The Color Purple

This man will forget more about painting than I'll ever know.

In my last update, you may recall an overwhelming sense of optimism regarding my new job in the art department for an upcoming media event. I acknowledged that there would be manual labor involved, but I was ready and eager to do the work because it was in the film industry, it was ethically okay, and it paid well. After three days on the job, I think it wise to point out that a lot of the reason I was so optimistic last week was because I wrote that the night before I went in for my first day of work.

My non-disclosure agreement prevents me from giving you any specifics about what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, but rest assured we’re trying to make things in a place look like they’re other things in another place so that people at an event will be able to pretend they’re in that other place. This is a process that requires the use of power tools, ladders, and entire aisles’ worth of materials from the Home Depot. Try to picture me in these circumstances, and then meet me in the next paragraph once you’re done laughing.

I have no right to complain about this job, and that’s not what I’m going to do. I drive along Venice Boulevard to get to my internship, and every day I pass multiple slightly scruffy but otherwise ordinary looking guys standing on the center median, holding signs and begging passers-by for money. Whenever I go to the Home Depot for this job, my car is just about swarmed by the Dawn of the Dead hordes of Hispanic day laborers lined up around the parking lot, dying to get picked up to spend a day doing the sort of hard work I’m so ill-qualified for. So I’m not complaining; I’m damn lucky to have this job and I’m giving it my all until they fire me or until the job is over.

That being said, golly, I don’t particularly relish this line of work.

The art department is not construction per se – the carpenters build things, and it’s the art department’s job to make those things look the way they’re supposed to: Color, furniture, and general ambiance are the responsibility of the art department. It didn’t occur to me before I actually started on the job, though, that color, furniture, and ambiance are created by painting, moving furniture, and generally doing far more hands on home improvement style work than I ever thought I’d have to do.

Before now, my ingrained attitude towards home improvement was that it was generally the thing you paid other people to do. For example, my room in Portland was and still is purple, because that was the color it was when we bought the house four years ago, nobody ever painted it not purple, and my parents weren’t willing to hire a painter to do it. Mind you, I hate purple due to its unfortunate ties to a university in Washington, but what could I do? I sure as hell didn’t have the money to hire a painter, and the idea of buying paint and doing it myself no more occurred to me than the idea of solving my money problems by brewing my own gold out of yeast and angel shit.

I mean, I guess I was aware that ordinary civilians did these sorts of things themselves – I saw the Home Depot and Kohl’s commercials where unsure newlyweds transform their ramshackle hovel into a dream home in 20 seconds with the help of some friendly, attractive employees. But these commercials were always followed by commercials where guys open a Coors Light and an icy train full of girls in bikinis crashes through the wall,* and I sort of assumed that both commercials were equally realistic.

*In any other circumstances, a train full of people drinking beer crashing through a wall would be a horrible tragedy followed by multiple lawsuits and government hearings.

On my first day at work, though, my boss pointed to a wall and said, “Alright, Truman – prep that wall and paint it white.” He could’ve just as well said, “Alright, Truman, land that F-16 on an aircraft carrier at night.”

I knew very little about prepping a wall to paint it: I knew that you had to put blue tape on some things, and that you had to rub a paint scraper on some other things, and then you black out and when you wake up the job is done and Gene Hackman is telling you that Lowe’s made this all possible, somehow.

I had applied some tape to the wall and was scraping fruitlessly at some loose paint when one of my supervisors walked past, stopped, and said, “Truman, you’ve never painted a wall before, have you?”

Classic Truman Capps moment.

I was given a crash course on wall painting and by the end of the day I had a solid first coat of paint on the wall. That night I looked up an Internet tutorial on the finer points of wall painting, and the next day on the job I had most of a dynamite second coat down before they notified me that professional painters had arrived and sent me to assemble some Ikea furniture instead, which was much more my speed.

In the three days that I’ve been on the job now I’ve developed bonkers amounts of pain in my legs and lower back from all the squatting, lifting, kneeling, and general lack of stillness my job requires. But I also learned how to paint, reinforce a wall, and use a pneumatic staple gun.

I do not relish this job the way I relish my internship where I get to criticize crappy screenplays all day. These are not tasks that I strictly enjoy doing, but I’ll keep doing them because the money is good and it’s a really valuable experience – for perhaps the first time in my life, I’m learning practical skills that, in the event of the apocalypse, will make me useful.*

*”No, I can’t build anti-zombie barricades – no construction experience. No, I can’t soup up that shuttle bus into a zombie-proof tank – I don’t know shit about engines. No, I can’t make napalm out of the supplies we’ve got here in the mall – I’m useless with chemistry. Look, is there anything you need written? Is there any way writing could help us kill zombies?”

Also, this job has given me a real, tangible appreciation for manmade objects. Are you in a building as you read this, or have you seen a building recently? Well, a lot of people put a lot of energy into building, painting, and decorating that building, and that’s before you turn on the lights or flush the toilet. Relish the fact that there are people out there who love building things and allow the rest of us to have jobs so sedentary that it’s possible to surf porn while we work.

Truman Capps admits that Internet-enabled phones make it possible to surf porn no matter what job you’re doing.

Updating Monday

I am very tired from my job, and tomorrow I will update about my job and why it makes me tired. If that's a problem, then...

The Good Lord Will Provide (Part 2)

Hollywood is a small town and everyone works together eventually, but it took until 1995 for this to happen?

With each passing day here in LA, things I learned at that stupid filmmaking camp that I at the time wrote off as bullshit are suddenly ringing true more and more. It was like a knowledge savings bond: I invested a week with a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool doucheleopards and now, five years later, the investment has matured and I’ve reaped the reward of finding that like two of the things I learned there were actually true. Look, nobody said it was a good investment. We’re talking Bear Sterns, here.

One of the other speakers we saw – far less colorful and in-your-face red state than the other one – spoke at great length about what a small town Hollywood is. Los Angeles itself is oppressively huge, but the filmmaking community is on the smaller side, which is why it’s absolutely imperative that you watch what you say about other people or their movies, because it could easily get back to them. Everybody knows everybody because they all either work together or have worked together, they hang out together and get married to each other and have kids who go into the same line of work – it’s just as much of a drama pipeline as the Greek system or a college marching band, except that Will Smith is in the mix somewhere, so it’s infinitely better.

I discarded that piece of information too, because it sounded a lot like this woman was telling me I couldn’t talk shit about people and movies I didn’t like, which was basically the only thing I did in high school and is a major component of what I do today.

Her advice might have been slightly exaggerated – I could tell everybody I meet that Gary Busey is crazy and I doubt that word would get back to him, both because I don’t think that celebrities are quite that connected to the average person* and because thousands of other people have probably already said the same thing about Gary Busey and it’s considered old news. The idea is more that you shouldn’t shittalk other professionals or prominent union members in your field, because sooner or later you’ll be working for them or trying to work for them.

*But God help you if you talk shit about Kevin Bacon.

The upshot to this is that the relatively small and incestuous film community makes it far easier to get a job – because unlike an actual small town, there’s a lot of jobs and money to be had if you know the right people. (Also unlike a small town, Will Smith is here.)

Quitting one of my internships left me unoccupied Tuesdays and Thursdays, and when I’m already not making money on the days that I do spend working, having days in my schedule where I make no money and also do nothing is kind of disheartening.

Also disheartening was my last credit card bill, which was about twice as much as it usually is, even though in the past month I’ve done very little eating out or barhopping, which in college were my two biggest expenses by far. It’s kind of frustrating, really, because I feel like I’ve been curtailing the amount of money I spend on booze pretty well in spite of the fact that virtually every retail establishment in California seems to have a liquor aisle, right on down to Christian bookstores. The sad fact is, gas is expensive and I need to fill The Mystery Wagon every week whether I want to or not (I generally don’t).

Fortunately, I have my cousin Gene, who has lived in LA for nearly 23 years, dividing his time between working in the art department on various films and TV shows and drumming in rock bands – he was the drummer for Queens Of The Stone Age between 1999 and 2002 before being replaced by Dave Grohl, who seems like a pretty cool guy to have replace you in any capacity. Gene has been circulating my resume and advocating my abilities to virtually everybody he knows in the film industry since long before I got down here, essentially staking his reputation on my competence – risky move, that.

The night that I quit my internship, Gene called me with some good news: One of his friends and coworkers was the art director for an upcoming media event, and he had called Gene to offer him a few weeks’ work helping out on the project. Gene already had another job going, but he referred his friend to me, and less than 24 hours after quitting my internship I’d landed a paying job as an art department production assistant.

A lot of what this job entails is moving furniture around, painting walls, and driving to Home Depot to pick up large orders of mysterious home improvement type things the purpose for which I cannot imagine. No part of my job requires me to use tools – that’s construction, an entirely different department – and more importantly, no part of my job requires me to play tricks on people. Also, the money is pretty good and lunch is provided, so if it comes up that I do have to play tricks on people here, they just might have found my price.

I’m going to be working 7 days a week for the next couple of weeks until the media event which marks the end of this job – Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as an unpaid intern, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday as a paid art department PA. The last time I worked 7 days a week was after my freshman year of college, when I made milkshakes at one restaurant and bussed tables at another all summer long. That was not a terribly enjoyable summer for me, because making lactose-based products and carrying around plates full of strangers’ half eaten food weren’t my idea of a good time.

Here’s the thing, though – for how lazy I’d always thought I was, coming to LA I’ve realized that it’s fully possible for me to be a workaholic if I like the work I’m doing. I’ve been bringing multiple scripts home with me from my internship to read and cover in my spare time, and the idea of working every day doesn’t really bother me because that’s seven days a week I’ll be working in the entertainment industry, which loyal readers may have noticed is an interest of mine.

So I quit a morally dubious unpaid position and within the same day wound up with a morally agreeable paid position. Did the good Lord provide for me? As an atheist, I’m inclined to say no – the real hero in this story is my cousin Gene and his sidekick Networking.

I think there’s some truth to what that fat little Texan was telling us, though: Even if the good Lord doesn’t provide for you because he’s too busy not existing, your friends and family (and their friends and family) just might. The key is to make good impressions on people and not talk a lot of shit behind everyone’s back so that they actually want to help you when you need it – which, to my understanding, is the sort of thing the good Lord would probably appreciate anyway.

Truman Capps has not ruled out the possibility that this entire job could be a massive Inception style hidden camera prank.

The Good Lord Will Provide (Part 1)

Adam turned down a role in a porno, so God gave him this legitimate role in Creation of Adam.

Five years ago I attended a weeklong summer filmmaking camp in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. I’ve discussed it here before, but for those of you who are new to the blog or (wisely) have just been skimming my updates for the past few years, I’ll recap the experience for you: The whole camp was a bunch of rich kids from the Midwest and Florida who kind of liked movies but mainly wanted to get away from their parents for a week to do drugs and have sex. Knowing my prior stance on mind-altering substances and my perennial difficulty convincing women to sleep with me, you can imagine how much fun I had.

One aspect of the camp was presentations from “industry professionals,” which translated to listening to career extras, infomercial directors, and a guy who’d worked on the sequel to Behind Enemy Lines telling us the secrets of their success. Near the end of the week a rotund, middle aged woman who worked as a commercial videographer came in to speak to us. She was a giggly, fast talking busybody from Texas with the accompanying accent, and true to Texas form she managed to make a good chunk of her presentation be about her love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and her support for President Bush and the War in Iraq.

At one of the rare points when she was somewhat on topic, though, she told the following story:

A few years ago, she’d been short on money after a long spell of unemployment, and on top of all that, her car broke down and needed costly repairs that she just couldn’t afford. She had a family to feed and her husband’s salary alone wasn’t going to cut it. She was seriously considering applying for a job in food service when a career opportunity came up – the Playboy channel was shooting some softcore lesbian porn version of Judge Judy,* and they’d be willing to pay her a good wage to do some of the filming.

