The Things I've Learned

I did not learn how to artfully crop pictures.

1) Public Bathrooms Are Pretty Much Okay

I mean, use common sense of course, but there comes a time when you’ve got to lose that high school mentality of, ‘I have to poop but I’m going to hold it until I get home because all public bathrooms are full of AIDS.’ You’re going to hurt yourself if you try to live that way at the University of Oregon. If it looks clean, you use a seat cover, and the bathroom in question isn’t in a place that hobos can easily get to, you’re probably golden.

Lillis and LLC South have the best bathrooms on campus, followed by Allen Hall and Willamette. The EMU and library are iffy. You’d be healthier going to the bathroom inside Chernobyl than in the bathroom at Rennie’s Landing.

2) It Isn’t Stealing If They Left It In Your House

If you’ve gone to the trouble to throw a house party, anything that you find there the next morning is yours to keep. Those beer cans people left all over my floor? They’re mine now. And generally, I choose to throw those new possessions in the recycling.

That half-full fifth of vodka that you left in the kitchen? That is also mine, and I choose to put it in my liquor cabinet, with all of the other liquor that is mine. If you call me asking if I found your vodka, I’ll say no, because I didn’t – I found my vodka. If you want it, you can come over and clean the house and I’ll go to bed.

(If The Ex Girlfriend is reading this, the aforementioned rule only applies to alcohol in post-house party situations. I want my DVDs back.)

3) Drunk People Never Know When They’re Going To Throw Up

It’s not like when you’ve got the flu and you can feel it coming. With drunk people, the terror alert level goes from green to red in probably one second. Every time you ask a drunk person if they’re going to throw up, they’ll say, ‘No’, and that word is immediately followed by their vomit.

If a drunk person looks suddenly concerned or preoccupied, you have a choice to make: Are you going to be a hero and swiftly move that person into a bathroom or out of the house, or are you going to get the hell out of Dodge and watch the fireworks from a safe distance?

(Protip: If it’s a girl, ask her if she has a hair tie. Then you don’t have to hold her hair back and can concentrate on finding a place to empty out her garbage can when it’s full.)

4) 80% Of Men Are Slobs

For three days I watched hundreds of ants swarming a big chunk of hard boiled egg sitting on our kitchen counter, spread on there so thick and dense that the whole thing just looked solid black. When I finally asked my roommate who’d made the potato salad to clean up the ant infested chunk, he took a look at it and said, “Oh, gross! I didn’t even notice that!”

The same goes for the roommate who drank milk in the shower or the dormmate who preferred to shit in plastic bags rather than walk down the hall to the (reasonably clean) bathroom in our dorm. 80% of men are slobs. That’s why my roommate didn’t notice the ant laden hard boiled egg, and that’s why I put up with it for three days before saying anything about it.

5) End Your Day With Taquitos

Yes, it’s unhealthy to eat a deep fried tortilla wrapped around melted cheese and red meat within an hour or two of going to bed. Of course, if you were that concerned with your health, you wouldn’t be eating something at 7-11 anyway, would you?

If you’re going to have a taquito, you’ve got to do it at the end of the day. Eating a taquito is one of the best things that can happen to a person; if you start your day with that, you’ll be hard pressed to top it, and then you’ll probably be bitter that your day peaked at breakfast.

6) 80% Of Women Are Late To Everything

I recently sat down with a pen and paper and tried to calculate up the total amount of time I’ve spent waiting for women in my life, and the answer I came up with was exactly seventeen hojillion years. It’s gotten to the point where I’m thinking about just saying, ‘Meet me at 7:30’, so when I show up at 8:00 I only have to wait 15 more minutes for her to get there.

I get it, I get it – a lot of women are more concerned with their appearance than men and take longer to get ready. All I’m saying is, people compliment my hair every damn day and I got here early.

7) FinalCut Pro Works Better When You Eat Candy

One night two years ago, Mike and I were set up in one of the edit bays to cut together an episode of Writers. Mike, a wizened veteran of digital video editing, turned to me and proceeded to teach me one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned about the creation of electronic media:

“This is going to take us awhile,” he said, and then produced a crusty, wrinkled $10 bill from his equally crusty, wrinkled acid wash jeans and shoved it into my hand. “You need to go to the vending machine and get us a candy feast. There should be Almond Joy in there, somewhere.”

Did I utilize candy in all of my FinalCut work this past year? No. The videos where I didn’t eat candy are the bad ones. The good ones were brought to you by Reese’s Pieces.

There’s a historical precedent for this:

Clearly, the inferior film technology of the 1940s required a lot more candy. And maybe some deep fried pork chops, too.

Truman Capps also learned that list based updates are a great way to circumvent writers’ block.

What Good Are Notebooks?

This is what my last four apartments have looked like.

Four times, now, I’ve stood in the middle of my room, looked at all the stuff in it, said, “Fuck, why do I own all this shit?”, and then started to dismantle it, piece by piece, and put it into boxes.

Most of the time, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape when it comes to not being like somebody from Hoarders. I’ve got no problem throwing useless shit away, and I don’t bring things home just because they’re free. Not only do I refrain from keeping stacks of newspapers in my house, I go one step further and refrain from reading newspapers in the first place. I don’t even start to put myself at risk.

But then, when the time comes to put my whole room into boxes and take it home with me, I start to regard my lifestyle with the same sense of exasperated bewilderment as we reserve for the people on TV who bottle and catalogue their own urine for years at a time, just in case they need it.

For example, I’ve been trucking the same box full of notebooks back and forth up and down I-5 for four years now. Nevermind that I don’t take notes in the first place, or that handwriting is both a laborious and painful process for me – at least I know where they are in case I need them, right?

Well, no, actually, because every year I forget that I have a box full of notebooks until I’m moving, when I open the box, see that it’s full of notebooks, and think, “Huh. Box full of notebooks. I should put this in a blog.”

I think a lot of my problem is that I tend to store things in cardboard boxes. And when I say cardboard boxes, I mean the boxes that I moved them in. And when I say ‘store’, I really mean, ‘bring the box from the car into my room, set it down, and leave it there for nine months, unopened, until I pick it up and take it back out to the car.’

Of course, it would make more sense to unpack everything and put it up on shelves or in drawers, but I don’t have any shelves or drawers because if I bought them I’d just have to assemble and disassemble them every time I moved, and who wants to go through all that nonsense when you can just have a desk surrounded by boxes and live like you’re in a refugee camp?

Really, nowhere I’ve lived for the past four years has felt like home, because every time I’ve moved into a place, I’ve done so with the knowledge that I’ll be moving out in nine months.

As a freshman, I knew I didn’t want to live in the dorms next year, because the only guys who spend a second year in the dorms are the ones who stand awkwardly by the bathroom and try to hit on the towel clad girls going in to take showers – not that there’s anything wrong with that; I just prefer to be a more subtle type of pervert.

As a sophomore, I lived in a decrepit quad with management whose heads were lodged so firmly up their own asses that they probably felt more at home inside their rectums than I did in the dirt cheap fleabag room I was reluctantly inhabiting.

As a junior, I lived in a three story townhouse that was just as luxurious and perfect for parties as it was insanely expensive, requiring me to spend at least two hours a day fretting about how much of my college fund I was pissing away to rent an apartment with a walk in closet to store my 16 T shirts and two pairs of shoes.

And this year, I live in a closetlike alcove in a duplex miles away from campus, and while it’s nice enough, I’m graduating. The only way I’d live here a second year with no scholastic obligation to stay in Eugene would be if my roommates were replaced by three Christina Hendrickses, in which case I’d spend every day standing awkwardly by the bathroom and trying to hit on them as they went in to take showers.

I never make an effort to make my living space truly livable because my housing is always temporary. I’ll go to Ikea and get all excited about the classy, super efficient model studio units they’ve got set up all over the place, but then I think about how much setup time must’ve gone into creating that tiny Scandinavian paradise. I mean, an Ikea dresser weighs more than an aircraft carrier and requires a degree in engineering to build (plus a degree in hieroglyphics to read the fucking instructions) – who wants to go through all that mess every nine months?

But in LA,* I’ve found a place where I can see myself living for a long time – a place where my roommates are as nerdy and anal retentive as I am, where cute girls reportedly live upstairs, where there is a restaurant nearby that sells deep fried tacos.

*Yeah, that’s right, assholes, I am talking about LA again. I used to talk about marching band or Battlestar Galactica - at least my new fixation doesn’t immediately cockblock me like the old ones did.

I’m going to hit up an Ikea (if they even have those down there) and start grabbing every piece of umlauted furniture I can find, because I’m tired of living out of boxes. I want to have a grown up house for my grown up life, even if my grown up life includes a poster of a painting of robots and humans swordfighting.*

*Not cockblocking myself online, you see, frees me up to cockblock myself in real life.

Will furnishing an apartment make me feel at home in a new city? Maybe. Will surrounding myself with heavy, near immobile furniture prevent me from turning tail and moving back to Oregon as soon as the going gets tough? Definitely.

Make your laziness work for you, people.

Truman Capps becomes a college graduate tomorrow, by the way.

Girlfriend Is Worse

I love when exactly the image I was looking for pops up right away.

Hey, remember how I was going to make a movie this term? Yeah, me too. Honestly, I was kind of hoping you’d forget, because I didn’t make a movie this term in spite of all my bravado and preparation, which rivals my senior prom insofar as public humiliation and frustration is concerned.

Let’s dissect why this happened, and why I’m so ashamed of it that I seriously debated even calling attention to it with a blog post until I realized I had nothing to write about and I was already a day late:

I hate being lied to, first and foremost. I mean, I guess there aren’t a lot of people who enjoy being deceived, but I really take it personally when somebody straight up lies to me – not in the, ‘I asked you how I looked and you said I looked great when really you thought I looked mediocre but you were being polite’ way, but in the ‘I asked if you shot my dog and you said no but you actually did’ way.

I feel as though if somebody is going to do something, they ought to be able to own up to it. Sure, actions speak louder than words, but being willing to use your words to acknowledge your completely heinous actions is worth at least half points in my book.

What I hate even more than garden variety lying, though, is people who make a habit of lying to themselves.

Sure, at the outset it sounds harmless – if somebody is willing to delude himself, well, then he deserves what he’s getting, right? – but in my experience, people who lie to themselves get so confident that they are, in fact, all that and a bag of chips that other people start buying into their bullshit and get dragged down with them when their façade collapses, Inception style.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a senior named Andrew decided to take me under his wing and ‘mentor’ me. Through a series of awkward, ham fisted monologues at arcades or during drives to speech and debate practice, he tried to impart some clumsy life lessons about morality, ‘doing the right thing’, and what it meant to be a man.

For my part, I felt as though I’d already picked up a decent sense of these values from my parents’ upbringing, but I was flattered that somebody saw potential in me and so I sat still for his regurgitated Boy Scouts of America life lessons and generally came to value the connection we had.*

*As I write this, I realize that this situation looks at least a little predatory, so I’d like to point out that at no point in these proceedings did anybody touch my wiener.

After several months of this, his girlfriend, a close friend of mine, broke up with him, and he spent the next year or so stalking her, showing up in tears on her doorstep, trying to manipulate her away from other men, and playing every cheap, dirty trick in the book to try and get her back, no matter the cost to her or anyone else’s feelings. Somewhere in the mix he also found time for an affair with a married woman and a subsequent bonus affair with one of his coworkers’ girlfriends.

He’d wanted so badly to be a role model that he just convinced himself that he was, but as soon as the chips were down he actually turned out to have about as much strength of character as mayonnaise that’s been left in the sun for too long. Watch one of your supposed role models do something like that and you might just have to start a cynical comedy blog in college.

