A Place Called Nevada

NC-17 vision, that is.

When I was a sophomore in high school, our marching band took a big road trip to Reno to participate in a marching band competition at the University of Nevada. From the second we got off the buses at the suburban high school where we were staying, we could tell something was wrong with this place – the air smelled like sewage, the water tasted like the air smelled, and the bathrooms had foregone toilet paper in favor of a small napkin dispenser full of little paper napkins bolted to the wall of the stall, which made for one of my least satisfactory bowel movements of 2004.

Once we’d competed, picked up our small plastic trophy, and departed, we agreed pretty much unanimously that Reno was a terrible place – and that means something coming from a bunch of people who lived in Salem, Oregon. What we didn’t know, though, was that by staying on the outskirts of town we’d only scratched the creepy, sewery surface of Reno and Nevada in general.

I spent this past weekend working as a production assistant at a small ranch outside Reno where men legally pay women to have sex with them. (There is also a four star restaurant and motocross track.) The experiences I had this weekend could fill multiple completely awesome books, but the circumstances of my non-disclosure agreement prevent me from discussing much of it in detail. That said, my five days in Nevada gave me a lot of opportunities to reflect on what a goddamn bizarre state Oregon and California share a border with.

First, the good:

1) On November 26th, 2010, the University of Nevada handed Boise State their first loss in 24 consecutive games when Boise State kicker Kyle Brotzman missed two consecutive field goals, crushing the Broncos’ hopes of attaining any sort of relevance by going to the BCS Championship. This day was henceforth known as Football Christmas.

2) In Nevada, gambling is legal statewide, prostitution is legal in most counties, and alcohol sales are permitted 24 hours a day. Let me go on the record as saying, here and now, that I think this should be the case in the rest of the United States, because I’m of the firm belief that the government has no fucking business legislating morality, and in Nevada they clearly agree. When these sorts of activities are properly licensed and regulated, I think they do one hell of a lot more good than the financial industry – the brothel I stayed at generates the vast majority of the revenue in the county, and so far none of the working girls there have orchestrated a worldwide economic meltdown.

But then, the bad:

1) The University of Nevada didn’t so much win that game as Boise State lost it.

2) I’d encourage anybody on the fence about my pseudo-libertarian philosophy on vice legislation to not visit Nevada – I believe it’s fully possible for a place to have legalized gambling and prostitution without being all skeevy and weird; Nevada just happens to be all skeevy and weird on its own.

On Halloween – our last night in town – a bunch of us decided to leave the rural brothel and drive the 20-odd miles into Reno for a drink and something to eat. Imagine our surprise when we arrived in downtown Reno to discover that the city seemingly exists in a vortex where it’s perpetually 1986 and ground zero for the crack epidemic. Drunks and tweakers stumbled the mostly empty streets, lit by faded neon lights on the few downtown casinos that hadn’t closed. A billboard on a strip club advertised a ‘$5.99 PRIME RIB!!!’, along with a picture of easily the least appetizing cut of meat I’d ever seen. Photoshop, Nevada. Photoshop.

Nevada, I’d say, is the equivalent of a kid I knew and disliked in high school named Dan – so desperate to be liked and accepted by others that it engages in outlandish activity in hopes of attracting attention and friends. In the early 1900s, when the Silver Rush died down and the people living in Nevada started to realize that there was no reason to live in the desert anymore, the state legislature started legalizing every vice they could think of in hopes of keeping the population they had and drawing some more back. Likewise, Dan wore outlandishly colored contact lenses and openly bragged on his direct relation to a Nazi war criminal.* The difference here is that Nevada is now among the fastest growing states in America, whereas Dan still has no friends.

*I think Dan saw this as a calculated risk because there are only seven Jewish people in Oregon at any given time, but that still doesn’t make it okay.

The reason I’m turning around and criticizing Nevada’s lax vice laws after praising them earlier is because they’re so inconsistent – in Nevada, a minor caught in possession of any amount of marijuana is looking at between one and four years in prison and a $5000 fine. I mean, screw inconsistent – inviting somebody to your state to gamble and pay for sex and then not letting them herb up afterwards is practically criminal. When you think about it, that really makes Nevada kind of a tease. They want to act like some kind of Libertarian paradise, but they’re not prepared to go all the way.

During the shoot, we took a trip to Carson City, Nevada’s tiny capital city, to film the annual Nevada Day parade. Nevada Day – the anniversary of Nevada’s statehood – is such a huge deal in Nevada that everybody gets the day off from work, which explains why seemingly the entire state had gathered in this small town to watch a whole bunch of floats, horses, and classic cars inch down a mile of Carson Street. One of the camera guys and I ran ahead in hopes of getting some good B-roll but were stymied by the crowds of proud Nevadans lining the streets, blocking our shots.

We spotted a second floor balcony on a local law firm, and I ducked inside to ask some of the employees lounging around if we could get up there to use it as a vantage point to film the parade.

“Hi there,” I said to the handsome middle-aged lawyer who the employees told me ran the place. “My name’s Truman. I’m here with [production company] and we’re shooting a documentary about [brothel] – is there any chance we could get up on your balcony to film their float in the parade?”

He flashed me the warmest, brightest, most blinding smile in the universe. “Sure! Head on up there. Door’s on your right. You want a doughnut? Have a doughnut. We’ve got too many. Just take one.”

This is why I can’t fault Nevada completely – everybody I met there who wasn’t a meth addict or one remarkably dour waitress in Reno was overpoweringly nice in a good natured, happy-go-lucky, small town Americana kind of way; sex workers included. As it turns out, nice people can and do live in a creepy, awkward place – even Dan had a couple of cool hangers on from time to time.

Truman Capps can’t stress enough that he doesn’t consider himself a Libertarian – he just hates getting kicked out of bars at 2:00 AM.

Diet Coke Revisited

As if it wasn't already a girly enough beverage, periodically they put hearts and pretty dresses on the can.

Those of you who’ve known me for awhile are well aware that I’ve been struggling with a Diet Coke habit for most of my life, and before we go any further let’s all stop and laugh at the fact that I actually used the word ‘struggle’ to describe my relationship with a soft drink. ‘Struggle’ probably isn’t the right word, given that at this very moment there are probably a few thousand people in Los Angeles prostituting themselves on Craigslist so they can buy meth – ‘dysfunctional relationship’ might be the best way to describe the situation between me and Diet Coke.

I covered a lot of this background in a blog entry almost a year and a half ago in which I claimed to be done with Diet Coke. Things have changed since then. Allow me to recap our relationship and recycle a lot of jokes from the earlier entry in hopes that you won’t notice:

I started drinking Diet Coke in 5th grade, when I’d come home from a rough day of the lasting psychological damage that only elementary school can provide and console myself with a frosty can from the old refrigerator in our garage. Now that I think about it, this was really great training for my adult life, where I frequently use liquid substances as cheap therapy.

"This is Ketel One and melted blue Otter Pop. Let me know what you think."

Point is, from an early age I got used to drinking a can of Diet Coke every day – it became a habit. I carried it on in middle and high school, because really, why the hell not? Given the fact that a lot of my high school classmates had a friendly relationship with another brand of coke, what I was doing was beyond harmless.

It became sort of my after school ritual, drinking a Diet Coke, and it didn’t take long for me to associate the taste with kicking back after a long day – a sentence that I’m sure gives Coca Cola shareholders a halfie. These were the salad days for Diet Coke and I, an uninhibited bliss the likes of which I know we’ll never see again.

In college, though, things went sour when a woman entered the picture – as usual, am I right, fellas? High five. Just… I’ll high five you next time I see you. Don’t let me forget.

'Scrubs', children, was a TV show that had approximately five brilliant seasons and like 15 horrible ones.

The Ex Girlfriend was a health nut, in addition to being just a garden variety nut, and as our relationship moved from the honeymoon stage to the ‘fight about literally everything’ stage, she went to work trying to break up me and my favorite soft drink, perhaps jealous that that relationship was far healthier than ours.

“Oh my God, Truman,” She whined for the umpteenth time one afternoon as I cracked open a Diet Coke to accompany my post-coital turkey sandwich. “You are, like, addicted to that stuff! It’s so bad for you!”

“Look, I acknowledge that it’s not good for me, but I don’t think it’s explicitly bad for me either when I’m only drinking one can of it a day. If I was drinking it nonstop, that’d be another matter.”

“So you admit that it isn’t good for you but you keep drinking it! Why do you do something that you know isn’t good for you!?”

“Because I enjoy it? Don’t talk to me about doing things that aren’t good for me – you drink alcohol.” (This was back when I was still on my moral high horse as a teetotaler, a horse I promptly dismounted and subsequently shot about six months after this conversation.)

And then this happened. I don't remember how; I was pretty drunk at the time.

“You drink Diet Coke every day. I don’t drink alcohol every day!”

“Yeah, but you drank enough alcohol in one day that a certain someone had to hold your hair back while you vomited red wine, corn chips, and tequila into a popcorn bowl. Diet Coke never made me do that in any quantity.”

“Jesus, Truman. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Nevermind.”

Presently, in spite of my firm stance on not negotiating with terrorists, I gave into The Ex Girlfriend’s demands and started to curtail my Diet Coke consumption. Problem was, that left me with a void – I’d come to assume that there was a time in every day where I drank a tasty sweet beverage. Stupid as it sounded, it was something to look forward to in the middle of the day, my Special Cola Flavored Relaxation Time.

The Ex Girlfriend and I went our separate ways shortly thereafter, and in the emotionally trying couple of months that followed I hated women and Diet Coke in roughly equal measure. My beef with Diet Coke was really more of a self-loathing, though – I desperately wanted The Ex Girlfriend’s claims of my addiction to be as asinine and poorly informed as most of her other thoughts, feelings, and opinions, but the fact that I kept going back proved her right. So I drank my Diet Coke every day, but hated myself for it.

What I'm trying to say is, 'Breaking Bad' was going to be about me, but the suits ruined it with all that meth stuff.

Then came my trip to England, a rainy and prohibitively expensive country where everyone copes with the crappy weather and cost of living by drinking pretty much constantly. Diet Coke was so expensive in England that my own guilt about how much of my family’s money I was spending outweighed my desire for aspartame-sweetened syrup, and within a matter of days I’d broken my habit for the stuff. This was especially satisfying in light of the fact that The Ex Girlfriend was in my study abroad group.

“Would anybody like something to drink?” One of our professors asked our group one evening at a social function at the school. “Soda or something?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

The Ex Girlfriend stared at me icily and addressed me in a cloying, flinty tone: “What – no Diet Coke?”

“Nah,” I said, triumphantly. “You know, that stuff’s apparently pretty bad for you.” I had rebuffed both of my destructive relationships in the same sentence.

“We’ve got some harder stuff too, if you’d like.” The professor continued. “Beer, cider…”

“Ooh!” I exclaimed. “I’d take a Strongbow, if you have one.”

Strongbow is a positively delicious English hard cider. It comes in 16-ounce cans and has an alcohol content of 5.3 percent. It’s sugary and sweet, and by the end of my time in England I was drinking at least one of them a day, which put my alcohol consumption at one of the lowest in the entire United Kingdom.

Scientists have determined that this is the proper amount of Strongbow for you to wake up in jail.

When I returned to the States, Strongbow wasn’t widely available but I was wary of going back to my old mistress Diet Coke, who I’d so decisively broken up with overseas. I resolved, then, to only drink Diet Coke when I was using it as a mixer, which was how I wound up drinking whiskey and Diet Coke five or more times a week during parts of my senior year of college.

After graduation I knew I had to cool it on the boozing, which was really no sweat once I put about a thousand miles between myself and the alcohol fueled shenanigans of the Oregon Marching Band. For the occasional drink on a weekend evening, I keep a handle of Jack Daniel’s in the house and a case of Diet Coke with which to mix – and that was just fine until, craving something sweet in the afternoons but not wanting to be the college graduate boozing by himself at 2:30, I’d just crack open a Diet Coke and leave Jack on the shelf.

Diet Coke fueled the late nights that led to the completion of my TV spec scripts and the third draft of my screenplay, but then I put my foot down – I’d fallen off the wagon, and I needed to get back on. Last week, at my internship, I made the conscious decision not to have a Diet Coke with my lunch in the employee kitchen. I did just fine without it – and, as a result, my sweet tooth ran wild and I wound up eating half the contents in the candy jar over the course of the rest of the afternoon.

And then, this happened.

A relative of mine used to be pretty fucked up with drugs and alcohol, but he’s been clean and sober for nine years now. One afternoon, I was watching him play Call of Duty: Black Ops - a 45 year old man absolutely dominating the server, demolishing legions of people one third his age.

