Lord Of The Fleas


Everywhere.


If you want my opinion, I think it’s a pretty bad idea calling them ‘flea markets’. What you’re referring to is a loosely regulated Calcutta-style market full of people hawking old stuff they found in the deepest recesses of their garages and attics. When I’m buying something three times my age from a complete stranger, the last thing I want to think about are fleas or any other potential vermin who might have laid eggs in that old ammo box full of glass Coca Cola bottles.

My friends Dylan and Holly – or, put more bluntly, all of my friends – have been cruising LA area flea markets pretty regularly for the past few months, and as I’ve expanded into my own space and developed a more pressing need for décor, I’ve started tagging along.

I don’t really know what it is I’m looking for from a flea market, but whatever it is, I certainly haven’t found it yet. I think I should just resign myself to the fact that flea markets aren’t where I’m going to find a Nazi combat knife* or a first edition workprint from Star Wars with a bunch of heretofore unknown deleted scenes.

*As awesome as it would be to find Nazi war memorabilia at a flea market, I have to stop and wonder what the hell I’d do with it. I don’t know that I’d want to have something with a swastika on it mounted above my TV for all my guests to look at. Check it out, I got Hitler’s knife! Woah, no, calm down, it’s not like I agree with him or anything! I’m basically president of the Jewish people fan club. But still, Nazi stuff, right? It’s like the History Channel on my wall! Don’t tell Israel.

I wouldn’t take most of the stuff that I see at flea markets even if it was free. Turn of the century farm style dressers with fading turquoise paint just don’t make my balls tingle the way they do everybody else’s, I guess. Still, I enjoy going because it gets me thinking about why and how people sell the shit that they sell.

Magazines, for instance – I can see the reasoning behind buying an issue of LIFE magazine from Pearl Harbor or the day of the Kennedy Assassination, but why the hell are so many people trying to sell me issues of TV Guide from 1986? If I want to read a breathless preview for the second season of MacGyver, I’ll do it on the Internet, thank you very much.

Or the beads and jewelry! I’m not quite sure how one person selling homemade bead necklaces can set up shop next door to another person selling identical homemade bead necklaces and yet somehow the two of them both turn a profit. I mean, how are you competitive at that point? What do your bead necklaces offer that the other bead necklaces don’t have?

Colored glass dishes are the best example, though. If you want to know why, Google for your nearest flea market and go there. I don’t care where in the country you live - you’re going to spend most of your time walking past card table after card table loaded with glass dishes of all shapes, sizes, and colors, the likes of which your grandmother used to store hard candies in.

What aspect of American life in the 1930s and 40s necessitated the production quintillions of colorful little glass dishes? Was there just more little shit to keep track of back then? Did they pay day laborers in tiny ball bearings during the Great Depression? Or was it just a cultural thing that’s gone by the wayside now – was a little blue dish where you kept all your favorite racist newspaper cartoons and nasty unsent letters to Herbert Hoover?

In the 21st century, demand is definitely not keeping up with supply – I imagine that’s why everybody seems to have a few crates of these dishes to get rid of and why you ever see anybody buying them. I mean, I see people buying lots of weird shit at flea markets, but so far I haven’t seen any soccer moms haggling over a little orange glass dish.

”Wow, this just really speaks to me, y’know? This dish would finally make my house a home. It’s really sort of an emergency, too – I’ve got so much hard candy just lying around, but nothing to put it in! Are you sure you can’t go below $1.50 for this?”

On rare occasions, though, I do find things that I like. Today I bought some old movie posters for Chinatown and The Shining - because no living space is complete without a young Jack Nicholson leering at you from two different locations – and at the truly gargantuan Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena I stumbled upon a number of mid-century couches and chairs in one sun baked corner of the parking lot that really knocked my socks off.

Of course, I didn’t buy any of the couches or chairs – some of them cost upwards of $700, and who the hell takes $700 in cash to a flea market, along with a truck big enough to lug a couch home? Complications like these limit my flea market purchases to anything less than $40 and small enough to fit in my car, and most flea market items that meet those benchmarks are either creepy old dolls or colorful glass dishes.

I wonder what flea markets are going to look like in 75 years, when all the things we hold dear are just clutter in our grandchildrens’ basements that they’re desperately trying to pawn off on the antique crowd. I can only imagine that the smartass bloggers of the future are going to be bitching about how every table at every flea market is loaded with dusty old flash drives and iPod Nanos.

Truman Capps would browse more stuff if the damn vendors would quit desperately trying to talk him into a purchase.

Truman vs Drain


It's a lot like this. Too soon?

I am no stranger to clogged drains. Regular readers will remember that I have a somewhat thick head of hair – true adherents will notice that the blog is actually named for my hair – and one of the downsides to that is that shower drains and I generally don’t get along so well. (I also wilt pretty quickly in humid climates, but that’s another update.)

The best example of this was the Super Bowl during my senior year of college, when the sink, the shower, and the toilet all backed up on the same day at the same time when we had about 30 people crammed into our house. Since I was the one responsible for the sink and the shower clogs*, it was I who had to run to the store for an emergency bottle of Drano.

*The toilet clog had nothing to do with my hair, but it was still indirectly my fault – I’d whipped up a huge batch of Battledip Galactica, which contains about four full jars of Tostitos liquid cheese dip, and by halftime most of the guests had put our toilet through the paces.

I dumped half of the Drano down the sink, then turned on the hot water at full blast to flush out the drain as directed and ran back to the living room to watch the game. As it turned out, half a gallon of extra strength Drano was no match for my hair, and the sink promptly overflowed and flooded the bathroom with a mixture that was part water, part corrosive acid, and part clumps of hair. (The smell was still an improvement over the backed up toilet.)

So while I’m useless in most tasks relating to home improvement, such as assembling Ikea furniture or buying the right sized replacement lightbulb on the first try, I’ve got a good amount of experience with clearing plugged up drains. Of course, it helps that the preferred method for dealing with drain clogs is removing the cap from a bottle, turning it upside down, and letting gravity take over, but I like to think I’m pretty damn good at it.

The drain in my new apartment has a real beast of a clog in it. Since moving in last Friday, I’ve taken exactly one shower where water hasn’t pooled up above my ankles, and that was the inaugural shower the night I moved in. Since then, every shower has gradually turned into a footbath.

I didn’t deal with the problem right away, due largely to my own laziness – the nearest Ralphs is several blocks away, and the clogged drain wasn’t appreciably affecting my quality of life. I mean, my feet are going to get wet in the shower either way, right? So what if they wind up fully submerged in the dirty water running off of my body? They’re just going to be getting sweaty and gross in my shoes all day, anyway.

After a few days, though, enough was enough, so I picked up a $2.99 bottle of off-brand drain cleaner, brought it home, and dumped it down the drain to work its magic. During my shower the next morning, though, I discovered that CVS brand drain cleaner is apparently about as acidic as a glass of horchata* and my drain was just as blocked as ever. Having underestimated my opponent, I decided to up the ante and splashed out $8.99 on a huge bottle of Drano.

*If I had to pick a way to die, it would be drowning in horchata. I can’t get enough of that stuff. I feel like we could solve anti immigration issues if we just gave every racist a glass of horchata and told them who invented it.

I should point out that for the entire time that a bottle of Drano is in my possession, some small part of my brain is thinking of ways that I could wind up inadvertently drinking it and dying a horrible death, because apparently some small part of my brain thinks I’m a two year old. I even turn my head away from the bottle as I open it, as if I’m expecting a tsunami of poisonous drain cleaner to leap out of the bottle and down my throat the second I give it an opportunity.

So, with one arm across my mouth for protection against predatory drain cleaner, I dumped the Drano down and let it work its significantly more expensive magic. At this point I was getting kind of nervous, because if Drano didn’t work I really had no idea what the next step in the process was.

The next morning, I discovered that either my hair is stronger than the Space Shuttle or the previous tenant had been using concrete for shampoo, because the drain remains just as clogged as ever. At this point I’ve got three options: Spend a lot of money on a plumber, stick my hand down into the hair and poisonous cleaner filled drain to unclog the blockage manually, or just let the drain clog win.

