In The Closet

My room is not this big.

Going to Ikea is always a fun experience because it gives me the opportunity to see what sort of inhumanely tiny faux apartments those crazy Scandinavians have made to appear completely livable thanks to cheap, efficient design.

Walking through an Ikea, you move through smaller and smaller apartment style showrooms, all of them seemingly spacious and luxurious due to liberal use of Ikea products throughout. By the time you’re done you’re standing in a room the size of a dog kennel, but since there’s some modular cabinets and a framed picture of a fake family in there it feels like a suite at the Bellagio.

Yeah, you think, planning out a future in which every furnishing in your house has a quaint name with an umlaut in it. Clean, spare, and efficient. Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

Then you go to the Ikea warehouse and realize that in order to fill one room you’d need to spend at least a thousand dollars, and so instead you spend the day on Craigslist and cobble together a mismatched living room set for $45 which includes an ottoman that somebody’s dog got pregnant on.

Now, I find myself in the sort of situation that is Ikea’s bread and lingonberry butter – while I was in England and Hollywood, my roommates moved into our new place and discovered that instead of the four bedroom unit we’d been promised, it was a three bedroom unit with a glorified 10x10 closet. Since I wasn’t around to answer first when my roommates played a game of ‘One, Two, Three, Not It’ for the closet, it is now where I live like a lonely, jaded Harry Potter.

Admittedly, my closet has a window and a heat register and a smaller closet inside of it. It’s a ground floor room, the window is at eye level with no curtains, and the door doesn’t lock. It’s less a dwelling space and more a special tiny chamber designed by the Catholic church specifically to prevent masturbation from happening.

I’ve just reached a point where I’ve been able to successfully stow all my cardboard boxes full of stuff in my closet or under my desk, and I’m afraid that’s where they’re going to have to stay, because if I went so far as to unpack anything I really don’t think I have enough surfaces on which to put the things I’d taken out of the box.

Since getting back from LA I’ve just been pulling clean shirts and underwear out of my suitcase, but today I did laundry for the first time and I’m not sure where to put all my clean, folded clothes. The best idea I’ve had so far is to put it on my three tiered bedside table, which is the closest thing I have to a dresser. The advantage to that would be that I could get dressed without having to get out of bed, but since getting dressed is only something I do when I’m planning on getting out of bed anyway, it’s sort of a moot point.

Also, a room this small tends to get cluttered pretty quickly – all you have to do is set one thing down on the floor and right away 30% of the room is a complete mess. Since I tend to make a mess whenever I’m looking for something in my boxes and am always too lazy to pick it all up, my plan now is to simply mooch off my roommates whenever I need something rather than get it myself, because the very act of opening a box and taking two things out of it will make my room into an instant pigsty.

Today the good people at Sleep Country USA delivered the twin bed that I’d bought, which has done a lot to make my room look less like a slob lives there. Until then I’d been sleeping in a sleeping bag on a queen sized air mattress on the floor, which not only took up a lot of space but also put me far closer to the dusty, hairball and Astroturf laden hardwood floors than I wanted to be after a full day of band camp.

I’m sleeping in a twin bed in a tiny room. This takes me back to freshman year in the dorms, only there isn’t free food provided and at 2.1 miles from campus my house now is slightly closer to my classes than the Bean Complex was. Also, to my knowledge nobody here is crapping in a garbage can rather than walk to the bathroom, which is certainly one step above the dorms.

Truman Capps thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to write shorter updates during band camp.

Fall Television Preview

Now if you want to talk about a show they SHOULD remake...

Hawaii Five-O

This is a remake of a show that was popular in the 1970s. Remakes are popular with studios because it’s a formula that’s been proven to work in the past. So naturally this show should work, right? I mean, people have the same attitudes and sensibilities as they had 40 years ago, and plenty of folks in the coveted 18-to-35 age group advertisers shoot for grew up watching the show, so there’ll be that connection, right?

Oh, wait. I guess not. Well, still, it’s a cop show, so at least there isn’t a whole lot of competition.

Oh, wait. Well, uh… At least it’s set in the one place in America where they haven’t already had either a CSI or a Law and Order.

Shit My Dad Says

Am I the only one who’s a little bit bothered by the fact that they made a TV show about a Twitter feed? I mean, really? That’s 140 characters or less per update. Three years now I’ve been cranking out an average of 2000 words per week, and as I’ve mentioned many times before, nobody has given me a fucking TV show yet. I had to go out and make my own, and it got about one trillionth of the hits that that guy’s Twitter feed did.

How’s about this for a show - Shit That Happens To Truman. Every week it’s a new 22 minute long peek into my ongoing and bloody war with the modern world. Spoiler alert: Not a lot of sex on this show.

Mike & Molly

It’s a sitcom about two fat people, which I suppose is reflective of networks assuming that couch potatoes watching their shows want to see similarly proportioned characters on TV. I’ve got to call shenanigans on this one, because all three of my roommates are fat and they spend between 70 and 100 percent of their time talking about what thin blonde woman on TV is hottest.

Regardless, according to the show’s synopsis on Wikipedia, the titular Mike and Molly “…will have to deal with the comments, jokes, and criticism from Mike's fast-talking [coworker] Carl McMillan; Molly's slim sister Victoria, and her mother Joyce.”

Outside of the fact that Mike and Molly meet at an overeaters’ anonymous group, this is all the description they give, which leads me to believe that the show is nothing beyond a weekly chain of fat jokes, which was a viable concept when The Drew Carey Show pioneered it but doesn’t work quite as well anymore.

The Walking Dead

It’s a serialized TV show about the zombie apocalypse being produced by AMC, which has recently been giving HBO a run for its money with Breaking Bad and that show about people smoking in the past. Angry Dudes, I think it’s called.

I can’t tell you how excited I am for this show – not just because it’s the union of the two things I love most (zombies and television’s ability to tell epic stories) but because this is the sort of thing my main bro Alexander and I have been talking about wanting to see for the past ten years or more. It’s good to know that somebody’s finally listening.

Secret Millionaire

It’s a reality show about undercover rich people going into the projects, living like poor people for between a week and ten days, and then dramatically revealing their wealth to their salt of the Earth Bruce Springsteen friends and rewarding them with large amounts of money. Presumably, this solves all of society’s problems.

I don’t know if you heard, but I worked in reality television, and I’ll tell you this right now – if you’re making a TV show about something, people know. Snappy editing (some of which I was responsible for) obscures a lot of this, but the creation of a reality TV show requires at least two cameramen, a dedicated sound crew, a crack squad of producers, and at least $15,000 worth of equipment.

The presence of all these people tends to disrupt the very reality that’s trying to be conveyed in such a way that bystanders tend to notice. And no matter what alibi the camera crew gives the poor people around the secret millionaires, I’m pretty sure in an era of constant reality TV show pranks and inversions (Intervention, Undercover Boss, Dame Edna’s Neighborhood Watch) just about anyone – even poor people! - will be able to connect the dots between the presence of a camera crew and forthcoming good fortune.

Outsourced

Last year, Parks and Recreation really screwed with my Thursday night NBC schedule. Things started off strong with the shining brilliance of Community, but then, in the half hour before 9:00 when The Office and 30 Rock took up the comedy reins, there was Parks and Recreation.

I don’t want to slander any of the writers for that show, because they were doing the best they could with a concept that was basically, “Do The Office, only Michael Scott is a lady.” But it wasn’t a great show, plain and simple. It was a buzzkill between Community and The Office. In protest, my friends and I would actually turn off the television and just talk to each other for half an hour until The Office came on.

So that’s why I’m glad Outsourced, a strikingly original concept for an office comedy (in spite of being a spinoff of a movie) coming to NBC’s dynamite Thursday night lineup. Good or bad (I think it’ll be good), it’ll be rocking/sucking in a bold new way, which at the very least is worth some brownie points.

Conan

Whenever I got sad or lonely in England, I would pull up old YouTube videos from Late Night With Conan O’Brien or the magical seven month window then The Tonight Show didn’t suck and let Coco’s antics remind me that my friendly homeland with its rich, exploitable pop culture was waiting for me.

I am going to watch the fuck out of this show.

Truman Capps thinks that watching TV on his roommates’ 62 inch television will be akin to watching NBC’s Thursday night lineup in an IMAX theater.

XBox Live

"You're a camping faggot, Dad!"

As much as I enjoy the song ‘American Pie’, I’ve always wanted to write a version more relevant to my life. ‘American Pie’ was all about Don McLean lamenting the shift in American pop music from danceable tunes the likes of Buddy Holly to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, bands that, while great, were better to do drugs to than to dance to.

I don’t have quite as strong an opinion about music, but video games? Man, I could write a song about what’s been going on with video games for the past decade or so, no sweat – the only thing holding me back is my inability to rhyme the whole thing and think up cryptic metaphors.

I grew up playing Goldeneye 64, which revolutionized console multiplayer gaming by making it quick and easy for four friends to get together, huddle around a TV, and have an epic movie quality shootout. Goldeneye took wanton murder, previously only the preferred pastime of the Manson Family and various pro athletes, and made it a cheap and harmless hobby for millions of people.

What was great about this system was that it made video games, which until then had been an activity primarily directed at pathetic, antisocial nerds, and made it an activity that could be enjoyed by pathetic, social nerds, the likes of whom would invite all their friends over to play industry standards like Perfect Dark, Halo, or Super Smash Brothers. All you needed to throw a successful party was one copy of the game in question, four controllers, and one or more friends who lived nearby. Still, this was difficult for me during elementary school.

As time went by, though, things couldn’t stay the same. The Internet came to console gaming in a big way, with XBox Live making it possible to hook your console up to an international network and play against other Asperger’s sufferers in other mother’s basements around the world. Within a matter of years, gaming had gone from a social phenomenon back to people sitting alone in the dark staring at a screen, which is pretty much one step above pornography.

What’s really terrible about online console gaming, though, is that it’s kneecapped the fun of split screen multiplayer. XBox Live killed the Goldeneye star, you could say. Now that online gaming is so big, many developers have started releasing games that only support two player split screen instead of four – some games don’t allow split screen multiplayer at all. Yes, that’s right – if you and your friends want to play Crackdown 2, you need four XBoxes and four copies of the game, not to mention four XBox live subscriptions.

Almost all of the games I play on my XBox are single player only. I never bought an XBox live subscription and when I do play a game with a multiplayer option, I leave it alone on the main menu to gather dust. I do this for two reasons:

1) I don’t want to play ball with the game developers and Microsoft, because the game is basically Rape Ball, and they invented all the rules and created an environment in which it was acceptable to win at the game every time. If in 1999 you released a game that didn’t let four friends plonk down in front of one TV and play together, it was fucking broken, and that was that. Now, if I want to play a game with friends, I’m expected to buy a $60 a year XBox live subscription – and that’s provided that they have XBoxes and copies of the game too.
2) XBox Live has a near intergalactic reputation for being a haven for angry prepubescent middle schoolers with all the decorum of angry, prepubescent middle schoolers. Not only are they better at every game than you are, but they’ll let you know it, squealing insults over voice chat and calling you a faggot in spite of the fact that their user name is JUSTINBEIBER9.

I’m intentionally staying in the past – sort of like the guy who refuses to get a cell phone, except I’m not going bald and driving a convertible Mustang. However, the future catches up with all of us, whether we like it or not, and it’s happened to me too.

My new roommates are all XBox owners, and devotees of the religion known as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game so fast paced and hyperactive that just watching it puts you at risk of contracting ADHD. While the most popular game mode is a team deathmatch, the title is sort of a misnomer, because in Modern Warfare 2 you don’t so much have a team as a bunch of people who aren’t trying to kill you. Any sort of actual teamplay is nonexistent – everyone charges into the breach independent of one another, desperate to score as many kills as they can in hopes of gaining the most points and bolstering their kill to death ratio (the number of people they kill compared to the number of times they die, which is ranked on the international leaderboards and is just as big a chick magnet as this blog is for me).

My roommates want me to jump headfirst into this violent, angry, hyperactive mosh pit, just like they did, and to entice me they’ve gone so far as to buy me a month’s subscription to XBox Live. I was reluctant at first, but I decided to humor them – these are the same people who introduced me to drinking, and that’s been working out pretty well for me so far.

I’ve been playing for a few days, and I’m slowly but surely mastering the breakneck pace of Modern Warfare 2. It’s not enjoyable yet to repeatedly spawn and be killed by an 11-year-old potty mouth sharpshooter from the other side of the map, but I’m pushing through it because we’ve got a 62-inch TV.

What’s great about this TV isn’t just that it’s absolutely gigantic, but that it’s possible to divide (or, I don’t know split) the screen down the middle and do two different things at once – you can watch two different channels, or watch a DVD and play an XBox game, or have two XBoxes going at once. Using this last option, we’ve been able to huddle together in front of the same TV and fight together. When my other two roommates are playing from their rooms only a few feet away and we’re all screaming abuse at each other, it starts to remind me a little of my Goldeneye days.

So I guess I’m willing to play ball with Microsoft when I’m able to play at least a little bit on my terms – a task that required me to find not only three friends with XBoxes and copies of Modern Warfare 2, but also a gigantic TV and a house to keep it all in. It might be more expensive in the long run, but I tell you, I did miss that old-timey ultraviolence.

