Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 2

Part 2: Speed: The Suckening

Last year we went to the Holiday Bowl, which differed significantly from this trip both in that we took a bus instead of a plane and in that the trip was more fun and relaxing and less like that scene from Platoon. You know the scene I’m talking about. The one where nobody is enjoying themselves at any time. Here, let me help you out:

However, even though we spent 20 hours on buses going to and from San Diego, I’d venture that we probably spent more time on buses this year traveling back and forth across a much shorter distance.

Everything in Southern California is at least 45 minutes away from everything else, and that’s if you’re lucky. Maybe this is not the case for everyone – maybe it was just the case for us.

You see, we had been booked into a hotel in Manhattan Beach, near LAX. This had seemed nice at first because the name Manhattan Beach, California suggests a stiff drink and, more importantly, proximity to a beach. Once we arrived at the hotel, though, we realized that the name fell somewhere between a misnomer and an outright bald faced fucking lie, because the Manhattan Beach Marriot was a full five miles away from the nearest beach. Of course, I guess a lot of people probably wouldn’t stay in the Shitty Office Plaza and Strip Mall Marriot, so it behooves them to use a misleading name.

“But,” we thought, “That’s cool. This hotel may not be in a cool place, but it may be close to the other places we need to go during the trip.”

Nope!

We went to California to march in the Tournament of Roses parade and play at the 96th Citibank Rose Bowl, both of which take place in Pasadena. Now, of course, I wouldn’t want the athletic department to go making half-cocked assumptions before all the facts were in, but being as the parade and the game both took place in Pasadena, I would certainly assume that we would be spending a lot of time there. I would not book us into a hotel that is literally on the other side of the city.

To be fair, our rehearsal site was only nine miles away from the hotel. However, Google Maps was quick to point out that with traffic it can take 40 minutes to travel nine miles. And oh yes, dear readers, there was definitely traffic.

No, not like... Oh, fuck it.

But maybe they booked us into a hotel in Manhattan Beach because it was closer to Disneyland, where we were scheduled to perform on the first day.

Nope!

Disneyland is some 30 odd miles away from Manhattan Beach, a trip that can take well over an hour in traffic. And trust me, it did.

It’s not like I expect every single aspect of a bowl game to run smoothly or anything, but all I’m saying is that they could have booked us into a hotel on the Moon under constant siege by flaming nuclear alligators and it still would have been easier for us to make it to all of our destinations in a timely fashion.

You may remember how in the last update I mentioned that we spent a lot of time sitting on the bus waiting for it to move. We had all figured that maybe it was just some weird Oregon bus driver thing. Well, as it turns out, California bus drivers have as much potential for sadism as anyone else.

Every time we left any location on the bowl trip we spent at least one God damned mother fucking hour sitting on the bus, staring out the windows, and definitely not moving. Just sitting. Just sitting on the bus, breathing the same stale B.O. perfumed air as everyone else, waiting for some grander force in the universe to decide it would be okay for us move.

“Ticking away, the minutes that make up a dull day,
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way!”

That’s “Time”, by Pink Floyd, and it was without a doubt the theme song for the entire Rose Bowl trip, unless somebody wrote a song called “Rose Bowl? Can’t You Just Fuck Me In The Ass Instead?”

To quote Jimmy Eat World, “It just takes some time”, and I get that, I really do. I get that the Oregon Marching Band is big, and that there’s a lot of equipment to load and move around. I understand this information. But this is my third year in the band and the second road trip I’ve taken with them this year, and while in the past we’ve had to wait a while to leave our destinations, we’ve certainly never had to wait an entire hour every single time. That’s just ludicrous.

Speaking of ludicrous, Ludacris wrote a song called “Move Bitch.” That would also be a great theme song for the Rose Bowl.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 3!

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part One

I'm going to be doing something a little different this time. There's an awful lot of stuff that needs to be said about the past week of my life, so in an unprecedented Hair Guy event, I'll be updating this multiple part series daily until I'm good and done with it. Watch this space, and please enjoy...

GRANDADDY OF THE SUCK:

Or,

How the Oregon Marching Band Learned that a Higher Ranked Bowl Game Does Not Necessarily Equate to More Fun

Ever since I was a little kid, I always remember seeing commercials for the McRib sandwich at McDonald’s. It was always mysterious and fascinating to me – how, for example, could somebody eat a rack of ribs on a sandwich? What was that sauce it was dipped in? Were the bones edible? However, what elevated the McRib to mythic proportions in my mind was its rarity – it was only around for a few months out of the year, and whenever it was, McDonald’s hyped it up big time with an ad campaign showing mobs of people all but killing one another to get a McRib.

My family did not eat a lot of fast food during my childhood, so I never got a chance to try one of these mysterious sandwiches, and as I got older I avoided McDonald’s entirely. About a year ago, though, I happened to be at McDonald’s with friends when I saw that the McRib was available. I eagerly ordered one, took it home, and unwrapped it, excited to see what all the fuss was about.

In the end, it was a pretty mediocre sandwich that failed to live up to any of my expectations, and it also gave me some of the worst gas of my life.

The Rose Bowl was exactly like that.

Part One: Getting There Is Half The Suck

We were sent an itinerary a week or so before the trip which informed us that the buses would leave Autzen Stadium for Portland International Airport at 4:00 AM. Accordingly, the entire marching band was there at 3:00 AM, allowing us plenty of time to load all of our stuff, get onto the buses, and hit the road.

So, once everything was loaded, we all sat there, buses running, for about half an hour. There was no clear reason for it – it was just kind of something we were doing. Maybe the bus drivers were pulling a prank on us and waiting to see how long they could sit in the dark with the engines running before somebody told them to move. If this was the case, the bus drivers had clearly underestimated the ability of the Oregon Marching Band to sit around with our thumbs up our collective butts and waste away our precious youth, because eventually they gave up and the buses lurched forward and we were on the way.

And then, after ten feet, the buses stopped again for another 15 minutes or so as kind of a parting “fuck you” to our schedule.

Entertainment.

We were just on the outskirts of the airport when the buses pulled over and we were informed that our plane had been delayed by a few hours, and that if we wanted breakfast we should utilize a nearby Sharis. We did, and two hours later we left for the airport once again.

Along the way, somebody on my bus went into the bathroom and violently puked up the fine Sharis cuisine he’d just ingested. This did not do much for the smell of the bus. However, I took solace in the fact that we had reached the airport, and as we rolled onto the tarmac I, in my childish naïveté, assumed that we would be boarding a non-vomity plane shortly.

So we sat on the tarmac, in the buses, for a couple more hours until Delta brought in a plane from Detroit that we could use. Later, I learned that our original plane had been having “technical difficulties” the night before that Delta had been unable to repair in time – all of this makes sense, I guess, save for why they didn’t send for a replacement fucking airplane 12 hours before 250 people on a tight schedule showed up.

What was worst about it was that they made us wait in the buses on the tarmac, so we could watch all the other planes taking off and contemplate how we weren’t on them. No, we couldn’t have gone into the terminal or something, where there was more space and perhaps no stench of half-digested Sharis eggs benedict – we just sat there on the tarmac, watching other planes take off, contemplating the fact that most of us had got up at around 2:30 AM and we probably weren’t going to leave Portland until noon.

When the plane finally did arrive, it pulled up near us on the tarmac and the flight crew began to prep it by loading it with airline food and wheeling a big staircase up next to the door. This, naturally, took about an hour, during which time we sat there and watched it all happen.

Finally, the buses pulled around to the plane one by one, where we unloaded and stood in line to be screened by a team of TSA agents with metal detector wands and short tempers. The temperature on the tarmac at this point was about 20 degrees, but with wind chill it was absolute zero. Naturally, this line moved as slowly as possible.

Once we made it up to the security agents, each member of the band was forced to remove his or her jacket and shoes and stand there in their flimsy Oregon Marching Band polo shirt and black slacks, arms out, in front of everyone else while they were wanded. I get the idea that this procedure was less to facilitate security and more to judge which members of the OMB nipped out the most prolifically. Incidentally, congratulations to Jerome.

Then we got on the plane, where the flight attendants forced us to strip naked and made us run down the aisles to our seats while they whipped our asses with bamboo canes and stubbed out cigarettes on our genitalia. We had the choice between two in flight movies – one was a slow motion highlight reel of each person’s own most embarrassing moments with an accompanying laugh track and commentary by Lee Corso, and the other was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

But then, once the plane got off the ground, our luck changed for the better. Part of the meal service was this absolutely delicious sausage cheese and biscuit sandwich – it may sound gross, and it honestly even looked gross, but basically the entire band agreed that that sandwich picked up our spirits and signaled a bold change in our fortunes. Life was good again.

Until we got to Los Angeles, at which point it immediately turned to shit.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2!

Conquering Boredom

Entertainment.

Part of what’s so exciting about diving headfirst into 2010 is the fact that we’re finally getting into the decade wherein a lot of the lame Tom Clancy novels I read during middle school were set, giving me the ability to laugh at their outlandish predictions of what human technology would be able to accomplish in the course of 20 years. One series in particular, Tom Clancy’s Net Force, tracked the efforts of an elite team of federal agents who patrolled the Internet in the 2010s, which by that point is accessible by a full body virtual reality hookup that rendered the Internet as a vast three dimensional expanse through which users would wander, gathering information as they did.

Today, Firefox choked trying to load Wikipedia.

It’s been a pretty crazy decade. For the past ten years, everything has been getting smaller and faster* to the point that games which in 2000 required all the power a Nintendo 64 could muster now can fit on a handheld device so small you could hide it inside your own ass and probably forget it was even there. To that end, I feel as though 2000-2009 could be considered “The Decade Of Conquering Boredom.”

*There’s a sex joke here, waiting to be found.

Don’t get me wrong – even in the year 2000 it was sort of irresponsible to live in America and suggest that you were bored at any given time. One of the most profitable industries in America is the one that exists to try to and keep us from being bored. For example, turn on your TV right now and start flipping through the channels – sooner or later you’re going to see an episode of COPS. At that point, it’s a scientific fact that you won’t be bored for between one and 22 minutes.

However, while at the time boredom had been conquered in the home, the fact was that millions of people spent entire minutes of their day without anything to occupy their minds – riding the bus, walking to school, driving – and needed something to stave off the inevitable horror of being alone with their own thoughts. A GameBoy alone would not cut it – not anymore, at least.

So along came the iPod and wireless Internet and cell phones that played video games and phones inside iPods and now here we are. The shining light of entertainment has taken great steps to cleanse the land of actual, certifiable solitude. I mean, who just sits in a park and watches people walk by anymore? Only hobos and pedophiles, both of whom probably have all kinds of entertaining things going on inside their heads without an iPhone’s assistance.

While this propagation of tiny entertainment technology has been great for most people, the real victims here are men. Yes, men. Please, allow me to explain.

In the 1996 film Swingers, Jon Favreau (when he was thin) is at a bar with his friend Vince Vaughn (when he was thin), trying to get over his ex girlfriend. Having had his confidence bolstered by his friends over the last 80 minutes or so, Favreau is ready to get back into the dating world, and looking around the bar, he sees this:

Not a great picture. Just rent the damn movie. Blu-Ray.

Now, if you’re looking to meet somebody in a bar and you see Heather Graham, and she’s not already sticking her tongue down some ex-JV football star’s throat, you’re having an incredibly lucky day. Hell, even if you see Heather Graham and she is making out with some other guy, I’d still recommend buying a lottery ticket – I mean, c’mon, it’s Heather Graham. All I’m saying is, while I haven’t been to a lot of bars, I’ve been to enough to know that Heather Graham is not the sort of person you’d expect to see in one.

She’s all alone, they make eye contact, he goes over to her, there’s some swingdancing, Vince Vaughn makes an asshole of himself, and Favreau gets her number. It’s a happy ending – like any ending that involves Heather Graham.