*If any of you can find that, by the way, please let me know.

She struggled over whether to accept the offer or not – on the one hand, she really needed the money, but on the other, it was porn, which, unlike the War in Iraq, was unjust and morally reprehensible. Finally, she prayed about it and decided to turn the job down, because God would provide for her. And sure enough, two days later another job with better pay and presumably less scissorfucking came along and she was able to feed her family while preserving her morals.

The lesson we were to take from this was that if any of us moved to Hollywood to start a career, we should never compromise our morals, because, and I quote "...the good Lord will provide no matter what." Then I think she gave us the URL for her church’s website.

At the time, I wrote off what she’d said as much as I wrote off the rest of that stupid camp. That was just some fortuitous coincidence. I thought, silently congratulating myself on using the word ‘fortuitous’ in my inner monologue. If not for that, the only thing the good Lord would’ve provided her would be a couple of social workers taking her kids to a foster home with dinner on the table. Besides, that doesn’t apply to me – this camp has really opened my eyes to how much bullshit the movie industry is. I’m never working in Hollywood.

So anyway, I was working in Hollywood Sunday on a shoot for one of my two internships (hence the lateness of this update). It was a hidden camera prank show shoot, and while the NDA I signed prevents me from giving too many details, the gist of it was that people were coming to a location because they believed they’d been hired for a job, and upon their arrival they were made to do a number of embarrassing and somewhat degrading things under the auspices of on the job training, all of which was recorded on hidden cameras. Then, when the jig was up, the marks signed a release, collected $100 for their troubles, and were sent on their way.

The whole ordeal made me uncomfortable. It’s a down economy right now – money is tight for everyone, myself included, and I’d be pissed if I was told I’d received a job, only to show up for work to be humiliated on camera, told there was no job, and sent on my way with a little cash in my pocket ($100 doesn’t go very far in Los Angeles). I didn’t like the idea of getting people excited that they had a job that didn’t exist, exploiting their desperation for laughs, and then capturing their shock and disappointment on camera when they found out the job wasn’t real.

And I got more uncomfortable in the actual shooting process – after each prank was completed, the crew, myself included, came out to clean up the area and prepare for the next person to be pranked as the most recent victim signed the release forms. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with the victims; they had shocked, vacant expressions on their faces as they processed what had happened and realized that when they got home they’d have to tell their friends and family that, no, the job they’d said they’d received was just an elaborate joke.

Every single person we pranked signed a release afterwards, and I guess you could argue that they don’t deserve sympathy since they were willing to waive their right to sue. I don’t necessarily agree, though – these people were shocked and disoriented, overwhelmed by the things they’d had to do and the realization that they’d been deceived about the job, and peoples’ decision making when they’re in that state isn’t so good.

When The Ex Girlfriend and I broke up, she asked if I was mad at her and I said no, which, at the time, was true. I’d been through such an emotional wringer with her over the previous couple of weeks that all I felt was relief that the roller coaster had stopped and I could get off. Only five days later did I start to realize that certain things she’d done to me could be considered war crimes worthy of UN sanctions. At the time, though, I was so overwhelmed by everything that I didn’t know what I was thinking or feeling.

These people were signing releases because we pressured them to and they were too disoriented to be anything but obliging – also, they could only get $100 if they signed the release. This made me feel horrible, and yesterday I called and quit the internship.

What we were doing was legal, and the people who were running the show that day are not bad people – they have families to support as well, and orchestrating pranks like that is how they make money. Likewise, this prank generated revenue for about 30 people on set who got paid wages for the day’s work.

That being said, tricking and humiliating people isn’t what I came down here to do. I’m not above laughing at other peoples’ misfortune, but generally those other people have done something worthy of ridicule – the only thing the people at this shoot had done was try to find a job. I didn’t like being involved in that.

I should also point out that this was an unpaid position: If I’d been making a living wage to do this sort of thing, I’m pretty sure I’d still be working there, because it’s a down economy and this shoot proved how treacherous looking for a job can be. But with no paycheck in the mix, the only thing I was walking away from was a situation I didn’t want to be involved in.

The woman from filmmaking camp and Rorschach from Watchmen would argue that I should never compromise, but I can’t say that I can make that promise to myself, because I don’t believe that the good Lord will provide for me and I unfortunately cannot eat my own moral fiber.

What I can say is that in a good compromise, both parties have to feel equally screwed – so when I do sell out, it’s going to be for a lot of money.

Truman Capps will be back with Part 2 tomorrow, because that’s how committed he is to timely updates!

Millennials

Backwards baseball cap? Ear buds? A cell phone? Lying around doing nothing? Clearly, these are Millennials!

It’s not easy being an opinion columnist.

I did it for a year at the Oregon Daily Emerald - I signed up because I was under the impression that I could do the same shit that I do here (long form, tangential comedic essays that aren’t necessarily opinionated) in a college paper format as a means to draw more readers to the blog.

What I found out many megabytes of hatemail later was 1) The reason thousands of people don’t read my blog might have less to do with poor promotion and more to do with the fact that a lot of people seem to think my writing style makes me sound like a douche, and 2) It is really hard to have a new strong opinion about something important every week.

My solution to that problem was to write shitty columns about topics I didn’t understand or care about just so I could meet my deadline; nationally syndicated columnists’ solution is to talk shit about people in my age group. Sure, my journalism wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but I also didn’t write off 50 million people as stupid, lazy slobs.

I hate the word ‘Millennial’ – a name better suited to a mid sized four door sedan than to my entire age group – almost as much as I hate the word ‘generation’, except when immediately preceded by the words Star Trek: The Next. It seems there’s a cottage industry of psychologists and sociologists whose sole occupation is to come up with trendy names for people born between certain dates (The Silent Generation, The Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X) and then make assumptions about those peoples’ personalities. This work is apparently key to maintaining our civilization, because it seems like every week I’m reading a new article about how Millennials are lazy, spoiled, emotionally stunted brats.

And it’s bullshit.

I’m not here to defend my generation. I will freely admit that there are loads of entitled, self absorbed doucheburgers in my age group. That said, I think there are loads of entitled, self absorbed doucheburgers in every age group, and trying to determine which age group has more doucheburgers is a fruitless, speculative waste of time that ultimately serves no purpose.

Nobody’s going to publish a study saying that people with darker colored skin are criminals or Jewish people are greedy, because it’s wrong, inaccurate, and dickish to make assumptions about peoples’ personalities based on factors they can’t control. But somehow it’s okay to assume that people born between 1982 and 2001 will be self involved and out of touch to the point of unemployability?

I was born in 1988. I don’t have one hell of a lot in common with people who were born in 1982, and I have even less in common with people who were born in 2001. Millennials from the 90s have had the Internet for their entire lives. Millennials from the early 80s remember watching the Berlin Wall come down. To try and make assumptions about all of us, in spite of these and a billion more differences on top of our own individual upbringing, is like trying to estimate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Trying to suggest that we’re all the same because we’re ‘tech savvy’ in an age when three quarters of a billion people are on Facebook is like saying Rahm Emanuel and Carrot Top are the same person because they both have eyebrows.

And when it’s all said and done, what do we stand to gain from these assumptions that we’ve made about a given generation? Do we pass out medals to surviving members of the Greatest Generation for being alive during World War 2? Put all Baby Boomers on trial for jumping behind Reaganomics? Personally administer a spanking to every Millennial in America to make up for their parents’ coddling?

No. We just read what’s been written and add it to the list of factually dubious preconceived notions we’ve got about people based on how many wrinkles they have. These researchers could better serve humanity by working at 7-11, because then at least they’d be facilitating the delivery of taquitos to the masses.

I think what best proves my point about the worthlessness of these studies is the following comment by Ruben Navarette, who is presumably a CNN diversity hire from when they realized there weren’t enough stupid people on the payroll. In the column he wrote that inspired this blog, he had this criticism about Millennials:

[They] put family and friends before work and career…

…Millennials are in no rush to start the rat race, because they work to live and not the other way around. They saw their parents get laid off or trudge to jobs they hated. They're determined to be different.

Yes, apparently valuing our loved ones more than our jobs and wanting to earn a living doing something we actually like is a bad thing. What Ruben Navarrette is saying is that if you follow your dreams, you’re an entitled brat – you should work the first boring, dead end job you get offered no matter how miserable it makes you, because it’s wrong to not do the exact same thing your parents did.

If it’s entitled for me to have high self esteem and to want the best for myself, and to be willing to hold out for what I want to do instead of sacrificing my happiness to play it safe, then fuck it – I’ll be entitled. Being entitled was what led me to quit my job as an opinion columnist: I was ill qualified for the job and it made me miserable, so I decided that my happiness was more important than my paychecks and quit writing shitty opinion columns.

Follow my lead, Mr. Navarrette. Be entitled.

Truman Capps hopes that none of his token ‘old’ readers took this as a slight.

Venice Beach

This guy is probably more educated than I am.

I’m not what you’d call a ‘beach person’ – one of those people who, after a stressful week, will jump up and say, “Fuck it, guys; let’s go to the beach! It’s going to be awesome! We can play volleyball and get tan and pick up beautiful women!” It’s not that I actively dislike the beach or anything; I just don’t think of myself as a beach person because the beach isn’t my go-to vision of a perfect day.*

*For the record, I do consider myself a ‘Steakhouse in downtown Chicago’ person, as well as a ‘Breaking into the Jack Daniel’s Distillery with a straw’ person.

The beach is sort of a hassle for me, riddled with activities I’m pretty unenthusiastic about taking part in. My left toenail is ten different kinds of fucked up, so wearing sandals turns me into sort of a walking freakshow, frightening children and small dogs. My hair doesn’t do well in the water, so swimming is right out. I didn’t like volleyball in high school and my opinion of it is unlikely to change when sand is added to the equation. I’ve already got a tan. And as far as picking up beautiful women is concerned, I’ve proven inept at that in any number of surroundings – being at the beach, where I will inevitably be wearing fewer clothes than usual, can only hurt my chances.

But given my circumstances, the beach is the closest interesting thing to me that doesn’t require driving or spending money, so recently I’ve been making more and more trips out to Venice Beach, an easy 20-minute bike ride away from my apartment.

Venice Beach is the very definition of a shitshow. Everything weird or grimy or moist or stoned that you’ve never wanted to see is on full, proud display along the Venice Boardwalk: Bucket drummers, shit peddlers, enormously fat women with monstrous breasts pushed up high for all to enjoy, an army homeless people splaying in all manner of positions… There’s a couple Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museums along the boardwalk, but I don’t see how they can get people to pay $5 to be grossed out when the circumstances outside the museum are so much worse.

There’s a patch of beach a little further south – halfway between Venice Boulevard and Washington Boulevard, for those of you who know the area – that I like to frequent. There aren’t any freaks (by which I mean there’s the bare minimum of freaks, which for Los Angeles is roughly 14), the beach is less crowded, and there’s a nice grassy bluff full of palm trees where I can sit, wearing my sneakers, and read Dune without feeling like too much of a nerd – because hey! I’m at Venice Beach! Wearing Ray-Bans!

This is my beach activity – reading. You’ve got to understand, though, that I grew up vacationing in the San Juan Islands in Washington, where the beaches were rocky and the water was freezing. All you could do on those beaches was read – provided it wasn’t raining at the time.

Likewise, I was raised in Oregon, where the ocean is similarly cold and our coastline fraught with riptides and sneaker waves that frequently pulled out to sea anybody foolish enough to go swimming. Most Oregonians grew up with the knowledge that the ocean was our frigid, conniving enemy – one we would’ve nuked the bejeezus out of long ago were it not for our love of Dungeness crab. To be honest, half the reason I like to sit and read at the beach is so I can keep an eye on the ocean, just in case it tries to start some shit.

The other half is that while Venice Beach is often terrifying, it’s definitely never boring. That’s the Venice Beach guarantee: Every time you go, you’re going to see something truly fascinating, whether you want to or not. For example, take this encounter from yesterday:

I was sitting on the bluff, reading my book, when a buff, shirtless young man, glistening with sweat, jogged up and crouched beside me.