“Shit, you’re good at this,” I said. “How do you find time to practice with your job and social life and everything?”

“I make time, Truman,” He replied, knifing an opponent in the back and prompting a slew of angry, racially charged profanity. “You don’t really get rid of an addiction. You just replace it with another one.” The round ended and he’d racked up enough points to earn a gold plated AK47, which, in Call of Duty, is apparently a good thing.

I’m not addicted to Diet Coke – I’m addicted to having something that tastes sweet at some point during the day. Compared to all the other sweet things I’ve tried, though, Diet Coke has the fewest total calories and least Surgeon General’s warnings. If I’m going to be an addict, I at least want to be healthy about it.

Truman Capps is desperately seeking out that corporate sponsorship.

Lord Of The Dance

'Humiliate yourself. YOUR ELECTRONIC OVERLORDS COMMAND IT.'

Recently my roommate stuck his head into my room and said:

“Hey, Truman! Want to play Dance Central?”

Dance Central is a game for the XBox 360 which utilizes the Kinect motion controller so that you can dance around in your living room like an idiot in order to score points in a video game.

“Um.” I said, not fully understanding the question – was this a goof of some sort? Maybe, I reasoned, he just hadn’t given me all the details. “Wait – are there girls here or something?”

“Nah, man! I just want to play some Dance Central! C’mon, it’ll be fun!”

“Wow. You really think that, don’t you?” I said, almost more fascinated than anything else.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

I shook my head. “Look, I guess what I mean is, no thanks. I’d rather not play Dance Central.”

“C’mon, man! Why not?”

It’s a testament, I think, to how many different and interesting types of people there are in the world that I had to actually give a specific reason for why I didn’t want to do the Soulja Boy dance in the living room on a Thursday night when there’s a whole YouTube full of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes to watch.

“Well, uh, to be frank, I don’t dance. As a matter of principal.”

“Dude, seriously? Dancing’s the bomb! It’s how you get chicks!” He adopted a more serious tone. “You know, maybe the reason you don’t bring girls home when we go out is because you don’t dance.”

“Yeah.” I said, staring at the Battlestar Galactica poster on my wall. “That’s probably it. Me not dancing. That is the only reasonable answer.”

“Yeah, man! Now c’mon! Let’s play Dance Central!”

I shook my head. “Sorry, man. Not going to happen.”

“Not even one game? Nobody’s going to see you, man. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“I’d see me. And I would have to be embarrassed.”

Now he shook his head. “Alright, you win. But you’ve gotta come out of your shell sometime, man.”

With that, he closed the door, and five minutes later I heard a Ke$ha song playing and the telltale thumping of my roommate flinging himself around the living room per the XBox’s instructions.

I think there’s a significant difference between being in your shell and simply knowing that you don’t fucking want to do something. It’s not like I secretly fantasize about dancing. When I close my eyes, I don’t see myself at the center of the dance floor surrounded by cheering clubgoers, moving as one with the music. I don’t have a copy of Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights hidden under my mattress. Dancing is just something I’m not interested in doing.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – I have a healthy respect for dance as an art form or recreational activity while drunk or sober. I just inherently don’t want to do it with literally every fiber of my being – whenever I find myself in the general vicinity of a dance floor, I can practically feel my muscles locking up, just to ensure that I don’t make any casual motions that could even be mistakenly interpreted as dancing. This is true at nightclubs, it’s true at weddings, and it was true at the Hieronymous Bosch-brand nightmare that was my senior prom.

Is that close minded, to not do things that you’re sure don’t want to do? I know it’s important to have new experiences, but I feel like going to a nightclub and dancing is going to be a bad new experience, and I’ve been trying to have fewer of those (with mixed results.) I mean, say somebody offered me crystal meth and I turned it down, because I don’t want to be a meth addict. Would he tell me I had to come out of my shell, too?

Looking back, it sounds like I was comparing dancing to drug abuse, and that might have been blowing things out of proportion a little bit. Meth is bad for everybody; dancing is not. Dancing is more like V-neck shirts – they work great for a lot of other people, but not for me.

The other night, I was at a jazz club with a couple of friends and a funk band was playing. Halfway through their set, right before they took a break, they played a snappy cover of ‘Pick Up The Pieces’ by Average White Band that more or less brought the house down – beautiful hipsters flooded the dance floor to cut a collective rug, eyes closed, all smiles, looking for all the world like a bunch of suave young people having the time of their lives.

One positively gorgeous girl who probably loved The Smiths was dancing with her boyfriend not too far away from me – subtlety shaking her ass for him, occasionally drawing her hands up her thighs to raise the hem of her dress ever-so-slightly, looking over her shoulder at him and batting her eyes while running a hand through her long auburn hair. He twirled her around and they shared a long kiss, bodies still moving against one another in time with the song for the last few measures. When the song ended, the couple promptly left to have what was probably the best sex any two people have ever had.

Ten minutes later, the band was back and the dance floor was empty. As they got into an original upbeat instrumental, a lanky, awkward looking guy in an XKCD T-shirt, perhaps energized by the reaction to the previous song, jumped up and started dancing, alone on the small dance floor.

Right away you could tell this guy didn’t have any dance training or experience – he was just letting the music flow through him, completely uninhibited by any social constraints whatsoever, and so naturally he looked like a guy on a bad drug trip having a seizure. Periodically he’d dance his way over to women at the edges of the dance floor to try and entice them to join him, and they’d politely ignore him for as long as it took, and then he’d dance his way back out alone and resume his agonizingly public social suicide, arms swinging and hips thrusting the whole way, essentially holding the dance floor hostage until he finally sat down

That’s the kind of dancing I’d do, and that’s the kind of reaction I’d get. This guy wasn’t dancing out of love or passion for rhythm; he was dancing because for years people had been telling him that it would make him cool, and he’d finally gotten drunk and desperate enough to give it a try. If that’s what it looks like to come out of your shell, I’m perfectly happy in here, thanks.

Truman Capps wants to star in a Dirty Dancing spinoff about a guy who stands by the bar and makes fun of all the people dancing.

Perspective

"This is generic soda water, not Perrier! UNACCEPTABLE!"

Recently I was working as a production assistant at a party attended by a lot of rich Hollywood industry types. The party was in a seriously remote and inconvenient location with very little parking and was so far removed from a main road that the 150+ guests had to park a few miles away and be chauffeured from their cars to the party in a number of 15 passenger vans. This wasn’t too big of an ordeal as people slowly started to arrive, but I could tell right away that this was going to turn into a disaster once the party ended and everyone wanted to leave at the same time but had to wait for vans to truck them away.

Sure enough, it did – once festivities began to wind down, a large mob of wealthy, tuxedoed, drunk people were standing by the loading zone for the 15 passenger vans and creating a very unruly last chopper out of Saigon situation, provided that the helicopters are vans, Saigon is a lavish industry party, the Vietnamese are industry movers and shakers, and I’m the Marines trying to keep them from swamping the helicopter vans in their desperation to get out.

Needless to say, once the number of people waiting for a ride outstripped the ability of the vans to make it to and from the isolated venue in a timely fashion, things got ugly quick.

“This is unacceptable!” A woman in an evening gown screamed, not long after I arrived. “We have been waiting up here for forty-five minutes! You need to get more vans up here, and faster!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling myself away from my walkie talkie long enough to try and keep her from going all 28 Days Later on me. “We’re doing the best we can.”

She snorted and threw up her hands, tears brimming in her eyes. “No you’re not!”

I just looked at her blankly, having never heard such an immature comment from somebody that old and not in Congress. She just glared back at me, defiantly, as if to say I stand by my profoundly retarded statement

An older couple approached some of us PAs a moment later.

“Hello. We were just wondering, is there any way we can get more vans coming up here?”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “The road is really narrow, so we can only get one van coming up to the location at a time. There isn’t room for two vans to pass one another going opposite directions, and there’s barely enough room for the one van to turn around.”

The wife pursed her lips. “Okay. It’s just, we’ve been waiting for a really long time. You know, we work for [NAME OF MEDIA CONGLOMERATE REDACTED]. We just wanted to see if there was any way we could get more vans running faster.”

I couldn’t think of a way to convey to her that the width of the road was in no way affected by what company she worked for, so I just shook my head apologetically, and she led her husband away, grumbling about what an idiot I was.

Before long, another woman was right up in my face, whispering, voice trembling as she struggled to keep her boundless rage under control.

“Who is your boss.” (Statement, not a question.)

I told her my boss’s first name.

“Good. What’s her last name?”

“I don’t…. I don’t know. I got hired twelve hours ago. I’ve seen my boss two times all day.”

“I want to see her. She and I need to have a discussion about how this event is being run. My husband and I have been waiting nearly an hour for a van.”

“I’m very sorry, ma’am.” I said, for what would not be the last time that night. “But my boss is back at headquarters trying her best to make the vans run faster. So if I bring her out here to talk to you, it’s probably just going to slow things down more.”

That – my tacit suggestion that she act like an adult – was her breaking point.

“This is unacceptable!” She shouted. “You have no right to do this!”

What I wanted more than anything was for Louis C.K. to be there with me, because I get the idea he’d set every one of these assholes straight. Maybe Ron Swanson could be backup. Without them, though, all I could do was think of what I would’ve said if I’d wanted to destroy any chance I had of a Hollywood career.

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s take a step back from this situation for a moment. All of you have just attended a fancy party. You ate a free meal, took full advantage of an open bar, and from the smell of things at least a few of you got stoned behind the catering truck. Now, you have to wait longer than you’d like for a chauffeured van to take you back to your cars, so you can drive back to the homes that you own, so you can go to sleep and, on Monday, go to work at the high paying jobs that you have. That’s inconvenient, and again, I’m sorry that it’s inconvenient, but I didn’t pick the location for this party, nor did I tell the Works Progress Administration to build such a narrow road up this hill 80-odd years ago. So until the next van arrives, I’d ask you all to calm down for a moment. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, four women get raped every five minutes. You all have to stay at a lovely garden party for a little longer than you’d like. If this is the low point of your weekend, you’re some of the luckiest people in the whole course of human history.

I’m not suggesting that as Americans we shouldn’t complain about things or be unsatisfied with the degree of luxury we live in, because even White People Problems are still problems that need to be dealt with and bitched about. What I’m saying is that there are very few situations in which it’s okay to be a complete douche to a stranger – go ahead and do it if, say, your life savings are obliterated by corporate greed or when you find out one of your family members was killed in a gang related shooting.

Feel free to complain about having to be patient, but don’t use it as an excuse to go nuclear on the nearest minimum wage earner. It’s not that big a deal.

(In other news, after I clocked off, I found that my Ray Bans had been stolen from the production office and spent the next two days on the verge of a nervous breakdown.)

Truman Capps is still hoping that they might get mailed to him with his paycheck.

Hubris

Somebody thought this script was amazing. And, I mean, it was, but not for the reasons he thought it was.

I’ve been reading a lot of really bad scripts recently. Between my internship and a work-from-home job I recently took in which I read and write coverage for $10 per screenplay, I spend a fair amount of my life wading through asinine bank heists rife with poorly spelled profanity, horror movies about horny college students that alternate between torture porn and just regular porn, and sappy romances where I’ve seen the line ‘a Taylor Swift song starts to play’ written into the script more than once.

In just about every bad script I read, there comes a point when something so mind bendingly stupid happens that I have to just step away from the computer and laugh, because the only alternative is crying. During that time, I usually wind up fantasizing about yelling at the person who wrote the script.

”Wait, so all of a sudden Otto and Roman switch bodies? Why the hell do you introduce this more than halfway into the movie!? It doesn’t make any sense! You can’t have your movie start out being about one thing and then have it turn into another thing! Also, being as this is a movie about the Holocaust, I think it’s in pretty poor taste to go all The Change Up on your audience. That’s got to be a hate crime or something!

Usually I start feeling guilty about halfway through my fantasy, though, because in all likelihood the writer in question probably didn’t set out intending to write a crappy movie – he just did it by accident because he thought that writing a screenplay was as simple as writing down every cool thing you can think of, throwing in a few awkward sex scenes (standing up the whole time, naturally), ending on a poop joke, and typing FADE OUT.

It happens every day, with horrifying results.

No matter how bad of a script I’m reading, though, it does wonders for my smug sense of superiority – with every bad script that I read, I subconsciously begin to feel more and more bulletproof writing-wise. Just like how ancient cultures would consume animal testicles to gain their virility, I’ll picture myself consuming bad screenplay testicles to gain immunity against crappy dialogue and a stagnating second act.