This scene, more than NHL Hockey ’94 and the fact that swingdancing was cool, definitively makes Swingers dated. Still a great movie, yes, but dated.

In 2009, if by some fantastic coincidence a lovely specimen of womanhood such as Heather Graham were sitting at a bar without at least three men clinging to her like horny barnacles, she would not be just staring at her cocktail, all but inviting Jon Favreau to come over and entertain her. No, she’d have her cell phone out, and she’d be texting one of her friends, or playing a game, or checking her email. She’d be reaching out through social networking in search of something more entertaining than her current surroundings, and putting away her phone in favor of Jon Favreau, who at his best wasn’t especially good looking anyway, would probably seem like a drag.

Boredom is the building block of how people meet. Our cell phones and iPods, while trying to keep us entertained, deprive us of the desperate need to talk to somebody for lack of anything better to do – in essence, they give us something better to do. When choosing between meeting new people or texting the ones we already know, it’s pretty much a given which one somebody is going to choose.

Two and a half years ago, I was sitting in a waiting room in the journalism school with several other people, preparing to audition for the student public access TV station. It was highly boring in there. Sitting next to me was a guy in 15-year-old red and black striped sweatpants, a 1995 Rose Bowl sweatshirt, and a jean jacket who smelled profusely of cigarettes. I thought for all the world that he was a hobo or a male prostitute who had wandered onto campus in a coked up stupor, and wished that I’d brought my iPod so I could pretend to be busy in case he tried to talk to me.

When, inevitably, he did, I wound up getting to know Mike Whitman, Smoker of Cigarettes, and one public access TV show later we’re looking for a nice little fixer-upper somewhere in Vermont. He’s no Heather Graham, but I think you get the point.

Truman Capps admits that, in spite of all this, he wouldn’t turn up his nose at an iPhone if Apple makes a deal with Verizon.

Commercials I Would Like To Live In

Ugh, Pepsi. Gross.

God, I wish my life was more like a cold medicine commercial.

Not the whole commercial, mind you – because the first half is usually pretty bad. People are dramatically sneezing at the office or in the street or at a football game (“GO STATE!”) and looking miserable. Their friends either regard them with a mixture of concern and embarrassment or just outright ignore them, already severing the emotional ties once it becomes clear that their acquaintance has become ridden with disease and will die shortly.

But the second half of a cold medicine commercial? High times, friend. People are laughing and frolicking, swingdancing, cheering for State*, and just having the best old time. Beggars are walking and blind men are seeing, all thanks to cold medicine. The only thing keeping them from going out and enjoying the bejeezus out of life was the lack of Sudafed in their bloodstream, and now, in those precious few hours before it makes them fall asleep, they’re going to have so much fun.

*We’ve seen a lot about State’s football program on AllState and Delsym commercials, but I feel like their academics lag significantly behind as I’ve never seen a commercial where somebody sneezes while graduating from State.

If I couldn’t get a cold commercial, I suppose the next best thing would be a commercial for the Snuggie or some similar product. Things start out pretty rough for the people in those commercials too, but their fortunes start to turn around as soon as they purchase a machine that squirts out exactly the right amount of toothpaste every time, or a ladder that is in some way superior to all other store bought ladders. At that point, they start dressing better, they smile, and their world stops being black and white (also, the music changes to upbeat synth-pop instead of “Werp-werrrrrp” every time something goes wrong).

When I’m fantasizing about a successful career, I’d like to be in a commercial for an online or privately owned community college, because according to those commercials, only the most attractive and successful people received their associate’s degree in personal time management from these schools. Everyone in these commercials is motivated and driven to get their life on track, right on down to the beautiful girl in tight shorts and an oversized T-shirt who explains that she goes to class in her pajamas every day because she goes to online college.

I would not want to live in a commercial for an actual college, because those commercials tend to play up symbolism and sentimentality rather than stressing how successful their graduates are – after all, they are actual, real colleges. That’s really all they need to say:

“The University of Oregon – tuition keeps going up, but it’s also a real college. PS – Do you like football?”

Some people argue that it would be more fun to live in a beer commercial, thanks to the abundance of sports stars, scantly clad women, and beer. Also, nobody in a beer commercial is ever truly sad – at the very worst, everyone is lounging around sweating through their shirts on a super hot day, bereft of beer. But even then that unhappiness doesn’t last long, because eventually a gigantic train smashes through the wall, followed by snow and classic rock, and then everybody is drinking ice cold beer in the snow in swimsuits without being too cold.

The way I see it, though, that’s all people in beer commercials do. They just party nonstop with beautiful women. And sure, a never ending party with free beer and all your best friends and hot women may be fun for the first few decades, but eventually even the rowdiest of individuals get all partied out. Sometimes a man just wants to sit in the dark and play video games, and that never happens on a beer commercial. Nobody ever sleeps on a beer commercial – or, if they do, it’s as part of a prank, and when they wake up they’ve got dongs drawn all over their face.

On cold medicine commercials, people are just kicking back and enjoying the simple pleasures. Yeah, the women are beautiful, but they’re not quite as easy as the beer commercial girls. Yeah, guys are having a good time together, but they’re having a really restrained, responsible good time. Sure it may not look as glamorous, but I think that in the long run it’s a much wiser choice. It’s the sort of life that I’ll want to live forever, not just in my twenties.

Most importantly, though, people in cold medicine commercials are in a better position to enjoy their newfound happiness because they’ve actually experienced the misfortune of disease. In a beer commercial, people are so happy that they don’t know how lucky they are; cold medicine people know true suffering, and their happiness is that much sweeter for it.

Hell, though, is living in a HeadOn commercial – much like watching one is also hell.

Truman Capps is applied directly to the forehead.

With Regard To Anal Sex And Christmas

Heartwarming. Subtle. Good. Not the movie we watched last night.

Dear Mom,

I just wanted to let you know again how sorry I am that I rented Bad Santa last night. I had thought that it would be fun to mix up our standard Christmas movie watching ritual by renting a well-regarded movie that we’d never seen before and knew nothing about.

Thus, I was not aware that in the course of the movie Billy-Bob Thornton has graphic anal sex with a lady. This was something that we all found out at the same time, together.

I guess Bad Santa seemed like a really good idea at the time, and then, like most ideas which turn out to involve anal sex in some way, wound up being a bad idea.

For everybody else who’s reading this, Mom, I’d like to take a few paragraphs to explain some of the background:

My family has one enduring holiday tradition: the movies. We are admittedly a family of movie nuts and always have been – I’ve seen video of my parents at parties before I was born absolutely kicking their friends’ asses at movie trivia, and now I’m like their superhero movie trivia offspring, and I guess when our powers unite we form a gigantic VCR and fight Communist librarians in space or something like that.

The movies we watch, every year, in roughly the same order, are:

1) Love Actually
The most recent addition to the list, my parents saw Love Actually a few years back thanks to Netflix and fell in love with this clever, orgiastic, schmaltzy salute to love and Christmas and watch it three or four times every Christmas season. This usually comes first in the rotation because the movie begins five weeks before Christmas, and that sort of thing matters around the Capps household.

2) Scrooged
You may have seen this movie on TV because apparently you can get the broadcast rights for a nickel and a corndog, and around this time of year AMC is always looking for something cheap they can throw on until Mad Men comes back. We’re all Bill Murray fans, so several years ago we found the DVD in a bargain bin and added it to the rotation.

3) A Christmas Carol
This is when you know it’s serious. When we throw on A Christmas Carol, we’ve got about five days left until Jesus’s birthday. This, by the way, is not the dull as hell black and white 1951 version that everybody waxes poetical about, but instead a 1984 made-for-TV movie starring George C. Scott.

4) A Christmas Story
I double dog dare you. I can’t put my arms down. How do the little piggies eat. Bumpuses.

5) It’s A Wonderful Life
Christmas Eve. Every year. This movie is a national treasure and if you disagree I will personally kick your ass.

My family doesn’t have religion to pull us all into the same room at this most auspicious time of the year, so we’ve turned to the same thing that we’ve always shared – sitting around watching movies. And that’s great. It’s part of Christmas. But this year, I wasn’t feeling the Christmas spirit.

We watched Love Actually a couple of nights ago (it was already my parents’ second time watching it this month, and they’ve seen it so many times in total that it’s like The Rocky Horror Picture Show to them) and for some reason it just didn’t work for me this time around. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s the mileage, maybe it’s my decidedly less than cheery experiences with love over the past year, but I found a good chunk of the movie to be almost sickeningly heartwarming. It’s all the most overbearing sentiments of Christmas smashed into all the most overbearing sentiments of Valentine’s Day, and while it hadn’t bothered me in the past, this year it was like getting blasted in the face with a shotgun filled with happiness.*

*This may sound like a good thing, but I know from experience that it’s never good to be blasted in the face with a shotgun filled with anything.

Yesterday afternoon I knew that Scrooged was our movie for the evening, and I knew what was in store – Bill Murray is an asshole (a bigger asshole than he is in Kingpin but not as big an asshole as he is in Groundhog Day) who has a variety of encounters with colorful ghosts until he realizes the true meaning of Christmas and does a 15 minute long monologue to a bunch of TV cameras about how super Christmas is, culminating in caroling and a rushing tidal wave of heartwarming.

Don’t get me wrong; I think heartwarming is great. But I think all things should be done in moderation. Lots of great movies are heartwarming - Rushmore, Boogie Nights, The Room - but they do so in such a way as not to beat you over the head with it. They’re subtle. At Christmas, however, the law of subtlety does not seem to be in effect.

I realized that I could not take it – not last night, at least – and endeavored to make a change. I had to spice up our viewing schedule in hopes of not completely burning out my ability to feel by the time we got to the jewel in the holiday movie crown, It’s A Wonderful Life.

“Hey!” I said to my parents over dinner. “Why do we always watch the same old movies at Christmas? Maybe we should try something new!”

My parents looked at one another as though I’d requested an autographed copy of Going Rogue for Christmas.

“Well,” Dad said, after a pause. “What did you have in mind?”

Here he had caught me off guard – I had mostly expected them to stone me for blasphemy and was not thinking this far ahead. I suggested that we defer to our friend The Internet, and after looking up a list of the 25 best Christmas movies, we decided on Bad Santa, a movie none of us had seen or knew much about, because it was a departure from the norm and we all liked Billy-Bob Thornton.

I ran to the video store and picked it up. On the way back, I realized that if what I expected to be a quirky, slightly risqué comedy was a big hit with the parents, this could be my big break. I could steer our holiday choices away from the mind-numbingly heartwarming and into subtler, more avant garde territory.

And then we threw on Bad Santa, and within the first five minutes Billy-Bob Thornton had vomited, wet his pants, and angrily cussed out enough children to fill two school buses.

This has to end soon. I thought to myself, watching the titular Bad Santa be thoroughly unlikeable for fifteen, then twenty, then twenty five, then thirty minutes. Somewhere in there, Billy-Bob bones a girl in his car while she yells “Fuck me, Santa!”

This guy has to start redeeming himself eventually. I assured myself. I mean, they said this was the 19th best Christmas movie of all time. This guy can’t just be a wang the whole time, right?

And right as I thought that, the Bad Santa had anal sex with a fat woman in a department store dressing room while John Ritter watched.

I don’t know your opinion on anal sex, dear readers – I don’t know if you’re into that or not, and either way it’s fine with me because we’re all into weird things. I mean, I like Battlestar Galactica, maybe you like anal sex. That’s cool. I’m not judging – it’s Christmas. But I’ll tell something about anal sex – like it or not, it’s not the sort of thing you want to acknowledge the existence of when you’re sitting next to your mother.

God bless my mother, because she’s a wonderful woman and she’s told some of the dirtiest jokes I’ve ever heard. Some of them have even been about anal sex. But it’s a whole new sack of potatoes to be sitting there with your mother watching people have anal sex. When you’re just talking about it and not watching it, anal sex is all conceptual. You can laugh and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Now, though, I can hear her thinking:

“Oh, my. This movie was popular with my son’s generation – are they into this sort of thing? Is… Is he into this sort of thing? Good heavens!

