Girlfriend Is Better

Maybe not a total coincidence.

Remember two years ago, when I announced Writers? I made a nice little video and everything. Well, ‘nice’ is a relative term – looking back on it now, the framing and lighting is terrible and I acted like a snotty bastard the entire time. Rest assured, had I made a video for you today, it would’ve at least looked nice. The rest of it would’ve been more of the same: “Maybe, if I use just enough big words, people will finally like me.”

And I was going to make a video for you today – honest. I mean, I work in a room filled with cameras, and I’m an electronic media major. It would’ve been a great idea. I could’ve edited it, and had musical cues, and special guest appearances and everything.

But I’m also busy – so fucking busy, really. I’ve got five classes left to take before I can graduate and I’m taking four of them this term and working as much as I can to save up a good deal of money. I even quit the basketball band, a decision that apparently entitles my own friends to punch me in the balls whenever they feel like it.

These sacrifices (my free time, followed by my genitalia) were made due to the love of cinema. Please, let me explain.

I my feelings about journalism are the same as my feelings about proper sewage disposal – I really like and appreciate its role in society, and enjoy it when other people do it for me, but it’s not the sort of thing I’d ever want to do myself.

Now, my experience with sewage disposal really stops after the sewage creation phase (which I am great at, not that I’m bragging), but I’ve actually tried journalism. Remember that year where my blog updates were halfhearted and sucked more than usual? That’s because at the time I was working as a journalist, writing for the Oregon Daily Emerald, and writing when I have to make sure everything I say is 100% correct is pretty taxing and really takes the fun out of the whole process.

God, that sounds bad. Look, keep reading.

The simple fact is that journalism is a field in which you write about real people who exist in the world, and, with respect to all of you, none of you on your own are quite as interesting as the people and events that I make up. All of you are fabulous in your own special ways, but I don’t want to write about you. Don’t worry – I know plenty of people who do, and they’re all way better at it than I am.

After this term I’ll be clear to graduate as a Magazine Feature Writing major, whereas I would have two more classes to complete in my Electronic Media sequence. Both of these classes are very grueling fare about how to properly attach a lavolier mic to a person’s lapel and interview them about something boring, like a parking garage or baseball.

I want to write scripts; I don’t want to be a journalist. I realized two months ago that if this were the case, I shouldn’t be spending my last term at the University of Oregon busting my ass to learn how to be a journalist.

So instead, I wrote a script for a 40-minute short film over the break. At the end of the term, I’m dropping the Electronic Media major, hence why I’ll only have to take one class (Geology 103) in the spring.

And with all that free time and the help of some close friends, I’m going to make that short film and take it with me to Hollywood.

The movie is called Girlfriend Is Better, and like most of my work, it’s a dialogue heavy piece about three guys who sit around being assholes. More specifically, one of the guys gets a girlfriend, and the other two decide to try and break them up.

Yes, it sounds a lot like Saving Silverman. However, it’s not. Maybe it also sounds a lot like Writers. It’s also not.

Unlike Writers, we’re making this movie pretty much independently of the University of Oregon – we’ve got our own camera and sound equipment and our own copy of FinalCut, so we won’t be dependent on the School of Journalism, nor hemmed in by their restrictions on how many anal sex jokes we can tell (one or less).

Unlike Writers, we’ll be shooting on an HD camera, so it’ll look like a million bucks, and this time around we’re planning on not leaving a piece of camera equipment in basically every shot.

Unlike Writers, my tech savvy better half in this endeavor isn’t chain smoking, life hating Mike Whitman, but the diet-albino Dylan Sylwester, whose skills involve being thin and practically every aspect of multimedia production.

His skin tone is somewhere between 'Conan O Brien' and 'Mirror'.

And unlike Writers, I won’t be befouling this movie with my presence as an actor. No, this time around we’re looking to hire the best people for the job, which is why we’re holding open auditions on Friday and Saturday, January 28th and 29th , between 6 and 8 PM in the Chambers Electronic Media Center in Allen Hall. If you’re interested, hit up our event page so we can send you an audition script.

I mention this to all of you both because I want to create a significant amount of buzz, and also because this will be dominating my life more and more over the course of the rest of my college education, hence you can expect to see a lot about it on the blog.

For example, I could already write an entire update about how hard it is to find an adult shop willing to let you film a non pornographic movie inside it, or how few restaurants are willing to let you use them as a location when the scene you want to shoot involves a dildo.

Not joking. This is going to be awesome.

Truman Capps regrets to inform you that he may have to start using Twitter to build more interest as time goes by.

The Great Gig In The Desert: Finale

"Alright! OMB forever!” - Drunk guy at pregame tailgate

"Yeah – it feels that way. - Me

Awwwwwwwww.

When I joined my high school’s marching band as a freshman, it had about 120 members – a good size for a high school band in a rainy state like Oregon. My first year was our first with a new director, our halftime show was terrible, and drama abounded. Next year, thanks to people fleeing the dysfunctional, sinking ship, our numbers had dropped to about 70, and the exodus continued for the rest of my time there.

I was a rare breed who got hooked early on – in the offseason I would aggressively anticipate the upcoming season, spending hours on YouTube analyzing the performances of other bands and speculating about our chances in the coming year’s competitions with the same fervor sports fans take to March Madness or the Super Bowl. My love life could have charitably been called ‘unremarkable.’

That's me on the right. I think in this picture I'm wondering what it's like to kiss a girl.

As I watched more and more of my friends depart the Sprague Olympian Marching Band, fed up with the inherent Suck of being in a marching band, I turned my nose up at them with scorn. Pussies. I thought. The thrill of performance more than makes up for the rehearsals, or the exhaustion, or the incompetent student leadership!

What I know now, after eight years of marching band, is that membership in one requires a certain amount of gas – some sort of inner drive allowing one to remain enthusiastic and excited about marching band in spite of all the things this activity does to beat up, downgrade, and dissuade you from enjoying it. Everybody coming into it has a different amount in the tank. Some people run out early and leave the organization after a year or two. Others stick with it through high school until they have to pull over.

As it turns out, I had enough for about seven years and two days, which is why I feel like I spent virtually all of this very long, grueling season pushing my car uphill and wishing I’d taken the bus.

Y’know?

PART 4: OMB FOREVER

The Oregon Marching Band rehearses for three hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Storm systems in Oregon have gotten accustomed to this schedule, and so they save up all their rain for between 3:20 and 6:00 on those days.

Rain is pouring out of the sky like in Jurassic Park, it’s cold as hell, soccer balls from the adjacent athletic field keep flying over the fence and hitting us, we’re tired and mostly sick, and The Band Director is hounding us to keep focused and work because, rain or shine, we’ve got to perform in three days.

Squat thrusts: A major part of our performances.

For my first three years at Oregon I didn’t like this by any means, but I just viewed it as a fact of life. I don’t like being lactose intolerant either, but it’s not like I have any choice. You have to deal with the shit to be the shit, as they say, and while I’m certainly not the shit just yet, my plan was to become the shit eventually after dealing with enough shit to qualify me for the position.

It was only this year, driving to rehearsal on a frigid and rainy Wednesday, feeling like a convict being led to the gallows, that I realized I didn’t have to be doing this. I think the revelation came when I looked out the window and saw other people – that great majority of people who aren’t in marching band – going into houses and apartment buildings, shutting the doors, and getting away from the elements.

Before, it was the thrill of performing that had energized me, but now it was all different. I mean, yes, the fans enjoy our performances, but you could bring out Saddam Hussein wearing green and yellow and they’d probably go cheer for him too. At the very least, I had loved being able to get into the sold out games at Autzen Stadium, but after four years of going to every Oregon home game whether I wanted to or not, I'd come to think anything anywhere beat a couch and a television and a toilet that less than 30 people have crapped in in the last ten minutes.

I had run out of gas.

Me, out of gas and proving that it's possible to be creepy in your sleep.

After the end of my first high school marching band season, I was mortified that this activity I loved so much would come to an abrupt halt in only seven years. Offices do not have intramural marching bands, nor can you join one at the YMCA. Now, though, at the end of my marching band career, a moment I had expected to be tearful and bittersweet, I’m walking on air.

I don’t regret for a second any of the time I spent in the marching band. I’ve made some of the best friends of my life in this organization and picked up some of the best stories and blog fodder from it. If not for the Oregon Marching Band, I would not have experienced Taco Tuesday, the movie Wedding Crashers, the song ‘Gonna Get Through This’, motor coaches, or baseball caps being flung at motor coaches in quite the same way.

Some experiences I might have been better off without...

I never would have had the opportunity to chase a five foot tall inflatable penis around a San Diego hotel, pour Absolut into my fountain drink at Taco Bell in the bathroom while waiting for my Crunchwrap Supreme, board the Los Angeles Metro with an open container, or perform at a Rose Bowl and a National Championship in two consecutive years. And, of course, The Funeral Party, which, if not more prestigious than the Rose Bowl and National Championship, was certainly more enjoyable for everyone involved.

It’s strange to spend a decade doing something and then so abruptly stop with so little sentimentality. Who knows – maybe it hasn’t hit me yet. Maybe at the end of this summer I’ll drive past a high school and hear the warbling of brass, the flatulent rumble of a drumline, the Psycho style screech of a metronome, and I’ll break down in tears, either due to loss or PTSD.

Or maybe I’ll go on about my day a little happier, knowing that no matter what happens to me that day, if it starts raining I can go inside, whereas those poor bastards on the field are at the whim of the elements.

The trumpet section at its finest - Spiderbret, Boss Waffle, Poopy Bano, Joo, Jack MFBDPS Brazil, Longhair Trevor, Slambar, Captain Spickard, Super Dave, Regular Dave, Smashmorshman, Bremerson, Tako, multiple Jive Turkeys, Jefe the Mexican Drinking Machine, and Angry Kyle.

It’s been a good run.

Truman Capps looks forward to no more band related updates, and I’m sure you do too.

The Great Gig In The Desert, Part 3, Part 2

Welcome, indeed.

I have this way of anticipating a moment for a long time, and, despite my best efforts not to, building it up in my mind until there’s no possible way for the actual experience to match what I’m looking for. When whatever I’m anticipating finally happens I wind up disappointed to some degree.

I call these experiences Classic Truman Capps Moments. If ever you happen to hear me muttering ‘And that’s another Classic Truman Capps Moment,’ you can be sure that I just tried a combination of toppings at Subway that tasted disgusting, or a girl just told me she couldn’t go out with me because she was a ‘free spirit’ or ‘helping her parents move.’

Walking into University of Phoenix Stadium, something I’d been anticipating since early December when we won the Civil War, was not a Classic Truman Capps Moment.

PART 3, PART 2: ...AND WE SANG MIGHTY OREGON LIKE 'PEANUTS' CHARACTERS

We were each frisked by security, and then directed to walk through a gaping open garage door that would take us underneath the bleachers and into the stadium. The Oregon Marching Band stumbled in like 200 small town yokels on their first trip to the big city, craning our necks to look up past the lights and everything else to see the stadium ceiling so high above us.

Everyone who had not previously been aware that this shit was real now officially knew: This shit was about as real as it was ever going to get. We were walking into an 80,000 seat stadium packed with people waiting to see the last college football game of the season, nationally televised, between the two best teams in the country, one of which was the team of the school we’d all been going to and loving for anywhere between six months and, in one case, 15 years.

This is America, and we all know that men should not cry. However, if there is one circumstance when a man can cry, it’s when he’s been brought to his knees by the pure beauty and majesty of college football. So yeah, I teared up a bit. Feel free to mock me for it, if you want to, but I dare you not to do the same when you walk into the stadium where your team is playing the BCS National Championship.

"No, I've... I've just got something in both my eyes."

Coupe de grace? The theme from ‘Chariots of Fire’ was playing over the stadium PA system. The only music that might be better for those circumstances is the last two minutes of November Rain, but then that music is better suited to something exploding with a motorcycle jumping out of the explosion on fire and then the person on the motorcycle leaps off and lands in an awesome tuck and roll and then the motorcycle also explodes.

So we climbed the stairs into our spot in the bleachers, arrayed behind the Oregon goalposts, and looked out across this gigantic stadium to see that about two thirds of it was orange and blue. One entire side of the stadium, not to mention a few sections of the opposite side, was uniformly full of people who were rooting against the Ducks.