So, somewhat predictably, I’ve decided to let the drain clog win this one. It’s clearly got more willpower than I do.

As I’ve discovered in the past couple days since the truce, the drain clog is actually improving my quality of life by reducing my water consumption.

My former roommates can attest that I tend to take pretty long showers – and remarkably, it’s not even because I’m doing anything smutty, but just because I like hot water and general cleanliness. Remember that Seinfeld episode where Kramer starts living in his shower? That’s the dream for me.

With the clog, though, I’ve got five minutes tops before the tub completely fills and overflows into the bathroom. It turns my showers into sort of a game – a fast paced race against the clock to get clean and shut off the water before I flood my apartment. It’s like a very hygienic 24.

Truman Capps apologizes if you pictured him in the shower at any point during this update.

The Couch


THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!
 
This is the first time in my life I’ve truly been on my own. For my entire life, I’ve always been sharing my living space – whether it’s with my parents, roommates, or about 50 Bay Area stoners with questionable hygiene practices during my freshman year in the dorms. Now that I’m in a one bedroom that’s all mine, I’m starting to realize the benefits and disadvantages of getting exactly what I’ve been fantasizing about for years.

The good news? Nobody else lives in my apartment. I know – I’ve made that clear already, but I can’t emphasize enough how nice it is to not have to deal with anybody else’s bullshit, be it physical, emotional, or dog. Dealing with my own bullshit is pretty much a full-time job, and I’m glad that I finally have ample space and privacy to focus on it, in the nude if I so choose.

The bad news is that furnishing an apartment from the ground up turns out to be quite difficult. In all of my previous situations, each roommate simply brought what furnishings and decorations he already owned, and between the three or four of us we’d buy what we didn’t have to fill out the apartment, albeit with a decidedly mix-and-match décor.

It seemed like in every situation I moved into I was joining up with a guy who already owned a crapload of inherited furniture and also had access to a pickup truck to move it, and by the time I got to the apartment with my paltry Subaru load of belongings the place already would pretty much look like a home: A bright green, ramshackle hand-me-down couch that one of my roommates had no doubt been conceived on, mismatched pots and pans in the kitchen, the obligatory Boondock Saints poster… Most of my stuff just stayed in my bedroom, along with me, most of the time.

Since I never had a need to buy any of these things for myself, the past five days in my new apartment have been as close to camping as I’ve gotten in the past three years. I’m sleeping surrounded by cardboard boxes on an air mattress, which I’m keeping in the living room so I can sit on the edge of it to play video games on my PS3, perched with my television in a small Ikea entertainment center that is currently the only piece of furniture in the entire living room. Up until today there was no refrigerator, so I had to catch all my meals (normally by flagging down a waitress at Denny’s), and my shower drain remains so stubbornly clogged that every shower almost immediately has me ankle deep in dirty water, like I’m fording the Willamette at the end of the Oregon Trail.

This is a bit taxing for somebody as frugal as I am. I spent around $320 today on things that I had never even considered that I’d need to buy – a bathmat, a toilet scrubber, plates – plates! In every other apartment I’ve lived in, there’s been a five-foot tall stack of multicolored Formica plates in the cupboard, kept company by seven pint glasses from various breweries, 23 mildewy solo cups that my roommates for whatever reason held onto, and the obligatory Portland Trailblazers commemorative glass from the mid 1990s.

I haven’t even bought furniture yet – today was all about necessities and groceries. I’m holding off on buying the ungodly amount of shelving and tables I’ll need to hold all my stuff until next week because of work, but the upcoming furniture purchase that’s weighing heaviest on my mind is the couch.

We’ve been over and over the fact that I hate spending money, which is why the couch is such a big thing for me. I know there’s no way I’m getting out of this cheap: Couches are expensive if you’re buying them new, and I’ve seen enough shit happen on couches in college to know that I don’t want to buy a used one – especially now that I live in the San Fernando Valley, the porn capital of the United States.

I’ve fallen in love with a couch at a nearby mid-century boutique furniture shop run by a couple of aggressively gay dudes. The model in the shop is a shade of green that doesn’t quite suit my apartment, but the owners can get me one in charcoal that, like The Dude’s rug, would really bring the room together.

On three, let's all sing the Mad Men theme.

This couch doesn’t fuck around with cupholders or extending footrests. It doesn’t need that shit, because it’s classy and comfortable as the dickens. Edward R. Murrow probably had a couch like this in his house. This couch drives a 1965 Ford Galaxie to work and drinks rye whiskey at lunch. This couch will set the tone and style for my apartment, and will determine the look of the other furnishings I buy for the rest of the place.

The price of this couch is pretty reasonable, I guess, given that I consider it to be Nirvana with cushions, and my parents have told me that a couch of a similar design would cost a lot more at a store in a mall. However, this couch is still expensive enough that I will probably vomit after I pay for it, because it will be probably the biggest single purchase I’ve made in my life so far.

I’m kind of surprised that I’ve even gotten this close to the purchase without backing out. The thing is, now that I have an apartment to myself, I want to stay true to the philosophy of Jurassic Park and spare no expense in making it my own. A couch, after all, is an investment – it’s something you’ll use virtually every day, and it’s all but essential if you ever want to have friends over.

It means even more to me, though, because as somebody who’s moved a number of couches, both on the clock as a PA and off the clock as a dutiful friend helping somebody move, I know that once you get one of those motherfuckers in your house you’re pretty much staying. You can’t move a couch without a van, and it guarantees that when you do move you’re going to need somebody else to help. For a lazy person like me, that’s a pretty binding commitment to make to a piece of rental property.

But I feel like I’m ready for a commitment. With no roommates to get under my skin, the only person who could fuck up my living situation right now is me. (And that’s not entirely unlikely.)

Truman Capps has been fantasizing about getting a liquor cabinet, but that’s probably asking for trouble.  

Rigorous Scholarship, Revisited


"You feel my dick fuckin' your mind?" 

It’s a source of continual frustration for me that word ‘nerd’ has suddenly gone from being an insult, hurled at marching bands by jocks since the dawn of time, to a fashion statement that comes bundled with a pair of thick glasses with no lenses in them and an ironic love of Star Wars.

Fortunately, as hipsters try to claw their way into the territory that we actual nerds earned through years of wedgies and late night Dungeons and Dragons sessions, the truest nerds among us have fled deeper from the mainstream with the proliferation of Alternate Fan Theories. I’ll explain in the next paragraph.

An Alternate Fan Theory is what happens when a fan base uses careful analysis and some educated guesses to explain away a film’s plotholes or give a deeper meaning to the story. Popular theories include: The suggestion that the events of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off take place entirely in Cameron’s mind (Cameron, miserable and sick with a fever, invents Ferris as a cool alter ego and imagines the adventures they’d have together, explaining the fantastical elements of the film), the idea that James Bond is simply a codename passed from one 00 agent to the next (explaining why there have been multiple different Bonds over the course of 50 years), and that The Office and Parks and Recreation take place in the same universe.

Yes, you’re reading that right: Not satisfied to simply watch and rewatch the same movies over and over again, nerds have instead begun to create competing imaginary movies running parallel to the real movies to enhance the viewing experience for themselves. I’m scared to think of what the fan theories for Inception must look like.

Last night, somebody on Reddit posted asking for the community’s favorite theories, and, being a nerd, I pitched in with my own personal favorite, which I first picked up from Cracked and then expanded on: The idea that every Quentin Tarantino movie takes place in the same alternate history universe. My theory turned out to be immensely popular, and as of this morning it’s been retweeted by over a hundred people and featured on at least half a dozen film blogs.

Before this whole thing gets too viral, I’d like to post my theory here, in detail, with my name on it. For those of you not interested in taking part in a huge movie nerd circlejerk, feel free to go watch Dance Moms or something. Everybody else, buckle in – it’s going to be a nerdy ride.