And no, Mom, I’m not into that sort of thing, although I’ve found out that a lot of people are. Anal has gained a lot of social acceptance recently – it’s not just for gay men anymore, I guess.

I’m as shocked by all of this as you are, Mom.

And I know that all three of us agreed on Bad Santa, and so maybe we’re all a little at fault, but honestly, when you think about it, if I hadn’t gotten a bug up my ass about heartwarming movies in the first place we could have avoided this whole unfortunate incident.

I’m sorry that my misguided need for variety resulted in me bringing anal sex to our house, Mom. I can’t promise you that this will never happen again, but with God as my witness I’ll do my best to prevent it.

What I’ve learned from all of this, Mom, is that while it can be a little sickening when movies are aggressively heartwarming, the alternative is far, far worse. And really, Christmas itself is a sickeningly heartwarming holiday – the movies are only keeping pace, and given all the subtlety with which we approach heartwarming themes throughout the rest of the year, maybe now is the best time to get it out in the open.

And by God, after seeing the festering turd of a movie that was Bad Santa, some heartwarming, mainstream stuff like Scrooged would really hit the spot right about now. All with those Christmas carols…

Look, anyway, I just wanted to apologize again, and let you know that I hope we can make it through the rest of our holiday movies without having to watch any more kinky sex acts together.

Merry Christmas, everybody. God bless.

Love,
Truman

Truman Capps is eagerly anticipating all the hits he's going to get from people Googling "ANAL SEX MOM LOVE".

Back To Basics

What's up, four years of my life? How you doin'?

As of the 15th, Amazon declared my original order of Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition officially lost, and the good natured and helpful people at Amazon customer service (all of whom have long and completely unpronounceable names, as per Indian tradition*) have done a great job of getting me a new one – no sarcasm. They had me re-order the game with a much faster shipping option, then waived the cost and held onto my original, much lower Black Friday payment.

*Here’s an ironic sidenote: Fallout 3 was not released in India because the game contains mutated cows called Brahmin, which is the same name applied to a class of Indian religious scholars, as well as the fact that cows are considered holy in Hindu culture. Basically, imagine if there was a video game in which you could interact with wandering naked mutant Jesuses with stark erections, and their name was “The Holocaust Was Greatly Exaggerated” – that’s kind of what Fallout 3 is like over there. But even though the game I wanted is considered sacrilegious, Amazon’s Indian customer service reps still rendered impeccable service. Keep that in mind when you read the next paragraph.

So before we even begin, Amazon, I’m sorry for calling you out last week. You truly are the best in your chosen field. If you were a building, you would be the White House. If you were a spaceship, you would be Serenity. If you were a sandwich, you would have bacon.

While I wait for my new game to arrive, though, I’ve still been desperately trying to catch up on the video gaming I’d been putting off until the break. To fill up some time I rented the newest Halo game, Halo 3: ODST, because in spite of my mixed feelings about the Halo franchise I was still desperate to shoot something in the face.*

*On an even geekier note, ODST features the voice acting talents of Nathan Fillion of Firefly as well as Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica, and their characters are romantically involved. This marriage of lead characters from my two favorite shows (and the potential half space pirate, half Cylon offspring it could produce) gives me the same sort of squealing, girlish rapture as Twilight does to the prepubescent and the prepubescent at heart.

I played through ODST surprisingly quickly, and when it was over I wondered if video games have been getting shorter as they continue to get more expensive. I’m serious – the end of ODST came after a couple of evenings’ worth of play, whereas I sank an entire summer into beating Super Mario 64 when I was a kid. I literally played Super Mario 64 like it was my job and it took me three months to beat, and now they’re charging $60 for a game I can finish in a couple of days? Was I just really stupid as a kid, or are video games actually getting shorter?

To find out, I fired up my Nintendo 64 and played some Perfect Dark, a video game that had more or less dominated my life all throughout middle school both in terms of the hours I spent playing it and the more plentiful (and infinitely more embarrassing) hours I spent writing fan fiction about it. I remember pouring a solid month into beating the game on its easiest difficulty as a child, and so I went back and started playing on the hardest difficulty, just to see how far I’d come and what had changed.

Enemy artificial intelligence has not come too far in the nearly ten years since Perfect Dark. About the biggest advancement is that enemies today throw grenades.

You see, in the violent video games I played when I was growing up, I very quickly learned that the best way to take out a posse of guards was to shoot one of them at a distance and then retreat around a corner and wait for the rest to blunder around the corner in pursuit, one by one, at which point I would calmly murder them one by one. Keep in mind that I learned this ice-cold commando tactic well before I learned my multiplication tables.*

*That said, I still don’t know most of them now.

When I try that in a newer game like ODST, however, enemies throw volleys of grenades at my hiding spot, forcing me to run out and slaughter them on their terms as opposed to at my leisure. Dicks. That’s about the biggest tactical advancement they’ve made.

Story in video games remains trivial and stupid, but now it’s trivial and stupid in a different way. Perfect Dark’s story existed mainly to link together several interesting locations in which to shoot people, but it included hallmarks of the craft such as flying cars, a clone of the president, and an alien named Elvis. It was scanty and stupid, but it really didn’t interfere with the fun too much.

The storyline for the Halo series, on the other hand, is honestly more complex than the Bible, in spite of the fact that it had the benefit of being written by ten or so people who spoke the same language over the course of five years. I looked up the complete and chronological storyline of the entire Halo series – games, books, short films – the other night, and while I still don’t have half a clue what’s going on, I can tell you that the franchise features not one but two omniscient ancient alien races, a military history more varied than Guam’s, and a half dozen or so artificial intelligence constructs with divergent motives and personalities. While back in the day video games had too little story, now they’ve got so much that you’re lucky if you even know why you’re shooting the people you’re shooting at any given time.

Despite the advancements that are, at best, limited, whether a game is running on my XBox or my Nintendo 64 doesn’t take any of the fun out of shooting guards in the face. One system just makes it look prettier than the other.

Still, I hope my new copy of Fallout 3 gets here soon, because I’m looking forward to some more aesthetically pleasing violence.

Truman Capps drinks a lot of Amaretto and Coke to silence the screams of all the guards he’s killed over the years.

An Open Letter To Amazon.com

Amazon has forced me to miss out on post apocalyptic alien space samurai. God DAMN it.

Amazon,

I ordered Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition on November 26th, and it shipped on the 28th. I had selected the standard shipping option, and I was told I could expect the game to arrive on December 8th.

I am a college student splitting my time between my home with my parents in Portland, Oregon, and my apartment at the University of Oregon. I had the game shipped to my apartment because I assumed, based on the estimate that I was given, that it would arrive before I left after the term ended for me on the 9th. However, the game did not arrive on the 8th, or the 9th, or any of the other days since. Because I'm not there to pick up the game, one of my roommates will have to repackage and mail it to me in Portland, which will take several more days.

I guess it's small potatoes in the big picture - I am, after all, fed, clothed, and getting an education, so I probably shouldn't be griping about having to face a delay in when I get to play a video game. But I had specifically been looking forward to spending my time off from school playing this game; it was my way of rewarding myself for working hard all term. I had thought about ordering it sooner, but I held off - I am a particular fan of the Fallout series, and I knew that if I had it with me while I was at school it would be one big fat temptation to not study. I addressed the package to my school address because your estimate said it would arrive on the day I finished my last final, which I figured would allow me to spend the afternoon playing the game before taking it and my XBox back up to my parents' house for the holidays.

Again, the more I make of this, the more I feel like a spoiled brat for even complaining, but hear me out: I feel that a cornerstone of human civilization is the trust that one can exchange currency for goods and services. Now, consider this - I gave you guys $42.00, and in return you've given me a bunch of lies about when my video game will arrive, plus no video game. I don't want to accuse you of anything, but what do you have against civilization?

I understand that once the item ships, it's in the hands of the United States Postal Service. You at Amazon really have no control over my game's amazing, time consuming adventures in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. However, while I was told that the game shipped on the 28th, according to the tracker it didn't leave the Seattle area until five days later, on December 3rd. To give you some perspective, it only took four days to get to the Moon - and that was 40 years ago. Both because my game spent five days being shipped nowhere and because you’re the ones who I gave my money to, I address this letter to you.

Incidentally, out of the $42.00 I spent roughly $3 on shipping and handling, and I really feel somewhat dishonest about that, seeing as your people have been shipping and handling my video game for so long now. I mean, my two-ounce video game spent a whopping four days in transit between Federal Way, Washington, and the sorting center in Portland, Oregon. You guys are shipping the HELL out of this video game - I feel as though I should give you more money, if anything.

On that same note, I did a little research, and according to Google Maps, a large highway known as Interstate 5 runs between Federal Way, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. From what Google says, it takes 2 hours and 28 minutes to get from Federal Way to Portland on I-5. I don't know why my game has taken four days. Maybe you were delivering my game via an Oregon Trail-style covered wagon pulled by a team of snails, or maybe you just had grandma deliver the game, and she spent four days putting along in her '84 Plymouth Ciera at 35 miles per hour in the left lane, turn signal blinking the whole time. But on the off chance that your delivery people just didn't know about I-5, I highly recommend it. In fact, I highly recommend the entire Interstate Highway System, because in my experience it's one of the most efficient ways to transport people (or, hey, even video games) over distances in less than four days.

Also, it might interest you to know that the same highway runs between Portland and Eugene. I only mention it because the last update on my stuff says that it left the sorting center in Portland three days ago, and perhaps the driver got lost on the way from Portland to Eugene. Also, I just checked, and it's possible to drive from San Fransisco to New York City in less than three days - almost less than two days. So again, you really should iron out some of the problems in your shipping department. Maybe get them a GPS unit for Christmas or something. Just don't order it from yourselves, because you probably won't get it until Easter.

Again, though, I really shouldn't be complaining, because it's just one luxury item that I'm waiting a little longer to use. There are bigger problems in the world, and my quality of life hasn't been affected that much. However, I was really looking forward to playing my game, starting on December 8th - the date that you told me. And for the past five days, I have not been playing my game. And that's frustrating to me. Not as frustrating as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for residents of the Gaza Strip, but frustrating all the same.

In the end, your entire business thrives on the fact that people are willing to buy something at a reduced price from your online store rather than spending a few bucks more for it at the mall. However, while this game probably would have run me $50 at GameStop on Black Friday, I guarantee you I would be playing it right now instead of amusing myself by writing blog entries. If the delivery aspect of Amazon.com colossally fails, like it did here, what are you really offering?

I get it – this is an isolated incident and by and large Amazon is one hell of a reliable way to get things. That said, could you at least refund my shipping or give me some store credit? I feel like this whole issue is pretty out of line.

Best,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps doesn't think this is such an out of line thing to to bitch about in an era of space travel and large hadron colliders.

Totally Boned

Well played, Google Image Search.

I had finished the last of my finals on Tuesday, first getting up at 7:00 and braving the penis-inverting cold of the early morning to take my anthropology exam before stumbling through my physics final with all the grace and poise of Kanye West. I was done at 5:00, and at roughly the same time, one of my friends from class was loading up his car to drive back to Portland.

“Why don’t you ride home with Jake?” Some people asked me. “It’s way cheaper and faster than taking the Amtrak bus on Wednesday.”

“Because,” I responded. “Taco Tuesday comes but once a week.”

So I went to Taco Tuesday at Taylor’s and enjoyed five tacos and an Amaretto and Coke,* then returned home to pack.

*I found out the hard way on a non-dollar well drink night that a double Amaretto and Coke costs $9 ordinarily. Liking bitch drinks is one thing – paying as much for one as a footlong Philly Cheesteak at Subway is another.