Truman Capps knew that if he had his chance that he could make those people dance.

A Look At My Road Trip Playlist

Ugh... Sorry I'm late, guys. Driving 450 miles and having a welcome home party right after will make that happen.

My version had less nudity, but probably a much better soundtrack.

Dire Straits, “Sultans of Swing” – There are guys who listen to Dire Straits and guys who don’t listen to Dire Straits, and I’m a guy who doesn’t listen to Dire Straits. However, my father is (clearly it’s not an inherited characteristic) and has been for some time, and “Sultans of Swing” has been a part of his road trip mix since the pre compact disc era, when if you wanted to listen to a song in the car you had to actually hire Dire Straits (or an equally good cover band) to come along and play it while you drove, and then give them cab fare to get home. Regardless, I heard so much of this song on family road trips growing up that I now can’t drive across state lines without listening to it.

Cheap Trick, “Surrender” – Is “Surrender” a great road trip song because its driving tempo just makes you feel like going somewhere, or because I and all fellow nerds associate it with Conan O’Brien sprinting from New York to Los Angeles to host The Tonight Show?

Guns N’ Roses, “November Rain” – In the summer of 1992, everyone who lost their virginity in or around a car did so while this song was playing.

Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir” – Kashmir might be a great road trip song because Robert Plant first got inspired to write the song while on a road trip through a flat, boring, seemingly endless stretch of highway – which, if you’re on a long drive anywhere in the United States, you’re bound to encounter eventually (up yours, Nebraska). Incidentally, for any of you who spend a lot of time driving to Northern California from Oregon, I recommend listening to Kashmir as you come out of the Siskiyous and approach Mt. Shasta in the distance, right after customs. I can’t really make a joke about that. Just do it. You’ll shit bricks.

Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon” – For all I know, this could be crappy road music, but it’s my favorite album so I’m inclined to recommend it. I had all of the songs in my road trip playlist in order when I drove down, but coming back I hit ‘Random’, which mixed them up in a way that, while jarring to a snotty Pink Floyd fan like myself, made for an interesting segue when the mellow, drugged out instrumental “Any Colour You Like” led right into “Hey Ya” by Outkast.

John Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane” – I really like John Mellencamp – not in the sense that I like his music, because I’m not a huge fan, but because he’s got basically my politics but the popularity and talent to be able to write successful songs about how much Reaganomics sucks. Also, in spite of his fame and fortune, he still lives in his home state of Indiana, which I respect, in a mansion with his supermodel wife, which I respect even more. Look, some people write fan letters, some people pray, and I occasionally listen to a song about poor white trash, even though I don’t like it that much.

B-52s, “Rock Lobster” – The B-52s are such a guilty pleasure for so many people that they’ve earned this reputation as a ‘party band’ – you play their music at parties, because then everybody has alcohol as an excuse to dance and sing along with all the completely ludicrous lyrics. Being in a car on the highway is the next best thing: As far as everybody else on the road knows, you’re belting the lyrics and doing the robot to “Candle in the Wind” or something more respectable than a song consisting almost entirely of double entendres about marine life.

Steely Dan, “My Old School” – This is yet another song that, thanks to hearing it on my parents’ road trip mix tapes every summer throughout the early 1990s, I now associate with being in a car full of bags and using rest stops that smelled like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar” – For the 1998 Super Bowl, Pepsi released a commercial where a CGI fly drinks some Pepsi and then is inspired to start dancing around with a matchstick, singing the chorus to “Brown Sugar” in an annoying falsetto voice while the original recording of the Stones backs him up. I was nine at the time and I thought the song was catchy, and for a few weeks I’d walk around humming or singing the snippet that I’d heard in the commercial. “Brown Sugar! What makes you taste so good? I say yeah, yeah, yeah, woo!” I figured that the Rolling Stones had loved pouring brown sugar on their oatmeal so much that they up and wrote a song about it – and hey, I could relate, because that shit was and is delicious.

Imagine my surprise when I first listened to the whole song, shortly before making my road trip mix. It turns out this song that I had been cheerily humming along to for a good chunk of fourth grade was actually about white plantation owners buying slave women at auction and pretty much raping them all night long.

This doesn’t explain why I listen to the song while I’m driving, but I hope it helps you understand why I don’t like Pepsi.

Truman Capps has never heard a song with content as filthy as ‘Brown Sugar’ – which is saying something, because he’s listened to, like, five rap songs.

In-N-Out

He's like ":)" and his colon is like ":(".

I leave Los Angeles for Oregon on Tuesday morning. Accordingly, I’ve been trying to pack all the Southern California that I can into these last few days so that I have some mementos when I return to far superior state to the North. Accordingly, in the past few days I’ve bought vodka at an Albertson’s, spent hours driving around with the air conditioning on at full blast, and had multiple animated conversations with people about traffic.*

*Everywhere else, people talk about the weather, but since Los Angeles doesn’t have weather in the conventional sense, people talk at great length about traffic. “God, I tell you what, the 101 was ten different kinds of fucked up today – it took me like 20 minutes to go two miles! But then as soon as I got on the 405 it was totally clear and easy for a change, right up until about a mile before the off ramp for the 90, when it got fucked up again. Hell of crazy, dogg!”

More than anything else, though, I’ve been partaking of a good amount of In-N-Out. I’m hoping to one day have ‘enough’ In-N-Out, but I get the idea that In-N-Out Burger, like money and Firefly, is something you can never quite get enough of.

You have to admire the relatively large balls it takes for In-N-Out, in an era where the McDonald’s menu features coffee and frappes and Jack In The Box serves quesadillas, to continue to diligently serve only three things – burgers, fries, and shakes, of which there are only three flavors. There’s never been a chicken sandwich, or a special peppermint shake at Christmas – hell, they don’t even put bacon on their burgers, which is really saying something in this day and age when bacon has started showing up in mayonnaise, chocolate ice cream, and probably income tax returns.

They don’t even do sizes. On one of my first trips to In-N-Out down here I asked the girl taking my order for a burger and a small side of fries, to which she shifted her weight nervously and said, “Sir, uh… We don’t have sizes.”

Idiot. I could hear her thinking. You can either eat fries or you can not eat fries. Make up your mind. You can’t split the difference.

In-N-Out has been serving the exact same food for something like half a century with virtually no changes. Since when has staying firmly rooted in the past like this ever actually worked out well for anyone? As we all remember from Drumline, the moral parable for our times, that one marching band didn’t play hip hop music like all the other bands, preferring to stick to songs from its heydey in the 1970s, but then thanks to Nick Cannon they started playing modern music and won the competition, and everybody learns a valuable lesson about teamwork.

The generally held idea is that if you want to be successful you need to evolve and adapt, but on any given night there’s a line of cars around the block at In-N-Out, the evolutionary dead end, while McDonald’s is, as ever, filled with worn out parents too tired to resist their children’s demands any longer.*

*Given that In-N-Out prints Bible verses on their cups and bags, maybe they’re not big fans of evolution in the first place.

People who live in an In-N-Out state don’t know how good they have it, and I’ve seen conversations like this happen many a time at work:

“Hey, what did you do for lunch?”
“I went to In-N-Out.”
“Oh. Hey, how about that traffic, huh?”

If an Oregonian were part of the conversation, it would look more like this:

“Hey, what did you do for lunch?”
“I went to In-N-Out.”
“[Eyes pop out of head, jaw inexplicably lengthens and crashes onto the floor, person levitates and begins hitting self in head with frying pan. For reference, see all cartoons ever.]”

To Oregonians, saying you had In-N-Out for lunch is a lot like saying that you boned Megan Fox for lunch, or beat Indiana Jones at air hockey for lunch. No longer is it small talk; it’s you intricately describing a religious experience. Hell, even after being down here for two months I still get the urge to elbow the guy next to me in line at In-N-Out and go, “Hey! Do you see this shit? In-N-Out Burger, man! It’s really happening!”

Of course, nobody here cares, because nobody here knows the pain of watching In-N-Out expand to Utah and Texas while casually snubbing their home state. It’s like the prettiest girl at the dance only wants to dance with the insensitive and morbidly obese kids.

A lot of my friends argue that Burgerville, the Pacific Northwest only fast food chain with the menu full of seasonal all natural ingredients, trumps In-N-Out. While I love Burgerville, I’m reluctant to say that it’s better. Of course, that may well just be because I’ve been going to Burgerville my whole life – stopping at the Burgerville in Centralia on family road trips to Northern Washington or having celebratory onion rings after the Solo and Ensemble competition in Monmouth. The food it just as good, but it doesn’t have that sultry, forbidden allure of In-N-Out.*

*Oh, Jesus, I just sexualized fast food. This is a new low.

Maybe California people go to Burgerville and feel the urge to elbow strangers and say, “Look at us, man! Fucking Burgerville!” On second thought, they probably don’t – they’re too busy talking about how smooth traffic was on I-5.

Truman Capps found it a lot easier to openly mock California when he didn’t live there also.

RIP Digg

I miss you already.

A lot of my friends are StumbleUpon addicts, but no sir, not me.

StumbleUpon, for those of you who have not been desperate for entertainment during an endless general education lecture, is essentially a toolbar in your browser that, when activated, will take you to a website that it has determined that you will find interesting based on preferences you set when you downloaded the service, and then drops you off there to explore, like a Mom leaving her kid at Discovery Zone.

Of course, it’s tempting for me to have the ability to turn the information superhighway into some sort of court jester, bringing me things it believes I will find entertaining, but I stay strong. For one thing, I get precious little accomplished as it is without a quick and easy way to distract myself, and also… Well, this next one probably requires a new paragraph.

And also, using the Internet is already probably one of the more passive activities out there, which is probably why I spend most of my life on the Internet. You just sit around thinking of stuff you want to know more about, and then typing that stuff into Google or Wikipedia, a process that in turn will lead to more stuff you find interesting. You’re just drifting along in a digital innertube down a peaceful river of information, catching the occasional glimpse of some pornography just below the surface – and yeah, if you want to cast your line out and try to catch some of it, that’s fine, so long as there’s nobody on the riverbank watching you.*

*Speaking of, have they got StumbleUpon for pornography yet? Because I feel like that would be the world’s greatest invention for perverts with ADHD. “I want lesbians! Click Now midgets! Click Now anime! Click Now for some horses!”

StumbleUpon, through, has accomplished the seemingly impossible task of making Internet use even more passive than ever before – it provides you with a button essentially labeled ‘USE INTERNET’, which you push, and then you are using the Internet. It’s like wanting to float around on your innertube but being too lazy to leave the house, so you hire someone to do it for you and provide you with pictures of the best parts and a cooler full of the fresh porn he caught along the way. I imagine StumbleUpon 2.0 will probably read the webpages out loud to you while you sleep, and maybe order you a pizza for when you wake up.

The thing is, I’m not without sin in this regard, because I have found a means to filter the vastness of the Internet down to a few relevant and interesting chunks, and that means is a website called Digg, where users submit webpages and vote on their relative goodness, and the ones with the most votes are presented to the visitor in one big, constantly scrolling sort of top ten list. Clicking a link listed on Digg is like reading a good review of a movie and going to see it, only the review only consists of ‘WE FIND THIS INTERESTING AND SO SHOULD YOU’, and if you don’t like it you aren’t out $15.

What I like about Digg is that since it isn’t tailored to my specific interests but is rather governed by the collective nerd groupthink of the Internet, I’m occasionally exposed to new, fascinating things I’ve never looked at before. Of course, the majority of Digg lines up perfectly with my interests anyway, seeing as the collective nerd groupthink of the Internet also loves science fiction, Cracked.com, and bacon.

The thing about Digg, though, is that there is a complicated hierarchy with regard to how sites are voted on, whose votes are more powerful, and how many votes it takes to get a site listed on Digg’s front page. For the most part, I’m oblivious to this – I don’t comment or vote on submitted sites and I only joined Digg so that I could submit Writers, in hopes that it would wind up on the front page and go viral (instead, Mike and I each gave it one Digg and then it died).

Recently, Digg has gone into an uproar for reasons I can’t fully understand – the development team released a new version which apparently kills small children and doesn’t like Firefly, to hear Digg’s enraged users tell it, and in protest the community which until now had trolled the Internet for new content to submit and vote on has now more or less gone on strike, opening the door to new users who have hijacked the site and started voting lame, low quality articles onto the front page. Don’t believe me?

This is currently the #3 highest voted item on Digg today.

While the Digg higher ups battle it out with the striking community, it’s lazy people like me who stand to suffer. After so many years of having my Internet prepackaged for me into easily digestible chunks, being left without Digg is like being thrown into the deep end of the pool. Now when I’m bored I can’t fall back on Digg to find interesting things – I either have to find them myself or stop using the Internet.

It’s times like these that StumbleUpon, run by algorithms with no need for an unpredictable human community, looks pretty damn attractive…

Truman Capps will never use Reddit, out of solidarity to Digg.

Liveblogging The Emmys, 2010

4:57 - What the hell is Kim Kardashian doing at the Emmies? Her only contribution to television is being her slutty, voluptuous self in front of a camera.