“’Allo!” He said, his smile bright and his Eastern European accent thick.

Oh, Lord. I thought. Three weeks in California and I’m being openly propositioned by homosexuals. And here I’d thought my terrible fashion sense would protect me from this sort of thing.

“Hi.” I said, returning a smile that conveyed a sense of I am happy to talk to you so long as you understand that I’m not interested in doing Maximum Cuddles.

“Do you know where is gaiem?” He asked, his eyes alight.

“Uh…” I must call my gay friends immediately and find out if “gaiem” is slang for something. “What?”

“A gaiem, you know. On beach?”

“I’m… I’m really sorry, sir, but I don’t know what a gaiem is.”

Just then, his friend – similarly buff, shirtless, and moist – ran up.

Oh God, I’m drawing a crowd. Where does it end? Yeah, you just had to leave the house today, didn’t you, Truman?

“Is gaiem!” The new arrival said with an equally big and welcoming smile. “You know gaiem?”

“I don’t know gaiem. I’m really sorry. I wish I knew gaiem, I mean, you guys make it sound so great…”

The new arrival started pumping his arms in and out and breathing heavily. “Gaiem, you know?” Soon, both of them were doing it.

Now, at first, seeing two buff shirtless men standing in front of me, pumping their arms and huffing and puffing, I was prepared to lie back and think of Portland. Then, I recognized what they were doing as miming bench pressing.

“Oh!” I said. “You’re looking for the gym!”

Their eyes lit up and they nodded. “Yes! Gaiem! On beach!”

I pointed north, towards Santa Monica. “Muscle Beach. It’s like half a mile up that way. Never been there myself, but I hear they’ve got one hell of a gaiem.”

The guys clasped their hands in front of them, grinned a bit more as a sign of their appreciation, and then jogged off together, cracking up at the ignorant, possibly retarded guy to whom they’d just spent a minute explaining what a gaiem was.

This part of Die Hard gains new meaning at Venice Beach.

Truman Capps is pretty sure they were a couple of wild and crazy guys.

Ninety Percent Of Everything

That's me at the bottom.

Big development since the last blog: All those emails I sent out finally paid off, and now I’ve got an internship. Two internships, actually – both part time at two different production companies.

After less than a week, both internships have warranted some truly valuable experiences; they have not, however, warranted truly valuable cash money, but I have reason to believe that my chances of getting a job through connections forged at either of these internships is pretty good. Also, my landlady seems reasonable, so maybe she’ll be willing to let me pay my rent in truly valuable experiences for a while.

My primary duty at both companies is a task called script coverage, which is often foisted off on unpaid interns or other bottom level employees because it’s an unpleasant yet important job that few people want to do, like coal mining or being President of the United States. It goes like this:

Nerdy, self-loathing writers like myself write screenplays, most of them bad, and through either talent agents or fortuitous social connections they submit those screenplays to production companies, like the ones I work at. It’s the role of the production company to look at all the scripts they’ve received and make the executive decision on which ones would be profitable and thus worthy of attention and which ones are terrible and worthy of the garbage can (or recycling, if you work at an environmentally-friendly company like I do).

There’s more nerdy, self loathing writers than there are production companies, though, so every company has a giant stack of unread scripts that grows larger by the day as more writers submit stuff. The only way to tell if any of these scripts are good is to read them, but that’s something of a time consuming process, and it’s an assured fact that the vast majority of them aren’t good (see Sturgeon’s Revelation.)

In order to weed out the gems from the shit, production companies have people like me do script coverage, in which we sit around all day reading the submitted scripts and, when we’re finished, attach a page to the cover of the script with three things on it:

1) Whether we think the studio should PASS or CONSIDER the script
2) A summary of the script’s story
3) Comments backing up our decision on whether to pass or consider

Then, I put the completed script and coverage in the producer’s inbox so he can read my comments and make a decision on the script without having to blow an hour reading it. Meanwhile, I continue reading and rating scripts.

I absolutely love this fucking job. I love it so much I’d do it for free. Which, I suppose, is why I am. Hell, I love it so much I’d do it for money.

I love it because I love Mystery Science Theater 3000, the TV show where people (and profane, low budget puppets) watch terrible movies and make fun of them the whole way through. That’s my job now – I get to read scripts, the majority of which are bad, and then explain to my boss exactly why they’re bad and shouldn’t be made into movies.

Also, as a writer it’s really just delightful to be able to crush other writers’ dreams of having their scripts made into movies. This makes me sound like an asshole, but I actually think that passing on a bad script is almost an act of sympathy to the person who wrote it.

Think about it: You’ve poured your heart and soul into something that, it turns out, is shitty – would you rather have one person read it and laugh at your shoddy work, or have it get turned into a movie so millions of people can laugh at your shoddy work? Just ask Tommy Wiseau how he feels about The Room.

If the writer in question is serious about his craft, he’ll learn from his mistakes and either change his script or write a better one, and eventually a good movie will get made. If he gets disheartened by rejection and throws in the towel entirely, that’s good too, because the world needs plenty of bartenders and accountants.

And it’s great for my own writing skills – which, for the record, I don’t think are quite good enough for me to get a script past the snide intern at a production company either just yet. Bad examples, as I’ve said before, are in some cases better than good ones, and every day I discover all kinds of new ways for a screenplay to be bad. Protip: “Fucken” is not a word – it’s spelled “fuckin.’” Other protip: When every other word in your script is “fucken” or “fuckin’”, there’s a good chance your script isn’t a winner.

Of course, there are good scripts too – so far I’ve read two scripts which really knocked my socks off, an experience the guys on Mystery Science Theater 3000 sadly never got to have. After a day of shaking your head at scripts with no conflict and one dimensional characters who blurt out exactly what’s on their minds, reading one of these scripts can really help you appreciate how much the average moviegoer takes things like pacing for granted.

What I’ve found in years of watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 is that there’s a little nugget of good movie buried in almost every shitty movie, some plot point or idea that was strong enough to get somebody to write the script and then bring a crew together to raise money and shoot the thing:

Time Chasers actually has a pretty well thought out plot once you get past the shitty acting and effects. The relationship between the disembodied head and the monster in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is slightly engaging amid the 1950s sci fi schlock. The concept behind Hobgoblins is pretty cool when you forget literally everything else about the movie. The plot twist at the end of Monster A-Go-Go would’ve been thought provoking if the rest of the movie had been remotely comprehensible.*

*The Starfighters is terrible in every way and I want to punch all the surviving crew members square in the dick.

It’s fun to find those moments in the scripts I read every day – the one idea so good that a writer thought, “Fuck it – I’m going to build a screenplay entirely around this idea.” And it’s even more fun, in a sort of House MD way, to reconstruct what went wrong and try to figure out how the writer could make the rest of the script live up to that one idea.

Oh, and on top of all that? Free employee kitchen!

Truman Capps was late on this update because he got hired on the spot at one of his internship interviews and had to work late, which is the best excuse he’s had in a long time.

Battleship

I feel like this is all one grand joke.

They did it. The crazy bastards finally did it. They made a big budget action movie out of one of the world’s lamest board games.

Why is it that projects like this don’t get caught in Development Hell with all the things I actually want to see? I mean, it’s Battleship, for God’s sake – the game is built around two bored kids reading grid coordinates to each other. How is it that this is on the fast track to theaters but we’re still waiting on season 5 of Mad Men?

That was a hypothetical question: Movies like this get made because the average filmgoer sees maybe one film in a weekend (if he doesn’t just Torrent it) and studios know that he’s more likely to see something that he already knows and presumably kind of likes. This is why we see so many sequels (“You liked X-Men 2, right? Well, you’ll love X-Men 3, except for that it sucks!”) and movies based on comics and toys.

This still doesn’t explain why there’s a Battleship movie, though, because Battleship is a game that absolutely nobody likes.

A lot of critics derided the Transformers series not just because it was trite and stupid but because the whole epic venture was based on toys. What the critics perhaps didn’t realize was that while Transformers were toys, they were awesome toys – kids love cars, and kids love robots, and Transformers were both. The possibilities were limitless.

Battleship, as defined by Wikipedia, is a pen and paper guessing game that predates World War I. You just try to guess where on the 10x10 grid the other guy has put his ships. They’re making a summer blockbuster film adaptation of a game with no strategy and no learning curve – expect to see Rock, Paper, Scissors and Roulette in theaters soon, one or both of which will probably feature a cash strapped Hellen Mirren in a supporting role.

They just recently released the first teaser for Battleship. While most teasers are big on anticipation and short on exposition (see The Dark Knight Rises or the early Inception teasers), the Battleship teaser is two and a half minutes long and sets up the entire first act of the movie – presumably because anything less than that wouldn’t be enough to convince filmgoing audiences that the movie wasn’t just about two disinterested kids playing a board game because they forgot that video games exist.

The teaser for Battleship opens with some guy lying on a beach making out with Brooklyn Decker, which is a striking divergence from the source material – if a standard game of Battleship involved Frenching Brooklyn Decker, I would not be writing this blog, because I would be too busy playing Battleship.

In the next scene, Liam Neeson shows up. To be honest, I’m always kind of surprised to see Liam Neeson in anything - he played the lead role in Schindler’s List, for Christ’s sake, and now he’s in the movie based on little plastic boats? Anyway, he’s mad at the guy who was making out with Brooklyn Decker (his daughter) because presumably he’s some kind of highly talented fuckup the likes of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. *

*Little known fact: Top Gun is actually based on paper airplanes.

And then the titular battleship is out at sea, and one of the handsome square jawed guys onboard spots some weird metal thing floating in the ocean, and The Guy Who Made Out With Brooklyn Decker (I will continue to refer to him as such because that’s by far the most compelling aspect of his character) goes out to check on it. He touches it, it shocks him, it transforms into a giant alien battleship, etc.

Maybe this is just me, but if I see one more fucking movie where the inciting incident is a handsome guy touching a weird looking thing only to have it shock him and then turn into another weird looking thing while making a bunch of throaty, alien, electronic noise, I’m going to take four shits and die. It’s embarrassing enough that you’re making a movie based on a shitty board game; you’re only compounding it when the event that sets the entire $200 million extravaganza in motion is a dude touching a thing.

It makes you wonder how many potentially dangerous alien artifacts there are on Earth that haven’t called down a legion of otherworldly killing machines, just because nobody’s found them and touched them yet.

So the big alien ship thing transforms and makes a giant force field which encapsulates a wide swath of ocean, all while the U.S. Navy very helpfully doesn’t shoot it, and then the camera zooms dramatically up into the stratosphere to show a top-down view of the Navy fleet and the alien fleet on opposite ends of a wide swath of water – a view that looks not unlike a game of Battleship.

In movies based on game or toy franchises, there’s usually at least a scene or two dedicated to paying lip service to fans of the original product. In Transformers, Shia LeBouf unwittingly uses lines from the old Transformers TV show theme song to woo Megan Fox. The movie Doom, based on the pioneering early 90s first person shooter of the same name, was more or less sold on the novelty of several scenes shot from the first person perspective of one of the space marines.

What the aforementioned shot suggests is that Battleship is going to have at least one scene where we watch from above as two fleets randomly fire in the general direction of one another, just to pay homage to the game. This is reinforced by the fact that some incidental dialogue after the appearance of the alien ship reveals that the Navy’s radar is offline.

This is what you can expect if you go see Battleship: A lot of shots of square jawed guys using trial and error to decide which part of the ocean to blow up next. Also, Brooklyn Decker.

Truman Capps wonders why the Navy doesn’t just use their high powered binoculars – because the two fleets don’t really seem that far apart…

In Solitary

Because this picture is funnier than some stock image or ClipArt of a guy in solitary confinement, that's why.

