The Obama Economics Lesson


"Man, they didn't have chalkboards like this back in Kenya, where I was bor- Wait! Shit! No!"

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a student before, but had recently failed an entire class. Now, ordinarily a statement like this would raise a few eyebrows, because one has to expect that in the course of his career any self-respecting college professor would hand out at least a few Fs to people who never showed up to class or slept through the final, but this was a tenured professor with a fairly serious alcohol problem, and the administration at Local College University figured it was just less of a hassle to keep him on the payroll.

The class he’d failed, though, had roiled him out of his booze-induced indolence by insisting that Obama’s socialism worked and that nobody would be poor and nobody would be rich, a great equalizer. The students were either stupid or just really bad at keeping up on current events, as Obama’s 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would make him arguably one of the worst socialist conspirators of all time. However, Local College University was not known for the intelligence of its student body or the factuality of the statements made by its professors – it was, however, remarkable in its ability to fill classes with students who all unanimously supported radical agendas with no internal dissent.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.” (Substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all.)

Some of the students in class were unaware of what ‘Obama’s plan’ was, having never heard anything about some radical wealth-redistribution agenda from the guy who could barely get Congress to agree on a budget to run the country. The professor, you see, was referring to House Resolution 3798, or the Take All The Money From Rich White Republicans, Use It To Build A Gigantic Spaceborne Electromagnet Which, When Turned On, Will Remove Everyone’s Guns From Their Homes, And Then Give The Remaining Money To Black People And Abortion Doctors Act of 2012, which was introduced in a double super ultra maxi top secret session of Congress by Barney Frank and Dennis Kucinich, both of whom were completely stoned on medical marijuana at the time.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. At no point did any of the students who studied hard think to tell the administration that one of the professors was endangering the academic standing of a large number of students in order to prove a political point.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. Antisemetic graffiti began to appear on the walls between classes. Desks were overturned and set on fire. A bunch of Chinese exchange students started cooking meth and selling it during class, but one day they cooked a bad batch by accident and this one girl OD’d and had to go to the hospital, but by the time she got there she was braindead, so her boyfriend (who was on the Local College University football team) got a bunch of his friends and went to beat up the Chinese kids, but one of them, thinking ahead, had bought a Glock from some dude selling them out of the trunk of his car out on County Road 9, so when the football players showed up there was this huge bloodbath and the courts spent like five years trying to straighten the whole thing out, eventually agreeing that all this strife could be tied back to the class’s enthusiastic support of Barack Obama’s socialist agenda.

To the class’s great surprise, EVERYBODY FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that. Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections. He then listed the following points:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

One of the remaining students who had not been killed or driven mad by the effects of Obama’s socialism raised his hand. He was an atheist with great hair, and had skipped all of the previous classes because he was taking the class pass/no pass and just needed a C- or above on the final to get a P.

“Question.” He said. “If socialism will ultimately fail, how do you account for countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland? The governments there – which are some of the least corrupt in the world – provide a wide range of social services, ranging from full healthcare to college tuition and rent assistance, and citizens there are considered some of the happiest, most contented people on Earth. I mean, I visited Denmark, and it seemed great – their public infrastructure greatly outpaced that of America’s, everyone seemed pretty happy, and the women were uniformly gorgeous! I mean, there were clearly some people who had more money than others, but nobody was going around trying to redistribute it and enforce some sort of government mandated equality – the high tax rates funded a higher standard of living for everybody, and the money they spent in taxes was money that they would’ve spent on healthcare or other things the government provided.

“Furthermore,” he said, brushing his hair out of his face as was his nervous habit. “Are you really trying to tell us that there’s somebody running against President Obama in 2012 who can fix the economy? Are you saying Mitt Romney, a serial liar, is going to look out for the little guy if he gets elected? Or Newt Gingrich, who sucks so hard that he was more or less forcibly removed from the government in the mid 1990s? And, I mean, does Rick Santorum even have economic policy? I think his entire stimulus plan consists of putting half the country to work printing Bibles and the other half to work making bricks to throw at gay people.

“Hey, I’ve got a brilliant fucking idea, you stupid goddamn hypothetical cocksucker,” he shouted, adding profanity to get his putrid liberal agenda across. “If you want to make an argument against the president’s economic policy, how about taking a fucking fact based approach instead of throwing around fucking buzzwords like ‘socialism’ and hoping that enough limp dick chowderheads realize that it’s the same word as the second ‘S’ in USSR and vote for whoever will ensure that they don’t see a horrifying 3% tax hike, you fear mongering, ill informed cun-“

Before he could finish, a MARINE who had served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan punched him in the face. The atheist tumbled to the floor, visibly shaken, and exclaimed, “Why did you do that?”

The MARINE calmly replied, “God was too busy taking care of America’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid shit and act like an asshole, so he sent me instead.”

“Psst!” The professor whispered. “I think you’re in the wrong story. The atheist professor asking God to knock him off his podium is down the hall.”

“Oops!” The MARINE said, and hustled out of the room.

Meanwhile, at the back of the classroom, two self styled libertarians who got most of their talking points from South Park and Pen and Teller were eagerly watching the proceedings.

“Oh man,” One of them, whose parents were paying for his college tuition and living expenses, grinned. “That socialist just got told!”

The other, a 25-year-old whose recent appendectomy had been paid for by his parents' insurance per the Obamacare extension, nodded and said, “I’m SO posting this on Facebook with a picture of Obama standing in front of a chalkboard.”

Truman Capps is sick of your bullshit, America.

If It Ain't Broke


To truly be effective, I probably need either this or a ShamWow.


I’m a big believer in the philosophy of ‘If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix it’ – largely because it allows you to be lazy as hell depending on how strictly you define the word ‘broke.’ Take the set of metal Ikea drawers I bought a couple weeks ago and still haven’t assembled. I’m not sweating it, because they’re not broke at the moment and my need for storage space is manageable, so I’ll just chill the fuck out and let the box lean up against my entertainment center until I feel like misunderstanding instructions, bruising up my fingers, and screaming obscenities about Sweden.*

*Take it from a Finn – it’s the Washington of Scandinavia.

Those of you who were reading last week may have remembered that last Saturday was my big Day of Improvement for The Mystery Wagon – that is, the day that I went to AutoZone, picked up some scratch remover, and tried to pretty up the side of the car that I totally shitrocked on my way out of the alley.

I had high hopes for that afternoon, as evidenced by the fact that I spent a full two updates planning and talking about it, plus this super-belated update recapping it. I saw it as an excuse to break out of my slothful, ‘If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It’ mentality. My car was pretty clearly broke in a cosmetic sense, and the least I could do was try to fix it.

I dropped $20 at AutoZone on a small box of scratch remover and some special polish cloths, drove back, and parked in the alley behind my apartment. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and my Mexican neighbors were throwing a fully fledged birthday fiesta for one of their kids, complete with a bouncy castle and what I’m pretty sure was a Spanish language rendition of ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ blasting during the piñata ceremony. These afternoons are the sort of afternoons made for working on your car in an alley.

I opened the box of scratch remover and was immediately disappointed to see two separate balms I had to rub on the scratches, along with several small strips of sandpaper and a lengthy list of bilingual instructions.

For how gung-ho I was about the entire process, it turns out I was really only gung-ho because I thought the process of removing scratches from the side of one’s car was as simple as spending the money and then taking 20 minutes to rub one product onto the affected area, at which point the problem went away forever. Seeing that this was going to be a complicated process – and by complicated I mean ‘one or two more steps than I’d anticipated’ – quickly reduced my enthusiasm.

However, I’d come so far and blogged so much that I figured now was no time to give up. So I set to work, first gently sanding the scratches with strips of wet sandpaper, then applying substance A, rubbing vigorously for two minutes, letting it sit, and then applying substance B and rubbing it equally vigorously for two minutes.*

*I want to say I put in some ‘elbow grease’ but that term has always sounded really gross to me, because I’m sure a lot of people, particularly in states that were enthusiastic about Rick Santorum in the primaries, actually have elbow grease, and it’s not something I want anywhere near The Mystery Wagon.

At first, I wasn’t impressed with the results, but as I worked harder and my expectations dropped lower, I started to feel better and better about the work I was doing. The scratches weren’t going away, no, but they certainly did appear to be shrinking as a direct result of the physical labor that I, Truman Capps, was doing in the sun.

”Pero no dice el corazón, el corazón dolorido de breaky que yo sólo no pienso comprendería…”, a drunken Mexican father wailed into the karaoke machine a few hundred feet away.

My work completed, I packed up the gear, went inside, and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 while eating vegetables and hummus in hopes of balancing out my previous usefulness by just being a totally lazy shit for a few hours. That night, I went and met some friends at a bar in Los Feliz, the whole time secretly hoping that they’d notice The Mystery Wagon in the parking lot and say something.

”Woah, Truman, your car… There’s clearly some visible damage to the rear right side door, but somehow not as much as I would’ve expected, almost as though somebody with a reasonable degree of competence in the auto maintenance department had worked on it. Did you take it to a shop?”

“Hell no! I did it myself, because I’m an adult male, and that’s the sort of thing that we do.”

It rained that night, and when I got a look at my car in the morning, I was in for a bit of a shock.

The scratches seemed to be just as noticeable as they were before I applied the remover – what’s more, rainwater had unseated the rub-on scratch remover, leading to big swirly stains of it on the side of the car door. I had gone into this venture in the first place because I didn’t want my car to look like I was a typical shitty California driver, and now not only does it look like I’m a shitty California driver, but it also looks like I’m a shitty Oregon car maintenance dude. The only phrase I can think of to describe this situation comes from the brilliant Comedy Central series Workaholics: It’s seriously Loose Butthole.

What I can’t quite figure out, though, is whether the rain fucked up my work, or if I just lost so much perspective in the course of working on my car that it took me a day to get the necessary space and realize that my car was just as fucked up as before and all my work and $20 had done was give me some false sense of accomplishment.

I scratched up the other side of The Mystery Wagon last summer when I lived in Studio City under very similar circumstances – I was trying to pull out of a tight spot in the garage under my apartment and, bingo was his name-o, I’d ground some of the paint off the side of my car. I was pretty bummed about it for a week or so, but gradually I got used to the scratch, and now I barely see it.

I guess that’s going to become the case for the other scratch as well – I’ll notice it less and less until it just becomes yet another story woven into the fascinating tapestry that is the life and times of The Mystery Wagon, like the missing seatbelt in back or the arrhythmic turn signal or the ominous length of black rope coiled up next to the snow chains.