4:58 - Wait, what? The commentators are already making snarky remarks about the worst hair and dresses of the red carpet before the red carpet show is over? Jesus, people, give it until at least 15 minutes after the show.

4:59 - Anna Paquin's dress - "This looks like something a matador in Spain would wear." Zouch.

5:00 - Glee appearance count: 1.

5:01 - Seriously? Fallon's doing a Glee themed opening? Why couldn't it be a Mad Men thing?

5:02 - Jon Hamm, asked and answered. Still, this would be better if everybody was drinking and smoking.

5:03 - Neil Patrick Harris! I suddenly approve.

5:04 - I can only imagine how funny this would be if I watched Glee. Oh, what up, Hurley!

5:05 - 'Okay Tina Fey, Jon Hamm, and assorted Glee-tards - just stand behind Jimmy Fallon and dance. That's all we need.'

5:06 - Every Glee joke needs to be matched with at least one cutaway of Neil Patrick Harris laughing in order to keep me satisfied.

5:07 - How much crack did Fallon have to do before this show to go from a song and dance number right into a guitar monologue? That requires Conan style energy.

5:08 - Oh, hi Amy Poehler's boobs. Are you pregnant, or... Yeah, probably pregnant.

5:11 - God damn it, Jon Hamm is like #4 on the list of people from Mad Men I'd like to bone, and I don't care who knows it.

5:12 - Well, shit. Eric Stonestreet is great on Modern Family, but Neil Patrick Harris is Neil Patrick Harris.

5:18 - Sofia Vergara is clearly taking boob tips from Amy Poehler. How long are you going to milk this, "I have an accent so I can't speak English" thing?

5:20 - Oh shit, Tina Fey's writing partner is a straight fox. Why isn't she on the show?

5:21 - Is this guy a TV writer? It's tough to tell - he's wearing a suit and appears to have bathed recently.

5:24 - What is Tom Hanks doing at the Emmys!? Can he just call them and say, "Hey! I want a seat at an award ceremony that I have no connection with. Can we do a thing? Forrest Gump, bitch."

5:25 - John Hodgman's commentary takes the sting off Glee winning things.

5:26 - Why the hell did they just play the song from Kill Bill before cutting to commercial? Nobody was trying to kill each other just then. I got all excited that Uma Thurman was a nominee for award, or there was some show about beautiful women with swords committing acts of hideous violence against one another.

5:28 - Big Oprah retrospective during the commercial break. Time lapse footage of Oprah is particularly interesting because you can always date the footage by her girth.

5:31 - Stop showing the Emmy control room. I don't want to see how my sausage is made.

5:33 - Neil Patrick Harris won for Glee. I both love and hate that.

5:34 - Oh God, Glee is like the all singing, all dancing, vaguely gay Lord Of The Rings of the Emmys.

5:36 - I wish I had 3D goggles just then.

5:37 - Eva Longoria? Hey, she looks as good as she did when I met her!

5:38 - Did I tell you guys about when I met her? It was really cool. I was on the Desperate Housewives... Oh, hey, I'm rooting for Baldwin.

5:39 - Huh, Big Bang Theory guy won. Anyway, I totally touched her finger.

5:41 - There's going to be a retrospective on reality TV? God damn it, if I hadn't started liveblogging this I could've walked the hell away. Sadly, I must stay true to both people reading this.

5:43 - The Infiniti M has silver dust polished into the interior? And that's a selling point? 'And the cupholder is designed to only hold The Holy Grail.'

5:44 - Haha, Neil Patrick Harris made a gay joke! That means straight guys can do it too, right?

5:45 - Are you going to give an award to Amy Poehler's boobs? They're working overtime tonight. Oh God, I'm saying a lot of creepy stuff about someone who's about to be somebody's mother.

5:47 - They actually give awards for reality TV? Do you give awards for bulkiness of bowel movements? Because if so, I think I'm a real contender this year.

5:48 - Smash cut from the dead Alaskan fisherman to Jersey Shore. Reaaaal classy, Emmys.

5:49 - Will Arnett probably shares my sentiments about Amy Poehler.

5:50 - How much does reality TV suck? John Hodgman doesn't even do announcements for the winners!

5:52 - Did anybody ever watch Peter Gunn? Lord knows we use the theme song all the time, but what the hell was the show about?

5:55 - 'Because of Ancestry.com, I discovered that my father was Josef Mengele. Thanks... Ancestry.com...'

5:59 - Emmys, if you spoil Mad Men for me with this fucking promo...

6:00 - Man, I miss the comedy guys. These presenters aren't nearly as funny.

6:02 - Yeah, Mad Men. You win those awards. You win all those awards.

6:05 - John Slattery spikes his hair? On Mad Men he gels his hair down, but in real life he gels it up. Fitting.

6:06 - Yeah, Avon commercials. Thanks for reminding me that the televised event I like is the one that women also like.

6:08 - 'Expo Markers - helping middle school janitors get high since 1981!'

6:10 - Fillion!

6:11 - Nathan Fillion giving Christina Hendricks the award for Best Supporting Actress would be an amazing Firefly reunion and also yet another opportunity for me to use this blog as a megaphone to broadcast to the world my love of Christina Hendricks.

6:13 - C'mon, Jon Hamm.

6:14 - This just in - Bryan Cranston loves his family more than baseball. To my family - I love you almost as much as Duck football.

6:17 - These new Tonka trucks - you just wind them up and they drive over the stunt track and do cool stuff all on their own. All I'm saying is, when I was a kid, you had to PLAY with your toys, not just wind them up and watch them play with themselves.

6:20 - If you'd get rid of the reality TV category, you'd probably have time to show people winning the guest actor/actress awards. Also, Robert Morse doesn't count as a guest actor when he's in like half the episodes.

6:26 - Cool, I hope that little musical number didn't spoil Lost for me.

6:31 - That guy in the Emmy band was playing the FUCK out of that cowbell.

6:32 - Patrick doesn't think Tina Fey is attractive. I think Patrick's totally gay.

6:35 - Is Coco nominated? I want Coco to win.

6:36 - The Emmys was already sort of gay, and then they brought Lady Gaga into the mix. God help us all.

6:38 - Joel McHale said 'Writers is good' and I just about shit my pants.

6:39 - What the hell are the Kennedy Center Honors? They always happen and I never know when they're on, or what they're about.

6:40 - The Emmys - the only award show to give an award for best award show to another award show. I may have said circle jerk on here in the past, but make no mistake - this is the end all, be all circle jerk.

6:46 - Gervais keeps showing up at our awards ceremonies. How come?

6:47 - Oh, wait, that's why - because he's fucking hilarious.

6:49 - BUCKY GUNTS, YEEEAH!

6:51 - Thanks for the human centipede joke, Colbert. I had ALMOST forgotten about that movie.

6:53 - Goddamn it, Stewart! Quit hogging the Emmys and give one to Conan.

6:55 - Why are they giving an award to George Clooney? He hasn't been on TV since like 1994. Which isn't to say that he doesn't deserve it. I have like four awards I want to give him. It's just, like, how is it relevant to TV?

6:58 - Is it just me, or are these commercials getting longer?

7:00 - No, Emmys, don't show pictures of charitable work and international tragedies. I can't humorously liveblog that! Man why you even got to do a thing?

7:01 - "My dear friend, Mr. George Clooney." Don't we all wish we could say that?

7:04 - Jack McBrayer is always Kenneth the Page. He never stops with that stupid, happy grin. God bless him.

7:07 - This is the longest I've ever seen January Jones go without smoking. Apparently it improves her ability to read lines.

7:10 - Jimmy Smits - Diet Edward James Olmos.

7:15 - Man, there are a LOT of miniseries I never watched.

7:17 - Okay, Temple Grandin, that's cool, so now- Who the hell is the skinny blonde chick with the guitar? No, stop singing - WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? WHY DID YOU HIJACK OUR AWARDS CEREMONY?

7:18 - The creator of Gumby died? I guess my childhood died this year too.

7:19 - If I ever die, I don't want them to do a sad, melodramatic slow motion thing for my Emmy obituary. They can do that for everybody else, but then when I come onscreen the chick with the guitar shuts up and Slash comes out to play the end of November Rain while they play slow motion clips of me fighting aliens and teaching inner city gangbangers how to read.

7:22 - Oh hai BP commercial. It's very impressive how much you've done to try and repair the oil spill. Fun fact: If you hadn't spilled oil in the first place, you wouldn't have had to repair it.

7:25 - God, I need to take a shower. That has nothing to do with the Outstanding Writing for Movie/Miniseries category, but it is a fact.

7:28 - Return to Cranford looks six different kinds of boring as fuck.

7:31 - Why do they keep hyping the cast of True Blood? I cannot wait until The Walking Dead comes out and cures this country of its unfortunate vampire obsession.

7:34 - Thank you, Harry Connick Jr. - it IS time to get back to football.

7:37 - This must be pretty boring for Temple Grandin - she's publicly stated that she has no interest whatsoever in interpersonal human interactions, and here she is in a room full of people all patting each other on the back and talking about how much they love the people who helped them get where they are today.

7:40 - No, that's cool, Pacino, make a terrible speech. Clearly this is your first time winning an award. Oh, wait.

7:42 - All I gathered from the trailer for The Event is that it is a series about things happening that make people angry and/or scared.

7:46 - Oh, The Pacific. THAT'S why Tom Hanks is here. Well, God bless, I suppose.

7:49 - Wait, Temple Grandin just hugged that lady! I thought she didn't like touching people! Was this an amazing television moment that we just saw?

7:51 - FUCK yeah, Mad Men!

7:52 - Thanks, Christina Hendricks, for giving the Internet something to host images of.

7:56 - Modern Family represent! I wish I'd watched you more often so that I could claim to have liked Modern Family before it was cool.

Truman Capps is going to go take that shower now.

Eight And A Half Hours Of Standup Comedy

The Comedy Store on Sunset, vastly inferior to any store with 'liquor' in its name.

I think sometimes, ‘Maybe I should do standup comedy, y’know?’

Sure, I’ve seen all of the comedians go on TV and talk about how rough it is to get started, and how everybody has terrible shows, and how you need to be thick skinned and able to take a beating without hating yourself, and none of these are things that I’m at all capable of and I know that. But in the back of my mind, there’s this little voice saying, “You were a three time state finalist in competitive high school after dinner speaking speaking in Oregon. You’re probably so damn good you’ll never so much as have a bad show!”

And then, Patrick and I watched eight and a half hours of standup comedy at The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, on a Sunday night, starting at 7:00 and going until almost 3:00 AM.

Patrick is writing a screenplay about stand up comedians, and unlike Mike and I, who get an idea for something and promptly sit down and bang out a screenplay as fast as possible, Patrick actually does painstaking amounts of research, because he’s concerned with the overall quality of his creative endeavors. Part of his research is going to comedy shows, and since I thought I liked stand up comedy, I went with him.

He plays a failed jock on the show, but in real life he's got wicked nerd cred. Also, he writes rap songs!

Earlier in the weekend we saw Donald Glover, who plays Troy on Community, and he was positively incredible. But, since Patrick’s script is about struggling comedians, we went to The Comedy Store on a Sunday night. Because, you see, Sunday is the least funny day of the week. Nobody wants to go out late on a Sunday and watch people tell jokes – they want to cry themselves to sleep asking their pillow where the hell their weekend went. It’s science.

This is an undesirable slot, so The Comedy Store offers it as a free show (as free as a two drink minimum can be at a place that charges $9 for a Jack and Coke), more or less an open mic night situation, from 7:00 PM until 2:00 AM – 40 consecutive comics, most of them amateurs with a few small to medium names sprinkled near the middle.

Patrick and I went into this sort of expecting to see some bad comedy. Hell, we were almost looking forward to it, at the time – it’d be a good ego boost, seeing how much funnier we were than the guys up on the stage. Besides, what’s wrong with spending an evening watching a bunch of court jesters trying to entertain everyone? As somebody who spent most of high school trying to make girls laugh hard enough to spontaneously decide to French me,* it would be fun to be on the other side of the situation for once. Sans Frenching.

*Mission failed.

Oh, right, like she would've married him if he wasn't funny. Hair only gets you so far, people.

As it turns out, though, bad comedy is even harder for me to handle than Tommy Wiseau’s guest appearances at The Room showings. When a movie sucks, it can’t tell that you hate it. When a standup comic sucks, he’s a few feet away from you, sweating, white knuckling the microphone, staring at you with big, scared eyes.

”C’mon, man!” He’s saying. ”I’m a funny guy, right? TELL ME I’M A FUNNY GUY!”

It was less a free show and more a free chance to watch souls get destroyed, which I don’t really enjoy unless the person on the receiving end is a University of Washington alumnus.

FINISH HIM.

Here’s how you know a person is a bad comedian: When they make jokes about Facebook. The first ten or so comedians all ran with pretty Facebook heavy sets, which, let’s be honest, has become the new airline industry punchline. We get it – poking is sexually ambiguous and it’s bad when your Mom is on Facebook. You can stop telling jokes about it now.