Sunday’s update may have given you a somewhat warped perspective of the life I lead here in Los Angeles. Yes, someone who read that update and only that update would assume that my fast paced Hollywood (rather, Culver City) lifestyle consists entirely of going to clubs, becoming nervous, being Finned* out of a lot of money for crappy booze, and then getting lost trying to walk home. Alas, the reality is not nearly that glamorous.

*Apparently, saying ‘I was gypped out of a lot of money’ is racist against gypsies. This has been brought to my attention repeatedly by various white, politically correct non-gypsies in my life. Anyway, I don’t want to offend any gypsies on the off chance that I ever meet one, so henceforth the word ‘gypped’ in my vocabulary will be replaced with ‘Finned’, which I, as a half Finnish person, am comfortable with. (Nobody else say it, though. It’s kind of ‘our word.’)

No, most of my days here in beautiful Southern California are dominated entirely by me sitting in front of my computer, sending emails to people who will, in all likelihood, not respond to me. Sometimes I take a break and eat some peanut butter, but I tend to hurry back – after all, I can’t not get responses if I’m not constantly sending out emails, right?

The bulk of this is thanks to my job hunt. Every day, I check a website called entertainmentcareers.net, where production companies post available jobs and internships and invite interested applicants to email them a resume and a cover letter.

So that’s exactly what I do – I work my way down the list of available jobs, identify the ones I think I might be interested in, and dash off a quick email with my cover letter and resume. Sending a cover letter and resume to a potential employer is a lot like falling in love: As you click ‘send’, your heart swells as you imagine the bright future you and this job might have together, until it’s two weeks later and you haven’t heard anything back, so you tell yourself that the job was probably a lesbian to preserve your self esteem and move on to the next one.

This is what my days are like. I wake up, apply for a bunch of jobs, get lonely and angry, watch an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 to center myself, and then get back on that horse in hopes that it’ll crap out a job or an internship somewhere along the way.

The Internet has made the job search so much more convenient – I’ve applied to around 30 jobs and internships in the past five days, and I don’t mind telling you that I did most of that lying in bed in my underwear without having showered.* For all that convenience, though, it’s also sort of lowered my quality of life.

*I’m in your head, ladies.

I live in Los Angeles, for God’s sake – or Culver City if you’re a stickler, but chances are I live closer to Los Angeles than most of my readers, so I’ll take some creative license here – and I’m spending my days shut up in my room in front of my computer? What is this, the previous 21 years, seven months, and three weeks of my life? Sure, it’s great that I don’t have to go out and knock on doors to get my resume out in the world, but on the other hand it’d be nice to get out and see some of the town.

Yes, I know – I could very easily go out and see the sights once I’ve sent out my applications for the day. The problem is that I’m living on a cushion of saved up (and inherited!) cash until I get a paying job, and virtually all the positions I’ve applied for are unpaid internships which, ideally, will lead to jobs in a few months. Point is, my cash flow probably won’t be positive for some time, which means that unless I find a way to start shitting $20 bills (and believe me, I’m trying really hard), I shouldn’t be spending money on anything short of rent and the occasional ten pound sack of white rice. That automatically disqualifies the sights that cost money, and also the sights that would require me to drive my car, which burns costly gasoline (another substance I wish that I could produce with my body but, so far, cannot).

So for entertainment, this leaves me with whatever is in biking distance of Culver City – which is not much, aside from Venice Beach, a location I won’t say anything more about right now because it’s very much deserving of its own blog update. There isn’t necessarily a lot going on in Culver City at 2:30 PM on a Wednesday unless you want to visit a Spanish language video store, either of our gun shops, or the local mosque.

There are a couple of parks within walking distance, though, which I make a point of going to once I’ve been inside for most of the day. My roommates work, you see, and when they come home from a hard day at work and ask what you did that day it’s very humiliating to look them in the eye and say that the closest you got to going outside was looking out the kitchen window while eating a piece of bread with some Western Family peanut butter on it.

So that’s my Hollywood life so far – wake up early, send some emails, eat peanut butter, send more emails, and then force myself to go to the park, where inevitably the only free bench is the one closest to the playground. So there I sit, alone, on a park bench facing the children, wearing Ray Bans, eyes glued to my copy of Dune out of fear that if I look up for even a second I’ll wind up having a very awkward conversation with the LAPD.

Truman Capps glossed over the fact that he’s actually got a couple of interviews coming up because it’s way funnier when he’s miserable, wouldn’t you agree?

Swingers

But no! Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is never playing in the bar, and Heather Graham is never sitting alone, just waiting to get talked to.

I’ve noticed that a recurring theme on this blog is the fact that many things civilized society does for fun are in some way excruciatingly difficult, unpleasant, and/or aggravating for me.

Think about it: Have you ever engaged in a recreational activity that involves crowds, loud noises, inadequate seating, soccer, unsanitary bathrooms, or lines, just to name a few? Chances are, were I there with you, I’d be in a quiet, contemplative state, observing and cataloguing the things I was hating about this experience in preparation for my next blog.

All the negative characteristics I described above apply in triplicate to bars, with my ultimate pet peeve, spending lots of money on stuff that should be cheap, thrown in for good measure. Somehow, though, in one of those great contradictions that presumably make this blog so interesting, I actually like bars.

Well, no – I like the idea of bars. I like the thought of a clean, well lit place, one where you can go and have a few drinks and chat with your friends. Cheers from Cheers comes to mind: A place where everybody has fun and engages in snappy dialogue and hijinx with occasional spinoffs.

If you’ve been to a bar in a big city recently, though, you probably know that my dream died long ago. Oppressively crowded, bereft of seating, music (possibly dubstep*) blasting loud enough to obliterate any chance of conversation or rational thought – this is the bar scene we have today. I mean, it’s really a shock to me that so many people hook up in bars, because it’s basically impossible to communicate in there aside from grunting, pointing, and rubbing your crotch on things.

*In case you were looking for the official Hair Guy verdict on this dubstep thing, here it is: Dubstep sucks. It aggressively, in-your-face sucks in ways that scientists had heretofore not known existed, and in five years the whole of mankind is going to be laughing at you for liking it, because you liked a thing that sucked.

I knew, moving to LA, that the delightful Taco Tuesdays my friends and I had at Taylor’s were a thing of the past. For me and my friends, going to the bar was a fun thing we did to unwind and tell jokes about porn. In LA, going to the bar is an event, one so important that it’s worthy of italics.

My roommates invited me out with them and their friends last night, and, because I like my roommates and wanted to be sociable, I went along. (In a rare burst of social media savvy, I “live Tweeted” the event on my “cellular telephone”, which you can find on my “Twitter feed” here.)

From the get go I knew this thing was fucked since Jumpstreet. We were young people going to a bar in Los Angeles, probably the trendiest, most pretentious city in the world after Portland – this is generally not a recipe for Truman having a great time.

The line for the bar snaked out the door, down the stairs, through a plaza full of closed boutique shops, and out to the street. The people in line were clad in designer jeans and Ed Hardy shirts; gel had been employed to make their hair pointier. My party waited amicably, inching closer and closer to the door to the bar – a gaping portal into an ominous, black void, punctuated by purple strobe lights and accompanied by a constant thumping beat.

Presently, my roommates disappeared. As I found out from them the next morning, they had goneto the front of the line and cozied up to some of the women there or slipped past the bouncers in order to get into the bar right away. This, apparently, is common practice on the LA bar scene. Try it at Space Mountain and you’ll get shitrocked by an overweight CPA from Terre Haute.

My roommates’ friends ultimately gave up on this bar and struck out in favor of another place down the street, and I – faced with the option of waiting in line alone to descend into my own personal Hell or go with other people to find a different personal Hell – went with them. We settled on an Irish pub called O’Brien’s, and as an ardent Team Coco member, I went in.

Everything was relatively dandy. Sure, it was crowded, but it wasn’t too noisy, and if you stood near the bar it was easy enough to get a drink without having to wait forever. I had some enlightening conversation with my roommates’ friends and had two drinks that cost a combined total of $21, because even though the liquor at stores is cheaper in California, the drinks cost more, perhaps because I’m being Punk’d or something.

By 1:00 AM, though, I decided that I was pretty wiped and wanted to go home. However, my roommates’ friends wanted to stay and my roommates – the ones who had driven me – were still in the other bar. So, thanks in part to $21 worth of alcohol, I decided that I’d just walk home.

My reasoning was this: I walked home from bars all the time in Eugene, and I knew that we were in Santa Monica, which is right next to Culver City. My reasoning was flawed because Los Angeles is somewhat larger than Eugene, and also is mostly unfamiliar to me. And as I found out, while Santa Monica is indeed right next to Culver City, that distance looks way more walkable on a map.

I marched off in what I thought was the direction of my apartment, planning to find a cross street I recognized and walk down it until I was home. Half an hour later I found myself trudging up a deserted suburban street, passing cross street I didn’t recognize after cross street I didn’t recognize.

Culver City is not a dangerous place. If you wanted to get murdered here, you’d have to call a murderer in Compton and pay him gas money to drive out here and kill you. That being said, wandering down deserted streets with no idea where I was, all I could think about was what the description of my death would look like on a serial killer’s Wikipedia page:

Stephens’ eighth victim, Truman Capps (22), had left a bar alone and gotten lost while trying to walk home. His body parts were found in the following counties…

Fearful of this outcome, I began “live Tweeting” my location every couple of blocks and left a voicemail message stating my whereabouts to a friend, just so the police would have something to work with in the event that I did get serial killed. Instead, I called a cab and a mute, humorless taxi driver picked me up and drove me home – as it turns out, I was exactly $15 away from my apartment.

I’m glad that I went out last night – I met some cool people and, equally importantly, I gave the trendy bar scene a shot rather than just avoiding it altogether based on my preconceived notions. Experience proves that my preconceived notions were correct, but hey – at least I got a blog update out of the deal.

Truman Capps considers getting lost in the suburbs to be his own personal ‘127 Hours’.

Begging And Choosing

I Google image searched 'begging' and got lots of disturbing pictures of toothless, one armed old men in Calcutta. Please enjoy this kitten instead.

If you asked me six months ago if I had a job lined up in LA, chances are I said, “Not necessarily, but I’m sure I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me four months ago, I probably said, “Not necessarily, but I’m 80% sure I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me two months ago, I most likely said, “Not necessarily, but it’s a toss up whether I can get my old job from last summer back.” If you asked me last week, I think I said, “No – and quit fucking asking, would you?”

For those of you who are new to the blog, last summer I worked at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment, a post production house for a raft of reality TV shows. Roundhouse Kick had so much content in need of editing that the office was open 24 hours – the day shift edited from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and the night shift edited from 7:00 PM to 5:00 AM.

As the new guy, I was assigned the position of night shift assistant editor on a ghost hunting show. Every week or so, the production crew would mail us their DV tapes from the ghost hunts they were doing in the Midwest. My job was to upload the footage to the servers and then spend the entire night watching hours of raw footage of ghost hunts, placing markers in the footage whenever something relevant happened, so that the actual editor could skip right to the good parts and not have to do the shit I was doing.

I quit at the end of the summer to go back to Oregon, get a journalism degree, and impress girls at Taylor’s by telling them that I’d had a career in television,* the whole time with the understanding that if I wanted the job back next summer when I returned, it would be mine.

*”Hey, I, uh… Edited a reality TV show. No, not Jersey Shore. What, that other guy you’re talking to plays sports? Shit, I can’t top that. Run along and have sex, you two.”

As I got closer to coming back down here, though, my friends at Roundhouse Kick became less and less certain that my job would be available – other people had been hired, some had been fired, and ten months is one hell of a long time to keep a job position open for someone, especially in an industry full of qualified people looking for work.

I panicked a bit, because the time that I found out that I didn’t have surefire employment in LA was roughly the same time that I put down my security deposit and first month’s rent on my apartment here. Picking up everything and moving to LA was suddenly one hell of a lot scarier when there wasn’t a job waiting for me. I mean, why go at all, otherwise?