My car was kind of broke, I tried to fix it, and it got slightly more broke, in that I now have to wash scratch remover off the side of my car. I’ve decided to amend the credo: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It – If It Is Broke, Hire A Professional Because You’ll Only Fuck It Up.

Truman Capps is hoping to get some money from Subaru for all this product placement.

The Mystery Wagon


Why, yes, that is a street parking spot directly in front of the office. Thanks for noticing!


There’s an ongoing, lively debate between gearheads and greasemonkeys regarding what is the greatest car of all time. Audi drivers prattle on about luxury and German engineering, while Toyota drivers are big on reliability and fuel efficiency. GM drivers are all about raw power and also the inherent huge dickness of driving an American car, and pretty much nobody has anything good to say about cars made in England. Everything I’m saying right now, like most facts I state on my blog, is based on conjecture and Wikipedia, but I think it’s acceptable in this case because the car superiority debate is pointless and stupid – we already know what the best car in the world is.

The best car in the world is a 1997 Subaru Legacy station wagon, light blue, with power locks, rear seats that fold down, and a bike rack. It’s a pretty specific package, I know, but coincidentally it happens to be the exact car that I drive, and I’m here to tell you that it’s better than literally all other cars, and also some countries. (I’m looking at you, Slovenia.) I call it The Mystery Wagon.

By the time I was old enough to drive around the apocalyptic, suburban expanse that is Salem, Oregon, my family owned not one but two Subaru Legacy station wagons, one of them blue, one of them silver. At the time, we called them ‘Ol Blue and Hi-Ho Silver. (I only include this detail so you understand that my whole family is like this, not just me.)

We’d bought Hi-Ho Silver from my late Aunt Karen when I was in middle school to replace my Dad’s old Ford Taurus. A ’95 Legacy, Hi-Ho Silver was the elder statesman of the pair, and my parents’ preferred car.

We picked up ‘Ol Blue, which would eventually become The Mystery Wagon, a couple of years later, due largely to how impressed my parents were with our first Subaru, when my parents bought it from the insurance company my Mom worked for. It had been a company car for several years, and at some point in its service either one asshole acting independently or a crack squad of assholes smoked in the car, leaving a thin film that coats the inside of the windshield to this day. The possibly carcinogenic film is probably why ‘Ol Blue was, by default, my car.

‘Ol Blue turned into The Mystery Wagon somewhere between me using it to learn how to drive, a thousand-odd late night Muchas Gracias runs*, and the 9/11-meets-Deliverance disaster otherwise known as my senior prom, in which it served as our limo. I wouldn’t call myself a people person and I have limited patience for animals, but let me tell you: I fell in love with that car – a deep, binding love that continues to this day.

*Muchas Gracias is a small 24-hour Mexican fast food chain in Salem and the greater Willamette Valley. Think of it like Chipotle but with the ingredients they use in prison food and no health and safety standards whatsoever. They sold a six-dollar burrito that was so big you could probably hide a Glock in it if you wanted to assassinate somebody. (And knowing the clientele at Muchas after 11:00 PM, that probably happened at least twice.)

I didn’t take a car to college, both because I didn’t feel like I needed one in Eugene and because my parents didn’t particularly want to give me one. They moved up to Portland with their two Subarus (keep reading; it gets more liberal) and traded Hi-Ho Silver for a Prius, which they own to this day. No word on if they’ve given it a cute name yet.

The arrival of the Prius only strengthened the bond between The Mystery Wagon and I. Dad takes the bus to work and Mom uses the Prius, so throughout college The Mystery Wagon was just an extra car that they had parked out in front of the house, for use on Ikea runs, during snowstorms (did I mention The Mystery Wagon has all wheel drive? Because it does.), and as the car I used whenever I came home to visit. After graduation, it was essentially mine to take to LA.

I love everything about The Mystery Wagon. Sure, it’s a reliable car that gets great – okay, good – okay, decent – okay, not terrible mileage, but more than that, it’s the last line of defense between me and Hollywood douchebaggery. Nothing says ‘I don’t give a shit about your fucking yoga class’* more than tooling around the city in a 15 year old station wagon that hasn’t seen the inside of a car wash since the Bush Administration.

*Or any yoga class, for that matter. Fuck you, yoga!

That said, I still take pride in my car, so imagine my frustration when I scraped up the side of it trying to pull out of the alley behind my apartment last week. In my defense, it was dark out and the entryway to the alley where we park is a narrow, Death Star-style easement between two buildings, and I’m definitely not the first person to have trouble with it.

All the excuses in the world, though, don’t make up for the fresh row of scratches along the rear end of my beloved car. It’s kind of embarrassing for me to drive now – driving an old, dirty car in LA says, “I don’t view my car as a status symbol,” while driving an old dirty car with noticeable damage in LA says, “I’m just as bad a driver as any natural born Californian,” which is very much not true.

That’s why I’ve decided, per my last post, to spend my Saturday afternoon fixing up my car. Thanks to a handy Popular Mechanics tutorial I found on the Internet, I know how to buff out a scratch, and the AutoZone down the street from my apartment has all the necessary tools (a rag and a bottle of scratch remover.) I might even take a radio outside with me and listen to Bruce Springsteen while I work, since I feel like most of his songs, on some level, are about a guy working on a car.

It’s not just a pride thing, though. As I may have mentioned a few times before, I really do love this fucking car, and I want to take good care of it, because in addition to being The Greatest Car On Earth it’s also my car, and I want to keep it looking nice. This car carries me over a mountain pass every day; the least I can do is spend a couple hours tenderly rubbing salve onto the rear portion of… Okay, you get the idea.

So Saturday is going to be a big day – at least, big by Truman Capps standards, given the sort of stuff I usually do on a Saturday. I’m heading to AutoZone to pick up the necessary supplies, getting the car washed on the way back, and then seeing how much of the damage really will ‘buff right out’ the way that I nervously whimpered it would when I first saw the scratches. I’m giving it 50/50 odds that the car somehow explodes in the course of the maintenance – if it does, you’ll see it on the news Sunday.

Truman Capps was going to explain how The Mystery Wagon got its name, but opted not to, because like most things that happened in high school it’s a serious case of ‘you had to be there.’

The Weekend Warrior


I can see my house from here! I mean, probably.


Chevron has a number of helpful billboards set up around Los Angeles that feature a running countdown until Friday at 5:00 PM, at which point ‘Weekend Warriors Go To Work’, or something like that. I should point out that in this case they’re not talking about the National Guard or the Army Reserve, who are actual weekend warriors who literally do go to work on the weekends, but instead to people who spend their weekends kayaking or hiking or fixing their cars or doing any other activity listed in the ‘Things Truman Doesn’t Do’ handbook.

For somebody who lives in a world city – albeit the crappiest one in America, far outshined by Chicago and New York – I’ve really done very little to take advantage of it in the 8 months I’ve been living here. Something I always complained about, first in Salem and then in Eugene, was that there was never a huge amount of stuff going on. In Salem there was hard drugs and various youth group meetings, in Eugene there was soft collegey drugs and a whole bunch of indie music events I gave exactly zero fucks about.

Even Portland, which I’ve stated time and again is The Greatest City In The World™, wasn’t necessarily a hotbed of fascinating activities for me. Again, I’m not really into indie music and I don’t drink coffee or beer, so most of the city’s cultural lynchpins didn’t apply to me. And while I had a lot of great times in Portland, it’s very much a small city – there are only so many events going on at any given time, and things usually close up before they should. If New York is The City That Never Sleeps, Portland is The City That Stays Up Late Enough To Watch Letterman And Then Passes Out On The Couch. (Salem is Terri Schiavo.)

Los Angeles, though, is huge. Look it up on Google Earth – it’s just a big, gray, self-centered tumor spreading from the Pacific Ocean to the Imperial Valley, casually talking about what famous people it’s met and whining about how it hasn’t been to the gym in ‘like forever.’ It’s The City That Never Misses A Chance To Take Its Shirt Off.

This city is home to approximately 18 million people, the tallest building on the West Coast, lord knows how many miles of beaches, multiple mountain ranges, an observatory, a few canyons full of severed heads, dozens of museums, hidden oil derricks, a huge sign that says the name of the neighborhood beneath it, and, somewhere out there, both Christina Hendricks and Alison Brie, which qualifies it for CILF status.

I have seen precious few of those sights. I realized this the other night while hanging out with my friends Dylan and Holly.

You see, it rained this past weekend, which in LA is usually bigger news than our serial killer du jour, and the three of us were chatting about the experience of waking up on Saturday to the sound of rain pattering against our windows.

“It was great. As soon as I heard it raining, I downloaded Fallout 2 and spent the entire day in bed playing video games.” I said, including, as usual, too much information about precisely how pathetic my life is.

“Yeah,” Holly smiled, nodding. “When I woke up and heard the rain, it was like a relief. I just thought to myself, ‘I don’t have to go out and do anything today. I can just sleep in.’”

“Uh huh.” I said. “Yeah, I… No, I totally get you. Every weekend I’m just so busy doing things. It was good to feel like I didn’t have to go out and do… Things. That I am always doing.”

Most of my weekends are basically extended weekday evenings, with the only difference being that I stay up later reading Reddit and there’s usually a particularly hostile game of Risk somewhere in there. I haven’t been to the beach in well over a month. I haven’t been to Griffith Park since I moved here. If I’m in Hollywood it’s either for business or because I’m meeting someone for an overpriced drink in a bar so loud I can barely hear them namedrop.

I think Dylan and Holly’s strength lies in that they’re a Power Couple who’ve been dating since like the fourth season of The Office and currently live together. Couples automatically do stuff more often than single people for a variety of reasons:

1) Sightseeing Alone Is Weird

I’m not going to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art alone, damn it. Everyone would think I was weird, or Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, even though I am without a doubt Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

2) Doing Nothing Together Is Difficult

Frittering a day away alone is way easier because you don’t have to worry that somebody else is bored.

3) External Motivation Does Wonders

I would wager that at least 65% of the people at a Farmer’s Market or a mall or a sporting event on a Saturday would, in their heart of hearts, much rather be in bed asleep or stoned and watching TV to recuperate after a long week of work. When you’re single, you can make all kinds of great plans to go for a bike ride along the beach, but when it’s 7:00 AM and all you want to do is sleep, you don’t have to answer to anybody but yourself. Couples, on the other hand, always have somebody else there to keep them honest.