So to tie this back to me:

I wanted very badly to make a film this spring – a snappy, dialogue driven comedy to serve as a portfolio piece showcasing my talents as a writer and my friends’ talents as cinematographers, editors, and actors. Unlike most student films at the University of Oregon, my movie would go beyond just talk and actually get made because of the intelligence and professionalism of everyone involved. I had no hard evidence indicating that I was up to this sort of thing, so I just told myself that I was and hoped for the best.

We went through a rigorous audition process and found six exceptionally talented actors to fill out the roles, made a crapton of phone calls to potential shooting locations, and got a head start eyeballing film festivals in which we could enter the finished product. I felt certain that we were going to make something great.

But then, nothing happened.

And I could write a whole other blog about the ins and outs of why nothing happened with my movie. But the simplest way to put it is that making a movie is, surprisingly, really fucking hard, and I’d deluded myself into thinking that I was somehow qualified to overcome all those obstacles when in reality I handled them with all the grace and poise of an old man falling on an escalator, which, in turn, was a waste of my cast and crew’s time.

In a way, Andrew turned out to be a really good role model by being the exact opposite of the sort of person I want to be. Whenever I’m at a crossroads in my life, I ask myself, ‘What would Andrew do?’, and then I do the other thing. Likewise, this failure and embarrassment has taught me some pretty valuable lessons about how not to approach independent filmmaking, so I wouldn’t label the entire term a wash.

Maybe people lying to themselves is the only way anything gets done in the world: People try to overcome their insecurities by telling themselves they can do things that they clearly can’t, and while most of them fail, some succeed against improbable odds, and those are our Sam Raimis, our Kurt Vonneguts, our Batmans. Maybe, one day, if you lie to yourself enough, your fantasies just might come true.

That being said, I’ve got myself fully convinced that my transition from Oregon to Los Angeles will be painless and almost immediately lucrative in both a financial and social sense. Sure, it sounds unlikely, but what if?

Truman Capps is just murdering these deadlines.

LA Craigslist

I recently spent a great deal of time searching for cheap housing in Los Angeles with the help of craigslist. I was fortunate enough to find a great place in a great neighborhood at a relatively great price, but only after wading through the absolute dregs of humanity to get there.

And now, because I lack the inspiration to throw together a cohesive, well written update, I present to you my findings, with my comments attached:

(For those of you who just got here from 1996, click on the pictures to make them larger and readable.)

Unhelpful

Cozy

Live In Girlfriend

No He Or She

Janiture

Truman Capps is seriously going to call that Iranian guy, though.

Last Class

I finished my journalism education in a geology class taught in the business school. Go Ducks?

I rarely skip class. If I had to count the number of times I’ve skipped class in four years of college, I’d say I’ve probably skipped around 15 times, total. Maybe 20.

These classes cost money, goddamn it – not to me, of course, but that almost raises the stakes. I’ve been blessed with a college education on someone else’s dime; it’d be practically fraudulent for me to take that money and then not utilize the product it’s buying. Well, maybe not fraudulent. Perhaps ‘cocktacular’ is a better term.

That said, when I get to class, I seldom if ever pay attention. I mean, shit, I gave up on taking notes sophomore year and never looked back. A lot of people take notes because it helps them pay attention, which was exactly why I stopped – all that paying attention bullshit was really getting in the way of my daydreaming, which I think is far more important to a writer than an intricate knowledge of the cultural impact of voodoo in the colonial period. Evidently my professor agreed, because he gave me an A-.

I paid close attention in the following classes: Feature Writing I, Feature Writing II, Intro To Electronic Media, Advanced Electronic Media, Writing For The Media, and Media Aesthetics. These classes were interesting to me and relevant to what I want to do with my life, so it wasn’t even a struggle to pay attention.

In my other classes, though, I go, sit down, and divide my attention between the front of the room and the clock for however long the class lasts. I don’t text or fuck around on the computer – I just sit and let my mind wander. It’s a very peaceful and meditative time. No wonder so many free spirited girls from the suburbs become Buddhists in college.

Perfect attendance and lackluster participation have earned me a 3.53 GPA. I’m not telling you this so that the girls who read my blog and reportedly “really like me” (thanks, Anonymous!) will tear off their clothes and line up for a chance at my clearly superior genetic material;* I’m telling you this because I think it reflects way more on the University of Oregon than it does on me.

*To make up for what could be considered egocentric bragging, here’s this story: Once, while trying to mount my bike, I caught my leg on the seat, lost my balance, and fell over into a clump of bushes, dragging the bike down on top of me, in front of a large group of people. In my defense, I had only learned to ride a bike three months earlier. I was 20.

Going to a state college is a lot like running away from a bear: You don’t have to run the fastest, you just have to run slightly faster than the other guy. In the bear scenario, the other, slower guy gets mauled horribly by the bear, giving you time to escape. In the college scenario, the guy who never shows up to class gets a C or an F, while the guy who shows up, smiles, and doesn’t pay attention pulls at least a B+, because a lot of the classes here are structured to penalize poor attendance more than poor attention.

Man, if there was an ‘Analogies For Writers’ class I would so take it, and all of you would thank me.

Of course, exams are ostensibly there to make sure you’ve been paying attention, but fortunately for me, almost every professor I’ve had has released an itemized list of topics that will be covered on the upcoming exam, so the night before I can go down the list, familiarize myself with those terms courtesy of Google/Wikipedia, and be set the next morning. I don’t even buy textbooks anymore.

I’d been woolgathering my way through a particularly dull geology lecture today – evolution, for all its controversy in the south, is still seriously boring – when, with three minutes left until class let out, I realized that this was the last college class I would ever attend.

The next three minutes were very wistful and melancholic as I tried to savor every last second of classroom education before it was gone forever, as opposed to ignoring it and wishing it would end faster like I’d been for the past four years.

The thing is, it’s easy to savor every detail and form an amazing mental picture of something like a sunset or a wedding, but sitting in a lecture hall full of freshmen who keep dropping their iClickers somehow does not lend itself quite as well to sentimentality.

I wound up thinking a lot about my first college class, back in fall of 2007: COLT 101, Intro to Comparative Literature.* Sitting in class that first day, I paid rapt attention and took meticulous notes, because college, I knew, was a big deal. There were no second chances, and as we’d been told in our orientation seminars, we couldn’t expect to just coast through four years and get a diploma.

*The Comparative Literature department had recently changed its four-letter class abbreviation to COLT from CLIT, presumably because lots of business majors were signing up.

I learned a lot of important stuff in college, but I’d say that the bulk of that learning took place at Taylor’s, or somebody’s apartment, or Fathom’s, or a motorcoach, or Rennie’s Landing. Very little took place in a classroom, because I wasn’t interested in learning most of what was being taught.

The way I see it, my family didn’t buy me an education, they bought me an opportunity to get a piece of paper that tells employers that they have to pay me more for some arbitrary reason. Everything I’ve picked up along the way – friends, social skills, improved writing abilities, a taste for whiskey – is part of the package.

Truman Capps will feel like an ass if he fails geology now.

Interactive Movie

Worst. Movie. EVER.

I established a few weeks ago that now, in these last few weeks of college, my updates may be a little less timely than usual because I’m trying to concentrate on my social life, seeing people I may not see again for quite some time once I grab my diploma and take off for the neverending hot tub party of Hollywood.

I get the idea that my readership (my parents, my roommates, a pubescent French 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and people who accidentally found my blog looking for hair tips) doesn’t have a problem with this, because so far nobody has taken me to task for being up to 12 hours late with this jumble of run on sentences and trademark overanalysis that, for some reason, they keep reading.

I want to come clean, though: This update wasn’t late because I was out having some drunken, life affirming adventure with friends (think Superbad meets Stand By Me) – no, it’s because I was up all night playing video games.

In spite of all the press and money and mainstream legitimacy the video game industry has been accumulating over the past few years, I feel as though admitting you play video games is still sort of a social taboo. It’s like if I came on here and said that I didn’t update last night because I was having sex with dudes in a gay bathhouse: There’s nothing wrong with it, but I think even the gay people I know would be reluctant to, in mixed company, say, “Oh, yeah, I was at a bathhouse last night. Fucking in public. You know how you do.”

I feel like I’m a little off track here.

Even though it’s a multi billion dollar industry, video gaming still seems to be perceived as a bizarre hobby for borderline psychopathic, anti social nerds, which is why I’m even reluctant to write about it on the off chance a girl ever reads my blog. Last year, film critic Roger Ebert publicly stated that video games were not and could never be art, and when the borderline psychopathic, anti social nerds of the Internet rose up to contest that point, he made a statement that was essentially, “I’m sorry I told you all how right I am about this.”

The game I was playing last night was called LA Noire, a James Ellroy-style detective mystery game set in postwar Los Angeles. A main component of the game is reading witnesses’ intricately rendered facial expressions to figure out if they’re lying to you or not, as opposed to shooting peoples’ faces like in most other games.

LA Noire has been getting a lot of press recently as the flagship arthouse game; it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, the cast is stacked with legitimate character actors, and the game is driven by dialogue and story. This has led a lot of critics to refer to it, glowingly, as an ‘interactive movie.’

I dropped $60 on the game, both because I appreciate story and dialogue and because I’ve always wanted to be a detective in the 1940s, and having spent last night playing it I can tell you that I have some issues with the term ‘interactive movie.’

LA Noire is not like an interactive movie; if it is, then it’s clearly one of the most disjointed, poorly paced movies of all time. I think a lot of the video game reviewers who applied the ‘interactive movie’ title confused the presence of good actors, setting, storyline, and dialogue with what movies are actually like.

Movies have meticulously crafted pacing that drives towards a conclusion; there are not 20 minute, wordless driving sequences between plot points, punctuated by fender benders when the lead character tries to run a red light, or hyperviolent action sequences that are unconnected to the plot (provided it’s not a Michael Bay movie, that is).*

* In all fairness, LA Noire does have options to skip driving segments and action sequences in favor of simply concentrating on story, but if you spend $60 on a video game and then opt to take two thirds of the video game out of it, you are a bold sort of spend-happy idiot.

This doesn’t make LA Noire a bad video game – it’s a great video game, actually. It just makes it a crappy movie. I just don’t see why we were comparing it to a movie in the first place.

Why can’t a great video game just be a great video game? Why do video games need to aspire to be more like movies in order to be considered great? I mean, they’re two completely different art forms.

Should my blog aspire to be more like David Copperfield? Should In-N-Out aspire to be more like The French Laundry? Can’t a thing just be good on its own merits, without comparison to something completely different?

LA Noire is also better than a movie in a lot of ways – for example, I’m finding that I’m not as great of a detective as I always pretend to be when I’m bored in class, which in turn has affected the cases I’m working and led to a lot of nagging doubts about whether I arrested the right guy in past cases, which, when you think about it, is something that lots of film noir detectives deal with.

That’s a cool experience. Video games can do that sort of thing. Movies can do cool experiences in other ways. Can’t everybody just play to their strengths and be happy with it?

Truman Capps has never been to a bathhouse. Just, y’know, for the record.

Terminate With Extreme Prejudice

Armed and extremely dangerous. And cute.

God, wouldn’t it be great if every issue in my life went away as soon as I wrote an update about it for the blog? Well, I suppose it wouldn’t necessarily be great for you, but my life would be a damnsight easier.

If every problem I’d mentioned on my blog was resolved as soon as I clicked update, I’d be sitting on the couch with Christina Hendricks watching season 5 of Firefly, sipping on a gigantic milkshake thanks to my being lactose-tolerant. It would rain Jack Daniels, and the space once occupied by the University of Washington would be replaced by a 150-foot tall statue of Kenny Wheaton.

Sadly, though, that’s not the case, and long after I’ve told the world about any given dysfunction, incident, or substance that my digestive system is unable to process, they persist. Such is the case with our house and mice.

You may remember my horrified reaction when we first discovered a field mouse living in our house in the winter, and my eventual triumph when he was killed by a mousetrap. At that point, I thought that our mouse problems were over. I mean, hell, I wrote a blog about it, didn’t I?