Also, some of the people on stage were perhaps the only people less enthusiastic about the performance than the people in the audience. Multiple performers openly admitted that they were high, giggling through sets interspersed with sidelong rants about how hungry they were and their love of the McDonald’s value menu.

One old, fat guy with long greasy hair and a beard of equal length and greasiness stumbled onstage, grasped the microphone, and muttered several barely coherent sentence fragments. He exhaled deeply into the microphone a couple of times, moved it into a position that warranted a blast of feedback, then started to step away before regaining his confidence and coming back long enough to say,

“H-have you guys been watchin’ the Internet recently?”

The loudest silence of all time was his response.

“Thankyou.” He whispered into the mic before all but running off the stage and disappearing into the darkness.

It couldn't have been him. The Dude has a great sense of humor.

Another guy took the stage for his three-minute set carrying a big dry erase board and pen. He produced an easel from behind the stage curtains and spent 30 seconds setting it up, then placed the board on it, revealing a series of blanks.

“Hello.” He said. “Let’s play Comedy Store hangman. Somebody shout out a letter.”

There were about six audience members there, counting us, and nobody responded at first.

“Quick, now.” He said. “I’m running out of time.”

We started yelling letters, and as he began to fill the right ones into the board it became clear that the puzzle was spelling out his name. Yes, that’s right – this comedian finagled a three minute set at a comedy institution so he could go onstage and berate a tiny, disgruntled audience into yelling out the letters of his name, not necessarily in the right order. What was his name? Hell if I know – I forgot it as soon as the emcee said it, and even when it was sitting there in front of me I didn’t give enough of a shit to read it.

So I guess the joke’s on you, Hangman Comedian. Go to Hell – unfortunately, as I would later discover, Hell is The Comedy Store on Sunday.

"Stand still - Hieronymous Bosch is still setting up his canvas."

As we got into the 9:00 PM range, the room filled up a bit more and some more talented comedians began to grace the stage – a relevant and hilarious pit stop on the bumpy highway to 2:00 AM bullshitville.

One of the acts I particularly enjoyed was a woman whose thoroughly amusing set was anchored by jokes about the South and how many of her high school classmates are married or pregnant, which is really my comedy reservoir as well. Also, like most attractive female comedians, her set got me wondering whether I had a chance with her, and I spent some of the lamer sets of the evening imagining situations where I bumped into her and casually mentioned that I was a three time after dinner speaking state finalist, which would convince her to spontaneously French me.

In High Fidelity, John Cusak and his music nerd friends fantasize about dating a musician, and likewise I’ve always fantasized about dating an attractive lady comedian. I could see myself lounging around her house working on blog entries, coming up with jokes together, or the two of us going out to dinner and spending the entire meal quietly mocking foreigners and overweight people outside. Plus, I think we can all agree that I’m a comedy goldmine that no other girl has had the presence of mind to capitalize on just yet.

See? SEE!?

So all I’m saying is, if you Google your name and find this blog, Sarah Tiana, you should drop me a line even though I’m 11 years younger than you. That picture at the top of the page? That’s my actual hair. We both know you can’t walk away from that.

By about 11:00 the sun had disappeared and dark clouds were pouring down a torrent of increasingly bizarre crap. Audience members began to filter out, only some of whom were replaced by new, drunk, heckle-oriented arrivals. Patrick and I, sitting almost front and center, were the target of multiple jokes from the increasingly bad comedians onstage. Most of the jokes implied that we were gay, and one joke implied that we liked Ben Folds, which I found to be in very poor taste.

I had to listen to November Rain twice after just LOOKING at this picture.

The acts became more and more avant garde. One of the only good acts after midnight was a freakishly tall – I’m talking Stephen Merchant tall – guy in basketball shorts and a T shirt who started his set by announcing his phone number, standing on a table at the front of the stage, and making snarky (frequently hilarious) responses to durrogatory text messages sent by members of the crowd. The crowd didn’t find him as funny as Patrick and I did, and when a woman at the back of the room yelled at him to “Get off!”, he stared at her, wide eyed, and described himself masturbating while fantasizing about killing her.

When he finished his violent diatribe, he smiled and said, “Now I can get off.”

At that point it was 12:30 and I tried to leave, having seen enough ill will and human suffering for an evening, but Patrick followed me outside and in the time it took him to smoke a cigarette convinced me to come back in and finish the night.

As we rounded 1:00 AM, the room was empty save for comedians waiting to go on stage and Patrick and I, at which point it became less a comedy show and more of a one sided conversation. One lady comedian in her mid 50s started her set by marveling at some length at how Patrick and I were both young enough to be her children and how she really wanted to take us both home for a night of ‘hot fucking’ and then make us both peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Then she branched into a very detailed monologue about her pubic hair.

I kept an eye on my watch, waiting for 2:00 AM. When it finally arrived, on the heels of an almost tragically unfunny 18 year old Jewish girl, I began to tense the muscles in my legs in order to leave, but then the sleepy yet foulmouthed emcee was onstage again, introducing the next comic through a torrent of jokes about vaginas and requests for two audience members to come and have sex onstage.

A black guy got up and spent most of his politically charged set mocking President Obama for not cleaning up the oil spill, as though he blamed Obama for not renting a boat and spending a few months personally skimming oil himself. Meanwhile, a man dressed as Jesus – white robes, sandals, long hair, beard – entered and waited at the back of the room, while his groupies – three drunk black women, two drunker Irishmen, and a fat middle aged white guy in glasses who claimed to be one of the girls’ ‘acting coach’ – had a seat behind us and began to heckle.

Wait. Long hair, robe, sandals OH SHI-

The circumstances of my life had at that point grown so bizarre that I began to wonder if I would ever return to a world that was even halfway recognizable to me, populated by familiar objects like marching bands, The Mystery Wagon, and Battlestar Galactica. I was depressed, dear readers – as depressed as I’ve ever been.

I was watching a sad parade of society’s dregs onstage before me, comics so bad that they couldn’t even perform on Sunday night but rather early Monday morning, comics who knew how bad they were but soldiered on ahead anyway, even though they were playing to an audience of two. I wanted nothing more than to go home and forget that such people existed; to pretend that I lived in a world where everybody who was talented at comedy succeeded, and everybody who was bad got the hint quickly and then went back to business school.*

*Ha ha, kidding! Everybody knows business majors are only funny when we use them as a punchline.

The emcee introduced who I thought was the last comic as a ‘professional model,’ perhaps as a means to quiet the increasingly rowdy crowd of drunk Irishmen and (potential) prostitutes. The woman who took the stage was indeed attractive, wearing a nice patterned dress and high heels, but I could tell from the way she flounced that she was not the sort of lady comedian that I fantasized about.

“Hi!” She squeaked into the microphone in a voice that was a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Minnie Mouse. “I’m a girl!”

She then awkwardly curtsied several times, produced a notecard from her bra, and began to read off of it.

“Do you want to hear a joke about high heeled shoes?”

It’s painful for me to remember – hopefully you get the gist of the character she was trying to play. Picture female Andy Kaufman, only not funny. If you’re not an Andy Kaufman fan, imagine someone far less funny than you think Andy Kaufman is, playing to seven people, the majority of whom are drunkenly heckling, at 2:30 AM in a deserted comedy club on Sunset Boulevard on a Monday morning.

"Hey, waddaya mean 'thank you very much', asshole?"

When she was done (her set ended with her ‘dying from lack of attention,’ only to be revived when the emcee stormed onto the stage to demand that we bring her back to life by giving her a round of applause) Patrick and I locked eyes.

“Time to go?” Patrick said.

“Yes.” I said.

We got up and began to thread our way out, to the jeers of the drunk Irishmen.* The emcee took the stage once more.

*And fuck those guys, all being from a country far inferior to Scotland. Yeah, I said it.

“Hey, are you guys leaving?” He asked over the mic. “We’ve still got one more comic!”

I could see Jesus, waiting on deck in the shadows beside the stage. Patrick stopped and looked at me.

“You got one more in you?” He asked.

“No!” I said, emphatically, both to him and the emcee. “I’ve watched eight and a half fucking hours of standup comedy tonight. I officially hate standup comedy now.”

Everybody seemed to understand. Well, I didn’t see Jesus’ reaction, but based on his reputation I think he’d have been cool with it. And Patrick seemed just as happy to leave then, anyway, being as he had to get up for work in four hours. The Irish guys called me a pussy, I think, but they’re from a country that didn’t invent the deep fried cheeseburger, so the joke’s on them.

All the drunkenness of Ireland, only the food is better and they've got their own parliament.

In the parking garage, thankful to be surrounded by things that weren’t trying to tell us horrible jokes, Patrick fired up another cigarette and we got to discussing the evening.

I scolded Patrick for not letting me leave at 12:30. Patrick pointed out that I would have regretted leaving, and he was right. I said that eight and a half hours of comedy is a fate worse than death.

Patrick tossed his cigarette butt on the ground.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I think I’m going to do this again in a couple weeks.”

Truman Capps doesn’t know what the deal is with airline peanuts, nor will he ever.

To The People Living Vicariously Through Me

Hey, folks! You may have noticed that this blog went up early on Monday as opposed to Sunday as usual. It bothered you, and it bothered me. I was late because I was watching eight hours of live standup comedy, a decision so terrible that I’m already writing it up for Wednesday’s blog. So just know that my tardiness is giving you a crackerjack midweek update. Look forward to it.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled Hair Guy!

This picture becomes relevant in a few paragraphs. Until then, it's just Han Solo, making this blog cooler.

I’ve been away from home, in one sense or another, for the past six months now. Of course, ‘home’ is something of a nebulous concept, but by my definition, home is the place where my box of Pop Tarts is, and where there is a toaster to heat up the Pop Tarts should I feel in the mood for That Sort Of Thing, and where there are old friends with whom to eat the Pop Tarts and reminisce about Pop Tarts we’ve eaten in the past.*

*It’s not that I’ve got a raging boner for Pop Tarts or anything, it’s just that they really fit into my rock n’ roll lifestyle because they’re basically the most passive food in the world. Cereal takes too long, what with the milk and the pouring.

One thing that people kept telling me before I left was that they were living vicariously through me. To be honest, I’d say at least half a dozen people have beamed at me and said, “God, Truman, it’s so exciting! I’m just living vicariously through you.” I mean, Mike said it, for God’s sake, and he’s made it clear in the past that he thinks it’s gay to use a word with more than three syllables.

Living vicariously – that means basically they want to experience everything I experience, from afar. Think of it as a really passive version of Avatar, I guess.

This puts an awful lot of pressure on me, having to live for multiple people besides myself, because as a general rule I seldom do interesting stuff. To those of you for whom I am living right now: Congratulations! In the past 24 hours, we have watched half a season of Mad Men, fixed the toilet, and invented a name for a drink.*

*Vodka + root beer = Mrs. Beer. Copyright Truman Capps, 2010, all rights reserved.

Please don’t take this as me being critical of your choice of vicarious life buddy, because I’m quite honored to be doing this for you. It’s just, if I had to pick somebody to live vicariously through, I’d pick somebody who did cool stuff nonstop, 24 hours a day – somebody who’s such a dude of dudes that he even sleeps in a badass way.

Who would I pick to live vicariously through? Well, Han Solo, naturally – that’s everyone’s answer, whether they know it or not (although I was not pleased a few years ago when Lucas reedited the movie so that the guy I’m living vicariously through just sits there while Greedo shoots at him). Second place, though, would probably go to Richard Branson, pictured below, for reasons you will understand when you see the picture.

I’m not really into parasailing, but under these circumstances I could learn to love it.

On the rare occasion that some opportunity arises to do a cool thing, I’ve been trying recently to say ‘Yes’ as much as possible and just do whatever it is, so long as it doesn’t involve heroin or watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Some of this is out of concern for the various people living vicariously through me, and some of this is borne out of the insanity that comes from not seeing the sun for two months.

Last night, for instance, my cousin Gene and I went out to have some burgers and see The Other Guys. When we left my apartment, there was a house party in full swing across the street – people were piling out of cars, techno music and splashes from the backyard pool echoing through the neighborhood. When we got back four hours later, the music was still thumping and people were still milling around.

Gene pulled up at the curb near the house and as we discussed our plans for next weekend, a girl staggered up to the window and knocked on Gene’s window, which he rolled down.

“Do you guys need any help or something?” She slurred, hopefully.

“No, we’re fine. I’m just dropping my cousin off.” Gene explained, gesturing to me.

“Oh.” She said. “So, do you want to come to our party?”

I considered the situation – walking alone into a complete stranger’s house. Best case scenario, there could be some cool snacks, and maybe somebody there would be Neil Patrick Harris. Worst case scenario, the party could be an elaborate hit organized by Mara Salvatrucha, the world’s deadliest gang.

“Sure!” I said, hopping out of the car. I bade Gene farewell and followed the girl as she stumbled up the driveway into the house.

To start out with, some girls look a certain way when you’re looking at them through a car window on a dark street, and then a different way in a well lit area, and seldom is the difference an improvement. Also, while this house party may have been cool earlier, by the time I arrived it was a largely empty house, floors strewn with empty Coors cans and crushed Cheetos, the remaining 15 guests clustered in the far corner of the room, shouting to be heard over aggressively bad techno music blasting from the speakers.