So I started emailing other contacts and looking for work elsewhere. The search was more fruitful than I expected, and as of today I have some promising meetings set up with people for next week, not to mention a potential line on a production assistant job for an upcoming reality TV show produced by a different company. In other news, there hasn’t been a joke in two paragraphs, so here’s a funny scene from the 1980 film Caddyshack:

Out of the blue today, though, one of my Roundhouse Kick contacts called me and told me that he’d talked to the boss and there was a spot open for me – I could start tonight, if I wanted. Assistant editor credit on IMDb, on the job training in AVID editing software, $500 a week, and more free bagels in the break room than I knew what to do with.

I told him that I really appreciated the offer, but that I was going to have to decline the job.

Do you remember at the end of Spider Man, when Kirsten Dunst totally wants Toby Maguire’s sauce but he says no? It was like that, if I was him and Kirsten Dunst was Roundhouse Kick. Well, I mean, I hadn’t been in love with Roundhouse Kick Entertainment for my entire life, nor was I turning them down because I wanted to protect them from supervillains, but what’s important to remember is that in this situation, I am Spider Man.

Roundhouse Kick Entertainment was a fucking great place to work. The pay was good, the management was friendly, my coworkers kicked ass, and I can’t stress enough how great the free bagel situation was. This has nothing to do with Roundhouse Kick Entertainment – it’s not them, it’s me.

For how great of a workplace it was, though, my job was essentially video editing. I’m probably underqualified for that sort of job in FinalCut Pro, the system I just spent a year learning – when it comes to using AVID, I’d have more luck playing pickup sticks with my butt cheeks.

I was being grandfathered into a job for which I was not properly qualified, and sooner or later that would hurt the company – for all I know, there’s a hotkey command in AVID that fills all the servers with saltwater taffy, and God knows I’d probably wind up hitting it by accident and ruining all our data. (On the plus side, though – free taffy!)

I’m trying to make myself sound really gallant here, but the primary reason I said ‘No’ was because it’s just not a job I’m interested in doing. I don’t want to spend my days (or nights, as it were) glued to a computer screen, wrestling with finicky editing software. I want to live the glamorous life of a production assistant – coffee runs, getting yelled at by producers, disposing of the dead hooker in the star’s hotel room, etc. Sure, it’s all Kenneth The Page grunt work, but there’s variation to it, you meet lots of people, and better than that, it’s actually something I’m interested in with opportunities for advancement into other areas I’m interested in.

Part of me feels pretty stupid for turning down a job when I’m unemployed and living off savings. But the fact is, I came down here to do what I’ve always wanted to do – if I wanted to do something that didn’t interest me, I could’ve just as soon stayed in Portland and gotten a job as a journalist. Like I mentioned last week, now is the best time for me to fuck up and not hurt anybody but myself.

So here I go, boldly fucking up where no man has fucked up before. If worse comes to worse and I can’t get a job, at least I know I’ve got bodily fluids (and one spare kidney!) that I can sell.

Truman Capps has discovered that even a change of state still makes it hard for him to post on time.

Making Movies, On Location

As you can see, my transition to coked out LA greaseball is complete.

On Friday I went to see Mike’s band play at a bar in Old Town called the Ash Street Saloon. When I got there, a pop punk trio was up onstage – two heavily tattooed, almost certainly lesbian girls clawing away at electric guitars and a more ordinary looking male drummer who seemed almost shocked and confused about where he was and what he was doing.

The girls were screaming out a brash cover of Joan Jett’s cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ ‘Crimson and Clover.’ The crowd – a dozen or so classic punk types with mohawks, tattoos, and sleeveless leather jackets, along with one guy in black skinny jeans, tuxedo top, and a bowler hat – were listlessly swaying and flailing their arms to the music in an oh-so-cool fashion. Voodoo Doughnut was right around the corner, and some of the punks were munching on bacon maple bars.

I realize now that in a few days, when I tell people I’m from Portland, Oregon, they’re going to think that every night of my life was exactly like this.

I’ve lived in Oregon for my entire life – save for an embarrassing six year stint in Washington which we will not discuss – and all of a sudden I’ve been getting my head around the idea that for the first time ever I’m going to be living in a place where everyone around me doesn’t know who John Kitzhaber is or why this picture is laughable and makes no damn sense.

A couple of days ago I was talking on the phone to someone from LA who had never been to Oregon. We were making small talk:

“The A/C at my office went out this week, and it’s been super hot down here so we’re all dying.” She sighed.

“God, that probably sucks. Yeah, it’s been really hot in Portland all week too – I guess it’s just hot all up and down the West Coast.” I replied.

“Really?” She asked, before saying, in all seriousness: “It’s hot in Portland? I figured it’d be cool and rainy up there or something.”

And I caught myself laughing. Because pretty much everybody I talk to on a regular basis knows that Oregon is three-quarters desert, and all of them have experienced one of those terrible midsummer weeks where it’s 300 degrees in the shade and there’s more pollen in the air than air – although I knew that lots of people thought that Oregon was just trees, rain, and assisted suicide, this was my first time meeting one.

Nothing better cements the idea that you’re leaving home than the acute understanding that your home is a place that most other people have, at best, a cursory knowledge of. Most Angelinos probably know about as much about Oregon as they do about New Hampshire, and I don’t know about you, but I’d forgotten that New Hampshire existed until I wrote this sentence. Is Oregon equally forgettable?

Oregon, home of the Oregon State Fair. The checkout room. Alexander coming to school dressed as Chewbacca. Duck football. The Prom Night Disaster. Writers. The state solo contest. Getting home from LA last September and seeing my new roommates sprint out of the house to group hug me. Speech and debate championships. Cape Lookout with The Ex Girlfriend. Spanish. Yelling at the dog. Girlfriend Is Better, not. The Oregon Daily Emerald. Cleaning up dog piss. Thinking I had meningitis. Fred Meyer. My funeral party. Mice. Thinking I had appendicitis. J331. Getting lost in Beaverton. These experiences and about a billion others made up my life in Oregon, a place that I’m leaving behind in approximately twelve hours.

Mom came in as I was writing this and we had the sort of tearful, emotionally charged hug that happens when a gigantic mama’s boy is about to leave home.

“Sad, or excited?” I asked her.

“Yes.” She said.

“Yeah, me too.”

I’m sad because I’m leaving a state that scientists agree is better than all other states anywhere else – especially Idaho. I’m sad because I hate pumping my own gas. I’m sad because I’ll miss Burgerville. I’m sad because I’m leaving behind a raft of friends, family, bandmates, artists, musicians, writers, Airsoft sharpshooters, gingers, Jewish people, architects, and future presidents, among others.

If you believe nothing else I’ve ever written in my life, at least believe this: I would rather be with you people than the finest people on Earth.

I’m excited because everything that’s ever inspired or interested me in my life is common to the point of being boring in Los Angeles. I’ve wanted to write stories since I was four. I’ve wanted to write movies since I saw Fargo in eighth grade. And now I’m moving to a city built on stories and movies. Also, Christina Hendricks lives there.

If ever I’ve said a scornful thing about people who graduate from college and live in their hometown for years despite dreaming about something bigger, I apologize – this shit is hard for me on an emotional, logistical, and physical level, and I’m a white upper middle class 22 year old man with no family to support. Venturing into the world to make a name for yourself looks glamorous on paper and in Star Wars, but in reality it’s an unpleasant, awkward, and at times heartbreaking experience to start that journey.

I’m not going through all this because I’m especially tough or courageous or any more ambitious than the next person. I’m doing it because with the exception of methamphetamines or an unprotected sex tour of Sub-Saharan Africa, I’d much rather regret doing something than not doing something, and this is the one time in my life when I really have the opportunity to completely fuck this thing up and only wind up hurting myself. (I don’t plan on having that happen.)

It’s difficult to come up with an appropriately climactic ending for this, but the fact is that tonight really isn’t the end of anything, nor is it the beginning of anything else. It’s just another Sunday in America, and I look forward to talking to all of you on Wednesday.

Truman Capps directs you here.

Nike Employee Store

$10 says these cost more than my car.

After ten minutes I reached the head of the line, and a young receptionist in a grey T-shirt with ‘RUNNING SUCKS’ emblazoned across it waved me up to her desk.

“Welcome to the Nike Employee Store!” She chirped. “How can I help you?”

“Um.” I said.

Her question struck me as odd: The only way to get into the Nike Employee Store was to wait in line for a receptionist to verify that you were either a Nike employee or a guest of a Nike employee. The only help I needed was help getting into the store without being tased by security.

“My name is Truman Capps,” I ventured, handing her my driver’s license. “I’m on the guest list.”

“Great!” She chirped – and yes, I know I said chirped earlier, but this woman was chirping all over the place. As she went about processing my guest pass, she looked up and chirped, “Have you ever been to the employee store before?”

“Nope.” I said.

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, wow! Are you excited?”

And for a second, I thought she was joking, and a laugh got halfway up my throat before I saw the committed glee on her face and realized that, no, this person was dead serious. She thought that going shopping for shoes was the high point of my day. She was not aware, obviously, that I find the pursuit of shoes to be about one of the most boring and perverse endeavors in the fashion world, which I consider to be pretty damn boring and perverse to begin with.

I don’t care about shoes. If you asked me to make a list of things I cared about, shoes would beat out yoga and Puerto Rico to sit pretty at the absolute end of the list. I don’t see the point in putting a great deal of personal and financial investment in the article of clothing that, statistically speaking, runs the highest risk of getting covered in dogshit in day to day life.

So no, I was not excited to visit the Nike Employee Store. It wasn’t Conan O’Brien’s house. It wasn’t the Redding Liquor Barn. It wasn’t Build-A-Battlestar workshop. It was a big room full of shoes – goofy looking, brightly colored shoes optimized for athletes, a caste of our society to which I do not belong. Unless there was a brand of Nikes in the store that were filled with Jack Daniel’s or could make Christina Hendricks stop being married, I didn’t regard this opportunity with a particular amount of merriment.

But, since I didn’t want to be a dick to the nice lady, I said, “Yeah! Sure!”

A friend of my parents’ worked at Nike for long enough to retain her Employee Store privileges after she retired, meaning she could still get her non-former employee friends into the store, giving them access to essentially a warehouse full of discount top of the line sporting apparel. She offered me a guest pass so I could pick up some good shoes before my departure, and I took it, because as much as I hate it, I do need shoes, if only to provide a buffer from the sun baked, dirty needle laden streets of Los Angeles.

It mystifies me that one of my roommates had between half a dozen and a dozen pairs of Nikes. My philosophy on shoe shopping is this: Your old shoes have fallen apart, so you go to the mall, find the cheapest pair of sneakers you can, pay for them, and then leave the store, because you now have a new pair of shoes and mercifully don’t have to waste any more of your life thinking about shoes.

My current shoe shopping landspeed record* is six minutes from the time I walked into the store to when I walked out with a $45 pair of white New Balance sneakers, which all of my friends told me looked like the sort of thing their grandparents wore when they went mallwalking.

*Depending on your definition of ‘shoe shopping’, I shattered my own record when I wrote one of my roommates a check for a pair of his Nikes when the New Balance wore out and I didn’t want to go to the mall.

At the Nike store, though, I made a point of trying to study on every shoe very carefully and think my purchases through. Some of this was because I was trying to lay in a supply of good sneakers for the foreseeable future in hopes of not having to buy shoes with sales tax in California, and some of it was because I was aware that passage into the Nike Employee Store was somehow akin to being allowed to roam around that warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, as such, was not to be taken lightly.

This just in: Most Nikes look pretty fucking terrible on me. I have clownishly large feet; I’d rather not draw attention to them with lime green accents or neon laces. I don’t want to make a bold fashion statement with my shoes – I want them to be just good enough so that they’re not noticeably bad, but not noticeably good, either. I want my shoes to be as inconspicuous as possible, so people don’t notice my shoes and assume that I’m the sort of guy who cares enough about shoes to put a great deal of time and energy into picking trendy ones that look super cool.