Well, long story short, they didn’t. We killed four more mice over the course of the winter, all of them running face first into 79 cent Victor brand mousetraps baited with Western Family peanut butter, usually in the middle of the night.

It was sort of frustrating, given how much we hated these little bastards for chewing on our wires and spreading salmonella, that our most effective means of killing them was so passive on our part. Set a trap, go to bed, and rely on the natural predisposition towards peanut butter shared by all living beings to finish the job. Ho hum.

When the spring came and the temperatures inside and outside our house began to equalize, we all thought we’d seen the end of the mice – even moreso when we got a dog.

But still, earlier in the week, Cameron spotted a mouse scampering down our hallway in broad daylight, the brazen little shit. Indy, our dog, regarded the mouse with mild curiosity before laying his head back down on his paws and plotting out his next major bowel movement in our living room.

I can’t be sure why mice continue to colonize our house in such temperate weather. It might have something to do with the fact that my roommates are incredibly good at leaving food strewn across our countertops and dirty plates all over the couch, perhaps believing that if the house is just filthy enough, the anal retentive mouse will up and leave. Again, this is all speculation.

We baited and set some traps, but this mouse was apparently a crafty fucker, because after a few days the traps were still full of peanut butter and empty of dead mouse. Indy wasn’t going to be of much help unless the mouse got accidentally crushed under one of his living room shits.

We were feeling pretty glum about our chances of catching our unwanted guest when the other night, while watching Death Race, we saw the mouse dart out from behind the TV and under the door of our closet.

We all shrieked and squealed about it for a moment, but then all had the same idea at the same time: We had the mouse cornered, essentially. It was just him and us.

“Cameron.” I said. “Get your Airsoft guns.”

By the time I said it, though, Cameron was already sprinting down the hall to his room.

Cameron, something of a gun nut, keeps a large arsenal of Airsoft guns – projectile weapons that appear completely realistic, but that fire BB-sized biodegradable pellets rather than bullets, and substitute compressed gas and electricity for gunpowder. The pellets hit hard enough to hurt like a motherfucker and maybe leave a bruise, but not hard enough to break the skin. Think of them as Diet Guns.

Cameron returned shortly with three semi automatic Airsoft pistols (“The battery was dead on my M16.”) and a heavy duty police Maglite. We debated a little bit about who was going to open the door, and eventually decided on me, largely because Cameron was undoubtedly the best shot and Eli, being from a small town full of rednecks, still probably knew his way around a (fake) firearm better than me.

I held my breath, flung the door open, and then scrambled out of the way of the guns as Cameron passed the flashlight beam back and forth across the contents of the closet. However, no mouse emerged; the little shit had gone to ground.

“We’re going to have to pull everything out of the closet.” Cameron said. “It’s the only way to be sure.”

“Nose goes.” I shouted, finger already on my nose.

Eli was slowest on the draw, so he started dragging our possessions out of the closet one at a time while Cameron and I covered him. In retrospect, I suppose it looks bad that I made Eli do all the heavy lifting when he’d recently thrown out his back, but on the other hand, the rules of Nose Goes are ironclad and strict.

With each item that Eli dragged out of the closet, Cameron and I tensed up more and more, guns at the ready, flashlight beam piercing the darkness. But soon the closet was all but empty, save for a large stolen road sign lying against the back wall of the closet, and there had still been no sign of the mouse.

“Well, gentlemen,” I said, adjusting my safety glasses. “See you on the other side.”

Eli reached in, grabbed the sign one handed, and pulled it away from the wall.

And there, cowering in the blinding circle of light from our Maglite, was a single tiny field mouse. We all said the following:

“WAUGHOLYSHITFUCK!”

And then something like this happened:

Eli, by virtue of proximity, was the first to hit it, blasting the mouse at close range from above and stunning it. We can credit him with giving us a stationary target.

I fired next, and while in the aftermath the guys charitably told me that they’d seen me hit the mouse, I’m pretty sure that my pellet was just the first of many to rebound off the back wall and hit me in the stomach.

And then, Cameron started shooting.

Cameron had supplied Eli and I with two of his lower quality handguns that needed to be recocked after each shot. He himself was using the crown jewel of his collection, an automatic pistol that, just like real ones, automatically rechambered a new round after each shot. What this meant was that while Eli and I each only had time for one shot, Cameron was free to fire as many of the 40 pellets in his chamber as he wanted to.

As Eli and I pranced around in adrenaline fueled hysterics, frantically trying to recock our pistols, I turned to Cameron and saw him standing there in a perfect shooter’s stance, face blank, calmly squeezing off shot after well calculated shot into the mouse. Not to brag or anything, but I think I live with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Turning back to the mouse, I saw Cameron’s pellets striking home. It reared up on its hind legs, took a couple hits to the chest, then fell over and started twitching.

When the mouse was finally still, we all lowered our guns and looked at what we’d accomplished.

We had won. The three homo sapiens with firearms and capacity for abstract thought had successfully outsmarted and killed a tiny field mouse in their house.

Some of the girls in the audience might think that we’re monsters for massacring a cute, defenseless mouse. I’m inclined to disagree.

If that mouse had the ability to kill us – outside of spreading all kinds of infectious diseases to our food supply or gnawing on wires and putting us at risk of an electrical fire – I feel certain that he would’ve exercised it in pursuit of his goals. Were that the case, so be it – let the best animal win. It just so happens that in this case we were the better animals.

Evolution’s a bitch, isn’t it, mouse?

And just in case you were wondering, yes – his body was handled in accordance with Islamic tradition. We wrapped it in a white sheet (a paper towel) and buried it in the backyard. We took some pictures in the course of all this, but we’ve decided not to release them in the interests of not spiking the football.

Truman Capps warns any PETA members that firebombing our house in protest will also kill however many other mice live here.

Judgment Day

Fun secular childhood facts: Until I was in high school, I was unaware that Judgment Day was a Bible thing. I thought James Cameron made it up as the name for a plot device for his movie.

Thank God the Apocalypse finally happened, because shit was getting downright unbearable at the corner of 13th and University.

For weeks now, all kinds of interesting flavors of angry religious nutjobs have been drifting through campus, setting up shop in the amphitheater outside the student union, and yelling a bunch of heinous things that would make for some pretty blue standup comedy if they weren’t so damn serious about them.

We had a couple of fat old dudes from the South, pacing around yelling to all us college kids that we were sinners. We had a crusty Edward James Olmost lookalike in a vest and bowtie doing basically the same thing. He was relieved by a withered old woman in a white Chip Kelly visor who had a lot to say about why it was OK to bomb abortion clinics. Standing just outside the amphitheater, meanwhile, was a guy holding a massive ‘JUDGMENT DAY IS MAY 21’ sign and yelling about how the Bible was a hojillion times better than science.

Have you ever noticed how different peoples’ speech patterns get when they’re talking about Jesus? “And then JESUS did say to the masses that this is my BODY, this is my BLOOD, and if you don’t live by that message you will BURN in HELL for all ETERNITY!”*

*This example was severely undercut by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about the Bible.

My dearest wish is that one day people will talk about me the same way. “And TRUMAN did return from the bar, and he did say ‘FUCK, if I don’t get some FUCKING TAQUITOS in me soon I will literally MURDER a BABY!’”

This three-ring moron circus drew a considerable crowd of hecklers and debaters, who, by their very presence, turned it into easily a seven-ring moron circus. Hipster philosophy majors – by which I mean, philosophy majors – would periodically jump up and interrupt whatever sermon was going on by regurgitating whatever contradictory/horrifyingly racist Bible verses they’d read online.

Heads up: If a person has the sack to stand in public and scream that all women are whores, nothing you say – no matter how meticulously fact checked it is – will make them think otherwise. The real reason that you’re yelling at them is because you’re just as big of an attention whore as they are, and you’re hoping that your point-by-point critique of the Bible you found on reddit will earn you the affections of some sexy MENSA member with a bag of raisins in her purse.

This isn’t something that just affects religious or crazy people – everybody is, to varying degrees, completely convinced that everything they believe is absolutely true, infallible, and right. Hunters know that blowing deers’ brains out is good for the environment. PETA members are sure that dressing women like animals and putting them in cages will stop animal testing (somehow). Boise State fans are certain that their football field isn’t the sporting equivalent of 9/11.

The reason that anybody argues ever is because usually people wind up being royal dongs when they meet other people who are sure that something different is absolutely correct, and the reason that those arguments, like the ones by the student union, wind up being fruitless is because there’s no hard evidence to prove, conclusively, that either party is right.

I know that the Philly Cheesesteak is the best sandwich of all time. That knowledge is good enough for me, but not good enough to shut down all those motherfuckers repping the French Dip. There’s no objective way to prove that the Cheesesteak is better – if the other party doesn’t recognize that a sandwich with steak on it covered in cheese and onions is just inherently good, then you can’t make your primary argument and there winds up being no resolution.

That’s what made Harold Camping’s doomsday predictions so delightfully exciting for me. He very publicly and expensively painted himself and his followers into a corner, plonking down millions of his and others’ dollars to announce that the world would end at a specific date and time – which, considering the fact that he was already wrong about this shit once before, means his balls must be so huge that God would have trouble fitting them into Heaven, were the Rapture to actually have occurred on Saturday.

It was a once in a lifetime chance to see people I fundamentally disagree with have their worldview be proven completely, irrevocably wrong; the Halley’s Comet of laughing at idiots, if you will.

Oh, grab your telescopes! There it goes now:

The longer I watch the confused old man who just blew his life savings so that he could become a laughing stock, I start to feel like kind of an evil bastard for being so excited to watch these people be sad and wrong.

But keep this in mind: These people are sad because the world wasn’t violently destroyed over the course of five months, plunging 97% of its population into eternal torment in Hell. The fact that there was no horrendous global catastrophe makes them sad. It doesn’t make it okay that they ruined their lives, but keep in mind, they ruined their lives in the course of acting like a bunch of dicks.

If there’s anything to be learned from this, maybe it’s that we shouldn’t go around telling everybody that our shit doesn’t stink. Of course, we all know in our hearts that it really doesn’t, but, purely in the interests of self-preservation and general politeness, maybe we ought to refrain from telling other people about it on the off chance that we might be wrong.

Truman Capps really wants a Philly Cheesesteak right now.

A Message To Potential Employers Regarding My Alcohol Consumption

I'm not saying that it's okay for me to drink because Don Draper does it. I'm saying that compared to chain smoking, adultery, identity theft, and depression, drinking is the safest of his vices for me to have.

When did everybody get such a stick up their ass about alcohol?

I’m probably the wrong person to be asking this, because I only pulled that very stick out of my own ass at the beginning of my junior year. As I’ve mentioned before, I was a very pretentious teetotaler for my first two years of college.

I even wrote an early blog entry on the subject, wherein, as I recall, I came to the conclusion that, “My life is interesting enough as it is; I don’t need alcohol to spice it up.” Apparently when I was a freshman, sitting alone in your dorm playing Resident Evil 4 on a Friday night passed for ‘interesting.’

I’ve come around since then. It’s tough to pinpoint exactly why I had such a paradigm shift – maybe I’d become more open minded, maybe I was getting more social, or maybe I’d realized that whiskey tastes like bottled liquid candy. Maybe it’s all three. Maybe it’s all three but especially the last one. The point is, I enjoy recreational alcohol consumption on a regular basis.

Statements like that, according to virtually every guidance counselor and academic advisor you’ll ever meet, are career suicide for college students. Or, since these statements supposedly kill careers before they even start, they’re more like career aborti- Hey, let’s move onto the next paragraph!

I can’t count how many times I’ve been reminded to carefully police my ‘web presence’ for any incriminating material that would give potential employers reason to believe that I’m an alcoholic. “You’ve got to be really careful,” speakers from the Career Center have told me. “All it takes is one drunk picture or story for them to decide you’re not responsible enough to hire.”