Unfortunately for my smug sense of superiority, I’ve just completed the most recent draft of a script Mike from Writers and I have been working on for awhile – some extremely late night writing sessions were a lot of the reason for there not being an update yesterday, for those of you who’re keeping score at home. The point is, it’s really easy for me to talk shit about how other people are crappy writers when I’m not putting any of my own stuff out there either.

The thing about writing a script is it’s a lot like having a child. Now, unlike everyone else who I went to high school with, I don’t have any children, but what I assume from Everybody Loves Raymond is that it’s a really difficult and often thankless task in which you somehow inexplicably love the little brats who make your life so difficult. This is presumably because the more time and effort you put into a thing, the more attached you grow to it and the more likely you are to ignore its flaws and think it’s perfect, hence why so many parents raise shitty children.

To be fair, sometimes they're shitty parents, too.

Mike and I have been working on our script for around 18 months at this point, which is an awfully long commitment for a couple of profoundly lazy people. We’ve put more effort and soul into this script than we’ve put into most jobs or relationships we’ve had, and after all that output I’m afraid we’ve kind of lost perspective. We’ve fallen into the trap that makes grade inflation possible: The assumption that if you work really hard at something, it’s automatically great.

As I proofread our script in advance of sending it out, though, I’m starting to see more and more elements in it that might be less funny or compelling than we think they are. It’s like I’m about to send my kid to his first day of school, and I already know that he’s going to get picked on because, well, he’s related to me, but right as he gets on the school bus I see that his fly is down.

Because I know how script readers work. I know that they swap stories about the worst scripts they’ve read, and I know that I’m not the only person who fantasizes about yelling at writers for writing crappy scripts. Here at the 11th hour, I’m worried that maybe my script is just as bad as some of the ones that I’ve read – maybe the stuff that I thought was so interesting in my script was only interesting because I find everything I do inherently interesting.

I care about my script, and I don’t like the idea that people might read it and hate it the same way I read scripts and hate them. Also, I care about my (currently and perhaps forever nonexistent) reputation as a writer, and I don’t want to sully it by putting out a script that’s crappy. And on top of that, I feel a certain sort of kinship with scriptreaders everywhere, and I’d really hate to contribute to their misery by sending them another script they have to slog through and hate – in a perfect world, my script would have the same effect on its reader as Ralphie’s fantasy-theme does on the teacher in A Christmas Story.

Ultimately, though, I guess the only way to tell if your script sucks or not is to send it out and let the world be the judge. I can only imagine how many truly terrible scripts are still sitting in the sock drawers of writers who, quite wisely, are too scared to send them out – maybe a few elusive good scripts are out there, too.

I still think that our script is going to stand out from the crowd, though: The movie is about one thing, the only sex scene takes place in a bed, and all of the words are spelled and punctuated correctly. You have no idea how few scripts can pull off that last one in a country with a 97% adult literacy rate.

Truman Capps has to read and cover two more scripts before he goes to bed tonight.

Chick-Fil-A

Back in high school, my main bro Alexander took a trip with his family to visit relatives in the Deep South, and he returned bursting with fun stories about rap music, humidity, and casual racism.

“And here’s another thing,” he said after explaining about sweet tea. “They had these fast food places all over the place called Chickafilla.”

“What the fuck is a Chickafilla?” I asked.

“I don’t know! We never stopped at one. It’s a mystery!”

That night, I went home and Googled Chickafilla in hopes of finding out what this mystery establishment was. I don’t remember precisely what I found back then, but when I Googled Chickafilla just now I found the profile for a girl in Chicago on an online dating site that matches people based on what books they like. (She liked Animal Farm a lot.)

Point is, Chickafilla was a mystery to me for a long time – a little slice of Southern Mysticism dropped into our dreary Pacific Northwestern lives.

Years down the road, I discovered that there’s an immensely popular Southern fast food chain called Chick-Fil-A, and deduced that there was no mystery to be had here: Alexander had simply fucked up the name in true Alexander fashion.*

*This could also be the result of Alexander’s Hannibal Lecter-style fondness for byzantine wordplay. Examples include habeeb instead of believe, Sakala instead of Alaska (it’s an anagram), and Parah Salin instead of Sarah Palin, which, when spoken aloud, sounds exactly like “Parasailin’.” He’s difficult to be bros with.

I have a certain fascination with regional fast food chains, to the point that when I meet somebody from a different part of the United States, I invariably wind up talking to them about their regional food chain before I ask them about their hometown. In a country where morbid obesity is kind of our thing, I think you can learn a lot about the character of a region by the way they set themselves up for heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Initially, Chick-Fil-A struck me as emblematic of a lot of the things I like to make fun of the South for – their ad campaign is kind of folksy, they’re so extremely religious that they don’t open on Sunday, and they’ve got a spotty gay rights record. What’s more, Chick-Fil-A promotional materials make the bold claim that they ‘invented the chicken sandwich.’

This seems like an almost foolishly bold thing to say, because I tend to believe that the chicken sandwich was invented five minutes after chickens and bread were in the same place at the same time, and that was probably well before Chick-Fil-A hit the scene. It was this sort of hubris that made me wary when Chick-Fil-A opened its first Southern California location in Hollywood last month.

I was finally persuaded try the place by my Southern friends, who assured me that the food there tastes like Christmas, and by the fact that Neil Patrick Harris tweeted about how amazing the meal he ate there was. Not only did that assuage any guilt I might’ve had over eating at a relatively gay-unfriendly establishment, but it also gave me hope that I might bump into Neil Patrick Harris while I was there.

(I didn’t, by the way; so don’t get your hopes up for this update getting any more interesting in the next couple of paragraphs.)

I hit up the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru for lunch last week, and when my car finally pulled up to the menu I was shocked to find that instead of a simple, unintelligible loudspeaker, the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru ordering system has an actual live video feed of the person in the restaurant taking your order – you can see them, and they can see you.

This, I feel, eliminates a lot of the mystery and fun of the drive-thru. When all you do is yell your order into a microphone, you’re taking a leap of faith – it could be anybody preparing your food, and you have no idea how clean or bronchial they actually are until you pull around and collect your order, which may or may not have been filled correctly. This sort of anonymity and danger was as close as I was ever going to get to airport restroom hookups, and those damn moral crusaders at Chick-Fil-A took it away from me.

“Hello there, and welcome to Chick-Fil-A!” The beaming talking head on the video screen chirped. “How may we serve you this afternoon?”

As much as I appreciated the Southern hospitality, I felt like they were laying it on a little thick here – I’m not the King of France; I’m an unemployed writer trying to order a chicken sandwich. Let’s keep things in perspective.

“Uh, wow, thank you. Food is the only service I need today – could I get a number four combo please? Large?”

“Great!” I watched her record this order on her computer, which felt oddly voyeuristic. “And what’s your name?”

“Truman.”

She looked up at the camera with a somehow broader smile. “Oh, cool! Like The Truman Show!”

I was going to make some pithy remark about how often I hear that, but then I realized that she’d made that comment while watching me on a television screen, meaning she was arguably the first person in history to legitimately make that reference.

“Yes. Exactly like that.”

When I pulled around to the window, another woman was already waiting for my credit card.

“Here you go, Truman!” She said, handing me a semi-translucent paper bag full of chicken sandwich. “Is there anything else we can do for you today?”

Am I missing something here? I was under the impression that Chick-Fil-A was a restaurant, but the employees keep making these very broad offers like How may I serve you? and Is there anything else we can do for you? Do they offer life help in addition to food? If so, then I’ll take a #7 combo with a side of paying job in the entertainment industry and an extra large Obama 2012. Otherwise, just the sandwich will be fine.

Back at the office, I ate what turned out to be a pretty tasty chicken sandwich. But at the end of the day, much to the chagrin of the cows in Chick-Fil-A’s commercials, I just don’t like chicken as much as beef. Even with God and Neil Patrick Harris on their side, Chickafilla can’t compete with that.

Truman Capps is still waiting to try Waffle House.

More Dog Stories

This isn't the exact breed I'm dealing with, but I imagine they're equally annoying.

Newsflash, girls I go out with: I don’t care about your dog. I suppose maybe I’m sending mixed signals – I do, after all, say ‘Oh, what breed is it?’ – but that’s because I’m trying to be nice and make conversation, not because I want you to pull out your iPhone and show me all 368 pictures of your dog accompanied by 368 stories about how smart he is and how he’s so protective but oh don’t worry he’ll probably warm up to you pretty quick.

Second, followup newsflash: He won’t warm up to me pretty quick, if at all. Dogs and I seem to have this understanding – I am civil and relatively friendly in spite of the fact that I generally don’t like them, and they, in return, shit in my house. I don’t care how smart or sweet or housebroken your dog is; the second we’re alone together, it’s going to take a steaming dump on the carpet and then look at me, head cocked as if to say, This is how it’s going to be, motherfucker.

When this happened with Indy, my old roommates’ dog, I chalked it up to a side effect of his being emotionally disturbed and just generally retarded, mixed in with a hint of animosity for me, the one roommate who didn’t play with him or coo to him or generally put up with his dog bullshit. It was just sort of the special relationship we had – he would soil the house when it was just the two of us there, forcing me to clean it up, and I, as I cleaned it up, would tell him in great detail about how easy it would be for me to kill him, bury the body, and then tell my roommates that he’d run away. Nobody would ever find out.

"Well, hot diggity dog. Yeah, but seriously, we're not going to investigate this case. Dog murder isn't our thing."

But at the moment, my roommate’s sister’s dog is staying with us, and in a few short days she’s proven to me that there seems to exist a state of open warfare between me and every dog on Earth. The primary weapons in this war are my profanity and the dogs’ bowels.

My roommate’s sister is a somewhat well-to-do young woman from Long Beach, so naturally her dog is a tiny fluffy white yappy terrier, small enough to hold in one hand or fit into a purse. The dog’s name is Bella.

I’m cohabiting with a small, annoying animal with a Twilight name. It’s like The Perfect Storm, except instead of a perfect storm it’s a cute little dog, which I guess makes it more like Marley and Me, only the dog and I have pretty open animosity for one another, so it’s got more of a Turner and Hooch meets Wilfred vibe, and I’m played by Jesse Eisenberg.

And then it becomes this, but it's more of a scary hotel like in 'The Shining.'

Every encounter with this creature sharpens my definition of the term ‘good for nothing.’ Bella is literally useless. She serves no purpose. There is no reason for her to be alive. If we humans were not here to take care of her, she would be dead in less than four seconds, and it’s a tossup as to whether she’d be dead from exposure, attack from other animals, or her own crippling stupidity. The only thing she can do is act cute – she’s essentially been trained to do it, because every time she does a cute thing, everybody fawns over her and gives her treats.

There were a lot of kids in elementary and middle school who reminded me of Bella – kids who were cute, and who had captivated their family with precocious babytalk, wide eyed thumb sucking, and replacing the ‘R’ sound in words with a ‘W.’ As they got older, a lot of them tried to continue this racket for as long as they could, which got pretty embarrassing for everybody once puberty started to set in.* Now all of them work in various tattoo parlors and supermarkets in Salem, and if I could send Bella to work at the Walgreens on Lancaster Boulevard, you damn bet I would.

*I had the benefit of being fat and awkward looking in my youth, which I feel was essential for my growth into an awkward looking adult.

Bella’s antics work wonders on my roommates and their friends, but recently she’s discovered that when they’re gone and it’s just me, her cuteness doesn’t go very far. Just like the 13 year olds in my math class who couldn’t talk their way out of detention by saying “Pweeeeease?”, Bella skipping around in circles and jumping up on my ankles only succeeds in pissing me off.

After my fourth or fifth ‘Get the hell off me, goddamn it, you little worthless shit!’, Bella clearly knew it was time to get tough. When I woke up the following morning, I turned on the lights in the bathroom to see several dog turds waiting for me on the bathmat. Wordlessly, I turned and looked at Bella, who was scampering back and forth in the hallway, her dark eyes gleaming.

Yeah, bitch, that’s how we do it in Long Beach! You notice how big those turds are in relation to my body? That doesn’t happen by not trying. What now!? 310 represent!

Today, hearing her incessant scampering and whining outside my room, I decided, ‘Fuck it’, and went in search of her leash* so I could take her outside just long enough to get her to shit out anything that could be used against me later.

*Bella’s leash is hot pink, which is great for me, because instead of going to the trouble of emasculating myself by not liking beer or unconsciously playing with my hair, I can just walk a tiny fluffy dog on a pink leash and get it over with quickly.

It would look exactly like this. No detail would be different except for the leash.

“Sit.” I said, holding the leash and waiting for her to be still enough so I could affix it to her collar.