Full disclosure - this is an LSU home game. But still, nobody here is making jokes about fathers and bribery.

So what happened there, Duck fans? We were one of the most talked about teams all season. We had the AP Coach of the Year. This was the first National Championship we’ve ever been to, and most of you just couldn’t make the drive? Auburn is about 600 miles further from Glendale than Eugene is, but they were still able to rally enough fans to turn the National Championship into a home game.

That sort of thing is why the SEC can talk like they’re the only people who know how to play football – they’ve got the numbers to back up whatever heinous shit they say. Their fans may not make as many corny hip hop videos about their team, but they’re very, very good at going to football games. Yesterday, Auburn held a victory rally in their stadium and 78,000 people showed up. It was like Saturday’s slapdash Parade of Champions in Eugene, only less rain and probably far more people who actually wanted to be there. Like, probably 78,000 more.

But, on the bright side, it wasn't six miles!

So we hoisted The Sign and cheered extra loud and wiled away the seemingly endless minutes until it was time to run onto the field for our pregame show, an event which, in spite of how much time we spent dodging TV cameras and playing jump rope with AV cords as we ran on, was still fairly awesome. And we filed back to the stands and watched the clock tick closer to zero, and then, something amazing happened:

Hey, who's that dapper gentleman behind him?

The little fucker made it.

I don’t know how he managed to convince the hospital to discharge him, the marching band to let him come, or stadium security to allow an apparent SARS case in a surgical mask to walk into a stadium full of people, but somehow Trevor Jones fought off the icy grip of death to come to a football game, so great was his love of his Ducks.

So again, Oregon fans, not to belabor the point, but in the future you should try to be more like Trevor.

...but not too much.

Multiple service organizations sang various patriotic songs, and then the National Anthem, the performance of which included a trained eagle flying around the stadium (this, the flamboyant union of college football and America, is another acceptable time to cry), and then, at last, came the moment that Duck fans everywhere had been waiting for not just the past month, or the past season, but for their entire lives:

Kickoff.

Courtesy Charlie Riedel, AP.

I was going to fudge the details and say that on the buses going home, we sang Mighty Oregon like Peanuts characters – a somber unofficial tradition in which members of the marching band quietly sing the word ‘loo’ to the tune of the fight song, not unlike the way the kids hum ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ in A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s about the most dignified and graceful thing the band does, and we do it, from time to time, when events have transpired in such a way that there’s nothing left to say.

But we didn’t sing it - not that I heard, at least, and while it's good enough for a title, it's not good enough to lie about. We ate Chick-Fil-A postgame meals as the bus spent an hour or so jerkily inching out of the parking lot with some 80,000 other cars and bitched about the game while watching drunk Auburn fans run into the bushes and piss. Before long, some mixture of illness, despondency, and the bus driver’s heavy handed application of the break pedal led Trevor to stumble into the coach’s bathroom and vomit the rest of the way home.

As I listened to my friend wretching and watched Auburn band members chest bump one another in the parking lot, I realized that this would, forevermore, be my last memory of the Oregon Marching Band. Not my best, no, nor my worst, but in 30 years, that’s going to be what I remember as my last moment with the OMB: Very acutely understanding the experience of defeat. It smells like bile and tastes like cold fried chicken.

And that’s another Classic Truman Capps Moment.

Truman Capps brings this whole thing to a close tomorrow – and aren’t you glad? Jesus, let’s just move on already.

The Great Gig In The Desert, Part 3, Part 1

Apparently he's a genius, but I've still got my doubts.

Trevor Jones, lead trumpet player in the Oregon Marching Band and recipient of a full ride athletic scholarship for his service in the OMB’s Green Garter Band, woke at 6:00 AM on the morning of the BCS National Championship, ran into the hotel bathroom, and copiously vomited. He kept up this act with such force and dedication that within hours he was on his way to an urgent care clinic in Scottsdale – Trevor, whose fanaticism for Duck football knew no bounds, was at death’s door on the day of the most historic game in Duck football history. Two other members of the OMB had come down with similar ailments in roughly the same time period.

This fucking game was going to be the death of us.

PART 3, PART 1: LOOKING AT A WINNER

Our mood on the day of the game was giddy, which came in contrast to our mood on the day of the previous bowl game, which was more like, “Fuck shit ow why am I awake?”

We clambered onto our buses in full uniform and rolled out onto I-10. At the back of Bus 1, where all the main OGs of the Oregon Marching Band ride, we bus surfed for most of the hour long drive from Scottsdale to Glendale.

If you lived here, you'd be home by now. And eaten by coyotes.

And let me take this opportunity, having seen a good amount of the countryside, to ask what possessed someone to look at any part of Arizona and say, “Hey, you know what we should have here? Human civilization!” Because really I’ve never been anywhere that’s seemed less enthusiastic about having life in or around it. It’s all sand, scrub brush, and rocks as far as the eye can see, yet Phoenix is one of the largest cities in America. The summers are so hot out there that hobos routinely cook to death in the streets, and yet they’ve got an opera company and an NFL team.*

*But apparently they don’t have a Major League Soccer team, and if I have to go into the middle of an uninhabitable, racist desert to get away from people who consider it acceptable to like soccer or talk about soccer in polite company, well, so be it. Maybe that’s why 4.5 million people live there.

In Phoenix’s favor, the city’s seal bears an uncanny resemblance to the insignia of the Rebel Alliance. So there’s that, I guess.

Rebel Alliance...

...and Phoenix. Eh? Eh? C'mon, it's not just me.

Presently, we joined the throng of cars headed to the game. Most of the cars we saw had Auburn gear adorning their windows and back bumpers, but we figured that it was probably just because the road we were on was closer to Alabama than all the others, and that the northern facing roads were veritable logjams of Subarus repping Duck colors. Out of spite and school spirit, we pressed The Sign up against the window whenever we passed an Auburn car, hoping to, at the very least, confuse them and make them run off the road. Go Ducks.

Derp.

When we first caught sight of University of Phoenix Stadium rising out of the sand, a hush fell over the bus. Jokes and giddiness stopped as people whipped out phones and cameras to document what a pro football stadium in the middle of a desert looks like through the tinted window of a motorcoach.

It looks like this.

Thanks to traffic it took us a good 40 minutes from first sight of the stadium until we were in the parking lot and unloading in a pavilion of dead grass near one of the parking lots. Our rehearsal was brief and relatively focused. As we tweaked our music, Auburn’s band showed up and began massing at the other end of the pavilion, like a big blue and orange Zerg rush with sousaphones and baton twirlers.

I’ve always had marching band size envy. Be it in my days at Sprague High School, when our 50 piece marching band would square off in competitions against bands three times our size, or more recently in the OMB, where at every bowl game we’ve faced off against a band from a part of the country where everyone is as fanatical about marching bands as I used to be, I’ve always looked at the band I’m in and felt that it was somehow small and inadequate.

Let’s just say that if the National Championship was an Enzyte commercial, Auburn’s band was Bob, and the Oregon Marching Band was everybody in the commercial who isn’t Bob.

Well, uh... War Eagle, I guess.

Auburn’s band is almost laughably huge. They have 62 trumpets and 19 sousaphones. The band’s total size is 380 members, which is the equivalent of almost two U.S. Army companies. The Oregon Marching Band, which dwarfs the high school bands at the annual competition we host, barely even exists next to something that huge.

This, times, like, a hojillion, and then you've got a sense of scale. (Christian Petersen, Getty Images.)

There’s no real reason for my size envy, I guess – I just want to feel like I’m in the better organization, and no matter how much better in tune or in balance the small band is, the big band always looks more impressive. If you’re in a gigantic marching band that sucks, at least you’re sucking with several hundred buddies.

Auburn’s army lumbered off into the distance, and not long after we followed, marching around the stadium to visit a number of tailgates, none of which, thankfully, were attended by Sebastian Bach.*

*You know what? I bet he doesn’t even like college football. Fuck that guy.

The ‘Shit Just Got Real’ moment for me came when we marched into Westgate City Center – basically a spiffy and expensive mall arrayed on either side of a street adjacent to the stadium – to find the sidewalks and elevated mall walkways lined with Duck and Auburn fans alike, all of them screaming and cheering like crazy, drunk on the moment (and probably beer, too).

Westgate City Center on a normal day, because apparently nobody at the rally had a fucking camera.

We stopped in the middle of the street and played Mighty Oregon, and then kicked into Winner, just like we had at the previous day’s pep rally. Winner is a hip-hop song by Jamie Foxx, featuring Justin Timberlake, and the lyrical content is mostly about being awesome and infallible. I get the idea that Jamie Foxx specifically wrote this song for guys to listen to right after they have sex.

My old roommate Bret arranged a rendition of the song for the marching band, which we learned and began to play more and more in the leadup to the big game. It’s the sort of song that a marching band should play, and I’m surprised that more don’t. The marching band is there to make the team feel awesome, and this is a song all about being awesome. Connect the dots, folks.

Halfway through the song we reached the drumline solo, and we at once began our pre-choreographed dance moves. For the first time, I happened to be looking forward when this started, and I was suddenly able to appreciate the beauty of it all – our ranks spontaneously broke apart as three rows of white girls in the flutes and clarinets began booty poppin’*, saxophones all but humping their instruments in time with the music, we trumpets thrusting our crotches forward with each note, the crowd going nuts and positively eating it up.

*This, I am told, is what the black people call it.

It was roughly this bootilicious.

Jesus! I thought. We’ve got a shot at this thing, don’t we?

When we finished, blasting out the last notes of the song –

You know you’re lookin’ at a winner, winner, winner
Can’t miss, can’t lose, can’t miss
You know you’re looking at a winner, winner, winner
‘Cause I’m a winner
‘Cause I’m a winner

- an Auburn fan behind me clapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey,” He said. “I sure hope your team doesn’t play as well as you guys do.”

I’ll say it right now: With a couple of notable exceptions, Auburn’s fans were some of the nicest people I’ve met in four years of attending college football games. And if you’re out there, that guy, thanks for at least temporarily curing me of my size envy.

Truman Capps will cover the rest of game day, as well as the fate of Trevor Jones, tomorrow. Incidentally, apologies for the shitty embedding on the videos - my HTML isn't THAT good, okay?

The Great Gig In The Desert, Part 2

His college didn't even have a football team, for Christ's sake.

Poor Jimmy Fallon. Not only does he have a lackluster late night TV show that nobody watches, but he has to share the ‘limelight’* with another guy named Jimmy with another lackluster late night TV show that nobody watches. Imagine if there was another guy named Truman who loved Taco Tuesday and never got laid. People would get us mixed up all the time!

*Mo’ like lemonlight – coming on at 12:35 AM isn’t fame unless your name is Conan O’ Brien and it’s between 1993 and 2009.

So maybe Jimmy Fallon was trying to set himself apart from the crowd when he and his staff wrote ‘We Are The Ducks From Oregon’, the first college football power ballad, and hired former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach to sing it on the air about a week before the game. Or maybe he was trying to make a desperate grab for publicity, predicated on the idea that fans and alumni of a given school in the leadup to the season’s biggest college football game might start paying attention to him if he wrote a congratulatory song about their team.

This doesn't rhyme as well.

Look, I’m not trying to sound nasty or anything. It was really sweet of Jimmy Fallon to write a song about how great our football team is. I just wish the song hadn’t sucked so much, along with the guy he had sing it.

PART 2: YOU ALL KNOW THE WORDS

In case you were wondering, this is what lame looks like.

On Day Two of our National Championship adventure, we rose at 10:30 and trotted off to yet another dusty rehearsal. We had a lot to learn in a short amount of time – today was the day of the official Oregon Pep Rally, which was forecasted to be attended by some 15,000 people, and we had just been handed the music for the marching band arrangement of Sebastian Bach’s ‘We Are The Ducks Of Oregon.’

The Band Director assured us that, if we learned this song and played it at the rally, the resulting video would ‘go viral.’ I didn’t really see how having a viral video on the Internet would improve the fortunes of the Oregon Marching Band, save for perhaps opening the athletic department’s eyes to the fact that, yes, the University of Oregon does have a marching band.

I almost think we were shooting for virality purely out of envy of local acapella superstars On The Rocks and their viral success with ‘Bad Romance.’ The sad inequity of the situation is that no matter how good your 200 piece marching band is, nobody is going to like it as much as 16-odd super cute boys with oh-so-dreamy harmonies.