Eventually, though, I settled on two pairs of shoes that I felt worked for me. On my way to the cash register with them, I glanced at the price tags out of morbid curiosity and just about puked – one of the pairs cost $60, the other one cost $85. Flight of the Conchords materialized in my head:

They’re turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers,
But what’s the real cost?
‘cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper…

Not only had these shoes been manufactured by Indonesian toddlers, as is the Nike way, but I was getting them at the lowest price humanly possible – and all this in the same week that I’d spent three figures on fucking sunglasses. I’ve already become a name brand wearing, spendthrift LA doucheburger and I’m not even there yet.

Gazing sullenly at the price stickers on my shoes while waiting in the checkout line, I noticed something else. Off to the side of the sticker, in small print, was the suggested price for each shoe. The suggested retail price for the $60 sneakers was $130; the price for the $85 shoes was $180.

Does that make me feel better about spending what I did on those shoes? No. Honestly, it makes me feel worse about mankind to know that people in this world spend $180 on goddamn shoes.

Truman Capps hopes to counteract any douche-cred he’s earned with recent purchases by continuing to drive The Mystery Wagon.

Shades Guy

If this picture doesn't make you want to put on a pair of sunglasses, you're a goddamn Communist.

As I’ve mentioned before, if there’s one thing I really hate that isn’t soccer or Washington, it’s spending money. God only knows why – at the moment I’m sitting relatively pretty between what I made in the checkout room, graduation gift checks, and some inheritance.

Maybe it’s because I’m not 100% certain about my employment in LA just yet. Every time I spend any amount of money, I see a brief flash of myself broke and destitute, starving to death on the streets of LA. ”If only… I had… Eight… More… Dollars… I wish… I hadn’t… Gone… To Chipotle… On July 3rd 2011…”

That is the one exception that I make: Food. I’m more than willing to spend my money on food, because I genuinely consider myself something of a foodie. Plus, spending money at a restaurant gets you real estate in addition to food; you paid good money for that table, so you’re entitled to sit there as long as you damn well please and enjoy the atmosphere. This is a great way to get waiters to hate you.

Anything else, though, and I’m inclined to save, save, save. I wear a $19 watch from Walmart, I buy bulk socks at Costco, and I don’t have a smartphone. In fact, I’d say my phone – which barely takes low res pictures and doesn’t have a customizable background – would qualify for the short bus, were there such a thing for phones. This same spirit applies to my sunglasses.

I heard today that Oregonians buy sunglasses more frequently than anyone in the country, because every year we buy a pair for when it gets hot and sunny, then promptly lose them two weeks later when the monsoon season restarts and then go through the same process again the following year. Part of the reason it’s so funny is because it’s true.

Every summer when my participation in nerdy outdoor activities made eye protection necessary, I would search up and down for last year’s pair of sunglasses, not find them, and then head on down to Safeway wherein I would immediately grab the cheapest pair within reach and call it good. This was how I wound up spending three months wearing official NASCAR shades with little skulls on the frames.

This shit will not fly in LA. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, it is located in a desert next to a beach, so there’s a fair amount of sunlight. Also, many buildings are white or tope, which is probably meant to reflect heat from the interior but also does a bang up job of reflecting light into everyone’s eyes. The Walt Disney Concert Hall was either built by a sadist or somebody who was fucking an optometrist, because the entire building is made of chrome, and to stand within three blocks of it is like having somebody shine a Maglite in your face.

Under these circumstances, virtually everyone in the city wears sunglasses. Celebrities, poor people, Gary Busey, cops, rabbis, the blind – hell, even the marching band at the school that isn’t going to a bowl game this season wears them. It’s as much a part of the city’s culture as the film industry or breast implants.

Breast implants would be of little practical use to me, though, so instead I recently decided that I needed to get a really good pair of sunglasses – a pair that I would not lose. Spending a lot of money on sunglasses in Oregon is really kind of stupid because you never need them for very long; on the other hand, the weather here necessitates a high quality parka, and people spend accordingly. Good sunglasses are the LA equivalent of a good parka – the only difference is that nobody has ever looked cool in a parka.

A lot of sunglasses on the market today are targeted at people who want to give the impression of being athletic, outdoorsy men on the go. Naturally, these shades would look about as natural on me as breast implants, so I’ve stayed well away.

The only kind of sunglasses that I think ‘work’ for me are Ray Ban Wayfarers. While Oakleys say, ‘Yeah, bro, sun’s pretty bright up at the top of this mountain I’m about to BASE jump off of’, Wayfarers say, ‘I put these on because I wanted to drink Jack Daniels in the sun but it’s too fucking bright out here, goddamn it.’ This is a problem that I often have, which is why today I went to Sunglass Hut and bought a pair of Ray Bans.

A basic pair of Wayfarers cost $169. That is a lot of money for anyone, and especially a lot of money for me – I might spend $170 on the greatest meal of my life, but I’m pretty sure Ray Bans aren’t edible. Actually, hang on a second.

Yes, Ray Bans are definitely inedible. Moving on!

In this case, the logical course of action for me would be to get a pair of knockoffs; given how popular the Wayfarer look is, there are $25 knockoffs available just about everywhere. My roommates had several pairs of Ray Ban knockoffs with the 76 logo on them that they picked up at the Pac-10 championship.

There are two reasons I conquered my stinginess and shelled out the big bucks for a pair of authentic Ray Bans:

1) I probably would’ve felt roughly the same amount of guilt spending $20 on some shitty Ray Ban knockoffs with faulty UV protection as I do for spending $170 on the genuine article – the difference is that at least for the amount of money and guilt I’ve invested in my Ray Bans, I know I’ve got something good.

2) I am well aware that Ray Ban Wayfarers are the de facto shades of hipsters everywhere. The thing is, most hipsters I’ve seen wear knockoffs: Um, these aren’t Ray Bans. They’re English Laundry. Ray Bans are so over, Truman. I’m wearing an immensely popular name brand that I only recently got interested in because I saw other people wearing them. If you think that makes me a hipster, then we need to consult UrbanDictionary.

Truman Capps will commit seppuku if he loses these fucking shades.

Going Away Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Because 'Leaving In The Mystery Wagon' was a shitty song.

You will no doubt be shocked to find out that I’m moving to Los Angeles in 12 days. Yes, I know, this comes out of left field – up until now I’ve made no mention of it, and I’m sure the news is completely blindsiding you. In the future, I’ll try and find a more eloquent way to let people know what’s going on, perhaps by making an endless parade of blog updates about every facet of my preparations for the upcoming trip, continuing long after everyone has quit caring. Obviously, though, that is not the case right now, and for that I apologize.

Right. Well, anyway…

This is the last long stretch of time I’ll be spending in Oregon for the foreseeable future, and as a result I’ve been trying to put it to good use seeing friends and classmates before I leave. To that end, I just recently took a four-day stroll down Memory Lane in Salem, and, like most lanes, streets, and boulevards in Salem, it was lined with shuttered businesses and meth addicts asking for spare change. (Some friends from high school were in there, too.)

It was great to see the Salem people who I’d missed, but at the end of each of our little reunions – and, really, most meetings I’ve had with friends since graduation – there was always an awkward moment that played out something like this:

Classmate: “So… Am I ever going to see you again?”
Me: “Oh… Yeah, sure! I’ll be in and out. Christmas. You know how it is.”

It’s difficult to stand in an Applebee’s parking lot and predict the future with any degree of certainty, unless you’re trying to predict whether you’re going to go to Applebee’s again in your life, in which case the answer is clearly ‘No.’ Moreover, having someone flat out ask you if this is the last time they’ll see you is unnerving under all conditions.

Will I see you again? I can say with a lot of certainty that I would like to see you again, yes – I’m thankful to have as many great friends as I do, both because of their endless support and because they serve as something of a forge in which the inspiration for new blog updates is created, giving me raw material which I can take back to my computer and smelt into comedy, sort of like I’m doing now.

But the hard answer that I’m reluctant to give in public – and that I feel like a douchetruck for saying on my blog, even – is that in many cases, the answer might be ‘probably not.’

I don’t say that out of any sort of malice or lack of interest or desire to break with my old Oregon connections as I start my new life – I say it because if I learned one thing while failing to produce an independent film this past term, it’s that logistics and coordinating people is a bitch when everybody lives in the same city over a long period of time. When you’re dealing with geographically disparate friends for a weeklong period on and around the single biggest family holiday in the Western hemisphere, it’s about as easy as chopping down a tree with your wang.

I know this to be true, and I like to think of myself as a somewhat straightforward person, but when one of your friends asks if they’re ever going to see you again, you’ve got to be a ‘David Caruso in Jade’ quality asshole to look them dead in the face and say, “No.”

Really, the proper reply is “I don’t know” – because I don’t. Maybe we’ll both be in the same place at the same time and we’ll be able to make something happen. Or maybe I’ll be with my family and you’ll be at church or in Michigan or whatever other people do for Christmas.

“I don’t know” is the most truthful answer, but it still sounds like a purposefully indifferent David Caruso response to a friend who’s concerned that this is your last face-to-face meeting. “I guess time will tell” might work a little better, but only so long as you’re not standing near the body of somebody who was murdered with a clock, in which case you’ve once again strayed into Caruso territory.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

In a few days I’m going to a wedding that will be attended by virtually my entire social circle from the past four years and will undoubtedly be the last time I see a lot of them. I’m still trying to figure out how emotional that experience is going to be – the presence of alcohol will definitely influence the outcome, as will the ever-tantalizing opportunity to steal attention from the bride and groom on the most important day of their lives.

When I watched the (fantastic) episode of The Office where Michael leaves Dunder Mifflin, I thought it was a typically stupid Michael Scott decision for him to secretly leave the day before his going away party. Now, though, I kind of get it. Saying goodbye is exhausting. Sneaking out the backdoor, though, is the coward’s way out, and even David Caruso in Jade wouldn’t do that.

Truman Capps is sure that David Caruso is probably a very friendly guy in real life, but his career sure does a great job of making him look like a cock.

Fireworks

I did not see Katy Perry on the shelves at the fireworks store, and I was understandably disappointed.

Alexander pulled up outside my house in Portland an hour before he’d said he would and bounded up to the doorstep with Brent and his sister Olivia in tow. Once I’d let him in and we’d dispensed with the bro grabs, he stuck his hands in his pockets and said, “So, we’re gonna hit Voodoo Doughnuts and then head to Vancouver and buy some illegal fireworks. You in?”

As I mentioned, Alexander had arrived an hour early – but I should’ve been ready for this. Having known Alexander for ten years now I’ve become accustomed to his scattershot approach to punctuality: He may be there an hour early because he was bored, or three hours late because he forgot what day it was.

But I wasn’t ready, meaning I hadn’t had a chance to shower or change out of yesterday’s clothes. And normally I’m pretty stringent about being clean and shaven with my hair freshly gelled before I leave the house to go about any errands, but I figured that given the clientele at Voodoo Doughnuts and Washington parking lot fireworks markets I could probably go with a dead skunk tied around my neck and still be one of the classier people they’d seen that day.

Oregon law prohibits any firework that travels more than six feet along the ground or twelve inches into the air; these fireworks are commonly known as, “The Only Good Ones.” Thanks to this law, there are massive tents in supermarket parking lots in the early summer that only sell snakes, party poppers, and fifteen different varieties of sparklers. Those are inadequate supplies to celebrate the birthday of the country that invented injectable butter.

Fortunately, as far as fireworks are concerned, Washington is about as lawless and deregulated as Somalia or Wall Street, so any Oregonians looking to celebrate the Fourth the right way need only drive up to Vancouver and reap the harvest of lax pyrotechnic legislation.