INGLOURIOUS HISTERY: THE FILMS OF QUENTIN TARANTINO



THE REALER THAN REAL UNIVERSE


It’s a pretty well established fact that most of Tarantino’s movies take place in the same fictional universe – the psychopath bank robber in Reservoir Dogs, Vic Vega/Mr. Blonde, is the brother of the dancing, heroin addled thug Vince Vega in Pulp Fiction, Mr. White refers to having worked with a call girl named Alabama, who was the lead in True Romance (which Tarantino wrote but did not direct), and Donny Donowitz, The Bear Jew from Inglourious Basterds, is the father of movie mogul Lee Donowitz, again from True Romance.

This isn’t even fan theory yet – this is factual information. Tarantino has confirmed in interviews* that his characters and movies are interrelated like this, and some fan theories go so far as to suggest that the timelines of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction actually overlap to some degree – the reason the police never get involved in any of the various public acts of violence in Pulp Fiction is because they’re completely overwhelmed responding to the botched diamond heist shootout and aftermath in Reservoir Dogs. 



*"The Movie Lover", The New Yorker, October 20th, 2003. 

Now, as you’ll remember, Inglourious Basterds comes to a pretty dramatic, if not factually dubious, ending: During the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film in 1944, the owner of the theater locks the audience inside and sets the building on fire. As screaming Nazis stampede for the exits, two badass commando Jews burst into the box seats and machine gun Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to death, then blow the entire theater up with dynamite. 





So clearly, Inglourious Basterds takes place in a different historical continuity than our boring, whitebread world where Hitler killed himself in 1945 with nary a Bear Jew in sight.

But remember: All of Tarantino’s movies take place in the same universe. Since Inglourious Basterds is a part of that universe, what it means is that Tarantino’s subsequent films - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance, et al. – take place in a world where the Allies won World War II by locking the Nazi high command in a burning movie theater and blowing it up.

At first, this seems like a minor, interesting tidbit, but the more you think about it, the more it starts to explain all the idiosyncrasies of Tarantino’s movies.

Why, for example, does everybody seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and pop culture? Well, probably because they grew up reading in history books about how World War II ended in a movie theater, thanks to the efforts of a Jewish film enthusiast, a British movie critic, a famous German film actress working as a double agent, and the father of a successful contemporary movie producer.* America essentially destroyed fascism and saved the world with the movies – why wouldn’t Americans be obsessed with them?

*Full details about what happened in the theater would’ve survived with Marcel, the theater owner’s boyfriend and a co-conspirator in the plot who lit the fire and presumably escaped, as we do not see him die onscreen.  

You might think this is a stretch, but consider how the real ending of World War II affected American culture: We invented nuclear weapons and dropped them on Japan, and for the next 50 years nuclear weapons played a huge role in movies, music, literature, and art.





"Atomic Bombs", Andy Warhol.

 


This also explains why people in Tarantino movies tend to kill one another so often without seeming especially fazed by it: They grew up reading in history textbooks about how the lynchpin in America’s defeat of the Third Reich was sending 8 angry Jewish American soldiers to Europe on a clandestine revenge mission to ambush and torture Nazis to death as an act of psychological warfare. Talk about being desensitized to violence – along with movies, killing people is practically our heritage.*

*Naturally, Regular America already has a crazy violent history, but I think the difference here is that virtually all public school curricula teaches that slavery and genocide against Native Americans was a terrible mistake made by an imperfect society. The Nazis, however, were the worst people imaginable, and I believe the history books would take a somewhat more lighthearted view of the Basterds’ actions.

This is why, after accidentally shooting an acquaintance in the face in Pulp Fiction, Butch and Jules are more concerned about cleaning up the car and playing the blame game than mourning their friend. Butch learns that he beat his opponent to death in the boxing ring and is unfazed by it; his cab driver, Esmerelda, is obsessed with death and demands that he tell her what it’s like to kill someone. In Reservoir Dogs, Mr. White and Mr. Pink have a fairly pragmatic conversation about killing in their line of work:




Mr. White: A choice between doing ten years or taking out some stupid motherfucker ain’t no choice at all.
Mr. Pink: I don't wanna kill anybody. But if I gotta get out that door, and you're standing in my way, one way or the other, you're gettin' outta my way.


In their words, the ends justify the violent means. Defeating the Nazis justified the Basterds’ Operation Kino.

So, to recap: Quentin Tarantino’s movies are stylized, hyperviolent, pop culture tributes because they’re all set in an America where violence and movies are patriotic. Take a moment to let that sink in.

Good. Now we’re going to talk about the other universe.



THE MOVIE MOVIE UNIVERSE

 
Tarantino has gone on the record and said that his films technically take place in two separate universes. There is The Realer Than Real Universe, above (his name for it, not mine – I would’ve picked something different) and The Movie Movie Universe. The difference between the two is that while The Realer Than Real Universe constitutes ‘reality’, films taking place in The Movie Movie Universe are films that Tarantino characters like Vince Vega or Mr. Pink would go see in theaters.

Movies that take place in The Realer Than Real Universe:


Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance, Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds, and reportedly Django Unchained, Tarantino’s upcoming Civil War film.


Movies that take place in the Movie Movie Universe:


Kill Bill Volume 1, Kill Bill Volume 2, From Dusk ‘Til Dawn,, and Natural Born Killers - the latter two which were written by Tarantino but directed by Robert Rodriguez and Oliver Stone, respectively.



(Jackie Brown, as an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, exists in its own universe separate from both of these, hence why it features no characters from other Tarantino films and is generally less violent and more ‘normal’ than the rest of his canon.) 



What stands out about the films in The Movie Movie Universe is that they’re grotesquely violent, even by Tarantino standards. Kill Bill is wall to wall blood geysers, From Dusk ‘Til Dawn features a band of vampires playing rock music on dismembered human body parts, and Natural Born Killers’ stylized hyperviolence was blamed for the Columbine High School shooting.


Keep in mind, within Tarantino’s continuity, these are the films produced by an especially callous and desensitized film industry. If every movie in theaters were that violent, it again stands to reason that ordinary people wouldn’t have as much of a problem with doing horrible things to one another on a regular basis.


This explains why characters from The Realer Than Real Universe never show up in The Movie Movie Universe*, but why Tarantino products like Red Apple Cigarettes and Big Kahuna Burger do – movie characters smoke Marlboros and eat Big Macs, but you can’t go join them.


*Tarantino has stated that The Wolf from Pulp Fiction and the sheriff from Kill Bill can jump between universes, but I think this is complicated enough already, don’t you?




This also makes Kill Bill significantly more interesting, at least for me. As you’ll remember in Pulp Fiction, gangster moll Mia Wallace (played by Uma Thurman) tells Vince about her role in a failed TV pilot called Fox Force Five, about a team of sexy assassins. Kill Bill is a film in The Movie Movie Universe about a team of sexy assassins (and one dude) in which the lead role is played by Uma Thurman – or is it Mia Wallace, returning to her acting career in a loose film adaptation of her failed pilot?


EPILOGUE


A few people on Reddit have called bullshit on this whole theory – they say it’s a stretch, or it’s too speculative, or completely unrealistic.

And to them I say this: It’s a goddamn fanboy theory about an imaginary alternate timeline in a couple of movies! It’s not meant to change the world or cure cancer or hold up in a court of law. It’s just a fun thing I like to think about when I watch Tarantino films, because, like all nerds, I like speculating and thinking about shit I find cool.

For me, it’s really revitalized my interest in Tarantino, who I used to think was a bit of a one-trick pony. Now, I’ve been rewatching his movies, making note of how everything fits into this alternate reality that I like to believe he’s consciously created. 

I’d spend some time musing about whether it’s weird or not that I have to play imagination games with myself to enjoy movies, but my biology study group is meeting soon and I don’t want to be late. Coolcoolcool. 


 

Truman Capps can’t possibly imagine why he’s still single.

Everything I Need To Know About Work I Learned From Grand Theft Auto

Another day at the office. 

I will never take any career as seriously as I take my virtual criminal enterprise

I’m incredibly fortunate because not only am I one of the six recent college graduates in America to have a job, but because I also happen to really enjoy that job. I love what I do – I find it fascinating and I love the opportunity to get paid to be creative.