I know it sounds a lot like I’m doing the classic 2005 LiveJournal ‘why am I single’ blog post, but I’m genuinely not – I’ve been in a relationship before. I’ve stared into that black, desolate abyss. I’ve had arguments about whether the hypothetical food at our hypothetical wedding will be vegan or not, I’ve pretended to be interested in the beads at the Eugene Saturday Market, I’ve watched Titanic because I knew it was going to get me laid. I know what a relationship is, and it’s not worth all that just so I can have an excuse to go to The Museum of Jurassic Technology with somebody.*

*Google it. It’s two miles from my apartment and it looks awesome.

But sadly, the Weekend World discriminates against us single people. There’s nothing sadder than a table for one at brunch, save for maybe two heterosexual guys going to brunch together and spending the entire time desperately trying to convince themselves that nobody thinks they’re gay. I don’t think I have any male friends down here who would be super interested in a trip to Echo Park, with its cute little two seater paddle boats, or the Getty, with its romantic views of the coast.

Part of me wants to take this as a hint that fate, Science, the universe, or whatever is trying to tell me that it’s okay to be a lazy slob on the weekends because circumstances are such that I’ve got no other choice. Thing is, this is the same part of me that told me it was acceptable to eat several fistfuls of shredded cheese for dinner tonight, so I can’t be sure that part of me has my best interests at heart.

That’s why I’ve decided to give Weekend Warriordom a try. Next weekend, I’m going to go out into the alley, perhaps with a can of Strongbow, and work on my car. Yes, that’s right – I’m going to perform maintenance on an automobile, and yes, my name is still Truman Capps. I’ll cover the specifics of what I’m going to do in Wednesday’s update, and the horrible results on Sunday, if I’m still alive at that point.

Truman Capps is actually not a huge brunch fan, because hollandaise is overrated.

In Defense Of Rush Limbaugh


I hate his face, so... Close enough.


I hate when people use the word evil to describe Rush Limbaugh. He’s not evil. Pol Pot was evil. John Wayne Gacy was evil. Augusto Pinochet was evil. Calling Rush Limbaugh evil weakens the term, because he isn’t evil – he’s just a huge, fat, blubbering, worthless piece of shit asshole. Make no mistake: There is a huge difference.

Evil is knowing that you’re inflicting grievous harm on others for your own personal gain and not caring. Neil Goldschmidt, for example, had a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl in the mid 1970s when he was mayor of Portland, as a result of which she developed a number of severe emotional problems and lapsed into poverty and drug abuse, dying in her mid 40s.

Goldschmidt spent the bulk of his career covering up the uncomfortable fact that he was a rapist; after the story broke in 2004 he shiftily accepted responsibility for what he’d done whilst simultaneously trying to discredit as much of the victim’s story as he could, and, after learning that she’d been raped by another man while living in Seattle, publicly stated, ”…bad things happened up there for which she's probably blameless, in the sense that she didn't invite it -- I mean literally ask for it. But she was always putting herself in circumstances like that.”

Neil Goldschmidt is evil. He really wanted to have sex with an adolescent girl, so he did it without particularly caring about what it was going to do to her, and then he didn’t want to face the blame for it, so he attempted to dehumanize her in the eyes of the public.

Rush Limbaugh is a huge asshole and a terrible person, but he’s not evil. Calling him evil is like me calling bleu cheese evil just because it’s ruined pretty much every meal I’ve ever had it in. Bleu cheese is just doing it’s job – being stinky and bitter. Rush Limbaugh’s job is more or less the same.

Not that I’m one of those people waving his hand dismissively and saying, “Oh, he’s just an entertainer. He exaggerates things to get ratings, and he says what a lot of people are thinking!”

Because for one thing, the fact that a lot of people are thinking something doesn’t necessarily mean you should go out and say it publicly to a massive audience. When the Erin Andrews nude video leaked a couple years ago, a significant majority of men in this country thought, “I am going to download that video and look at it while I masturbate.”

However, I don’t recall anybody going on the airwaves and saying that out loud – and that’s the sort of thing you’d remember if you heard it coming from Andy Rooney or Brian Williams. The reason that we don’t automatically vocalize every thought that we have is because humans inevitably have a lot of really shitty thoughts in the course of the day, the bulk of which are better left in the privacy of our own minds.

The things Rush said about Sandra Fluke and women in general really, really pissed me off, because I know, admire, and am, in fact, related to a number of women who did nothing to deserve all this, short of being born without penises. Just the other day I was driving home on the 405, fuming about the horrible things this piece of shit said about women, when a pink Volkswagen Beetle cut me off.

Goddamn it! I thought to myself as I hit the brakes, and, before I even knew what was happening in my brain, followed that thought up with: Probably some fucking woman driver.

See? That was a thing that I, a pro choice liberal feminist, thought to myself. Of course, I don’t actually believe that – it just sort of popped into my head. Sometimes you just think shitty things. The fact that Rush Limbaugh goes on the radio and routinely says every shitty thing that he can think of doesn’t make him some kind of bold and tireless crusader for what’s just and good; it makes him functionally retarded since he seems to lack the part of the brain that tells us when we should just shut the fuck up, already.

So let’s tally it up: Asshole? Yes. Bad person? Yes. Bigot? Yes. Hypocrite? Yes. Detracting from the cause of intelligent and rational discourse in the American political arena? Yes. Deserving of censorship? Fuck, no!

I’m not talking about the consumer pressure that’s caused 140+ of his sponsors to leave, resulting in large patches of dead air between segments on his show. We, as consumers in a free market economy, have the right to do business or not do business with whomever we want, and those businesses have the right to advertise or not advertise with whomever they want.

For example, earlier in the year a bunch of folks tried to boycott JC Penny for hiring Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson. JC Penny stood by their spokesperson, the nation had a laugh at the folks’ expense, and everyone moved on. The same pressure has been applied to Rush Limbaugh’s sponsors, almost all of whom have decided that they’d rather not stand by him and have taken their money elsewhere.

This is not censorship; this is a wise business decision on the part of 140-odd companies. Censorship is Jane Fonda’s demand that the FCC ban Limbaugh from the airwaves.

I do not like Jane Fonda.

In 1972 she went to North Vietnam, posed for pictures on a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun, made propaganda broadcasts on Radio Hanoi, and publicly called American POWs “hypocrites,” “liars,” and “war criminals” who were “trying to make themselves look self righteous.” She apologized 16 years later when controversy about her wartime activities threatened the box office profits from her latest movie. I think she’s a reactionary who makes liberal feminists look bad, and her campaign to sully our reputation continued in a CNN.com editorial she coauthored:

Like the sophisticated propagandist Josef Goebbels, [Limbaugh] creates rhetorical frames -- and the bigger the lie, the more effective -- inciting listeners to view people they disagree with as sub-humans. His longtime favorite term for women, "femi-Nazi," doesn't even raise eyebrows anymore, an example of how rhetoric spreads when unchallenged by coarsened cultural norms.

Here’s a tip: Criticizing someone for comparing women to Nazis loses its power when you compared him to a Nazi in the previous sentence. Where did you get the idea to compare him to a Nazi, by the way? Nobody ever does that these days. Very creative. Moving on.

This isn't political. While we disagree with Limbaugh's politics, what's at stake is the fallout of a society tolerating toxic, hate-inciting speech. For 20 years, Limbaugh has hidden behind the First Amendment, or else claimed he's really "doing humor" or "entertainment." He is indeed constitutionally entitled to his opinions, but he is not constitutionally entitled to the people's airways.

As I may have mentioned a few times, Rush Limbaugh is an asshole and there’s very little good in him. (Although he never went to a warzone and made nice with enemy combatants while American servicemen were dying…) But above all else, he is a very popular asshole. A lot of Americans like listening to him for reasons that I’m still trying to understand, and the FCC is there to make sure that everybody gets equal airtime.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I don’t find the idea of an America that blindly tolerates hate speech scary. I just find the idea of an America where the government silences anybody they disagree with way, way scarier.

Truman Capps said a lot of nasty things about people in this update, so he’d like to mention that he thinks George Takei is a really great guy.

Ikea Weekend


"Keep building! Between the size and the color scheme, there's no way aliens CAN'T see us!"


I really love being white, which is fortunate, because I’m really good at it,. That said, it’s not like there’s really anything to hate about being white in the first place. Hating being white is like hating having free steak delivered to you, or your own Learjet – like Louis C.K. says, white people aren’t inherently better, but being white is far easier and less stressful than the alternative. Pretty much the only downside is that between Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum, and the Pope, white people have a pretty solid reputation for ignorance and bigotry.

The one time that I do start to feel a bit self conscious about my ethnicity – as though you can call living in Culver City and liking Huey Lewis an ‘ethnicity’ – is when I go to Ikea. Because while Ikea is staffed and patronized by a large number of racially, ideologically, and economically diverse people, when somebody asks you how your weekend was and you say, "I went to Ikea on Saturday.”, the un-PC knee jerk response is still, "Yeah, I’ll bet you did, honky.”

So I went to Ikea on Saturday – with my white friends, in my Subaru – to pick up some home furnishings and eat some cheap meatballs, not in that order.

My room was pretty short on furniture. For the past eight months, the corner of my room was home to several decaying cardboard boxes, the veterans of several college-era moves, loaded with various books, DVDs, and trinkets that I had no storage space for outside of the boxes I brought them to California in.

Until recently, though, I’d never had enough disposable income to justify a trip to Ikea, because as we all know, that minimalistic paradise may as well be a vengeful blue and yellow god who tricks countless mortals into sacrificing large stacks of money to him in return for the false promise of a living space as cozy as the ones in the showroom.

Being as my immediate concern was paying my rent in a timely fashion, I opted to hold out on an Ikea run until I had some income to dispose of. I mean, I needed furniture, but needing furniture isn’t the same as needing food or medicine. There has never been a furniture emergency, unless you count when poorly constructed bookcases tip over and crush their owners, in which case I will probably suffer a furniture emergency in the next week or so.

Point is, the work I’ve been doing in advertising is considerably more lucrative than getting coffee for people, so this weekend I opted to go out and drop around $100 on home furnishings before I inevitably screw this job up and have to go back to living on a tight budget again.

Ikea is a roller coaster ride, from start to finish. On the one hand, you’re excited and inspired by all these beautiful dwellings around you and thrilled at how little you’ll have to spend to make that shelf your own. On the other, you’re contending with gigantic crowds, hopelessly lost in the ergonomic maze, and, if you’re there with a significant other, probably having a fairly pouty and melodramatic fight.*

*I’m not stealing that joke from 30 Rock, 30 Rock stole that bit from a thing that always happens in real life.

After you leave, though, is probably the ultimate low point. Driving away, your car loaded down with hundreds of dollars’ worth of cheap balsawood, it begins to sink in that the battle is only half over. There’s one more step between buying your Ikea furniture and having it in your house, and that’s building the fucking furniture.

