement’s kids alone!”

Remember then, our state so desired and so deserved ethics reform. We promised it, and now it is the law. Ironically, it needs additional reform to stop blatant abuse from partisan operatives, and I hope the lawmakers will continue that reform. We promised that you would finally see a fair return on your Alaskan owned natural resources so we build a new oil and gas appraisal system, an is an equitable formula to usher in a new era of competition and transparency and protection for Alaskans and the producers. ACES incentivizes new exploration and it's the exploration that is our future. It opens up oil basins and it ensures that the people will never be taken advantage of again. Don't forget Alaskans you are the resource owners per our constitution and that's why for instance last year when oil prices soared and state coffers swelled, but you were smacked with high energy prices, we sent you the energy rebate. See, it's your money and I've always believed that you know how to better spend it than government can spend it.

For the record, when she says “your money” what she’s actually referring to is “whatever is left after I buy plane tickets for my family and accept per diem to live in my own house.”

I promised that we would protect this beautiful environment while safely and ethically developing resources, and we did. We built the Petroleum Oversight Office and a sub-cabinet to study climate conditions.

“…And then disregard those studies so we can drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

I promised that we would manage our fish and wildlife for abundance…

Oh, what, she shot fish from a helicopter too?

…and that we would defend the Constitution, and we have, though outside special interest groups they still just don't get it on this one.

She’s right – the Constitution doesn’t say that you can’t try to ban books from the local library…

Let me tell you, Alaskans really need to stick together on this with new leadership in this area especially, encouraging new leadership... got to stiffen your spine to do what's right for Alaska when the pressure mounts, because you're going to see anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood and here's how they do it. They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets, they use Alaska as a fundraising tool for their anti-second amendment causes. Stand strong, and remind them patriots will protect our guaranteed, individual right to bear arms, and by the way, Hollywood needs to know, we eat, therefore we hunt.

Those Hollywood liberals prefer to eat meat that comes from inhumane and sadistic factory farming operations as opposed to inhumane and sadistic helicopter and shotgun operations.

What I promised, we accomplished.

“And in two and a half years, no less! So I just figured, hey, why not knock off about a year early?”

So much success, and Alaska there is much good in store further down the road, but to reach it we must value and live the optimistic pioneering spirit that made this state proud and free, and we can resist enslavement to big central government that crushes hope and opportunity.

In Palin’s eyes, the only opportunities the government should crush are the opportunity for gays to get married and women to have abortions. All other opportunities should remain un-crushed.

Be wary of accepting government largess. It doesn't come free and often, accepting it takes away everything that is free, melting into Washington's powerful "care-taking" arms will just suck incentive to work hard and chart our own course right out of us, and that not only contributes to an unstable economy and dizzying national debt, but it does make us less free.

Could you speak up? I can’t hear you over the sound of the Alaska Permanent Fund.

I resisted the stimulus package. I resisted the stimulus package and we have championed earmark reform, slashing earmark requests by 85% to break the cycle of dependency on a stifling, unsustainable federal agenda, and other states should follow this for their and for America's stability. We don't have to feel that we must beg an allowance from Washington, except to beg the allowance to be self-determined. See, to be self-sufficient, Alaska must be allowed to develop - to drill and build and climb, to fulfill statehood's promise.

And, most of all, to be able to rape the bejeezus out of its environment.

Alaskans will remember that years ago, remember we sported the old bumper sticker that said, "Alaska. We Don't Give a Darn How They Do It Outside?" Do you remember that? I remember that, and remember it was because we would be different. We'd roll up our sleeves, and we would diligently sow and reap, and we can still do this to carve wealth out of the wilderness and make our living on the water, with strong hands and innovative minds, now with smarter technology. It is what our first people and our parents did. It worked, because they worked. We must be prudent and persistent and press for the people's right to responsibly develop God-given resources for the maximum benefit of the people.

Alternative energy is not a God given resource. It is for fags and ladyboys.

Yes, America must look north to the future for security, for energy independence, for our strategic location on the globe. Alaska is the gate-keeper of the continent.

Alaska is situated between the least populous part of Russia and one of the least populous parts of Canada. It’s a lot like keeping a gate on the Moon.

So, we are here today at a changing of the guard. Now, people who know me, and they know how much I love this state, some still are choosing not to hear why I made the decision to chart a new course to advance the state.

And it’s a lot easier to influence policy and guide Alaska as an ordinary citizen with no political power than as the most powerful politician in the state.

So, as we all move forward together, let's vow to keep championing Alaska, to advocate responsible development, and smaller government, and freedom, and when I took the oath to serve you, I promised...remember I promised to steadfastly and doggedly guard the interests of this great state like that grizzly guards her cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own.

It’s like a hurricane hit the dependent clause factory and scattered them all over the place.

And I will keep that vow wherever the road may lead. Todd and I, and Track, Bristol, Tripp, Willow, Piper, Trig...I think I got 'em all.

I don’t get what she’s so uptight about. Letterman only implied that 1/6th of her children had gone to bed with an MLB player. This is a numbers game, woman.

We will forever be so grateful for the honor of our lifetime to have served you. Our whole big diverse full and fun family, we all thank you and I am very very blessed to have had their support all along, for Todd's support. I am thankful too. I have been blessed to have been raised in this last frontier. Thank you for our home, Mom and Dad, because in Alaska it is not an easy living, but it is a good living, and here it is impossible to lose your way. Wherever the road may lead you, we have that steadying great North Star to guide us home.

Hey, sometimes the North Star guides you home early. Like, really early. As in, before you’re done doing your job early.

Truman Capps salutes those of you who kept reading the whole time.

Observations for July 26th, 2009

This guy and I, we like to observe shit.

1) Fred Meyer has a checkout aisle marked “family friendly,” nestled in right next to the express “12 items of less” aisles. I was interested to see what made one checkout aisle more friendly toward families than any other – is the checker in a family friendly aisle not a convicted sex offender? – so I peeked into the aisle to investigate. As it turns out, the “family friendly” aisle has no tabloid magazines with pictures of Britney’s liposuction or Jon and Kate’s recent marital pandemonium. Honestly, I think “family friendly” isn’t a broad enough term for a checkout aisle devoid of trumped up celebrity gossip. “Intelligence friendly aisle.” “People friendly aisle.” “Friendly aisle.”

2) On more than one occasion, while driving up and down MLK Boulevard at night, I’ve run into crime scenes where the Portland Police have blocked off all four lanes, forcing me to take a convoluted detour through sidestreets. This never once happened to me in Salem, and while I’m sure more people get shot in Portland than in Salem, I spent ten years in Salem versus maybe a year of actually living in Portland (as opposed to Eugene). This leads me to believe that while in small towns like Salem people are courteous enough to get murdered on sidewalks or in their homes, where their body will be of relatively little public burden, Portland city-slickers callously get shot in the middle of the street as a final act of defiance.

3) I feel as though in the grand scheme of things, the mosquito may have served a purpose at some point, but that purpose is now long gone. Jurassic Park was made possible by the notion that mosquitoes who had sucked dinosaur blood would get trapped in amber and preserved into the 20^th century to better facilitate the creation of velociraptors for fun and profit. Fine, good, great – that movie came out like 16 years ago. The mosquito has served its purpose as a plot device for a great movie about dinosaurs; I’d like it if they’d stop stinging me and go extinct already.