Bella sat. As I knelt down to attach the leash to her, she promptly jumped up and started scampering around.

“No! Sit! Stay!”

Bella sat. I knelt down again, and again she jumped up and started prancing around. Rinse and repeat six times.

“You goddamned worthless animal!” I shouted, throwing the leash across the room as Bella continued to caper at my feet. “You know what? You win. I’m going to go in my room, shut the door, and listen to Pink Floyd until my roommate comes home to clean up your mess. So long as you don’t get your shit in my rice cooker or in my Jack Daniel’s, go nuts.”

Having just delivered an angry monologue to a small animal, I flipped her off and sequestered myself in my room. I didn’t see this as forfeiture so much as a tactical retreat – best case scenario, Bella would do so much territorial urinating on our carpet that she’d get dehydrated and die, and then I would be the winner.

The carpets have absorbed the bulk of the urine and my roommate diligently follows Bella around cleaning up that which she shreds or drags around. I ignore her and she ignores me, and I look forward to Thursday when she finally returns from whence she came.

Why, yes, since you asked – under the right circumstances, I would get a dog. Were I under house arrest at a large ranch in Vermont, I would get a Bull Terrier. Bull Terriers are good natured and resourceful animals who scientists have proven are smarter than most three year olds and virtually all business majors. If I had a large outdoorsy space and nothing to do but hang out with that dog, that’s exactly what I’d do.

If your dog doesn't look like this, you've bought the wrong type of dog.

Until then, though, I’ve decided that I’m pretty unenthusiastic about sharing my living space with any other animal, because at this point in my life the benefits of dog ownership are greatly outweighed by my unwillingness to live in or around excrement. I mean, if I really wanted to take care of another defenseless living creature with questionable bathroom habits, I’d just get a girl pregnant so I could snag a tax break and some free cigars.

Truman Capps is very much pro-dogs when he’s encountering the dogs in a neutral zone where it’s clear that the burden of the poop cleanup won’t fall on him.

Occupy Wall Street

The problem with promising to write a two-parter blog is that sometimes, between part one and part two, a current event happens that you’re way more interested in making a comment on. Hopefully none of you were dying to hear more loosely connected ramblings about the stresses and injustices of making a TV commercial.

Based on these signs, this could be a rally for like three or four different things.

Good Lord, how I hate those fucking liberals.

Now, to clarify, I consider myself a liberal. I’m all in favor of gay people being able to get married and women being allowed to have as many abortions as they want. What’s more, to some degree I genuinely support the idea of a big government – particularly one with a large and very well funded Department of Education and Veterans’ Administration (and healthcare, while we’re at it.) I drive a Subaru; I want to drive a Prius.

But I feel like as a liberal my views on certain other liberals are pretty similar to Chris Rock’s views on certain other black people. Namely, every time I turn on the TV there’s some attention mongering Code Pink assholes pitching a hissy fit about a Marine recruiting station, every time I get near a Whole Foods there’s some Henna tattooed philosophy major with an iPhone trying to get me to sign some anti-capitalism petition, and in college I took a class where the professor and virtually all the students engaged in daily, hourlong class discussions in which the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘Nazi’ were used interchangeably.

Point is, there’s a great number of liberals who are calm, well reasoned, rational people who support progressive causes and an intelligent dialogue, and then there’s liberals who love buzzwords, drum circles, and yelling so loud that the opposition doesn’t have a chance to speak. As I’ve said time and again, rhetoric and fundamentalism are the two things that are really wrong with this country, and they happen on both sides of the aisle. It just pisses me off more when liberals do it because I hate seeing my team acting like douchetanks.

Douchetank.

It’s these liberals who are usually the ones holding noisy, poorly thought out protests and ultimately wind up getting pepper sprayed, much to my delight – that’s what you get for making my political views look stupid, hippies. In most cases, I’m of the opinion that running around in the street chanting is a good way to get attention and a bad way to enact real change* – remember all those Iraq War protests? How well did those work out?

*The Civil Rights Movement is an obvious exception to this rule.

So then, Occupy Wall Street.

I hate the finance industry too, obviously – everybody does. As Rolling Stone put it, they stole more money than most people can rationally conceive of in a few blinks of an eye, then went to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it. And none of them got punished for it; rather, they got their money back at taxpayer expense, which is basically anti punishment. In the interests of preserving the shitstained tatters of our economy, the TARP bailouts were a good idea, sure, but it’s still sort of offensive to those of us who live by the ‘What Would Batman Do’ credo.

The answer, as usual, is 'punch a dog in the face.'

In all seriousness, if I found out that some of these bankers had been killed or grievously wounded, I’d react about the same way as I did when I found out Osama Bin Laden died. Not to defend Bin Laden or anything, but he did heinous, terrible shit because he had a twisted ideology saying it was okay – the Wall Street people did heinous, terrible shit because they, some of the richest people on Earth, wanted to make more money.

So Occupy Wall Street is really a meeting of two groups I’m not so fond of – attention seeking ass clowns with dreadlocks on one side and human garbage wearing suits on the other. But here, I’m siding with the ass clowns – no contest.

I’ve been following Occupy Wall Street and I have to say, I’ve been fairly impressed – despite their appearance, there seem to be a few pretty intelligent, rational types at work there, and on a base, instinctive level I love the idea of regular people rising up against Wall Street’s excesses, my distaste for protests be damned. What’s more, the movement has been gaining mainstream support from celebrities and labor unions, which gives it a chance of being one of the few protests that actually accomplishes something, provided everyone plays their cards right.

But for Occupy Wall Street to play its cards right, they need to settle on a cohesive fucking message, already. How long has this thing been going on for and they still can’t say specifically and more or less unilaterally how they want Wall Street to change? The whole world is watching, but they’re not going to be watching for very long – if I can’t figure out what the protagonist in a script is fighting for, I lose interest pretty damn quick.

Right now, the closest thing Occupy Wall Street has to a message is, “Wall Street is corrupt and needs to change.” I think this video shows how well that’s working out:

What I see in this video is a bunch of angry people marching around and yelling, and then the camera pans up to a bunch of suits on a balcony, watching with disinterest. Until Occupy Wall Street organize all their power and anger behind one specific goal, the protest is going to be exactly as effective as it looks in this video: The protestors will make noise and the bad guys will watch.

All the yelling and drumming and ideology in the world can’t and won’t stop these fucking crooks from doing what they’re doing and getting rich at it. An agenda, on the other hand, is a stepping stone to change, because it gives people something to yell at their Congressmen about. Occupy Wall Street needs one of these, and fast – soon it will start to snow in Manhattan, and the occupation will be effectively over.

Truman Capps is unlikely to participate in the Los Angeles occupation because it combines his two least favorite things: Crowds and outside.

Mad Props

Naturally, we didn't need to get THIS prop. (Which I'm positive is fully functional and fully awesome.)

One thing that a lot of actors fear is being typecast – that is, playing a particular character or role so many times that they become so identified with that role that those are the only parts that they ever get offered. Typecasting is why John Wayne was always a cowboy, why Jason Statham is always an angry guy driving a car, and why Leonard Nimoy is the saddest rich person on Earth.

What I discovered in the past few days, though, is that low level production assistants can get typecast as well. Last month I worked for nine days as an art department production assistant for the Call of Duty convention – a job consisting largely of manual labor and the use of power tools, tasks I was ill-qualified for, to say the least.

Regardless, I did the work, picked up a couple of skills, met a lot of really friendly gay dudes, and then deposited a large paycheck that essentially bought me three more months in Los Angeles (or 56 handles of Jack Daniel’s – I tend to measure wealth in how much whiskey it could bring me at any given time.)

Art department PA work isn’t really the sort of work I want to be doing – it doesn’t offer me a lot of connections in the writing department, and sweating all day doing backbreaking labor so I can take home a paycheck to provide for myself is a little too Bruce Springsteeny for the life I ideally want to live. I’d much rather be working as a pre-production PA, because it’s an office job that would put me in contact with writers, directors, and producers, or as a general production PA, because that job is mostly guarding the craft table and bossing extras around, and I’ll never pass up the opportunity to talk down to actors.

On Wednesday, though, I was at my internship when I got a call from a production manager I’d submitted my resume to for an upcoming commercial shoot – the art department needed another PA, and since my resume indicated that I had art department experience, she wanted me for the job.

Naturally, I took the job in a heartbeat, because money is money, but as I drove to the production office I realized that now I would have two art department PA jobs on my resume, which would only build my reputation as an art department PA until those were the only jobs I was getting offered, in spite of no real skill or inclination towards that field. Moving heavy props around would be my Star Trek.

Part of my job on this shoot was helping the art director secure props for the commercial – among them four surf boards, six incredibly heavy oil drums, and some retro looking chrome stools, along with a box of tiny perfume bottles. To carry all these props, they had me to go a nearby rental car company to pick up a cargo van.

Interestingly enough, it came with a bag of free candy!

The white, windowless monstrosity they gave me at the rental lot was the sort of vehicle you’d see parked under a barren tree near the Interstate somewhere on the outskirts of St. Louis. People might label it a pedophile van, but I think that’s narrow minded – there was enough room for easily five homeless dudes to smoke crack in there.

However well suited it might have been for child molestation or drugs, the van was shit for driving. It had more blind spots than Stevie Wonder and equally good shocks, which made for a nerve wracking and bumpy ride to the prop warehouse at Universal Studios, where the art director and I went about collecting the necessary props for the shoot.

On the productions I worked on in Eugene, we usually got our props from Goodwill, or any other musty smelling thrift store filled with weird, grimy 80s crap that nobody wanted anymore. Going to the multi-story Universal prop warehouse, the largest in the industry, I was expecting a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style stroll through movie memorabilia, like giant Styrofoam boulders and the fake glass bottles you can break on peoples’ heads without hurting them.

As it turns out, the Universal prop warehouse is essentially a five story Goodwill that just happens to be on the lot of a major motion picture studio – everything is equally grimy and musty and has the feeling of being something that was donated because a small child vomited on it at some point. There’s shelves upon shelves of board games in crusty, deteriorating boxes, garish plastic faux-crystal glasses from the 1970s, dilapidated printers from every era… As I wandered around the warehouse, grabbing the items the art director told me to grab, I wondered if any of the props I was so carefully avoiding contact with had been in the background of any of my favorite movies.

The prop warehouse is like a video store, in that you browse through it, make your selections, and then take them to the front desk to rent them out for a specific period of time.* The front desk was staffed by a profoundly grumpy minimum wage earner who had absolutely no patience or sympathy for the fact that I had no previous experience with the checkout system and thus was making mistakes on the paperwork I had to fill out.

*Unlike a video store, it still exists.

“Wait,” I said, at one point. “I need to sign every page, or just initial everything after the first page?”

He sighed heavily. “You initial. And hurry up – it’s after 5:00, so you’re wasting my time now.”

I wanted to put the pen down and give him some tough love.

”Look here, fuckstick.,” I would’ve said. ”I’ve been on your side of the checkout desk. I know how much it sucks back there. I know that being a dick to renters is about the only perk to your job. But you’ve got to draw some battle lines for that shit, and right now I haven’t crossed any of them. I’m not some PR major trying to scam restricted equipment off you. I didn’t come in here reeking of American Spirits and B.O. And I sure as shit didn’t start out conversation off with, ‘Is this the prop warehouse?’ So until I do any of those things, I recommend you treat me just like I used to treat any given one of my old customers: Only subtle disdain and sarcasm until they cross the line. Go ahead and make a Facebook update about me. I want to see your weenie ass try some shit.

Of course, as I well knew, the person checking out items holds all the power in these situations – if I’m a dick to him, he has every right to just not give me the stuff I need. If he’s a dick to me, I have to either put up with it or go to the other Universal Studios prop warehouse. (There isn’t one.)

So I navigated the troll’s maze of bureaucracy and wheeled my rented props out to the pedophile van. Step one of my job – get the props – was complete. Step two – move those props around for arbitrary reasons – lay ahead.

Truman Capps will cover step two in part two, in case you didn’t catch that.

Brought To You By Samsung

This afternoon I got hired to work as a PA on a three day shoot for a Korean Samsung commercial - I just got back from eight hours of prep work and I have to get up at 5:30 tomorrow so I can drive a rickety white rental van to Universal City and pick up a prop surfboard. You know how it is.

Point is, I'm going to sleep instead of write a blog. I'll get back to you on this one later, folks - probably with a story about shooting a Korean Samsung commercial.

PETA Porn

All the Google Image Search results for PETA were disturbing/too racy, so instead I typed 'Ron Swanson Meat.'