I have limited Ikea construction experience – I’ve disassembled and reassembled my desk, LACK, several times, but that’s pretty easy seeing as it’s only got four parts. I had been cautioned to stay away from anything with moving parts – such as drawers – unless I had an engineering degree, so I did just that. But I did not expect that BILLY, my seven-foot tall bookcase, would drive me to the brink of insanity and then send me over it, screaming and yelling all kinds of profanity.

I know some people say that putting together Ikea furniture is easy, but in my defense, those people are idiot liars because putting together Ikea furniture is fucking impossible. I spent an hour and a half just pounding dowels and trying to get planks installed facing the right direction, and that was before things even got frustrating.

I first realized I was out of my league when I found that the sort of screwdriver the asexual humanoid was using in the instruction manual was not included with the supplies, so I had to drop everything and go to Rite Aid in search of a screwdriver and a hammer. The good news is that while their limited tool section lacked a hammer, it did have a screwdriver with a hammerhead in the base. The bad news is that it was made by a company called Latitude, which proudly produces tools for women and women only.


So I bought the hammer/screwdriver designed for women with the turquoise handle and went home to continue being vexed by a Scandinavian bookcase. I do emasculating things with such depressing frequency that I think it’d make more sense to just start mentioning when I do something that actually is relatively manly.

I returned home and spent the next two and a half hours on the floor of my bedroom alternately screwing and nailing BILLY. The process was far from enjoyable for either one of us – he was obstinate and unyielding, while I, due to my lack of experience, was mostly just frustrated. Finally, though, after a lot of sweat and anguish, I was able to finish, and ultimately I’d say I’m pretty satisfied.


Oh yeah, that’s right: BILLY is black. Needless to say, making him hold all my possessions like that is triggering my finely tuned white guilt right about now.

Truman Capps disappoints his older readers to no end.

The Conversation Rulebook, Part 2


...get it?


3) CHECK YOUR DREAMS AT THE DOOR

Los Angeles is full of people doing shitty, menial jobs who wish they were doing awesome, usually highly artsy and creative jobs involving music or acting or some shit like that. Frequently I’ll find myself in conversation with these people.

Now, sometimes the conversation is going swimmingly – they’ve held off on all but the absolute best facts about themselves and they’ve been appropriately interested in all my awesome whorehouse stories. Other times it’s halfway through a rambling story of unrequited love set in a Jiffy Lube waiting room. No matter what, eventually we wind up at a line a lot like this one:

“…my dream is to be a [DERP] – as a matter of fact, I’m [DERPING] at [INCONVENIENTLY LOCATED VENUE] on [INCONVENIENT EVENING]. You should come! It’ll be really awesome. The cover charge is [AN AMOUNT OF MONEY I AM UNWILLING TO PAY.]”

I am then left holding a poorly made flier and trying to look interested while actually trying to gauge when I’ll be out of this guy’s line of sight so I can throw it away.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t promote yourself; I’m saying that when you do it within a few minutes of meeting someone it immediately devalues their role in the conversation. Even though we all know nobody cares about what we have to say as much as we do, we enjoy pretending that it’s true, and when you abruptly shove a flier with your face on it into our hands we come to the uncomfortable realization that you’re only talking to us because you want us to do something for you.

The only flier I have ever taken seriously was for a DJ duo called Reaganomics back in Eugene, Oregon. All they played was pop hits from the 1980s. I heard them one night at Fathom’s, physically approached them, and said, “You guys are awesome. Can I have a flier?” They then gave me a flier for their show at Fathom’s the following week, and a week later I came back with my friends and had the best Wednesday ever.

So when is it acceptable to promote yourself to someone? Tough to say. I hung out with a PA for the better part of two shooting days before he gave me his rap CD, and I didn’t feel at all used. Also, since he set me up with a job in advertising, I feel obliged to tell you that his name is Jonathan Denmark and you should all buy his album, so clearly he’s got the hang of this conversation thing.

See? He did it right, and as a result, now I’m promoting him.

4) DON’T GET TOO HEAVY

I once went on a first date with a girl in which she wound up telling me a two hour long story about her struggles with drug addiction, eating disorders, self-mutilation, and sexual abuse. Prior to this story I had had one brief phone conversation with this girl, along with the 20 minutes of the date prior to the part where she opened the floodgates of dysfunction.

I’m not saying that you should bottle up your problems and not tell people about them. Civilization is here so that people can help each other. What I’m saying is that when you first meet someone, you should definitely bottle up your problems and not tell that person about them, because you put them in the absolute weirdest and most uncomfortable position because once they’ve said sorry, there’s really basically nothing else they can say, short of sorry a second time.

Again, this all comes back to empathy – when you meet somebody you want to try to gain some understanding of their nature. What do they like? What don’t they like? You want to know if they’re like you. You want to know if they’re the sort of person you can invest time and energy in caring about.

But when the first thing somebody tells you when you meet them is that both of their parents died on 9/11 while on their way to finalize divorce proceedings as a result of the stresses of raising a child together, you don’t know the person well enough yet to say much beyond, “Sorry,” except perhaps, “Bummer.” Before you have any inkling of whether this person is going to be in your life more in the future, you find yourself feeling sorry for and counseling them. That’s an awkward first impression.

So what’s too personal and what’s all in good fun? I made another chart to help you find out.


As you can see, there are really very few personal details you should be sharing with a person when you first start talking to them. Anything much more intimate than “I’ve got a cold” is way over the line.

PROTIP: Just because an illness isn’t particularly severe doesn’t mean it’s automatically okay to tell people about it. Like pinkeye, for example.

5) FUCK YOU AND YOUR HUMBLE BRAGGING

Months ago I was PAing for a camera crew at a celebrity’s wedding, and, during some of our downtime, was sitting on the back of a golf cart with a cute female PA who was inexplicably talking to me. We were talking about Mad Men and I was almost ready to drop my awesome Mad Men pickup line* when a lanky, funny looking assistant cameraman a couple years older than us shuffled over.

*”Actually, they shoot Mad Men on the Sony lot in Culver City, like two miles from my apartment! Speaking of my apartment, you want to get out of here? Maybe go to my apartment? It’s close to where they shoot Mad Men, y’know.”

“Hey, what’s up?” He asked, conversationally.

“We’re just talking about Mad Men.” The cute PA said.

The assistant camera guy nodded rapidly. “Yeah, I can’t really watch Mad Men, because I know so much about how advertising in the 1960s started utilizing studies by Sigmund Freud to make people think they needed stuff they didn’t, and it just pisses me off.”

Taking our bemused silence to mean, Tell us more! There’s nothing we’d rather hear than your half cocked amateur psychology you found on the Internet, he continued.

“Yeah,” he said, reacting to himself. “See, Freud basically published all these theories that were really big in Europe, and then this ad guy in New York started reading them in the 1920s, and so he started using the theories at his agency and their profits…”

Long story short, he yammered at us for about 20 minutes and I never got that girl’s number, something which I blame entirely on the assistant cameraman since I am normally quite successful in that department. Point is, what this asshole did was clumsily hijack our conversation because he wanted to stroke his own ego over how he read a thing about psychology once.

Look, if you want to tell a bunch of people about how great you are, do us all a favor and just be upfront about it.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen – may I have your attention please? I just wanted to let you all know that I can run REALLY fast. Thank you.

I mean, we’re still going to think you’re a douchebag for interrupting our conversation so you can brag about yourself, but on some level we’ll respect you for being comfortable enough with yourself to just come right out and brag about it without having to hide behind some sort of fake modesty.

Truman Capps hopes that this improves every conversation you have in the foreseeable future.

The Conversation Rulebook, Part 1


This is scarier than most actual conversations.


We’ve all been there before – you’re in a place, such as an airplane, an elevator, or even your own office, when you encounter another human being. Perhaps you’ve wondered in these situations, as I often have, What’s my next move? Do I say something to them? If so, what should I say? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to just kill this person?

The answer, obviously, is yes – killing the other person and either successfully hiding the body and deflecting all guilt or being caught, prosecuted, and sent to jail are both far simpler and more pleasant options than having a conversation, but unfortunately neither choice is terribly feasible if you’ve got any other plans for that evening or the rest of your natural life. Sadly, there’s no way around it: You’re going to have to have a conversation.

Now, the vast majority of the conversations you have won’t be terribly enjoyable or interesting for one or even both involved parties. On the rare occasion that a conversation is enjoyable, it’s because both parties have had the proper training.

Right now you may be asking, ”What is this proper conversational training, Truman, and who do I know who’s qualified to give it to me? Is it you? And if so, how are you qualified to give advice of this nature?”

Well, since you asked, I am qualified to train you on how to have a conversation, and my qualifications come from the fact that due to my conservative, clean-cut, highly approachable appearance I am a frequent target for terrible conversationalists, and as such I’ve had ample opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

So sit back, relax, and gratefully absorb the TRUMAN CAPPS DR. PEPPER TEN CONVERSATION RULEBOOK!*

*I sold a sponsorship to make ends meet.

1) NOT ONE SOLITARY SOUL ON EARTH GIVES A SHIT ABOUT YOUR LIFE

Look, I’m sorry, but you had to find out sometime – please don’t take this the wrong way! It’s not me talking, it’s science. Unless the person you’re talking to is one of your good friends, the 20 minute story you’re telling about your decision to drop out of the biology department at the University of Southern Maine and turn your theater minor into a major is of no interest to them whatsoever.

For what it’s worth, it’s not you – it’s human nature. Why are some movies better than others? Because in the good movies, you can empathize with the characters, so you wind up rooting for them and wanting them to succeed. In bad movies, poorly drawn characters feel like strangers and you don’t give a shit about what happens to them, so as far as you’re concerned, the story has no stakes.

And as usual, what applies to movies applies directly to real life – if the person you’re talking to doesn’t know you very well, they’re not going to be interested in your story because they’re not interested in you. The story of how you changed majors may seem like Animal House meets The Graduate in your head, but depending how well you know the listener, to them it could easily be The Room.

Of course, there are rare occasions when someone can have a story so interesting that it trumps these rules – to clarify, I’ve made the following chart, on which any point south of the Axis Of Lame represents a bored listener and any point north represents an engaged listener.


As you can see, really the only 100% surefire way to tell an interesting story is to have it be about the listener, while literally nobody, including the person with whom you’re romantically engaged, gives a shit about your ski trip.