4) I’ve never been able to lock something and just walk away from it worry-free. I can step out of the house and watch myself lock the door, making the mental note that, yes, the door has been locked, but by the time I’m two blocks away I’m already asking, “Are you sure you locked the front door? Because, y’know, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you turned the key and you thought you heard the bolt go, but actually you accidentally turned it the wrong way, so the door is still unlocked, and crackheads will come in and steal all your shit. You should go back and check while you still have shit in there. Those crackheads be fast. Go back and check. Go back and check. Go back and check.” But no – I power through it. I drive to wherever I’m going and try to carry on with my day. But as soon as I’m out of sight of the car, I’m already asking, “Are you sure you locked the car?”

5) As much as I hate to admit it, I think that deep down in my subconscious, I actually think that I can trick my lactose intolerance by sneaking uncultured dairy products when it isn’t looking. For example, I’ve recently taken up drinking some Bailey’s Irish Cream with seltzer on those special occasions when Diet Coke just isn’t special enough. The first two times, it was larks – it was creamy and delicious and proved that there was a sort of alcohol I liked. But then, the other night, was the third time, and about half an hour afterwards I paid the price for a good long time, as though my body was saying, “Oh, yeah! You thought you could sneak all that cream by me? You think I’d just process it by accident? We call that hubris, asshole!” As usual, I learned my lesson and swore off uncultured dairy products like cream and milk. But give it six months. Sooner or later, my large intestine will let its guard down, and then bring on the milkshakes.

6) Speaking of milkshakes, Carl’s still hasn’t given me my job back, even though they’d told me I’d get it back, which was why I didn’t apply anywhere else during spring break and thus could find no other jobs when they pulled the rug out from under me this summer. Back when I worked there, I used the name “Carl’s” in order to protect the restaurant’s identity in case I ever wrote about something really raunchy going on in the kitchen. However, they’ve pissed me off and I choose now to strip them of that anonymity: The restaurant was called Mike’s Drive-In, a three-restaurant burger chain located exclusively in the Portland Metro area. Good food but dishonest middle management.

7) While I wholeheartedly agree that both the Democrats and Republicans are full of shit, I’ve noticed that some Libertarians can be awfully self-righteous about how they and they alone recognize the truth and beauty of the free market and individual liberties.

8) Things Mike Whitman has stolen from me over the past year and a half: MIT mug given to me by my aunt and uncle, the equivalent of roughly 14 cans of soda and three bags of chips (by way of sneaking sips and bites when I’m not looking), and one University of Oregon hooded sweatshirt. I had lost track of the sweatshirt after using it to wrap up a bottle of cheap rum to smuggle it into the journalism school (it’s cool, it was for Writers), and had thought it was lost until six months later when I met Mike for lunch and found him sitting there wearing it. It took about ten minutes’ worth of argument before I convinced him that the sweatshirt was mine. Joke’s on him, though – yesterday I snagged one of his University of Oregon sweatshirts, albeit from 1995.

Truman Capps is highly observant.

Into The Wild

Nobody is in this tent because the bears got here before the guy with the camera.

Whenever I tell people that I’ve never been camping before, they always look at me as though I’ve just said, “Insofar as minorities are concerned, I could really do without black people.” This look of utter shock is usually followed up by outrage, which more often than not comes in the form of the words, “You’re an Oregonian!” as though I’ve allowed some sort of metropolitan elitism to influence my life for the past 20 years because I was under the impression I lived in Greenwich Village. They follow this up by shaking their heads in despair, muttering, “You have to go camping, Truman.”

I’d like to start by blaming my parents, as I do for most dysfunctional elements of my upbringing. While you and your parents were out pitching tents and heating up Ballpark Franks over a fire, my parents and I were playing Mario Kart and using a microwave to cook our hotdogs with a great deal more speed and efficiency. We’re just really not outdoorsy people, to the point that my childhood was almost entirely bereft of picnics, because my father thought it was crazy to prepare food and then, instead of eating it in a climate controlled environment with easy access to a sanitary bathroom, take all that food outside where bugs would come after it and wild animals could attack at any moment.*

*At first, I thought my Dad was just being a party pooper, but when I was in kindergarten or first grade I was sitting on our back porch eating a McDonald’s hamburger Mom had bought me when a crow swooped down and grabbed the top bun right off my burger as I was sitting there eating it. For years afterwards I was convinced that Dad either was an expert on the dangers of nature or had the ability to communicate telepathically with crows and was punishing me for not heeding his warnings about the evil of picnics.

I guess camping has always seemed a bit antithetical to my way of life. I’m a 21^st century guy, and if I had the opportunity I’d love to be a 24^th or 25^th century guy in order to facilitate my desire to captain a smuggler’s spaceship and employ guile and laser cannons to solve all of my problems. Camping, to me, seems like the act of transforming oneself into an 18^th century guy by living in drafty quarters with no electricity or running water. As I understand it, when you have to take a shit while camping, you basically go into the woods, dig a hole, shit into it, and then fill the hole. Don’t get me wrong – I love filling up the Earth with my excrement as much as the next guy, but sometimes I’m not up for the whole song and dance of finding a shovel and picking out an unused patch of my neighbor’s garden. That’s why I use the toilet that countless years of scientific discovery has seen fit to place inside my house.

The closest my family ever got to camping was a small green cabin on Lummi Island in Northern Washington. It had electricity, cold running water, and 400,000 mice, but no bathroom and only a wood stove for heating. We went up there a lot when I was a kid, and even though there was an outhouse and no TV and the radio there only picked up Canadian stations, I had a lot of fun. This was back before I realized how much I enjoyed bathing on a daily basis.

Even then, though, I still had a roof over my head and something besides a flashlight for electricity. There were beds and floors in that cabin; in a tent, as I’ve heard, it’s just you surrounded by nylon thinner than the clothes you’re wearing. If a bear or a serial killer or a serial killer riding a bear happened upon the cabin at Lummi, he’d have to contend with four walls and locked doors. When I think about spending the night in a tent, all I can see is a claw or a knife (or a claw and a knife) plunging through the thin, malleable wall and cutting a new entrance.

I bring up camping now because the month of August has become The Perfect Storm of outdoorsy activities. Early in the month, my family will be returning to Lummi Island for the first time in a couple of years, although this time around we’ll be renting a house that I’m led to believe has toilets, showers, and a bare minimum of local wildlife. A week later, I’ll be spending a few days in a yurt with The Girlfriend and her parents,* which will be the longest amount of time I’ve ever stayed in something with such an obnoxious name. Mere days after that, The Girlfriend and I are going camping in the vast badlands of Eastern Oregon with friends from school, who have told me that I can look forward to a “character building experience,” along with “tubing,” whatever the hell that is.

*I would say “yurting,” which is apparently a word in spite of what my computer seems to think, but my knowledge of a yurt is that it’s a primitive dwelling with few amenities, which sounds a lot like the cabin at Lummi, and we never called it “CabinatLummiying.”

Expect to hear more about camping in roughly a month, once I’ve run this gauntlet of new and interesting stuff. If you don’t, well, blame it on the bear mounted serial killers.

Truman Capps hopes Nature has WiFi.

Issues

STELLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

God damn it.

God damn it.