And we career conscious students embrace this. Before applying to the business school, my friend Bret went through every one of his pictures on Facebook and deleted about 250 that depicted him engaging in hijinx, and a certain female cast member from Writers who had invited me to one of her sorority functions started the evening by pointing at me and saying, “You can’t put any of this on your blog.”*

*On an unrelated note, Kirkland tequila packs a wallop.

I play along too, systematically untagging myself in most of the drunk pictures of me at Taylor’s that surface on a weekly basis – although this is mostly because alcohol has a way of making me look even more like a stoned child molester in pictures than I normally do, and I’ll take any excuse I can to get that shit off the Internet.

But I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’ve decided that it’s straight up bullshit that I should live in fear of a potential employer seeing a picture of me enjoying a drink and assume that I’m an unemployable lout. Hence, I’m issuing the following statement, accompanied by some of the finer photos taken of me while completely drunk:

Dear future employers,

My name is Truman Capps, and I love whiskey.

See?

As far as I’m concerned, Jack Daniel’s is the best there’s ever been, but Evan Williams is perfectly satisfactory and way more economical. I also like vodka and I’m coming around on gin. I hate rum in all its forms and if the opportunity presented itself, I wouldn’t even drink it with my ass.

You had to be there.

When I go to one of the dirt cheap bars here in Eugene, I can handle four double whiskey cokes – five if I’m looking to have an especially good time – spread out across however long the drink special that night lasts. Then I wander home by way of 7-11 for some taquitos, drink a few bottles of water, and go to bed. I seldom get hangovers, and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve blacked out.

King of the makeouts.

Yes, I do drink to get drunk. I like that acute sharpening of the senses after my second drink, and the inevitable shenanigans that it leads to. Moreover, I like it because it’s a fun feeling. I like to drink for the same reason I liked to spin around in circles until I was dizzy when I was a kid: Altering your ordinary perspective on the world is fun. Spinning in circles isn’t totally delicious and refreshing like whiskey, though.

Liberate our minds, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my drinking habits – not that they’re any of your business, anyway. It’s okay for me to drink like this because I’m in college, and this is what college students have always done. You probably did it when you were in college too, only back then you didn’t have social networking sites, so you didn’t have to pretend like you wore a shirt and tie 24/7 the way my generation does.

I can't tell you how many potentially successful people I cropped out of this picture.

My drinking has never interfered with my schoolwork or my job, and I never drink alone, because there’s nothing fun about getting wasted in front of the TV. It’s something that I do with my friends, recreationally, to have a good time. It’s something lots of college students do with their friends recreationally to have a good time, and frankly I kind of resent the fact that we’re being made to feel like it’s some dirty, secret, shameful thing that nobody else does. The book ‘Everyone Poops’ comes to mind.

I hope you've been counting how many of these pictures that Rushmore sweatshirt shows up in.

You can't look at one picture from one moment in someone's life and assume that it''s representative of their actual lifestyle and personality. How would you feel if I took a picture of you on the toilet and then assumed that you were constantly taking a crap? I sure as hell wouldn't hire someone who was perennially shitting - there's work to be done outside the bathroom. What, you say you're not taking a neverending dump? Well, I'm not on a neverending alcohol binge. I enjoy an occasional drink, just like you (and everybody) enjoys an occasional crap. Get over it and give me a fucking job.

I don't remember this picture being taken, but I'd like to assume this fist bump was an exploding fist bump.

I’m not going to drink like this forever, in case you were wondering. Once I’ve graduated and made the move to Los Angeles, I’m going to have to temper my recreational drinking because I’ll have less free time and less money in a city where everything is really expensive.

More than that, though, I’m going to cut back because I won’t be in college anymore, and showing restraint is the adult thing to do. I won’t stop drinking by any means – I get the impression that mind altering substances might have some minor role in the workings of the entertainment industry – but you can count on me to cut down on the sauce once I’m in a stimulating work environment and not just cooling my heels at a suburban party school.

Way to ruin a perfectly good awkward picture of me, Megan's fingers.

That said, I don’t plan to do anything with cocaine, so if that’s something you expect of all your employees, I might be a bit of a buzzkill at the Christmas party.

Sincerely yours,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps did the final edit on this update after coming home from a bar.

Fort Kickass

Your authority is not recognized in Fort Kickass.

One of the thousands, or perhaps trillions of things I don’t understand about the opposite sex is the fondness of girls my age for old Disney movies. Don’t get me wrong – I loved Aladdin too. But I was five at the time. I don’t have the entire soundtrack on my iPod. I don’t know all the words to all the songs. I don’t consider it among my favorite movies, because I see it as a film for children, and as a 22 year old college almost graduate I consider myself above such shenanigans.

In other news, when two of my roommates came tumbling into the kitchen of the beach house we were renting this weekend and said, “Truman! We’re building a blanket fort in the living room! You want in?”, my response was, “What the fuck do you think? Of course I do!”

What compulsion, as children or childish adults, drove us to build forts? Is it some leftover hunter gatherer instinct, or was it just what we did in the days before games like Minecraft allowed us to exercise this urge on a grander scale? I don’t know, but I can tell you that I spent several hundred afternoons as a kid tearing up mine and my friends’ houses in search of vital building supplies (they were usually in the linen closet).

There were two central problems to fort building:

The first was that the most abundant building supply, quilts, were usually the most difficult to work with. (Light, flexible sheets are like gold.) Sure, a quilt makes a good floor for your fort, but if you try to use it as a ceiling it’ll sag down in the middle, compromising what precious little vertical space your fort already has. You can use lots of heavy household objects to secure the edges of the quilt on whatever surfaces you’re stretching it between, but that brings us to the second problem, which is:

Mom hates it when you build forts. She might have just enough patience to let her kid and maybe a couple of his dumb friends roll around on the family’s valuable bed linens for a little while, but eventually someone’s going to come over who will want to sit down on the couch, and she’s going to want those cushions back, east wall facade be damned. Furthermore, the commonly accepted tactic to hold blankets in place is to anchor them by setting heavy objects on top of them, but heavy things are inevitably valuable items like lamps or the Bible or something, and mothers have shown time and again that they’re willing to let their fear of heirlooms getting damaged stand in the way of architectural progress.

At the beach yesterday, however, we had no such constraints. We had four bedrooms’ worth of blankets and sheets, and without any parental figures in the house our imaginations were only limited by our own common sense. Like the creators of Jurassic Park, we were pursuing our dreams with careless abandon; unlike the creators of Jurassic Park, we succeeded completely and nobody got eaten by dinosaurs.

And if any dinosaurs did show up, we could hide from them inside this totally sweet fort that we built.

We used the surface of a glass coffee table to make a skylight so we could watch TV from inside.* We used a broomstick to prop up the ceiling over at the north end, which served as a valuable ventilation source for a stuffy fort filled with serial abusers of the ‘no farting’ policy.

*No, Mom and Dad, it didn’t shatter because it was about an inch thick. Resist your urge to file a claim.

As we built with the fevered intensity of five hungover Frank Lloyd Wrights, we agreed that we were satisfying a unified childhood ambition to build the grandest, most improbably large fort of all time. Because I feel like that’s what every fort builder tried to achieve in his or her childhood, but couldn’t because they ran out of blankets or Dad pitched a fit when he came home and couldn’t walk through the living room.

One of my last fortmaking endeavors before this weekend happened at a friend’s house when I was twelve. We were in the middle of construction of a modest two room affair in the basement when we ran short on blankets and I was selected to awkwardly ask my friend’s Mom where we could find more.

I went upstairs and outlined to her our cause: We were building a fort in the basement, and did she know where we could find some more blankets? She responded by snapping angrily that no, we could not have any more of her blankets, and we were too old to be making forts anyway.

This was, I think, the first time in my life that I ever felt indignant. Stifle our creativity by denying us construction material? That’s one thing – I understand Michelangelo had a fair amount of interference with his masterpieces as well, and he never let that stop him. But trying to tell us we were too old to be making forts?

I had a very distinct urge to say something Samuel L. Jacksonish, to the tune of “Woman, I will tell you when I am too old to play GameBoy in a fortress made out of an All That blanket and the dining room table, and today is not that goddamned day!”, but instead I just mumbled an apology and glumly relayed the bad news to my friends downstairs.

I reflected on this experience yesterday. Who’s to tell us when we’ve outgrown something, anyway? That’s a decision everybody has to make for themselves. Incidentally, I thought about all of this while lounging in the West Wing of our fort, drinking a screwdriver and watching Arrested Development through the skylight.

As I write this, it’s Sunday morning. We have to be out of the house in a few hours, and currently every linen and cushion in the house is haphazardly tangled up in the living room, along with a good chunk of the furniture.

No regrets, but when faced with the prospect of carefully dismantling Fort Kickass and returning its component parts to their rightful places throughout the house, I’m suddenly seeing this from a Mom’s perspective and sort of wishing we’d decided to outgrow forts sooner.

Truman Capps has seen that episode of Community where Troy and Abed built the huge fort in the dorms, so you don’t even have to ask.

Rocks

Oh, what, like you wanted to see a picture of just a rock?

Here’s something that happens at least once a day in my Geology 103 class:

Our professor, who is so Chinese that to write his name would look like somebody with a mouthful of weird consonants did a spit-take, will be lecturing about fossils or rocks or asteroids or something, when he will abruptly stop, point somewhere into the four hundred or so students in the lecture hall, and say, “You!”

The student he’s pointing at is someone he spotted discreetly texting or saying something quietly to a friend in the already dead silent classroom.

Very quickly he’ll whip around and grab the roll sheet for the class, and then march up the aisle, still pointing, until he reaches the student he was pointing at.

“Stand up please.” He’ll bark.

The student, mortified, will slowly stand, the eyes of the entire class upon him or her.

“What is your name?”

The student, who at this point is already embarrassed and shamed beyond belief in front of a large group of people, now has to sacrifice his or her anonymity, which is basically the last thing he or she has left. Naturally, the student makes a conscious effort to sound as nonchalant and collected as possible, and inevitably winds up sounding like he or she is about to or already has peed their pants.

“Hmm.” The professor says, looking down the list. Sometimes, depending on his mood, he’ll make a comment like, “Oh, Sarah, that’s a very nice name, yes,” which I guess is supposed to diffuse tension but instead makes him sound a lot more like a James Bond villain. ”No, Sarah, I expect you to DIE!” Once he’s found her name, he makes a mark next to it.

“Your final grade will be lowered by five points. Please leave my classroom.”

He will then stand there, with his arms crossed, and watch, silently, as the student in question picks up his or her things and shuffles out of the room, before he returns to the front of the classroom and launches back into his lecture as though he hadn’t just performed the academic equivalent of a Mortal Kombat fatality on one of his students.

Again, this happens at least once per class, usually more, and has been happening every Monday and Wednesday for the past seven weeks, and no doubt will continue.

Of course this would be the last class I take in college.

No, it wouldn’t be some piss-easy lecture that always gets out 20 minutes early and has a ten question open book final exam about what color and shape the rock in this picture is, taught by some hungover GTF or a professor so old he’s legally dead in California. No, of course not! That would not do at all.

As it turns out, my college career won’t end with a whimper, but with whatever fascism sounds like.*

*God, don’t you hate when some young asshole with four years of liberal arts education under his belt up and decides to start labeling every stern person he meets as a fascist? I think I’ve heard the term ‘fascist’ applied more in 2011 than it was used in the 1930s in reference to the actual inventors of fascism.

I think he got in trouble recently, though, when in a fit of particular disciplinary zeal he confiscated a girl’s cell phone and then refused to give it back to her even after class, which is pretty much stealing no matter what class you’re teaching. He devoted about half of the following class period to an open forum discussion about his disciplinary policy, which, while boring, beats the shit out of geology.