Generally speaking, I’d say that PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – is a group of confrontational idiots, run by confrontational idiots. I like animals as much as the next guy and I’m very much against factory farming; I’m just also against handing out violent, disturbing comic books to children of fur wearers, running campaigns comparing animal consumption to the Holocaust, and suggesting that murder victims and animals killed for food are one and the same. I think that there’s a line between being committed to something and doing stupid shit because you love attention, and PETA flew across that line years ago in a rocketship powered only by their own insanity.

For a long time, PETA has championed against human consumption of animals by having attractive women take off their clothes in public. I guess their idea is that beautiful naked women will draw attention to their cause at the expense of the womens’ dignity – and Lord knows, you can’t make an omelet without exploiting a few daddy issues – but I think their plan has backfired, because thanks to them I now have it in my head that if I continue to eat meat, PETA will continue to show me naked women, and that is the textbook definition of a win-win situation.

I mean, they’re essentially rewarding me for acting contrary to their cause. What’s phase two of this operation? If I wear a fur coat, they’ll pay my credit card bill? Kill a dog and I get free gas for a year? Look, I’m not suggesting that killing a dog is something I’d want to do. It’d probably be a real crisis of faith for me. But then, it costs easily $40 to fill up The Mystery Wagon, and, I mean, it’s not like we’re about to run out of dogs or anything…

PETA’s most recent counterproductive publicity stunt is their announcement that they’re going to start a porn site. Read on:

(From nationalpost.com)

The nonprofit organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) whose controversial campaigns draw criticism from women’s rights groups, said it hopes to publicize veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering.

This, I believe, is a bad idea. It betrays a poor understanding of economics, and an even poorer understanding of pornography. Now, I’ve gone on record many times as saying I can’t/don’t/won’t understand economics, but I do know a thing or two about porn, if only because it’s way more fun to study than economics.

There’s a lot of porn out there. Every 39 minutes, a new porn video is created. According to a statistic that’s at least a couple years old, there are 4.2 million porn sites online. To put that another way, 12% of the entire Internet is porn.

This is where limited economics comes into play: There’s a lot of competition in the porn market. We haven’t cured cancer and there’s no flying cars yet, but at least feel good in knowing that if you want to see something dirty, you’ve got more options and variety at your fingertips than anyone else in human history.

My point is this:

If a man wants to look at pornography online, I’d say it’s pretty unlikely that he’s going to go to a website where his smut is mixed in with pictures of bleeding, tortured to death animals. When a person looks at porn, he isn’t out to have his mind changed about his dietary habits or ponder the ethicality of animal testing.

So yeah – this plan would work like gangbusters if PETA’s porn site was the only porn on the Internet, but it’s not. If you show a guy slaughtered animals when he really just wants to look at some tits, he’s less likely to consider your point of view and more likely to go to any of the 4.2 million other porn sites on the Internet that don’t have an animal rights agenda.

It’s an ineffective plan, to say the very least – PETA’s going to invest a lot of time and energy and nudity into a website that nobody is going to use, right? Well, actually, no. People are going to use it. And this is where PETA’s plan stops being ineffective and starts to downright backfire.

Crushing is a sexual fetish in which people get turned on by watching small animals get tortured to death in various erotic or sexual settings – usually by getting crushed underfoot. The government has done its part to stamp out (so to speak) crush films by legislating against them under various animal cruelty laws, which is one instance where I think we can all agree that government censorship is a beautiful, warranted thing.

So: There’s a not insignificant subculture of Internet perverts who specifically seek out and encourage animal cruelty for sexual purposes, and now PETA, the radical front dedicated to stopping animal cruelty, is making a porn site full of sexy naked women and animal cruelty photos. In other news, the DEA is going to start handing out free meth.

I eat meat because I really like the taste; I hate the idea that in factory farms, a lot of the animals providing this meat die terrified and in significant pain. I don’t think women wear fur coats because they’re jazzed up at the thought of animals being messily skinned, nor do I think people who take insulin do so because it was tested on animals. The vast majority of people, I’d say, benefit from exploitation of animals and acknowledge that it’s a bad thing, but also acknowledge that there’s only so much we can feasibly do to completely stop it while maintaining our own quality of life.

And for this, PETA guilt trips all over us with their ad campaigns and their pie throwing and their support of the Animal Liberation Front, but then they turn around and create a porn site for people who are specifically aroused by the thought of animal suffering and pain – People for the Unethical Treatment of Animals.

I’m all for activism as a means to kick off social change, but I think at this point PETA’s goals have taken a backseat to shock value and spectacle, as evidenced by this most recent stunt. And it’s fine by me if they want to humiliate themselves and become irrelevant; I just wish they’d do it a little quieter so I don’t have to hear about it.

Truman Capps made it through this whole update without making any jokes about veganism, and for that he apologizes.

So You Want To Write A Screenplay...

"Poop joke sex scene Danny McBride."

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve written script coverage in LA for a couple of different production companies. What this means is that I get to read a lot of scripts by a lot of lot of writers with varying levels of talent and experience. It’s taught me a lot – both about how to write a screenplay, how not to write a screenplay, the sorts of things people think they can put in a screenplay to make it sell, and the myriad of ways writers have found to make sex scenes cringe inducingly awkward.

From my experience, here’s some parables for those of you who may be interested in writing a screenplay - for the record, all examples in this update have been kept vague to protect the creative juices of the writers who got on my shit list in the first place:

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You know in media res? When you start your movie at the end, briefly, and then flash forward to the beginning to show how you got there? Just because it was cool in Sunset Boulevard, Fight Club, and The Hangover doesn’t mean you need to do it in your script – it was a cool device because it was unconventional, but now everybody seems to want to start their script in a weird place and immediately flash back to how we got there. I recommend drawing viewers in by having the beginning of your script be interesting, and then progressing from there.

Please try to have had sex at least one time in your life before writing a sex scene. Descriptions like ‘she sexily grabs his crotch’ or ‘he takes off his shirt and starts making love’ will only get you laughed at.

Likewise, never use the phrase ‘explores her body’ – too creepy.

When the lead character is a young professional who rides a scooter and loves French New Wave films, you’re not allowed to derisively refer to the people outside the nightclub as ‘a crowd of hipsters.’

If it’s page twelve and the protagonists have boned four times already, you’re writing a porno whether you know it or not. If you want to make a porno, make a porno – just don’t make me read the script.

Characters nonchalantly shitting themselves is not comedy.

If after reading your script one of the most glaring plot holes to me is, “Wait – why didn’t she just use a dildo?”, your script might have some problems.

The only people who will ever read your screenplay is the cast, crew, and me, so don’t write the fucking thing like you’re William Faulkner – the first assistant director doesn’t care about ‘the sun shimmering beautifully off the surface of a pond flat like a pane of glass, waves softly lapping at an ancient dock constructed in a bygone era’; he cares about what the setting is and who the characters are so he can shoot the fucking thing.

Once and awhile, your characters should have sex not standing up. Just for variety. It’s cool the first time the hero fucks a girl up against a wall; the fourth time I think even the girl is getting tired of it.

If your screenplay is a faithful, autobiographical account of some trying time in your life that you wrote as therapy to recover from your hardship, I can almost promise you it isn’t going to be very interesting to anybody but you. It’s great that you wrote it – writing is a wonderful way to exorcise demons and get your head straight. What you shouldn’t do, though, is try to sell the disjointed contents of your soul. No matter how eccentric you think your friends are or how inspiring you think your story is, it’s probably not good enough to be a movie because your midlife crisis probably didn’t have snappy act breaks, a car chase, and a couple of engaging subplots.

Two characters can only fuck each other so many times before we start getting impatient to learn who they are and what the movie is actually about.

The proper number of exclamation points is one. Once in a blue moon, you may use two exclamation points. More than two exclamation points will make you look like a jackass – that’s not me talking; it’s science.

Less than half of one percent of American women use a diaphragm, so you should probably stop having the female characters in your movies use them. Nobody’s impressed that you’re a scholar of contraceptive history, or (more likely) that you saw that episode of Seinfeld.

Your script should be about one thing. If your script starts off being about a dorky guy pretending to be gay to get hot chicks, it shouldn’t end as a buddy cop horror film – it should end as a script about a dorky guy acting gay. If it’s a teen house party movie, it shouldn’t become a casino heist movie halfway through. This may seem obvious, but I’ve seen it happen in multiple scripts. Star Wars didn’t morph into American Beauty on page 52 – it was about spaceships and aliens the whole time.

Just because Tarantino movies are chock full of pop culture references doesn’t mean you need to do it too. That’s just how he rolls – he likes to mix little chunks of other movies into his movies. It’s his thing now. He owns it. When you do it, it’s not going to be cool – it’s going to be an excuse for you to not come up with your own content and instead use somebody else’s work as a crutch, which makes you a jackass. When you rip off Tarantino by using pop culture references to Tarantino films, you’re an Inception jackass.

Truman Capps awaits the inevitable onslaught of bullshit when people realize how many of these rules he broke with Writers.

Liveblogging The Emmys, 2011

Yes, it’s that time of year again – like Christmas in September, the Emmy awards have arrived, and we can once again gather to watch the annual celebration of Mad Men and several made for TV movies nobody has ever heard of.

This year’s liveblog is going to be a little more difficult, seeing as we don’t have TV at our house and Fox isn’t streaming the ceremony online. Admittedly, this seems a little hypocritical given that they’re touting their new media friendliness, what with hashtags and Tweeting and Jimmy Fallon and all, but in their defense, it is 1983, after all. There’s no such thing as an Internet, so it’s obviously not a terrible business decision to neglect a gigantic, youth-oriented market like this.

Oh, wait. It turns out it’s 2011, there is an Internet, and Fox is just making an immensely stupid move.

Anyway, the only access I have to the Emmys is ‘Emmys Backstage LIVE!’, a slapshod backstage stream showing blurry images of people in tuxedos walking around the green room, and also some tearful extended acceptance speeches from winners on the ‘Thank You Cam.’ It’s like they cut all the bones and gizzards out of the delicious roast chicken they’re serving to the TV audience and threw the refuse online for me to watch and make fun of. Regardless, it’s all I’ve got, so here we go!

5:41: The camera backstage is pointed at a TV playing the Emmy ceremony, and we’re watching the crew watching it, while some guy tries to do terrible voiceover commentary and what he thinks of Charlie Sheen. Thanks for this amazing media experience, NBC!

5:45: The guy they hired to do commentary on what's happening backstage is clearly being punished for something, because they've given him the most thankless job. "What's... Okay, well, I can't tell who just won... Hey, look in the green room! It's Ashton Kutcher! Do you think he and Charlie Sheen hung out? Think they did the Maverick/Goose high-five? Woosh! Woosh! Charlie and Ashton talking. This is amazing." I hate this. I hate this already.

5:47: "Meanwhile, Charlie is STILL talking to Ashton... What could they be talking about? Stock tips?" My God. This guy makes sports commentary look like Kurt Vonnegut.

5:48: You have been livestreaming a conversation between Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen for three minutes. And we can't hear what they're saying. We're just watching them talk. This is online content.

5:49: Commentator just revealed that he's drinking. Say! That gives me an idea!

5:50: Emmys Backstage LIVE! drinking game: Take a drink every time this doesn't suck.

5:51: Ahh, the good old Thank You Cam - it allows Emmy winners to continue crying and prattling on about people we've never heard of for as long as they want to with no orchestra to play them off.

5:54: Joel McHale is doing some singing and dancing thing, apparently. In response, the backstage stream changes to Ty Burrell at a press conference talking about gay rights. The commentator, meanwhile, repeats everything Joel McHale is saying, just so he knows that we got it.

5:56: Just because a thing exists doesn't mean it needs commentary, NBC.

5:58: Is David Spade going to win an Emmy for outstanding achievement in creepy goatees?

6:01: Ashton Kutcher is so posturing for the lead role in the new 'Passion of the Christ' movie with this long hair/beard combo.

6:02: Commentator: "This is obviously live, because I've made about a thousand mistakes. But mistakes are fun!" No. Mistakes are not fun. This stream was a mistake, and I am not having fun.

6:05: The producers of The Amazing Race are at the Thank You Cam, and one of them looks like Ebeneezer Scrooge.

6:07: I'm watching a shitty stream with terrible commentary, and writing commentary about the terrible commentary. INCEPTION.

6:09: A bunch of garishly dressed 80s looking dancer girls milling around backstage. Maybe my joke about NBC in the intro wasn't so far off...

6:11: Commentator: "There is Scott Caan, who was eating cookies earlier..." BRILLIANT. COMMENTARY.

6:14: I'm missing a Lonely Island tribute. Goddamn it. How fast can I get cable?