I want to tell you a story. It’s a story about two ostensibly heterosexual dudes who, after doing their time writing brilliant scripts for a terrible public access Reno 911 ripoff, decided to abscond with most of the cast to create a show of their own design, starring them, about them. It was a show about writers who never actually wrote anything, who were utter and abject failures in most ways it’s possible to be a failure, and who spent most of their time squabbling and trying to one up each other. It was a show called Writers, and man, did Mike and I ever feel clever.

But then there’s THIS shit.

Michael and Michael Have Issues is a show starring Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, veterans of the vastly underrated Stella (which influenced Writers in its own subtle ways), as two guys named Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black who host a variety show and spend most of their time squabbling and trying to one-up each other. Yeah, there are some differences, but it’s basically the same fucking show.

Well, come to think of it, there are quite a few differences – for example, their show has a cast of professional actors anchored by two legitimate TV celebrities. They have access to far more advanced equipment, and have a full crew to operate all of it. They have a budget. Their show is being watched by more than 15 people. They are getting famous. They are getting paychecks. They are happy right now because they are receiving positive reviews.

It is the same show. And what’s worse is that it’s really, really good. In one of the scenes, Michael and Michael come to blows over what a butterfly fart sounds like. It’s a scene of such elegance and beauty that I honestly am embarrassed that Mike and I didn’t come up with it first. I mean, butterfly farts – if genius gags were snack foods, farting butterflies would be Funyuns.

I don’t know if there’s a feeling quite like what this feeling is. There were parts of making Writers that were fun, yeah – I can remember maybe two distinct times that I wasn’t riding on the cusp of a spastic stress dookie. But I’d say that the majority of making the show was definitely not something we did for our own personal enjoyment. By its very nature, filmmaking is not a relaxing experience – this is why there are no filmmaking classes at resorts or day spas. The whole business of shooting something is about setting up cameras and focusing them, and white balancing them, and getting the lighting right, and blocking the actors so that the lighting is right on the actors, and framing everything, and then, provided that they did everything right, you repeat the process for the next shot. And it will take all day, and it will go over schedule, and something will break, and somebody will go to the bathroom and not come back. And then, after that, you’ve still got to edit everything. Fortunately, we delegated – Mike was in charge of shooting and editing the entire series, and I bought pizza one day.*

*Actually, Mike paid for the pizza.

Through the whole thing, though, we reminded ourselves that our show was original and a breath of fresh air, and that some kind producer would find it and give us a TV show, and then we’d be so fabulously rich that we could spend our days drinking expensive bottled water and playing Supermodel Polo.* It’s what kept us going through the arduous seven month process of cranking out high quality entertainment; that is, as high as quality can be when your show is running on a station that broadcasts maybe 50% of the time due either to technical difficulties or apathy.

*You may be wondering if that’s regular polo played while riding around on supermodels’ backs, or water polo played with supermodels, or water polo played in a pool filled with supermodels instead of water. I leave it up to you to decide.

But now, with all this hard work done, it turns out that other, more famous, more talented people had come upon the same basic concept and successfully pitched and marketed it. It’s like if you busted your ass to paint a pretty cool picture on your ceiling, and then, right when you were hoping that the hard work would pay off, you find out that Michelangelo just painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and his painting has much higher production value and better comedic timing than yours. Sure, maybe what you painted was pretty cool and good for you, but when you’re up against Michelangelo, it doesn’t look quite as good anymore. In fact, it makes you start to look like a poser.

Mike pointed out to me earlier that there’s a lot of overlap on TV - 90210 and The O.C., Full House and Family Matters, Fox News and Triumph of the Will - but that’s because those are markets with broad appeal. Everybody wants to watch shows about sexy teenagers and middle class families haphazardly raising their kids, but the “antagonistic losers competing against one another in order to regain some long lost sense of manhood” genre is pretty narrow. It’s the white chocolate of TV genres. There’s about enough room in this genre for one show, and it isn’t the one created by two guys in Oregon who nobody in Hollywood has ever heard of.

Of course, this is far from the end – Mike and I are doing other revolutionary shit that will doubtless transform us into bold new American gods – but Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter appear to have beaten us to the punch on the TV show angle. So I guess our only option at this point is to sue Comedy Central for stealing our idea – sure, Michael and Michael was probably in pre-production long before Mike and I had even met, but that’s the thing: Those tricky bastards copied our show before we’d even thought of it.

Truman Capps and Mike Whitman also have issues, but nobody ever talks about them.

Harry And Me

It's like, why even use Google Images when I can just look at Facebook?

It was an otherwise ordinary afternoon in fifth grade when I returned from school to see that Mom had purchased a new book whilst out doing errands that day. On the whimsically illustrated cover there was a funny looking kid in glasses on a broom, diving after a rock with wings on it. Mom explained that this book – which by now you’ve all figured out was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - had been getting a lot of great reviews, and suggested that maybe the two of us ought to read it. I obliged, and so it was that I hopped onto the magical roller coaster of Harry Potter, the Transformers of the literary world.

Now, in the grand scheme of geekdom there are two widely read genres: Fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy deals with magic and mythical creatures and is enthusiastically enjoyed and debated by overweight, unemployed nerds who live in their parents’ basements, while science fiction deals with technology and alien creatures and is enthusiastically enjoyed and debated by overweight, unemployed nerds who live in their parents’ basements. It’s possible to like both, but everybody likes one more than the other, even though at the end of the day they’re basically the same goddamned thing, only one has a picture of a unicorn on the cover while the other one has a picture of a spaceship.

I like science fiction, because spaceships are awesome.

Both science fiction and fantasy depict weird and wonderful worlds, events, and characters, far more glamorous than anything we’ll ever see. The difference is in the explanation – in fantasy, no matter what kind of outlandish shit goes on, you can always make it fit into the story by saying, “Hey, it’s magic!” With science fiction you can explain all the same outlandish shit by saying, “Hey, it’s science!” You don’t even have to explain how it works – in The Forever War, the futuristic human space marines develop a box that generates a large impenetrable field in which technology simply doesn’t work, the explanation for it being “They used, like, all the science to build this thing.” That’s all; at the end of the day, in either genre, you can explain everything with either magic or science. I prefer science fiction, though, because science is real, and even though I understand absolutely none of it, I know that if I cared enough I could figure it out.

So keep this in mind when I say that I thoroughly enjoyed all the Harry Potter I read. Mom read the entire first book to me over the course of about a month, and when the next book came out we were quick to grab it and read it together as well. When the third book came out, Mom bought it but was taking her sweet time finishing whatever other book she was reading at the time and didn’t want to start on Harry Potter until she was finished, so I took it and read it on my own in a matter of days.* I really liked Harry Potter, up until the fifth book.

*It was your fault all along, Mom.

Sometimes reading for me is like exercise: I do a little bit of it, don’t enjoy it, and then never do it again under any circumstances. This was the case with the fifth Harry Potter - I picked it up, read some, was not immediately drawn in, set it down for a while, and never looked back. None of this was out of any particular malice, mind you, I just suddenly had other stuff that needed doing, and more stuff after that, and now I’m in college and I’ve got a backlog of something like 2500 pages spread over three books to catch up on. As I’ve said before, I’m lucky if I even manage to read the pages I’m assigned to read in the textbooks I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for.