Before every conversation, take a second to assess what you’re about to say versus how well you know the person you’re talking to. Chances are, they don’t care. What should you talk about, then? Well, that’s easy, because…

2) EVERYONE IS MORE INTERESTING THAN YOU

Remember how nobody finds your stories interesting? That’s largely because they’re comparing your stories to their stories, and theirs are so much better than the inane shit you’re talking about. Every second that someone is listening to one of your stories that falls below the Axis Of Lame is a second that they’re secretly hating you for not asking them to tell their awesome stories.

Objectively, of course, there’s no way that the other person’s stories are all more interesting than yours unless you’re talking to Teddy Roosevelt.* The other person just thinks their stories are better because they’re wholeheartedly invested in the protagonist and empathize with every single one of his or her actions.

*And if you are having a conversation with Teddy Roosevelt, what the fuck are you doing talking!? Quit flapping your lips and listen. Any given hour of his life is several times as exciting than the entire fourth season of 24.

But if you don’t want to come off as a self absorbed douche, what do you do? You ask the listener questions to elicit their own stories. Yes, of course you don’t care. Of course your stories are better.

Right now, though, you’re playing the long game. The more you listen to the other person, the more likely they are to want to talk to you again, meaning you’ll become better acquaintances, meaning you’ll soon be able to captivate this person with any of your own stories provided they’re not about fucking skiing. Think of your current boredom as an investment in the future excitement of telling this person a story about a dream you had!

Deep In The Heart Of Taxes


Never has there been a greater lie than 'EZ.'


I’ve never quite resented paying my taxes as much as, say, the Tea Party does. That is, I don’t resent the paying part – I do, however, resent the large amount of math-oriented paperwork that leads up to the paying part. Actually, when I get to the paying part, I usually don’t pay anything – the one benefit to not making loads of money is that, just like a bear ignoring a human he thinks is dead, the government doesn’t want to mess with your money if there isn’t a lot of it there.

I got pretty serious about taxes this year, because this was the first year that my parents were no longer claiming me as a dependent on their taxes, which meant I could claim myself as a dependant, which is both a cause for philosophical introspection about the degree to which a man must depend on himself and also a chance to get a fat tax refund in the middle of a cash-strapped couple of months.

As previously mentioned, I started saving my receipts with the compulsion of a schizophrenic collecting newspapers and keeping careful track of the mileage on The Mystery Wagon in hopes of milking as much money as possible out of my tax return. In retrospect, I guess it’s kind of shady to try and grab as much money as I can from our dysfunctional, bankrupt government – like taking money from an overweight guy with a huge credit card bill who keeps trying to pick fights with shifty Middle Eastern dudes – but for the time being at least, I need it a lot more than they do.

Normally I just print out the necessary form and spend the better part of an afternoon sweating my way through it with help from the online tax guide and my first grade math skills, but this year, based on recommendations from my friends Dylan and Holly, I opted to try TurboTax, the online tax software that… Yeah, you all know what TurboTax is.

Dylan, as it turned out, had gotten a huge refund, because filing through TurboTax he’d discovered that he technically owned his own business last year when he shot a bunch of TV commercials for local Eugene businesses.* If he’d been filing on paper, he would’ve just reported his income and been taxed on it, but because TurboTax knows all the loopholes, he was able to write off the cost of his camera as a business expense.

*Technically, though, Dylan should’ve received a grant from a charitable organization to do that, because before he started making them Eugene had arguably the worst local commercials anywhere in America – nay, the world.

This got me started wondering just how many potential refunds I’d missed in the blur of confusion, tears, ink smudges, and fears of an audit that accompanied my pen and paper tax preparation in the past. The American tax code is huge with lots of loopholes, but you have to know about them to exploit them – for all I knew, there could’ve been a gaggle of Bush-era tax credits for white people with good hair still in the system just waiting to be found.

I hit up the TurboTax website, got the free version of the software, and went to work figuring out how much money the government was going to give me. I’m in no way trying to shill for TurboTax here, but I actually caught myself having fun using it, because basically the whole process is answering a lot of pretty easy yes or no questions and looking to see if your answers will get you money or not. It’s sort of like a really boring, simplistic, low stakes quiz show where the big winners generally have disabled children or a truck large enough to write off as farm equipment.

I had a pretty solid $179 bonus coming to me when I hit a snag – one of the jobs I’d worked hired me on as an ‘independent contractor’, which required me to fill out separate forms that my basic version of TurboTax didn’t have access to. Figuring that independent contractor status might bump me into pretty cool writeoff territory, I shelled out $20 for upgraded software, considering it to be an investment in a higher refund.

My shiny new version of TurboTax ran the numbers and told me that my independent contactor job meant that, according to the IRS, I was self employed for nine days in August. I figured this was probably going to turn out to be a good thing, even though in the Capps family the words ‘self employed’ are usually our way of delicately implying that someone is a prostitute.* Then I glanced at the upper right corner of the screen and realized that my $179 refund had turned into me owing the government $10.

*That said, I do degrading jobs because I need the money, so technically maybe I’ve been ‘self employed’ for way more than just those nine days. And then there’s the matter of the two weeks I spent living in a brothel…

I moved on to the credits and writeoffs section of my taxes, hoping undo the damage, and started throwing down everything I could – mileage on The Mystery Wagon, every receipt in my large envelope full of receipts, the four dollar LED flashlight I bought at Rite Aid and used two times on a PA job… But no matter what I gave TurboTax, it insisted that I owed $10. What’s more, it told me I owed $30 to the State of Oregon.

So this first year that I’m not a dependent, I owe $40 in taxes out of the $6500 I made – or 162.5% of my annual earnings.* Don’t forget, on top of that, the $20 I spent on an upgraded version of TurboTax.

*That can’t be right. I think I did the math wrong. How do you find percentages, again?

I can understand how using tax preparation software can save you money – it knows the loopholes and it can tell you if you’ll fit through them. But let’s imagine for a moment that I didn’t use TurboTax. I never would’ve known that I was technically self employed, and thanks to my mathematical limitations I probably wouldn’t have even been able to figure out that I owed money. It wouldn’t have cost me a red cent, and if the government had come after me for its $40 I could’ve legitimately pled ignorance (and probably some sort of learning disability in the numbers department to boot.)

As it turns out, ignorance is bliss – or, at the very least, it’s cheap.

Truman Capps just got you to read a blog update about him doing his taxes. SUCKER.

LA Craigslist Revisited


Craigslist went APESHIT for the lamp and leftover mattress.


I am at a point in my career where I have very little to offer anybody. I’ve been in LA for around seven months, which to me feels like a long time in spite of the fact that it isn’t, I didn’t go to film school, which means I’ve got limited connections and on-set experience, and all the experience I do have only qualifies me to be a production assistant, which is the film production equivalent of one of the redshirt security officers on the Enterprise only without benefits or cool uniforms.

Of course, I’ve got my writing, but the problem is that the number of people who want to be writers greatly outmatches the number of paying jobs for writers, so to apply for any writing-oriented job or job that’s even close to writing I have to compete with literally hundreds of other people with more or less the same aspirations and qualifications as me.

For example, I spent the past several months waiting with baited breath to see if I’d gotten a writer’s room PA position on a basic cable mystery/comedy TV show – and take it from me, several months is a long fucking time to have your breath be baited. The reason I had to wait so long to find out that I ultimately didn’t get the job (my response) was because while it was very important to me, it was of minimal importance to the people doling out the jobs – production assistant positions are pretty much the last to be filled.

This, more than anything, has become the bane of my existence – I apply for a lot of permanent jobs that I’d really love to have and then simply hear nothing, as though I’ve fired my resume into a black hole. Getting a prompt ‘no’ would be far preferable to this, because it’d at least give me closure; hearing nothing only leaves me uncertain and reminds me that I’m of so little importance that the people I’ve sent my resume to can’t be bothered to think of rejecting me until the last second.

It’s kind of frustrating. I mean, given half a chance I’m sure I could explain to these people that I am, in fact, quite important and worthy of a prompt response, but since the people I’m sending my resume to barely have time to say ‘no’ to me I doubt they have time to watch my ninety minute one man musical revue about my employability, tentatively entitled Truman!

Recently, though, I was granted an incredible opportunity to visit the opposite side of this issue – one of my roommates had moved out, so I created a Craigslist ad to search for a new one.

I’ve previously covered the unchecked insanity of Los Angeles Craigslist pages during my search for housing before I moved down here. For those of you who don’t remember and are too lazy to click on the link I so courteously provided you, I discovered that something about 340 days of sunlight per year makes people incapable of writing a posting that isn’t either stupid, unintelligible, or the ramblings of a serial killer.

I set out to do better with my ad – I took a number of in-focus, well-lit pictures of the room and apartment, then wrote up an ad that was as detailed as it was funny and grammatically correct. I posted the whole business on Thursday night at around 8:00 PM and then promptly went to bed so I could get up at 4:30 AM for the shoot I was PAing on the next day.

When my alarm woke me up, I had around 20 emails in my inbox already. By the end of the day, it was over 50. When I had a spare second at work to check my email, I found that a few people had emailed me twice – once in the wee hours of the morning, when they’d first found the ad, and then a second, more desperate inquiry later on in the afternoon, asking whether the apartment was still available and requesting in the politest terms possible that I hurry the fuck up and respond to them.

It’s really a strange thing to wake up one morning and find that lots and lots of people suddenly want something from you and are willing to bend over backwards to get it. Having people fill my inbox with polite requests and outright pleas for a chance to rent a $630 a month room in my apartment is probably as close as I’m ever going to get to having sex appeal. Honestly, I don’t know how Christina Hendricks deals with it.

I resolved that as soon as I was off work on Friday, I’d send prompt emails to the people who I wanted to meet, as well as gracious denials to everyone else. But after work on Friday some of the other PAs and I wound up going out for a drink, so I resolved to respond on Saturday. But then on Saturday I was pretty tired and mostly wanted to watch How I Met Your Mother, so I figured everybody could wait another day.

Ultimately, I did what all of the job interviewers I’ve emailed have done – that is, the bare minimum necessary. I emailed the guy who had sent me the sanest, funniest, and most grammatically correct application, invited him to come meet us and see the place, and then, judging him to be cool and hygienic enough for our high standards, invited him to live with us.

I know that I should email everyone else to let them know the room has been filled, but I’m reluctant. Craigslist masks my email address on the posting so applicants don’t know who they’re emailing, but replying to their emails reveals my true address – for me to send a mass response would be giving my email address and, by proxy, my name to around 70 complete strangers, any number of whom could be serial killers.