My host stumbled and swayed, explaining with the elocution of a stroke victim about her job as a tax preparer in Long Beach, then struggling to describe the workings of the Long Beach Red Bull Flugtag she had attended that day, in spite of the fact that I told her I had been to one before and knew what it was all about.

She would stop, periodically, and just stare at me, and she had the look on her face that people have right before they ask if they can touch my hair, which is creepy enough when people I’ve known for years do it, let alone anonymous, trashed party girls. I made furious, brutal smalltalk in hopes of delaying that question, and at one point, when the music abruptly stopped as someone fiddled with the computer, my voice was briefly the loudest thing in the room.

I was immediately aware of everyone else in the room staring at me, these people with saggy jeans and spiked hair looking at me and sincerely wishing that I wasn’t there almost as bad as I did.

Fortunately, at that point I got a call from my imaginary girlfriend, one of the calls where the phone doesn’t ring loud enough for the other person in the noisy room to hear it, and I apologetically explained that I had to go before walking out, telling my imaginary girlfriend that I loved her, congratulating her for her 2006 SyFy Genre Award for Best Special Guest, and that I would be waiting outside for her to pick me up in her time traveling De Lorean.*

*What, your imaginary girlfriend doesn’t drive a time machine? Well, I guess I’m just lucky.

I strolled back across the street to my apartment, my imaginary girlfriend having done her duty, and settled in for another evening of video games and roaming Wikipedia. I don’t know where that party was going to go, but I’m pretty sure the people I’m living vicariously for would’ve hated it just as much as I did.

Truman Capps actually shrank the Richard Branson picture just a bit, just so that when his parents and 3rd grade teacher read this blog they don't wind up getting a facefull of naked supermodel.

Two Weeks' Notice

I might do this to some of our old Meridian systems on my way out.

I’m honestly kind of pissed that Neil Sedaka made as much money as he did off of ‘Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.’ Because really, what does that sentiment offer to the world that we don’t already know? I mean, crap, dude, if I’d known that people were into songs about blatantly obvious things I would’ve skipped this whole blog business and gone to work penning chart topping hits like, “Eating Ice Cream Too Fast Gives You Brain Freeze” or “Spider Man 3 Was Disappointing.”

The reason I bring this up is because I had to break up with my job the other day, in anticipation of going back up to school in September, and even though the process went smoothly it was not easy or enjoyable.

I’m not really an expert about breaking up – I’m more of an expert about being broken up with. Most of my girlfriends have had the good sense to take a long, hard look at their lives and say “Oh my God. I’m dating Truman Capps,” which is always a shocking enough revelation to convince them that they want to be single again. This has usually worked out pretty well for me, as being dumped warrants zero personal guilt, vast amounts of pity (both self and from others), and a weeklong period when it’s socially acceptable to drink whenever you want to.

Admittedly, my breakup with The Ex Girlfriend ended with her donating my box set of Freaks and Geeks to Goodwill, but in spite of my DVDs’ valiant sacrifice it’s still preferable to be the victim.

NEVAR FORGET

On the few occasions that I’ve instigated a breakup, on the other hand, I’m always left feeling like some sort of callous, diabolical asshole – as well you should when you tell someone you don’t want to spend time with them on a regular basis, I suppose. And in most cases, a bunch of other people start to see me that way too – namely the girl’s friends, who no longer appreciate this dorky addition to their social life, or her parents, who until then had all but worshipped me for my politeness and Republican, seemingly asexual outward appearance.

Believe it or not, though, the experience is more awkward when quitting a job, as I just found out, because essentially what you’re saying is, “You couldn’t pay me to work here. You tried, and it worked for a while, but now I would gladly trade a steady income in the midst of a horrible recession in exchange for not being an employee here anymore.”

And, y’know, maybe that’s cool if you’re one of the 96% of Americans who hate their jobs, but I’m not. I like my job, as I’ve mentioned before. And I like my boss, which is why it just about broke my heart when, once I’d walked into his office and stumbled over my words, he said, “Aw, Truman, are you leaving us?”

This hasn’t been an issue at the other jobs I’ve done – when I washed cars or bussed tables or made milkshakes, I did so with the understanding between myself and my supervisor that at the end of the summer I’d be off to school. Also, I hated those jobs. Like, a lot. And I was bad at those jobs. Like, really bad, which is presumably why I didn’t get hired back.

Roundhouse Kick Entertainment is different, though, because this is a career style job, the kind that people go to college and compete with one another to get, and I got it through luck and friends in (relatively) high places in spite of the fact that I wasn’t 100% qualified for it at the time. Also, in my interview I was purposefully vague about my plans to finish my degree in Oregon. The point is, my boss had stuck his neck out by hiring me on the spot, and by quitting the job to go back to school I feel as though I’m taking a dump on his kindness – metaphorically donating a bunch of his DVDs to Goodwill, perhaps.

Of course, this is what I’m feeling – it didn’t go down like that at all. My boss was completely understanding and encouraged me to give him a call next summer when I come down here for realsies; for this reason he is, as always, a straight up G.* I provide my own crushing guilt, whether it’s warranted or not.

*Everything I need to know about ebonics I learned from watching season 1 of The Wire.

Unlike breaking up with a girl, though, that’s not the end – I was just giving my boss my two weeks’ notice today. This means that for the next two weeks I’m walking past his office, preparing to vacate this badass position he cleared for me, feeling ‘ol Mr. Guilt every time he looks at me. Imagine dating a girl for two months, then buying her dinner and saying, “This isn’t working out. Let’s break up in two weeks.”

As with all breakups, though, I know I’m better off. Los Angeles is a big, vibrant place full of activity and culture and sweaty homeless Mexican dudes asking you for change, and it’s been fun living less than six miles away from Jack Nicholson, but it’s also been pretty lonely from time to time, seeing as my social circle down here consists of Patrick, my cousin Gene, and my two roommates whenever they aren’t asleep or out getting drunk with chicks they met on the Internet at trendy nightclubs.

What was perhaps most strange was that last night I was lying awake fantasizing about being back at college – this coming from the guy who spent much of this past year fantasizing about having a job in the entertainment industry in LA. Frustrating as it may be to take classes for a career path I’m all but certain I won’t pursue, it’s one hell of a lot better than working a full time job and having to pretend I’m an adult.

Truman Capps will miss those sweet, sweet paychecks, and that sweet, sweet employee kitchen.

Ground Zero Mosque

I make too many dick jokes on here to post pictures of anything remotely related to 9/11. Thus, pic unrelated.

Hey, Muslims! Having trouble with your sunrise to sunset fast for Ramadan? Might I suggest working the night shift? It’s way easier to not eat during the day when you go to bed at sunrise and wake up a few hours before sunset. Unless… Is that cheating? Can you cheat at religion?

Everybody’s getting all riled up about Constitutional rights these past few weeks – both because the gay libertarian Bush-appointed federal judge made gay marriage legal in California, and then because a Muslim organization wants to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City. It’s raised all kinds of questions about just what freedoms we have here in America, and have divided Americans in the way that only abortion, American Idol, or any other given issue that the media blows out of proportion can.

I’d talk about the gay marriage thing, but it would pretty much come down to me repeatedly saying “Gay marriage should be legal everywhere,” accompanied by at least one totally inappropriate anal sex joke, which I think we’d all like to avoid. Also, seeing as the current controversy over Prop 8 is more about the power wielded by the judicial branch, I feel like I should stay away, as it would require me to do a lot of hasty research about separation of powers on Wikipedia and use the word judiciary far more than I’ve ever wanted to.

What I do want to talk about, though, is the Ground Zero mosque – namely, the controversy over Muslims building a religious cultural center really close to a place where a bunch of seriously misguided Muslims killed three thousand people.

A lot of the reaction I’ve seen on conservative blogs amounts to the idea that putting a mosque near Ground Zero is basically allowing terrorists to do a victory dance on the site of their one great triumph over Western hedonism. I’ve seen it referred to as Islamic domination and expansionism.

This, I think, plays into the increasingly common idea that Islam is less a religion and more a vast, all inclusive conspiracy to destroy everything we love, right up to and including the McRib. In this worldview, mosques aren’t centers of worship and community organization but rather StarCraft style barracks – once built, Osama bin Laden just has to push a button on his command console and a terrorist pops out, all ready to fight, and all it cost him was 50 minerals.

Here’s the thing: If Islam really is the warlike religion of hatred that so many right wing figures paint it as, we are so fucked, you guys. There are 1.57 billion Muslims on Earth, accounting for about 23% of the world’s population. As I see it, if a billion and a half people have all united behind a common cause, your best bet is to bend the hell over (unless their common cause is ‘Bake Free Pies For Everyone!’, in which case we have entered what is commonly known as Heaven).

But that’s just it – we’re not fighting 1.5 billion Muslims, we’re fighting fundamentalist Muslims, and there aren’t nearly as many of them (probably because one of their favorite battle strategies is to blow themselves up). The vast majority of Muslims, I would assume,* are fairly ordinary folks who adhere to a religion that, like most world religions, is based on the practice of not being a dick to other people, even if that one guy really deserves it.

*There are 1.5 billion Muslims and not a lot of them live in Oregon, so it’s been taking awhile for me to meet everybody. Also, Cat Stevens won’t return my phone calls.

And plenty of Teabaggers and hardline conservatives will disagree with that last statement, trotting out various blogs that show the supposedly evil and warlike nature of Islam by highlighting the heinous lines in the Qur’an. And in that case, go to Hell – seriously, now – because I guarantee you your religion has just as much fucked up, heinous shit in it. I mean, come on, people, the symbol of Catholicism is a man nailed to a fucking piece of wood, and it doesn’t get any better from there.

What’s more, those of you fighting against having a mosque near Ground Zero have already failed. Twice. In the past. There’s already two mosques within 12 blocks of Ground Zero that have been there for decades, and the reason that a new, larger mosque is being constructed in the area is that the two mosques already in Lower Manhattan are too small to accommodate the number of Muslims in the area who want to use them.

See, the Ground Zero mosque isn’t a victory dance at all – it’s a religious organization in America trying to serve its community (largely comprised of Americans) by purchasing property on the open market and then building on it. It’s the exact sort of freedom of religion that’s protected by the Constitution.

Yep, double edged sword, that freedom of religion. Sure, it’ll be there to help when you want to fight to get prayer in schools, but next thing you know it’s off helping Muslims build a mosque in their own damn neighborhood.

Truman Capps hopes that if he was wrong and Islam is in fact a globe spanning conspiracy that this blog entry will curry favor with his new Muslim overlords.

Lucid Dreaming

"You're on a first name basis with lucidity, little friend! I have to call it Mr. Lucidity, and that's no good in a pinch."

Here’s why I don’t think that Leonardo DiCaprio and his merry band of dream thieves could successfully Inception me – I watched the movie, and as far as I’m concerned, the dreams they were whipping up were way too realistic. If I ever found myself in a rainy city in the middle of a Heat style shootout between two groups of armed men with physics and gravity in full operation, I feel like I’d know right away that it wasn’t one of my dreams because the things happening in it were things that, on some level, made a degree of rational sense and were possible in the real world.

Even when Inception did get weird, with big sections of Paris folding up onto themselves like some sort of briefcase sized travel Paris and people doing kung fu in zero gravity, it was still way more normal than any of my dreams. At the very least, it was weird in cool ways, unlike my dreams, which tend to be weird in creepy, Lars von Trier art film sort of ways.

Post Inception I’ve been interested in doing some lucid dreaming myself, so I Googled ‘How To Lucid Dream’ in hopes of getting some pointers. The first thing I found out is that wanting to know how to lucid dream is like wanting to know how to date beautiful women – if you Google the question, you’ll come up with multiple tutorials you have to pay for and a WikiHow entry that was clearly written by a 16 year old.

The second thing I found out is that if you want to be able to be bold and powerful master of your dream world, you have to be fully willing to make a fool of yourself in the real one. Since dreams are cobbled together from the stuff we do on a regular basis in real life, you have to integrate various dream tests into your everyday existence so that eventually you’ll remember to do them in your dreams. Dream tests include reading and then re-reading a block of text to see if the words have changed or leaning on a wall to see if you fall through it, and they are to be performed every time something bizarre happens in your life that gives you reason to think you may be in a dream.

When your job is to sit and watch video footage of a team of supposed psychics wandering around in the dark trying to talk to ghosts, you find yourself doing a lot of dream tests. Mine is to pick up a pen and drop it to see if it falls and bounces the right way. Of course, given my nonexistent understanding of physics, the pen could explode or turn into a unicorn and I’d still probably consider it a normal reaction.

The other method suggested to start lucid dreaming is to keep a dream journal in which you record the goings on of your dreams as soon as you wake up. The better you’re able to remember your previous dreams, they say, the better you can recognize common traits within your dreams and then realize that you’re dreaming. Here, let’s analyze some entries in my dream journal together and see what we come up with:

-My parents and I were staying in a hotel in the middle of the forest when a grizzly bear broke into our room. We all played dead. It spent several minutes sniffing me and licking my face, then went over to the wall and destroyed a painting of a beach identical to one my grandparents had in their house in the late 1990s, then left. We all got up and quickly checked out of the hotel.