Packing for me is dictated by how much stuff I can fit into the green Nike duffel bag I won in a trivia contest when I was in middle school. I know from several years’ experience that it can hold 70% of my clothes, my toiletries kit, my slippers, and, when necessary, my laptop. Every time I pack I try to bend or break the laws of space and time by cramming more stuff in, which always results in failure and occasionally an uncomfortable ripping sound. After I graduate I may take the bag out back and shoot it.

Into my backpack I stuffed my XBox 360, the necessary cords, and three controllers, along with my external hard drive and a few other laptop doodads. I brought along my trumpet in its 600 pound black case, and a few of my music books, stuffed into a plastic Safeway bag because there was no room for them anywhere else.

Wednesday morning I rose at 10:00 and went to the bookstore to sell back my textbooks, netting me a clean $75 in cash. I celebrated with a burrito at Qdoba (which still cost less than a double Amaretto and Coke on any day but Tuesday), then returned home to gather my things and meet the bus.

I’ve spoken a lot about Amtrak’s bus service versus Greyhound on here before. I’ve made it clear that both outfits will screw you in the end, but Amtrak will screw you on a bus that doesn’t smell like pee and is populated by 30% fewer serial killers, thus making it the best choice. One of the advantages to Amtrak is that their buses offer service to the University of Oregon, picking riders up outside MacArthur Court.

I had bought a ticket on the Amtrak bus scheduled to leave Eugene at 1:15 PM, which was slated to stop at Mac Court at 12:50. Thus, I lugged all my bags up the hill and perched on the steps, waiting for the bus, the cold slowly sapping my will to live.

I had booked my ticket by calling JILL, Amtrak’s automated telephone ticket vending robot – and while I believe that robots are, in general, pretty cool, being the robot whose sole purpose in life is to shill out tickets for the obsolete train company is pretty sad. While JILL clearly got dealt a bum robo-hand, she remains one of the friendliest women I talk to on a regular basis, if not a little fuzzy about important details.

“Please spell out your last name, followed by your first name.”

“C-A-P-P-S, -T-R-*cough*-U-M-A-N.”

“I heard, C-A-P-P-S, T-R – is that correct?”*

“Yes. Wait, no!”

“Great! Moving on, would you like to pick up your tickets at the station?”

*My name on the ticket was TR Capps, which, I have decided, stands for Teodor Roosevelt Capps.

After speaking with JILL, I talked to a live operator who informed me that I could meet the bus on campus, ride it to the train station, and pick up my tickets there. I asked her, just to be sure, if the bus still stopped outside Mac Court, and she said yes.

So there I was, sitting outside Mac Court, when I see the bus come rolling up the street towards me. I was the only person outside Mac Court, the designated stopping place for the bus. I had baggage scattered around my feet in plain view. I stood up, waved to the driver, and turned around to gather my things.

When I turned back, the bus was just truckin’ on down the street.

I stood there for a second, watching it, wondering if this was some sort of weird bus driver prank. But he just kept on going and going, like the Energizer Bunny of boning all my best laid plans.

I left all my bags, packed with some odd $3500 worth of personal affects, unattended by the basketball arena and took off sprinting down the street like the T-1000, bemoaning the fact that I would once again have to write a blog about my continuing frustrations with Amtrak. What I’ve found is that while buses never seem to go fast enough while you’re inside of them, when you’re running along behind them they floor it like they’re John Cusak in 2012.

The bus had slowed up to turn the corner onto 18th, giving me a great chance to catch up, and I got close enough to choke on exhaust fumes. I had nearly made it to the door, which I could presumably hit with a balled up fist like Keanu Reeves in Speed in order to get the driver’s attention, but then the bus started to go up the hill. At that point, the bus couldn’t lose – not only was its engine competing with my weak writer’s legs, but its engine hadn’t had 15 pounds of Qdoba earlier in the day.*

*We both were experiencing similar problems with exhau[FART JOKE REDACTED]

I fell behind and watched the bus fade down the street, the bus driver evidently assuming that the guy running after him and waving his arms in the rear view mirror was just saying “GOODBYE! DRIVE FASTER!”

Head hung in defeat, I returned to my stuff. In elementary school I once chased an ice cream truck several blocks before the driver finally stopped, but I was younger then, and there were Choco Tacos on the line.

I called the train station several times, but while the operator had been perfectly willing to pick up a few minutes ago when I called to confirm that the bus was on time, she was mysteriously busy when I was calling to calmly inform them that their bus driver had plainly cornholed me and that they were all a bunch of cocksuckers.

I looked at my watch – it was 12:58. In 15 minutes the bus would leave, taking with it all my dreams of not being in Eugene anymore. I knew that the bus’s next stop would be the Eugene Amtrak station, where it would pick up passengers before leaving town at 1:15, but there was no way I could make it from campus to downtown with four bags in the next 15 minutes on foot.

On my right, I saw a guy of roughly my age walking out of Mac Court towards a pickup truck. Overcoming everything that my parents and the Oregon DMV had told me about hitchhiking, I ran up to the man as he got into his car and asked him if he could give me a ride to the train station if I gave him $20.* For proof, I pulled one of the crisp new bills I’d been given at the bookstore out of my pocket.

*In retrospect, $20 is an awful lot of money for a guy to drive you about a mile. My bus ticket itself cost roughly that much for a guy to drive me about 100 miles. On the other hand, I didn’t have any $10 bills and I didn’t want to give this guy a $20 and ask him for change. “Thanks so much! Not $20 so much, but definitely $10 so much!”

The man – Tim, as he introduced himself – agreed, and I clambered into his truck, throwing my bags into the back. We made light conversation on the way to the train station, and in the process, I found out that Tim was a driver for DoughCo, the local calzone delivery service. It made me feel less bad about approaching him out of the blue – picking up and dropping off was kind of his thing, and while I was hardly a bready pocket filled with meat and cheese, I tipped one hell of a lot better than most college students.

We pulled up to the train station with just a few minutes to spare, and there was the bus. As I thanked Tim and retrieved my bags, I rehearsed in my mind the verbal ass-kicking I was going to give this bus driver – the dipshit who, through his own negligence and inability to do his seemingly simple job correctly, had forced me to just about double the cost of my ticket and, more importantly, physically exert myself.

“Hey.” I said, leaning into the bus as I set my bags down at my feet. The bus driver was sitting in his seat, a newspaper in front of him.

“Yes?” He asked, pleasantly, looking up from his paper. He was in his 60s, a kindly look about him, like he’d be better suited to a job in a candy shop or as a friendly Southern doctor during the Great Depression who didn’t expect payment from needy families.

“You, uh…” Pull it together, Capps! I chided myself. Douchebags can work in candy stores too! “I was waiting at the University bus stop and you drove right on past me.”

“Say!” He said, getting out of his seat and stepping off the bus. “Is that a trumpet?”

He was pointing at my case.

“Uh, yes.”

“Well, sorry – no brass players on this bus. Woodwinds only!” Then he socked me on the arm and gave me a wide, friendly grin – the same grin he probably gave some impoverished hillbilly mother of three after she tried to pay him for curing her son’s measles. “I’m just messin’ with you!”

So I smiled and just sat at the back of the bus, bemoaning the fact that I was, in fact, the world’s biggest pussy.

The moral of the story is that you should always tip your DoughCo delivery boy, because those guys are heroes.

Truman Capps is going to write a nasty letter for this one.

Interviews

Oh man, I WISH.

One of the things that sucks about being a teaching assistant is that when you grade other students’ papers, you can suddenly empathize with the teaching assistants who will be grading your papers in a few days. This is problematic for me, because it helps if I can completely dehumanize the people who are evaluating my work in order to better hate them when they give me a bad grade.

Every time a student fails to make an adequate logical connection or doesn’t properly back something up with facts, I’m quick to jump in with the red pen and make some snarky comments about how that could have been avoided. But now, as I pull together my final story for Reporting 1 to turn in tonight, all I can imagine is my professor hovering over it with a red pen of her own, seeing all the mistakes that I missed, preparing to make a few snarky comments herself.

My final story for Reporting 1 has been the labor of several weeks, a story about the difficulties faced by public school music programs as a result of budget cuts and the craptacular economy. The story has been difficult because I’ve been trying to interview national sources, and apparently people in Minnesota don’t believe in answering emails.

The band director in question agreed to be interviewed three weeks ago, but after I sent him the questions he apparently decided that, no, he’d rather spend his time ice fishing or masturbating to hockey or whatever they do out there, and instead of telling me that I should look for a new interview source, he just quit responding to my emails and decided to let me figure it out the hard way. Now here I am, seven hours away from my deadline, anxiously waiting on a response while in all likelihood the band director is probably sipping a Harvey Wallbanger on the shore of any one of his fine state’s 10,000 lakes.

In all likelihood, I’m going to have to do without his interview, which probably means I’m going to get some red pen on the part of the paper where I talk about his band because I don’t have a quote from him there. And of course, it makes sense to me that I don’t have that interview there, but when my professor is grading it, all it’s going to look like is me either being lazy and opting not to conduct sufficient interviews, or stupid and forgetting to conduct sufficient interviews. Basically, thanks to the actions of another person I’m going to look like a bad journalist, and as it is I don’t need any help.

If anything, this experience has taught me to empathize with the students whose papers I’m grading – now I realize that maybe there are reasons that some of them don’t have sufficient research to back up their conclusions. Of course, they’re getting most of their information from books, and never in my life have I opened a book and had it say, “I’m not going to give you the facts you need until well after your deadline!”

This is part of the reason I envy history majors – while journalism majors have to report on the here and now, with its uncertainty and its do-nothing Midwestern band directors, history majors report on the past, which is considerably more set in stone. Nobody expects you to actually conduct an interview with Abraham Lincoln (although if you did, you’d totally get an A), so instead you can just use well established source documents that will always be there for you and never let you down. Sure, history is still a time consuming major that requires many long hours spent in the library, but I’d honestly rather blow a few weeks sitting around in the library looking for information I know is there than trying to get it out of some big Minnesotan cocktease.

Journalistic Interview Techniques:

a) Bribe them with candy
-Versatile; everyone likes candy
-Not effective on diabetics (unless in insulin shock)
-Do not withhold candy from a diabetic in insulin shock to get interview; this is unethical, and more importantly, people in insulin shock are bad sources

b) Tell them you’ve kidnapped their family
-No threats necessary; the knowledge alone will do the trick
-Difficult to pull off if subject is with family when you tell him they’ve been kidnapped
-Might put you in tricky legal territory

c) Actually kidnap their family
-No longer have to worry about subject being with family when you tell him they’ve been kidnapped
-Definitely puts you in tricky legal territory

d) Ask nicely
-Works 15% of the time
-People from Minnesota are immune

e) Bribe with sexual favors
-Versatile; everyone likes sexual favors
-Difficult for stories about the clergy unless you work for the middle school newspaper
-Do not recommend for stories about the National Herpes Convention

Truman Capps thinks it was very kind not to slander the band director by name in this update, seeing as that slothful bastard basically cost him several highly valuable points on his final.

Taco Tuesday

Man, if I had one of those things, it'd be so much easier to make tacos...

One of my great passions in life is free food. It just doesn’t get much better than a meal that you know you don’t have to pay for – and while in the long run there is supposedly no such thing as a free lunch, in the short term I am more than willing to attend your Campus Young Republicans for Christ meeting if there’s free pizza (preferably Papa John’s).

Almost as good as free food is ludicrously cheap food. Sure, you’re still spending money, but if you can feed yourself using only pocket change I’d say that you’re still doing pretty well (please note that this does not count if you eat the pocket change). IKEA is a pioneer in this field, thanks in part to their 50-cent hot dog, among other menu items. Sure, you may have just spent $20,000 on disassembled furniture with cute names* and the hot dog is probably made of hair and pig anus anyway, but still! Think of the savings!

*My desk chair is named Rutger. This is as close as I will ever get to realizing my dream of sitting on Rutger Hauer’s lap.