Oregon what band?

And it didn’t help that our arrangement of ‘We Are The Ducks Of Oregon’ sounded more like a bad Irish drinking song than a bad novelty power ballad. The deck was stacked against us, but earnestly we carried on, learning the crap out of that godawful song so we could play it for 15,000 people and get Internet famous.

And then we loaded our buses and trundled off to downtown Scottsdale for the official Oregon Pep Rally – basically a gigantic block party with a huge stage, overpriced beer, and some of the worst acoustics this side of the vacuum of space.

In space, no one can hear you have school spirit.

The Oregon Marching Band plays at lots of pep rallies. It’s old hat to us now – we march in and play Mighty Oregon while graduates from the class of 2005 slam more tequila shots, the class of 1980 turns down their hearing aids, and the class of 1950 rolls their wheelchairs away from the noise.

In a way, pep rallies are a form of torture for the OMB – they’re shoving the unfairness of our chosen activity in our face every time we go to one. “Look how much fun college football is, guys! Even old people are getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon! Too bad you can’t because you’re in the marching band!”

Such was not the case with the Oregon BCS tailgate. This was not an awesome party. It’s like one of those parties where lots of people show up, but none of them are your Good Friends – y’know, the really fun and interesting ones. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. Don’t act like you aren’t now wondering if you’re one of my Good Friends.

Event coordinators led us via a backdoor into the fenced off area, and gestured towards a laughably small roped off area in the center of a sweaty, boozy sea of alumni and students. We crammed in as best we could, and by the time we’d all been shoehorned into position our asses in the back row were more or less grinding with the crotches of the senior citizens in green and yellow on the other side of the caution tape.

We played Mighty Oregon, which the crowd enjoyed about as much as any crowd does, followed by Jamie Foxx’s ‘Winner’, during which the trumpets have lots of booty shaking and hip thrusting visuals which made our already complicated relationship with the fans we were packed so close in front of even more awkward.

Presently, a pair of MCs took the stage and kicked off the event, encouraging us to make some noise and saying some really nasty things about Auburn, Oregon State, and whatever other rival they could think of when they wanted everybody to yell and scream. Three Oregon congressmen came out and aggressively promoted both their political platforms as well as the Ducks, in spite of the fact that I don’t think any of them actually went to the University of Oregon.

And then out came Sebastian Bach, to a thunderous roar of applause from the crowd.

And you ask me why I don't like tattoos.

Have you seen The Wrestler? In it, Micky Rourke plays a washed up former pro wrestler with a big mane of long blonde hair who lives out of his van but loves what little time in the spotlight he can get wrestling in third rate matchups throughout southern New Jersey.

See?

I feel like Sebastian Bach is basically the musical equivalent of that guy – long blonde hair, muscular build, and glory days so far behind him that, in spite of all his onetime success, I still feel sorry for him. I mean, I know of his old band Skid Row in the same way I know of theoretical physics, but my firsthand knowledge and interest in both is pretty much nonexistent. What I surmise from his Wikipedia page, which dedicates more space to his reality TV career than his music career, is that Sebastian Bach is basically Diet Axl Rose. He can act like a doucheburger and sing some high notes, but he lacks the superhuman talent required to have his name on November Rain. Also, he’s chock full of Splenda.

“Alright!” Sebastian yelled into his mic as he loped onstage, feedback blaring across the crowd. “Now there’s a word in this song, we all know it, that I’m not allowed to say…” He began, referring to the power ballad’s climax, Don’t fuck with the Ducks! “So I’m gonna need you guys to say it real loud! Let’s try it! Don’t-”

He pointed at the crowd, which boozily screamed, “FUCK!” at him.

“-with the Ducks!”

Fifteen seconds onstage, and Sebastian Bach had already found a way to incite a crowd packed with a fair number of children and the elderly to scream profanity, which, I am told, is what metal is all about.

Sebastian Bach can't even pronounce 'Willamette', but HE gets to meet Chip? Horseshit.

So he launched into his rendition of ‘The Ducks Of Oregon,’ accompanied by an androgynous human sporting a similar golden mane on acoustic guitar. Right away it became clear that Sebastian Bach was lagging behind his backing track, and what’s more, that he wasn’t able to catch up to it. Thus, all 15,000 of us got the rare opportunity to hear the same crappy song twice at the same time while watching Sebastian Bach frantically gesture at the sound booth without missing a beat.

Yes, he didn’t miss a beat, but good Lord, did that man miss some pitches. As much as I hated our rendition of ‘We Are The Ducks,’ we were at least playing it better in tune at rehearsals than he was singing it – and if you’d been at the rehearsals, you’d know what a totally sick burn that is on Sebastian Bach.

So at long last he finished his performance, and as the crowd began to applaud, The Band Director leapt up onto his ladder and counted us off to start our version of this abortion of a song. We got two measures in, the bleating of the tubas just rising above the sound of the crowd, our viral dreams (supposedly) within reach, when Sebastian Bach’s voice was coming through the speakers again, accompanied by a guitar intro.

“Hey, here’s another little ditty I’m sure you all know!” Bach grinned as The Director hastily cut us off. “It’s called I Remember You. You all know the words, sing along!”

Ironic, because we don't.

And then Sebastian Bach started singing, stopping just long enough to yell at the sound booth to cut his backing track, which he had once again fallen behind. The song that he sang was a sentimental acoustic and vocal piece about memories and friendship and lost love, which, had it been a recognizable song performed by a good musician, still would’ve been completely out of place at a college football pep rally.

What was worst was that he kept looking at the crowd with a big grin and nodding, as though the only reason we weren’t singing was because we didn’t feel properly encouraged. Between lyrics or during instrumental breaks he would occasionally say, “C’mon, now!” or “Yeah! You all know the words, let me hear you!” Maybe he was saying it more for his own benefit at that point.

Having researched the song on Wikipedia now (I’ve written more words about this song in the last two paragraphs than there are on the entire Wikipedia page) I’ve discovered that it hit #6 on the Billboard charts 20 years ago, and, according to Sebastian Bach in a 2007 interview, was “…the number one prom song in the United States of America in the year 1990.”

Good for him, I guess.

The song went on far longer than its supposed five minute running time – I feel like Sebastian Bach went back for one more chorus, but then decided ‘Hell with it’ and just sang the whole rest of the song all over again. There was muted applause at the end that bolstered when Bach yelled “Go Ducks!”

After that came acapella superstars On The Rocks to sing their rendition of Bad Romance, and, to be honest, I’d never been so happy to hear a Lady Gaga song – say what you will about her, she’s definitely not Sebastian Bach. Unfortunately, the event organizers had only provided microphones for maybe a quarter of On The Rocks, so the real entertainment became watching them try to sing, dance, and coordinate microphone handoffs in time with the music. It was still way better than Sebastian Bach.

After the event, we filed out of the tiny pocket we’d been shoved into and drove off into the night, eager to get back to the hotel and drink the Supplies we’d bought the previous day. We hoped that our team’s performance on the field the following evening would be better than the performances at the pep rally.

Jury's still out on that one.

Oh, who am I kidding? No it's not. Anything is better than this guy.

Truman Capps is sincerely sorry for the delay. Come back tomorrow for the scheduled update!

The Great Gig In The Desert, Part 1.5

I wrote an entire update at work and emailed it to myself to upload tonight. However, when I opened the document, there was nothing there but the title - The Great Gig In The Desert Part 2. Which is what the update will be called, when I can get into the locked technology checkout room on Tuesday and mail it to myself for good.

The best I can offer right now is a preview, because I don't want to try and rewrite something that's already good and give you an inferior product. In The Great Gig In The Desert Part 2, I write about this guy:

At this event:

Singing this song:

Be ready.

Truman Capps apologizes for how many anti-updates he's had to make recently. It'll be worth it on Tuesday.

The Great Gig In The Desert, Part 1

Well, now that all is said and done, maybe they’ll stop making those fucking music videos.

Don’t get me wrong – I take pride in the fact that my university has become a muse of sorts for so many songwriters and video artists. It’s sort of like how George Harrison’s wife was the inspiration for Harrison and Eric Clapton’s best songs, only instead of a beautiful woman torn between two musical geniuses, it’s a middle of the road state college with a really good football team, and the songs themselves are mostly repurposed hip hop beats about Chip Kelly and special teams, and basically all of them came out in the space of about three months.

CHIIIIIIIIP KELLY! GOT ME ON MY KNEES, CHIIIIIIIIIP KELLY!

Would you have liked ‘Bell Bottom Blues,’ ‘Layla,’ and ‘Something’ if they’d all come out in the same three months? Well, you probably would, come to think of it, because those were all really great songs. ‘Teach Me How To Duckie’ will not stand the test of time, I imagine.

The Oregon Marching Band was flying to Glendale to watch what had been hyped up in all of those corny songs and music videos for so long – a lucky 220 people granted the opportunity to watch history in the making. How does one even begin a story so pregnant with emotion, anticipation, joy, and anxiety?

Well, I guess you’d have to start with The Sign.

PART 1: OH YEAH GLENDALE YEAH

Maybe the Rose Bowl last year was necessary to make my last bowl trip with the Oregon Marching Band a good one – once I’d seen the worst a trip could be, I could come to better appreciate something that, by Holiday Bowl or Pac-10 Championship standards, would be mediocre.

On Day One of our trip, when we were on the ground in Scottsdale, Arizona, we were in high spirits because our buses and plane had departed their respective locations at roughly the time they were scheduled to on the itinerary. Again, most college marching bands view bitching as their birthright, but we were all walking on air because we had successfully driven to an airport and flown to another state in the 21st century. After last year, there was nowhere to go but up.

Not only did we not wait around on these for hours at a time, but we never rode them to a 7 mile parade, either.

We checked into the hotel, sprinted a half mile to Safeway to pick up some Supplies, dropped of our Supplies in our hotel fridge, and then jumped on the buses that took us to Saguaro High School, where we would be rehearsing for the weekend.*

*I should take this opportunity to mention, having driven through some of Scottsdale, that it is pretty much a city of a quarter million people built around a gigantic golf course. While in Oregon golf courses tend to stay behind fences or in groves of trees, in Scottsdale roads curve around or simply bridge over golf courses, as though the golf courses had been there before human infrastructure, and the urban planners had opted to preserve them at their own inconvenience.

Saguaro High School recently won the 2010 4A Arizona State High School Football Championship – a truly remarkable feat, given that their field could only have been less hospitable to human life if it had the Sarlacc Pit in the middle of it. The field was brown and dusty, with tiny tan wisps of what may once, under a very broad definition, have been grass.

"I think I've got black lung, pop!" (Photo courtesy of Jack Hunter, Oregon Daily Emerald)

And there, taped to one of the locker room doors outside the football field, was The Sign:

It was, for lack of a better word, perfect.

You see, at every bowl game I’ve been to, the Oregon Marching Band develops a catchphrase of sorts for that game – something annoying and obnoxious pertaining to the bowl’s location that we can yell whenever there’s a lull in the conversation.

Sun Bowl, 2007 (High pitched voice, rapid creschendo) : eeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLL PAAAAAAAAAASOOOOOOOOO! …onward!

Holiday Bowl, 2008 (Yelling) BAH NAH NAH SAAAAN DIEEEEGO!

Rose Bowl, 2010 (Southern accent, emphasis on first syllable) PAS-adena!

But we hadn’t thought of one for Glendale yet. Sure, we’d kicked a few around, like, (Spoken with admiration) “Fuckin’ Glendale!”, or (To the tune of the old Fox Sports Network theme song) “Ba-na-na-na Glen-dale!”, but none of them had quite stuck.

The Sign, though, stole our hearts instantly.

BCS National Championship, 2011 (Excited) OH YEAH GLENDALE! YEAH!

It completely captured all the blind hysterical excitement of Oregon’s postseason, the unadulterated frenzy that no hip hop parody overlaid with footage of the Civil War fake punt could quite top. There’s no purer expression of glee, save for perhaps an episode of Glee.*

*I should stipulate that I don’t watch or particularly enjoy Glee, but it’s been a while since I made a joke and I’m coming up on my deadline so this is the best you’re going to get.