He explained to us that he’s teaching this course the exact same way he has for the past several years, save for this new harsh disciplinary policy, which he’s implementing for the first time this term. And then he revealed that this term, the average grades on our midterm were three percent higher than those of any previous class that hadn’t been taught with his draconian stance on distracting behavior.

Now that is what I call some old school science – he’s just conclusively proved that people of my generation get slightly smarter when they’re living in constant fear of public humiliation. Imagine how much higher standardized test scores would be if the bottom percentile were forced to come to class the following week naked.

He opened it up for discussion and a vote, giving us the option of getting rid of his policy if we found it upsetting, and in the end 85% of the class voted not to change anything.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t some sort of inspirational Stand And Deliver moment where we all rallied around our professor’s unorthodox methodology and quit being in Latino street gangs. Every day since then he’s still had to kick someone out; the only difference is that when we watch that person shuffle out of the classroom, we know that all of us (or, at least, 85% of us) were complicit in throwing them to the wolves.


For the record, I don’t think my professor is a fascist – the line earlier was just too good to pass up. He’s acting completely within his rights as a professor in the interests of preventing classroom distractions that will impair other students’ learning abilities in the class they’re paying to take.

He outlined for us his very strict policy on the first day of class. He explained exactly what types of punishments would happen if he caught people doing things he deemed distracting, and invited anybody who didn’t want to play by his rules to leave.

I’m not disputing the fact that he’s being a wang of the highest order, but his job is to teach us geology, and him being a wang has made us certifiably better at geology. He even gave us a chance to make him stop humiliating us and we cold turned it down – even we the students, who stand to suffer the most under his policy, recognize that it’s somehow made us better at remembering what Burgess shale is.*

*I have no idea what Burgess shale is.

Look, I’m just in it for a journalism degree – if I get to watch him make a different chatty freshman cry every day, well, that’s really almost a bonus.

Truman Capps would say that watching an old Asian guy humiliate cheerleaders is cheaper entertainment than a movie, but then he remembers that this class is costing $1100 for some reason.

Mother's Day, OR: Why I Didn't Go To A Strip Club Last Night

Mom in back in the day. Photographic proof that for at least one second in the 1960s, two people weren't drinking bourbon and smoking.

Yesterday, my roommates and I were hanging out around the house when they realized they needed to do some Mother’s Day shopping – cards, flowers, the whole nine yards. They asked if I wanted to come along with them, and I said sure, because I had nothing else going on. As we strolled out to the car, the following exchange occurred:

Roommate 1: “I think there’s a florist out in West Eugene that’s pretty cheap.”

Roommate 2: “Yeah, plus it’s really close to that titty bar, so we can go there right after!”

Roommate 1: “Yes! We’ve got to take Truman to a strip club - he’s never been!”

Me: “We’ve been through this before, guys – I’m not going to a strip club. Much less one in West fucking Eugene. They’re disgusting.”

Roommate 2: “How can you say that if you’ve never even been to one?”

Roommate 1: “You’re like a 5 year old who says he hates vegetables just because he’s never tried them!”

Maybe this little debate is more telling about my roommates, that in their minds thought processes like BUY STUFF FOR OUR MOMS and LOOK AT SOME TITS get put together one after another without any red flags. However, I think it also says something about how I am.

I love bars, and I’m generally pretty enthusiastic about women taking their clothes off, but I feel like strip clubs are yet another combination of two good things that, in my mind, do not make a great thing. If only all of life could be as simple as a Reese’s commercial, right?

For anybody even remotely familiar with me, it shouldn’t be hard to think of a list of problems I’d have with a strip club. Hygiene. Quality control. Musical selections. Creepy old townies with boners. I could list them all for comedy value, but I’ve got bigger things to talk about, so I’ll just say that if I really wanted that sort of experience I’d just buy a bottle of cheap scotch and a Playboy - I’d save myself some money and read a decent interview to boot.

But really, what bothers me the most about strip clubs is the nagging question, What, oh Lord, would my mother think if she saw me in here?*

*It’s more of a rhetorical question; don’t ask how I’d bump into my own mother in a strip club without being from Pullman.

In the 1970s my mother was, by her own admission, a ‘lipstick feminist’ – she wore makeup and refrained from burning any sort of underwear, but on an early date with my father she about pitched a fit when he tried to give her his jacket on a chilly walk through the park. The sentiment there, I believe, was something along the lines of, “What the fuck would I want with your coat, you Man - I can take care of myself!”

She was ever-so-briefly a member of a sorority at Whitman College, but quit after a couple of weeks when the sorority held a ‘slave sale’ as a fundraiser, in which all the sorority girls would stand up on a stage and fraternity guys would buy the ones they wanted, at which point the newly purchased girl would have to do whatever the guy asked. Keep it classy, Washington.

Mom left the sorority as soon as they announced the slave sale. When she left, she didn’t tell the sisters that she was offended by the fact that they were basically commoditizing and debasing themselves to men, but rather made up some excuse about how heavy her courseload was.

This, I think, exemplifies the sort of feminist that my mother was: She was principled enough to stand up for what she knew was right, but she did so in a polite, Miss Manners sort of way. Now that she’s old enough to not give a fuck what anybody thinks, Mom has said that she’s disappointed she didn’t royally bitch out the whole sorority for what they were doing. Thing is, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t the only one who had her doubts about the whole notion of, y’know, being labeled as a slave, but she was the only one who didn’t go with the flow. What I’m trying to say here is, I think there’s a lot of other women from Mom’s sorority who are even more disappointed because they did nothing at all. And willingly turned themselves into slaves.

And here, in 2011, I have to skip over the song ‘Area Codes’ whenever it comes up in my iTunes playlist.* I mean, it’s catchy as all hell, but whenever I listen to it I get scared that Mom is going to walk in. “Oh. So this sort of thing is okay now? Wonderful, Truman. Glad to see you appreciate what I fought for.”

*Mom, Dad, Uncle Dennis – it’s a song by this guy named Ludacris, and it’s just him listing the area codes of all the women he’s had sex with. And the song is almost four minutes long, so clearly he’s had sex with a lot of geographically disparate women. Just… Don’t listen to it. It’ll piss you off.

I think I should make it clear again that I don’t have any sort of moral objection to strip clubs or Luda’s musical career. This is a free country, and if women choose to get naked on a stage or have sex with Ludacris we shouldn’t look down on men for patronizing strip clubs or Ludacris for writing a song about it.

On a strictly personal level, though, I don’t want my Mom to think that that’s my deal. I feel like it’s any mother’s dearest wish to know that she’s imbued her son with enough guilt to deny himself something, and, well, this one is mine. Strip clubs. Also, most rap music.

So happy Mother’s Day, Mom – I didn’t get you anything and I’m not coming home to visit, but on the plus side, I didn’t go to a strip club last night. So, uh, thanks for putting me through college, I guess.

Truman Capps is an unapologetic mama’s boy, as if you hadn’t noticed.

"Zed's Dead, Baby. Zed's Dead."

It's like, bin Laden was the gay rapist, and Bruce Willis is America (obviously), and the motorcycle is oil, and The Gimp is, uh, stem cell research or something. I didn't really think this one through.

There have been a lot of wise words on the Internet recently regarding the moral implications of rejoicing at another human’s death. There’s been some intelligent debate and a lot of profoundly unintelligent debate on the Facebook status updates in my news feed. Pundits and columnists have been weighing in on America’s jubilant reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden. In this spirit of discussion, I’d like to make my opinion known:

I am fucking elated that Osama bin Laden is dead. Thrilled. Overjoyed. I had more fun learning that he’d been shot through his left eye at close range than I’ve had watching most episodes of The Office this season. During class today I spent a lot of time trying to imagine precisely what kind of ‘Oh shit’ look he was wearing on his face right before a bunch of American commandos straight up killed his ass.

Is that barbarous? Is that monstrous? I suppose it probably is. But it’s how I truly feel, and I’d much rather be up front with the world about what a bloodthirsty revenge loving son of a bitch I am than post some sage philosophical quote about the futility of war in hopes of looking deep.

9/11 is something all Americans share. I’m not going to say that any one class of people in America got more or less hurt by that disaster. What I will say, though, is that my generation experienced 9/11 differently from any other generation before or after.

On September 11th, my Mom woke me up for school differently than she ever had before – instead of flinging open the curtains and telling me that breakfast was in ten minutes, she walked into my room, turned on my radio, and said, “Something is happening,” before leaving to continue making breakfast and watching the live feed of the Twin Towers smoldering on TV. I was watching when the first tower collapsed. The second came down while I was in the shower.

My friends and I, raised on a diet of A-Team reruns and action movies, had to come to terms with the fact that the country we lived in was A) Not invincible and B) About to change forever.

Our grandparents had Pearl Harbor to shake their faith in their nation’s might. Our parents learned cynicism from Vietnam and Watergate. We watched 3000 people get murdered on national television. I was twelve.

I hope the Navy SEALs weren’t using hollowpoint rounds – for those of you who don’t live with a Republican gun nut, hollowpoint rounds make your head explode – because while Osama bin Laden’s head exploding is undeniably awesome, it means he would’ve died instantly. I like the idea of him spending at least a few seconds on the bloodstained floor of that mansion, half of his skull scattered around behind him, wracked with pain and the knowledge that he won’t live to see the rest of his jihad play out.

One statement I’ve seen popping up a lot among the people taking a more somber view of bin Laden’s death is, “This isn’t going to make things any better.”

I completely agree. They don’t call Afghanistan ‘The Graveyard of Empires’ because it’s known for cut and dried solutions to complex, messy, expensive problems. Me being overjoyed at Osama bin Laden’s death has little to do with foreign policy and everything to do with me loving it when bad people get killed.

Another statement I’ve seen popping up a lot is, “Killing bin Laden is only going to put us in more danger.”

I respectfully disagree.

After ten years of the War on Terror, I wasn’t getting the impression that the terrorists were on the verge of burying the hatchet with us Western infidels before us killing bin Laden reminded them of their old warlike ways. Religious fanatics don’t strike me as terribly forgiving people. I mean, come on – their catchall slogan is ‘Death To America.’ I feel like they would’ve kept on spending every waking moment trying to destroy our society whether we killed Osama bin Laden or not.

I don’t think us killing Al Qaeda’s leader is going to make them all that much better at being terrorists than they were before. Osama bin Laden’s martyrdom will likely serve as a short term propaganda tool, but it’s not going to imbue suicide bombers with any special properties that make them immune to metal detectors or bulletproof.

Hell, disregard all that and answer me this: Do you think we were safer while he was alive?

One last statement I want to address: “One more death just perpetuates the cycle of violence. It’ll never stop.”

I wrote a 100-page research paper a couple of years ago about the American prison system and, by proxy, the War on Drugs. For better or for worse, I’m probably more qualified to talk about international corrections policy than I am about journalism.

What I learned doing that project was that the least sexy solution to a problem is usually the best one. Building hardcore inescapable prisons and fighting drugs with SWAT teams and flamethrowers is both kickass and sadly ineffective - Shawshank style prisons have recidivism rates of around 70% and generally just teach mediocre cons to become better ones by putting them together with thousands of other bad guys, while taking a hardline stance against drugs simply makes drug dealers richer and puts more minorities in jail.

Scandinavian countries, on the other hand, have significantly lower rates of recidivism and imprisonment, largely because their prisons, which are arguably better appointed than my high school, center on rehabilitation of prisoners through vocational training, education, and leisure activities. Likewise, the RAND Corporation has proven on multiple occasions that providing free drug treatment is 23 times more effective than drug busts.

So why do we keep sending people to dangerous, overcrowded prisons and wage military campaigns against drug dealers?