Free or cheap alcohol, as I have recently discovered, is also something to cherish. Booze costs a lot more than soda – most likely because the principal ingredients are more than high fructose corn syrup and seltzer water – but the experiences it provides last a lifetime. The problem is that far fewer campus organizations offer free alcohol as an incentive to attend their meetings (save for certain fraternities, but then you’re expected to put out).

At the intersection of cheap booze and cheap liquor lies Taylor’s Bar and Grill, the campus watering hole right across the street from the University. Just as Optimus Prime can change from an ordinary truck into an awesome heroic robot, every Tuesday Taylor’s changes from an ordinary bar into an awesome heroic source of 50-cent tacos and $1 well drinks. Both, also, are from space.

It’s been painful these past few months, watching my over-21 friends go to Taylor’s on Tuesday nights sober and hungry and come home drunk and on the verge of vomiting up record numbers of tacos.* So many of my friends go to Taco Tuesday that Facebook is more or less a ghost town on Tuesdays from 9:00 until 11:00, after which it comes alive again with drunken status updates and embarrassing pictures.

*The current record in the Oregon Marching Band is 13 tacos in one night, set yesterday by our tiniest Asian. I challenge you, readers, to outdo him next week.

Last night was my first night at Taco Tuesday, and it definitely did a lot to wash out the bad taste left in my mouth by my negative bar experience in Salem last week. Sure, the drinks were mixed with the cheapest of alcohol and the taco meat was probably made of hair and cow anus, but seldom have I found both savings and Good Times in the same place at once.

My thoughts:

Amaretto and Coke is a really good drink. Yes, I know that it’s also traditionally what bridesmaids drink before getting knocked up by somebody’s cousin at a wedding reception, but did you ever consider that maybe they drink it because it’s delicious?

The salt/tequila/lime shot, on the other hand, did not live up to my expectations. I’d heard my parents talk about it and watched drunk girls try to figure out the steps at parties* - hell, it was in Caddyshack, for God’s sake, and if that doesn’t give something legitimacy, I don’t know what does. But all I got out of it – and hey, who knows, maybe I did it wrong – was three distinctly unpleasant tastes, followed by the gripping fear that I, like 80% of all people who consume tequila, would become violently ill.

*”So, wait… It’s lime, salt, tequila?”
“No, no, it’s tequila, lime, tequ- no, salt!”
“Maybe it’s salt, tequila, lime?”
“Yeah, let’s try that!”
“Okay, so it’s tequila, salt, lime?”
“No, wait, what are we doing?”

Karaoke could not exist without alcohol. I watched people get up on that stage who clearly knew that they had no business singing in front of people, but had been led to believe that maybe alcohol enhances your vocal cords (after all, it worked for Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis…).

Dead Week is the best time to go to Taco Tuesday, because all the bros who would ordinarily be there are instead at home, desperately cramming in hopes of passing a couple of classes, whereas the rest of us have the time to go out and grab a drink or two before going home to desperately cram in hopes of passing a couple of classes.

Lines do not exist in bars. I learned this the hard way when I stood behind a guy waiting to order at the bar and then watched several other people walk up to the open spaces on my right and left and order ahead of me. There is no reason that a line wouldn’t exist at the bar – it would still serve the purpose of “first come, first served” – but it simply doesn’t. When it comes to alcohol, it’s every man for himself.

Lines DO exist in the bathroom, something that I also learned the hard way.

Truman Capps is going to find every bar in Eugene that offers cheap tacos on a certain night, and then he will reap the savings all week long.

21 (2)

Not in Salem.

Well, it’s finally happened. At midnight on Friday morning, I instantly and unexpectedly gained a wealth of worldly knowledge and maturity that vastly changed my outlook on alcohol and its recreational purposes. The state, in turn, recognized this change in my psyche by giving me permission to drink, a privilege which I recognize as a bold new responsibility.

Really, though? Really, it’s like they say about having an affair: “Half the fun is the sneaking around.”*

*I’m pretty sure this is something They say, because I think I heard it on TV or in a movie. However, I would not put it past myself to come up with a totally creepy, morally questionable saying all on my own.

When I was under 21, drinking had a certain rebellious vibe to it that I kind of liked. Sure, it was rebellious in a pathetic way, like peeing outside, but it was rebellious all the same – furthermore, drinking and peeing outside usually went hand in hand anyway. Getting together with friends and drinking was fun, yes, but in a subconscious way we were saying, “Fuck you, America, for not letting us drink until we’re 21! We can handle it! Watch us drinking!” We would talk passionately about how stupid it was that we weren’t allowed to drink or be around people who were drinking. In some cases, we wrote blogs about it.

Having turned 21, all that fire has gone out of me. I’m like a hippie in any decade except the 1960s – rudderless, bereft of cause, and sitting in a bar.

My birthday was the day after Thanksgiving and most of my friends were otherwise indisposed (or so they said), so instead my parents and I went to a steakhouse for a fancy dinner with a quick stop for a drink in the bar beforehand. In the low light the bartender had to examine my ID carefully under a lamp, and I was worried for a second that he would accuse me of fakery and throw me out.*

*”Nice try, asshole. Truman? Go for a halfway plausible name next time, McLovin.”

Instead, he flashed me a big smile and wished me a happy birthday, and I made a big show of knowing the names of drinks by ordering a Cuba Libre (which is basically a rum and Coke with a lime in it). I was expecting the sort of drink that you get at a college party, wherein somebody splashes a bunch of either rum or vodka into a glass, followed by an entire can of soda, to the point that you can only barely taste the booze.

What I got instead was a glass full of rum with a splash of cola in it, which served to give it a pleasant light brown color and did little or nothing to make up for the fact that it tasted like a glass full of vaguely sweet, intensely painful napalm. This, I realized, was a Big Boy Drink, while the countless dark brown rum and Diet Cokes I’d sucked down at band parties were the equivalent of milk taken through a Jonas Brothers crazy straw. I was 21 now, and I could no longer get away with drinking alcohol that didn’t taste like alcohol.

I had to taste the pain.

I nursed that drink all night, much to the consternation of the staff at the steakhouse, all of whom were quick to share their 21st birthday experiences with us and were somewhat disappointed when I didn’t order six more Cuba Libres, turned down the offer of wine with my steak, and didn’t act in a way that would require them to forcibly eject me from the restaurant and/or break out the body fluids kit.

The next day I travelled to Salem to be with Alexander (as seen on Hair Guy), who had turned 21 about a week before while serving in Afghanistan. To my understanding, a 21st birthday is a difficult thing in a Muslim country that is also a warzone filled with people who hate you, so we had agreed to go visit a bar in Salem and do our 21st birthdays up right.

The problem is that Alexander and I are both men of discerning taste. We like good things, and unfortunately we were in Salem, where there are no good things (or happiness). This applies to bars as well – there are a few hundred bars where truckers go to drink Coors and play video poker while overweight 45-year-old unemployed receptionists sit on the deck and smoke Virginia Slims through their tracheotomies. However nice that may be for them, it is not exactly our scene.

Alexander’s dad recommended a bar downtown called The Brick, his reasoning being that it catered to a “younger crowd.” When we told our friends that that was where we were going, everyone groaned and said, “Not The Brick!”, and then, when we got there, all it took was one look to realize that people who Mr. Jasper considers young are still old enough to be our overweight trucker parents.

We wound up going to a bar nearby called Pete’s Place, which had a friendly enough look to it in spite of the fact that there was a hobo sitting at the bar making no end of trouble for the bartender. We arrived, showed our IDs, and then balked when asked what we wanted to drink.

Wary from my Cuba Libre experience the other night, I asked for a rum and Coke, and then really distinguished myself as a class act by asking the bartender how he made a rum and Coke, in the interests of seeing if the proportions were to my liking. Alexander, who has drank far less than me in his life, ordered a double shot of Jack Daniels, no chaser, which he put away in about five seconds.

“What,” he said, staring at his empty glass. “That’s it?”

We left shortly thereafter, returned to Alexander’s house, and played PS2 until the break of day.

Truman Capps has not given up on drinking just yet.

Hey!

I'm hanging out with Alexander today, so the update is going to be later tonight. Support our troops!

Some Other Times, Alexander...

War is hell.

As you may recall, my main guy Private Alexander Jasper left for Afghanistan in February. Over these past nine months, he’s been playing a lot of video games, taking pictures of dirt and sunsets, reenacting Lady Gaga music videos, and being a fucking all-star American hero in his spare time.

Alexander will be coming back to the States on two weeks’ leave in the next few days, which will put him in the position to decide which place is worse: Afghanistan, or Salem, Oregon. In honor of his return, I’ve decided to once again chronicle some of the crazy shit he got up to back in the day.

Some Other Times, Alexander…

…used his father’s camera to revolutionize the film world.

During my junior year, I was hanging out at Alexander’s house when we found his dad’s old video camera under a pile of dirty laundry in his bedroom. “Huh!” Alexander said. “I haven’t seen this in over a year! Let’s hook it up to the TV and see what I was last using it for.”

So we did just that, digging up a bunch of red/yellow/white cables to hook the ancient camera up to Alexander’s equally ancient TV. I remember being pretty excited to see what was on the camera; Alexander was always remarkably creative, and so I figured that whatever footage he’d shot was bound to be something bold and groundbreaking.

We hit “Play,” and the screen came to life, showing a bobbing, handheld recording of one of the family’s houseplants. From behind the camera came Alexander’s voice:

“Oh, hey there, Mr. Plant!”

And then, in a gravelly, high pitched voice, Alexander shouted the response:

“AW HI ‘DERE ALEXANDA HOW’DYA DOOOOOOOOOOO?”

“Oh, I’m just fine, Mr. Plant! Hey, what’s your favorite kind of soda?”

“AHHH YEEEEAH, YOU KNOW I LIKE-A DA MOUNTAIN DEEEEEEEEEEWWWWW!”

Maybe this isn’t as funny on the page, but there was essentially no background noise in this video, which suggests that Alexander was just sitting alone in his house, pointing a camera at a potted plant and having a conversation with it.

The camera then abruptly cut to one of Alexander’s experiments with stop motion, in which he had pointed the camera at a pair of fingernail clippers on the carpet and, by turning the camera on and off and moving the clippers around, tried to make it look like they were marching across the floor. Other amateur filmmakers would have used action figures or toy cars or something, but Alexander’s reasoning had clearly been something like, “Well, I’ve got the camera here, and I’ve got the fingernail clippers here, so why not just make some lemonade?”

…had a multiple year-long feud with his neighbors.

In middle school, I was walking up Alexander’s long-ass driveway with him when he pointed to his neighbors’ house and said, “Those guys are assholes.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I was out here yelling at the moon the other night, and they came out and told me to shut up.”

Keep in mind that Alexander lived way the hell out in rural Marion County, and his neighbors’ house was a football field or two away from where the Jaspers’ property ended. This, clearly, must have been some yelling if it was loud enough to wake the neighbors.

“Why were you yelling at the moon?”

“What, you don’t yell at the moon?”

He never quite let go of this grudge, and several times over the next few years he mentioned his continual anger at these assholes next door who tried to discourage him from yelling at a celestial body. Finally, my senior year, he said:

“Oh, yeah, I talked to the folks next door. They’re actually pretty cool.”

“So you’re okay with the whole yelling at the moon incident now?”

“…Yeah, I guess.”

…was the most regular motherfucker on Earth.

If we may descend into potty humor for a second, Alexander shat more often than anyone I’ve ever met. This was especially interesting considering his affinity for large pieces of red meat, which, in my experience, pass about as easily as rubber cement.

This one time, senior year, I was trying to sweet-talk this girl in our British Literature class when Alexander comes up to me, his eyes bulging, and says in a hoarse whisper, “Truman…! I have to poop so bad!”

When we would play Dungeons and Dragons on Sunday afternoons, Alexander would often take two or more three-minute breaks to drop a superfast deuce. Eventually, when he’d come out of the bathroom after his power dump, everybody would clap for him and he’d bow.