After our last rehearsal at Saguaro High School, we took The Sign with us. It wasn’t stealing – it was a piece of construction paper pertaining to a football championship that Saguaro had already won, so if anything we were saving the custodians a job by removing litter from the premises.

At that point, The Sign was more ours than theirs anyway.

Truman Capps will hopefully be back soon with the next installment – whether it happens tomorrow or not depends on how quickly he can catch up on the school he missed while having the experiences he’s blogging about right now.

Glendale: A Primer

I don't know if you heard, but the biggest football game in the history of the University of Oregon is happening tomorrow in Glendale, Arizona, and as a result I'm in Glendale, Arizona with the Oregon Marching Band. We're pretty busy loving our Ducks, so here's this piece that I wrote for the OMB newsletter in advance of our trip. Be prepared, though, because come Wednesday I'ma blog the SHIT out of this trip.

I’ve been asked to write a primer article for Glendale, based on the usefulness and popularity of the one I wrote for Pullman. What nobody seems to realize is that my article about Pullman was effective because I’d actually been to Pullman before, whereas I’ve never so much as been to Arizona, let alone Glendale. However, as a trained journalist I’m determined not to let complete ignorance of my subject get in the way of the factuality of my article.

History: The City of Glendale was incorporated in 1920, the same year that the Wizard Exclusion Act was passed in nearby Phoenix. Under the Wizard Exclusion Act, all practitioners of magic – broadly defined in the legislation to include telekinesis, pryokinesis, mind reading spells, and the ability to summon water, rocks, or burritos – who lived in the city were forced to leave. They resettled nine miles outside of the Phoenix city limits, in a magical refugee camp that they called Glynn Dalle, which is Magic Latin for ‘I Wish I Was In Phoenix Right Now.’

Population: Glendale is home to roughly 250,000 people. This is half the population of Portland, but for whatever reason, these assholes get a pro football team, whereas we are saddled with the shame of a Major League Soccer team. Scientists agree that this is Horseshit.

Demographics:

White 47%
Hispanic 23%
Closet Wizard 15%
Black 10%
Retired Jewish People from Illinois 9%
Wizard 8%
Girls Gone Wild 2%

Culture: Glendale is apparently ‘Arizona’s Antique Capital’, as though this were something you’d want to brag about.

Glendale has very stringent public indecency laws, and has repeatedly throughout its history executed unwitting tourists for removing articles of clothing without first filling out the proper paperwork. As a result, Glendale is considered to be the most dangerous city in which to rock out with your cock out.

Stephanie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, resides in Glendale, presumably in a gigantic castle from which she is systematically destroying American literature.

Mexico: Is close to Glendale. Don’t go there.

Climate: Glendale is in the middle of a freaking desert, so you’d expect it to be pretty warm there. However, in Southern California at the Rose Bowl last year we got soaked by a downpour – the moral of the story is to always bring a parka, because in the Oregon Marching Band, we make it rain.

Music: According to the website for the City of Glendale, the city’s official song is the theme from ‘Sanford and Son,’ played on bagpipes. Maybe it’s a wizard thing.

Education: Glendale is home to Midwestern University, a medical school that clearly has no idea where the hell it is. There are no other schools in Maricopa County.

Entertainment: What is perhaps the country’s largest brothel is located in nearby Tempe. Named ‘Arizona State University’, it is the first whorehouse to have its own football team.

Truman Capps will be back on Wednesday with his annual bowl game wrapup. Go Ducks!

Stereotypes

One of my classes this term – in fact, one of the last journalism classes I’ll ever take – is a breadth requirement about how gender and diversity are represented in the media. This subject inevitably winds up pissing me off, especially when a group of 100 or so white college students are talking about it, but my options were either to take this class or one that assigned a lot more homework, and let’s be honest – I’d much rather be pissed off than busy.

In our first meeting of the class yesterday, we talked about stereotypes, a conversation which was punctuated with presentations about the evils of making assumptions about a person’s character based on how they look, such as this image:

We also watched a video comprised of various minorities addressing the camera – a black guy saying, “Why do you assume I’ve been to jail just because I’m black?” or an Asian woman saying “Why do you assume I’m good at math just because I’m Asian?” or a girl with bleached blonde hair saying “Why do you assume I’m a slut just because of how I dress?”

Now, maybe you’ve already picked up on the particular nugget of bullshit I found during class, but if not, I’ll point it out: The people in the left hand panels of the picture and the girl in the video are being stereotyped based on shit they choose to do, which doesn’t necessarily strike me as a tragedy.

Racial stereotypes are bad because you shouldn’t judge a person based on aspects of their outward appearance they have no control over. Believe it or not, there’s a reason why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover – best case scenario, you’ve just spent $15 on a really shitty book, worst case scenario, you’re a racist.

I thought this book was about sunsets and apples. GOD WAS I WRONG.

But after the Holocaust, Japanese internment, and Apartheid, I really can’t feel sorry for the punk girl who gets stereotyped as a rebel just because she dresses in the style of a social movement specifically built around anarchy and rebellion. I mean, I guess I feel sorry for her because she’s an idiot. Is that the point of all this? Should we not stereotype all punks as needlessly butthurt morons?

The same goes for the bleach-blonde girl in the video who was so pissed that people assumed she was a slut, just because she dresses like a slut. I’m no fashion expert, but if your standard of dress leads so many people to assume you’re a floozy that you have to appear in a public service announcement to decry the injustice of it all, maybe you’re the one who has a problem, not society.

Unless you live in Utah, in which case please continue to wear that pencil skirt or tank top in public. You go, girl!

It’s difficult for me to get up on a soapbox about this sort of stuff, because I’m an upper middle class white male. 200 years ago I would probably have roughly as many rights as I do now – or more, if you count the ability to own another human being. I don’t want to sound like the guy who’s saying that black people are trying to make us feel guilty or women who dress provocatively deserve to be raped, because those things aren’t true and the people who say them are ratdick assholes. But I think there’s also a point where political correctness goes too far.

If I left my house wearing an orange prison jumpsuit with my hands covered in blood, I wouldn’t have a lot of reason to call people out for crossing the street to avoid me, nor would I be pissed off if people came to me with medical problems if I was lounging around near a hospital wearing a labcoat and tie.

How you dress determines how you’re perceived in society, thanks entirely to stereotypes. It’s why police officers wear easily noticeable uniforms – people see them and assume that because they’re wearing blue uniforms with badges they’re law enforcers, hence why their presence deters crime.

Stereotypes, bad as they may be on a racial level, are an unavoidable part of life. We, as humans, use sight to quickly judge and categorize the people around us as a means to make sense of the general nonsense that happens in our day-to-day lives. When we stereotype black people as criminals or Asians as geniuses, it’s a taboo thing that we need to learn to avoid. When we stereotype people who dress a certain way as members of a culture that decides to dress in that way, we’re doing exactly what we evolved that ability for – figuring out which people around us we’re likely to get along with.

Again, as soon as I say this I feel like I’m going to get called out by about a thousand people for being a racist or a sexist or something else that I’m not. All I’m saying is, the reason I don’t tell women that I played Dungeons and Dragons in high school is because I’ve found women tend to stereotype people who choose to play D&D as socially awkward, unhygienic dorks, and based on most of the D&D players I’ve met, they’re not entirely wrong.

Truman Capps awaits a torrent of hate mail from slutty punks.

Chip Kelly vs. The Zombie Apocalypse

I floundered through the heavy underbrush of Alton Baker Park, all but praying my pursuers had been thrown off by my detour through rough terrain. It was just after 1:00 on a lovely Tuesday afternoon – the ground was still slick from a recent rainstorm, there was a certain chill in the air, and, somewhat surprisingly, the dead had begun to aggressively hunt the living.

“Of course,” I muttered, hopping across a narrow creek and scrambling up a muddy incline. “The fucking apocalypse had to happen before Taco Tuesday.”

How could I describe my feelings when my roommates, all having been bitten by hobos recently, spontaneously fell ill, died, and then hopped back up again? I’d say happy at first, because I knew that at long last I wouldn’t have to share a single bathroom with three plus-sized men and their remarkably productive colons. But the happiness, a knee-jerk reaction at best, was quickly replaced by fear when they chased me out of the house and down Amazon Parkway before being distracted by the smell of the burning Wendy’s on Willamette.

A college campus is the worst place to be during the zombie apocalypse, because it’s densely populated with people who are oftentimes pretty dense themselves. A longboard is a terrible means of escape from a crowd of bloodthirsty undead, and Ugg boots are a terrible choice of footwear when you’re trying to run for your life. As I crept through campus, sticking to bushes and shadows, and observed the herds of flannel clad zombies staring vacantly at their scattered fixed gear bikes, I thanked God that I was better prepared than them.

Because I, unlike the rest of campus, had a plan. While they were out making friends and getting laid, I was at home, preparing for, if not eagerly anticipating, a day like this.

“Who’s laughing now?” I shouted across the river to the three beefcakes in wide brimmed baseball caps who had chased me that far. “…It’s me. I’m laughing.”

I turned my back on them and looked up ahead, where Autzen Stadium loomed a few hundred feet away. It was a big concrete bowl surrounded by iron gates – basically the closest thing suburban Oregon had to a castle. Once inside, I’d kick back and wait for a helicopter to pick me up. If no helicopter arrived, I could think of no place I would rather starve to death than the home of Oregon football.

I stumbled, gasping, across Leo Harris Parkway, gazing up at Autzen’s majestic bulk above me, unable to believe that I’d actually arrived.

My victory was short lived, however, when from the corner of my eye I spotted a lone figure careening toward me, snarling and snapping its broken teeth. What’s black and white and red all over?

“A zombie referee.” I muttered, sprinting away into the parking lot as the undead officiator gave chase.

I didn’t have a lot of run left in me, though – it’s one thing to plan for a horrific disaster that may never occur, but it’s another to actually undergo physical conditioning. As my legs started to give out and the gap closed, I knew that this was probably the end for me – as much as I’ve always wanted to beat a Pac 10 referee to death, I didn’t want to do it when the ref could fight back.

“What the hell are you even doing here?” I screamed over my shoulder at it. “It’s not even a game day! This makes no sense!”

His bloodstained hands were inches away from my back when, seemingly out of nowhere, a football went careening into his face, caving in his weakened skull and knocking him to the pavement. I stumbled to a stop, looked at the corpse behind me, and then followed the ball’s trajectory to one of the entry gates where a stocky figure in a white visor and green polo shirt was squatting, arms crossed, surveying the situation.

I opened my mouth and gasped, both due to exhaustion and awe. “Chip Kelly!?”

The day had gone from good to great!

I met him at the edge of the parking lot with an outstretched hand, hoping, in my wildest dreams, that we’d do one of those handshakes where the two people pull together and then hug, but instead he regarded me and my gratitude with a curt nod.

“Did you come to hide out at Autzen Stadium too?” I asked, realizing that the only thing better than starving to death in Autzen Stadium was starving to death in Autzen Stadium with AP Coach of the Year.

“No,” he said, plainly. “Stadium’s no good. Bunch of zombies in there.”

“Damn. Now what?”

He jerked his head north, toward the smoky horizon. “Government evacuation center over in Springfield.”

“Are you going there?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Can I… Can I come?”
He shrugged, and that was good enough for me.

We clambered into a sturdy SUV from the parking lot and sped off down Leo Harris toward MLK – Chip driving, of course.

“What if the road is blocked up with abandoned cars?” I asked.

“Right now I’m just focused on driving down this street without running into any more zombies.”

“Okay.” I nodded, digesting this information. “I don’t know, though, if you had an plan for if we have to ditch the car.”

He shrugged again. “It’s just a matter of us getting lined up, recognizing where the zombies are, and understanding how they’re trying to eat us.”

This advice seemed so simple and brilliant that I almost hoped we would run into another pack of zombies, just so I could implement it.

As we zipped up Coburg toward Harlow, Chip narrowly maneuvered the SUV around crashed emergency vehicles and over any zombies that got in the way, and I helped by yelling encouraging things like, “Boomtown!” or “Hit it, Chip!”

“Say, Coach,” I mused as he wheeled us onto Harlow, the road that would take us across I-5 into Springfield. “What do you think caused all this, anyway?”

“Let’s just Survive The Day, and then we can discuss the why and the how of all this in Glendale.”

“Oka-” I stopped and did a double take. “Glendale?”