That said, I’m still as much of a lazy shit as I was at any other job I’ve held: When my alarm goes off every morning, my first thought is, FUCK me, I’ve got to go to work. BULLSHIT. Even though I’m going to end up enjoying what I’m doing, I still hate having to get up and go do it. Likewise, I spend the last couple hours of the day with one eye on the clock, looking forward to going home. I work to live, not the other way around.

However, when I’m playing an up-and-coming freelance thug in a Grand Theft Auto game, I’m an absolute workaholic. Each successive installment in the Grand Theft Auto series has added more and more extra activities to their vast open worlds – street races, stunt jump challenges, minigames like pool – but I eschew virtually all of them in favor of rushing across town to get another mission from whatever bent cop or sociopathic crimelord needs a witness assassinated or a brick of heroin stolen.

My in-game avatar will work mission after mission for virtual days on end without seeing the inside of his apartment or even changing his clothes. If I brought the same sort of enthusiasm to writing that I bring to gangland hits and drug dealing, I’d have won the Nobel Prize for literature by my sophomore year of college.

Networking is everything

These guys probably have kickass business cards. 

Just about every Grand Theft Auto game starts like this: You’re an everyday guy with impeccable driving skills and decidedly hazy morals who shows up, penniless and alone, in a fictitious American city. You’ve got one eccentric friend or relative in the area who inevitably is in a serious pickle that can only be resolved by you killing someone – presumably because it wouldn’t be a very interesting game if you just had to help your friend move a couch into his new apartment or something.

So the way it pans out is that you do a bunch of shitty low level jobs for your friend until, in the course of one of your missions, you meet somebody who’s impressed with your ability to run over a prostitute while simultaneously sniping the fuel line of a pursuing police cruiser with your Uzi, and then that person starts offering you work. You meet people through those jobs who start offering you work and so on and so forth until you’re suddenly the most sought after mass murderer this side of Uday Hussein.

The only way you can get work in Grand Theft Auto is by making a name for yourself on the strength of your talent alone. You never apply for a job or hand some mob boss a resume (JULY 2006 – SAN ANDREAS – SHOT DOWN POLICE HELICOPTER W/ ROCKET LAUNCHER, STOLE ICE CREAM TRUCK, RAN OVER OLD LADY) – you just do good work and make connections.

In my first month in LA I sent out probably 150 resumes and online applications for various entry level industry jobs and didn’t hear back from any of them. Finally, I finagled an unpaid internship, and thanks to my two-pronged method of writing great script coverage and kissing copious amounts of ass, I got the people there to hook me up with about a dozen paid production assistant gigs.

I didn’t blow up a helicopter or run over any prostitutes (quite the opposite – I lived in harmony with about 50 of them for two weeks) but my reputation as a friendly and helpful PA got me a good reputation, which turned into more work.

The downside to that was that, as a production assistant, I was the bottom of the food chain and an easy target for abuse and misdirected rage from the various coked-out producers calling the shots on set. Fortunately, years of Grand Theft Auto taught me that…

It usually pays off to work for a total douchecanoe, at least for a while 

This is actually one of your least threatening employers.

Your employers in Grand Theft Auto exist far outside the realm of normative social behavior. If you try to count how many times one of your employers screams at you, kills one of his underlings in front of you, waves a gun around, threatens to kill you, or actually tries to kill you, you’re going to need a pretty huge abacus. (Or, y’know, a four function calculator.)

Grand Theft Auto isn’t a game that rewards you for making a principled stand regarding your workplace conditions – you can either work for crazy people who routinely threaten and backstab you, or you can turn off the XBox and go read a book or some stupid shit like that. Over the course of the work you do for these nutjobs, you wind up making a lot of money and connections that allow you to move onto more lucrative work, leaving your old bosses in the dust. (Sometimes, you get to kill them later, which is an added bonus.)

The last PA job I ever did was without a doubt my worst. I’d worked with this company once before – they’d gotten my name from the folks at my internship – and they called me back to do three days as an office PA and two days as a set PA for a commercial for a South Korean bank.

The producer – my boss – was a South Korean national with a thick accent, a short temper, and the lumpy build and Communistic-chic fashion sense of the late Kim-Jong Il. He was great at giving vague, unintelligible instructions, and then flipping out when his implied demands weren’t followed to the letter. 

Two people have ever thought these glasses were fashionable, and I worked for the other one.

On day three of working with this cocksucker* he came back to the office from an errand, took one look at the production booklets I’d put together according to his very hazy specifications, and went nuts at me in front of everyone in the office. 

*If you’re a male or female who legitimately enjoys sucking on penises, please don’t take offense – I’ve got no problem with people who literally suck cocks, but I cannot abide a cocksucker.  

He flipped through one of the booklets, tearing pages out, yelling at me and demanding to know why I hadn’t included this table or why I’d used that font or put such and such section ahead of some other section – all things that he’d just assumed, like the shittiest of girlfriends, that I would know I had to do.

Finally, he pointed to an actress’s picture on the call sheet.

“What is her call time tomorrow?” He demanded.

“I… I’m sorry, I don’t know.” I stammered.

He pounded his fist on the desk. “8:30 AM! You should know this! This should be your Bible! If you ask me another question, you’re fired! I’ve worked with you twice now – ask yourself, why would I want to work with you again?”

So we all had to stay three hours late, remaking the booklets to his marginally different specifications. On set the following day, he made so many changes to the schedule that the books were all completely useless within 30 minutes.

Immediately after being publicly humiliated for no reason, I was very seriously flirting with the notion of marching into his office and quitting. In my country, that’s not how we talk to people! I imagined myself yelling in the least racist way possible.

As a general rule, dropping Frank Costello quotes is not a good way to make friends.

But ultimately I swallowed my pride and finished out my week working for The Cocksucker – I hadn’t had a job in months, and I desperately needed the money.

In my second day on set, I wound up palling around with an art department PA. We hit it off and had a great time shit-talking The Cocksucker behind his back at every opportunity. We exchanged information, and a week later the art department PA called me to let me know his friend’s ad agency was looking for freelance copy writers, and would I be interested?

If I’d jumped ship the minute The Cocksucker went all cocksucker on me, I never would’ve met the art PA (JonathanDenmark.com) who set me up with a fantastic job. In all likelihood, I’d still be foraging for $100 a day PA work, getting up at 3:30 AM and breathing cigarette fumes and BO from the grips.

The Cocksucker’s company called me earlier today, offering me a PA gig. I politely declined, and told the person on the phone that I don’t do PA work anymore. I had leveraged my work for the low-level mob flunky into a contract with a friendly and professional major crime syndicate, and I needed him no longer.

Now, I’m making it my goal to become successful enough that I can afford to buy The Cocksucker’s company through an anonymous third party, and then force him to watch as I burn the building to the ground, all while dancing around cackling, flipping him off, and yelling, “Who’s fired now!?” There would probably be an arson investigation, but I could easily elude the authorities by having my car repainted and lying low for a couple of minutes.

At least, that’s how I roll in Grand Theft Auto.

Truman Capps hopes that an inordinately long update makes up for the lateness.  

To Valley Or Not To Valley


Not just any valley. THE Valley.


Here’s what I’ve noticed: If you walk down the street in Chicago yelling, “CHICAGO SUCKS!”, you’ll get your ass kicked. If you do it in New York, you’ll get shot. If you do it in Portland, a hipster on a double decker bike will frown at you. But if you do it in Los Angeles, everyone will either ignore you or shake your hand and say, “Tell me about it, right? Fuck this place!”

Highways, gang crime, smog, etc – I’ve established in great detail the things that people hate about living here. What I’ve found, though, is that even people who hate LA seem to have a militant devotion to the part of town they live in. People who live downtown insist that it’s the best place to live because it’s centrally located; people in West Hollywood say it’s the best place in the city because of proximity to nightlife, and people from Inglewood say the crack prices there can’t be beat.