6:17: So long as I've got you here and nothing is happening, I should mention that I thought Winter's Bone was overrated. Meanwhile, the guy from Big Bang Theory is doing a press conference. But yeah - pacing just wasn't that great. I get it; everybody's doing meth and Missouri sucks. Not Best Picture quality, if you ask me.

6:20: The back of Jon Stewart's head as he makes an acceptance speech. Now there's a man with a good back of the head, am I right? Oh Lord, I hate this.

6:23: Jon Stewart on the thank you cam: "Why are you not watching television right now?" I know! Don't rub it in!

6:28: Outstanding writing for a drama series... Mad Men? Let me know if Mad Men wins. I'm watching the commentator put on a plastic football helmet.

6:32: Friday Night Lights? Really? I thought that whole show was just buff dudes swaggering around going, "Football football football football football."

6:35: If not for the Thank You Cam I wouldn't have seen any hysterical crying women today. Near thing.

6:39: Jane Lynch looks younger now than she did in The 40 Year Old Virgin. How come?

6:41: Boardwalk Empire took a bold step by focusing their promotional campaign around pictures of Steve Buscemi, if you ask me. Amazing actor and a genuinely good person, but Christ, I do not like seeing his face on a bus bench.

6:43: The only exciting thing about watching this stream is that if some celebrity comes to the thank you cam and says something racist, I'll probably be the only person to see it happen. Silver lining.

6:45: The feed has been flawless all night, but as soon as Martin Scorcese goes to the Thank You Cam, it dies. Great. The ONE PERSON I wanted to see thanking people tonight.

6:48: Peter Dinklage clearly hates the idea of a Thank You Cam as much as I do, hence why he only said, "This is heavy. Thank you." And then the Commentator: "Peter Dinklage, keeping it short." Wow. Classy joke, Mike Kosta.

6:52: The whole time I've spent watching this, I could've been watching a documentary about maritime disasters and probably gotten as good of an idea about what was going on at the Emmys.

6:54: Watching Scorcese walking out with his Emmy. "Yep, guess I'll just put this on the pile of other awards I've won. No big deal."

6:57: For every drama category, I just go with the assumption that Mad Men is going to win. I'm usually right.

7:00: Well, okay, I was wrong on that one.

7:02 Emmys Backstage LIVE! is punishment for shoplifting in some countries. If not, it should be.

7:04: 11 different backstage cameras aren't worth shit if they aren't pointed at anything good.

7:15: Sorry for the absence. I had to put on pants when my roommate came in with his new girlfriend. That was far more entertaining than this entire livestream.

7:16: Well, since you asked, yes - it IS pants-optional here at Hair Guy.

7:19: I guess I should either get a lock for my bedroom door or start wearing pants more often. I'm leaning towards the lock.

7:22: Look, I recycle. I pay my taxes. I play by society's fucking rules, and after a long day of wearing pants in public, sometimes I just take off my pants and surf the Internet at home. It isn't weird. Lots of people do it. You probably do it, you just won't admit it.

7:24: Why are people under the impression that the 'Hallelujah' song from Shrek and Watchmen is a good song? It's not. It might have been before they used it in every sad or poignant scene in every movie, but those days are over.

7:25: Furthermore, I should point out that pants are actually sort of unhealthy for guys to wear. They raise your overall nut temperature, and that fucks up your sperm count. That said, I'm not planning on having kids, but this is at least indicative of the fact that pants are not, strictly speaking, our friends. Sorry for partying.

7:28: Half an hour to go. We can do this, people!

7:32: The presence of pants makes this program so much worse.

7:35: Maria Bello rocking a flask. Never has drinking looked that good.

7:38: William H. Macy is making long greasy hair cool again.

7:40: Open bar in the winner's lounge. If there's one thing I want more than to go to the Emmys, it's to go to an event with an open bar.

7:44: What's Gwyneth Paltrow doing at the Emmys? Furthermore, how the fuck do you spell that woman's name?

7:47: Mad Men, four years in a fucking row. In your face, haters.

7:49: If Christina Hendricks talks to the Thank You Cam, this will all be worth it.

7:52: Jon Hamm yelling 'Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!' into the Thank You Cam was almost as good as Christina Hendricks.

7:53: It's going to be a real logjam for comedy. I'm pulling for Parks and Rec.

7:55: Goddamn. I need to start watching Modern Family. And with that, I'm going to take off my pants and make some dinner. Goodnight!

Truman Capps loves getting out of actually writing a blog by doing this shit.

Celebrity Revisited

I am the small Asian girl in this scenario. As usual.

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but during my senior year of college, I did some drinking from time to time. Once the party was over, though, I had a very strictly regimented post-drinking ritual: I would walk back to my house, fill a metal water bottle with tapwater, and drink it (and several other subsequent bottles) while listening to music through my headphones on my computer.

I don’t know what it was about drinking that immediately gave me a powerful urge to listen to music – maybe it had something to do with the fact that the bar I frequented had karaoke, and after listening to drunks literally murdering music all night I wanted to listen to those songs as they were recorded by the original artists (who, given my preference for classic rock from the 1970s, were probably under the influence of way more than just alcohol in the studio).

My playlist was different every time thanks largely to my mood, but the one song I listened to (and, occasionally, sang along with) every night, without fail was Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.

Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury and its accompanying music video are largely the work of Los Angeles-based improv comedian/actress Rachel Bloom, who parlayed an NYU theater degree into a viral video about her wanting to get nailed by a 91 year old science fiction icon. It’s catchy as all hell and hilarious to boot, and if I were to recommend you watch any Internet video, it’d probably be this one. (If I were to recommend you watch any Internet video not at work, it’d also be this one, followed by most porn.)

Last week, she mentioned on her Twitter feed that she’d be doing standup with a bunch of other comedians at The Improv on Monday, and, based on the strength of her music video, I bought tickets for me and my friends Dylan and Holly.

I feel like there’s a pretty thin line between ‘fan’ and ‘stalker’ – in both cases your ultimate goal is to get closer to a personality you like who doesn’t necessarily know you exist; the only difference is that stalkers are generally way better at it because they play to win. Think about it: Margaret Ray broke into David Letterman’s house and stole his Porsche; John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill the president to impress Jodie Foster. If you wouldn’t do that for Lady Gaga, then you probably shouldn’t call yourself her biggest fan.

The line is even thinner, though, with Internet personalities like Rachel Bloom, because by and large they’re everyday people whose fame is less high profile and who may not even have an established fanbase. It’s one thing to eagerly follow Tom Hanks’ career and go to events he’s at, because thousands of other people do the same thing; it’s a little weirder if you go to all of your bus driver’s intramural softball games and create a fanpage for him on Facebook, because you’re the only one doing it.

I mean, yeah, she publicized her appearance at The Improv on Twitter, but as I drove to the show I had trouble shaking the knowledge that at its most basic, what I was doing was driving to a location because I had used the Internet to figure out that a girl was going to be there.

It was a small venue and by no means a full house – there were probably 20 people or less in the audience. The comedians – Rachel Bloom included – all turned in solid performances, and overall I’d say the show was well worth the price of admission (admission was five dollars.)

Afterwards, the comedians were all gathered at the back of the room, chatting with one another as people filed out. Holly nudged me and pointed at Rachel, who was talking to two of her friends.

“You should say hi to her.” Holly suggested.

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea,” I said, glancing toward the exit. “It’d just be weird, and I already feel weirder than normal just being here, and I usually feel pretty weird anyway.”

“Oh, c’mon. Just tell her about how you listen to her Ray Bradbury song when you’re drunk. I bet she’ll get a kick out of it.”

Her logic was sound enough – after all, I like it when people tell me they’ve read my blog (thanks again, Dad!). Dylan and Holly departed and then I wound up standing a few feet away from Rachel Bloom for several minutes, trying to look nonchalant as she talked to her friends.

I’m not good at a lot of things, but I’m really not good at blending into the background and not looking awkward. I spent ten minutes standing there, pointedly not looking at her, Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ playing at full blast in the back of my head, and contemplating whether I should just interrupt her, say my piece, and run like hell. I eventually opted to wait, because the only thing more awkward than what I was already doing would be interrupting a genuine interaction she was having with her friends. (Plus, previous experience has proven that it's sort of a dick move.)

Presently, she finished talking to her friends and I caught her eye. She stepped closer and I realized, now that I had her full attention, that talking to her was probably the least creepy option at this point, compared to running away or perhaps vomiting.

“Hi,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I just wanted to let you know that when I was in college I watched ‘Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury’ and sang along every time I came home drunk.”

Immediately I realized what I’d said basically translated to:

”Hi, I’m an alcoholic stranger, and I just wanted to let you know that when I’m drunk I frequently watch the music video where you dance in a low-cut nightie.”

Rachel Bloom, God bless her, threw her head back and laughed, presumably getting a kick out of what I’d said, as Holly had promised. She seemed appreciative that I was both a fan and that I’d come out to see her perform, and in the course of our subsequent conversation she gave me some career advice and encouragement.

What is it that compels us to idolize and seek out famous people – that makes it so important to us that we force them to pose for pictures or write their name down for us as proof to our friends that we actually met them? Is it part of some greater urge to prove to ourselves that they’re actually real people who don’t just live in our televisions and computers? Or do we all just secretly fantasize about being best friends with Will Smith? (Protip: It's the last one.)

Driving home from The Improv afterwards, I felt surprisingly good. For somebody like me who spends so much time with his head firmly jammed up pop culture’s ass, it’s good to be able to say thank you every once and awhile – and I didn’t even have to shoot Ronald Reagan, so in your face, Hinckley.

Truman Capps will not retain any semblance of composure if he ever meets Nick Offerman.

Touchy-Feely

Man, how often do I use Arrested Development as my starting image?

I worry sometimes that my roommates think I’m depressed - which would be fine if I actually was depressed, but unfortunately I’m pretty happy and enjoying my life a lot. The thing is, my version of happy and enjoying life makes me look a lot like I’m depressed.

My roommates are a couple of friendly, good natured guys who play sports, go to the gym, work out, dance at nightclubs, and wear men’s fragrances. They are men in the truest sense, in that they do things that Truman Capps does not do. Do you know how much milk they drink? I can practically hear their bones mocking my bones.

I, on the other hand, like watching movies, surfing the Internet, writing, reading, and occasionally having a leisurely drink in a quiet, sparsely populated place with ample seating. The thing is, I can do most of my favorite things from the comfort of my room, and I frequently do. At this time, please feel free to make a joke about me masturbating.*

*By my own estimate, between half a dozen and a dozen of my friends’ parents read this blog, all of whom can expect handwritten letters of apology for that last line.

My door, also, tends to stay closed – my back is to the door when I sit at my desk and I startle very easily, so this is really more of a strategic concern to stave off my first heart attack until at least my early 30s. Also, I have the unconscious habit of mumbling everything I write out loud to myself as I write it – in fact, I’m saying the words I’m typing right now. Boondoggle. Monkeybutt.

So were a roommate to poke his head into my room, he’d see me hunched over my computer mumbling dick jokes to myself until he made his presence known, at which point I’d probably jump so hard I’d hit the ceiling. Closing the door is a much better option than having them think I’m a psycho.

The thing is, this doesn’t exactly look healthy to them. On one of my days off last week, a roommate and I had this conversation as I was walking out of the kitchen with a bowl of rice, headed for my room:

Roommate: So what’ve you got going today?
Me: Oh, y’know. Still just plowing away at that script.
Roommate: Cool. You going to do anything today?
Me: Besides work on the script? No. I mean, I might go to the bathroom later. Still thinking it over, though.
Roommate: Oh… Well, I’m off to work. Have… Fun, I guess.

Now, I feel great about how much work I’m getting done. However, I get the sneaking suspicion that my roommates think I’m spending the whole day lying in bed crying, because from the outside, writing and suicidal depression don’t look that different (and in some cases, they aren’t).

To try and counter this, I make an effort to bro out with my roommates every so often. We’ve gone to some bars and watched some movies, and it’s by no means an unpleasant experience – my roommates are genuinely good people, who I like. The main problem is that there’s some touching going on that I don’t really like.

It’s not the after school special kind of touching where somebody’s stepdad gets arrested, mind you – it’s the kind of touching where every five seconds somebody is slapping somebody else on the chest or the back or throwing an arm around somebody or grabbing a shoulder…

I wouldn’t say that I don’t like to be touched. I’d clarify it as saying I don’t like to be touched by men. And this couldn’t be further from homophobia – it’s not that I don’t like men touching me because I think they’re coming on to me; it’s because I feel like they’re trying so hard to assert their masculinity that they’ve resorted to recreational violence.