“That’s where they’re evacuating people to.”

“Oh.” I said. “I guess we don’t have to worry about seeing any Boise State zombies there, huh?”

He didn’t react to this, and I was about to tell the joke again, louder, when he put on the brakes.

“What? Why are we…”

In the parking lot to Gateway Mall up ahead there were several fenced in Army helicopters and soldiers loading evacuees into them – by far the greatest thing to ever happen in Springfield. Between us and them, though, was a bridge across I-5, which was currently populated by about a hundred really hungry looking zombies.

“Shit.” I said. “There’s too many of them. We’ll have to turn around and find someplace to hole up in the city.”

Chip shook his head. “Nah. Let’s go for it.”

And with that, he opened his door and stepped out of the car.

“Coach!?” I exclaimed, reluctantly jumping out after him. “There’s a hundred of them there! It isn’t safe!”

He looked at the sea of pale, bloody faces like they were made of Jell-O. “I’m not making a bold prediction, but I believe we can avoid all those zombies.”

I gritted my teeth. The bridge ahead was positively thick with the damn things, and all I could think of was us being torn limb from limb, the best college football coach of all time and the creator of Writers going down in a futile suicide run together.

“Well, I heard on the radio that some people in Northern California have been able to trick the zombies by smearing themselves with blood and acting undead.” I reasoned.

He gave me a look of disgust so piercing that I almost threw up. “You’re saying we should fake injuries.”

Indignant, I stammered, “W-what would you do in this situation?”

“I’d run faster than the zombies.” He said over his shoulder, trotting over to a crashed refrigerated truck in the ditch.

“But they’re in front of us!” I wailed, following him as he rummaged around in the back of the truck. “If we run faster than they do, that just means they eat us faster! How the hell do we get past them?”

Chip jumped out of the truck. “We do a steak punt.”

I stood there, dumbfounded. “…You mean a fake punt? I don’t see how that-”

He thrust a raw steak from the truck into my hands. “Punt formation, sport.”

Clutching the steak and slowly coming to understand what was happening here, I ran up the road thirty or so feet and knelt, holding the steak up with one hand.

“Ready!” I yelled.

I was playing football with Chip Kelly, using a hunk of red meat as the ball, during the zombie apocalypse. I was certain that no manlier feat had ever been accomplished.

Chip ran up at a good clip and gave the steak a solid kick. With a wet squish it jumped from where I had held it and sailed through the air, arcing beautifully over the bridge.

He squatted next to me, both of us watching the zombies’ eyes lock onto the airborne meat as it flew over them, angled to the right with the wind, and splattered onto the Interstate below.

“I hooked it a little, there.” He muttered.

All at once, the zombies were throwing themselves off the bridge like lemmings in pursuit of the tasty treat we’d baited them with, clearing a path to the evacuation center where a platoon of soldiers were beckoning for us to hurry.

“Wow.” I breathed. “Good thing I’m with you and not Kyle Brotzman!”

But Chip was off, running – sauntering, rather – for the choppers. I fell in behind him, skipping over spilled blood and entrails on the blacktop.

This had been the best apocalypse ever.

Truman Capps apologizes to his readers who don’t keep up with Oregon football. In his defense, they probably should, because it’s always this awesome.

Territorial Animals

Hey, remember how funny it was when I wrote about the mouse in my house? Wanna read the piece I wrote for Feature Writing I about it? Well, good, because due to extenuating circumstances I'm unable to write an actual blog tonight. Enjoy!

When I stepped out of my room to take a shower, I was surprised to see my roommate, Cameron, standing on tippy-toe in the hallway in his underwear and a T-shirt, holding an open shoebox face down, his crazy eyes darting back and forth across the floor.

“We have a problem,” he muttered, his eyes not coming up from the baseboards.

“What?”

“I just saw a mouse run out of my room and down the hallway.”

My hand shot out and wrenched my bedroom door shut behind me, and then Cameron and I were both standing on tippy-toe in the middle of the hallway, back to back, scanning the hardwood for our newest roommate.

As a child, I had often dreamed of having a mouse living in my house, thanks largely to Beverly Cleary’s book The Mouse And The Motorcycle, in which a friendly mouse living in a Northern California hotel befriends a young human guest and drives his toy motorcycle around at night. As an only child with few friends, the idea of a house mouse seemed almost too perfect – a cute, furry little buddy who could play with all my toys; an acquaintance who I’d have to keep secret from my parents lest they call an exterminator. We’d be pals. I’d name him Patrick.

Fast-forward 15 years and there was Cameron and I in the hallway in our underwear, discussing the fastest way to find and kill this rodent.

“What, are you just going to drop the shoebox on him?” I asked, gesturing to the orange Nike box clutched in Cameron’s hands.

“Yeah,” Cameron said. “It’ll trap him so we don’t have to kill him and clean up a bunch of mouse guts.”

“We have to find him first,” I muttered, looking down the hall into the living room and groaning as I spotted trillions of dark spaces behind couches and under furniture where the mouse could hide. My roommates love crumbly, sweet foods like cookies and chips, and there were probably enough sugary crumbs in secluded nooks and crannies to sustain a mouse for years. “Oh, Jesus. We’re never going to find this guy. He’s like Keyser Soze.”

Cameron snapped his fingers. “That’s it! We need to get a cat.”

I glared at him over my shoulder. “Oh, yeah, great idea Cameron. Bring more fucking animals into my house. No cats.”

Some historians believe that the only reason humans started domesticating cats in the first place was to protect their homes from mice. After all, mice are one of the most commonly found pests in the world, and their history is neatly intertwined with that of humans. Originating in Northern India, mice spread to the Mediterranean in 8000 BC, and the rest of Europe about 7000 years later. The reason for the lag is generally believed to be the fact that there weren’t enough major agrarian human settlements in Europe to sustain mouse populations until then. Mice – history’s furry little freeloaders – go anywhere they can rely on humans to drop or store enough food for them to eat, and in return for our kindness they contaminate our food and spread diseases from typhus to rabies to the Bubonic plague.

And now, we had one in our house.

“I don’t think he made it all the way down the hall into your room,” Cameron said, shining a flashlight under my bed as I pulled my desk away from the wall and waited for something cute and disease infested to come running out. “He was walking, and by the time I followed him into the hall he was gone.”

“The little asshole was just sauntering,” I grunted, shoving my desk back against the wall. “Cocky prick.”

“I’m pretty sure he went into Jefe's room,” Cameron said, stepping back into the hall and looking at Jefe’s closed door, which sat kitty-corner from his. Jefe had a room strewn with stuff under which a mouse could potentially hide.

“Is Jefe home?” I asked, joining him.

“Yeah, but he’s asleep. And he’s got his girlfriend in there with him.”

This complicated matters.

I gritted my teeth. “Do you think they’re boning?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Definitely not, if she hears there’s a mouse in the room. We’d be cockblocking him.”

“The mouse would be cockblocking him.”

Male mice have remarkably large testicles when compared to the rest of their physique. While they can retract them into their bodies (a great party trick), mice frequently let it all hang out, so to speak, dragging their balls along the ground and leaving a trail of urine which activates females’ estrous cycle.

This fucking mouse was teabagging every flat surface in our house with his inordinately large nuts, no doubt attracting legions of horny lady mice for some sort of rodent orgy under our couch, which would result in each knocked up mousette, within three weeks, giving birth to a litter of five to eight new food contaminating, poop spreading, ball dragging monstrosities.

“Our doors aren’t flush with the ground!” I snatched the shoebox out of Cameron’s hands and began tearing it into wide strips.

“Hey!” Cameron blurted out as I started taping the strips of cardboard to the bottom of my door, creating a hopefully insurmountable mouse barrier. “I was going to use that to catch the mouse!”
I snorted and tore off more duct tape. “You think this guy is going to come that close to getting caught and then stick his nose out again? He’s like Osama Bin Laden now – we’ll never find him. We’re in this thing for the long haul, and if we’re going to win we’ve got to secure our borders.”

Cameron shot a glance back down the hall to the inviting gap between his door and the floor, then held out his hand. “Here, man, quit hogging all the cardboard.”

A protective layer of cardboard laid across the gap between my door and the floor, I retreated into my room as Cameron went to the store to buy mousetraps. My room still felt permeable, so I shredded another box and duct taped a second layer of cardboard to the inside of the door gap.
Feeling somewhat more secure in my mouseproofed fortress, I went to the Internet and began looking up mouse repellants. Mice, it seems, are terrified of artificial fruit smells and strobe lights. For longer than I’d like to admit I speculated about the cost and quality of life impact of transforming my room into a German discotheque, but instead settled for flicking the lights on and off a few times while playing ‘Der Kommisar’ and called it good.

When Cameron returned and I ventured into the house to help him lay traps, I realized that I felt naked and vulnerable outside of the safety and security of my room. This made mealtimes difficult – eating in my room was a strict no-no, as the crumbs would attract ants and possibly more mice, but eating in the kitchen or the living room would make me a big target for a hungry, rabid, urine-spreading mouse.

With every bite of my mid-afternoon Pop Tart, I’d frantically glance down toward the floor, expecting to see a tiny, red eyed, huge balled mouse clambering up my pant leg, mouth foaming, his whiskers twitching maliciously.

“Hey, Truman!” I could imagine it squeaking. “I’m going to rape you!”

Nowhere was safe. This mouse was my Vietnam.

As I lay in bed that night, covers tucked in tightly around my body to prevent unwanted entry, I wished that I’d bought the $120 Rodent Strobe I’d seen online and listened for the telltale snap of the mousetrap that would signify the end of our little chess game.

Fifteen years ago, I would lay awake in bed wishing for a mouse, and now I was waiting to hear one die. The difference, I suppose, was that I knew now that the mouse was not necessarily friendly. It was not visiting because it was curious about humans, or because it wanted to ride my toy motorcycle. The mouse was here in search of food, food that was rightfully mine, and his quest would contaminate my possessions with whatever muck he had crawled through to get into my house in the first place. All the mouse was doing was leeching off of me, and potentially making me sick in the process. He was a parasite – a cute, fuzzy little parasite, but a parasite nonetheless, and it was either him or me.

I woke up at 7:00 the next morning to find that the traps were still empty. When I returned from my shift at work at 11:00, I found Eli and Cameron sitting silently on the couch, drinking beer, their eyes vacant with the so-called ‘thousand yard stare’ of combat veterans.

“We got the bitch,” Cameron muttered, taking a pull on his Pabst. “We saw it happen.”

Eli and Cameron had been watching TV when the mouse came out from behind the monitor and run along the baseboard to a trap, drawn by the smell of the peanut butter bait. He went after it headfirst, and the wire bar snapped down across the bridge of his nose, snapping his face in two.

“It was fucked up,” Eli said. “He didn’t die right away, either.”

“Did you at least put him out of his misery?” I asked.

Eli and Cameron stared at their beers and didn’t say anything.

“You just sat there and watched him die!?”

“Well, what did you want me to do?” Cameron exclaimed. “It was really gross and I didn’t want to go near it. And I don’t have any of my guns.”

I went back to my room, thankful I hadn’t been home to see the gruesome display, and shut the door. The mouse was dead and gone save for a bloodstain on our carpet, his 24-hour reign of testicle dragging terror at an end, and our home was once again safe.

Although, to be honest, I didn’t feel so great about my victory – a tiny creature had entered my home in search of warmth and negligible amounts of food, and my response was to crush his skull with a spring loaded wire trap. What did that say about me?

Mice, it turns out, are territorial creatures, usually sharing a dwelling space only with a few females and whatever offspring they’ve created who aren’t old enough to move out and find a new couch to live under. If two males are held in close proximity for long enough, they’ll eventually turn violent, and one will kill the other.

Maybe we had more in common than I had thought.

Truman Capps will give you a fresh update on Sunday.

12/26

lol boxing day

Every Christmas, after the presents and the dinner and the movies and the free-flowing nog, I want to go sit in a room full of radios, tuned to every station on the FM band, and just wait. I imagine they’d all be playing Christmas music, because, after all, pretty much the only reason to have a radio between October and December 25th is so you can check if Christmas is still coming up. If you turn on the radio and you hear campy songs, almost all of which involve snow, you’re in good shape.