While using a toilet stall at our high school, I looked at the wall and noticed a great deal of remarkably literate graffiti that included references to Faulkner and Neil Gaiman as well as a token “Who Watches The Watchmen?” Seeing this, I knew that Alexander had been there, probably for some time, and that he’d clearly put more thought into his bathroom graffiti than his schoolwork.

…laughed in the face of human reproduction.

During our Wellness II class, our moronic wrestling coach of a teacher showed us a BBC documentary about pregnancy that included footage of a woman giving birth. He warned us as we got closer to the Moment of Truth that squeamish people should look away from the screen, and so I did (because the last thing I want to see right after lunch is a screaming, bloody baby crawling out of a complete stranger’s vagina).

I turned my head to the left, which meant that instead of seeing the screen, I saw Alexander’s face as he watched the screen. And as the baby was born on TV with a great symphony of moist noises, while everyone else in class groaned at the sight of it, Alexander’s entire face lit up like he was seeing the funniest thing in the world, and he just cackled for the rest of the video.

…further thwarted my Wellness II teacher’s lesson plans.

Wellness II was a class taught by idiots to idiots, in an attempt to give kids a basic education of how not to get fat and/or pregnant. Seeing as our teacher was far better at coaching wrestling than teaching, most of the curriculum was videos. For the nutritional section of the course, we watched Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me, and had to write down five facts we learned from the movie (you know – for the learning).

Those of you who have seen Super Size Me may remember that the opening credits start with the song “Fat Bottomed Girls,” by Queen.

After the movie, Mr. Cox went to the front of the class and asked us to read back some of the facts we’d written down. Alexander raised his hand.

“Okay, Alexander, what’s one of the facts you wrote down?” Mr. Cox asked.

“I have: ‘Fat bottomed girls make the rockin’ world go ‘round.’” Alexander said, with a completely straight face. I looked at his paper, and yes, he had written it down.

However, what made this experience the best was Mr. Cox’s reaction. Shaking his head as though Alexander had actually mistaken late 1970s classic rock as legitimate medical advice, he said:

“No, Alexander – that’s just a song.”

It only could have been more condescending if he’d added the words, “You silly goose!” or smacked Alexander across the snout with a rolled up newspaper.

…was forced to change his culinary ambitions.

A lot of my great memories of Alexander come from Wellness II, which was less of an educational experience and more of an excuse for Alexander and I to goof off at the expense of Mr. Cox’s patience.

The final project for our nutrition unit was to create a menu for a health food restaurant, listing the caloric content of each item, based on our wealth of newfound knowledge of how to eat properly.

Mr. Cox was addressing the class, laying out what items couldn’t be on the menu:

“No fried food, and absolutely no alcohol!”

To which Alexander said, “Damn! So much for my Beer Battered Beer Beer.”

…inadvertently freakdanced on the band director.

Those of you who have been to high school know that all high school assemblies everywhere tend to suck. That’s just how it works.

My sophomore year, those of us cool enough to be in band had taken to hanging out in the band room during assemblies. The band director looked the other way about it, and it was only band kids anyway, so the school never really noticed.

During one assembly my sophomore year, a bunch of my friends and I snuck Alexander into the band room during an assembly. He wasn’t in band, but we figured he’d blend in easily enough with the other 20 or so people in the room.

We were all standing around talking and Alexander had his back to the band director’s office door. And then we said or did something that made Alexander start singing The Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or maybe we didn’t say or do something – maybe a car honked outside or Alexander started thinking about the space-time continuum. Honestly, it doesn’t take a lot to get him started on The Time Warp.

As he was singing, the band director came out of his office and walked up behind Alexander, somewhat perplexed at what was going on in his band room. Still unaware that there was anyone behind him, Alexander got to the part of the song about doing the pelvic thrusts, and stuck his ass out behind him and waggled it around as he sang. This more or less resulted in him grinding his ass against the unamused band director’s crotch.

Realizing what he’d done, Alexander turned around and nonchalantly said, “Oh, sorry.”

To which the band director responded, “WHO ARE YOU!?”

Nobody really knows.

Truman Capps hopes to generate enough material during Alexander’s leave in Salem to make another one of these updates.

Special Thanks

The Hair Guy Board of Regents would like to take this opportunity to recognize the following Eugene institutions for their contributions to the city’s overall quality of life:

Robert Saks Mattress Company

While mattress retailers such as Sleep Country USA hawk their wares with jingles, synthesizers, and attractive spokespeople, Robert Saks decided to go in a bold and unprecedented direction. He decided to eschew the notion that slick and exciting ads make people want to buy things, and instead decided to let his undying enthusiasm for mattresses speak for itself.

Mr. Saks, while Billy Mays spent years yelling at cameras, you address your audience in a hoarse whisper, as though you have just been told a highly exciting mattress-oriented secret that you are discreetly trying to share. Furthermore, you have clearly decided that music in this commercial would only slow you down, so you’ve left it out entirely. This combination of the quiet voice and lack of musical accompaniment gives the viewer the impression that he is seated alone with you in a completely silent room, looking you directly in the eye, and listening to your sales pitch about mattresses. And this gives him a powerful desire to buy some mattresses.

And special mention must be given to your slogan – “Come see me!” It is simple, elegant, and to the point – so much so that you decide to use it twice within ten seconds. After the first usage, the viewer doubts whether you are serious; the second time he knows that Robert Saks does not fuck around when it comes to mattresses.

The Kiefer Kia Princess

Small town car dealerships have never been known for their high advertising standards, but your majesty, you do the world a great service every time you prance around a lot filled with compact cars while waving a magic wand and wearing a pink dress.

Many girls grow up wanting to become princesses; alas, sooner or later they give up on their dreams and instead nurse an unhealthy obsession with Disney films that will sabotage their love lives with ridiculously unrealistic expectations for years to come. You, however, refused to give up on your dreams and proved to the world that it’s possible to be both a princess and a car saleswoman. We can only imagine which of those occupations you put on your income tax return.

You are a role model to girls everywhere. You don’t passively sit back and wait for customers to come to you – you yell loudly enough that viewers can often hear you in the other room, if not the other county. Yes, you are a grown woman dressed as a princess, but your enthusiasm and passion for your car dealership comes through clearly enough that countless men have been inspired to get up and buy a brand new compact sedan out of fear that you might physically reach through the TV screen and suck out their souls like that girl in The Ring.

DoughCo

In a world where pizza chains now sell sandwiches and McDonald’s sells coffee, you have refused to do anything but calzones and cookies. While others have diversified and tried to be something they’re not, you have recognized that so long as there are human beings and marijuana existing in the same general area, there will shortly thereafter be a profound need for a bready pocket filled with cheese and meat. That’s where you come in.

We also wish to recognize the incredible friendliness of your telephone operators – while employees at other establishments might get tired of constantly reminding callers what the five side dips are, yours say the words “Ranch, marinara, bleu cheese, barbecue, and hot sauce” as though there’s nothing they’d rather be doing than talking about dipping sauces with a complete stranger. When one is ordering a cheap calzone late at night that he will eat alone in front of his computer, it’s good to hear a friendly and sympathetic voice whisper the word “marinara.”

My Neighbor The Lowrider Owner

Some people are ashamed of their tiny penises, but you, sir, put that information right out in the open with your grey two door sedan which rides a few inches off the ground, has a wicked spoiler, and an engine loud enough to wake up your neighbors every time you decide to turn on the car.

You may be surprised to find out that your engine is capable of waking up your neighbors, but it is. It definitely is. It has proven itself quite capable time and again over the past three months. In fact, some have begun to doubt whether your car is even a car at all or just a big mobile alarm clock for douchebags.

When you turn on your car, the powerful engine purrs to life with all the subtlety of an atom bomb riding a Harley Davidson into an Insane Klown Posse concert. And then, not content to end the experience by driving away, you hop out and smoke a cigarette for a few minutes, allowing the engine to rattle the floors of the units above the parking overhang. It’s like a free foot massage nobody asked for.

With a dick that small, there are any number of opportunities available to you – phone sex patron, University of Washington linebacker, journalism major – but you have not let any of this go to your head. No, while you could write your own ticket in the absolutely tiny penis world, you haven’t forgotten your roots, and persist in having a tiny penis right there in Unit 4.

Thank you. Thank you for subjecting us to an impromptu earthquake drill three times a day.

Truman Capps genuinely respects the Kia Princess and Robert Saks as pioneers of bizarre local advertising – so if you two are reading, good job!

Registration

The purple one is me. Yeah, that's right - the one who's WINNING.

I consider The Perfect Class Schedule to be the ultimate achievement in the college world, followed by Free Alcohol, Convincing A GTF To Give You A Higher Grade, and, somewhere much further along the line, Graduation. The Perfect Schedule resides at the top of the list because once you have that element of your life in order, everything else falls into place.

Class registration has come once again, and starting tomorrow at 8:00, I’ll be able to register for the four classes that will determine how much bitching I’m going to be doing over the course of the next term. Students are allowed to register based both on how many credits they have as well as the last four digits of their student ID number – this element of randomocity ensures that no matter how long you’ve been going to school, you’ve still got just as good a chance to get screwed out of the classes you want as everyone else.

In the days leading up to my appointed registration time, I’ve gone to painstaking lengths to find classes that live up to my criteria:

No Classes Before 10:00: I spent four years getting up at 6:00 AM every day for jazz band in high school – six years, if you count middle school jazz band as well. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all the waking up early I’ll ever need in my life. So help me God, I will not find out what the garbage men look like around here.

Tuesdays And Thursdays Only: This just might be the only time in my life that I’ll be able to get away with only having to put pants on twice a week (and potentially less than that, if the University alters its definition of sexual harassment).

Overall Coolness: Once I’ve isolated classes that take place after 10:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I cross reference the instructors with RateMyProfessor.com to make sure I’m not walking into a “No laptops allowed, and I will be taking attendance every day” sort of situation.

Relevance To My Major (Optional): I’d really like it if The Perfect Schedule fulfilled all of my credit requirements and put me on track for graduation. I’d also like to barbecue with Jack Nicholson.* Some things are just too good to be true. In the pursuit of perfection we all have to make some sacrifices, and a 400 level Volcanology class that meets at 2:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays is one of them.

*”Say, Mr. Nicholson, why aren’t you using any A1 on your steak?” “I guess I just don’t see the point in ordering something ‘rare as hell’ if you’re not gonna be able to taste the blood. And Truman {shades off}, call me Jack, for Chrissake.”

All told, I put one hell of a lot more work into selecting and structuring my classes than I do into the classes themselves.

The main roadblock to me achieving schedule nirvana is the presence of my arch nemesis: other people. Yes, I am not the only one who wants to get up as late as possible for infrequent education, and the competition with other students for the cherriest classes is usually why I wind up taking classes that require me to get up when it’s dark outside.

For example, I had earmarked J387 as a class I wanted to take next term – a class about journalism history or law or karate that, more importantly, met from 4:00 until 5:20 PM. Monday night, I saw that there were twelve openings left in the class, and held my breath in hopes of securing a spot for myself. Today, however, I found that twelve punk-ass bitches with earlier registration times than my own had already discovered the class and filled it up.

Seeing that was like watching my dreams get executed in front of me by the Viet Kong. Sure, they’re also offering J387 at the same time on Monday and Wednesday, but then I’d be in class a whopping four days a week, like a chump.

As we speak, there is only one spot left open in J371, the introductory magazine journalism class that is more or less the cornerstone of my major, and (ideally) a class that I will like (which, in a rare and fortunate coincidence, happens to start at noon). Constantly refreshing DuckWeb and earnestly monitoring that single solitary digit, I can only darkly wonder how many other people with my registration time are doing the same thing, eagerly plotting how quickly they’ll pounce on that last spot as soon as they become eligible to register tomorrow morning. The rush for the final opening in J371 will start out like a horse race and end like Reservoir Dogs.