I’m guilty of this sort of neighborhood-fanboyism too: Now that the lease on my current apartment is up and I’m looking for a new place, I set three simple search parameters for my new home:

1)   That I would be the only occupant

Because after four years of having roommates, I’ve learned one thing, and that’s FUCK LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE. I have income now, which means that I can afford the luxury of not finding somebody else’s manscaping clippings all over the toilet bowl.

2)   That there be no roaches

Because if there’s one thing I hate more than other people living in the same space as me, it’s bugs living in the same space as me.

3)   That it be in the general West Los Angeles area, preferably west of the 405 and north of El Segundo

I love this part of town, which I affectionately call We405NoElSe.* It’s marginally cleaner than the rest of LA, crime rates are very low, and proximity to the ocean means we get cool salt air breezes all the time, which serves to both keep the heat down and blow the smog away from us.

*Yeah, it’s no TriBeCa. I can’t help that there’s a number in the middle of it. 

Also, I like living within a couple miles of the beach. I mean, I don’t really go to the beach that often, what with all the homeless people and tourists and prodigious amounts of seagull shit, but as someone who grew up living 50 miles inland, I like the freedom of knowing that, if the mood strikes me, I can go look at the ocean for a little while on a whim. I mean, if I’m living in California, I may as well reap the benefits, right?  


Did I mention dudes in Speedos? Because Venice has those in SPADES.




Before I started looking for a place, I thought finding an apartment that met all these standards would be fairly easy. This was because, in my fresh faced naïveté as a newly minted working man, I assumed that the salary that I found so generous for my cheap tastes would easily net me a classy single occupancy apartment close to downtown Culver City, which sports a bunch of cultural civic bullshit and, most importantly, a Chipotle.

What I discovered was that the income that seems like so much to a cheapskate like me really won’t get me much of anything in We405NoElSe unless I’m willing to compromise one of my rules – I can either live in a decrepit 150 square foot fleabag with no kitchen and pay $950 a month, or I can share an apartment with some person who has noisy fights with his girlfriend all the time and tries to talk to me while I’m in the bathroom, or, if I’m lucky, I can do both.

I’m flat out unwilling to compromise on my first two criteria, which means that the third – living in We405NoElSe – went on the chopping block. Having been priced out of my own neighborhood, I started looking around the rest of LA, and I wound up in the San Fernando Valley. 

Enjoy this handy yet slightly pixelated visual aid! 

The San Fernando Valley is a large basin north of downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood – it’s actually on the other side of the mountain that bears the Hollywood sign. It’s expansive, clean, suburban, home to about 1.5 million people, and universally derided by douches on the south side of the Hollywood sign as being a lame bedroom community for old people with children and mortgages.

I was – and maybe still am – one of those very douches. Remember that neighborhood pride I was talking about earlier? Well, it really burns hottest when you get people talking about the neighborhoods that are inferior to theirs, and the one thing everyone in regular LA can agree on is that neighborhoods in the Valley are about as hip and exciting as Laurence Welk boning June Cleaver.

What the Valley has going for it, though, is that it’s cheap to live there. The money that would barely get me a North Vietnamese prison hut in We405NoElSe would easily land me any number of spacious one bedroom apartments in the Valley, most of which are in complexes with swimming pools, parking, and laundry on site.

What’s more, it makes sense for me to live in the Valley, at least from a purely analytical perspective. Burbank, where I work, is in the Valley, and right now I spend about $200-250 a month on my 40 mile a day commute to and from there.  

I spend two hours a day sitting alone in my car, in traffic, muttering potential blog material/copy lines out loud to myself to see how they sound. Recently, I’ve caught myself unconsciously doing this in my cubicle at the office or in line at Chipotle, which gives me the general air of a guy who thinks his neighbor’s dog is telling him to kill prostitutes. 

It doesn't help that most of the copy lines are about violent video games.

Everything – from common sense to my wallet to my overpowering desire to not be perceived as a schizophrenic – is pointing to it being a good idea for me to move up north to the Valley.

But I don’t want to move out of the neighborhood that I went to the trouble of thinking up a trendy mashup name for, primarily because right now I live less than a mile away from my friends Dylan and Holly. It’s nice, after spending a big chunk of my day in my car, to be able to walk over to see my friends – even if we usually wind up playing a video game which simulates driving cars. As I’ve found out, it’s difficult to make new friends as a responsible working adult, which is why I want to try and stay close to the ones I already have.

Yesterday, I put down a nonrefundable security deposit on a one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood called North Hollywood, in the Valley. The apartment is newly renovated and clean, and it’s about a block away from a number of trendy bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and highrise condos dubbed the North Hollywood Arts District. It’s four miles from my office and within spitting distance of a Ralphs, allowing me to finally become The Dude.

I didn’t want to move away from my friends, and I still feel shitty about it, and I’ll probably feel shitty about it for the first few nights that I’m alone in my new place, bereft of ocean breezes or muted stylings of Adele seeping through my ceiling, courtesy of the gay guy who lives in the unit upstairs. I also didn’t want to move to a place with a reputation for being sedate and boring, because that’s not the kind of lifestyle I want in my early twenties.

But the simple fact is that I work ten hours a day in the Valley, and spend a further two in the car each day going to and from there. I’m spending essentially half of my weekdays in the Valley, waking up at 6:50 so I can be stuck in traffic by 7:30, getting home approximately three hours before I have to go to bed so I can get up at 6:50 to go back out there, racking up 200 miles a week on a 15 year old used car. Something had to change, and I really didn’t want it to be the transmission in The Mystery Wagon.

I commuted for work five days a week; I can commute for my friends two or three days a week. The close proximity, How I Met Your Mother-style social life I was looking for just really isn’t feasible in the city I live in, nor is the How I Met Your Mother-style ability to sleep with improbable numbers of gorgeous women. 

How does Ted have more game than me!? Is it because he's fictional?

I’d be willing to settle for a Frasier-style social life, though: A pretentious-yet-lovable guy moves away from his old environment to start anew, living alone. There are regular visits from his old drinking buddies, he meets new eccentric people, sleeps with a couple of gorgeous women, and has a scrappy dog that does silly tricks.

I think I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Truman Capps would like to point out that most professionally-made American porno films are shot in the Valley – so the next time you watch one, keep in mind that I’m probably less than ten miles away from that botched pizza delivery.

Six Seasons And A Movie


I'm in love with everything in this picture. Yes, that includes three quarters of Donald Glover's face.

If you don’t watch the TV show Community, you’re doing yourself a grave disservice – both because it’s a spectacular, ballsy, hilarious show with a great cast and a fair amount of Alison Brie cleavage, but also because this update is going to be about Community, so if you haven’t watched the show there’s a good chance you’ll have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.

The gist of the show, for those of you who don’t watch it, is this: A disbarred, asshole lawyer has to take classes at a dysfunctional community college. He winds up in a zany, racially diverse study group, and they proceed to have shenanigans of the highest order, including, but not limited to, sailing a boat on a trailer through a parking lot, throwing a dead body out a window, a paintball war, a massive blanket fort, Dungeons and Dragons, claymation, another paintball war, multiple divergent timelines, and making out with Alison Brie (once, or maybe more than that if we count the divergent timelines).

It’s a great show. In five or ten years, we’ll be talking about it the way we talk about Arrested Development now.

A lot of Community’s brilliance can be traced to the perfect union of a spectacular cast, spectacular-er writers, and creator/showrunner Dan Harmon, whose previous credits include co-creating The Sarah Silverman Program and a pilot for a show called Heat Vision And Jack, in which Jack Black plays a renegade superhero astronaut who gains super intelligence whenever he’s in direct sunlight and has a sidekick named Jack who is a talking motorcycle, voiced by Owen Wilson. (For whatever reason, the pilot did not get picked up for a full season.)

If you didn’t get the hint from the thing about the talking motorcycle show, let me tell you upfront: Dan Harmon is a weird dude, and his weird helming is what, I think, has made Community so great. He never plays it safe and swings for the fences with just about every episode, doing stuff you’d never see on another TV show. One Community episode was an extended parody of My Dinner With Andre - a highly philosophical art film that exactly seven people in the world have seen. Dan Harmon, like the honey badger, doesn’t give a fuck – he just makes the TV show he wants to make, which is why Community is so often groundbreakingly hilarious.

