Hair Guy: Behind The Follicles (Part 1)
I won’t be able to
make any updates this week because of some pressing engagements in San Andreas. Instead, I’ve had my staff conduct a number of interviews
with members of my inner circle to create a definitive oral history
(giggity) of Hair Guy from its meager beginnings through its turbulent middle
years until today. Enjoy, and I’ll see you next week!
Associate professor
University of Oregon
School of Journalism and Communication
“I first met Truman
in… Gosh, I guess it was late 2007, probably October or November. He was in one
of my freshman lectures that year, but he stuck out to me because he was a
regular fixture at my office hours. One afternoon when he came in he was pretty
agitated, and when I asked him what was wrong he explained it to me in great
detail. Apparently he’d wanted to buy a sandwich from some food truck at the
street fair, but after waiting in line for ten minutes he found out they only
took cash, and he didn’t have any. He was halfway through this rant about how
it was the 21st century and vendors should be willing to accept
payment in all forms when I stopped him and said, ‘You should start writing
this down.’
“I was only saying it
because I wanted him to stop talking and just ask me about the midterm, but I
guess he took it to mean he should start a blog or something. Wait, is he still
writing that? Is that what you guys are talking to me about?”
Jefe Gottlieb
Classmate/trumpet
player
Oregon Marching Band
“We were in the same
hotel room the night before the away game at Washington our freshman year, and
while the rest of us were doing shots Truman was talking about how he didn’t
drink because he preferred to enjoy life without ‘chemical enhancement’ or some
shit like that. And when he finally finished, I just go, ‘You know what,
Truman? You should start a blog where you say stuff like that all the time. I
bet lots and lots of people would read it because your opinions are so good!’
And he just started nodding and got really quiet for the rest of the night.
“I don’t think he got
that I was being sarcastic. I thought it was pretty obvious. I mean, everybody
laughed after I said it.”
Usher
R&B/hip hop
artist and performer
“We were taking it
easy backstage after a show sometime in 2008. Maybe it was the Here I Stand
tour; it’s fuzzy but I’m pretty sure we were in Stockholm. So it’s just me and
the fellas – my manager Russel was there, Malik and Jaybird were there, a
couple of girls from the club the night before, and Truman. And all night he’s
just blabbing about how he wants to do a writeup of the tour for his bog, and
how he thinks his bog might get more hits if he added more of an urban flavor.
“So finally I go, ‘T,
what the fuck is a bog? You say you have a bog?’ And he’s like, ‘Not a bog – I’m
writing a blog.’ And I go, ‘Oh, whatever.’”
David Capps
Truman’s father
“No, I didn’t support
his decision for the first couple years. I wanted him to go into the family
business – we’re an insurance family, not a writing things and putting them on
the Internet family. Insurance underwriting is in our blood. And Truman had
natural talent. When he was six years old I gave him a policy renewal from a
mid-sized drycleaner downtown – y’know, just for fun – and 20 minutes later
he’d assessed them a 3.2% increase in premiums over a fire code violation from
the previous fiscal year that I hadn’t even noticed. It was beautiful.
He was like the Mozart of analyzing and mitigating risk for small business
policies, and he threw it all away for a blog.
“Eventually I came
around. He’s my son and I love him, and I want him to be happy. But I still sit
up some nights, looking at policy limit documents and wondering what might have
been.”
Jessica Pazinski
Ex-girlfriend
“The blog was
definitely a strain on our relationship. Even when it wasn’t an update day you
could tell he was thinking about it. We went to the Saturday Market once, but
the entire time it was obvious that he was just trying to think of a way to
distill the experience into a thousand or so words and a barely-relevant
picture from Google Images.
“Finally, at dinner
one night, I gave him an ultimatum: Me or the blog. I don’t think he was really
listening, because he spent most of his next blog talking about how his chicken
Caesar wrap didn’t live up to his expectations. It must’ve affected him,
though, because he started hitting the amaretto pretty hard after we split up.
But you’ve probably heard all about that already.
“Also, I just want to
go on the record as saying that he was really bad in bed. Seriously. I cannot
make that clear enough.”
1st
Battallion, 3rd Infantry Regiment
“We were on patrol ten
klicks outside of Da Nang when suddenly the treeline just lights up – Charlie
was fucking everywhere, man, and we’d walked right into an ambush. Blackjack
and McCoy went down right away – five’ll get you ten they were dead before they
knew what was happening – and I had to drag Fitzsimmons back behind the fire
line after an RPG took off his leg. Later he bled out on the chopper back to
Saigon.
“Truman was riding the
M60, but we weren’t getting any covering fire. So I crawl back to his foxhole
and damn if the little shit isn’t sitting there with his MacBook Pro, trying to
hammer out some blog update while the fucking [racial slur deleted] were dropping mortars right
on our heads!
“I smack him so hard
his helmet falls off and yell, ‘What the fuck are you doing!? Where’s our fire
support!?’ And he goes, ‘I know, I’m sorry – I just need to get this thing
finished and uploaded before midnight so it still goes out on Wednesday.’
“A lot of good men
died that night because of Truman. But damn if that wasn’t the most mildly
amusing blog post about ‘Community’ I’d ever read.”
Tune in Sunday for part 2!