To pass the time between page reloads, I’ve been pacing back and forth in my room, fantasizing about bounding to my computer tomorrow morning and typing the course registration number for J371 into the registration window mere milliseconds before my legions of competitors. Then my imagination runs wild, fueled by my somewhat quaint ideas about how the Internet works:

I picture a cluster of ones and zeroes (my registration) rocketing through a maze of tubes (the Internet) at breakneck speeds (broadband) toward some grand docking mechanism with only one space left open (J371). My registration is in a desperate race against several other clusters of ones and zeroes (my competitors’ registrations), and it just barely manages to squeeze into the final spot ahead of all the others, causing the students controlling them on the other end of the Internet to throw up their hands and curse while I triumphantly backflip onto a motorcycle and ride off into the sunset at breakneck speeds. I must hurry, because the barbecue is about to begin, and Jack Nicholson does not like to be kept waiting.

Truman Capps admits that there is also a J371 class offered at 8:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but… Well, there you have it.

On Failure

The cat is me, and physics is the cheese.

As an atheist, I prefer the concrete facts of science to the theology of religion. Somewhat ironically, however, my overall understanding of most sciences (take your pick – biology, chemistry, and, most recently, physics) is embarrassingly bad, and I find it much easier to think that things like cellular mitosis and velocity happen because of some fantastical magic that nobody can comprehensibly explain. Essentially, instead of accepting a belief system that has been lent societal credibility by a few millennia of existence, I prefer to make up my own version of science and substitute that instead.

So I guess I could argue that the fact that I have to take four science classes in order to graduate is against my religion – if I were teaching my Physics 152 class, the syllabus would look something like this:

Physics 152 – The Physics Of Sound And Music

Physics is an unproven theory, the mysteries of which humanity’s greatest minds have yet to unravel, although the general consensus is that wizards are responsible for most of it. As it is fruitless to try to try and understand magic, the bulk of the class will be dedicated to the study and pursuit of the perfect Christopher Walken impression.

Attendance: Attendance and class participation is mandatory. Talking like Walken is not a spectator sport.

Homework: The Deer Hunter. Every day. Until you get it right.

Extra Credit: Only students willing to engage in no holds barred Deathfights in front of the class or during my office hours will be eligible for extra credit. Only the victors shall receive it.

*

Sadly, the actual syllabus for my Physics 152 class is far more sacrilegious, making outlandish demands such as the purchase of a scientific calculator and a working knowledge of high school algebra.

Many people have asked me why I took a physics class, as physics is apparently the mathiest of sciences. The fact is, I had not known just how mathy physics was, and even if I had, I would’ve assumed that as it was a 100 level class I probably would have been able to muddle through with my usual combination of charm, sexual favors, and crying.

Well, you heard it here first – physics is fucking hard, no matter what level the class is. Do you know what a Hemholtz Resonator is? I’m not sure I do, either – I know that you blow into it and then magic happens and a lower sounding note comes out, but that’s about it.

The thing about physics is that they want me to explain how the magic happens. If you’re a Christian, imagine somebody asking you, on the penalty of failing a class, to explain exactly how a virgin got pregnant. “God did it” is not an acceptable answer. You’d be a little bit fucked, wouldn’t you? That’s kind of where I’m living right now.

Hubris got me on the first midterm. I assumed that physics was no different than any other class I haven’t understood before, and that a night of studying right before the exam would be enough to get me a B. So I studied with a friend who was far more versed in the mythology of physics than I was, and the next day went in and took the midterm. I left confident that I’d pulled at least a C.

A few days later, when I found out that I had, in fact, received a D, I knew that shit had just gotten real.

I’m by no means a perfectionist. In most cases, I’m usually willing to settle for less if it can get me passable results with minimal effort,* and what I figured was that it was this reprehensible character failing that resulted in my poor grade. I’d been too lazy to put any serious effort into my studies, and as a result I got a D on a college midterm, which is not necessarily easy to recover from.

*Have you ever noticed how some updates on here aren’t very funny? Yeah, there you go.

Fortunately, the professor is a lenient guy, and he told me that if I could improve my performance for the second midterm that he’d base my grade more off of that than the first. So last week during the leadup to the second midterm, I studied like a motherfucker. I hit the book hard, I reviewed old homework, I did practice questions and studied with friends who had gotten As on the first test. I went into class on the day of the midterm confident that I would make the test my bitch and not the other way around like last time.

The good news is that I only got 48% of the questions on the second midterm wrong. The bad news is that scoring 52% on a midterm that comprises 20 percent of your grade is definitely not a good way to qualify for scholarships, and it’s usually a pretty bad sign if you were at all interested in not writing the past ten weeks off as a several hundred dollar goof.

52% is an F. Had I stayed at home that day and masturbated instead of taking the test, I still would have gotten an F, but probably would have been in a much better mood all afternoon.

I guess what confuses me is how 90 minutes of studying the night before the exam got me a grade that was eleven points higher than the one I got after some eight hours of studying over the course of the week leading up to the next one. Had I just gotten another D, I would have assumed that the course materials had progressed further than my study habits since the last exam, but the fact that hours of concentrated, thoughtful study got me a lower grade suggests that maybe studying is not the best way to prepare for tests.

Maybe I should get drunk before the final.

Truman Capps can’t wait to use his science skills to become the best journalist ever.

Reporting 1

The Google Image Search results for "reporter" and "journalism" weren't so good, so I just ramped up the Chevy.

Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook may have noticed that over the past seven weeks or so my status has periodically indicated some level of dissatisfaction with the journalism class I’m currently taking, Reporting 1. Some of you have called me out for being an obnoxious whiner; I always thought everyone had sort of accepted this, seeing as I’ve got a blog upon which I obnoxiously whine on a regular basis. Calling a blogger out for bitching too much is like calling Batman out for having an ostentatious car – it sort of comes with the territory.

To give you an idea, though, of why I bitch about Reporting 1, let me tell you about Monday morning:

I’d had a really great weekend. There hadn’t been a home football game, so I was able to sleep in to my heart’s content, and in spite of the Ducks’ poor performance at Stanford on Saturday my friends and I were still able to pick ourselves up and throw on hell of a party that night. The following day I ate a nutritious breakfast and spent several hours playing video games (hence Sunday’s late update). I went to class Monday with a spring in my step, feeling optimistic about the week ahead.

When I arrived, our professor assembled us around a table and said, “Sometimes in the newsroom, a disaster strikes and you’ve got to drop everything you’re doing to report on it, which is what we’ll be doing today. In a few minutes we’ll be having a simulated press conference in which several faculty members posing as public health officials will inform you about a hypothetical swine flu outbreak that has overwhelmed area hospitals at the same time as a freak windstorm. After the press conference you’ll have an hour to assemble the facts into a story.”

It was 9:00 AM.

It was 9:00 AM on Monday, some of my classmates were probably still drunk, and we’d been dropped headfirst into an episode of 24. I guess this is just one of those situations where learning how to do a certain job is a lot less glamorous than the job itself. When George Clooney was on ER I’m pretty sure there was never an episode where had to sponge up some homeless guy’s diarrhea, and All The President’s Men didn’t have a scene where Woodward and Bernstein have to cover a fake apocalypse.

Reporting 1 has always been very good at forcing me to confront my mortality head on. For the first two weeks of the term, we spent the bulk of our class time reading press releases from the Oregon State Police about fatal car accidents and then using the raw information to write newsbriefs, which we would then share with the class like excessively bland, rigidly structured beat poetry.

Warren Jenkins, age 56, of Springfield
was
pronounced dead on Sunday afternoon when the
Pontiac
Firebird
he was driving ran off the road near mile post 118.
He was ejected from the vehicle.
Jenkins was not wearing…
HIS SEEEEAAAATBEEELLLLT!

There’s nothing quite like getting up early on a Monday and promptly being handed a terse list of everybody who died in a car crash while you were partying over the weekend. It makes you feel kind of irresponsible for having any joy in your life at all when there are half a dozen families across the state all grieving and making with the funeral arrangements. It also makes you never want to drive again for fear that your inevitable death will become fodder for a bunch of sleepy journalism students.

Shortly after that came obituary training, where we learned how to take the necessary information off of death reports from funeral homes and put it into a brief, drab, and spectacularly uninteresting block of text that will probably only be read by family members and other journalism majors looking for a good template on which to base their obituaries.

The reasoning behind learning how to write obituaries and traffic accident reports is that pretty much anyone who goes to work for a newspaper will at first be the newsroom’s bitch, relegated to the worst available duties. This is true of most jobs - it’s just not as readily apparent in the minimum wage world because no matter how long you’ve been working at Mike’s Drive In you still have to clean a bathroom at the end of every day.

Now, of course Reporting 1 has to be like this, both in order to weed out the pussies and because the whole reason I’m even going to college is ostensibly to learn how to do journalism. Reporting 1 is teaching valuable journalistic skills, but it just so happens that learning valuable things isn’t always fun. In Kill Bill, Uma Thurman wasn’t having fun when she spent several months getting her ass handed to her on a daily basis by the cruel master samurai Pei Mei, but if you’ve so much as seen a trailer for the movie you know that she makes it through her training and goes on to establish the world’s first hotel for dogs.

That might not be right. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie.

I’m sticking with Reporting 1 because I don’t want to get weeded out like the aforementioned pussies, but I’m still enough of a pussy to make a point of bitching whenever school interrupts the cycle of video games and pornography that is my life. I guess that’s a part of who I am – I enjoy finding new and innovative ways to bitch about things (hence, again, the blog). If I quit doing it, I wouldn’t be staying true to myself.

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure “stay true to yourself” was the moral of Kill Bill.

Truman Capps has to go to bed now so that he can wake up in seven and a half hours for the NONSTOP MISERY FIESTA that is Reporting 1.

Little Known Facts About The Healthcare Bill

Bow before your new god!

The House of Representatives narrowly passed a health care reform bill a few days ago, to much condemnation from the right and praise from the left. Here are a few interesting facts about this controversial piece of legislation:

Death Panels Are Go
The brouhaha over Death Panels that ensued over the summer died down after it was proven that the public option would not empower the government to decide when old people died. Yes, it turns out that the actual language of the bill allows the government* to decide when any person can die, young or old. Also, if the person the Obama Administration has selected for termination does not already have a preexisting medical condition, the bill gives government commandos the authority to create one. Special attention shall be paid to babies, whose blood will be used as ink for future healthcare legislation.

*And by “government,” they mean “the Illuminati,” and by “the Illuminati,” they mean “President Obama’s fellow countrymen in Kenya.”

We Will Punch Mortality In The Face
Democrats are quick to point out that the only reason the Health Care Bill allows for rampant, Holocaust-style extermination of innocent people is because once there’s a public healthcare option available, average lifespan in the United States is projected to jump from 79.5 years to Infinity. While this is great for the bulk of the non-Marilyn Manson listening population, it will create something of an overcrowding problem, hence Death Panels.

Taxes Will Jump A Bit
Once it officially becomes the government’s responsibility to care for every sick or injured person in America, everyone, particularly small business owners and single mothers, can expect to see a significant tax increase in order to fund abortions for illegal immigrants. In some cases, the taxation may surpass simple monetary payments and instead require taxpayers to physically perform the abortions themselves, on the penalty of being Death Paneled. This is, after all, necessary in order to provide enough ink for forthcoming healthcare legislation.

Justifies Not Giving Money To Homeless
Fine print in the healthcare legislation will make it a federal law that people no longer have to feel bad for not giving money to panhandlers, as they are a part of the generation that provided free healthcare to all Americans. Instead, people are now allowed to point at the homeless and shout, “Spare change!? I just saved your life!” The homeless person in question will then be so overcome with gratitude for his savior that he will kick his heroin habit, get a job at Starbucks, and volunteer on the weekends at a charity of your choosing.