That said, the My Dinner With Andre episode of Community was arguably one of the worst episodes of the series. And, sadly, there have been some real contenders in that department. Community, for as much as I love it, is admittedly inconsistent – some episodes should win Nobel Prizes, some are pretty funny, and a few have sucked harder than [trashy celebrity] at [location – e.g. CMA’s/handicapped stall at Olive Garden].

I, personally, am fine with that. I’d much rather watch a show that sucks sometimes because they swung for the fences and missed than a show that plays it safe and is too tepid to appeal to anyone – commonly known as Don’t Trust The Bitch In Apartment 23 Syndrome.

However, the people writing the checks tend to favor consistency over innovation, and on Friday it was announced that Dan Harmon had been removed as Community’s showrunner, an act that has drawn considerable derision from Community’s cast and the whole Internet.

Now, I’m as pissed as any Community fan that the driving force behind the show has had his baby forcibly removed from him, like the Cylon/human hybrid child in season 2 of Battlestar Galactica, but at the same time I can kind of understand the reasoning behind taking it away, just like I did in season 2 of Battlestar Galactica when they took the Cylon/human hybrid child away.

Dan Harmon is a genius, yes, and I’d love to meet him, but by all accounts, including his own, he’s a pretty difficult guy to work with. His relentless perfectionism leads to a lot of long nights and frayed nerves that often explode into fights during the production cycle. He drinks constantly and routinely threatens to commit suicide. In his defense, if I was in charge of a TV show of my own creation I’d probably be drinking and threatening to kill myself too.

More recently, he’s been rather publicly butting heads with Chevy Chase, who is apparently one of the worst people in the world. Chevy seems to be the one cast member who isn’t BFFs with all the others, and has been openly critical of Dan Harmon’s scripting, which resulted in Harmon delivering a fairly hostile speech at the cast Christmas party, the gist of which was apparently, “SCREW YOU, CHEVY!”

So I can understand why Sony pulled Dan Harmon. He’s a renegade cop who doesn’t play by the rules – Jesus I use that analogy a lot! – helming a risky show with sub-par ratings. In Sony’s eyes, something had to change for this venture to become less troublesome for them.

Regardless of whether Dan Harmon comes back, I think we, as Community fans, should focus on the good:

1) The New Showrunners Are Pretty Good

Harmon got replaced by David Guarascio and Moses Port, who previously worked on critical darlings Happy Endings and Just Shoot Me. Keep in mind, Happy Endings is the show that some critics were saying was better than Modern Family. These guys don’t seem to be idiots, which is why we should be thankful that…

2) At Least It Didn’t Get Cancelled

Community’s shitty ratings have put it in considerable danger of being cancelled from pretty much day one, and it’s a testament to NBC that they’ve kept it around for as long as they did, hiatus and truncated fourth season episode order notwithstanding.

Now, I’m sure a great many fans would rather see the show cancelled then have it continue, Scrubs style, as an unfunny embarrassment that cheapens its former greatness. I, however, still have some hope.

As established, the new showrunners aren’t idiots. They’re good at their jobs, so presumably they know what Community is and why people like it. Community’s writing staff remains fully intact, and I have reason to believe they’ll be allowed to be just as weird as they were being before.

Community will undoubtedly be different under new management, but I don’t take that to automatically mean that it’ll be bad. Community has always been different from everything else on TV, and it’s been great – usually. Now Community is going to be different from previous seasons of Community. On a show this meta, that’s bound to be a comedy goldmine.

Truman Capps would immediately quit watching the show if Alison Brie were no longer on it.

New York Guy


8 million people, infinity roaches.


I have to get up at 6:50 every morning so I can be on the road to work by 7:30 – more like 7:40 if I make the mistake of logging onto Reddit before leaving the apartment. When my phone alarm goes off each morning, I drag myself out of bed feeling like shit, because the night before I stayed up way later than I should have – a problem as old as time itself (or, at the very least, as old as the Internet.)

Each morning as I stumble into the shower I bitterly resolve to turn things around. When I get home tonight, I’ll have a little dinner, watch a couple episodes of Frasier on Netflix, and then hit the hay at around 8:30 so I can catch up on all the sleep I’ve been missing.

And then, every night, I get home, eat, watch several episodes of Frasier, and next thing I know it’s 12:30 and I’m balls deep in a Wikipedia article about the Confederate Postal Service (which was apparently a pretty well run organization when you leave out the slavery parts).

The reason that I was overtired this morning, though, was because I made the mistake of looking up New York City on Wikipedia last night, which led me on an extensive quest through a few dozen articles about the city, its history, and its residents, followed by another half hour of browsing apartment listings in Manhattan and trying to figure out how anybody there is able to pay their rent and eat in the same month.

New York City has been sort of a point of fascination for me recently, particularly since I moved to Los Angeles. You see, I was worried before I came here that life in the big city would be too much for me – which is a legitimate concern, given that killing spiders, talking to strangers, simple arithmetic, drinking milk, and watching Ultimate Fighting Championship matches have all proven to be too much for me in the past.

Since moving here, though, I’ve found living in LA to be considerably easier than I expected. For the most part, it’s just like living in any other city with most of the shitty stuff – traffic, hobos, pollution, absence of an NFL team – dialed up to 11, with the helpful addition of nice weather and an entertainment industry. Sure, the gas prices are insane ($4.49 a gallon yesterday) and sometimes you have to drive to Orange County, but it’s far from the soul crushing grind that I’d feared it would be.

New York, though, is a horse of a different color, and now that I know I can tolerate LA I’ve started to wonder if I could successfully live in the Big Apple.

The short answer, I’m almost positive, is, No. The slightly longer answer is, No, you goddamn moron. Why would you even consider something like that? God, I just want to slap you sometimes, you’re so fucking dumb. (I’m very hard on myself.)

Something I’ve noticed in a lot of TV shows and movies set in New York City is the stock ‘LA Douchebag’ character who shows up from time to time – an ingenuine, coked out sleazebag who’s obsessed with new age wisdom and is constantly at odds with New York’s streetwise, working class culture. Notable examples include Devon Banks on 30 Rock and that fast talking assistant director guy in Scrooged.

If I moved to New York, I’m pretty certain I’d be the epitome of the LA Douchebag. Admittedly, I take a pretty dim view of new age-y trends and have postponed my raging cocaine addiction until at least my late 30s, but in most other respects I’m pretty sure I fulfill the stereotype to a T.

Try to picture me finding an apartment in Manhattan – something that, due to the insanity of the real estate market there, pretty much requires you to talk to a real estate broker:

”Okay, so I’m looking for either a studio or a one bedroom, preferably for under $900 a month – with parking, of course. I’ve got this station wagon I love, I call it The Mystery Wagon… Well, you can read about it on my blog where I write lengthy articles all about myself twice a week. Anyway, I’m definitely looking to live alone, because I’m kind of anal about sharing space with other people. Oh, and no roaches under any circumstances. I totally hate roaches. If I see even one roach, I swear to God, I will probably jump out a window and burn the building to the ground. Okay, that was a bit extreme – I’m still kind of rattled because this crazy person tried to talk to me on the subway. Total nightmare. I’m sorry, I haven’t had a Diet Coke in like two hours; is there a Ralphs around here?”

I’m pretty sure there’s a city funded program to buy Greyhound tickets back west for people like me.

I’ve been to New York two times and I loved it on both occasions, but at the end of both trips I was always very ready to go home. I am West Coast guy, through and through: I’m used to cities that don’t smell like garbage, temperatures well above freezing, no humidity, and a distinct absence of homeless people shitting in public, all of which seem to be core elements of living in New York. I’m high strung enough as it is; the last thing I need is a stressful East Coast lifestyle to push me into my cocaine addiction earlier than anticipated.