I want to sit in that room full of radios, all blasting Christmas music, and wait for the moment when all the station managers hit the big red button that says ‘STOP PLAYING CHRISTMAS MUSIC’, and they all switch from playing songs about goodwill and harmony and snow to regular songs about doing drugs and fucking chicks, which, let’s be honest, are certifiably better, morality be damned.

Does it happen at midnight, when the 25th becomes the 26th? Do other stations stop earlier? Do some lone holdouts continue past midnight, desperately trying to cling to as much Christmas as possible? Do they have to turn two keys simultaneously, like launching a nuclear missile? Is there a big to-do about it, like the closing ceremony of the Olympics, or does it just seamlessly switch over from ‘Feliz Navidad’ to ‘Like a G6”?*

*This applies mostly in Eugene, where every commercial radio station has the same four song mix tape, and two of the songs are ‘Like a G6.’ (It’s a bunch of people rapping about airplanes, Dad.)

When I was a kid, I, like all kids everywhere, hated December 26th. My birthday and Christmas were once again light years away, and I had nothing to anticipate except for returning to school in January. Fischer-Price could market that feeling of hopeless dejection and call it My First Hangover.

Right now, though, I’m loving my December 26th. I walked downstairs this morning and the radio was playing ‘Smoke on the Water,’ which, no matter how you slice it, isn’t a Christmas song. Hell, after six weeks of hearing ‘Frosty the Snowman’ covered by every artist under the sun, I probably would’ve wept openly if I heard a Lady Gaga song – and my tears probably wouldn’t turn into blood until at least the second chorus!

TV will be back soon, and when it is the detectives won’t be investigating murdered Santas and the happy go lucky sitcom types will be able to move on with their lives, having now discovered the True Meaning of Christmas. My parents and I can watch movies without feeling obligated to pick something with a Christmas theme. People everywhere will stop wearing Santa hats.

I don’t hate Christmas – I’m just not as patient with it as everyone else. Up until about December 10th it’s all good fun, but a major holiday can only invade every aspect of your life for so long before you start wishing for everything to go back to the way it used to be.

When I was younger it wasn’t like this, because when I was younger the things that I wanted were tangible and usually within my parents’ price range. Back then there were broad categories of things that I wanted: Basically anything with ‘Lego’ written on it, or any video game with guns in it, or any movie with an explosion on the cover. The massive buildup to Christmas was intense and glorious for me as I watched the presents pile up under the tree and tried to anticipate what I was getting. The movies and the music and the Christmas specials were all just signposts on the road to getting all that stuff, and I welcomed them.

Now, though, I’m a grown up, and there are only three things I want in the whole world:

1) For Taco Tuesday to be every night.
2) A job in the entertainment industry.
3) Christina Hendricks.

I can ask for them all I want, but my chances of getting them were just as good as my chances of getting the Little Tykes motorized jeep that I asked for every year between 1992 and 1997. Back then, it was my parents’ own common sense preventing me from getting what I wanted. Now it’s the economy and several state and federal laws regarding kidnapping.

It’s a difficult thing, trying to write a comedy blog update about how glad you are Christmas is over, because I know loads of people my age and older who go absolutely ape shit for this holiday starting in September, and I’d hate for any of them to think that I’m dissing them or that I’ve missed out on the True Meaning of Christmas.

Because I feel like I do know what Christmas is all about, and I appreciate and celebrate that, but I’m so damn good at it that I can get all my appreciating and celebrating done faster than the rest of the Western world, and then I’m just sitting there at the finish line, looking at my watch and wishing they’d quit playing fucking ‘White Christmas’ on the radio.

Truman Capps wishes he could just watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles at Christmas as well as Thanksgiving.

Five Guys

There's enough calories and fat for five guys in this picture, I tell you what.

Oregon and the West Coast in general are, in my opinion, severely lacking in terms of food that can flat out kill you if you eat it more than twice in your life. Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles combine to form this sort of new age hippie trifecta which suggests to the rest of the country that we all only listen to bands who play instruments made out of wood from trees that died of natural causes and only eat things that are as healthy as they are bland and flavorless.

Oh, sure, there are the minor exceptions. California has In-N-Out and its bacon food carts and the Pacific Northwest has Burgerville (which still barely counts because they serve a salad with hazelnuts in it, which sounds a damn lot like healthfood if you ask me) and Mike’s Drive In, but to really appreciate how far behind we are in terms of junk food, you have to just take a look at some of the options available in the rest of the country. Before long, one gets the idea that congestive heart failure is, in the Southeast and Midwest, less a medical condition and more a lofty goal not unlike knighthood.

Steak ‘n Shake, for example, combines the least healthy meat item with the least healthy dairy item. From my (limited) research I’ve seen no evidence of them offering a steak milkshake, but given that there are around 500 locations, each one featuring a cramped kitchen fully stocked with both steaks and milkshake ingredients, the law of averages states that sooner or later there’s going to be a Resident Evil style accident which combines the two and brings about the downfall of civilization.

Or there’s Texas’s own Whataburger, which serves biscuits and gravy, pancakes, and a burger with triple meat and triple cheese. At, say, In-N-Out, a burger with triple meat and triple cheese is a secret menu item, the sort of backdoor deal that you have to know about in advance and ask for with a special codename. In Texas, the only thing you have to do to get this skyscraper of meat is ‘please.’

And who can forget the East Coast mainstay White Castle? While many fast food restaurants have shunned their inherent grossness in recent years, White Castle fully embraces it, presumably with a creepy, sweaty hug. In spite of this, I’ve never heard people rave so much about something that so consistently gives them diarrhea, save for perhaps Battledip Galactica.

And before anybody gets their feathers ruffled, I’m not hating here – I’m saying I want to have these options available to me in Oregon. I eat fast food rarely, which, according to Science, is about the healthiest way to eat fast food short of not eating it at all, and in my eyes if I’m going to treat myself in a way that’s basically giving my body the finger, I want to do it right.

One chain I’d heard about a lot in recent years was Virginia-based Five Guys Burgers and Fries, which has been getting all kinds of great reviews from magazines and newspapers throughout the greater Washington D.C. area. Wikipedia told of its commitment to fresh vegetables, organic meat, and great service, tenets which were causing the chain to expand roughly as fast as its patrons’ waistlines.

I had heard Five Guys food was incredible, standing in stark contrast to its name, which is horrible. Who, when asked “Where did you get that burger?”, wants to tell their friends, “From Five Guys”? It sounds like there’s some sort of anonymous assembly line process in a parking lot, where five mysterious gentlemen who hopefully have food handler’s licenses are cobbling together burgers and fries out of whatever they can scavenge from the surrounding landscape. I mean, come on, folks – this is food service. The idea is to make your business sound reputable. What’s next? “Crackhead Under a Bridge with Oral Herpes Burgers and Fries?”

Recently I was overjoyed to find that Five Guys had made its way to Portland, evidently having missed the rumor that all we do out here is worship the sun and eat bean sprouts. Accordingly, not long after I got home for break my friend Lizzie (who you may remember from a horrible TV show) and I set out to West Linn in hopes of sampling the Five Guys there and seeing if it would harden my arteries with cholesterol in a new and delicious way.

No chain better defies the logic that fresh food is somehow better for you – Five Guys is as fresh as it gets, and the bags they handed Lizzie and I with our food in them were so greasy that you could practically rub them on your elbows to moisturize.

Five Guys is notable for having all kinds of toppings available for their burgers: Grilled mushrooms, grilled onions, Jalepenos, green peppers, and A-1, to name a few, all of which are free. Is this a great idea? Yes. But it’s also basically socialism, and as I discovered, the fact that most burger chains charge me 50 cents to add Jalepenos is the reason that I generally don’t get Jalapenos on my burgers, and, consequently, don’t get severe heartburn shortly after leaving the restaurant.

Five Guys’ décor is comprised of sacks full of potatoes, fresh off the truck from Idaho or whatever other Godforsaken place potatoes come from. Maybe they put them there because there isn’t space in the storeroom, or maybe they put them there so that the proprietor can point to the sacks of potatoes and say, “See? I told you we were hardcore.”

Also, perhaps most interestingly, Five Guys has open boxes of complimentary in the shell peanuts for customers to eat while waiting for their food. As an appreciator of both peanuts and free things, I love this, but the placement is somewhat inconvenient for me – being as Five Guys is a fast food restaurant, you’ve got at best five minutes to enjoy your peanuts, and furthermore, I don’t want to fill up on free peanuts when I’ve just put down $10 for a burger and fries that even on their own sit heavy enough to make Michael Moore break a sweat.

All I’m saying is, I think the world would be a better place if it were more like Five Guys. The University of Oregon should let me pick as many classes as I want for no additional charge and everywhere, from the library to churches to the entire State of Oregon, should provide complimentary peanuts.

Truman Capps’ arteries were horrified to learn that there is a Five Guys maybe three miles away from his house.

Reading

With a cover like that, how could this book NOT be great?

I find that I constantly overestimate my work ethic and ability to get things done, which would be fine if I had just met myself, but after 22 years of constantly setting goals and then failing to achieve them, it’s sort of embarrassing that I don’t know myself better. At this point, I feel like I’ve proven to myself that I’m not to be trusted with the responsibilities I give myself, and I really should just be delegating these tasks to other, more competent people.

Every year at the end of fall, winter, or spring term, I set out with a number of lofty goals for myself to achieve over the break. Applications to be filled out, people to contact, Worthwhile Books™ to read; just a big ‘ol laundry list of things that I didn’t have time to do over the course of the school year and thus should take care of now that I’ve got a big and uninterrupted expanse of free time.

To give you some idea of how this usually works out, here was my to do list for this break:

1) Contact folks at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment to see if my old job is still waiting for me
2) Apply for the NATAS Scriptwriting Internship
3) Apply for the NBC Page Program (Burbank)
4) Continue work on novel
5) Write screenplay for short film

And, having been home for a week now, here’s what I’ve accomplished:

1) Eat 9 oranges
2) Bathe
3) Catch up on 15 Community episodes in two days
4) Try out 5 Guys Burgers and Fries
5) Achieve ‘Fame’ within the New California Republic*
6) Introduce my parents to Robot Chicken
7) Clear Vault 3 of psychotic drug dealing thugs*
8) Try an Old Fashioned

*Listed item occurred in Fallout: New Vegas, where I am far more responsible and accomplished and better at lockpicking than I am in real life.

Hell, I’ve been so busy not achieving my goals I haven’t even been able to do the things I thought would be distracting me from my goals – I still haven’t watched season 4 of Mad Men or become a regular at the local bars like I had thought.

But – and let’s all be sure to appreciate the gravity of what I’m about to say – I have read a God damn book.

Yeah, that’s right. With words in it. No pictures. Almost four hundred pages long. And yes, for your information, it was about zombies, but I think you’re missing the point: A book. Which I read.

To be honest, it’s sort of embarrassing – this is the first book I’ve finished since this summer. And to be honest, the book I read over the summer was a screenwriting tutorial; I can’t even remember the last fiction book I read. It might have been The Stand, which I finished lying on a beach next to The Ex Girlfriend back when she was The Girlfriend, if this gives you any idea of the shamefully small amount of reading I do.

Keep in mind, I want to be a writer. For a writer to not read things is a lot like being a surgeon who doesn’t like to cut people open, or an airline pilot who hates to fly, or a pacifist serial killer. You’ve got to take at least a passing interest in the stuff you want to do – otherwise the suggestion is that maybe you don’t really like this stuff as much as you thought.

I don’t even pretend to make the excuse that I’m too busy reading for my classes to read other stuff, because I’m not – I never read for my classes. In fact, there’s plenty of times that I’ll find myself just sitting in front of my computer, bouncing back and forth between Facebook and Wikipedia in search of something interesting, with at least three books I’ve been meaning to read lying in a box by my desk. Reading just doesn’t occur to me, much in the same way rubbing a housecat under my arms doesn’t occur to me when I step out of the shower.

In my defense, books have let me down a lot before. Some books have spiffy titles and eye-catching covers, but once you get beyond that the writing itself is cumbersome and juvenile. And don’t get me wrong – I love cumbersome, juvenile writing, because it reminds me that bad writing gets published all the time, so I’ve definitely got a shot at success. But I’m not especially inclined to spend a few weeks plugging away at cumbersome, juvenile writing to get to the end of a book, even if I paid $15 for it.