Because, as previously stated, while the way we’re doing things now isn’t terribly effective, it looks awesome on the news. A politician who builds a new maximum security prison or authorizes a strike on a Columbian drug lord is far more likely to be reelected than one who supports a corrections system where thieves and drug dealers can take carpentry lessons and go horseback riding, no matter how much cheaper and effective it is.

Apply this thinking to the War on Terrorism. Predator drones and Navy SEAL raids are fucking awesome, I’ll be the first to say that. But these methods are also making us lots of enemies in the Muslim world. It has been suggested that a better way to fight terrorism would be one based more in diplomacy, education, and foreign aid – aimed at reducing the number of people who hate us enough to kill themselves and us – would be more effective than a strictly militaristic approach.

Based on what I’ve read, I’d say that’s probably true. Based on what I’ve read, I’d say that probably won’t happen, for the same reason American prisons are still veritable warzones overflowing with people serving 20 year sentences for cocaine possession.

Killing Osama bin Laden is the closest we’re ever going to get to winning the War on Terrorism. He was the single highest profile target and the man responsible for this war starting in the first place. The equivalent in the War on Drugs would be Nancy Reagan strangling the guy who invented crack.

But killing bin Laden won’t end terrorism. Nothing will – not even diplomacy and building schools and all that wimpy looking stuff. We can reduce terrorism to varying degrees, depending on our tactics, but no matter what there will be crackpots who hate America and want to kill us all, and from time to time, in spite of the remarkable diligence of the military and law enforcement, they’ll be able to do it, Osama or no Osama.

This, more than anything else, is why I’ve been so unabashedly happy about Osama bin Laden’s remarkably violent end. For better or worse, it’s good news from the War on Terrorism. Sure, the Afghan Army is a corrupt illiterate nightmare and one of our major allies may be a supporter of terrorism, but we killed Osama bin Laden. We accomplished one of the main things we set out to do, with all the bravado of an episode of 24.

So I don’t know about you, but I’m going to spend as much time as I can being happy that a fellow human was shot in the head in front of his wife and 12-year-old daughter. Sooner or later – probably sooner – something is terrible is going to happen that’ll shake my confidence, but right now I’m having a blast feeling like America is invincible again.

I think that I should be allowed this much.

Truman Capps promises a return to comedy in the near future.

Dog Stories

Enjoy your nightmares tonight, kids! That's what you get for reading Hair Guy.

Recently, my roommate Jefe’s mother needed to get rid of her dog, Indy, for a variety of reasons, one of which involved Indy biting one of her horses and just completely fucking its shit up. Jefe volunteered to take care of Indy, but not before checking with each of his roommates to see if a new addition to the family would be okay with them.

My other two roommates had no problem with the idea, because dogs, by and large, are awesome. They basically eat and lie around thinking about eating, which is pretty close to my roommates’ day to day lives as is, and, as it’s been pointed out to me by several guys in varying states of drunkenness, ‘Guys with dogs get chicks, man.’

Jefe came to me last, because I’m the roommate who, thanks to being raised by a pair of insurance industry professionals, has learned to see the downsides and negatives of every conceivable situation, making me more prone to saying ‘no’ than the others. This quality makes me a lot like a Mom, although when push comes to shove I prefer the term ‘Lawgiver.’

I ultimately said yes when Jefe asked me if he could bring a dog home, although it was not without a bit of trepidation. I’ve got no problem with dogs conceptually. I enjoy loyalty and silly pet tricks, and in those Wrangler commercials Brett Favre always seems to be having fun playing with that Golden Retriever in slow motion.

I do, however, have a problem with things going to the bathroom in my house. That’s the scene that never made it into the Wrangler commercial – the Golden Retriever squatting in the living room in slow motion, Brett Favre noticing too late to stop it, just clutching his hair and screaming, still in slow motion, Bachman Turner Overdrive playing in the background…

We don’t need that here. I mean, the house smells bad enough as it is, and that’s with my roommates going to the bathroom in our toilet.

But I put this aside and said yes, because even the Lawgiver gets sick of crushing dreams on a daily basis, and a few days later, Indy arrived.

He looks like this.

What you see there is Indy’s favorite trick – looking at you. In the week or so that he’s been living with us, Indy has proven to be pretty obedient and otherwise friendly, but far quieter than I’m used to.

I grew up with a black Labradoodle named Sophie whose enthusiasm and happiness was matched only by her truly mind boggling stupidity. When I’d walk past the back fence on my way home from school every day, Sophie would be there, jumping up and down in elation that I was home, her ears and snout just visible above the top of the fence at the apex of each leap.

When I get home from school now, Indy just looks at me as if to say, “Oh. You again. Make yourself at home. I’ll be right over here.”

My Dad pointed out that Indy may be trying to assert his dominance over me by engaging in staring contests, which sounds like the sort of thing stupid kids in 5th grade did, only now the stupid kid has sharp teeth which he’s already used on at least one horse, presumably after a staring contest gone bad.

I was concerned about this until two nights ago, when I came home to find Indy with his head in the kitchen garbage can, munching on as much of our trash as he could find. In retrospect, I should’ve let him keep going – I feel like we’re getting overcharged on garbage pickup, anyway – but instead I yelled something to the tune of, “Ah, fuck it, man, don’t do THAT!”

Indy promptly withdrew from the garbage can and scampered into the kitchen, where I followed him and proceeded to commence with the punishment, Lawgiver style.

“No! Bad dog!” I shouted as he cowered by the oven, head bowed. “Why the hell would you do something like that? That’s our garbage can! Garbage! Anything you smell in there is food so disgustingly bad that three fat men won’t eat it!”

Midway through my rant, Indy opened the floodgates and peed all over the kitchen floor.

Ten minutes later, I was in pretty high spirits for someone who was on his hands and knees mopping up dog piss. I had intimidated another living thing so badly that it had essentially wet its pants. When you’re me, you take your self esteem boosts wherever you can find them.

In retrospect, I realize that Indy’s Big Lebowski treatment of our kitchen may not have been a submissive act of fear but rather the only retort he was capable of.

As soon as I saw Indy peeing, I quit yelling at him, and Indy sure as hell didn’t have to do any of the hard work cleaning the mess up. Urination, as it turns out, is quite an effective tool for stopping an argument. If I’d found this out sooner, I could’ve really cleaned up in the speech and debate circuit, or at least won a few more fights with The Ex Girlfriend.

Things were pretty awkward between Indy and I for the next couple of days. Humans can go to a bar and buy each other alcohol to mend the fence, but getting drunk with a dog won’t convey to it that everything is alright and you can still be friends.

For the record, I’d like to point out that getting drunk with animals is a delightful pastime that I support wholeheartedly.

Today, though, when I came home Indy actually got up and came over to say hi instead of just staring at me. He bumped his nose ever so gently against my crotch and looked up at me, his nubbin of a tail twitching back and forth.

Time heals all wounds, I guess.

Truman Capps would like to point out that Indy is the same breed of dog as the dog from The Road Warrior. Not to brag or anything, but… Yeah.

Tardy/Unprepared

What do you bet all the other Internet images beat this one up every day before lunch?

At my middle school, and, hey, maybe yours too, they gave out little pink slips as punishments for minor infractions. If you were late getting to a class, you got a ‘tardy’ slip. If you showed up to class without essential school supplies, you’d get an ‘unprepared.’

Back then I prided myself on never having received a tardy; my perfect record for ‘unprepareds’ was spoiled late in 8th grade by a bitchy Spanish teacher who got tired of my habit of coming to class without a pencil. It was traumatizing.

I’m sharing this completely uninteresting tidbit for two reasons:

1) So that you can how pathetic I used to be, and thus appreciate all the progress I’ve made in spite of still being scared of spiders and unable to drink milk.
2) You might be able to understand why my blogs have been showing up late more often these past few weeks.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, when I started this blog as a freshman it was consistency, not necessarily quality, that was going to be my gimmick: The blog would always be updated on time, but whether it was any good or not had a lot to do with how long I’d spent working on it before the deadline came down on me and I shoved it, wet and trembling, out onto the Internet to be seen by all.

Like me in middle school, you could count on the blog showing up on time, but how much effort and preparation had gone into making it good was anyone’s guess. Unlike me in middle school, my early blogs were not fat.

Keeping up with the somewhat strict schedule I’d set for myself was pretty easy my freshman year of college, when I’d made the curious decision to not drink alcohol. As a freshman, virtually every worthwhile social outlet ends with at least one person throwing up Cuervo in a garbage can, which ensured that I spent a lot of time cooling my heels in the dorms looking for something to do while everybody else was out giving or receiving herpes.

With that much time on my hands on a nightly basis, writing 2000 words a week was hardly difficult. I looked down my nose at other people whose blogs faltered and fell apart when they couldn’t stick to a realistic update schedule. Later I would figure out that these people weren’t update their blogs because they were busy meeting people, having fun and occasionally disgusting life experiences while I sat in my tomblike dorm and tried to think up jokes about the contraception posters in my hall.

So you could say that I started out being so meticulous about my update schedule because I had nothing better to do. Only you’d be wrong, because I did have something better to do – engage in alcohol fueled hijinx at the one time in life when it’s socially acceptable to do so.

I did not make out with strangers. I did not run anywhere while naked and/or blindfolded. I did not release any barnyard animals in the dean’s office. My biggest mistake as a freshman was not going out and making more mistakes, and I regret my lack of regrets wholeheartedly.

Now I’m a senior – a bitter, jaded, alcohol consuming senior, taking a 100 level geology class in hopes of coasting into a bachelor’s degree. Three months from now I’m going to be writing my Dad a check for The Mystery Wagon and driving it to Los Angeles, filled with all of my worldly possessions while listening to a road trip playlist that has ‘November Rain’ on it like five times.

It’ll be a new city, a new lifestyle, and a crop of new friends that I’ll have to painstakingly cultivate, just like I did in college. So please do forgive me if I want to take a little more time to appreciate my current city, lifestyle, and friends before they become the old ones – even if I’m appreciating them on the nights when I should be writing dick jokes and run-on sentences for the Internet.

Last night, for example, I only had about an hour of uninterrupted blog writing time before my friend’s 21st birthday, which virtually all of my other friends were going to be at. I was racing against the clock, trying to throw together some shitty update about working in the checkout room, when I just threw up my hands, left the blog where it was, and went off and had an amazing time at some of Eugene’s more colorful bars.*

*On a related note, the downtown hobos are way more feisty than the campus hobos.

What I’m realizing is that I’d rather be tardy than unprepared. I’ve reached a point where life gets in the way of my blog more and more often, and when that happens I’d rather have something good and late to show for it, rather than something terrible I threw together to fulfill an arbitrary deadline I set for myself when I was 18.

My shift into college started with a lot of lonely nights sitting in my dorm, listening to blasting hip hop music and good natured belching from all around and wistfully remembering my safe and familiar high school days.

I’ve got every reason to assume Los Angeles will be the same way at first, and on those nights that I’m barricaded in my tenement apartment listening to drug dealers having cockfights in the hallway, I don’t want to look back on my last three months of college and remember myself walking out of parties saying, “Sorry folks – I’ve got to go write a blog.”

Truman Capps will leave the definition of ‘cockfights’ up to you.

The Office

I've never seen this graphic used in the real world to represent an office. I feel like an office is sort of self explanatory to begin with, and doesn't necessarily need a graphic denoting what it is.

I once saw a picture of two sets of footprints on a beach at sunset, along with a quote about how one set of tracks is this guy walking along the beach and the second set is God walking along beside him, forever, presumably even when he’s not on a beach. I think the quote was from the Bible, or maybe a country song. And now that I think of it, there may not have been a sunset, either. I’m pretty sure there was a picture, though.

Look, this was a rocky start, but I figured I should say something about religion since it’s Easter. So, you’re welcome.