”That was a funny joke!”
SLAP
“I like drinking too!”
SLAP
“A nude scene in the movie we’re watching!”
SLAP

As mentioned above, I’m already pretty jumpy, so randomly slapping me or grabbing me is not doing anything to improve my quality of life. For those of my friends who may want to touch me in the near future but are now confused as to how I’ll feel about it, I took the liberty of preparing the following flowchart to help you decide whether you should touch me or not:

The question, now, is how to bring this up with them in a non-awkward way – they don’t know I have a blog, so the passive aggressive option is right out. Again, I like these guys. It’s hard to sit down with people you like and tell them, apropos of nothing, “Please stop touching me.” Hell, that’s an awkward conversation to have with people you don’t like.

It also doesn’t look good in light of the fact that I spend so much time holed up in my room. I can just imagine how they’d explain it to their friends later:

”Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with that Truman guy… He’s always in his room, and apparently he doesn’t like for people to touch him. All I’m saying is, if I smell anything nasty, I’m going in there to look for a dead body.”

And this would be devastating for me, because I’ve worked really hard to cultivate a certain non-serial killer image.

In the long run, I guess I’m pretty lucky – if my biggest complaint about my roommates is that they touch me in a non molesty way, I’m probably doing better than a lot of people.

Also, it’s probably only fair for me to put up with this one annoyance, given what sorts of things I’m doing that must be pissing my roommates off. Last week I had a nightmare where I was being chased and was screaming at the top of my lungs, and I woke up in the morning with a sore throat. I might’ve just been sick, but on the off-chance that I was actually sleep-screaming I probably owe my roommates a little patience.

Truman Capps hasn’t seen any mice yet – lucky for them.

Words With Friends

Goonie? Really? Goonie is a word? If this guy can play GOONIE, I should be able to play BATTLESTAR.

I usually regard Facebook games with the same resentment and disapproval I have for skinny jeans and recumbent bicycles. On the one hand, I appreciate the Inception style humor in people wasting time playing a video game while wasting time surfing Facebook, but on the other, I don’t care how many heroin pies you made in MafiaCafeWorld and I resent your attempts to make me.

But then, there’s Words With Friends.

We didn’t play board games much in the Capps household – my parents found them boring and pointless, and then video games got invented and I’ve never looked back.* Much to Hasbro’s chagrin, we ditched family game night in favor of eating dinner together, watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, and playing Mario Kart 64 virtually every night for three straight years.

*There was a monthlong period in fifth grade where Mom played regular games of Monopoly Jr. with me in hopes of bumping up my math skills to at least a first grade level – take a look at my SAT scores if you want to see how well that worked out.

So while I’ll kick your ass at Mario Kart 64, I’m up shit creek if you want to play Yahtzee, Sorry, Risk, poker, cribbage, or virtually any other game that doesn’t plug into something. I’m just inherently bad at formulating strategies for victory in a system where I have to remember all the rules myself. As a result, sitting down to play a board game with friends is usually a pretty stressful process.

Before we start, the other competitors will assure me that the game is pretty simple and then give me a quick rundown of the game rules, which I will simultaneously misunderstand and immediately forget. I’ll stumble through the first few turns and then, thinking I’ve got the hang of it, start to play competitively, driving for a landslide victory.

”Oh my God! That was the most incredible turn I’ve ever seen! Let me tally this up… Crap on a spatula – 987 points for Truman! And you say this is your first time playing? Are you a genius? Well, obviously, yes, but even by those standards this is very impressive. Here’s $7. No, take it. It’s the least I do after what you’ve shown me today.

Inevitably, before the game is up I’ll play what I think is my masterstroke, only for my friends to point out that what I’ve done is in blatant violation of half of the game rules.

”Truman, you can’t play the red card. The game is called ‘Don’t Play The Red Card!’ How could you possibly think that was a viable strategy? Here’s $7. Use it to buy anti-retard pills or something.”

Recently, though, my friend Dylan invited me to play him in Words With Friends on Facebook – essentially, a browser based version of Scrabble. In spite of all my hesitance toward Facebook games and board games, I gave Words With Friends a shot; after all, it’s a game based entirely around knowing big, obscure words. There hasn’t been a game better suited to my particular skillset since ‘Whose Hair Will Clog The Shower Drain First?’

My assumption has always been that the English language is so vast and complex that if you cobble together a series of consonants and vowels into an easily pronounceable form, there’s a better than average chance it’s a word. However, if Words With Friends has taught me anything, it’s that English is just sprawling enough to be confusing but just small enough that none of your seven Words With Friends tiles spell anything but CAT.

Take meandle, for instance. Looks like a word, sounds like a word, would’ve netted me 40-odd points if it was a word, but it’s not a word. Same goes for frandine and theaser – looking at them, you can imagine them being the names for obscure literary devices or penguin muscles, but as it turns out, they’re convincing looking nonsense (although in many cases when I Google my speculative words, they turn out to be the name of some 14-year-old’s deviantart page or YouTube channel).* In analog Scrabble, you could play these words off as real – in which case the actual skill on display wasn’t your vocabulary, but your bullshit artistry.

*In all seriousness, I tried to play the word ‘pantsed’ against my friend Chloe, only for the game to cluck its tongue and tell me that ‘pantsed’ is not a word. Clearly Words With Friends didn’t go to middle school.

Dylan, it seems, has been having no such troubles, and he’s been linguistically cornholing me all over Facebook for the past week.*

*Neither Cornholing (action), cornholed (past tense), nor even the singular noun cornhole are accepted in Words With Friends, which is really painful whenever one of my friends plays ‘corn’ in the vicinity of a triple word score tile and I’ve got HOLE just waiting to get played.

In most cases I’m willing to accept defeat, because I’ve recognized that, like all people, I suck at far more things than I’m good at. But I’m a writer, goddamn it – if I’m not good at wordplay, then what the hell am I good at? Dylan is a great video editor, but we’re not playing FinalCut With Friends, here; he should not be beating me at all, let alone by such an embarrassing margin.

So I’m fighting back. I’m studying up on Scrabble theory, memorizing words with Q and Z but no U, and I’m considering making a looping recording of this list of 2 and 3 letter Scrabble words and listening to it while I sleep.

A lot of the reason I never got good at other board games was because, like my parents, I always found them sort of pointless – winning at Monopoly is great, but what have you gained in the long run, short of the ire of your bankrupted friends? I’m motivated to get good at Words With Friends, though, because in my eyes this is the sort of game I should be good at. When I win at Words With Friends, the real prize is cheap, petty validation, and I can’t get enough of that.

So to all of my Words With Friends opponents who might be reading this: Just let me win – it’ll be way easier for the both of us.

Truman Capps is theaser that he’ll be able to get meandle into the dictionary.

Duty Calls

All opinions stated by Truman Capps are not necessarily the opinions of his former employers; all facts stated by Truman Capps are not necessarily facts.

Yeah, you're welcome.

For somebody who enjoys violent video games as much as I do, even I’m kind of surprised that I was never able to get into the Call of Duty franchise. For my more well-adjusted readers who aren’t in the know on video games, the Call of Duty series is essentially one grand celebration of the storied institution of violence, spanning eight games in multiple wartime settings, most of which are simultaneously exploding and on fire, wherein players run around with high tech weapons trying to kill each other.

As of late 2009, the CoD franchise had sold roughly 55 million units and earned $6 billion worldwide, making it as profitable as three Avatars, six Titanics, or approximately 9.154 Ice Age 2: The Meltdowns. The game has spawned a robust, somewhat hostile fanbase united by their love of shooting one another in the back of the head and their hatred of any gameplay features they consider unfair, unbalanced, or ‘noobish.’

The Call of Duty games have single player campaign modes that attempt to tell a story, but they’ve generally got weaker plotlines than most of the scripts I pass on at my internship, and the enemy artificial intelligence is about on par with the paper targets at a firing range; by and large, the games are carried by their chaotic, fast paced multiplayer mode.

My roommates last year were avid players, and they coerced me into buying a secondhand copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 so I could game with them. I joined in a few violent, profane afternoons, but ultimately I lost interest in the game and exchanged it a couple months later to get a copy of Portal 2, which I found far more rewarding.

My problem with the Call of Duty games, I think, is that these meticulously researched military shooters are a little too realistic. Every game of Call of Duty I’ve played usually involves me running around, confused, disoriented, and scared, until I suddenly die, sniped in the back of the head by an enemy I never saw – which, I’m certain, is exactly what would happen to me were I ever placed in an actual wartime scenario; the only difference being that the Taliban is probably way less homophobic than the Call of Duty community:

From IGN.com:

First-person shooters and war games like Halo and Call of Duty seem to spawn the most homophobic behavior among players, notes De Marco. It's not the games themselves that are the problem; it's the kinds of players they attract.

"Derogatory words for gay are used almost constantly while playing online to insult other players, gay or not," he says. "If you make yourself known as a gay player, you can be snubbed, sent nasty e-mails, turned on by your own teammates, and verbally abused."

In short, playing Call of Duty online ensures not only that I’ll be hanging out with close minded douchecopters, but that I’ll be doing so in an environment where they can easily kill me. This is not my idea of a great time, hence why I stick to single player games like Fallout: New Vegas, where the most abrasive and intolerant asshole I have to deal with is myself.

I say all of this because I want you to get an idea of how ironic it is that what I was doing at my temp art department job for the past two weeks was converting a massive aircraft hangar into the venue for Call of Duty XP, the world’s first ever Call of Duty convention.

I’m really proud of the work that my coworkers and I did at this event – my department turned a couple of bland rooms into a gritty and atmospheric armory filled with prop guns from the Call of Duty series. We put a latex zombie head in a big plastic jar, and mounted replicas of heavy machine guns and .50 sniper rifles on the walls like big, dangerous trophies.

A lot of art department work, I should point out, is essentially interior decorating, and as such I’d say at least half of the art department was openly gay. Nothing faster refutes all the stereotypes about homosexuals you see in the media than two gay guys arguing about whether the 12 gauge shotgun should be mounted above or beside the bloody, severed zombie head.

This event was essentially Mecca for the virulently homophobic Call of Duty community, and a major portion of it was designed and built by hardworking, talented, friendly gay dudes with some token heteros thrown in for good measure. As hundreds of attendees played the multiplayer demo for Modern Warfare 3 and called each other fags, they were sitting on wooden benches built for them by gay people.

I’ll bet that the bulk of the people who play Call of Duty aren’t necessarily any more homophobic than any other given American – the combination of anonymity and adrenaline pumping life-or-death combat probably encourages a special brand of situational ignorance.

If anything, though, it makes me want to give Call of Duty a second shot, mainly so I can confront the XBox live trolls with this information and maybe prompt some sort of chagrined self reflection. More likely than not, they’ll just call me a fag too and then shoot me in the face, but that’d probably happen either way.

Truman Capps can only imagine how many people at CODXP said something about the 'call of doody' on their way to the bathroom.

Because It's 11:30

Case in point.

The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.
-Lorne Michaels

And you know what? Maybe that’s why Saturday Night Live sucks these days.

A few months ago, I wrote about the fact that this blog, which I used to update strictly on Wednesdays and Sundays, has since slipped considerably in its timeliness. It started around my junior year of college, when I turned 21 and discovered that the Tuesday and Saturday nights that I had until then spent writing blogs were great nights for getting cheap drinks at the local college watering hole – updates started happening later and later on Wednesdays and Sundays until these past few months, when, with increasing regularity, I’ve been updating a day or two late.

Newer arrivals may be thinking, Jesus, he doesn’t update on time – is this really worth writing about? But you’ve got to understand, before I got a really active social life, you could set your damn watch to this blog. I made a point of staying up until midnight most Tuesdays and Saturdays, just so I could post the blog at 12:01 AM on the morning of my update day, which, given that my readership at the time was roughly 9 hits a day, was a lot like a five year old girl waking up at 4:30 AM to bake the imaginary cake for her afternoon tea party with her stuffed animals.

Even as my life got more complicated I was able to stick to this schedule. At one point I was working at the Oregon Daily Emerald, taking classes, shooting Writers, and writing this blog all at once, and the updates still came in on time. Late in my relationship with The Ex Girlfriend, she found a way to drag me into a heated shouting match about animal rights virtually every Tuesday and Saturday night, yet I was still able to hang up the phone and somehow put all that emotionally fraught nonsense behind me for just long enough to write a goofy blog update about pancakes or some shit and get it posted on time.