All that being said, if I were offered a job in New York City I’d move there immediately, no questions asked.*

*FALSE. I would ask several hundred questions regarding salary, benefits, relocation packages, and the size of New York cockroaches.

Although I’m all but certain that it’d be a stressful and terrifying experience, it’s the sort of stressful and terrifying experience I’d actually be willing to subject myself to. Unlike math, drinking milk, or killing spiders, living in New York would be the experience of a lifetime, albeit a crowded, stinky, humid experience with a greater-than-average risk of catching a hobo masturbating outside my apartment.

Truman Capps would jump at the chance to try and recreate Seinfeld.

Money


Damn, maybe I should sell drugs - these cartels seem to have everything figured out...


Periodically I’ll be on Facebook or Reddit and I’ll see a link to some Mother Jones article about a guy who’s been living completely without money for years and is loving his life, or the guy who, to protest the Iraq War, asked his boss to give him a 75% pay cut on his six figure salary so he’d make around $36,000 a year and thus not have to pay income taxes to fund an unjust war. These articles usually end with the subject talking about how happy and satisfied they are now, and how much richer their lives are without money.

I always wonder if these money-free types are, in fact, miserable, but are just putting on a brave face for the media because they don’t want to come out and admit that their lives are actually considerably worse without money, and the only reason that they haven’t gone back to it is because, after making a principled stand, it’s kind of tough to sit down again without everybody noticing and laughing at you.

Reading these articles makes me feel a little bit shitty, because my initial reaction to hearing about somebody getting rid of all the money they’ve ever had is always, ‘What the hell are you doing, you dope!?’ I mean, yeah, I was against the Iraq War, but I my level of defiance went about as far as writing nasty things about President Bush in the Oregon Daily Emerald. And I know that money doesn’t buy happiness; I read The Great Gatsby just like everybody else.

I just can’t help myself, I guess – I love money. It’s great! Money is probably one of my favorite things, and having money is probably one of my favorite activities. Go ahead and guess what my favorite song from Dark Side of the Moon is. That’s right: Time, followed by Any Colour You Like, followed by The Great Gig In The Sky, followed by Money.

Maybe this makes me sound greedy, but I’d ask you not to cast judgment on me for who (okay, what) I love – I think I pointed out in the last update that we shouldn’t do that sort of thing. Honestly, though, I shouldn’t be feeling this way this soon – 23 year olds are supposed to be fighting the man and soul searching. Presumably, I searched my own soul and found some Gollum-like creature who really loves money.

What I’ve found, though, is that I don’t love money because I can buy things with it. As it happens, I absolutely hate spending money. Whether I’m between jobs or fully employed, every time I pull out my credit card I wince a little bit on the inside and think about the money I’m about to part with like it’s some sort of adorable puppy that I’m about to shoot out of a cannon into the sun. The fact that I’m getting, say, a burrito in return for my puppy doesn’t really sink in until later – usually halfway through the burrito.

So, to recap: I am a terrible person who loves money, hates spending it, and currently does not have enough cash on hand to make a money swimming pool like Scrooge McDuck. If I were Jewish, I’d be fulfilling a really ugly anti-Semitic stereotype. 

I think I hate spending money so much because, as previously established in every other blog I’ve written, I spend a lot of my time worrying about things I have no control over and generally assuming all of the worst things in the world will happen to me. Some of this probably stems from being raised by two parents who’ve spent decades working in the insurance industry.

Money is the ultimate insurance policy; if you throw enough of it at a problem, it’ll eventually go away. So I stockpile money the way that people in Idaho stockpile guns – we’re both preparing for some sort of future disaster. The only difference is that mine is usually my laptop breaking or burglary and theirs is a race war. Likewise, I enjoy parting with my money just as much as Idaho survivalists enjoy parting with their guns.

So, I was at Best Buy on Saturday.

At the moment, I have a job – it’s a freelance job, though, and while the work has been steady I can’t be 100% sure it’ll be there forever. I also blew through most of my savings during my 7 months of spotty employment in LA, so I’ve been even more miserly than usual, outside of my raging Chipotle addiction,* while I try to replenish what I lost.

*There’s a Chipotle basically two blocks from my office. Do you know how many days in a row you have to go to Chipotle for lunch before you get sick of it? Neither do I.

But over the past couple of months, one desire overpowered by desire to not spend money: The desire for a Playstation 3 and a TV in my room to play it on. The way I see it, I’m a nerdy single guy who works 55 hours a week and has approximately five close friends within 200 miles – if I’m not going to have a social life, at the very least I can build some hand-eye coordination with a rigorous video gaming schedule.

So there I was at Best Buy, flatly refusing the salesman’s attempts to upsell me to a slightly larger and significantly more expensive TV and feeling nauseous as I watched him ring up a cheap HDTV (on sale), a Playstation 3, and all three Uncharted games. I declined all financing options, forked over my card, and minutes later was driving back to my apartment, hating myself for how much money I’d just parted with.

I recently listened to an interview with Louis CK in which he talked about living in New York and working as a standup comedian when he was in his 20s. At that point in time, standup was somehow really lucrative, and Louis was making upwards of $500 a night. One night, he explained, he’d come home on his motorcycle from a show with his pockets bulging with cash and consciously thought, “This is amazing. I’m kicking ass at life.” The next night, he got into a motorcycle accident and nearly killed himself, and in that same week two of the most profitable comedy clubs he’d been performing at closed, ushering in an era of poverty that lasted for years and an era of self-doubt that continues today.

I took that, like most things Louis CK says, very seriously – as soon as you get comfortable, life throws you a disaster-shaped curveball to fuck it all up. This is why, after bringing my TV and PS3 into the house, I sat on the bed and stared blankly at the boxes for God only knows how long, eying my receipt and considering taking them back.

What if the agency I’m at closes tomorrow? My advertising resume isn’t impressive, and I doubt the incredible luck that got me this job could get me in the door elsewhere. Once the money I’ve made – less what I just dropped on a PS3 and television – runs out, I’d have to go back to being a production assistant, which is infrequent, low paying work that I hate. And God forbid I should get paid very little to do a job I don’t like, because we all know nobody else in the world has to do that.

I eventually unpacked my TV and found that it actually looked quite nice sitting on the stand in front of my bed – same with the PS3 beneath it. Then I started playing these Uncharted games I’d been hearing so much about, and next thing I knew it was Sunday and I was making the conscious decision not to write a blog so I could keep shooting evil enemy treasure hunters in the face.

It took me longer than most people to get to this point, but I’ve decided I’m very satisfied with my purchases. No matter what happens to me employment-wise in the future, the TV and the PS3 are a sunk cost – rain or shine, work or no work, I’ll be able to play video games. Come to think of it, my PS3 was really just an investment in cheap home entertainment for the next couple of years.

At least, that’s how I’m going to try and spin it when I write it off on my taxes next year.

Truman Capps can see easy access to video games being a real obstacle to his writing career.

The Wrong Side Of History


If North Carolina saw this picture, Amendment 1 wouldn't have passed.


As both a history buff and a big fan of worrying about totally pointless things, I spent a lot of time in high school worrying about just how big of an asshole I would’ve been if I’d been alive in another time period.

For example, I’ve never really given Thomas Jefferson a pass for owning (and fucking) slaves while simultaneously penning the ‘all men are created equal’ parts of the Declaration of Independence. A lot of people in my AP US History class in high school argued that he was alive during a different time, and his actions were reflective of a society that erroneously believed that black people weren’t people, just like how nowadays we erroneously believe that Kim Kardashian is newsworthy.

I always felt like that was sort of a cop out, though – there was an abolitionist movement at the time and all of the other founding fathers eventually freed their slaves, so clearly some people were feeling guilty about the whole deal, but there’s Thomas Jefferson, one of the architects of freedom and democracy, basically acting out the lyrics of Brown Sugar until his last dying breath.

What I think is that he knew, on some level, that slavery was bad news, but that it was such an inconvenient truth that he kept it buried and tried not to think about it that hard, seeing as slavery was making him and his friends very rich. In the end, Jefferson had the good fortune to die long before it became clear that he was on the wrong side of history.