It’s a real shame, too, because Harry Potter seems to have been written for people of my exact age – when the first book came out, all of my classmates and I were the same age as Harry, and we’ve aged more or less in real time with him and his friends. By jumping off the Harrycoaster* halfway through, I didn’t get to compare my experiences on the latter side of puberty with those of the magical and fantastic messiah. It’s like if you grew up in Detroit in the 1960s but never listened to Motown, or if you didn’t get laid in high school and completely missed out on Dungeons and Dragons – it’s a major pop cultural experience to pass up. These comparisons may sound stupid to some of you, but I still know people who shout alohomora! at closed doors in hopes that they’ll pop open, if that gives you any idea of how pervasive Harry Potter is today (to date, the incantation has not opened any doors, but it can be practically applied as a Incite Scorn From Truman spell).

*Not to be confused with the film Hairycoaster or its sequel, Hairycoaster XXX: Five Dollar Footlong.

So here we are – the latest Harry Potter film has been released, and everybody is all up in arms about how it could be an Oscar contender. Whether that’s true or not, the fact that it’s a movie that came out in 2009 means it will most likely be nominated for Best Picture, which means I’ll have to see it, which is a scary proposition. I know the key players in the Harry Potter saga from the time when I kept up with the series, but watching the trailers now I see them surrounded by new and mysterious faces. And what’s the deal with Snape – is he a bad guy, or what? It’s like moving away from your hometown at an early age and coming back to visit several years later – all your old friends are running with a new crowd who you don’t know that well, and you can’t be sure if Snape is legitimately evil or just a huge dick.

I guess I look pretty strange what with my ignorance of the Harry Potter franchise, but for the record, that’s how other people look to me when I find out they’ve never heard of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Truman Capps also never read Angels and Demons, but he could tell you things about Kurt Vonnegut that would literally make you crap your pants.

Summertime At UO

Oh, hey there! Sorry this wasn't up earlier, but I was staying up all night playing video games with old friends.

Yeah, it's kind of like that.

I’m sure that Eugene, Oregon is probably a very nice place. People tell me that there’s great local culture, as well as wonderful hiking and camping (which is a lot like telling a fish that there’s a really great bar he has to try in the middle of the desert). I can definitely see that there’s some charm here – downtown is pretty, and there’s a lot of trees, which has to count for something – but I’m almost always unable to appreciate it because Eugene is where school is.

Those of you who have jobs: Do you really appreciate where you work for its rustic, natural beauty? Do you stop to ponder the way the fluorescent lights reflect off the coffee stains on the mauve carpeting, or study and relish the flight patterns of individual flies as they dive bomb the griddle? I’d venture that no, you don’t – the main reason you go there is because they send you checks with your name on them, not because you can’t get enough of the nightlife in the break room next to the TaB machine. And then I would further argue that, because there are very few standup routines about people who love going to work, you aren’t terribly enthusiastic about going to your workplace.*

*By analyzing standup routines, I can also tell that black people and white people do simple tasks differently and that nobody quite understands airline peanuts.

That’s how Eugene is to me. Whenever I’m down here, I’m living in a place where I spend my days in class, my nights doing homework, and at no point is Mom there to cook for me. Now, I’m not bitching any more than I usually do on here – school is loads of fun, too, and it’s where I hang out with all my friends – but the simple fact is that I associate Portland with sleeping late and zero responsibility, whereas once I hit the Eugene city limits all I can think about is how many sources I have to annotate tonight. I usually don’t have time to appreciate a lot of how nice this place can be because I’m either in class, studying, or hanging out with friends at somebody’s apartment that by nature is not very far from campus. I’m always shocked when I find out that 130,000 other people live in Eugene, some of whom don’t even work at the University!

A few days ago I was in Eugene because I had an internship with the theater department (please withhold snide remarks until the end of this sentence) in which I watched and assisted as a theater troupe in residence researched and wrote a play. This was the first time I’d been to Eugene in the summer when I wasn’t going to a camp of the band variety (please withhold your devastatingly original American Pie references until the end of this sentence), and I found it to be surprisingly nice.

None of the jobs where I dropped off applications have called me back yet, so I gather that by now they’ve somehow figured out that I’m really not a people person. I get nervous in large crowds, both due to claustrophobia and because of the knowledge that statistically, in a group of ten or more people, at least four of them are going to do something that’ll piss me off.* Without people, though, the University of Oregon is a much more peaceful and relaxing place.

*If I’m in El Paso at the time, that number can go all the way up to ten, wherein everybody around me is pissing me off while I simultaneously piss myself off for getting into a situation in which I’m so pissed off.

There’s cool breezes bereft of cigarette smoke and verdant green lawns without so much as a single Bay Area douchebag lying around with his shirt off. The people in the library are friendly, helpful, and chatty – as part of my research earlier in the week, I had to find a bunch of children’s book reviews by Anne Caroll Moore, which the library staff were tirelessly willing to help me search for, to the point that a reference librarian came looking for me upstairs to tell me about a new book about Anne Caroll Moore he’d discovered after I had left. Later, when I was checking out that musty tome, the librarians at the front desk made all kinds of pleasant banter about how I was the first person in library history to check out this particular compilation of children’s book reviews (surprise!). Compare this to during the school year, when the library staff is so busy trying to keep hobos from looking at porn on the computers that they have little time to be extremely helpful.

Sure, there’s still some lingering memories of my torturous Spanish classes, and no matter where I am I always can point out where the journalism school is, but those seem like distant memories. I mean, sure, I bet a lot of those tropical islands where they tested nuclear weapons in the 40s were really nasty then, but they’re totally nice and okay now, right?

Truman Capps finds it a lot harder to miss school like he did last summer when he doesn’t have to go to work all the time.

An Open Letter To Sarah Palin

Not pictured: Russia.

Dear Sarah,

Wow! I really can’t believe it’s come to this. Why, it feels like it was only yesterday that my father told me that McCain had picked you as his running mate, and I said, “Who the hell is that?” And then, 15 minutes later, having Googled your name, I knew. I won’t say that I was never happy again after becoming aware of your existence, but I will say that what happiness I did experience was considerably different from my pre-Palin happiness. It was duller and blander, the colors all faded – like on a Claritin commercial before the person takes Claritin. However, living with the burden of knowledge that somebody like you can come within a few million votes of being next in line for the presidency, it’s pretty irresponsible of me to experience any emotion besides abject terror at what democracy can do.

Don’t get me wrong, I see the appeal – I mean, who wouldn’t want to have Francis McDormand in Fargo as their president? The thing is, in Fargo, Francis McDormand actually knew what she was doing and exercised some respect for the law and common human decency. Also, I assume that if she were to go into labor while out of state she wouldn’t spend several hours flying back home before delivering the baby* – this, of course, is all speculative.

*Now that you’re out of politics for the moment, tell me – did you lose a bet with Ann Coulter or something? I mean, really, what was the deal there? You found out you were in labor before giving a speech in Texas, then gave the speech, flew back to Anchorage, and drove an hour to Wasilla before delivering. I mean, sure, there was a time on a band trip when I had to take a dump but waited three hours until we were back in Eugene, but that was because I knew the toilet in my apartment wouldn’t give me hepatitis, as opposed to the ones in the rest stops on I-5. Emergency rooms, on the other hand, tend to have something of a uniform quality to them.