I’ve been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption recently, and late in the game you start to encounter grizzly bears in the wilderness who are pretty much the Old West equivalent of big furry Death Stars. The experience of walking through the virtual forest, minding my own business, and then being sent to the ‘GAME OVER’ screen courtesy of a big rampaging bear has instilled in me a suitable fear of the creatures. I’m not sure why the savage beasts hate my parents or my relatives’ artwork so much, though.

-I was at a vacation house somewhere in Washington. It was a massive building, so big that there were multiple smaller houses built within it. Somewhere in there I bumped into The Ex Girlfriend’s father, who started making me some sort of drink involving white wine/champagne. As I drank, I read a recipe I found on the table for some sort of onion dip.

Onion dip is the de-facto dip of the Capps family; if at any point in my life I’ve been eating a non-salsa dip, it’s probably been onion dip, save for my recently invented Battledip Galactica. Also, I drank with The Ex Girlfriend’s father on more than one occasion – although knowing what I know now about that particular gene pool I’d probably turn down any drinks for fear of getting roofied and having the rest of my DVDs and sweatshirts stolen. As far as the house, my family has been vacationing in Washington for as long as I can remember, so I suppose in my mind it’s earned a reputation as a place that there would be vacation homes – potentially even ones so big that they have smaller homes inside them.

Click here, Dad.

-I was attending a fundraiser at a fancy old mansion when I met Richard Nixon. He had been accompanying Mrs. Nixon while she showed guests around, but I guess he got bored and slipped away and bumped into me. We sat in the kitchen, eating leftover take out French fries from a tinfoil container, and he told me stories about his career. I took it all with a grain of salt, though, given his penchant for lying.

I can probably directly attribute this to the massive amounts of Mad Men I’ve been watching recently. However, out of virtually everyone involved with that show, Richard Nixon is probably the last person I’d want to meet.

Truman Capps hasn’t had any lucid dreams yet, but as soon as he does he’s going to be watching Firefly season 2 all night long.

Ralphs

Glorious.

No, keep your pants on – I didn’t let my grammar slip. Ralphs, the oldest supermarket chain on the West Coast and a Southern California icon, does not have an apostrophe in its name. It’s not Ralph’s (the supermarket which is owned by Ralph, such as Roth’s in Salem, the supermarket chain owned by Orville Roth) but rather Ralphs, the name of a supermarket chain started in 1873 by George A. Ralphs in downtown Los Angeles, which I’m sure gave Reedsport a run for its money at the time.

Ha ha, this is a small town. In your face, old roommate!

Until I got to college, I had always assumed that Fred Meyer was a national chain. I mean, how could it not be? Without Fred Meyer, where would we go when we wanted to visit a department store with higher prices than Walmart but a less stylish ad campaign than Target? But as it turns out Fred Meyer, like Burgerville and Bigfoot, restricts itself to the Pacific Northwest.

Ralphs is more or less the same way – like In-N-Out and dangerously high levels of air pollution, it prefers to remain in Southern California and let the customers come to it. This strategy seems to be working, thanks in part to the single greatest product placement of all time.

"Ralphs - the best grocery store ever! Although that's just, like, my opinion, man."

There’s a Ralphs two blocks away from my apartment, and since my schedule these days mostly consists of waking up, eating, going to work, and coming home, Ralphs is a valuable and necessary component of my rock n’ roll lifestyle. Two weeks ago, for example, I had neglected to do any shopping over the weekend, leaving me with an apartment empty of food and no time between work, sleep, and semi regular bathing to wander through the aisles in search of the necessities.

Delicious, delicious necessities.

Every day that week I would leave the house at 5:45, navigate the treacherous parking lot at Ralphs, and buy something from the deli to eat for my pre-work ‘breakfast’ as well as something from the frozen food aisle for my midnight ‘lunch.’ You know what the saddest thing in the world is? Eating greasy supermarket chicken fingers in the front seat of your Dad’s Subaru and all but praying that they don’t give you a case of the trots in 15 minutes when you’re gridlocked on the 405. (Good news, by the way – they didn’t!)

To be honest, I probably became gossip fodder for the staff that week – swooping in every day at the same time for my deli selection and single frozen dinner. Between my super lonely eating habits and the fact that the only window in my apartment is covered with cardboard and masking tape, I’m pretty sure the people of Studio City will eventually knock down my door with torches and pitchforks, eager to see how many dismembered prostitutes I have in my freezer, only to find me sitting in my boxers watching StarCraft II replays and drinking White Russians, my freezer full of Healthy Choice Café Steamers™ (the least masculine of all frozen dinners).

Ralphs is also home to some of the most spectacular savings I’ve ever encountered. You see, Ralphs is a 24 hour operation, yet they carry a lot of perishable items that due to various state and national laws have to be either sold or thrown out within a few days of being stocked. My roommates have figured out how to abuse this system and will routinely go shopping at around 2:00 AM, and often come home with steaks they bought for less than what I paid for a pound of dry macaroni.

Also, one of my roommates has a subscription to the Omaha Steak of the Month Club, courtesy of his father, so for a while there I woke up every afternoon to the sound and smell of multiple steaks of different cuts being grilled up on all four burners of our gas stove, which, with one notable exception, is a dream come true for me.

Above: The notable exception.

By far the greatest savings at Ralphs, though, can be found in the liquor aisle. To be honest, I visit the liquor aisle every time I go to Ralphs, regardless of whether I’m buying liquor or not. I just like to marvel at the fact that there are some places in America where a man can buy hard alcohol at the same place where he buys his hair gel, and that with his Ralphs Club Card the top shelf alcohol may well be cheaper than the hair gel.

I was pretty burned out two weekends ago, at the end of the week where I had to eat five meals in the Ralphs parking lot, and on my way home from work at 5:00 AM I resolved to swing by Ralphs and pick up a bottle of vodka so I could have a drink to celebrate the end of my week from Hell.*

*The road to Hell, it seems, is paved with greasy chicken fingers. It’s a slippery road that would go better with honey mustard.

Walking into the sparsely populated store as the sun just began to brighten the sky, I made a beeline for the liquor aisle but faltered as I got closer. I had already distinguished myself at this Ralphs as the guy with the sarcastic T-shirts who exclusively buys single servings of chicken fingers and frozen dinners – did I want to cap it off by being the guy who buys a fifth of vodka at dawn?

I’ll just explain to them that I’m on the night shift. I reasoned. Really, this is my Friday night, even though it’s Saturday morning for everyone else. I should be able to march right up to the counter and buy my vodka, no questions asked. This is America, after all.

As I entered the liquor aisle, I found an old Hispanic man in a Ralphs apron stocking the shelves, one of the two employees on duty that morning. I hesitated, as I had expected I would be the only one looking for booze at that hour of the morning. Sensing me there, he turned to look at me and smiled.

“Finding everything okay?” He asked with the gentle voice of a friendly and benevolent Stand and Deliver era Edward James Olmos.

“Yes.” I murmured, backing out of the liquor aisle, unable to further sully my already damaged Ralphs reputation in front of this employee among employees.

Five minutes later, he was at the cash register when I paid for my box of Pop Tarts.

“You got a Ralphs Club Card?” He asked.

I checked my pockets but realized that I’d left mine at home, and the registration paperwork allowing me to give them my phone number hadn’t gone through yet.

“It’s at home.” I said.

“Here.” He ducked under the counter and came up with a Ralphs Club Card, still in its packaging, which he swiped across the scanner for me.

I only got 16 cents worth of savings, but I thanked him all the same. As I left, I was glad I hadn’t tried to buy vodka and earned myself a reputation as a lush. Ralphs is too good of a place to be ashamed to enter.

Truman Capps later found out that it’s against California law to sell alcohol between 2 AM and 6 AM anyway, which would have made the situation far more awkward if he’d tried to buy.

World Of StarCraft

C'mon! Look how awesome it is! What am I going to do - NOT write a blog about it?

Things I’m not good at:

1) Math
2) Processing lactose
3) Exercise (all kinds)
4) Women (all kinds)
5) Micromanaging futuristic intergalactic military campaigns

The first four don’t bother me that much – there are people who can do those things and people who can’t, and the ones who can generally don’t have almost the same name as a prolifically effeminate gay socialite, and I came to terms with that a long time ago.

"Noun verb Battlestar Galactica."

But being a poor commander of space marines and Siege Tanks? That’s dorky and obscure enough to be right up my alley, and yet nearly every match I’ve ever played in the popular real time strategy video game StarCraft has ended in a humiliating defeat and tragic loss of life for the men in my command. Nobody said universal domination was going to be easy, but I was hoping it would at least be somewhat accessible.

In business, I’ve heard it pays to get good at golf. In college, you’ll do well socially if you know how to play poker. And among nerds, if you’re not playing Dungeons & Dragons,* it’s going to be StarCraft all the way – I suppose we’ve got around our weak social skills by driving one another to military ruin instead.

*I’m also not really good at D&D, as it’s built around basic math. Admittedly, there’s no way to win at D&D, so I guess being bad at it just makes me a bigger loser than everyone else playing.

Released in 1997, StarCraft is a military science fiction saga about a three way intergalactic war between the Starship Troopers style humans, the Jediesque Protoss, and the insectoid Zerg, who are also one hell of a lot like the bugs in Starship Troopers.

Unlike Starship Troopers, StarCraft does not feature Nazi Doogie Howser.

Top down real time strategy games were nothing new then, but up until StarCraft they had usually consisted of two armies differentiated only by the color of the shirts they were wearing, which worked really well as a commentary on the futility of war and the oneness of mankind but made for something of a dry and predictable fight. In StarCraft, different armies fielded different units that demanded different tactical skillsets, and as with all things that are both complex and meticulously well designed, legions of people threw away their social lives in hopes of mastering it.

The Korean Peninsula isn’t known for its masculine teen heartthrobs or functional systems of government, but thanks to StarCraft South Korea has distinguished itself as arguably the nerdiest member of the United Nations by fully embracing StarCraft as an element of its culture. Televised StarCraft matches are one of the most popular things on Korean TV, and professional StarCraft players not only exist, but also make more money than you do and probably get laid more often to boot.

Lim Yo Hwan, the Magic Johnson of StarCraft (sans AIDS).

When in high school I became aware of StarCraft and the godlike status of its players in South Korea, I for the first time in my life began having the fantasies of dominance in a competitive activity in front of thousands of people that most young people start having as soon as they get into sports.

The thing is, I had never gotten into sports – then and now they’ve always seemed like something of a futile enterprise that never caught my interest (especially soccer). To be honest, I think the only reason I love college football so much is because it’s a chance for the University of Oregon to show how much better it is than every other college in America.*

*Especially the University of Washington. Fuck those guys.

For whatever reason, though, StarCraft – a game about fictional armies fighting with nonexistent technology on a computer generated alien battlefield – circumvents my ‘futile enterprise’ hangups entirely, and so for a while in high school I dedicated a fair amount of time to trying to get good at the game. Finally there was something directly competitive that I had a chance to get good at!

Whatever hopes I’d had of becoming The Great American StarCraft Champion were dashed when I discovered that StarCraft is actually pretty stressful for something that’s supposed to be a recreational activity. From the moment the game starts you’ve got to be managing your economy, fortifying your base, building an army, attacking your opponent, scouting, and planning your next three expansions, and as a general rule I play video games because when I want to do less thinking, not more.

As it turns out, even though I’m terrible at the game itself, I still love watching the replays of professional matches that get posted online. Yes, it may sound pretty lame that I’m so bad at a video game that I can only enjoy it when I watch superstar Koreans play it, but I know a lot of fat and lethargic people who love basketball, so I don’t think I’m alone here in loving to watch something I can’t do myself – only my thing is better, because it has spaceships.

...So many spaceships.

Recently, StarCraft 2 was released, a full 13 years after the first installment, to widespread critical acclaim and outstanding sales. Now, in the age of YouTube, it’s far easier for replays of epic battles to be shuffled around the Internet, and I’ve spent an embarrassing number of my midnight lunch hours at work eating frozen dinners and watching StarCraft 2 tournaments with English commentary, an activity which is seldom ranked high on the list of habits of people who will one day be successful.

Having discovered a televised competitive event which, unlike virtually all sports, I both understand and enjoy, I’ve now come to share the same aspiration of most journalism majors: I want to become a sports commentator, only my sport has no penalties and involves casually laughing at widespread, horrific violence (not unlike UFC).

Imagine getting paid to watch people who are really good at video games play video games, and then talk about the video games. That’s a job that I think I’m really well cut out for.

Unfortunately, since competitive StarCraft isn’t everything in America that it is in Korea, English language StarCraft II commentaries are usually just recorded by a couple of guys sitting alone in their Dad’s garage (something I still could be good at). Competitive video gaming, like yogurt Pepsi and pornography vending machines, is yet another great Asian invention that has yet to make its way West.

Truman Capps knows that some amount of professional gaming happens in the States, but it’s more sweaty and creepy than cool, just like the porno vending machine he installed in the student union.