And even the elite cadre of books that I’ve finished haven’t always done so well, either. I can’t tell you how many of the paperback detective novels that I devoured throughout high school ended with the writer tap dancing his or her way through a hasty climax, clearly sick of writing the book and eager to shove this turd of a manuscript out the door. Characters infodump on one another to quickly and unglamorously reveal the last few twists and turns of the story with the help of some last minute retcons:

“I knew he was a serial killer because I heard him say it to you at the lake because I put a secret listening device there when everyone thought I was sleeping and I’ve already given the police a copy of the recording and they told me to tell you that you were cleared of all charges and I love you let’s get married.”

Books, you see, are difficult like that. While writing a screenplay or an episode of a TV series requires you to keep the plot turning at predetermined points and wrap the whole thing up in a certain time, there are no such rules for books. They’re free to meander and be boring in the middle, or to have characters disgorge monologues about shit absolutely nobody but the author cares about.*

*Like a blog or something. Disgusting.

And ending a book is difficult. It’s like landing a plane – you’ve got to bring subplots, main story, and character development to a graceful stopping point, all at the same time, without turning the whole mess into a big flaming clusterfuck that kills a bunch of people. Few authors can pull that off. God knows I can’t.

So for me to have read a book means not only that I was able to pull myself away from the computer and the TV, but that I was able to forgive the written word for its past betrayals and risk getting my heart broken again by a slapshod ending.

Learning to forgive, I think, is at least one major accomplishment for Christmas break.

Truman Capps would like to point out to any interested parties that Stephen King is the only author who consistently tells kickass, engaging stories that don’t turn into flaming clusterfucks at the end, in case you didn’t gather that from my recent status update.

Critics vs Zombies

I call it the perfect storm.

If you look around, you might notice that there’s more zombies about than usual. The movie Zombieland, AMC’s The Walking Dead, the zombie-themed Halloween episode of Community, four separate shelves of paper and hardback novels at Powell’s Books, and a plethora of video games - Plants vs Zombies, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Dead Nation, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 (not joking), and Barbie Horse Adventures: Dead By Dawn (joking).

Zombie-oriented pop culture is everywhere these days, it seems. Nobody really noticed when it showed up, but bit-by-bit it infected more and more seemingly unlikely forms of media (the comedy show about a community college? The video game about cowboys?) until there arose a great and massive horde of zombie media that severely outnumbered the unzombied parties, which are, at this point, consist only of 19th century Romantic literature and the movie How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

Oh, wait. Look out, Stella, Romantic literature is a zombie!

A lot of critics, particularly in the gaming arena where zombies have become the most prevalent, have criticized the abundance of zombie stuff on the market right now. They say it’s a cop out – people looking to spruce up their video game (or some long dead author’s book) have taken to pushing the zombie button in a vain attempt to make what they’re doing trendy and interesting.

You know what I say? I say that when zombies are routinely shoehorned into cultural products of virtually any genre, just for the hell of it, then there are almost enough zombies in our pop culture.

You’ve got to understand, this is the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for since high school. Me and Alexander and Brent loved zombies. We bought the zombie board games and played the original Dead Rising in spite of its severe commitment to sucking, and we agreed that the running zombies in the new Dawn of the Dead were way better than garden variety zombies, and we had our Zompocalypse Escape Plan memorized, prepared, and practically rehearsed*, in spite of the fact that we were barely able to organize our own prom night.

*Alexander and Brent, who both had guns in their houses, would secure as many firearms and family members as they could, efficiently dispatch the infected family members, and then make their way to my house. Once they had killed any of my infected family, I would beat cheeks to the Salem Library – a solid concrete building with very few entrances – with the other survivors and barricade us inside while Alexander and Brent went to WinCo to loot as much food and supplies as necessary for the long haul before coming back to the library to kill any zombies that might still be inside. I know I sort of look like the weak link in this plan, but my cultural contributions to our fortress would be invaluable.

And all of this used to be weird. It’s like we liked some really obscure band that most people thought was too violent or had no cultural value, but now, all of a sudden, that band has gotten really popular and everyone has started to appreciate it. Only here there’s no downside – zombies haven’t sold out or started doing drugs or released a concept album with really cryptic and poetic liner notes. Zombies just keep being awesome, and they’re profitably awesome enough that people keep finding uses for them. In your face, Queens of the Stone Age.

A lot of film critics allege that zombies, namely of the George Romero, Night of the Living Dead-onward variety*, exist as a satiric metaphor for the overindulgence of capitalism, mainly because seminal works like Dawn of the Dead are about mobs of zombies desperately trying to break into a barricaded shopping mall and get at the people inside.

*The other type of zombies are the legendary cursed ones from Haitian mythology, which aren’t nearly as cool because there isn’t an abundance of shotguns or chainsaws in Haitian mythology.

Critics can say that all they want – hell, it might even be true – but all I know is that when I watch The Walking Dead, I don’t scream “PEACE, BITCH!” when a zombie’s head gets blown off because I enjoy the subtle irony of the situation as it pertains to the economy. I scream “PEACE, BITCH!” because killing zombies is damn good entertainment. They, along with Nazis, are the only cannon fodder you can’t possibly empathize with, making it all the easier to be enthusiastic as they get disposed of in all sorts of gruesome and spectacular ways.

Even if you’re not into the good old ultraviolence, zombies make stories better by putting the characters into increasingly dire circumstances. A bunch of people in a building surrounded by flesh eating monsters always do more interesting stuff than people under most other circumstances – friends become enemies, enemies become friends, cunning last minute plans are thrown together, and something like 60% of the time at least two people start boning for basically no reason.

If Sex in the City was about four materialistic, whory bitches in a coffee shop surrounded by bloodthirsty zombies, you damn bet I’d watch that show. I just can’t guarantee I wouldn’t be rooting for the zombies.

So I say, bring on the zombies. Let’s have more movies, TV shows, and video games wherein the driving force behind the story is pungent, oozing, flesh hungry walking dead who need to be destroyed at all costs, as opposed to vampries, who want only to seduce mousy women and reinforce Christian values about love and marriage.

Truman Capps got in an awesome one-two punch at Sex and the City and Twilight, and hopes that he made at least one teenaged girl cry.

Duck Tales

DO WANT

I have, from an early age, had an inexplicable aversion to people in big mascot suits. Actually, come to think of it, I guess it’s pretty explicable, because I plan to spend the bulk of the following paragraph explaining and analyzing in great detail the basis for my aversion, before segueing into why the University of Oregon has the greatest mascot ever, primarily because he doesn’t trigger this fear in me. Spoiler alert.

Disneyland was a stressful experience for me in my youth, the whole time spent hoping that a gigantic mouse or dog wouldn’t come over and try to interact with me. This wasn’t because I was scared of them, necessarily, but because I was scared of something far more ominous, which still haunts me today: Awkward social situations.

So Mickey Mouse, let’s say, comes over to say hi to me. I would find this upsetting because I was in on the gag, so to speak – I knew that he wasn’t the real Mickey Mouse. I knew that there wasn’t a real Mickey Mouse. And I knew that there was nothing special about a man in a mouse suit. But at the same time, it was this guy’s livelihood; he was going to great lengths, sacrificing his own dignity, even, to entertain children by leading them to believe that they were palling around with the real Mickey Mouse. I wouldn’t want to make him sad by showing that I wasn’t fooled by his costume, so I’d have to act excited to see him and try to have an enjoyable experience. But the thing is, even when I was six, I interacted with others primarily through conversation, and Mickey Mouse can’t talk, or otherwise at all express himself beyond waving his arms around a little bit. So in essence, my time at Disneyland when I was a child was peril fraught because I was terrified that I might have to act entertained by an awkward game of charades with a nonunion actor in a poorly ventilated suit modeled after a cartoon character I wasn’t even all that fond of, when really all I wanted was some funnel cake and another turn on Star Tours

Why, yes, it is very hard being me. Thanks for asking!

Gearing up to come to college, I was afraid I would wind up in the same situation with our mascot, Puddles the Duck, as the marching band and the mascot fulfill similar duties and tend to stick pretty close to one another. I was worried because I had seen other college mascots and been sincerely creeped out by them, mascots the likes of…

Pistol Pete…


…Sparky the Sun Devil…


…And this hairy palmed bastard.

However, in my time spent at UO and around the Duck, I’ve found that he’s a huge exception to my childhood phobia for two reasons:

1) The guy inside the Duck has a great job. I don’t feel sorry for him in the slightest. While a Disney employee portraying Mickey Mouse has to contend with an army of screaming children and fat people from the middle part of the country for eight hours a day, the guy inside the Duck may as well be dressing up as Jesus when he walks around UO. All he does is crowd surf, mock the other team, and hang out with the world’s hottest cheerleaders, with a few thousand pushups thrown in for good measure.

2) The very structure of his uniform is such that he isn’t creepy. Most mascots are rendered with a simple, cartoonish smile that looks pleasant at a glance but becomes creepy immediately thereafter – for example, a guy broadly smiling on the bus seems nice at first, but when he’s just sitting there smiling for hours, you’re suddenly less inclined to sit next to him or have your kid pose for a picture with him. Puddles, with his wide eyes and open beak, looks like he’s constantly thrilled by everything around him, which is a damn infectious thing at a football game.

The other benefit to Puddles having an open mouth is that it makes him one of the few mascots who can eat things. (Please don’t make this sentence dirty.)

It may not sound like much, a sports mascot’s ability to consume items, but given the fact that mascots have only body language with which to communicate relatively complex messages about college football rankings and the BCS, the ability to eat is a valuable tool in a mascot’s arsenal.

Two years ago, when we went to Corvallis and utterly destroyed the Beavers when they were in line for their first Rose Bowl since 1967, the Duck ran up to the students after the game holding a large bouquet of roses and stuffed them into his mouth, then shook his head to empty the shredded petals and stems onto the ground.

This year at the Civil War, when it was clear that we were going to win, the Duck opened up a package of Tostitos corn chips and emptied them into his mouth, followed by several tortillas, which he then pulled back out of his mouth and tried to feed to the band director (with limited success).

And, just about every time I’ve seen him, the Duck has snuck up on at least one person and eaten their head. This is basically the funniest thing in the world. There is no greater joy than watching the Duck pose with a bunch of people for a picture and then stick his mouth over one of their heads right as they take the photo.

So maybe Old Dominion’s mascot beat the Duck in the Capital One Mascot Bowl, but so what? We all know who the real winner is: The mascot who could transform my fear of mascots into love, and who could make devouring children’s heads wacky and innocent again.

Truman Capps does not mean to suggest that the Duck is anything other than a real, freakishly large, seemingly immortal duck.

Deodorant

Where BO Man so often strikes...

When I go to the store, the only thing I’m thinking about is food. That’s my primary motivation to go to the store – find more delicious things that I’ll be able to eat. Eating is fun for me, like a very simple yet delicious arcade game, and going to Market of Choice to buy more food is like going to the front counter at the arcade to get more tokens. Buying laundry soap or a toothbrush doesn’t even factor into what I’m thinking about, because as soon as I go into an aisle that isn’t full of opportunities for me to eat stuff but rather to clean stuff, what I’m doing stops being fun and exciting and becomes a chore.

When I run out of Pop Tarts, I’ll gladly go right out to the store and buy some more, because then I get to play the game where I try to decide what bland fruit flavor I’ll be numbly shoving into my mouth on the bus to class every morning. When I run out of toothpaste, though, I think, “Ah, I’ll have to get more toothpaste when I go to the store.” And then, the next time I go to the store, I’m so busy deciding what kind of Newman’s Own pasta sauce to get that I completely space on the toothpaste.

And then, that night when it’s time to brush my teeth, I remember that I’m out of toothpaste and squeeze the completely flattened toothpaste tube as hard as I can, hoping that if I squeeze with enough intensity it’ll open a wormhole inside the tube leading to an alternate dimension completely filled with Aim toothpaste, which will then squirt onto my toothbrush. Whenever that doesn’t happen (it never does), I just use my roommate’s. I do the same thing with shampoo. If my roommates figure this out, I’m in deep shit, so nobody tell them, okay?