But hey, you were a maverick. You were too much of a maverick for cornerstones of politics, like facts or logic. Hell, you were even too much of a maverick for the cornerstones of the English language. To you, complete sentences were like the glorious wildlife of Alaska – you kept your distance from them, and then shot them from a helicopter until they were slowly bleeding to death on the ground. To wit:

“Well, let's see. There's ― of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but ―" Sarah Palin, talking about… Uh… Something.

Trying to follow the subject of one of your sentences is like one of those Family Circus cartoons where it shows the dotted line path Billy took that goes all around the neighborhood.



Recently, though, you’ve reached maverick nova status, and are now such a great and powerful maverick that you’ve slipped the surly bonds of the United States Constitution. I say this because of your recent threat to sue the media and the Internet for suggesting that the reason for your resignation might be rampant corruption and public scrutiny, as opposed to whatever nugget of clarity was hiding behind all those dropped gerunds and flimsy sports analogies you tossed out at your press conference. However, it may come as something of a shock to you to learn that, before your much beloved Second Amendment, there is another Amendment – the First. It’s my personal favorite (although I’m also a big fan of #3, wherein the government isn’t allowed to let soldiers live in my house).

But of course, we all know the real reason you resigned. It’s because you’re too much of a maverick to be tied down to some rank and file job like state governor! And, knowing that you didn’t want to come back to the job, you opted to resign – out of service to your constituency, of course. No, it’s not freeing up time to rack up some serious flow on the talk show circuit – as you said, the people of Alaska deserve a governor who wants to do the job, and for you to be occupying that position would be wasting their money. That’s a respectable position; ever the protector of public funds, you opposed pork barrel projects like the Bridge To Nowhere once you realized that people were watching. You really ought to move on to bigger and better things; sure, the people of Alaska will lose the governor who they had thought they were electing to a four year term, but that memoir ain’t gonna write itself.

I guess what I’m trying to say is thank you. Thank you for nearly a year of solid, unflinching punchlines. Every time I needed to point to something reprehensible or nauseating that was going on in the world, I only needed to look as far as you. It’s been a wild ride, hating you for so long like this, but I hope that in the private sector you continue to make an ass of yourself on a regular basis, lest I ever run out of things to write about.

Holla back,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps wonders if he'll get sued.

Award Inflation

And the Oscar goes to...

As I’ve previously mentioned, the Academy Awards are about the only nationally televised event that I can really get behind ever since the Foxy Boxing Network went off the air a few years ago. The Oscars are like porn for movie lovers – aside from, y’know, actual porn movies – and they give us a chance, once a year, to have people listen to us and respect what we’re saying. I don’t know what team Bret Farve plays for, nor do I know what all the hubbub about him is, but I’m still pissed that In Bruges lost out to Milk for Best Screenplay.

To be honest, I’m still pissed about a lot of stuff from this past Academy Awards, and so long as you’re here, I think I’ll tell you. I’m pissed that Mickey Rourke didn’t win Best Actor, I’m pissed that Milk didn’t win Best Picture, and I’m pissed that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button even got nominated. Also, I’m really pissed that Angelina Jolie has all those tattoos, because she looks like a legitimate fox in movies when they cover them up (save for in Wanted, where they covered the tattoos up with other tattoos), but then when I see her at the Academy Awards it’s a letdown because she looks an awful lot like a tramp. Honestly, I really don’t see the logic in getting permanent body modifications if you’re in a profession where your career depends on your ability to slip into wildly diverse roles an accurately play characters, some of whom might not have tattoos. This, I feel, is what’s holding Angelina Jolie back from getting any promising roles in movies about nuns.

There’s been a lot of angry mumblings from The Internet over the most recent Academy Awards, the bulk of it dedicated to the perceived logjam of good movies jockeying for five Best Picture spots (the rest of the rumblings were dedicated to Angelina Jolie, as is always the case when more than three people gather in one place). A lot of people are saying that movies like WALL-E, The Dark Knight, and The Wrestler didn’t get a fair shot at a sticker on the DVD case reading “BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR 2009” because the Academy only allows five Best Picture nominees. The Academy has responded by increasing the number of annual Best Picture nominees to ten.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the Academy Awards are a pretty big circle jerk. The whole ceremony is a big nostalgic look at Hollywood with lots of sentimental tribute montages designed to pad out the running time to four hours. It’s Hollywood patting itself on the back for being Hollywood – “Look at all these great things we’ve done and made! Look how awesome they are! You can almost taste the ad revenue!” But the thing is, while it is definitely a circle jerk, you’re still getting jerked off, so you may as well enjoy the ride. However!

However!

Expanding the number of Best Picture nominees is a damn stupid thing to do. I quote directly from the press release announcing this reprehensible turn of events:

“Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize,” commented [Academy President Sid] Ganis. “I can’t wait to see what that list of ten looks like when the nominees are announced in February.”

I’m sorry, folks, but that’s not how it should be. It used to be that way, but then they changed it, and that’s how it should stay.

Why do we feel like we need to hand out consolation prizes? Why do we need to give five more movies the pat on the head of a “BEST PICTURE NOMINEE” qualification? The Academy Awards are not about making sure everyone gets their fair share and goes home happy; these people are not six-year-olds, they merely act like them most of the time. The Academy Awards are about having six thousand wizened veterans of the industry vote on which movies out of the thousands produced in that year are the best ones, and then holding those movies up on a beautiful golden platter for everyone else to see, and then holding one of those movies up on an even more beautiful and even more golden platter so that everyone knows that it’s The Best.*

*Although it’s usually not. For reference, see the Best Picture winners for 2009, 2005, 2004, 2002, 1998, 1994, 1990… (continued on page 32).

If you want to see fantastic movies in the race for the top prize, the key here is to apply a somewhat more rigorous standard to the movies you nominate, not allow people to nominate more movies. Benjamin Button was by no means a Best Picture worthy film; it wasn’t a bad film, but I can name 100 movies that had considerably more spark and originality to them, five of which came out this year. Why didn’t The Wrestler get nominated? Benjamin Button was Forrest Gump in reverse, whereas The Wrestler was something original that had the added benefit of being really good.

The problem with opening up ten Best Picture nominee slots is that there aren’t necessarily 10 Best Picture quality movies made every year. Hell, some years there aren’t even 5 – in 1974, The Towering Inferno, a stock big budget disaster movie about a skyscraper on fire got nominated for Best Picture alongside movies like Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, and The Conversation. Basically, they honored a popcorn disaster movie with a Best Picture nod because they needed a placeholder. Would any of you feel comfortable living in a world where Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a Best Picture nominee because they’ve got one more spot to fill? The only award Transformers deserves is the Denise Richards Award for Special Achievement in Cleavage, which it would soundly win, hands down, no contest.

What we’re seeing here is basically grade inflation. Grade inflation is all well and good when it lets me get an A- in a Spanish class where I did about 40% of the work, but not when it’s ruining one of the most important events in my year. The more they widen the Best Picture Nominee classification, the more sub-par movies will inevitably find their way in as the people doing the nominating scrape the bottom of the barrel for worthwhile films. Thus, it won’t mean as much to be nominated for Best Picture – it’ll be about as easy as graduating from eighth grade, and just as much of an honor. In this cockeyed attempt to recognize other great movies, the Academy has undercut the meaning of that very recognition.