With The Passion Of Tennessee Williams

Our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen!

One of our family friends, David, has made no secret of the fact that he doesn’t get my parents’ and my affinity for Mystery Science Theater 3000, the brilliant Minnesota based movie mocking puppet show that ran for nine glorious seasons. Adherents love the show because it’s centered around making fun of crappy movies.

“But at the end of the day,” David always points out. “You’re still just watching a crappy movie!”

If you share his sentiment, then the rest of this update probably won’t make a whole lot of sense to you.

So there’s this movie, right? And it’s called The Room. It was written, directed, and produced by its star, the mysteriously accented, seemingly ageless Tommy Wiseau, for about six million dollars. The film is ostensibly a straight up melodrama about the Christlike Johnny (played by Tommy) whose unbelievable charity and goodness to those around him is not returned when his fiancée Lisa spontaneously decides to start an affair with his best friend, Mark.

And it’s… Well, words can’t describe it better than this scene:

The whole movie is pretty much like that. Major subplots involving drug addiction and terminal cancer are introduced and then never mentioned again, the set design makes no sense whatsoever (in the titular room, a television is placed behind a couch, next to a coffee table adorned with pictures of spoons), the same six establishing shots (including blatant lifts from the opening credits to Full House and Monk) are used constantly, characters parade in and out of Johnny’s house with no introduction for seemingly no reason, and the movie features four of the longest sex scenes in the history of cinema, all of which are heavy on nudity from people you don’t want to see naked and are, at times, seemingly anatomically impossible.

This movie is bad in virtually every way a movie can be bad. Sure, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Out Space was terrible, but it didn’t include any scenes where you spend ten minutes watching the director’s naked, strangely muscular ass pumping as he dryhumps the overweight, topless lead actress.

To be honest, watching this movie I can’t be sure that Tommy Wiseau had even seen a movie before he made it. Maybe his dad had told him a story about a movie once. “Well, Tommy, characters walk around and say things, and then there’s an establishing shot so you know which city you’re in, and then more characters walk around saying more things, and sometimes there’s a sex scene.”

And if that’s the model he was shooting for, then mission fucking accomplished, because The Room is exactly that – two hours of people walking around saying things and occasionally boning, interspersed with about two dozen slow pans back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge. Do the things they’re saying make sense? No – not even in the warped, funhouse reality of the film, let alone in real life. Is there a reason for them to be walking around? Not really – the only reason anybody walks into Johnny’s house is so they can say things and then depart as soon as they’re done saying things. Is there a reason for the sex scenes? Punishment for the audience, maybe.

Since the movie came out, it’s developed a sort of Rocky Horror Picture Show cult following, jumpstarted by celebrities like David Cross and Seth Green. A theater on Sunset Boulevard shows The Room on all five screens on the last Saturday of every month, and people line up around the block to go heckle it, sing along with the execrable soundtrack, and throw plastic spoons every time the camera lingers on Johnny’s framed spoon pictures.

I had already seen The Room on DVD a couple of times, courtesy of Mike, who wisely pirated the movie rather than pay money for it. However, I wanted to see The Room on the big screen, and I was in luck, because Patrick and his friends have gone to The Room showings some 14 times in the past two years and were planning on going again last night.

Was it awesome? Yes, it was awesome. Fans shouted synchronized responses to characters’ asinine questions, yelled actors’ names moments before they would accidentally break character and look at the camera, and yelled ‘BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!’ every time the overweight harpy Lisa walked through the room.

But in addition to being awesome, it was also kind of sad.

Tommy Wiseau was there, you see. He goes to every single showing in LA to drum up the buzz for the movie, and does a quick Q & A before every showing in each theater. The fans love him, they mob him for pictures and autographs, and they inundate him with creepy questions about his sex life. And he plays along, God bless him, acting like he’s a cinematic wizard who doesn’t know how badly his movie stinks.

What’s sad about it is that this movie was certifiably a labor of love for him – he thought he was making the best movie ever, and this is according to interviews with multiple members of the cast and crew who watched his bizarre, Red Bull fueled antics throughout the course of the shoot. He thought The Room was going to set the world ablaze with critical adulation, but instead it – and he – have become a laughing stock for both the filmgoing public and the Hollywood elite.

And he embraces it, which is great, but I can’t imagine what it does to a guy to go out and play MC once a month while thousands of people line up to pay money to mock you and the creative endeavor you spearheaded and sunk six million dollars into. It’s like if Truman Goes To The 2007 Sprague High School Prom was some sort of cult sensation – I don’t know if I’d want to show up every night and watch drunk fans chant, “BOYS DON’T CRY!”

When Tommy stumbled into the theater for our Q & A, wearing baggy jeans with a blazer and white vest, greasy hair hanging to his shoulders, a pair of 80s wraparound shades obscuring his eyes, he received a standing ovation before taking questions.

“Who are some of your influences?” Someone yelled.

“I don’ have influenzes – I influenze ze ozer directors.” Tommy slurred, to great applause.

“Where are you from?” Came another question.

“Alright, clearly you are new to Ze Room, so maybe zomebody who knows about Ze Room wants to tell him about zis, yeah?”

(Tommy Wiseau’s age and nationality are closely guarded secrets. This is one guy whose birth certificate I actually do want to see.)

“How’s progress on The Neighbors?” I shouted, referring to Tommy’s followup sitcom.

And to be honest, I don’t really know what his response was. Part of it was because he was slurring his words like a drunk stroke victim and part of it was because of the accent, but also there came a point at which it seemed like he was just saying words because it seemed like a good thing to do. The most I got was that he wanted to make ten episodes but some third party only paid him for one, and after that his speech had all the cohesive quality of that kid who just got back from the dentist.

Tommy Wiseau is a smart man – not a good filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s got enough going on upstairs to figure out how to milk The Room for all it’s worth (there’s talk of a Blu-Ray release and a 3D version). Unfortunately, this means that whatever his next project is won’t be anywhere near as funny as The Room, because he’ll be trying to make the movie corny and unbearable, which isn’t nearly as fun as laughing at a guy who thinks he’s an auteur. God bless Ed Wood – the poor guy didn’t know how bad he sucked and just kept on trying. Tommy, on the other hand, is going to make a career out of sucking.

But who am I to talk? Mediocrity got Mike and I 700 hits on funnyordie and a bunch of friends who quit watching halfway through the first episode. Maybe Tommy’s got the right idea.

Truman Capps has to admit that The Room is still way better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Night Shift

I wish my life was exactly like this poster.

Here’s how my day works at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment: I show up to work at 7:00, take an hour for lunch at 12:00, and then head home around 5:00.

Keep in mind that when I say 7:00, I mean 7:00 PM, at which point my parents are already on their second glass of wine and watching Jeopardy! back in Oregon. When I say 12:00 I mean midnight, when my digestive system is still getting used to the idea of me eating a meal that may well be from the nearby In-N-Out. And 5:00 is 5:00 AM, when the real assholes among you are getting up to go to the gym for two hours before going to work.

The night shift is more commonly associated with cops, waiters, and vampires* than with assistant video editors, but that’s part of what makes my employment at Roundhouse Kick so cool – the company is blowing up in the best way possible. We have multiple new shows in development, the ones that we’re airing right now are big hits, and we’re hiring people so fast that we’re expanding through the buildings in our office park like some kind of cancer, buying out office space of less successful production companies and moving the new people in fast enough to raid the old company’s bagel supply before they’ve fully moved out.

*Believe it or not, kids, there was a time when vampires only came out at night, and that was to drink people’s blood, not moon over pouty high school girls and spend their eternal life quietly espousing Christian values.

Part of what this success means, though, is that we have more stuff to do than time to do it, hence why Roundhouse Kick became a 24-hour operation, not unlike Denny’s or an unusually dedicated prostitute. When I show up to work each evening, the day shift people tell us the work they were unable to finish as they head for their cars, and then we go to work on it for the night, leaving them a note about where we left off before heading out ourselves.

Last summer I didn’t have a job (short of trying to keep The Ex Girlfriend happy, which was less a job and more cruel and unusual punishment) and so had little incentive to stick to any civilized type of sleep schedule. Many nights I’d retire from the XBox at around 3:00 AM and get up somewhere in the vicinity of noon. I guess my reasoning was that if I wasn’t able to find work, I ought to fully embrace being a slacker.

After nearly three weeks at Roundhouse, my sleep schedule has begun to normalize. Last night I got home at 5:15 AM and I woke up at about 2:00 PM, which, when compared with the hours I kept last summer, is roughly the same. I still see some daylight before I head off to work, and I don’t feel guilty about my sleep schedule because instead of being a byproduct of laziness it’s a byproduct of the fact that I work a 50 hour week.

Also, anyone who wants to accuse me of missing out on life by sleeping through my mornings can shut the hell up, because I watch the Sun rise and set every day, which, according to a lot of made for TV movies, is probably one of the most life affirming things you can do.

While it’s nice to watch the Sun rise as I drive home, the problem is once I get home the Sun stays up, and the blinds in my apartment weren’t so much designed to keep the Sun out as they were to keep the neighbors from seeing you looking at porn. This didn’t matter for the first week or so, because as I adjusted to my new schedule I’d be so tired coming home every morning that no amount of sunlight streaming through my paper thin blinds could keep me awake.

More recently, though, my after work routine became something out of a cartoon: I’d get home, drag myself inside, crawl into bed, and just begin to close my eyes when sunlight would barge into my room and pull my eyelids open like curtains.

The Internet recommended using an eye pillow to block out the sunlight, assuming that I was a regular shopper at Grandmas ‘R Us and had such a thing tucked away somewhere in my dingy bachelor pad. For most of last week I settled for laying two (clean!) socks across my eyes, which blocked out a fair amount of sunlight in return for a fair amount of dignity. Towards the end of the week, though, I decided that I was done letting the largest celestial body in the Solar System force me to go to bed wearing socks on my face, which led to the creation of Operation Nightfall.

The only reason it's so light is because I had to use the flash so you could see anything.

In one of those coincidences that you wouldn’t believe if you saw it in a movie, Mom and Dad had left several cardboard panels in the backseat of The Mystery Wagon when they handed over the keys. Remembering this one morning as I lay in my Sun dappled bed unable to sleep, I pulled on some pants and marched out to the car with the drive and determination of a madman.

After scouring the apartment for tape I went to work pasting the panels to the window, which miraculously fit perfectly, as though they had been designed for the task. Then, knowing that I truly had gone insane, I cut up a black plastic bag I had with me and taped the shreds over holes in the cardboard in hopes of more fully blocking daylight from my room.

As I write this at 3:00 in the afternoon, darkness reigns in my room, and I could well continue sleeping with no problem. Unfortunately, my neighbors across the alley now only know me as The Guy Who Covered His Windows With Cardboard, so they think I’m either a crackhead or a pedophile, or both.

Truman Capps thinks that his shying away from the sun is yet another step on the road to becoming the crusty old prospector everyone thinks he’ll be.

Working For A Living

Get it? Oh, for fuck's sake, PLEASE get it.

You know what’s ironic?

Driving 950 miles on the pretense that you’ll land one of two internships, both of which turn you down, only to instead through the good graces of a friend get an honest to goodness career style job in the entertainment industry, and be far better and more competent at that job, one which involves navigating complex computer systems in order to literally build television, than you were at your previous Neanderthal-style summer jobs washing cars, busing tables, and making milkshakes.

I guess that’s not ironic. Maybe it’s just sort of amusing. At least, I think it’s amusing.

When uncertainty first began to spring up regarding my internship situation down here (see last week’s update), I contacted my friend Patrick, Giver of Jobs, to see if he could get me an internship of some sort at the production company where he works, just so I could have something on my resume for the summer other than, “Sat around waiting by the phone; considered getting a gym membership.” Patrick’s response was that he wouldn’t allow me to come to his production company unless I had an actual paying job, and so he aggressively pitched me to his boss, who subsequently hired me as an assistant video editor.

So far, Patrick is arguably the only good thing to come from me socializing with Mike, Smoker of Cigarettes, on a regular basis. Patrick and Mike went to school together in the charming old timey Western village of Medford, Oregon, and when Mike went off to pursue a degree in journalism and lame public access television at the University of Oregon, Patrick went to film school at Full Sail University in Florida. He then graduated and, rather than getting a job at Subway like most film school graduates, actually got a job in the entertainment industry at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment,* a reality and documentary TV production outfit, where I now work as well.

*For those of you who weren’t here two summers ago, my places of employment on the blog always get pseudonyms, and that trend continues today. While it may look like I’m trying to protect them from any bad shit I may say, I’m actually trying to protect myself from Roundhouse Kick finding out that I’m blogging about them and firing me for exposing secrets (not that I will, guys).

It’s a good job, and it pays $500 a week. Yes, I guess that’s impressive by Oregon standards, but keep in mind that rent on my apartment in Studio City is about $690 a month when you factor in utilities (which is a pretty good price out here, by the way) and I run through one $50 tank of gas every week driving the 20 miles to and from work every day. It’s still a damn fine wage that I’m happy to be paid, but with the cost of living down here it’s about on par with most entry level jobs.