We arrived at a fireworks tent literally within view of the Interstate Bridge and immediately deferred to Alexander to figure out which fireworks to buy. Alexander is in the Army; moreover, he’s a mortarman in the Army, so if anybody was going to be dictating the explosives with which we endangered our lives, it ought to be him.

Alexander strode through the tent with cold, ruthless efficiency, grabbing boxes of fireworks off the shelves and tossing them to me or Brent to carry while he sought out new purchases. I was struggling under an armload of buy one, get one free roman candles when Alexander came to a stop in front of a tall, flashy package with a cellophane window in the front showing off a twelve inch tall mortar tube.

‘THE DESTROYER’ was emblazoned across the front of the black package in the sort of big, macho letters that you could imagine smoking cigarettes in the bathroom during letter middle school and fucking other letters’ girlfriends when they were bored.

“Oh, yeah.” A passing salesman said when he saw Alexander standing, entranced, before the Destroyers. “That’s probably the best thing we’re selling. Loud as hell.”

Immediately, Alexander reached out and grabbed one of the boxes – which, I should add, were clearly labeled as costing $80 apiece – tucked it under his arm, and then grabbed a second Destroyer, presumably to keep the first company, before heading for the cashier.

“Wait, Alexander!” Brent caught up to him, looking incredulous. “Why the hell do you need two of those things? You realize you’re spending $160, right?”

Alexander shoved the Destroyers off to his sister and took Brent by the shoulders.

“Brent,” he said, emphatically. “The time for bullshit is over. I’m buying these.”

That night we were back in Oregon, way out in the boonies of Marion County where Alexander lived, with nearly $200 worth of very high profile contraband. As Alexander set up the mortar tube, I was worried.

Part of this is because I tend to get a little worried when anybody - especially Alexander – lights something filled with gunpowder on fire. I am convinced that if not for the Fourth of July and its penchant for putting high explosives in the hands of unlicensed and unsober people on a yearly basis, there would be probably twice as many Americans as there are today. The celebration of our country’s independence is also its primary method of population control.

And then there were the legal concerns. It’s illegal to smoke marijuana or drink before you’re 21, but the benefit of those illegal activities is that you can be discreet about them in order to avoid getting your shit arrested. Fireworks, by their very nature, are meant to be loud and draw attention – you can’t pull all the blinds and set off fireworks in the privacy of your own home; if you do, I imagine you’ll very quickly have bigger problems than police attention.

Alexander lit the fuse on the first charge and bounded away, throwing himself to the ground in an Army roll once he got to the minimum safe distance. I got behind Brent, crouched, and covered my ears.

The charge blasted out of the mortar with a thumping PHWOOMPH noise and sailed up into the sky, leaving a coiling trail of twinkling yellow sparks. Watching the small red orb sail upwards, I thought, Hey. This isn’t so bad. It doesn’t seem very dangerous, and I don’t think anybody’s going to call the poli-

And then the orb exploded into a thousand smaller ones, exactly like the professional grade fireworks you see on TV, with a blast so loud that it honestly felt like we were getting punched in the head by sound itself. The echoes of the explosion rumbled up and down the valley like thunderclaps until long after the sparks from the firework had died out.

Holy Christ. I thought. Somehow, we got a hold of the shit they set off at Disneyland. Every cop for 30 miles probably heard that. There’s no way we can set off another-

Alexander went barreling back to the mortar tube, hooting and laughing, and dropped in another charge. “Again! Again! FIRE IN THE HOLE!”

He lit the charge and we all took cover, knowing now just how insanely overpowered this firework was. Ears covered, eyes locked on the mortar, we watched as the flame burned its way up the fuse and into the tube.

And for four very long seconds, nothing happened.

Alexander stood up. “I think that one was a dud.”

And then, the firework exploded in the mortar tube.

You know what fireworks look like when they blow up? It was like this:

…only it was at ground level, 20 feet away from me.

Amid the shower of colorful sparks, I could just see Alexander diving face first onto the ground, head covered, before I did the same. Green streamers cut corkscrew patterns through the air mere feet above our heads. Fireballs landed on the green, mostly inflammable grass and smoldered out, contributing to a haze that filled the backyard.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I get pretty tired of fireworks shows pretty quick. Whenever we watch the Fourth of July display that they set off at Oaks Park, I usually get bored and want to go home about a minute into the 20 minute show.

The problem is that you’re dealing in an art form which consists of shooting shit into the sky and having it blow up into massive, colorful shrapnel. It’s very difficult to top that, short of having it happen again in a different color, and as a result it gets repetitive quick.

The excitement of buying one’s own fireworks, in my eyes, comes not from watching your purchase blow up in the sky, but rather the more ominous questions surrounding what you’re doing. Did those sparks just land on the neighbor’s roof? Did I just hear a siren? Is this going to be the last night of my life?

When I walk away from an evening of shooting off illegal fireworks, I’m just exhilarated to be alive, not in jail, and not rapidly trying to think up an excuse for why everything around me is on fire. Fireworks are like Tyler Durden in a cheap Chinese package – they’ll make you appreciate your life (and all ten of your fingers) damn quick.

After the charge exploded in the tube, we all got to our feet, miraculously unscathed, and went to examine the mortar. It was half burned to hell and we had to empty the old charge out of it, but it’d retained its shape just fine and still pointed straight upwards. This was evidently enough for Alexander.

“Again! Again!” He shouted, diving back into the box for a new charge. “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”

Truman Capps shouldn’t shit talk Alexander’s punctuality when he keeps updating late like this.

Jack & Diane

I'm kind of all over the board with power ballads right now. Just read the blog update.

If I had to rank the things that graduates of my high school were good at, it’d look something like this:

4) Going to Tonga to convince people to become Mormons
3) Getting into a hoity-toity East Coast school
2) Growing/selling/smoking marijuana
1) Getting married

Now, of course, my rankings may be skewed by the people on my Facebook friends list, but in spite of all the nerd cred I repped in last week’s update, I’m Facebook friends with a wide range of people from my high school, and for every one of them who is selling weed to high schoolers, there’s at least two who have up and gotten married since graduation.

I usually find out about these weddings in one of two ways: Either Facebook proudly announces that the happy couple has been married, accompanied by pictures of the two of them clutching onto one another for dear life, or I see an update in my newsfeed from some name I don’t recognize.

“Mary Rubinowitz started playing CafeMafia?” I’ll say to my computer. “Who the hell is Mary Rubinowitz?” Then, upon further investigation, I figure it out. “Oh – it was Mary Anderson. She married Steve Rubinowitz two weeks ago. They already have 15 kids and a minivan.” And then I go back to eating Chef Boyardee out of the pot that I cooked it in because we don’t have any more clean bowls.

Marriage to me is a lot like home burglary or soccer fandom: It’s one of those scary things that always happens to ‘other people’, and when it strikes within your circle of friends you’re completely blindsided by it. It could happen to you too! Lock your doors! Don’t like the same sports as people from Europe! And above all, don’t ever grow emotionally close to anyone!

It’s always struck me as one of those traditionally adult activities that you begrudgingly do later in life, not unlike a colorectal exam. Picking one person who you’ll ideally spend the rest of your life with seems like such a monumentally important decision that I’m shocked anybody can make that kind of decision without a solid few decades’ worth of life experience.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a girl in the band who’d been awkwardly flirting with me invited my main bro Alexander and I to go to the Oregon State Fair with her and her friends – because that’s what you do when you live in Salem and it’s August.

Alexander and I went to the fair with them, but they seemed wholly uninterested in talking to or even looking at us; this is presumably because Alexander and I were a couple of codependent nerds who spent most of our time making highly obscure in-jokes about The Fifth Element and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Of course, any idiot would’ve known that from the get-go, so why bother inviting us in the first place?

Within an hour, the girls ditched us by the 4H pavilion, and, bemused and rejected, we spent the rest of the afternoon making fun of barnyard animals.*

*At one point, a cow we were looking at unleashed this neverending geyser of piss, and Alexander started pumping his fist and chanting, ”Go! Go! Go!”, and all the farmers were giving us dirty looks, and it was fantastic.

Shortly after graduation, that girl moved to a barely-inhabitable Southern state and got married to some guy there, and is now raising his toddler son from a previous marriage. Every morning she wakes up and sees her husband off to work, takes care of a young child, cooks dinner, makes pancakes on weekends… You know. Mom stuff. Earlier tonight, Alexander called to tell me he and his friends were going to WinCo to buy 300 sparklers so they could make a bomb and blow shit up in his backyard.

These are the sorts of things I think about when I see that yet another of my graduating class has found him or herself a spouse. Are they more or less mature? Lucky or unlucky? Was there a point at which they decided that they’d had enough of their freewheeling, responsibility-free 20s and wanted to jump right into an institution so classically nerve wracking that mankind has no recourse but to crank out terrible sitcom after terrible sitcom about it?

Usually my first reaction to finding these wedding announcements is a bit on the scornful side – I look down my nose at my Facebook newsfeed and think up something snide about how my high school cranked out a bunch of people who are in just too big of a hurry to grow up, and then go back to watching the video of the penguin farting in the other penguin’s face.

But that’s kind of hypocritical, because one of my absolute best friends from college is married and I’ve got no problem with that at all – the only difference is I know that he and his wife are one of those high school power couples who really love each other, and also appreciate the lucrative financial aid situation offered to married people.

Hell, the only reason I’m staying in Oregon as long as I am is because I want to go to another friend’s wedding in mid-July, and I’m totally thrilled that they’re getting married. If there wasn’t a free meal involved I’d probably downgrade my emotion to ‘approval,’ but that still beats my gut reaction to the nuptials of my graduating class.

Maybe it’s actually the opposite of what I said earlier – maybe marriage is something that I only expect to happen to my people, in a way. It makes sense when my friends get married to their significant others because I’ve seen them together, I talk to them a lot, and I can tell that it’s two people who know what they’re doing.

It’s different when it happens to obscure acquaintances I haven’t seen since high school, because I tend to assume that they haven’t changed in the slightest since then. I can’t get my head around that girl playing house in the Deep South because my last memory of her is her and her friends giving Alexander and I the slip in a large hot tent that smelled like manure. Some mother she’d make. Because I have no new picture of these people in my head as they are today, I’m imagining a bunch of hormonal, catty 18 year olds traipsing down the aisle together, and that’s probably not true for at least 20 percent of them.

Hey, and in other news, how about that gay marriage thing in New York? About time the government quits sticking its nose in peoples’ personal lives and minds its own damn business.

Truman Capps is just as shocked as you are that he keeps updating late when he’s living at home with no job.

Shirt Guy

Hey, that shirt's pretty funny. I should totally buy- Wait, shit.

The only time in my life that I have ever cared about fashion was for a few months in 1994, when some enterprising footwear company debuted a line of childrens’ sneakers that had a small reservoir of blue and black goop enclosed under a clear plastic window at the toe, and when you pressed it, the goop would swirl around in there and change colors.

The commercial was great – a bunch of kids are hanging out and having fun in the 90s, perhaps enjoying the powerhouse economy or planning to get on a plane while drinking a soda purchased elsewhere. Suddenly, an alien in a spaceship comes down and, in the process of meeting these awesome 90s kids, spills some sort of high tech alien goop on the toes of their shoes. The kids then touch the shoe-goop, and it changes color from blue to black.*

*This commercial was later remade as the movie Avatar.

The kids react with glee – between first contact with advanced shoe-enhancing beings from another world and the fact that it was still the 90s, this was probably the best day ever.

The combination of weird goopy chemicals and the opportunity to integrate science fiction into my daily life proved too much, and right away I began badgering Mom to get me a pair. Money was on the tighter side at the time and I didn’t get a lot of the brand new shit I wanted, but I damn well got the alien goop shoes – I think it was mostly because Mom was so shocked that I was expressing any interest whatsoever in clothes, of all things.

Since then, though, I haven’t given-

What, you want to know the ending of the alien goop shoes story? Okay.