This is just so upsetting.

Truman Capps will delete this update if ever a movie that he’s a part of is up for Best Picture.

Wait, WHAT!?

Cats and dogs, living together!

Billy Mays?

What!?

Never before has one weekend forced me to reconsider my mortality like this past one. Celebrities were dying faster than Stormtroopers or extras in the first scene in Saving Private Ryan! What was most interesting was the effect each of the deaths had on me.

First there was Farrah Fawcett, whose name I’ve always known and whose famous swimsuit photo I will always recognize, as does every other man on Earth, including the Amish and the blind. I always thought of her fondly, as I think it’s very charitable of beautiful women to be willing to take off their clothes and let people take their pictures to put in magazines for guys like me. However, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a Farrah Fawcett fanatic,* seeing as I never watched a lot of Charlie’s Angels and I didn’t closely follow her acting career. I was aware that she had a pretty nasty case of cancer, and when I heard that she’d died my reaction was one of, “Oh. Damn. That happened.”

*I guarantee you that’s the name of one of her fansites.

Next up, Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson, like sports and organized religion, was one of those American Institutions™ that I never really got into. Off the top of my head, without using Wikipedia, I can think of like four Michael Jackson songs, and I only know about one of those because I saw it on Wikipedia the other day when I was reading about Jackson after his death. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Michael Jackson, it was just that I wasn’t really interested. Sure, like I said last time, I thought he was genuinely talented, but I’d say that Joe Montana and Muhammad were both genuinely talented in their respected fields of football and revolutionizing traditionally held views in Arabic culture regarding female infanticide and usury – that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m interested in them.

And the thing is, it was getting harder and harder to develop an interest in Michael Jackson as time went by, because he kept doing crazier and crazier things. By the time I was old enough to really start paying attention to entertainment news, all I was hearing about was him getting all kinds of plastic surgery, and then next thing I knew he was dangling his baby off of a hotel balcony! As time went by and I started reading my parents’ collections of Bloom County, a comic strip from the 80s that’s about as a good a time capsule of 80s culture as you’ll find anywhere, I realized that Michael Jackson had been pretty crazy well before I was born – his best friend was a chimpanzee, for God’s sake.

So when Michael Jackson died, my reaction was more of a, “Well, shit. It was bound to happen sooner or later.” Michael Jackson had become a media circus in a downward spiral, and that sort of thing never ends well unless you’re Robert Downey Jr., in which case you have an Academy Award nomination to look forward to.

But then, Billy Mays.

Billy. Mays.

I’ve been seeing Billy Mays for a long-ass time. In elementary school, when I was at home during the day because I was sick or it was summer, I watched a lot of daytime TV, and I was always a little confused by the bearded guy in the blue shirt yelling at me about how great his new cleaning product was. To be honest, I found him kind of annoying at the time.

As I grew up, Billy Mays stayed the same – same shirt, same yelling, same beard you could set your watch to. 9/11 changed a lot of things, but the only thing that changed about Billy Mays was that in recent years he’d started to open his infomercials with “BILLY MAYS HERE!” I don’t think anything epitomizes the American spirit more than a man who is so enthusiastic about commerce that he makes a living out of aggressively yelling about seemingly inconsequential items.

I first really caught onto Billy Mays’ appeal late last year, when I was hanging out with a bunch of friends and watching late night TV. We were chatting through some commercials on a basic cable station with the volume turned down, just having a grand old time, when a Billy Mays commercial came on.

Right away, everybody sat up. One of my friends turned up the volume.

“All right! What’s he selling this time?”*

*It was Kaboom!, a spray on cleaner which my roommate Josh and I would later use to scrub out our apartment’s shower before we moved home for the summer. It’s a pretty good cleaner, but I’d recommend you buy it because things with onomatopoeias for names are always superior.

In a world where advertisers are spending millions of dollars to get young peoples’ attention, Billy Mays did it by being Billy Mays. It’s all about reputation, and being so loud. In that way, Billy Mays was an American Institution. So to understand how I felt when I found out that Billy Mays was dead, imagine how you’d feel if you were to find out that sports was dead. All of it.

Billy Mays dying made me contemplate my mortality one hell of a lot more than Farrah Fawcett or Michael Jackson. Those two were celebrities in every sense of the word; they were thoroughly isolated from actual society and existed as a sort of royalty who we eagerly followed in gossip magazines and on channels like E!. Billy Mays was a working man like you or… Well, not necessarily me at the moment, but you get the idea. He wasn’t insanely beautiful. He didn’t have a pet chimp. He was one of us. There was no downward spiral or extensive dragging-through-the-mud at the hands of the media; one day he was alive, the next day he was dead. The same thing could happen to any one of us – this is the primary reason I don’t plan on dying.

Now, of course, the death of a TV pitchman hasn’t derailed my life the way it has that of various Michael Jackson fanatics, but it did bring about one melancholy moment earlier tonight:

Mike and his roommate and I were watching Ninja, Force of Assassins and eating Popeye’s chicken, which is 15% chicken and 40,000% grease. In spite of being very careful to keep my slippery brick of poultry over the box it came in, when I was done I noticed that I’d gotten two drops of grease onto my new shorts. Staring at the very noticeable dark splotches, I found myself wondering if there was a cleaner that was really good at getting grease stains out of clothes.

I realized that I didn’t know, and probably never would.

Truman Capps seldom knows what he’s got ‘till it’s gone.

Truly Comcastic

Wooooohooooo!

Before I even start this update, let’s acknowledge that Michael Jackson died a couple days ago. He started out eccentric and then gradually moved into downright creepy and weird, but he was genuinely talented and it’s a shame to see him go. Sentiments similar to these have been gumming up the airwaves an awful lot recently, which, thanks to Comcast, has been even easier for me to notice.

As I mentioned last week, my family recently bought one of those specialty Comcast DVR boxes, because without it we would be unable to receive digital broadcast signals and, thus unable to watch Wipeout, which is arguably the most beautifully crafted and intelligent summer replacement show of all time. This considerably changed our TV watching experience around here.

My family has been a longtime adherent to basic cable, which gives us access to the major networks plus a few other channels that we absolutely can’t live without, like Spike, BET, and Country Music Television. If you’ve ever heard the saying, “5000 channels and nothing’s on,” it’s even more true when you only have about 60, because out of those 60 channels at least three are home shopping, two are in Spanish, four are variations on C-SPAN on the local, state, and national level, five are public access showing religious programming/Aryan Nation Adventures, and one is video of Earth from space as recorded by the International Space Station, which is only interesting if there’s a hurricane or a meteor shower. This leaves you with stuff like SciFi, which has been straight up bullshit since they cancelled Mystery Science Theater 3000, Oxygen, which implies that women are the only people who need to breathe, and The Golf Channel, which in spite of my letter writing campaign refuses to show Caddyshack on a continuous loop. American Movie Classics (AMC) defines “classic” as “whatever movie we have the rights to show” (hence why Ghostbusters II and The Birdcage are classics), and TNT may as well rename itself “Home Improvement Network” between 12:00 and 5:00 PM.