The point is, The Office, not God, has been my second set of footprints since I was a junior in high school. Through good times and bad, on various TVs and computers, in all kinds of different frames of mind and places in my life, I’ve been sitting around watching The Office on Thursdays for five years now.

As someone who almost habitually falls in love with great shows that get cancelled (Firefly, Arrested Development, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, The Tick, Mystery Science Theater 3000…) it was great to see a show I liked getting some actual love from the network for a change. Before The Office, I had come to think that whenever network executives found out I liked a show, they picked up the red telephone and put a stop to it right away.

“Hi there, Judd Apatow? It’s NBC. We’re cancelling Freaks and Geeks. Well, Truman Capps likes it. Yeah, the one with the hair. Because if he likes it, then clearly the people who buy Axe Shower Gel and Cadillac Escalades don’t like it, and then we have an ad revenue problem. No hard feelings.”

I’ve been following the staff at Dunder Mifflin Scranton for so long that it’s like I actually know them. I’ve been familiar with the finer details of Dwight’s personal life longer than I’ve known most of my friends in college.

In my head, that sounded impressive, but now that I see it on the page it makes me look pathetic.

But it’s true – I remember when Ryan was just a put-upon temp and not this ex-con hipster archetype. I remember when Darryl was just The Black Guy In The Warehouse. I remember a time when there was no Nard-Dog. More than any other program, it’s The Office that has shown me the power of television to build a strong connection with viewers by putting the same characters in their homes, week upon week, for years, because it did that to me.

So know how much this show means to me when I say that The Office sucks now. It’s like I’m saying that one of my closest friends sucks.*

*Well, a friend who only visits me for half an hour every week eight months out of the year and tries to sell me car insurance and fast food at regular intervals during his visit. So, all in all, a pretty sucky friend.

The past six or seven episodes have shown a distinct drop in quality, and this season has been sub-par at best already. We’ve seen Michael getting lost in the city in spite of the fact that he’s got a camera crew with him, Michael’s movie, Threat Level Midnight, which played out as an extended ‘Michael is stupid’ joke, and Michael’s proposal to Holly, in which he marshals an office full of people who either barely tolerate or outright hate him into an elaborate proposal involving a few hundred candles.

And then, on Thursday, the entire office sings a modified version of That Song From Rent to Michael as a going away present. That was when I turned it off – I don’t watch Glee, goddamn it, and it’s not okay for Glee to come looking for me on my turf.

But singing isn’t the problem here – it’s the nauseatingly sweet sentimentality of the whole thing. It just feels like at some point the writers’ mission stopped being ‘Make people laugh’ and became ‘Give teenage girls lots of material so they can make YouTube The Office compilation fan videos set to John Legend songs.’

It’s not like there’s something wrong with a thing being heartwarming or sweet, but if there’s one thing that I always liked about The Office, it was its ability to be really low key and understated. Scenes or entire episodes climaxed with a sigh or an enigmatic look, and now we’ve got a room full of people singing showtunes. It’s not The Office I remember. It’s changed, and we all know how I feel about that:

One of my friends argues that The Office is evolving and I should just suck it up and deal with it, but I think the word ‘evolving’ gives the show too much credit. Evolution suggests things getting better with time, but The Office is getting worse – less groundbreaking, less funny, more safe. It’s gradually turning back into a monkey. I expect a major story arc about shit throwing in season 8.

Now, of course, this is all just my opinion – as though I even needed to say that. Maybe The Office racks up more ad revenue when the characters have become cartoonishly broad and the whole thing plays out like a Kay Jewelers ad, in which case I’m sure all the writers are all driving solid gold Batmobiles at this point. I just miss the show that made me want to be a TV scriptwriter in the first place.*

*You see that? See how that line was kind of thought provoking and slightly sentimental, but didn’t beat you over the head with nostalgia? That’s what I want to see more of. Then you finish with a joke, like in this next paragraph.

This is the problem with appropriating a television show as a part of your life: A TV show is written by a large, slowly changing group of people, at least some of whom are bound to have a different creative vision than your own. Organized religion is far less complicated.

Truman Capps will continue to watch and complain about The Office until the bitter end.

Epic Meal Time

The new Canadian stereotype has arrived.

If you’re a young man in the 21st century, your personality and lifestyle place you somewhere along a scale between two extremes: Hipster, and bro. Hipsters, on the far left of the scale, are all about being artistically inclined nonconformists who like obscure things from the 80s, while bros, on the far right, live life on a diet of SportsCenter, Family Guy, and testosterone, all while wearing an unending parade of wide brimmed baseball caps.

Everybody fits somewhere on the scale. For my love of Doogie Howser, MD and my collection of ironic T-shirts (which, for the record, I’m trying to gravitate away from) I’m somewhat to the left of center, but not that much, being as I enjoy violent video games, actively follow college football, and vehemently hate soccer. My roommates all land, to varying degrees, on the bro side of the scale. It takes some guesswork, but everyone has a place. I’ve provided a scale with some reference points:

I see people from both extremes come into work in roughly equal numbers, and they each do what they can to stink up the checkout room in their own unique way – the hipsters with cigarette fumes from the American Spirit they smoked between classes, the bros with the cologne that they seem to excrete naturally from their pores.

It’s tough to say which subculture I’m less fond of, because I’ve got my fair share of problems with both. Fundamentalist Hipsters want to show the world that they reject the mainstream to the detriment of their personal hygiene and nose cartilage; Fundamentalist Bros want to show the world that they embody the mainstream to the point that they strut around thumping their polo-shirted chests and howling at the top of their lungs as soon as they begin to consume alcohol. If that’s how they actually want to behave, well, I suppose they have every right to, but then I have every right to find their respective lifestyles obnoxious.

What got me started thinking about this was the Internet series Epic Meal Time, which, as you can see from my scale, is about the broest thing that has ever existed. A twisted cooking show in which a bunch of beefy Canadians enthusiastically make catastrophically unhealthy yet delicious meals, Epic Meal Time wholeheartedly champions stereotypical masculine values like eating meat and yelling.

The show has been a guilty pleasure of mine because I like cooking, and also meat. I’ve put up with the broed out masculinity because at first, in the early Epic Meal Times, it was almost satirical – a bunch of guys running around Saskatchewan essentially making edible mud pies out of whatever junk food they can find, amped up with profanity and hip hop lingo just for the hell of it.

As Epic Meal Time has grown in popularity and the bros’ life expectancies have shortened, the entertainment industry has been quick to cash in on their success – they’re currently in talks for a TV show on one of three channels and are professionally represented by a talent agency.*

*Hey, want to know what else I learned from Wikipedia? The main host, Harley, is a substitute high school teacher. He’s either far more professional off camera or Canada has much lower standards for substitute teachers than America (where, at least in Oregon, the bulk of them seem to be chain smoking divorcees and/or conspiracy theorists).

Now that they’ve got funding and a gigantic fanbase, their videos have started to go a bit over the top – keep in mind, the status quo here is a guy eating chili made with 4Loko using a wooden paddle as a spoon.

Recent episodes have shown off the inflation of the bros’ egos, portraying them as mythical, godlike kitchen warriors traveling Eastern Canada in a quest to make all food extreme. There’s been an ‘origins’ episode in which they visited one of the bros’ hometowns, a college tour episode where they arrive at a college to help a bunch of nerdy kids become awesome through cooking, and an ethnic themed episode where they walk into an Indian restaurant with a gun and start making insane meals using Indian food.

Somehow, when I see a burly drunk white guy pointing a gun at a minority’s face, my first thought isn’t, ‘Hey, fun cooking show!’

This all culminated in the most recent episode: An eight minute long extravaganza in which the bros create a dozen or so macaroni dishes, several of them paying tribute to past Epic Meal Time videos, which they then serve to an equal number of nubile Epic Meal Time groupies, who promptly eat it with their hands as shown in a minute long orgiastic montage, replete with closeups and orgasmic fourth wall breaks from the girls.

It made me uncomfortable, and before you even think it, let me assure you that it had nothing at all to do with the objectification of women in the video. Women have every right to publicly debase themselves to men if they so choose, even in Canada, and I have no problem with that whatsoever.*

*That being said, is women covering their faces in macaroni supposed to be sexy? Because I like macaroni and I really like beautiful women, but the combination of the two isn’t doing it for me.

Rather, it made me uncomfortable because I felt like I was supposed to be enjoying this. Now that Epic Meal Time has been commoditized, this sort of thing must be what sells. It’s become less about a bunch of guys cooking crazy stuff and more about a bunch of bros being bros, and if I wanted to see that I’d just go to school, or work, or the supermarket, or a party, or California.

I guess what I’m saying is that Epic Meal Time was way better before they sold out and went too mainstream, alienating everybody in their original fanbase, like me. It was way better back when it was just some obscure Internet series you’d probably never heard of.

Wait.

Ah, shit.

Truman Capps will be pleasantly surprised if he isn't inundated with responses from people saying, 'Hey, I like Deerhoof!'

Night Of The Hobo

I'm pretty sure it was just a regular hobo, but a man can dream, can't he?

One night last week I woke up at around 4:30 AM to the sound of someone on our doorstep alternating between hammering his fists against the front door and pounding the doorbell as quickly as possible. Listening to this, I decided that the best course of action for me would be to stay in bed – if it were one of my roommates, drunk and locked out, he could just as easily call me and then I’d go let him in. If it wasn’t one of my roommates, then I figured that the locked door would do its job just as well whether I was standing there watching or not.

My roommate Cameron, on the other hand, felt differently, and after a moment or two of the assault on our door I heard him thumping down the hall to see who it was.

“I’m home, by the way!” I shouted from my bed, quite courageously. “That’s not me at the door!”

I heard Cameron’s feet stop in our living room as he looked through the window set in the top of our door, then turn around and hustle back down the hall.

“Eli!” He shouted. “There’s somebody at the door, and it isn’t one of us!”

When you’re an upper middle class white kid living in the suburbs, this is about as exciting as your life is ever doing to get – a person you don’t know ringing your doorbell late at night. The danger, if there ever was any (and I highly doubt that there was) ended as soon as our late night visitor looked through the window and saw a fat man wearing a pair of yellow boxer shorts.

Of course, in the heat of the moment, it didn’t seem like that at all. As far as we were concerned, this was World War III. Cameron shut off the lights to make it harder for people outside to see in, and Eli came out of his room holding two golf drivers, one of which he gave to Cameron.

“Hey guys,” I said, bravely stepping out of my room, phone in hand. “You think I should call the police?”

They looked at one another, and Cameron nodded gravely. “Yeah. Do that.”

I scurried to the computer and looked up the Eugene Police Department’s non-emergency number – because even in the midst of the action, I couldn’t convince myself that ‘Three guys who are scared because somebody knocked on their door at an unusual hour” stacked up very well against traditional emergencies like “My baby is choking” or “Someone is murdering me.”

I was excited to call the police, because for whatever reason, calling the authorities has always been a fantasy of mine. Maybe it’s some deep seated childhood desire to make my preschool teacher happy – ever since she taught us how to call emergency services when something bad happens, I’ve been itching for an emergency where I can demonstrate what I learned. It’s the most achievable form of heroism you can engage in – it doesn’t require strength or bravery, but rather that you A) Possess a phone and B) Know how to use it.

I’ll even catch myself daydreaming about it in class sometimes – in my mind, I see myself witnessing a crime, calling the police, and then them showing up and foiling the culprit. Again, all I’ve done in my idealized scenario is make a phone call and then keep a safe distance. As you can see, even in my idle fantasies I still set my sights pretty low. Realistic goals, after all.

Policeman: Alright, we got the guy. Who was it that called 911?
Truman: It was me.
Policeman: I’d like to shake your hand. That was arguably the finest 911 call I’ve ever heard in all of my 19 years on the force.
Truman: Just doing my civic duty, officer.
Policeman: I really liked the part where you told the operator your address. You did a really good job with that. Here’s five dollars.
Truman: I can’t accept that. The knowledge that I’m a responsible member of the community is all the reward I need.