However, the one place where I’m unwilling to mooch off my roommates is also perhaps the most necessary personal hygiene item of all: Deodorant. My roommates and I don’t have a strong enough relationship that we’re comfortable swabbing the same thing around under our armpits, but deodorant is also not the sort of thing you can get away with not using. I ride public transportation everywhere and will occasionally mouth the words I’m thinking; having an inoffensive odor is the only thing between me and the people who hang out at the transit mall all night.

It’s not that I’m even an especially foul smelling person – I pride myself on my ability to avoid all activities that could cause me to break a sweat. I wear deodorant out of a certain civic responsibility – it’s something we all do, as humans, whether we deem it necessary or not, if we want to be in society. Just like how immunization shots theoretically protect us by surrounding us with people who are unable to spread disease, the Deodorant Social Contract protects us by surrounding us with people who are unable to stink. And the people who refuse to wear deodorant are a lot like the people who refuse to let their children get immunized in that they’re insane douchewhales who nobody wants to be around.

So when I woke up this morning and found that I was out of deodorant, I grudgingly marched off to the store to refill my supply, worried the entire time that in spite of having just showered I might begin sweating profusely in the 15 minutes between leaving the house and obtaining the deodorant, creating a stink bad enough to permeate my shirt, my sweatshirt, and my jacket.*

*Like all other bizarre things about me, this obsession can be traced back to my parents. My mother, for her entire life, has been doing battle with a nefarious individual she calls ‘B.O. Man.’ He takes many different appearances but always winds up near my mother in a confined space, his suffocating Body Odor enveloping himself and the surrounding area like a celestial gas giant. He’s The Joker to Mom’s Batman, and throughout my childhood she made it known to me that people who smell bad are bad all the way to the core.

However, the only deodorant available at Market of Choice was the scented variety, whereas I am an ‘Unscented’ man, through and through. I wear deodorant because I want to not smell like anything – I find it highly unlikely that smelling like a pine forest will do much for your social or professional life beyond let everyone know that you’re wearing deodorant, a product which I appreciate for its subtlety in eliminating bad smells, not its ability to replace them with new, supposedly better ones.

And who are you trying to kid anyway, you with your ‘Ocean Breeze’ scented deodorant? You think we actually believe you’ve got the ocean in your armpits? Or maybe you want us to think that you just naturally smell like Lincoln City? You disgust me.

Alas, my options were limited – I had to go to work soon and I couldn’t go deodorant free under any circumstances. So I bit the bullet and bought the ‘Fresh’ variety of Speed Stick, figuring it was probably the least obtrusive out of all the available options.

And I’ve been sitting here in the checkout room smelling Fresh all afternoon – a foul, artificial odor that smells like wearing a wide brimmed baseball cap and riding a longboard. It’s really pretty awful. I’m considering doing a bunch of jumping jacks just so I can sweat some and balance it all out.

If this is what being fresh smells like, I’m going to have to seriously evaluate major parts of Will Smith’s acting career.

Truman Capps’ life got flip turned upside down…

A Trip To The Porn Shop

You may have noticed that yesterday, the Oregon Ducks won the Civil War and will be going to the 2011 BCS Championship. With all due respect to that, I find that this event, which took place shortly thereafter, is a far better read.

Oh, right, like I'm going to type 'pornography' into the Google Image Search window.

When I was a child, I was always intrigued by the dozens of adult shops in Salem. What kind of stuff for adults did they sell that you couldn’t get anywhere else? I figured it was probably calculators and bleach – things that were either too boring or too dangerous for children and, as such, had to be sequestered in special shops. I couldn’t understand why these places seemed to be so popular, given what they were selling, but I imagined that I’d figure it out when I became an adult and gained a true appreciation of calculators and bleach.*

*The Mystique Adult Arcade, located in a seedy repurposed house on Lancaster Boulevard adjacent to a used car lot, was a lot more enticing. I didn’t like arcades much because they were so noisy and full of hyperactive children; I figured that an arcade for adults would be more classy and demure, with a dress code and a velvet rope around the Time Crisis 3 machine.

I tell you, nothing positively destroys your innocence like learning that people have a fundamental desire to watch other people bone, and a robust and successful industry exists to satisfy that need. It kind of cripples whatever childish ideas you had about the superiority of our race when you find out that a guy with a video camera and a few open minded, flexible friends can make more money than your dad.

In spite of the appreciation for pornography that I cultivated throughout my teenage years, I had never gone into an adult shop before. You have to keep in mind, I’m a fairly self conscious person; I felt embarrassed eating a deep fried pizza in public, so understand that I never wanted to visit a store where everyone can assess one another’s sexual preferences from a quick glance in the shopping cart.

Last night, though, was the night of a Christmas party that included a secret Santa gift exchange with a 15-dollar limit. I had drawn my friend Adam and neglected to buy a gift until an hour before the party, so my roommate Eli, who also needed to buy a gift, suggested that we go out to Castle, an adult shop in Springfield. His reasoning, which seemed pure at the time, was that when you’re looking for cheap gifts for a quick laugh at a party full of your morally questionable friends, you can’t go wrong with porn.

Ten minutes later, when I walked into my first ever adult shop, I was admittedly a little disappointed. I had expected long, well-stocked aisles, floor displays, maybe free samples of edible panties – basically like a really smutty Albertson’s. Instead what I got was a large, bare, harshly lit and sparsely furnished room full of sex toys and dirty movies. In retrospect, I guess they removed a lot of the clutter so as to eliminate any dark corners wherein patrons could test out the merchandise.

Eli and I walked through the aisles, looking for some pornography that was just dirty enough to be funny but not so dirty as to be awkward in a group setting. Unfortunately, while we saw DVD covers adorned with penises being inserted into orifices that I didn’t even know existed and women covered in a wide range of bodily fluids, none of it really jumped off the shelf and shouted ‘Adam!’ at us.

I made the assumption that an adult shop operates along the same principles as Barnes and Noble or JC Penny and went to the front desk to see if somebody could make a recommendation for me.

“Hi,” I said, approaching a well kempt woman in her mid 30s standing behind the counter. “I’m trying to buy some holiday porn for my friend. He’s Jewish, married, and he loves World of Warcraft. Have you got anything that fits with that?”

The woman furrowed her brow in thought for a few seconds before uttering arguably the most wonderful sentence in the history of language:

“Well, we’ve got some circus porn. Do you think he’s into that?”

I’ll never know how Judaism, matrimony, and the world’s most popular online game combine to form a bunch of clowns fucking, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t exactly what the blurb on the back of the DVD promised. In all seriousness, though, I would’ve bought the movie for him if it hadn’t cost $35.

Hoping to find a more cost effective gift, I meandered on over to the dildo section, but the prices there got even higher. They were charging $150 for an apparatus that, thanks to its intimidating size and several curious protrusions, looked like it would do more harm than good.

I would’ve lingered more and given some real thought to my selections, but an adult shop in Springfield Oregon is not the sort of place where you want to spend a great deal of time. Most of the other patrons were overweight middle aged couples, the sorts of people who look like they’re bus drivers or middle school cafeteria workers, only they were locking eyes with me over by the gallon jug of discount body chocolate.

I realized that in these circumstances, Eli and I – a beefy former high school football player with a beard and an effeminate Conan O’ Brien knockoff, respectively – looked like basically the cutest gay couple in the world. Almost without thinking I grabbed the first novelty beer stein I could find and made a beeline for the counter.

In the long run I imagine it doesn’t matter what the patrons of Castle think about me, because if I bump into any of them again in my social life it will mean that something has gone very wrong. But I left the store all the same, because I found it personally offensive.

$35 is totally overcharging for circus porn.

Truman Capps wants to convey his sincerest and most heartfelt apologies to Mrs. Walsh, his third grade teacher who reads his blog, and assures her that he turned out this way due to his parents and not her teaching.

Running Behind

Magazine finals suck. Blog will be up in threeish hours.

Working For A Living, Tokyo Drift

Only because I couldn't find a picture of Huey Lewis in a lowrider.

I’ve always had a lot of friends who worked for the University. When I was a freshman, I knew an awful lot of people who worked in food service in the dorms, which always created something of an awkward dynamic for me. If I were in a friend’s dorm room and I asked him to get me a bag of chips, it was pretty likely that he’d flip me off and tell me to do it myself. However, as soon as his shift at work started, I could go to the cafeteria and he would be my slave, making me a turkey sandwich to my exact specifications.

“No, damn it, only toasted on the meat side! Do I look like the kind of two-bit country asshole who wants his lettuce to wilt? So help me God, I will beat you to death with a sack full of doorknobs! But yeah, we’re still on for Call of Duty tonight, right?”

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would one day be collecting paychecks from the same University that I had funneled so much of my family’s hard earned money into, mainly because in my more temperamental moments I like to say that the University of Oregon overcharges students for a product that is frequently sub par. What I’ve discovered, though, is that it’s far more profitable to collect paychecks and be a part of that sub-par product than it is to be the douchebag rallying against it.

I work as a Technology Monitor in the Chambers Electronic Media Center in the School of Journalism. More specifically, I sit in an almost comically tiny room full of very expensive camera equipment and check it out to journalism majors, some of them friendly, who have reserved it in our tattered and greasy logbooks.

When first applying for the job, I was worried that I was ill-qualified, because until now most of my work experience is either in food service or sitting up all night reviewing footage of Midwestern ghost hunts. What I’ve found out over the past couple weeks of work, however, is that this job is almost eerily similar to food service – the only difference being that the camera equipment I’m giving people is probably less harmful when consumed than some of the bacony, cheesy, cholesteroly foods I delivered to patrons at Mike’s Drive In.

What I’m learning is that when people want something – whether it’s a cheeseburger or an 85mm lens – their personalities are rooted in three core traits:

Friendly
“Hi there, I’ve got a reservation for PD-170 #8. Oh, it’s not in? No, it’s fine, let me see if another is open. Hey, it looks like #9 isn’t reserved! I’ll take that instead. Thanks!”

Stupid
“Hey… I’m, uh… I’m looking for a camera.”
“Okay. This entire room is filled with cameras, so could you be more specific?”
“It’s, like… It’s a small one. And I think there’s a number in its name.”
“Okay. That still describes most of the cameras in here. Do you have a reservation?”
“Um… No. Should I do that?”

Angry
“Hey, I’m here for PD-170 #8.”
“Okay… It looks like somebody else has that checked ou-”
“I put my name in the book and everything.”
“I’m sure you did. Somebody else probably just came in here and checked it out without looking in the b-”
“God DAMN IT this fucking happens to me all the TIME!”
“I’m really sorry – maybe check the book for another camer-”
“Look and see who checked #8 out! Get his phone number so I can call him!”
“Uh, it looks like we didn’t get this guy’s phone num-”
“You don’t take peoples’ phone numbers? How can you not take their phone numbers!? You should start taking peoples’ phone numbers!”

The friendly ones tend to be upper division journalism majors – wizened old sorts who realize that the best way to get what they want is to play nice with the people in charge of giving it to them, a position that’s favorable to me because it vastly inflates the amount of imaginary power I have in my role as a glorified librarian.

The stupid ones are generally freshmen, unfamiliar with checkout procedures, in the newly created Gateway courses. Gateway is strong in the creating electronic media department but weak in the writing a 100-page research paper department. As a result, these students are technically gifted but, having never experienced Info Hell, fundamentally weak down to their cores. They do not know true fear, and I will never fully respect them.

The angry ones are journalism majors of any given age who are having a bad day and have decided to take out their misfortunes on the Technology Monitor, which is tough to forgive seeing as all the Technology Monitors are either friendly, somewhat dorky guys or cute cheerful girls. Yelling at us because somebody else took your camera is like yelling at Mrs. Butterworth because your pancakes are undercooked.*

*This metaphor isn’t perfect, because I’m almost certain that none of the Technology Monitors dispense syrup when squeezed, but seriously – what kind of stone cold asshole would yell at Mrs. Butterworth? She seems so nice on the commercials.

Dealing with the public aside, this remains one of the better jobs I’ve had. I get to act knowledgeable in front of freshmen when explaining how to use camera equipment, which makes me feel like I’ve learned something over the past few years, I get to surf Wikipedia during downtime, which means I basically get paid to do what I do all the time for free, and my supervisor hasn’t publicly humiliated me.

Of course, I’ve only been working here for three weeks. There’s a whole lot of school year left.

Truman Capps does miss the risk and adventure of being a lactose intolerant person making milkshakes.