So already I’ve got it pretty rough, what with the poor selection of TV channels in the climate controlled house I live in rent free with no job, but what makes it worse is that the TV Guide channel allows you to see the awesome stuff showing on all the other channels that you don’t have. It’s like being a kid in a candy and Brussels sprouts store, and you’re only allowed to have the Brussels sprouts, but then there are 768 types of delicious candy that you have to watch everybody else eating. Some of the candy tastes like commercial-free presentations of The Dark Knight while it’s still in theaters, other types taste like Flight of the Conchords, and a fair number taste like pornography with ambiguous titles. But you can’t eat them – enjoy your Brussels sprouts, which taste like Andy Griffith on TVLand.

But now, we have the Comcast box, which gives us access to Comcast InDemand, which we had never used before. My Dad’s fascination with technology keeps us pretty up to date on all the latest gadgets (many of which involve lasers, none of which are in lightsaber form). However, the ability to press a button and have a movie beamed right onto your television screen is still a shocking novelty to me. I look really closely at the box sometimes to see if I can spot the little men inside who illegally torrent the movies online and play them for us, but I haven’t found any of them yet.

Of course, you have to pay for a lot of the best stuff available on InDemand, but the content that’s free is almost better, in a way. Sure, AMC shows crappy movies for free, but most of those are crappy movies that everybody’s heard of, and they’re censored. The “Free Movies” section on InDemand is a veritable all-you-can-eat buffet of movies you’ve seen in dark corners of the video store or in cardboard bins at Safeway but have never been willing to spend 99 cents to see. Right now, there’s a movie freely available on InDemand called Robot Holocaust. The mind boggles! Is it like Schindler’s List, but with robots? Are the humans perpetrating the titular holocaust, or the robots? Ordinarily, these questions aren’t enough to make me rent a movie, but now all I have to do is press a button and then I just don’t even have to worry about what I’m going to do for the next 83 minutes!*

*It is thanks to OnDemand that Mike and I were able to watch Starship Troopers for the first time since either one of us was in middle school. We picked up on a lot of stuff this time around that we hadn’t realized a few years ago – the humor in a futuristic army with guns that uses a strategy of “run up within 10 feet of the aliens and shoot them,” the brilliance of Neil Patrick Harris being in the movie, the fact that poor writing can make even Neil Patrick Harris look like a bad actor (“We’re going back to P!”).

Really, though, none of the new TV available to me is any more entertaining than the old TV I grew up on – there’s just more new fluff to be distracting. But really, that’s what television ought to be, anyway – a distraction (said the guy who made his own TV show). Whenever it’s been a rough day and you’re tired of taking active part in the world around you, TV is there to tell you it’s okay and show you tits and explosions for a few hours until it’s time to go to bed.

And let me tell you, in the walking nightmare of my life what with the getting up at noon and playing video games and not having a job, I need the comforts of TV all the time.

Truman Capps will never say “Comcastic” again.

The One About Books

Because a book just isn't as good if you can't swallow it whole.

Recently, while attending a Mormon wedding (long story), I bumped into an old English teacher from my high school who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. We exchanged all the usual pleasantries, her asking me about college (“Why yes, actually, I am still a journalism major. Yes, I agree, that is a shame.”) and me asking her about high school (“Kids are still crapping in the urinals, huh?”). However, it didn’t take very long for her to use her womanly powers to deliver a question that completely disarmed me and forced me to lie in a vain attempt to save face.

“So, what have you been reading lately?”

At first I laughed and said I’d been reading my textbooks, but of course, that wasn’t true, so I mumbled some stuff about the Vonnegut I’d been reading last summer and called it good. English teachers! Even after you graduate, they’ll always know how to make you feel guilty for not broadening your literary horizons as much as you should. The same thing happened to me last summer, when another former English teacher (I have a lot of former English teachers) pointedly asked me if I’d ever finished reading David Copperfield, which he had assigned my class to read roughly 18 months earlier. To answer now, no – I didn’t even make it halfway. SparkNotes was very informative.

Stephen King once said that you don’t have any hope of becoming a good writer if you don’t spend at least four hours a day reading and four hours a day writing. That statement always nags at me after I spend five hours playing Grand Theft Auto IV and half an hour pounding out a shoddy and hastily written blog so that I can free up my evening for more Grand Theft Auto IV. I’d love to dismiss Stephen King’s words, but the fact of the matter is that he’s about the only writer whose books keep me coming back time and again – thus, there is a good likelihood that the man might know what he’s talking about. The literally hundreds of books he’s sold might also be an indicator.

Reading is by nature more difficult than other forms of leisure. For example, my family recently acquired the Comcast Digital TV Magic Box, which has given us access to about 30 more channels plus the vast wonders of OnDemand (which I will cover in a separate blog). This means that whenever I’m bored, there’s always going to be some sort of interesting content beamed straight into my house; content that requires nothing of me save for the fact that I sit still and look at the only appliance in the room that is talking to me. Video games are a step up, as they present me with a wide variety of problems to solve, usually by shooting people in the face (although I will on occasion run them over with a firetruck). However, in both cases you’re still looking at a screen and pushing buttons – your own imagination is disengaged as you either look at somebody else’s (on television or in a movie) or actually go play around in it (in a video game).

Reading, on the other hand, is all about recognizing letters and forming them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into pictures. Sure, it happens instantaneously (if you aren’t a business major), but it still eats up a lot more brain activity – and I don’t know about you, but when offered the choice between some brain activity or minimal brain activity, I always go for that second one. As somebody who wants to be a writer, that’s an absolutely horrible thing to say/be.

In hopes of changing this, I went to Powell’s (the local mega-bookstore) and bought three books for a total of roughly $30. My hope had been that the significant investment would guilt me into finishing everything I’d bought, instead of reading half (or less) and then abandoning it, as I did with the fourth Harry Potter book and, believe it or not, The DaVinci Code. I vowed that I would not lose interest in any of my purchases and would read them all in full.

I was so zealous about this that I wound up reading my first purchase, The Forever War, in less than 24 hours, which sounds really great and pat on the back worthy until you realize that I paid $14 for a book which I just as easily could have read in the store. The good news is that I liked the book, the bad news is that I don’t know if I’m going to read it again. Of course, cultural edification doesn’t come cheap.

I had anticipated my second purchase, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, as a more enjoyable experience than it actually was. The book takes Jane Austen’s novel and seamlessly adds “ultraviolent zombie mayhem” in 19th century prose; protagonist Elizabeth Bennet is a ninja zombie hunter who trades barbs with Mr. Darcy when she’s not beheading zombies or sparring with her trainers.* I slogged through 115 pages, and I’ve come to the conclusion that while I’m very enthusiastic about the zombies, they’re only one third of the book’s subject matter, and I’m just not as interested in prejudice, pride, or any combination of the two. Yes, the zombie battles are great, but there’s a lot of Jane Austen between them. It’s like eating Lucky Charms – you bought it for the delicious and festive marshmallow, and while the marshmallow is good, you’ve got to wade through an awful lot of bland-ass Cheerio-lookalikes to get there.

*When The Girlfriend first saw this book, the title was partially obscured. “Pride and Prejudice!?” She exclaimed, holding out some hope that I might not be a lost cause. “I can’t believe you’re getting this!” Then she picked up the book and saw the full title, and her face registered the expression of extreme disappointment that I’ve come to know so well. “Oh. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Great, Truman.”