The phone rang once, and then operator picked up.

“Eugene Police and Fire.”

“Hi.” I said, watching my roommates stealthily creep toward the front door, golf clubs at the ready. “I’m in a police type situation. I don’t need firemen. Just police. Unless you want to send firemen. It probably wouldn’t hurt.”

“Sir, what is your address?”

Oh, God, I’m fucking it up already. I gave her my address and then started explaining what had been going on. “Somebody just started hammering on our door and ringing our doorbell. Someone who doesn’t live here.”

As I filled the operator in on the rest of the details Cameron and Eli eased the front door open and scrambled outside, drivers held high, two chunky dudes in flip flops and boxers ready to take on whatever the world could throw at them.

“Are there any guns in the house?” The operator asked.

“No. But my roommates have golf clubs.”

“Alright. We’re sending police units now. Tell your roommates that if the police come to your door, they’ll need to put their golf clubs down.”

“Okay, but really, I think they’re more of a danger to themselves right now.”

She wrapped up the conversation pretty quickly, and next thing I knew Cameron and Eli were shambling back into the house. I proudly informed them that the authorities were on the way, thanks to me. They kept watch by the window while I went back into my room to put on pants, my reasoning being that if a bunch of public servants were going to come out and arrest the guy who woke us up, the least I could do was be wearing pants when I thanked them.

Not long after, we watched through the windows as a couple police cruisers swept through the neighborhood, eventually stopping a few blocks away, their red and blue lights flashing against the weeds and puddles of our street. After about half an hour they left, one of the cruisers stopping in front of our house. We opened the front door, none the worse for wear after its attack, and eagerly crowded into the doorway as a police officer walked up the driveway.

“Yeah, we got him.” The cop said before we could even ask anything. “He was just running around through people’s yards. He said he hadn’t taken any drugs, but I’m not so sure about that. He’s on the way to the hospital now.”

He didn’t mention anything about my phone call. I let it slide, reminding myself that I hadn’t necessarily brought my A-game. Next time I’ll be more concise with my information, and maybe speak slower.

We thanked him and he left, and that was the end of the evening’s excitement. Now, my roommates are convinced that we need a gun to ward off anybody else who would dare wake us up in the middle of the night. I, on the other hand, just make a point of always having my phone by the bed.

Truman Capps imagines that children in third world countries dream of a day when their biggest excitement is a stranger knocking on their door and then running away.

Twitter

I can only hope that we one day regard Twitter with the same scorn we reserve for this product...

I’ve always been opposed to Twitter, not just because I don’t have a use for it, but because I feel like it’s almost the duty of the chronically unhip to relentlessly mock it. No, I don’t use Twitter. I also didn’t buy tickets to Sasqatch. Your fedora looks stupid.

Why do we need the ability to tell the world what we’re doing and thinking at all times? Man was not meant to have that sort of power, primarily because most of the things that we do in the course of our day aren’t particularly noteworthy or interesting. In seven days I can usually cobble enough experiences and poop jokes to make two blog updates, and that’s with no guarantees about quality. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I have one worthwhile idea in an hour, and usually it’s just a lame pun that requires an extensive set up to make any sense.*

*So I’m starting an Elton John themed restaurant. You know what I’m calling my signature pasta dish? Penne and the Jets.

Twitter almost expects you to broadcast all of your thoughts to the entire world as soon as you have them. Speaking as someone who’s prone to snap judgments and hyperbolic statements, that would be an absolute disaster for me. Honestly, I think it would be a disaster for a lot of people to have the ability to post their every careless statement for the whole world to see without having the time to come home and mull over whether it’s a good idea or not.

Of course, it hasn’t started raining blood since Twitter launched, so maybe I’m just looking for a deeper philosophical reason to hate Twitter so I don’t look like the stubborn luddite that I actually am. After all, I said a lot of careless and stupid things in my weekly opinion column back when I worked at the Emerald. I guess you can stick your foot in your mouth through virtually any form of media – the key to not doing it, maybe, is to not make public statements ever.*

*Or carefully reason through everything you say before you say it, but seriously, who has the time for that?

I think the real clue to why I’ve been abstaining from Twitter is this blog itself: When I started writing about 400 words ago, I was intending to talk about how I’ve decided to go with the flow and get a Twitter account. Look how long it took me to get around to the main point of what I was going to say. 1892 characters, or 13 and a half Twitter posts. I’m not a man of few words, and outside of the strictest biological definition I’m not really much of a man, either.

Twitter is all over the journalism school – hashtags and @ signs and douched up advertising and PR majors strutting around talking about how they want to get social media internships so that they build a company’s web presence or some shit like that. A lot of these people have told me that I need a Twitter page.

“You need to get on Twitter, Truman.” They’ll say, with the same urgency as they would if I’d been shot in a gunfight during a casino heist gone wrong. “You need to get to a hospital, Truman.”

Much of their argument is that Twitter is invaluable as a networking tool for someone going into the entertainment industry – a means to get your name out there as much as possible, so that large numbers of people are familiar with you, your personality, and your body for work so that if they’re looking for the right man for a given job, they’ll know it’s you without even having to look.

Again, I tend to assume that the more people know of my personality, the less likely they are to want to spend more time around me in a personal or professional capacity, so I don’t really know how Twitter could help me there unless I created an elaborate alter ego whose Twitter posts were all about how much he loved getting up early, volunteering, and praying.

But yesterday I went to work creating a Twitter account,* both because I’m a slave to peer pressure and because someone who smelled simply terrible came into the checkout room and stank the whole place up in a way that I felt needed to be shared with the Internet.

*Again, that is – many of you may have started following my ‘@trumanc’ Twitter account that I started freshman year after hearing about Twitter for the first time in J201. I decided to start a new account - @trumancapps – because the sooner I registered my full name on there, the less likely some racist was to register for it instead and start posting about which minorities @trumancapps hated the most (he probably wouldn’t even get all the right ones).

But I got stalled early on when Twitter wanted me to pick the first ten people I would be following. The first was easy – Conan O’Brien – and after that Edward James Olmos seemed like a logical choice, but then I hesitated. Who else on Twitter did I want to receive constant, trivial updates from? Not really anyone, as it turned out.

Understand that I live in a house full of people who update me on their bowel movements and sexual escapades (or lack thereof) on a daily or hourly basis, whether I want to know or not (I usually don’t). Signing up for Twitter, I realized, would be like living in a small house with everyone I was following – sharing their deliberations on whether Brooklyn Decker is actually all that hot and hearing Family Guy seeping through thin walls at any time, day or night.

So I left off on the creation of my Twitter account after following my fourth celebrity, George Takei. By all means, follow me on Twitter at @trumancapps, but I can’t guarantee you’ll ever see anything there. If you want to know something stupid and pointless about what I’m thinking, either come to this blog or ask me in person. I’m sure I’ll be happy to tell you.

Truman Capps has clearly begun to chafe under his own self imposed deadline.

Adrenaline Film Project

Wow, sweet graphic, guys. Did you only have three days to design it? KABOOM.

This just in: Making a movie in three days is fucking hard. The Filmmaking Gods* don’t give you a free pass when they hear that your deadline is 72 hours away from when you find out what film you’re going to be making – they dole out just as many technical issues and actor scheduling conflicts as on any other film, but they cram them into a much shorter time period, at the expense of the one or two fleeting enjoyable moments that occur in the production of any film.

*I’m an atheist whenever I’m not making a movie, but I’ll be the first to say that there are no atheists on film shoots. So much stuff goes wrong in the process of shooting a movie, regardless of length, subject matter, or shooting location, that the only answer is that there’s some higher power who really hates movies and really doesn’t want you to make yours.

I shouldn’t be complaining – nobody put a gun to my head to do the Adrenaline Film Project. Rather, my Asian friend Neilson asked if I wanted to do it, and I said yes, and then we pulled in my Asian friend Ryan from high school who also likes movies. The ethnic makeup of our group became even more significant when we found out that the theme of this year’s project was ‘Chinese Enlightenment’, and the prop that had to appear in every movie was a Chinese lantern. I figured that was our ace in the hole. Real, live, Asian filmmakers, and a dorky Anglo along for the ride. We were bound to at least get a concession prize.

I felt like we had a good shot in this contest – none of us were necessarily highly experienced, but we figured that a three-day time limit would level the playing field. No matter how good of a filmmaker you are – and let me take this opportunity to tell you that I am friends with and was competing against some really fucking good filmmakers - you can’t create a visual and emotional tour-de-force in three days, right?

Well, as it turns out, you can. I know this to be true because at last night’s premiere I saw half a dozen or so movies with a level of polish and production value that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve in three months, let alone three days. Choreographed fight scenes. Green screen special effects. Zombie song and dance numbers. By comparison, Writers, a dialog driven show about two guys who sit around indoors being assholes, just about killed me, and we had 10 weeks to make it.

Adrenaline Film Project? Mo’ like Truman Feeling Inadequate Film Project.*

*The grand jury prize would go to anybody with video footage of me at my senior prom.

Our movie wasn’t bad; it just looked like it’d been made in three days. We didn’t own our own equipment so we had to check out a second tier HD camcorder from the journalism school, we weren’t able to dress our location to make it visually interesting, and in the editing room we barely had time to string together our footage and edit the boom mic out of every shot, much less put in fancy titles or engage in this mysterious thing called ‘color correction.’

A big difference between me and my talented videographer friends seems to be that they ‘color correct’ their films. I’ve heard them mention it and, curious, have tried to figure out online exactly what color correction is, but I may as well have been Googling ‘HOW TO DO ALCHEMY?’ All I know is that color correction is the process by which your film goes from looking ordinary to looking beautiful – like She’s All That, but in FinalCut Pro.

Truman Capps, King of the Analogies!

I mean, if color correction is so important, why doesn’t the camera just do it for you? Given how much they’re charging for a good HD camera these days, I don’t want to have to mess with the footage later to make it look good. That’s the camera’s job. I mean, for $5000, I’m sort of pissed that I even have to edit anything – I just want a DVD of my finished product to pop out of the camera like a Polaroid.

What I’m coming to terms with is the fact that I’m not going to be as good at this stuff as other people are. Yes, of course, nothing is impossible and I’m sure I could attain that level of mastery with the investment of lots of time and money into study of the craft and the purchase of good equipment, but the fact is that I’m not interested enough to do that.

I was going to say ‘…the fact is that I don’t care’ in the last paragraph, but that would make it seem like I’m disinterested in making movies that look good, which is not the case. I want very badly to be able to, in three days, crap out a masterpiece without breaking a sweat. I want to be able to write a great script and then turn it into a great movie the way Wes Anderson and occasionally Quentin Tarantino do.

But as much as I want that, I just don’t have the passion to invest myself wholeheartedly in the act of learning how to do all the technical stuff that makes cinematic beauty possible. It’s taken me 22 years to get as good as I am at writing now, and I’ve still got a long way to go. I don’t have the energy to start at the bottom of another ladder and claw my way up, especially when I’ve got friends who are already at the top of it and willing to do the dirty work for me.

“Everybody’s got one special thing,” as they say in Boogie Nights, a movie that was both masterfully written and masterfully directed by college dropout Paul Thomas Anderson. The line rings true, I think. Last night, I saw a lot of films made by people whose ‘special thing’, so to speak, was filmmaking. They’re going to go far.

But I’ve got my own special thing: My hair was way by far the best out of all the festival participants, and the fact that I went away empty handed at the end of the evening is more a reflection of the fact that there was no ‘Best Hair’ award than of any inadequacy on my part. I also write occasionally.

Truman Capps was fortunate to have a dynamite cast for his movie, among them a Chinese exchange student who he convinced to use the word ‘honky’ on camera.