I wore the alien goop shoes to school for a while, and at first the other kids were all really interested and all ran up to me and wanted to press on my toes (acceptance at last!) before losing interest a week later when some smelly kid from the sticks wet himself during PE and became the next most interesting thing.

Yeah, I know. Sort of anticlimax. That’s why I wanted to move on.

Since then, though, I haven’t given two shits – nay, even one shit - about clothes or fashion. I have no idea which colors should be worn together or what pants will make me look gay, although I’m inclined to say ‘all of them.’

Part of my problem is that during my formative fashion years I sort of lived in isolation among nerds. Out of my core group of friends, I was the only person who didn’t come to class dressed as either an anime character or Chewbacca at some point in high school*, and pretty much everybody else in my social circle wore T-shirts from Goodwill and fifteen year old jeans.

*I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that even though my friends liked it, if I had the opportunity I would throw everything even remotely pertaining to anime into a volcano, and then take a dump in the volcano.

It was a fashion vacuum. All of my friends dressed the way I did or worse, so I assumed that my style of dress was normal and never really developed a fashion sense. (This vacuum applied to other things – I was also completely unaware that anybody at my high school was having sex, because, believe it or not, the heavily Mormon infused marching band and debate team crowd wasn’t quite the casual fuckfest that you might expect.)

What my lack of interest in fashion led to was the proliferation of my wardrobe as it exists today – pants of differing lengths and a wide array of T-shirts. I don’t deviate from this pattern because I know that, while it’s not high fashion, it also isn’t cause for overwhelming mockery. Any attempt to mix it up would be a blind stab; I have literally no idea what the verdict is on blazers with jeans right now, but I’d care not to find out firsthand.

The problem with a T-shirt based wardrobe is that T-shirts are generally a vehicle for graphics or phrases, which, in many cases, will turn out to be ironic or otherwise pithy.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

I began accumulating ironic T-shirts when I was in high school – at the time I didn’t see anything wrong with wearing them because I thought they were funny and, as you will remember from earlier, I was under the impression that nobody at my high school was getting laid anyway.

Over the past few years, though, it’s come to my attention that ironic slogan T-shirts are more the purview of rotund men in their late 30s with ponytails and cell phone holsters* than that of the cool, funny, well adjusted men I hope to one day slightly resemble.

*My father is a slim, distinguished, fashionable guy who also happens to have a cell phone holster, and I’d like to make it clear that I am in no way mocking him. Your cell phone looks quite comfortable, holstered there on your hip. Right above your giant, mostly empty pocket.

So, sometime in the next three weeks, I’m going to dive headfirst into the perfect storm of things I hate – 1) Shopping for 2) clothes, that are 3) trendy, at least by my standards. This will also require 4) research about 2) clothes on 5) fashion websites so that I can know where best to 6) spend my money.
I don’t know that the clothes necessarily make the man, but in my experience they definitely can make the man look like a flaming idiot, which, as always, is what I’m trying to avoid.

Truman Capps is so wary of polo shirts.

In The Middle

Yeah, still waiting for THIS to happen...

Ten days ago I walked across a stage wearing a green bathrobe, shook hands with a guy I’d never met, and got handed a leather carrying case with a University of Oregon Alumni Association advertisement inside it. This process was somehow meant to signify that I was now officially smarter, as certified by the Oregon University System, but the entire time I kept expecting Ashton Kutcher to pop out of nowhere with a camera crew.

”You just got Punk’d! Oh, man, we got you so good! You didn’t think that was what graduation was actually like, did you? Man, you’re an idiot!”

(I have never in my life watched an episode of Punk’d. All I know is that there are cruel pranks and Ashton Kutcher is involved, so please forgive me if I screwed up all the details besides those two.)

Also, I carefully guarded against any sense of accomplishment or finality, because I had some very serious and well-founded doubts about whether I had actually passed my last class or not. Attentive readers will remember that my last class was a 100 level geology lecture that was also the only class I was taking.

You would think that only having one rudimentary class to concentrate on would be a piece of cake, but in my case, that piece of cake wound up being really unpleasant and difficult to eat – like a cake made of rocks, or one of those cardboard cakes with a stripper inside, only the stripper has been dead for a few days.

What I discovered was that when taking 16 credits, the sheer amount of stress forces you to muster work ethic to finish the work for all your hard classes, and then momentum alone carries you through the work for your easy gen ed classes. When taking four credits, though, school becomes a very small and inconsequential part of your day-to-day life.

While it may be no sweat to read 11 pages about the fossil record after a day of editing video footage and transcribing interviews, when the only thing you have to do in a given day is read 11 pages about the fossil record, it’s way easier to blow that one obligation off and get drunk in the backyard with your roommates.

So when I stood around sweltering in my expensive, ugly bathrobe, I was facing the very real possibility that I might have to be one of those sad, unfortunate souls who still has classes to take after walking at graduation.

Somehow, though, I pulled it off – I scored a C- in geology, which, because I’d taken the class Pass/No Pass, went onto my transcript as a big, friendly P. Just today I received a congratulatory email from the dean of the journalism school; I’m not sure if he was aware when he wrote the email that I’d achieved the ‘momentous milestone’ he was congratulating me on by eking out a passing grade in a 100 level class with only four percentage points between me and a summer geology course at West Los Angeles Community College.

So now I’m a college graduate with a degree in a dying industry in which I have no interest, living at home with his parents for a couple weeks until moving to a brand new city where he’s 80% sure there’s a job waiting.

Right now, though, I’m in the middle, and when I say the middle I want you to think about the Jimmy Eat World song ‘The Middle’, not the hit or miss sitcom The Middle which consists largely of jokes about Indiana.

I’ve left the boozy, mouse infested world of higher education and am bound for the boozy, douche infested world of entertainment, but right now I can’t really lay claim to either one. In between college and real life, it seems, there is a boring month at home where you spend a lot of time checking email and putting off unpacking, culling, and repacking your possessions for the eventual move.

This, in turn, makes for pretty lousy blog updates. That’s why this one was so late – I had to choose between writing about college reflections or something about anticipating the move to Los Angeles, but four out of my last six updates have been about those subjects, and I’m a firm believer in the idea that everything you find interesting is at least 85% less interesting to everybody else.*

*And now all of you who invited me to see your band play know why I never went.

You’ve probably quit paying attention to this update if you’re even still reading my blog. Poop. Monkeybutt. Anybody out there?

But, like Jimmy Eat World said, it just takes some time, something-something-something-something, in the middle, something-something… You get the idea. I’m cooling my heels, (kind of) packing my bags, and very purposefully not spending money in preparation for the next big stage of my life, and as we get closer to the day that I leave Oregon* there will probably be a sharp increase in the amount of nostalgic bullshit you’ve already been putting up with.

*I leave on July 18th. Everyone else who asks me will be redirected to this update.

2011 is just a nostalgic year, I guess. The end of my marching band career, the end of my college career, the end of my Oregon career, and the beginning of my Southern California career. I promise to try and get us through this with the bare minimum of sentimentality, if any at all.

Truman Capps just needs to go out and get in a high speed police chase just so he has something to write about on Sunday.

Overflow

It's only a slapstick comedy prop until you need one, at which point it's a godsend.

There is absolutely no greater panic in suburban life than when the toilet, finally fed up with your shit (literally), starts backing up.

When it happened to me a few days ago, I tried to talk my way through the situation, which quickly turned into me trying to convince the toilet to stop backing up, first through diplomacy, then through threats and profanity, the pitch of my voice rising as fast as the water level in the bowl.

“Oh, fuck me, no, toilet! Don’t do that! That’s the opposite of what I want you to do! The water is supposed to go down, not up! Look, just stop! If you stop now you won’t get anything on the floor, and we’ll just call it good. No hard feelings! What- No! God fucking damn it, it’s all over the floor now! What the hell, toilet? I thought we were friends! Why are you doing this – do you think you’re better than me or something? You think you’re too good for my bodily functions? Fuck you, toilet! I don’t need you! I can crap outside! Oh, fuck it, my shoes! Shitting cockfucks!”

But really, what else can you do? We sort of take for granted the idea that the toilet is the one place in the house that we can put things we never want to see again – from body waste to dead spiders to as much cocaine as possible before the FBI breaks down the door. I never really considered that the toilet might spontaneously decide to bring all these unwanted items back up, because the thought of a human excrement geyser in your house about eight feet away from your toothbrush is one of those things so horrible you try not to think about it until you have to.

So I was watching the water rise, yelling at my toilet, wracking my brain in search of a solution. All I could come up with was ‘Call a plumber’, because that’s The Thing You Do when the toilet breaks, just like rolling on the ground is the go to solution for catching on fire and calling 911 is the thing to do when a hobo attacks your front door.

Of course, calling a plumber is really sort of a long term solution, and by my own estimate I had about four seconds to convince the toilet to quit backing up before I had to make Sophie’s Choice regarding which of my bath towels I was going to sacrifice to the cleanup effort.

It just doesn’t seem right. When your lamp breaks, it doesn’t shine uncomfortably bright – it just quits illuminating the room. When your car breaks, it doesn’t automatically drive off a bridge into the river and lock all its doors – it just refuses to turn on or go anywhere. But when your toilet breaks, rather than simply not flushing it actually reverses itself and promptly creates more problems. Now not only do you have a broken toilet, but you’ve got to clean and disinfect your floor.

I had a vague recollection of a time a couple years ago when something similar to this had happened at a friend’s apartment, and while we dithered and yelped in confusion her roommate shoved past us, leapt into the line of fire, and heroically turned a small knob behind the toilet tank, which, as she later explained to us, shut off the water flow to the toilet and prevented outright disaster.

I called up that little memory an instant before doomsday, and a moment later I was bent over the toilet, my chin less than six inches from the rising water, my hand wrapped around the knob set in the wall behind the tank. I made an executive decision and started twisting it to the right as hard as I could.

“Righty-tighty!” I whimpered, a waterfall cascading down the side of the porcelean. “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey! RIGHTY-TIGHTY LEFTY LOOSEY!”

Whether the toilet quit overflowing because of my cranking or because it had grown tired of the game, I’ll never know. What’s important is that it did stop – but not before coating the floor with water.

I threw some towels down and called Dad at work.

“Hey Dad,” I said. “Have we got a toilet plunger at the house?” I did my best to sound nonchalant, as though I wanted a toilet plunger for some innocuous, non-plunging oriented task, or perhaps because I was just making an alphabetical list of all the things that we had in the house and had just reached ‘P.’

“Yeah. There’s one in the garage, by the refrigerator.”

“Great! Cool. So that’s… Where that is.” I was hoping to wrap up the conversation quickly lest he question me and find out that even with a bachelor’s degree I still can’t be left alone in the house without fucking something up. “Garage it is, then.”

“Yes.” He was silent for a moment, choosing his next words. “…is there a problem, Truman?”

“Uh,” I muttered, looking over my shoulder and seeing that a trail of water had escaped one of the towels and was working its way across the tile toward the carpet. “No. Well, yes. But it’s nothing I can’t handle. I mean, I’m handling it now, as we speak. The plunger will help me handle it.”

“Great.” My Dad said, probably while shaking his head. “I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

I went to the basement and fetched the plunger – a plastic, accordion looking affair – and then returned to the toilet, which had mostly drained by now. I set to work plunging, but the rigid plastic plunger didn’t seal right and didn’t so much plunge the toilet as it created massive, frothy air bubbles that splattered more toilet water onto the floor, which was just what I needed at that point.

Dad returned a few hours later, produced a far superior rubber plunger from elsewhere in the garage, and had the toilet running smoothly again after only two solid plungings.

What’s the moral of this story? One, happy Father’s Day. Two, toilets, like the environment, are systems of incredible power that we should not take for granted lest they rise up and destroy us.

Truman Capps is happy to know he can always rely on his old friend potty humor for a few laughs.