Innovative Cost Cutting Measures
In order to cut down on the number of injuries requiring government funded medical attention, the Obama Administration will be collecting everyone’s guns in order to prevent any unnecessary injuries. This is also intended to make it easier for the Death Squads to do their work, and to better mimic the actions of other Socialist* countries. This ban on firearms will also extend to the military, as the healthcare legislation will coincide with President Obama’s plan to call off the War on Terror and allow Osama bin Laden to live in a house belonging to either a heroic fireman or Lance Armstrong.

*Oh, yeah, we’re officially socialists now, if you didn’t notice.

We Will All Be Heroes
Democrats who voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election will be recognized the world over as bold, renegade humanitarians who defied all odds in order to bring medical care to all. When visiting Europe, they will be entitled to no less than three (3) free drinks and ten (10) high fives from Europeans who are overjoyed that America has finally joined all other industrialized nations by recognizing the true value of human life. Also, in about ten years, Michael Bay will direct a feel-good biopic about each and every Obama supporter’s life in order to further commemorate the gravity of their decision to single handedly eliminate human suffering (in America).

Music Will Never Be The Same
The words to “Freebird” will be rewritten to instead be overtly congratulatory towards President Obama and liberals in general. The same is true for “God Bless Texas” and every song by Bruce Springsteen. All unaltered (or “inferior”) music will be wrapped up in surplus old-style American flags,* set on fire, and dropped in the ocean.

*The new style will consist of a single large picture of Michael Moore high fiving Keith Olbermann, accompanied by the full text of Moore’s firey rant about the Bush Administration at the Academy Awards several years ago.

Everything Will Be Fixed, Forever
Once healthcare legislation breezes through Congress and is signed into law, the economy, abortion, gay marriage, war, swine flu, and people driving slow in the left hand lane will all take care of themselves, simultaneously, in the space of about a week. Then, President Obama will undoubtedly be recognized as the greatest president of all time and you won’t have to feel bad about all the trash you talked to your Republican friends during the election or worry that maybe Obama won’t accomplish quite as much change as he promised.

Everything Will Be Ruined, Forever
Once they railroad healthcare legislation through Congress and get it signed into law, the economy, abortion, gay marriage, war, swine flu, and people driving slow in the left lane will all become much, much worse in the space of about a day. Your only comfort after you’ve killed and eaten your neighbors just to stay alive in the postapocalyptic nightmare that is 2010 will be that you were right all along – they can keep the change.

Truman Capps squeaked in kind of late on this one – blame it on the alcohol.

Strange Moments In Public Bathrooms

"Man, this is one hell of a public bathroom. I think I'll take a picture of it and put it on the Internet!"

My age: 15
Location: Newport Bay restaurant, Portland

I walked into the bathroom to find it completely empty save for one closed stall door. As I was making my way over to the urinal, the stall’s occupant, who sounded to be about ten years old, said:

“Hey there.”

And right away I knew that this was going to get really weird, really fast.

“Hey,” I said, entirely out of politeness, realizing as I spoke that I had now committed fully and would be unable to turn tail and run out of the bathroom, having joined in the conversation.

“I don’t normally poop at restaurants,” the kid said, quite matter-of-factly. “But tonight I just felt like I couldn’t wait ‘till I got home.”

“Uh huh.” My impulse was to use the bathroom as quickly as possible and get the hell away from this overly conversational little tyke, but he was making it very difficult to concentrate.

“I dunno what it was,” he mused, prepubescent voice echoing off tile. “I guess I had too much chicken at dinner or something.”

As a general rule, I don’t have a problem with being talked to by people who are using the bathroom or vice-versa. I really don’t have much choice; Mike seems to make a point of using the bathroom at least once during every one of our phone conversations.

However, I do have a problem with strangers talking to me out of the blue – moreso when the stranger in question is talking about the regularity of his bowel movements, and double moreso when he’s actually moving his bowels while he talks about them. The fact that the stranger in question was a child did not make this situation any easier. All I could imagine was what would happen if someone walked in right at that moment:

“What’s going on in here?”

“Oh, y’know, I’m just chatting with this 10-year-old about the regularity of his restaurant pooping, as he poops, in a restaurant.”

“Do you know him?”

“I didn’t when I first came in here, but I feel like we’re a lot closer now.”

It was inevitable – the longer I stayed in the bathroom, the worse my life would become. I abandoned any hope of peeing in the foreseeable future and instead went about noisily washing my hands.

“Well, I’ve got to run,” I said. “It sure has been something, though.”

“Wait,” the kid said. “I’m almost done. Just a sec.”

And I was already out the door.

My age: 10
Location: Wellington International Airport, Wellington, New Zealand

We had about an hour between flights, and so I went to use the bathroom while my parents sat and waited on a bunch of those uncomfortable black vinyl chairs you only find in airports. As this was several years before Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom extravaganza in Minneapolis, my parents had no qualms about letting their son walk into an airport bathroom unattended.

Just like in the previous example, I was alone in the bathroom save for one other person, but once I got into the stall, it was clear that the guy next door was not doing so well. Honestly, it sounded like a symphony of wretching, belching, and farting, all going on about a foot away from where I was trying to do my business.

Now, at first this was great, because I was ten years old, and when you’re ten, there’s nothing better than having a front row seat for an epic display of bodily functions – and believe me, this guy was like the Bruce Springsteen of disgusting bodily functions. There would be a long burst of gagging followed by a wall-rattling belch, topped off with a brief yet substantial round of flatulence. I’m serious. This guy was literally The Boss. To me, he was like every episode of All That! rolled into one.

However, the appeal of a guy being violently ill quickly wore off for me, and I started to get worried. For me, when I had been violently ill in the past, the noisy part of it usually lasted about five seconds, if that, and this guy had been going strong for the better part of a minute. It was kind of freaking me out, so I left the bathroom without peeing to get my Dad’s help.

In retrospect, I’m not sure what I expected him to do. Come in with me and say, “Hey, Sick Guy! Quit being sick!”?

Dad, who was more concerned with us making our next flight than some tourist’s digestive pyrotechnics, told me to go back in the bathroom, take care of business as quickly as possible, and leave.

So I gathered up my courage and did as I was told, picking the stall as far away from the sick guy’s as I could. And so help me God, the poor bastard puked, belched, and farted the entire time.

In years since, I’ve wondered if maybe somebody had just recorded a bunch of bodily functions, spliced them together, and then stuck a tape player in the bathroom to flummox kids like me. If that’s actually the case, though, I’m honestly a little more freaked out than before.

I think the most likely option is just that people in New Zealand are really, really good at being sick.

Alexander’s age: Middle school-ish
Location: Portland International Airport

After a long flight from God knows where, Alexander’s Mom ordered him and his brother (“The Spaz”) to go use the bathroom before the family got in the car for the drive back to Salem.

And so Alexander and The Spaz did just that. As soon as The Spaz entered his stall, though, he called out to Alexander.

“Alexander, get over here!” Alexander later described his younger brother’s tone as reverent. “You have to see this!”

Alexander dropped what he was doing and ran to see what The Spaz was talking about. What he found his brother staring at was shocking and also somewhat humbling:

The previous occupant of the stall had sprayed excrement across the wall above the toilet in what Alexander described as a “majestic brown rainbow.”

“And all I could think was, ‘Somebody wanted to do this.’” Alexander said later. “Because doing that could not have been easy or pleasant. Whoever did this clearly had a plan that he was very solidly committed to.”

It didn’t make sense to him then, and it didn’t make sense to me when he told me about it. For a while we wished we could have been there when it happened to ask the guy what motivated him to do it, but then decided that maybe that was a situation we shouldn’t have been wishing to be close to.

If he and I learned anything from our speculation, it was that more often than not, public bathrooms raise more questions than they ever answer.

That’s just a natural side effect of places where complete strangers gather to do taboo acts in close proximity. Sometimes, elements of peoples’ private lives are best left shrouded in mystery.

Truman Capps admits that potty humor is probably somewhat played, but it's still a damnsight better than Twitter.

Sorry Folks, This One's Kind Of About Sports

But first, some Star Wars.

I’ve said many times that there’s nothing better in college football than absolutely pounding Washington, but after last night I’ve realized that I was wrong.

The thing is, Washington fans have come to expect it. Sure, they get drunk and scream at us with all the acumen expected of born and bred Seattle hillbillies, but you can tell that deep down, they’re just getting drunk and screaming for the sake of getting drunk and screaming. Their team is still in such bad shape that it lost a recent exhibition match with the Oregon School for the Blind – the fans know this, but their logic is that college football is one of the last social institutions that does not frown on drinking Coors before 9 AM, telling a stranger that you fucked his mother, and vomiting in public, so why pass it up just because the team won’t win?

USC is a horse of a different color.

I’m always kind of shocked to see USC fans walking around in the world – I guess it’s a constant surprise to me that they actually exist. USC has been dominating the Pac-10, as well as a lot of college football in general, for about as long as I’ve been paying attention, and presumably for a while before then, too. They’re the reason that Midwestern douchetrucks call us the Pac-1. They have a tried and true record of steamrolling just about everyone, and in so doing have earned a reputation for being a bunch of snotty cockhammers* about it.

*Not to be confused with early 80’s English punk rock frontman Snotty Cockhammers.

I guess what I find entertaining about college football is the act of swearing allegiance to your team through thick and thin, and being there for the bad times as well as the good times. USC, however, has only had good times, and I feel like that’s kind of cheating. It’s basically guaranteed that their team is going to win. I mean, why even bother showing up? The only reason the fans (and their fucking band) seem to go to the games is to be spiteful after their team wins.

It’s like watching Star Wars and rooting for The Empire, because hey – how could they lose, right? “Fuck you, Alderaan! You just got your ass kicked by the Death Star! EMPIRE FOREVER!” And then the band plays that fucking song.

So last night, when we beat USC 47-20 (their worst loss in 12 years), we were essentially blowing up their Death Star, and watching the looks of vacant shock and confusion on their fans’ faces was priceless. The fact that we did it in front of a national television audience? Double priceless.

I think hubris was really USC’s biggest problem last night – that and the fact that they lost big time. When their team came on the field to warm up, our student section booed them, as is tradition (it’s not like USC has a monopoly on asshole fans – they’re just the very best at it). Their players reveled in it, one of them smiling at the students and sweeping his arms upward to encourage them to boo louder.

A few hours later he and his teammates were running for their lives to make it to the locker room as mobs of Oregon fans pushed past security guards to rush the field, eventually filling it up like a swimming pool full of drunk people.

That being said, we weren’t without hubris either – our fans were jingling keys and singing “Kiss Him Goodbye” when there were still seven minutes left in the fourth quarter. Admittedly, we had more than doubled USC’s score at that point, but we would have looked incredibly bad if they’d come back and won then. On the other hand, I’ve never heard that many keys jingling in unison before, and I’m pretty sure USC hasn’t either.

It all takes me back to the game against Boise State almost three months ago. That could charitably be described as a really awful day – The Girlfriend and I broke up that morning, and when I went to find solace in football, all I got was a well publicized ass-kicking show with a little bit of Rocky at the end. September 3rd was no fun at all.

But then last night I was looking at a scoreboard, and the number in lights underneath ‘Oregon’ was a lot larger than the one underneath ‘USC’, which is definitely a rare thing.

In light of Boise State, though, I can kind of understand how USC’s asshole fans feel. They tuned into the game expecting their team to teabag us and end all the national hype here and now, a lot like Oregon fans did three months ago. The results were hard for us to swallow then, and I’m sure they were hard for USC to swallow last night – particularly because at the time we were physically brushing their teeth with our dicks.

It’s surprising how quickly something terrible can turn an organization around. Maybe we should start every season with an embarrassing loss to galvanize us into greatness. Maybe USC should too – last night knocked them down a few notches, and I like that very much, but this is really an opportunity for them to quit trading on the fact that they’re USC and maybe quit playing like they’re The Empire.

Sure, The Empire thought it was invincible, but there was an exhaust port on the Death Star the whole time.

Truman Capps hopes that USC gets #3 in the Pac-10 so their fucking band has to spend four days in El Paso.