I suppose it’s wrong of me to engage in the same practice that gives me such a headache when I’m on the other side of the table, but I wouldn’t even say that leaving people in limbo is necessarily malicious or wrong. I can’t reasonably expect my search for steady employment to be important enough to warrant a prompt and hasty email from somebody who has a lot of other stuff on his plate, nor should a bunch of people who I’ve never met expect me to mass-email them that the room they applied for is now occupied – seeing as it’s been four days and LA Craigslist postings are auto-deleted after seven, I think the answer should be pretty clear by now anyway.

The sad fact is, if everybody’s primary concern was of primary importance to everyone else, nothing would ever get done and the storied institution of waiting in line would immediately cease to exist. There simply comes a point when it just makes more sense to leave somebody hanging for a little while. If I learned one thing from Inception, it’s that being caught in limbo, sometimes, is just a part of life.

Truman Capps will come to regret these words when he sends out his next job application.

Three Cameras


Consult this diagram later in the update to better understand what a 'three camera sitcom' is. DISREGARD THE FOURTH CAMERA.


Things women say to me a lot:

1) "Please stop texting me."

2) "Do you watch How I Met Your Mother? It’s so good!"

3) "Oh my God, you mean… Wow, this whole time I thought you were gay. That’s really weird! Uh, but actually, I have a boyfriend, so no. It’s really sweet of you to ask, though!"

Let’s focus on #2!

The show How I Met Your Mother has been recommended to me dozens of times by dozens of people, usually women who have huge crushes on Neil Patrick Harris.* And, as I do whenever people recommend something to me, I usually respond by saying, “Yeah, I’ve heard that’s really good! I’m definitely going to watch/read that as soon as I get some free time,” and then promptly not doing that thing when I do have the free time.

*I also have a huge crush on Neil Patrick Harris, but the difference is that I have a way better shot at getting into his pants than any of you ladies.

It’s not like I’m deliberately avoiding your advice – it’s just that in my spare time I’ve always got something that I want to do, and the things that I genuinely want to do usually trump the things that other people tell me I’d like doing. Long story short, I’m probably not going to read the fucking Hunger Games already, so maybe you should all just stop telling me to.

Such was the case with How I Met Your Mother. I even ranked it pretty low on the list of TV shows that I was meaning to watch, and this was with full knowledge that it featured Neil Patrick Harris, one of my favorite people.* I was doing this because I’m a gigantic TV snob – and for that, I apologize.

*Honestly, do we even need to say that we love Neil Patrick Harris anymore? I feel like that’s pretty much a given these days. I’ve never heard anybody say, “FUCK Neil Patrick Harris. I HATE that guy.” The only reason that gay marriage is still controversial is because Neil Patrick Harris hasn’t gone door to door in the Bible Belt having friendly chats with everybody.

How I Met Your Mother is what we enormously successful industry types call a ‘three camera sitcom’ – it’s pretty much the slang term for a show like Cheers, Frasier, Friends, Seinfeld, Home Improvement, or Two and a Half Men: a couple of cheap sets, a live studio audience, and action that cuts between three fixed camera angles. Shows like 30 Rock and Community are ‘single camera sitcoms’, which basically means their budgets are way higher, their stories are more intricate, there’s no studio audience, and, since they’re on NBC, there’s not much of an at home audience, either.

As a TV snob, I’d thought that the time of the ‘three camera sitcom’ had come and gone – I loved Seinfeld and Frasier, and I still do, but I prefer rapid fire comedic pacing, and three camera shows can’t really do that because actors always have to pause while everyone laughs or goes Awww or Woooooooooooh! whenever something sexy happens. Three camera stories tend to be on the weaker side and are generally more one-liner driven to play to the crowd. I looked down on that from atop my high horse, which, in and of itself, was at the top of an ivory tower.

Furthermore, I knew that How I Met Your Mother was not really filmed in front of a live studio audience – the show is built to look like it is, but because of how many different sets they use they just shoot the thing in an empty studio and then edit in pre-recorded laughter afterwards. That, again, upset the snob in me.

See, the people watching at home hear the laughter, which in turn cues them to laugh themselves – it lets them know that what they just heard was funny and deserving of laughter. A comedy writer’s job is to make people laugh, so for a writer to write a joke and determine in the editing room how many virtual audience members are going to laugh at it and for how long it is like an architect designing a building that’s already there. And that bugged me, because that’s an awful lot of power for a writer to have. If I had a magic button to make you all laugh at everything I wrote, I’d be mashing the fuck out of it every week. But I don’t, so like an honest schmuck I just do my damndest to write funny stuff and fail roughly 60 percent of the time.

But then one night a few weeks ago I happened to be in the living room, drunk, with my roommate, also drunk, and he turned on How I Met Your Mother on Netflix.

And holy shit, guys, How I Met Your Mother is so good! It’s totally hilarious! Why did nobody ever tell me about this show?

In that one drunk night, my roommate passed out on the couch beside me, I watched pretty much the entire fourth season, episode after episode, cackling and unable to tear myself away. And I realized that I was wrong to be snobbish about the three camera sitcom.

It’s not outdated or inherently worse; it’s just a different template upon which to lay your TV show that has a bunch of eccentric roots in TV history. The laughs are piped in because the scripts are written with them in mind. Watching the show now almost makes me nostalgic for the afternoons I spent watching Frasier as a child while everybody else was out developing the social skills that would allow them to lose their virginities at a reasonable age – the comedy is really good, and it just happens to be wrapped up in a different package than I’m used to.

Networks benefit from three camera shows for a number of reasons – for one, they’re much cheaper to produce, but they’re also much easier for audiences to jump into. Community is hands down the funniest and most groundbreaking show on TV right now, but if you don’t start watching at the beginning you’re probably going to be pretty confused. A three camera show like How I Met Your Mother, with its emphasis more on laughs than intricate long form storytelling, is a lot easier for audiences to get onboard with whenever with little backstory, and as a result it’s easier for them to pick up an audience as time goes by.

It’s a friendly show that you can just hang out and watch – and what better format for a show that’s about a bunch of awesome friends hanging out and doing stuff?

In fact, watching all those happy young people living in the big city, making their way in the world, and being together through thick and thin has galvanized me to put together a similar team of awesome friends. I’ve already got a Power Couple, but I’m taking applications for a serial womanizer and quirky, amicable ex-girlfriend. Over 30 need not apply; must be willing to go to a bar every night and engage in shenanigans at a moment’s notice.

Truman Capps still isn’t going to take all your other recommendations, damn it.

Turning The Other Cheek


How could I post a picture like this if I didn't support the troops and love America?

I’ve been seeing this fucking story on the Internet for the past six years and I think it’s about time we talked about it:

A MARINE was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the courses had a professor who was an avowed atheist and a member of the ACLU. One day he shocked the class when he came in, looked to the ceiling, and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.” The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop. Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am God; I’m still waiting.”

It got down to the last couple of minutes when the MARINE got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold. The MARINE went back to his seat and sat there, silently.

The other students were shocked and stunned and sat there looking on in silence.

The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the MARINE and asked, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

The MARINE calmly replied, “God was too busy today taking care of America’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid shit and act like an asshole. So, He sent me.”

I’m an atheist and an ACLU supporter, my best friend is in the Army, I support the crap out of our troops and love my country beyond reason. This kind of shit pisses me off. Let’s dissect the story bit by bit.

One of the courses had a professor who was an avowed atheist and a member of the ACLU.

I hate that this is like the part in the horror movie where they realize that the phone call is coming from inside the house! The fact that this professor doesn’t believe in God and is a member of the organization that fights for the Constitutional rights of all Americans immediately translates into him being a moustache twirling villain, holding these poor students in his viselike secular grip and forcing them to listen to NPR.

One day he shocked the class when he came in, looked to the ceiling, and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.” The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop. Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am God; I’m still waiting.”

What the hell kind of class is this, anyway? I had a fair number of professors at the University of Oregon who probably would’ve openly challenged the existence of God if they’d had a couple of Rennie’s Lemonades before class and were feeling sassy, but I didn’t have any professors who would’ve been willing to blow 15 minutes of class time staring at the ceiling just to prove a point.* Either the evil atheist professor in this story just got tenure and wants to test the limits or he was hoping to cover for the fact that he hadn’t prepared enough material to last through the entire class.

*I did have one professor who spent large portions of every class staring silently into space, sometimes midsentence, but he was actually brain damaged as a result of a bicycle accident, and nobody ever tried to punch him.

Also, if anybody at the University of Oregon did state that they were going to stand perfectly still and wait 15 minutes for God to punch them, I guarantee you that 75% of the class would’ve left, and the rest of them would’ve been texting and checking ESPN on their laptops the entire time.

I mean, why are these students so utterly transfixed by a dude standing on a podium asking God to punch him? What is this, the fucking Dark Ages? These students can’t think of anything more entertaining than watching a guy yell at the ceiling? The Christians in the class know that God isn’t going to offer any conclusive proof of his existence no matter how hard the professor begs, because my understanding is that that’s kind of God’s deal, so why watch? The atheists in the class know that God doesn’t exist, so why bother sitting around waiting for nothing when they could cut class early and get back to work fighting the War on Christmas and practicing their abortion tactics?

It got down to the last couple of minutes when the MARINE got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold. The MARINE went back to his seat and sat there, silently.

Not to take anything away from the Marine here, but this professor doesn’t strike me as the most worthy or fearsome opponent. Admittedly the story is fairly vague, but from the sound of things the professor stood still without moving while an imposing, muscled figure walked up and attacked him. He’s either stupid, blind, or trying to make a statement about passive resistance.

The other students were shocked and stunned and sat there looking on in silence.

Did these students drink a quart of Robitussin before class or something? So far all they’ve done in this story is sit in shocked silence without moving or saying a word. Right now they just watched a cut and dried case of assault and none of them so much as make a commotion, let alone try to leave or call the cops.

Now, if this Marine were active duty at the time he’d be in uniform, so maybe the argument is that the students respect the right of members of our armed forces to punch people with impunity. If it were me, though, I’d be pretty freaked out if anybody punched one of my professors, uniformed Marine or not – that said, I’m a Subaru driving gay rights supporting abortion loving Obama voting evil atheist, so I guess I’m pretty out of touch with what real Americans do and think.

The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the MARINE and asked, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

So the entire class sits there, watching this unconscious man who may or may not have a concussion, and just waits for him to come to? Nobody does anything to help him? Man, if only there was some sort of really old book that outlined a number of moral imperatives directing people to help one another…

Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Romans 12:10

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ Matthew 25:35-40

Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. Galatians 6:2

Well, okay, maybe that applies to everybody except those vile, stinky atheists.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Galatians 3:28

Hmm. Let’s just move on.

The MARINE calmly replied, “God was too busy today taking care of America’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid shit and act like an asshole. So, He sent me.”