Now, though, I’m late on updates more often than I’m on time – now, when I work during the day and come home at night to no homework, no extracurricular activities, no significant other to make me too miserable to be funny. In April, I said I’d take my sweet time on updates because I wanted to spend as much of my senior year with my friends as I could, update schedule be damned – but my senior year is over, and as a new arrival to LA my social calendar isn’t exactly bursting and the bars are prohibitively expensive. That’s right; I can’t even use alcohol abuse as an excuse anymore. Fitzgerald never had this problem.

Here, I’ve realized, is why my updates are coming in late now:

I go back and reread my older updates sometimes, but when I do I don’t venture much further back than the past year or so. The further back I go, the more consistently crappy the updates are, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the updates that are the most consistent.

Some of that is because I learned how to write a blog by writing this blog, and so there’s a bunch of wobbly entries where I clearly thought using lots of big words would make me look like a hilarious genius. But a lot of it is because there are updates back there that clearly weren’t ready for the spotlight – they needed another hour or two of work, or maybe a good night’s sleep, before officially becoming funny.

But I posted them anyway, because the update doesn’t get posted because it’s finished – it gets posted because it’s an update day.

And I guess that was okay for me at the time, because I needed to do as much writing as possible in order to practice up and get good at it – something I still need to do. Now, though, the game has changed.

I can’t run fast. My cooking skills are mediocre to poor. I’ve never built anything. I can’t fix a car engine. I don’t know karate. The one thing I can do well is write, and this blog serves as my portfolio – essentially the best way for an employer to figure out whether they want to pay me to write or not.

So I can’t really afford to have a lot of crappy, half finished updates showing up on here just because my deadline has arrived – when you read something crappy with my name on it, it gives the impression that I’m a crappy writer.

And hey – maybe I am a crappy writer compared to my competition down here, but I’m far less crappy at writing than I am at virtually any other skill, so it behooves me to put my best and funniest foot forward in this regard, because that foot is guaranteed to go way further than my ‘ironing’ or ‘talking to girls in bars’ feet can go.

I’m slower on the updates now because I think it’s better for all of us if I write something good instead of something strictly punctual. I get that punctuality is important in the TV scriptwriting game, but there the reason to be punctual is because there’s a damn show that needs to be put on, not just because you’ve got some self imposed deadline to meet for some arbitrary reason. And I think I’ve demonstrated pretty well that I can be punctual – for reference, just see my first two years’ worth of updates.

The real solution here is to start writing earlier in the week in order to allow myself plenty of time to get a good update done before my deadline arrives. And so long as we’re talking about responsible things I should do, I should probably open up the shower drain and clean all my clogged loose hair out of it. If I ever get around to that, I’ll let you know with a timely, expertly crafted blog update.

Truman Capps prefers Drain-O, anyway.

California Drivin'

DSRGRD 4 HMN LIFE... Wait, how many spaces do I have, again?

I was driving somewhere for my internship today, and while sitting at an intersection waiting to turn left I tried to think of what to write an update about, seeing as I was already a day late.

Hey, maybe you should do that update you’ve been meaning to write about how California drivers are terrible! I thought. You’d just need to spend a little time pulling together some good examples of the awful driving you’ve seen.

And just as I thought that, the light turned to a green arrow, and the car in front of me idled there for a good five seconds before I leaned on my horn hard enough for the driver to hear me. He floored it and zipped through the intersection just as the arrow turned red, narrowly avoiding getting T-boned by oncoming traffic, and then I was trapped in the intersection for another cycle.

So be honest now – what’s going on, California drivers? Are you guys doing okay? Did Good Driving touch you inappropriately in your childhood, and ever since then you’ve been driving like shit out of some combination of spite and self loathing? If so, you can tell me. This is a safe place. It’s not your fault.

If not, then come on, people. This is ridiculous.

After first discovering the true extent of Californians’ distaste for competent driving last summer, I mentioned it to some of my California friends at school. The conversation would usually go like this:

Me: Hey, so I’ve noticed that California drivers are kind of the worst ever. What’s up with that?

California Friends: What the hell are you talking about? California has great drivers. Oregonians are shitty drivers.

And this used to make me mad, but after six weeks here, I realize that it may just be a culture clash. Here is the Oregonian attitude on a few things I see pretty regularly on the road down here:

In Oregon, when a person has his blinker on and is trying to change lanes, the generally accepted practice is to let them in as opposed to pulling up alongside them as quickly as possible to prevent them from changing lanes. This was cool in Smokey And The Bandit when the truckers pulled into all the lanes around the truckload of Coors to shield it from Sheriff Justice’s line of sight; it’s not cool when I want to get off the fucking freeway.

In Oregon, we check where we’re going before changing lanes instead of just jerking the steering wheel to the left and hoping for the best. Yes, it’s okay to change lanes if you don’t see any cars, but the catch is you have to be looking at the lane you’re moving into to properly make that assessment.

In Oregon, we drive our cars between the lines, not completely straddling them. You don’t get a power-up if you drive over all the lines; you just endanger twice as many people with your monumentally shitty driving.

In Oregon, when somebody is driving ten miles per hour above the speed limit in the right lane on an uncongested freeway, it’s considered rude to speed up behind him, pull into the exit lane on his right, blaze past him, and then blast up the shoulder and speed away into the night. Fun fact: If you die in a horrible car accident while hotdogging it in your dad’s Mitsubishi Galant, you’ve still got a tiny penis.

In Oregon, we don’t weave back and forth through multiple lanes of traffic as fast as possible, squeezing haphazardly into the tiny spaces between cars and semis only to drift into another lane and blaze on ahead. That sort of behavior is only acceptable if somebody in your car is either about to have a baby or about to shit himself.

I’m well aware that I recently went on a tirade about how unfair it is to assume something about a person’s character based on the year they were born; I can see how it would look hypocritical for me to say that people born in California are inherently shitty drivers.

At the same time, though, in six years of driving in Oregon I didn’t have to employ defensive driving tactics, use of the horn, or my Emergency Profanity anywhere near as much as I’ve had to in the past six weeks. I take that to assume that there are simply far more horrifyingly bad drivers here than there are in Oregon – and that’s not me talking; that’s science.

And I don’t get why that is, because at least in LA you’ve really got no excuse to be a shitty driver. You can be a treacherous, backstabbing drug addict and still be a huge success in this town, but driving is something that you have to do virtually every day for a long period of time – I don’t get how so many people down here suck so badly at it.

When I was in high school I practiced the trumpet every day – I was never great, but thanks to the constant practice I was at least good, and certainly never as bad at it as California drivers are at driving. The musical equivalent of California drivers is me using my trumpet to club baby harp seals.*

*That, or Dubstep.

Does that image make you both angry and sad at the same time? Now you know how I feel whenever I have to drive somewhere.

The really scary part for me is that a lot of people in LA moved here from someplace else, like I did. That means either:

1) Oregon is the only place in the world where people know how to drive, or
2) Exposure to California gradually erodes your driving abilities.

So if I undergo some sort of Flowers For Algernon regression to the sort of driver I was at the age of 15, please use this update to remember me as I once was – a person capable of using his fucking turn signal.

Truman Capps wants to let his Mom know that he hasn’t flipped anybody off on the road because he remembers how you told him at an early age that you should never make rude gestures at other drivers because they probably have guns in their cars.

Celebrity

"We love your bodily functions! All of them!"

People ask me sometimes how many famous people I’ve seen since moving to LA – and by “people ask me sometimes” I mean “not a single person has asked me that, but pretending that they have makes it way easier for me to start this update.” And since you ask, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you; not because I’ve seen so many famous people that I’ve lost count, but because I really can’t tell if a lot of the people I’m seeing are famous or not.

I tend to assume that exquisitely attractive, glamorously dressed people are famous – what other lifestyle would allow you to spend that much money on clothes as impractical as loafers or a fedora or some kind of weird knit wraparound shawl thing that you wear over a bikini? Plus, dressing like that draws attention, and attention is like cocaine for celebrities (along with actual cocaine, which doesn’t care how you’re dressed.)

What I so often forget is that LA is full of attractive attention whores from virtually everywhere in the world, and whether they’re famous or not they’re going to dress like they are, presumably in hopes of people like me thinking they’re famous. Because of this and my uncanny ability to forget the details of what a person looks like, I can see someone who’s good looking and outlandishly dressed and not be sure whether they’re actually a celebrity or if they refinanced their house to buy those ripped up jeans.

Moreover, the definition of what a celebrity is has widened in the past few years and I really haven’t kept up. Reality television has led to an explosion of people who are now famous in spite of their lack any skill or talent beyond embarrassing themselves – something I’ve been doing my whole life for no money and virtually no recognition. People who look to me like ordinary clownish douches could, in fact, be professional douches – your Real Housewives Of…, your …Shore, your …elor/ette; people who are paid big money to act like children and let cameras film the ensuing chaos. Since I generally avoid reality TV, though, I’m as likely to recognize these people for their work as they are to recognize me for my blog.

This kind of sets up what happened to me last night.

I was having a drink with a girl at a bar in Hollywood, and since it was oppressively crowded inside, we opted to sit outside at a table in a small area separated from the sidewalk by a low gate. The upside to this is that it’s quiet enough out there that you can actually hear what people are saying; the downside is that every passing freak can hear what you’re saying too and, in many cases, will offer his opinion. For instance, this happened:

Girl: My friends are talking about doing a road trip up to Seattle, but it sounds like a lot of driving.

Me: Yeah, Seattle’s overrated anyway. Just go to Portland instead.

Passing Crackhead On The Sidewalk: Aw man, Seattle’s pretty legit – I ain’t been there in years, but I liked it a lot! They got that Space Needle, y’know?

He stood there and grinned at me with all three of his teeth, looking at me like I was the weird one for not offering a response.

”Thank you, crackhead! I appreciate your participation in this open forum discussion. We’ve all learned a lot tonight – both about Seattle, and about ourselves. No, sorry, I don’t have any crack.”

Shortly after the crackhead left, an enormously fat man and a few of his friends arrived and sat on a bench a few feet away from us, drinking some gin and tonics and generally being quiet and civilized. But after a few minutes, a bunch of drunk, raucous, pudgy girls waddled up the sidewalk, stopped right beside us, and started squealing and pointing at the fat guy.

“OHMIGOD!” One of them shrieked, about a foot from my ear, her finger pointing straight past me like I wasn’t even there. “I know you! You were on Jackass!”

We both turned and looked at the fat man, who was smiling modestly and raising his glass in silent acknowledgment.

The girls screamed and giggled some more.

“You’re, like so funny! You’re the one who always throws up!”

And immediately, all I could think about was this tremendously obese man vomiting, no matter how hard I tried not to.

“Yeah!” Another one of them chirped. “Or there was the time you drank that sweat from your butthole on the exercise bike!”

“Or when Steve-O was wearing that fart mask hooked up to your butt, and you shit in it and Steve-O totally puked!”

I was really starting to miss that crackhead and his opinions on various Pacific Northwestern cities.

And then, as the girls posed with the fat man for pictures and told more vivid stories about the things he’d puked and shit on, the waiter brought us our food.

It’s one thing to eat food after hearing a nasty story about a person shitting or throwing up. It’s another thing to sit there eating while hearing those stories with the subject of them a couple of feet away from you like some kind of visual aid. And he’s surrounded by groupies telling these stories like they’re goddamn Norse legends or something, and from these you learn that he’s apparently the Steve Nash of shitting and puking and drinking his own bodily fluids, and you’re looking at the girl across from you and thinking, I told her this was a cool bar. It was my idea to come here. Because of me, we are now having this experience.

No, of course it couldn’t be John Malkovich at the other table. ”Oh my God! You were so thought provoking in ‘The Libertine’ – both the film adaptation and the 1996 stage production at the Steppenwolf in Chicago!” No, I pick the preferred bar of a professional defecator.

What do you do, in those situations? How do you make conversation while that’s going on? Do you acknowledge the obese, shitting elephant in the room, or do you try to make small talk and pretend it’s not happening?

”So, do you want dessert?”

“Nothing with chocolate in it.”

Once the fat guy and his groupies had left, we did wind up discussing what had happened, and she mentioned that she felt sorry for that guy. I, however, was inclined to disagree.

The man shit on somebody else’s face and got paid more than I’ve made in five years to do it. And, you know, that’s the beauty of capitalism, and God bless him for making a buck, but I think there’s a certain poetic justice to him being loudly recognized on the street for that sort of behavior, if for no other reason to show the public that you can’t just go around shitting on other peoples’ faces and get away scot free. People remember that sort of thing. It follows you.

So I guess, to answer your question, I’ve seen one celebrity so far. And if there was a way to un see him – to un know that one can be so gifted in the field of solid waste that people will recognize him on the street – you bet I’d do it.

Truman Capps has now passed these lovely mental images on to you. Thanks for reading!