But why is it a good job, you ask? Three reasons:

1) Snacks!

All my other jobs have been food service, and under those circumstances one is surrounded by delicious food but knows he will be torn a new asshole if he eats any of it, because that food is the product, and skimming the product is a really bad idea that will probably get you killed (according to The Wire, at least).

At Roundhouse Kick, though, there’s a kitchen full of delicious snacks. Granola bars, Chips Ahoy, bagels, cream cheese, bread and peanut butter – keep in mind, folks, that given proper quantities of the aforementioned foods I could probably make it through the apocalypse no sweat.

Also, I definitely picked the wrong summer to swear off of soft drinks, because there’s a dedicated refrigerator completely stocked with all the Sprite, Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, and Dr. Pepper anyone could ever need. To your garden variety elementary schooler who (hopefully) has yet to discover the joys of alcohol and pornography, our company kitchen, lovingly appointed with all the free candy you could ask for, is probably Valhalla. To me, it’s a good excuse to leave my office every so often.

2) The Commute!

Yes, I know – not only do I hate driving under the best of circumstances, but I live in Los Angeles, the bad traffic capital of the world.

The thing is, though, that I work nights,* which means that I’m in the car going to work at 6:00 PM. Traffic is still kind of nasty at that point depending on which freeway you’re on (my commute takes me across three – the 101, the 405, and the 90, which, if you’ve never been to LA, probably doesn’t mean much), but it’s never so bad that it takes me more than 40 minutes to get to work.

*Yes, I work the night shift – this is a pretty big subject and will be covered in depth on Wednesday.

And honestly, I’d much rather deal with LA traffic going five miles an hour than LA traffic going full speed, which as I may have mentioned is like 2 Fast, 2 Furious meets the scene in Serenity when the ship is falling into the planet’s atmosphere and they’re trying to dodge an entire space battle between the Alliance and the Reavers.


Plus, I get off work at 5:00 AM, at which point it takes me a good 15 minutes to breeze on home, listening to Morning Edition and playing Spot the Hobo Village every time I pass a surface street.

3) I Like The Job And I’m Good At It!

What does an assistant video editor do, you ask? Well, he assists the full on video editors in editing video. Duh.

More concretely, it means that I polish up the raw Television that comes in from Roundhouse Kick’s productions and generally make it ready to be cut together into refined, premium Television.

As Roundhouse is a reality TV studio, a lot of the stuff I do involves grooming the excess reality out of the video that’s handed to me. This primarily happens through a time intensive process known as ‘Locating,’ where I watch the raw video footage of client interviews, historical research, and ghost hunts (I work on a ghost hunting show) and place color coded markers, or ‘Locators’, in places in the video which are of interest. There are markers for relevant dialogue, nonverbal reactions, people entering or leaving, and the all important paranormal activity marker (used sparingly).

Thanks to these markers, the editors know which parts of the 90 minute long tape are interesting enough to start working with. It isn’t their job to watch the cast fiddling with their microphones or a crusty old guy at the historical society yammering about his dog for 15 minutes – it’s my job. I also categorize and label B roll (general footage of the haunted house, the town it’s in, the cast dramatically getting out of their cars, etc) and stack audio (synchronize the video footage with what the cast’s independent wireless microphones recorded).

Is it sort of tedious? Yes. But I don’t care – even though I don’t watch reality TV and take the paranormal about as seriously as I take organized religion, I fucking love this job. Sure, it’s tedious work, but it’s tedious work that helps television, one of my favorite things ever, get made.*

*My other favorite things ever are pretty difficult to get jobs with – science fiction isn’t hiring at the moment and I’m underqualified for a job at a distillery.

I guess what I’ve learned is that I’ll throw myself headfirst into a tedious task if I appreciate the end result. So fuck you, Mike’s Drive In! It’s not that I wasn’t good at making milkshakes. It’s that I didn’t appreciate the end result.

Truman Capps thinks you wouldn’t have appreciated the end result at Mike’s either if you’d seen some of the manatees who had come in every day for their bacon burger and extra large shake.

It's coming

Srsly guys, give me like 20 minutes here.

"Cliche As It May Sound, This Is Show Biz"

How many times have I told the internship story now? Want to hear it one more time, for those of you who weren’t paying attention?

In mid February, I became aware of a highly competitive and well regarded internship program sponsored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the people responsible for the Emmy awards. This program offered internships in some 30 categories, one of which was television scriptwriting. I applied on a whim, thinking ‘It’s not likely, but hey, why not, right?’ This same reasoning is why I’ve had a condom in my jacket pocket for the past year or so.

So I mailed in my entry packet and more or less forgot about it. I interviewed for an unpaid internship in Los Angeles at a reality TV production company full of people friendly and understanding enough to 1) Offer me a job and B) Wait for my response until after I’d heard from the Emmys, who said they’d contact finalists in late April.

So imagine my pants-crapping surprise in late April when I received an email from NATAS telling me that I’d been selected as one of six finalists for the TV scriptwriting internship. This was exciting – getting the internship would mean a $4000 stipend and a seat in a TV writer’s room, which, as summer jobs go, is second in my heart only to a seat on the bridge of Serenity.

We only pay you in tiny leather bags filled with space-coins.

From April 27th until two days ago, my life was less a lived series of events and more a form of purgatory. The people at my safety internship agreed to hold the position for me until I heard the final answer from the Emmys, which they said would come in mid to late June. Every day revolved around getting up and spending 12 or so hours fretting about the strength of my submitted materials, staring at the phone and willing it to ring, and fantasizing about being placed as an intern on Community and having flirtatious, meaningful eye contact with Alison Brie on a daily basis.

Eye contact: Just one of many forms of contact I'd like to have with Alison Brie.

The Emmys blew their first deadline the week before I left England – they informed me that the winner would be notified early the following week. By late the following week with still no word, we were told to wait another week. At long last, word came through that the first of the two winners had been selected and notified, and whoever it was, it wasn’t me. The next winner, they said, would be notified after the Fourth of July weekend.

Shit had gotten real. All of my fantasies about winning the internship had involved me being the first winner selected (they also involved me backflipping onto a motorcycle, but that’s another story), and the idea that some script supervisor could watch my audition video and read my 30 Rock spec script and then pick some girl who wrote poems about horses in high school and wants to be a writer because it looked so fun when Sarah Jessica Parker did it on that show was very unnerving.

Incidentally, I heard this movie really sucked. I can't tell you how happy that makes me.

At this point, the Emmys’ indolence had cost me my safety internship – they had a business to run, after all, and they couldn’t be expected to sit around for three months waiting on an unpaid intern just because he had the good sense to wear a suit to his interview and smile a lot, so they interviewed and subsequently hired another person. Meanwhile, I set up another safety position courtesy of my friend Patrick, Writer of Screenplays, who I know through Mike Whitman, Smoker of Cigarettes, and struck off for LA in The Mystery Wagon, as I had decided that if I was going to spend my whole summer waiting for the phone to ring, I could at least do it in a place where they sell liquor in supermarkets.

As a going away gift, my parents bought me a Bluetooth headset – if you don’t know what that is, go find an asshole and look at the side of his head, and you’ll see one stuck in his ear. It’s for people who receive so many important phone calls while simultaneously doing so many important things with their hands that they have to resort to science to find a balance. I wore that fucking Bluetooth in my ear the whole way down to LA on the off chance that the Emmys called me while I was in the car and still, nothing.

"Yes Mr. President? Sorry, I'm too busy playing the final guitar solo from November Rain to pick up a real phone."

I’d been in LA for three days and the Emmys had once again blown their notification deadline, something I’d become almost used to. Then, I received the call I’d been waiting for and fantasizing about for so long:

“Hello, is this Truman? This is ________, with the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences internship program.”

“Holy shit.” I said. “Hi!”

The woman on the other end laughed. “Holy shit – I don’t have news. I’m just calling to tell you there’s been a shake up at the host company; they’ve ordered a rewrite of the pilot for the show and the writing team says they won’t be able to take on an intern until August.”

That happened.

So I started working full time at Patrick’s company – more details on that in the next blog – a job that I enjoy and appear to be pretty good at, which is a relief, seeing as I was pretty fucking bad at simple, lowpaying, non career oriented jobs such as milkshake making or water glass filling. I’ve been there for a week and a half now, something that I neglected to publicize on Hair Guy or Facebook lest the person vetting me for the scriptwriting internship look and see that I already had a job.

Two days ago, I received the following email from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences:

Dear Finalist,

Due to circumstances completely out of my control, I will NOT be filling the second Scriptwriting slot this summer. Production on _______ has been delayed, and it won't be premiering now until Fall of 2011.

I appreciate your patience, and I'm so sorry to have to give you this news. Cliché as it may sound, this is show biz.

Best,
[Name]

Suffice it to say:

Truman Capps eagerly awaits your comments and emails about what typos he made this week.

Road Warrior

Rush hour.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for over a week now, and while I promised that I’d never let this city change me, sadly it already has. No, I haven’t picked up a cocaine habit or killed a hooker in a drunken rage and dumped her body in the hills (yet!) – I’ve become a different type of driver.

I can’t whether my driving has gotten better or worse, because that really depends on where you’re coming from. By Los Angeles standards, my driving is very bad – I still signal when I change lanes and when I get on the 405 I insist on driving at the prevailing speed in the right hand lane instead of driving as fast and carelessly as possible like everyone else. When I get on Mulholland Drive, the narrow, twisty, two lane road that basically hangs off the side of the Hollywood Hills above a sheer drop, I make a point of driving at a reasonable speed and taking turns slowly instead of flooring it and passing on curves at 55 miles per hour like everyone else. I dunno – as much as I love Jack Nicholson, I don’t want to crash through a guardrail and wind up dunking The Mystery Wagon in his swimming pool. He’s not a man known for measured responses, or sanity in general.

By Portland standards, though, my driving has also gotten worse. I no longer regard other drivers as human beings like myself just trying to get to where they’re going, but rather as a pack of bloodthirsty adversaries who will stop at nothing to kill me. I’ve had some experience driving with this mindset before thanks to several years of nightly Mario Kart 64 matches with my parents.

It’s not like I wanted to become one of the terrible California drivers that we Oregonians bitch about – and yes, Californians who are reading this, you are terrible drivers – it was simply a matter of necessity. Have you seen Mad Max? That’s what it’s like driving from Studio City to Santa Monica. And did Mad Max adhere to the rules of the road that he as a futuristic apocalyptic policeman no doubt understood were created with law and order and personal safety in mind? No. No, he did not – because the mutant savage gangs he was tangling with didn’t adhere to those rules either. He had to become just as insane as they were in order to keep up with them long enough to scream anti-Semitic racial epithets at them, and I feel like I’ve done the same thing, with a few notable exceptions.

Driving from Studio City to Santa Monica is a trip that requires me to travel on three different Interstate highways, all of them jam-packed with porn producers in convertible Sebrings who treat their lane like their own personal territory which under no circumstances should they let anyone else encroach upon, even if it means that person misses their exit. These same people will abruptly abandon the lane they were so defensive of at the drop of a hat, darting into the tiny space between myself and the car ahead of me without so much a flash of the turn signal.

“Well,” I can hear them saying between rails of cocaine snorted off the back of their iPhones. “Seeing me pull into your lane should be signal enough, am I right?”

All of this would be far easier to understand if everyone wasn’t so fucking nice the second they got out of their cars. You think hugging is big where you are? Everybody hugs here. Hand shaking is out, because apparently that didn’t spread enough bacteria, so now complete strangers will throw their arms around you in a warm and welcoming embrace before you can so much as tell them your name.*

*Not that I’m anti hug or anything. All I’m saying is, Eva Longoria didn’t hug me, so I guess the LA hugging phenomenon doesn’t come through where it counts, as far as I’m concerned.

Complete strangers here are charming and friendly in the way that people in Europe seem to think that all Americans are. On my first trip to Ralph’s, the woman behind me in line heard the cashier tell me that they wouldn’t accept my Safeway Club Card and spontaneously whipped out her Ralph’s card and ran it for me. When I was at Galco’s Soda Pop Stop in Pasadena, the cashier casually advised me as to which drinks were not to be served over ice and which ought to be turned upside down before opening. Just a few minutes ago, the cashier at Blockbuster Video and I had a lovely little heart to heart about the movie Hancock and whether it sucked or not – this was thrilling both because the cashier was attractive and female and because it’s always been an ambition of mine to date a video store employee and get free rentals.

Now that I look back on what I just wrote, all my experiences involved retail in one way or another, but the fact of the matter is that seldom in Oregon have I met so many people who’ve been so jovial and friendly while taking my money and not working for tips.

Maybe people in Los Angeles are brought together by the freeways – maybe their reasoning is that they’ve probably cut off, tailgated, and otherwise endangered the lives of so many people on their way to work that as soon as they get there they try to restore karmic balance by being as nice as possible to everyone regardless of race, creed, or what sort of supermarket discount card they have.

Truman Capps also considered Death Race 2000 as a 405 analogy, but he wouldn’t have been able to make that totally awesome ‘Mel Gibson is a racist’ joke.