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. … Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. … Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Beatitudes 5, 7, 9

You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Matthew 5:38-42

America’s soldiers put their lives on the line every day protecting our First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of religion, and the Marine in this story is doing a grave disservice to his brothers in arms’ sacrifice when he punches someone in the face for saying something that he personally disagrees with. That’s not freedom of speech; that’s censorship.

The Taliban used force on people who said things they didn’t agree with, as did Saddam Hussein – if the Marine in this story had really fought in both of those countries to liberate oppressed people from governments and religious fanatics who sought to silence dissenting viewpoints, why is he using those same tactics in the country he defended?

Religious faith is a beautiful thing that brings people together, forms loving and accepting communities, and provides for the poor and underprivileged. Fundamentalism is what makes people start holy wars, kill abortion doctors, and fly planes into buildings. It’s the notion that if you’re not one of us, you’re one of our enemies. Fundamentalism starts with stories like this one.

This story says that people who don’t believe in God are un-American rabble rousers who are only tolerated because the Constitution says so. It’s bigoted, ignorant, and I find it highly offensive – and I hope that a lot of Christians do too. I love my country and the soldiers who fight for it, many of whom are also atheists. My lack of faith in no way makes me less of an American or less of a good person.

I’d ask that if you’re a Christian and you encounter this story that you not pass it along – but then again, our military is out there fighting to protect your right to say stupid shit and act like an asshole, so if you want to, I guess you should go ahead. I’ll be right here, turning the other cheek.

Truman Capps gets that this isn't a true story - even fiction can be offensive.

Head of State


"Wait. You're telling me NOBODY asked for your birth certificate?"

When I studied in England, I had the good fortune to be there during the election for a new prime minister. Our English professors went to great lengths to explain how the UK general election worked, showing us campaign literature, documentary films, and diagrams, and despite their best efforts to this day I understand how the United Kingdom picks its elected officials about as well as I understand how to win at cricket. My best guess is that in both cases they’re just sort of making it up as they go along.

What really struck me about the UK election, though, is that the candidates there are assholes to each other and especially whoever the reigning prime minister is – even by the remarkably high standards for dickery set by American democracy.

The thing is that in America, when talking face-to-face, politicians have some sense of restraint and respect for one another. Mitt Romney can say a raft of horrible and factually dubious things about the other candidates to the news media, but when he gets to the debates where he’s talking to the other candidates in person, everybody smiles and shakes hands and at least tries to act cordial going into it.

Politicians in the UK, however, have no trouble saying terrible things about their competitors in the media or in person – honestly, from what I saw over there, I’d say they were saving up all their best zingers for debates and parliamentary procedures with the Prime Minister, just so they could really nail him in person and get all of their friends to clap and cheer for them. This is the sort of aggression you build up living in a country where soccer is the most exciting sporting event.

After reading about an extended public flogging in Parliament of then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s public and private life by a group of opposing politicians and then seeing his name similarly dragged through the mud in the media, someone in our class asked one of our professors why the people in the United Kingdom seemed to have so little respect for their elected officials.

Our professor responded by pointing out that the UK, unlike America, has both a head of state, the Queen, and a head of government, the Prime Minister. The Queen represents traditionally English values like monarchy, alcoholism, and cute colloquial phrases, while the Prime Minister represents the government that makes people pay taxes for their free healthcare and outlawed the British tradition of public urination.

This way, our professor explained, it’s possible to show your undying love and support for your country and its culture by praising the Queen while venting all of your frustrations with that same country by attacking the Prime Minister, the lightning rod of his peoples’ hate. Honestly, it sounds like a pretty crap job to me – I don’t get why people don’t run for Queen more often, because that sounds like a lot more fun.

Our professor went on to opine that that might be America’s problem – our head of state is also our head of government. The President represents American values of democracy and representative government, and he’s also the guy who has to explain why taxpayer dollars keep getting sent to Pakistan.

That’s why, he said, our election cycle is so exhaustingly patriotic – everybody competing to wave more flags or wear shinier flag lapels to show that they really do love America in spite of the fact that they’re attacking the President.

I have to say, he’s got a point – how much a candidate loves America has actually become a talking point these days. Take a look at this screengrab from the campaign website of the Worst Person On Earth:


See, he has to say, out loud, that he loves America and will fight to protect it from terrorists. To me, the idea that a person running for office would want to protect his country from harm seems kind of like common sense, but in America how much we love our country has become a part of our political dialogue.

Politicians even attack one another over it – Newt Gingrich accused Obama of wanting America to fail. Why, for Christ’s sake, would the guy responsible for America not failing want it to fail!? What could he possibly gain from that? Why would any American want the country they are currently in to fail?

There’s so much posturing and needless patriotism in our elections when I for one would much rather see all the politicians involved ruthlessly attacking one another over their voting records and issues, England style. That’s why we need an American head of state, one separate from the President, someone who symbolizes all that is right and good about our country and way of life so that we can love him and hate our elected officials without accusations of being anti-American. And who better to fill this role than…


Tom Hanks.

Do I even have to explain? Tom Hanks’ approval ratings are sky high; admittedly, I have no facts or statistics to back this up, but if you can find me one person who genuinely doesn’t like Tom Hanks, I’ll withdraw my statement immediately.*

*Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t count.

He’s a friendly, goofy rich guy who hasn’t let fame go to his head; he went on a Spanish language morning show and danced while reading the weather report and donates generously to public radio in his community. He named his youngest son Truman, for God’s sake – it doesn’t get much more American than that. He’s the sort of American that all of us want to be.

So what I’m saying is, we build him a palace in Washington D.C. and give him an extensive schedule of entertaining visiting dignitaries, ceremonial parade viewings, and apple pie contest judgings. The palace would be funded through a tax hike, which, I imagine, would be roundly supported, because what kind of rat bastard idiot wouldn’t want to give a little bit of his paycheck so that Tom Hanks can become the official symbol of how great America is?

Please don’t attack my patriotism for suggesting that our politicians are too patriotic, or that our country should act more like Britain, of all places. I just think it’d make our awesome democracy that much better if we could all trust in our love of Tom Hanks (and, by extension, America) and talk about the shit that actually matters.

Truman Capps exercised considerable restraint with regards to Rick Santorum jokes.

Bearing Arms


Our founding fathers wrote the Second Amendment with scenes like this in mind.


I’ve been out of work for most of January because there aren’t a lot of PA jobs at the moment and because I’m holding out for a couple of long term job offers in early February. This has done wonders for my blood pressure and has allowed me to catch up on all the episodes of Community that I’d only seen once or twice before, but it’s taken its toll on my blog. That’s the reason I’ve been late to update the past few days – I don’t want to write a boring update, but there’s no way to spin ‘I spent an hour reading Cracked.com and then thought about vacuuming for awhile but ultimately didn’t’ into something interesting.

So when my roommate walked into the kitchen last night holding a 9mm pistol in one hand and a box of organic kale in the other, my first thought was, “Yes. Now this I can write a blog about.”

I was not aware, up until that moment, that our apartment had a gun in it – sort of like when you open the hall closet and find that the previous tenant left an ironing board there, only it’s a felony to transport this ironing board across state lines if it’s loaded.

“So what’s with that?” I said through my sandwich, as nonchalantly as possible. Yeah, I see guns all the time. I’m from Portland, remember.

“Oh,” he said, looking at the box of kale. “This stuff’s really good for you. It’s, like, a superfood.”

“Oh, yeah. I heard that, actually. It’s loaded with calcium, right?”

He nodded, consulting the label on the clear plastic box. “Yep. And Vitamin K, and Vitamin C… I think I’m going to steam it.”

“Good choice. My cousin steamed up some kale a couple months ago with some red beans. Delightful.” I finished the last of my sandwich. “So I see you’ve got a gun in your hand, there.”

“Oh! You didn’t know I had a gun?”

“It’s really my fault for not asking.”

“Yeah, well, I do. I keep it in [LOCATION REDACTED], loaded, in case somebody tries to break in.” He said, looking at the gun admiringly. “I’m filing for a concealed carry permit and I had to get my gun out to get the serial number for the papers.”

“And somewhere in there, kale happened.”

“I was hungry.”

Loyal readers will remember that a couple of years ago I took a rather controversial stance on gun control in my column in the Oregon Daily Emerald, wherein I stated that I didn’t think students should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus, to which a number of conservatives responded by enlightening me about how much of an idiot I was and the fact that several of the facts I stated were not, in fact, facts.

In the years since I ignited a firestorm of controversy with my lazy journalism, my position on gun control has changed to the same sort of apathy I feel towards religion. I don’t own a gun, nor do I intend to own one unless some sort of apocalypse makes it necessary and totally awesome to have one, possibly with a girl’s name.* But I recognize that gun ownership is a Constitutional right, and I really don’t take any issue with people owning them so long as they don’t wind up being used on me.

*Shortlist: 1) Christina 2) Bronwyn 3) Evelyn 4) Chloe 5) Rashida Jones

However, in developing that hard-fought apathy I’d never lived in a house where there was an actual loaded firearm on the premises. (That I knew of, at least.) Now that I know we’ve got a loaded gun on the property, I’ve spent the last few hours utilizing the insurance industry training bred into me by my parents to envision every possible situation in which I could wind up getting accidentally shot.

One night in November, for instance, I made the mistake of watching several Breaking Bad episodes right before bed, resulting in yet another one of my hilarious night terrors in which this time around I was convinced that the DEA was about to break into our apartment.

I stumbled out of bed and into the hall and started hammering on my roommate’s door, mumbling something about the DEA and the need to hide our blue meth. By the time he opened his door I was awake enough to be embarrassed, but knowing what I know now, I’m lucky to have made it through that night without a trip to the hospital.

I would wager that there’s more chance of the dream DEA breaking into our apartment than a legitimate, dyed in the wool bad guy, because I really can’t tell you enough how safe our neighborhood is. We’re across the street from an elementary school, around the corner from an upscale retirement home, and down the street from a church and a frozen yogurt shop that’s currently under construction. Watch Boyz n the Hood - there isn’t any froyo in that movie.

What I’ve noticed about a lot of the gun owners I’ve met is that their gun ownership is rooted more in a desire for peace of mind or just a general love of guns than it is in an actual sense of danger. When I saw my old roommate Cameron around Christmas, he proudly showed me the multiple loaded firearms he had stashed in our old house, which is in a sleepy neighborhood full of middle class stoners and mice. He assured me that he’d be ‘ready’ if anything went down, but until it did he seemed perfectly happy loading, unloading, and checking the sights of his various weapons and enjoying all the awesome clicky noises those activities made.