I had hoped the third purchase, a detective novel called A Drink Before The War (written by the guy who wrote Mystic River), would be a good time and a fast read, but it instead felt like it was written by somebody competing in a “talk like a detective” contest. The pages were so thickly laden with streetwise jargon and crime slang that I was halfway scared that the individual words would beat me up and take my wallet. Also, the protagonist was a tough-as-nails detective of the “Jack Dynamite” variety, which I always find hard to relate to.

Three books purchased, two of them abandoned despite my best intentions to the contrary – pretty bad showing for an aspiring writer. My consolation is that I have high standards, and that as two thirds of my purchases didn’t meet with them, I’d be better off looking for books I actually want to read instead of forcing my way through stuff I don’t care about (just like I did back when I actually read my textbooks for school). I suppose the real trick now is seeing whether I actually take the initiative of going and finding something I do want to read, or just use my elitist “high standards” excuse and keep shooting people in the face.

I mean, in video games. See, I was connecting it to the earlier thing.

I don’t actually shoot real people in the face.

Truman Capps grudgingly acknowledges that he stole the name “Jack Dynamite” from Zero Punctuation, but a name that great only comes along once in a great long while.

On The Mall

It's like an M.C. Escher drawing with stores in it!

The transition from Salem to Portland has been a pleasant one, but there have been plenty of culture shocks as I experience things in Portland that Salem outright lacked – viable public transportation, an abundance of locally owned restaurants, culture, Burgerville, Democrats, parks, etc. However, what has been most arresting about my time in the big city has been the malls. Oh, the fabulous, fabulous malls!

Sure, there were large spaces in Salem that could be referred to as malls. In downtown Salem we had the Salem Center, which consisted of a few large department stores joined by skybridges, along with a food court and the requisite Hot Topic and Honeybaked Ham Store, entities which are seemingly incapable of existing outside of a mall.* It was quaint, really, in a very Salem sort of way – as though some entrepreneurs had seen a mall on TV and attempted to recreate it on a smaller scale. There were overweight security guards and warring tribes of punkish 8th graders, sure, but it was more like a Hasbro mall playset than a real mall. For a long time, I thought that was what malls were like.

*Also, the Excalibur Cutlery Shoppe – I’ve seen a lot of those places in my life, and they’ve always been in malls. Why is that? If you’re going to buy a replica samurai sword, why is it that you can only do so within walking distance of an indoor fountain and an Orange Julius?

Eugene prepared me a little, but not much. Students at the University of Oregon have two options for malls – Valley River Center, a mall near the highway that is somewhat larger and somewhat classier than Salem Center, and Gateway Mall, a mall near the Interstate that has been known to cause unborn children to weep tears of blood. Valley River Center has upscale shops (like, for example, Excalibur) and wide open hallways. Gateway Mall, on the other hand, is all of the worst things that a mall can be.

Approaching the front door of Gateway Mall, one must contend with a mob of sullen faced teenagers who have come to the mall in search of something to do and found that fun is yet another product not sold there. Muscling through the crowd and entering the building, you’re assaulted by a cheap second run movie theater on the right and a food court on the left, which is dominated by a large and vaguely sinister circus type ride wherein kids are strapped into a compartment that looks like a smiling frog, hoisted up about two stories, and then jerked up and down a bit. The deeper you go into the mall the more confounding things you’ll see – a cushioned pen filled with screaming, mostly unattended toddlers, a vending machine that sells glow in the dark crosses, and a sports bar targeted at NASCAR fans. No, I’m serious – the bar is part of some chain of NASCAR oriented eateries, and what’s worse, it’s smack dab in the middle of the mall. If you can think of anything more depressing than going to the run down mall by the Interstate to get drunk and watch NASCAR, then I’m pretty sure you should go to work writing for 24.

So this was my training before I got up to Portland – quaint little malls, some better than others, some white trashier than others. However, two days ago I visited Clackamas Town Center for the first time in my life, and it rocked me in a manner best befitting a hurricane.

The Girlfriend and I have had little luck finding jobs in our immediate neighborhood, so on Friday we packed up a bunch of resumes and went to Clackamas Town Center, the nearest mall, assuming that it would be a veritable whirlpool of potential employment. I had known that Clackamas Town Center would be a bigger mall than I’d been to before, but I didn’t truly appreciate how big until I saw that the parking garage outside was taller than 90% of the buildings in Salem. Even more interesting was the fact that they even needed a parking garage, seeing as the parking lot itself was large enough to occupy two time zones.

We entered the mall at about its midsection, and when The Girlfriend explained that that the mall extended “basically forever” in either direction, I felt kind of overwhelmed by all the choices. Which way to go – left, or right? Should we start at the top and work our way down, or start at the bottom and work our way up? Did we have enough food and water for the entire trip? Was there a store where we could buy donkeys to ride from one end of the mall to the other? Imagine my shock when I found out that there was still the entire “West Village” to explore; a plaza filled with expensive restaurants and tonier stores (including – you guessed it – Excalibur Cutlery Shoppe), as well as The Promenade, another complex across the street that in and of itself is larger than Salem Center, as well as perhaps the very city of Salem.

To walk through Clackamas Town Center is to have the very spirit of capitalism knock you down with a sledgehammer and then dangle its balls in your face. There are stores on either side of the hall and kiosks in the middle of it, where employees scrape together what little remaining enthusiasm they have to anxiously ask how you’re doing and if you’d maybe like to buy a new iPod shell today. Wall space not occupied by stores is occupied instead by giant advertisements that go above and beyond the call of duty, such as the wall-spanning Aquafina ad that included an Aquafina vending machine built right into the wall, or the ad in the food court for a home remodeling superstore which included two glassed in examples of the finest bathtubs money could buy.*

*I’ve decided, by the way, that if I ever want to kill someone I’m going to stick them in one of those bathtub exhibits, trapped behind a pane of glass, forced to slowly starve to death while watching crowds of overweight children devour Carl’s Jr. a few feet away.

And the pretzels! My God, the pretzels! What is it about the mall experience that makes people crave pretzels? During my time in Clackamas Town Center I could’ve sworn I saw at least two Auntie Annie’s pretzel shops, as well as some mysterious competing pretzel shop (Creepy Uncle Monty’s, featuring their signature “Thanksgiving 1998” pretzel, which shows up late smelling like alcohol and cheap cigars). What about walking through miles of climate controlled economic splendor makes a person want a piece of dough wrapped up in a crazy way and covered in cinnamon?

Maybe it’s the screaming kids – of course, if that’s the case, then they’d do well to start selling liquor at pretzel stands.* Children truly have the run of Clackmas Town Center – they move in packs, devoid of supervision, eager to get underfoot. At one point, I rode an elevator up to the second story. When it arrived, I was all ready to leave the elevator when the doors opened and a literal tidal wave of children stormed in. As they did, several of them glared at me, as if to say “What the hell are you doing? This is our elevator.”

*Of course, at Creepy Uncle Monty’s, you can get your Thanksgiving 1998 Special with a 32-ounce Peppermint Schnapps in a commemorative Burger King cup, along with a side of Marlboros.

If any of the managers to whom I handed applications at the mall are reading this, please don’t take my cynicism toward mall culture as a sign that I’m a bad worker. All I’m saying is, if I ever go missing after my shift, check the trunk of Creepy Uncle Monty’s car.

Truman Capps could not quite bring himself to apply for a job in the food court.