My roommate, I think, is the same way – he has a gun because he likes guns, the law allows him to have it, and he’s been nothing but responsible with it as far as I’ve seen (I should point out that it was unloaded and safetied during the kale conversation). So long as I don’t wind up getting shot – and by my calculations, Mom and Dad, the chances of that happening are pretty low – I’m really not that upset to share an apartment with a gun.

At the end of the day, gun ownership is just a hobby, and like all hobbies it looks sort of eccentric and weird from the outside. I guess writing a blog in which you dissect everything that happens to you looks pretty eccentric too – although I doubt a crackhead would quit robbing our apartment if I pulled out my blog and told him to leave.

Truman Capps wishes he could start every blog with a guy walking in holding a gun.

The Postman


It's just easier to blame Kevin Costner.


Never, in all of my pre-LA jobs, did I ever set up a direct deposit account for my paychecks. I like physically receiving my checks because they’re a pretty tangible and definitive reminder of why I’ve been working – there’s nothing like being handed a piece of paper telling you how much money you’re going to get to restore your faith in capitalism, and then looking at the tax deductions along the side to instill an immediate and irrational loathing for socialism and government in all its forms.

With freelance PA work, you’re seldom working for someone long enough to set up direct deposit – most of the time, you’re not even there long enough for them to cut you a check, so they just mail it to you after the fact. This is actually pretty cool for me, because potentially finding an envelope full of money motivates me to put on pants, go to the mailbox, and sift through the coupons and credit card offers.

To be honest, I think I’d probably do a lot more around the house if there were a chance of finding a paycheck along the way. There should be a service that hides your paycheck in a random nook or cranny in your apartment every week, forcing you to go through cleaning and organizing all your shit while you look for it. ”Well, bad news is, the paycheck wasn’t behind the toilet this week. The good news is, the bathroom is clean now!”

The downside to receiving your checks in the mail is that you’re pretty much putting your entire livelihood in the hands of an inept federal agency that clearly quit giving a shit around 1995. Nowhere are the failings of the United States Postal Service more apparent than my apartment complex, which either A) Is in the mail equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, or B) Is owned by somebody who fucked the postmaster general’s wife.

For example, a girl named Bree used to live upstairs. The entire time she lived there, just about every piece of mail anybody ever sent her wound up at our apartment, in spite of the fact that the number on the envelope did not match the number on our mailbox. Recently she moved out, and now, somehow, even more of her mail has been coming to us.

I guess one way to look at this is that maybe our letter carrier is a friendly, wizened old man, disheartened by the increasing isolation of 21st century life, who is intentionally delivering our mail to the wrong units so that, in the process of handing off our mail to one another, we’ll all meet and become friends in some sort of heartwarming, Amelie style attempt at matchmaking. However, I haven’t ruled out apathy and low intelligence just yet, either, because so far two letters mailed to me by a close friend as well as my California driver’s license that the DMV says they sent three months ago have failed to show up at anybody’s apartment, let alone mine.

I should point out, by the way, that I don’t live on top of a mountain or in space or on a houseboat or something – I live along a major thoroughfare in a small apartment complex populated mostly by good natured working class Mexican families and at least one low level drug dealer. My place is by no means difficult to find or get to; the culprit here is that somewhere along the line there’s a guy who just doesn’t give a shit, and the inevitable victim is me.

As I write this I know there’s a pretty big check in the mail coming my way, and every day that I don’t find it in the mailbox is another day that I start to fret about the possibility that my earnings have been gobbled up by outdated bureaucracy. I mean, if my mail isn’t coming to me, and it’s not coming to my neighbors, and it isn’t going back to the original sender, where is it going? Did they build their sorting center over a Native American burial ground or something? Did a comical bulldog eat the envelopes at an inopportune time as part of some zany, ongoing caper to get my mail delivered? I mean, if that’s the case, fine – I just want to know so I can take an active role in the caper. (I don’t do nearly as much capering as I’d like to these days.)

Or maybe, rather than being a benevolent old man trying to get residents of my complex to be friends, our mailman is very slowly and deliberately going postal by systematically stealing all of my mail just to fuck with me. I mean, if it comes down to that or him shooting a bunch of people, I guess I’ll be the bigger man and take the hit on that one.

What’s frustrating about this – outside of the fact that I’m not getting things like my driver’s license and, more importantly, the letters my friend Adam writes to me when he’s drunk – is that it’s giving Libertarians everywhere an opportunity to nod smugly and say, ‘Toldja so!” I have not had these sorts of problems with FedEx or UPS – they’ve got a bottom line to protect, and everything gets where it’s going promptly. Have you ever seen a UPS guy not in a hurry? That’s private enterprise, and while it sucks for healthcare it’s working like gangbusters in the ‘making sure important mail doesn’t vanish due to carelessness’ department.

Looking on the bright side, though, in addition to my driver’s license and letters from friends, I also haven’t received any junk mail at all recently. Things that I actually want to get represent a statistically insignificant amount of the mail I receive – most of it is shovelfuls of business reply mail envelopes and coupons to get my car detailed. If not getting a few pieces of mail I want to get is what it takes to not get tons of useless junk either, I guess that’s a worthwhile trade to make, even if that means I have to go and pick up my paychecks by hand.

Truman Capps pictures his undelivered mail winding up filed next to the Ark of the Covenant in that big warehouse.

Drive


He is... Very attractive.

While watching the movie Drive, I realized two things:

1) Ryan Gosling is too good looking. It’s really just not even fair to ordinary schlubs like me that there should be a living, breathing work of art like Ryan Gosling walking around. And it doesn’t help that the movie consists entirely of him fixing his steely blue eyes on things in the middle distance and contemplating them for long periods of time, wearing a neutral or maybe slightly perplexed look on his beautiful goddamn face. The fact that Christina Hendricks, of all people, was also in this movie led to some pretty sexually confusing moments when they were sharing a scene and I found myself wanting to bone everybody onscreen at once.

2) As a car chase movie, Drive fails pretty hard.

I am not the only person who feels this way – recently, Michigan filmgoer Sarah Deming filed a lawsuit against both Drive’s distributor and the theater where she saw Drive, alleging that she’d gone to see the movie because it had been marketed as an action packed car chase film, and had suffered ‘damages’ when it turned out to be a brooding character study.

Now, it’s not in my nature to agree with somebody in the Midwest who files a lawsuit about something, but in this case I can see kind of where she’s coming from.*

*That said, I’m not going to go so far as to claim I suffered ‘damages’ from watching a movie that I didn’t enjoy. It’s actually pretty disturbing to me that America has gotten to the point where boredom and disappointment constitute ‘damages’ in a legally binding sense – this is yet another problem that I think could be solved by electing Louis C.K. god emperor for life.

I never saw any trailers for Drive – I watch all my TV online, and the online TV commercials I see seem to be exclusively for Yoplait Light, car insurance, Chevy Trucks, and feminine hygiene products, presumably because something about my viewing habits has led Hulu to believe that I’m a health conscious lesbian rancher from Missouri.

What I did see, though, were billboards for Drive plastered up all over the route I took to my internship, and the gist of the movie seemed pretty clear cut. For those of you who didn’t see the billboards, they consisted of a picture of Ryan Gosling sitting behind the wheel of a car, his 20 foot tall face gazing out over La Cienega Boulevard like a benevolent, impossibly handsome god.

What I took from the billboards was:

1) Being as the movie is called Drive and has Ryan Gosling sitting in a car, it’s presumably a movie about driving cars.

2) I want Ryan Gosling. In every sense of the word.

3) The retro font on the billboard suggested that Drive was a throwback to classic 70s car chase movies like Vanishing Point and Gone In 60 Seconds.

4) Look, it’s not weird that I want to bone Ryan Gosling – it’s weird that you don’t. Look at him. LOOK AT HIM.

5) Given the contemplative look on Ryan Gosling’s unspeakably perfect face, there’s probably some complex moral themes at work in this movie.

6) Look, I’m not gay. I’m not even bisexual. I just happen to be gay for Ryan Gosling and only Ryan Gosling. Other than that, I’m 100% straight.

7) Okay, Ryan Gosling and Jon Hamm. Other than that, I’m straight as an arrow.

So, last week, when I finally got a chance to watch Drive, I went into it expecting an actiony drama featuring a healthy amount of Ryan Gosling. And I’ll tell you, in terms of Ryan Gosling being in the movie, Drive delivered in spades. A+ on that.

However, I can say, without spoilers, that there are two – count them, two – relatively brief car chases in Drive. One of them is at the beginning of the movie, and one of them is about halfway through. Please allow me to explain why this is bullshit:

The Blues Brothers was a movie about a couple of stoic soul musicians on a god-given quest to save a Chicago orphanage. It is wall to wall car chases, in spite of the fact that it’s a comedy musical. I mean, it could’ve just as easily been a great movie if the whole thing was a love letter to soul music with cameo appearances from icons of the genre, but somehow John Landis found time to crash an Illinois State Police cruiser into a moving semi and drop a station wagon full of Nazis off a highway overpass, and it was awesome.

Drive is a movie about a guy who is a stunt driver for the movies by day, does some stock car racing for a hobby, and is highly sought after as an incredibly talented getaway driver by night, and the movie is wall to wall slow motion shots of him hanging out with the woman who lives down the hall from him, or looking across rooms, or listening to techno. It’s a movie about a stoic, silent, heroic protagonist who is wholly defined by his ability to drive, and we see him doing it twice. I don’t want to spoil the climax of the movie, but I’ll tell you, it doesn’t end with driving.

Remember how Star Wars ended with Luke disregarding the Force and engaging in a pattern of nonviolent protests against the Empire? No? That’s because it didn’t happen, because even a shitty writer like George Lucas knows that in a script called Star Wars it had better end with a war in fucking space. Drumline ended with a drumline battle, Chinatown ended in Chinatown. Why did Drive not end with driving!? THAT SEEMS LIKE A NO-BRAINER.


We give movies titles so that people get an idea of what the movie is about before they see it. In a good movie, the thing that it’s about is dealt with throughout the film until it’s climactically resolved at the end. I don’t see how the movie about a guy whose only passion is driving could end with him doing anything other than that.

And I’m not saying that Drive should’ve swapped character development for action – I’m saying they should’ve either swapped any number of meandering scenes where people look at each other without saying anything in favor of a couple more car chases, or changed the title to Ryan Gosling Looking At Things. Honestly, if they’d called it that, I probably would’ve seen it sooner.

Truman Capps could write a whole 'nother blog about how Christina Hendricks should've had a way bigger role in Drive, preferably with wall-to-wall nude scenes.