That’s the thing that I worried about – The Wrong Side Of History. I like to think of myself as a pretty open minded guy – a 21st century liberal looking back and condemning a couple centuries of America’s truly impressive prejudice – but there was always that voice in the back of my head:  

Get off your high horse, asshole. The rude voice would say. If you were born and raised in a time where everyone you knew took some grave social injustice for granted and only an entrenched minority opposed it, you’d probably go right along with the flow. Remember how stoked you were for Snakes on a Plane?

I mean, it’s a valid thing to ask – if, say, I grew up in an upper middle class white family in the Deep South in the 1960s, would I just be cool with racism, or do I, Truman Capps, have some sort of superior ethics hardwired into my DNA that would make me realize the injustice of it all regardless of what society thought?

I’d really like to think that I’d recognize the evil of discrimination and post lots of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes on Facebook or whatever the hell people did back then, but if I’d grown up in a loving family where the Civil Rights Movement was looked on as a bunch of rabble rousing and I had no interactions with black people to teach me otherwise, I can see how easy it’d be to go with the flow and wind up on the wrong side of history.

Now, I don’t want to draw too many parallels between the Civil Rights Movement and gay rights today, because there’s a lot of differences between a thoroughly disenfranchised minority group descended from slaves struggling against a violent establishment for the basic rights to life and Neil Patrick Harris having to go to New York to get married, save for the fact that both are shitty things America has done to people who should’ve been treated as equals.

That being said, I think the gay rights movement now is certainly the closest we’ve been to that sort of upheaval in some time. Unlike abortion, which is going to divide America forever, public support for gay marriage has been steadily growing, and I predict that those of you who have children will one day tell them about when gay rights had to be fought for and weren’t just taken for granted - sort of a How I Met Your Other Mother situation, if you will.

I mean, people at my high school were publicly saying things about gay people that you wouldn’t say now. During a class debate, one of my teachers pointed out that if we legalized gay marriage, next we’d have to let people marry their dogs. When Measure 36, Oregon’s equivalent of North Carolina’s bullshit, was up to a vote in 2004, a girl in one of my classes blurted out, ”Gayness is wrong!” when the teacher called her name during roll call, and most of the class was fine with it.

Hell, one of the most popular people at my high school was openly gay, and his best friend was a conservative Christian girl who I watched argue against gay marriage right in front of him, talking about how it was against God’s will or some bullshit like that.*

*Gay marriage is as much against God’s will as wearing a polycarbon shirt. Leviticus 19:19.

That sort of bigotry is becoming increasingly taboo outside the Bible Belt. Alternative lifestyles are moving closer to the mainstream, thanks to Lady Gaga, Glee, and It Gets Better, among others.

I’m not 100% clean, either – the word ‘fag’ gets bandied around a couple times in Writers, which, while far from a massive affront to the gay community, is still considerably less acceptable now than it was when we wrote and shot the show four years ago. At the time, we didn’t think twice about having Mike call me ‘faggotpants’ in an episode; now, although I may be overly sensitive, I don’t know if I’d write that line again. Yep, 2008 was a simpler time… 

So yeah, what happened in North Carolina makes me mad, and what President Obama said made me happy, and the Republican response made me mad again, but in the end I’m smiling, because I know how all this is going to end.

I try with limited success to present my political opinions as just that – opinions. I can understand why some of my friends will vote for Mitt Romney or post Tea Party images on Facebook, and I they’re not necessarily any more right or wrong than I am for feeling the way they do. But gay marriage is different.

If you’re opposed to gay marriage, you’re wrong.

You’re on the wrong side of history. You may disagree with me, but in 15 or 20 years you’ll know that we were right about this thing and you were wrong. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It does mean you might be a little sheepish about admitting your support for a number of contemporary politicians and public figures in your later years.*

*If this offends you, feel free to shoot me a Facebook message. I’d really like to discuss this with you in a rational, profanity free manner.  

Rick Santorum will be the new Strom Thurmond, while the rest of the GOP will, in the coming years, tone down their anti-gay rhetoric and pretend it never happened, just like they do with literally everything else. The next generation is going to be shocked that Rick Perry could ever be a contender for the presidency after releasing a commercial where he says that gays serving openly in the military is destroying America.

”It was a different time,” we’ll explain. ”His actions were reflective of a society that erroneously believed that homosexuality was an unhealthy lifestyle choice. People weren’t too bright back then – Truman Capps’ blog was getting, like, over 100 hits a day at the time…

Truman Capps wasn’t kidding – he’s seriously topping 100 hits a day.

Drink The Cam-Pain Away!


Alright, let's turn on C-SPAN!


The American election cycle, once a bastion of democracy and the spirited exercise of the will of the people, has become a cumbersome two year slog to the finish as physically and emotionally draining as that ten minute long fight over sunglasses in John Carpenter’s They Live. That’s why, in this excerpt from next month’s issue of Hair Guy Lifestyle magazine, we’re going to teach you a number of politically-oriented cocktails that you can throw back whenever you’re in danger of being close to a radio, television, or computer for the next six months.



Who knows? Maybe if you drink enough of these, you’ll black out and wake up after the election! Either that or you’ll die – but that’s still infinitely better than watching Wolf Blitzer and that giant touchscreen boondoggle CNN seems to expect us to be impressed with.

THE MICHELLE OBAMA


Four oz vodka

Mix with chocolate milk

Stir, serve in pint glass

In honor of our first lady, The Michelle Obama is strong, black, and simultaneously arousing and intimidating to most white guys. Mix one up every time a political pundit mentions her arms instead of talking about real issues, or every time Barack makes a joke in a speech that Michelle clearly does not find amusing.

THE JOE BIDEN



One shot of Jagermeister herbal liqueur

Dropped into a pint glass full of Jagermeister herbal liqueur
Dropped into a wide mouth beer stein full of tequila

Chug

Anybody who’s spent so much as five minutes in a college bar knows that some of our most embarrassing verbal gaffes get made under the influence of that bizarre German concoction Jagermeister, particularly in the popular Jager/Red Bull drop shot known as a Jagerbomb.

Joe Biden, however, has made public statements so baffling that he’s clearly foregone Red Bull in favor of more Jager, along with some tequila to embolden him enough to swagger around dropping F-bombs when there are open mics in the area and he’s the Vice fucking President of the United States.

THE SANTORUM SPECIAL



One pint of Budweiser

Several strawberries, cumquats, and pineapple slices hidden in the beer, just below the surface

Serve with a Bible with all the relevant passages about homosexuality highlighted for easy discrimination

If there’s one thing we all know about Rick Santorum, it’s that on the outside he’s a folksy, God-fearing, all American working man. If there’s two things we know about Rick Santorum, it’s that on the inside he’s super duper gay. Jean shorts, roller blades, calling his friends ‘queers’ and laughing about it, female friends are comfortable letting him into the dressing room with them gay.

That’s why Mr. Santorum’s drink is that paragon of the working class American man – a Budweiser – with a whole lot of fruit secretly hidden on the inside, just trying to break out. Try one outside a highway rest stop after a clandestine sexual encounter with another man, preferably while sitting in the front seat of your car, crying, reading the Bible while holding a revolver with one bullet in it and trying to work up the courage. (Or, as Mr. Santorum explains it to his wife, “Thursday night bowling with the guys!”)

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE



Three oz triple sec

Mix with Hamburger Helper

Now, you’re probably thinking, “That makes absolutely no sense! Why would something like that even exist?”

It exists for the same reason that in presidential elections, we’re actually casting votes for electors who, in turn, promise to vote for the candidate listed on the ballot, even though these electors technically can vote for whomever they want and only 24 states have laws on the books to prevent electors from casting their votes against what the people of their state actually want.

Yeah, it’s messed up and disgusting. Just like triple sec and Hamburger Helper. Bottoms up!

THE LIMBAUGH



A fistful of OxyContin

Because Rush Limbaugh is a fat fuck who’s addicted to OxyContin. Yeah, kind of phoned this one in.

ANDERSON COOPER 360



A crapload of Bailey’s

A crapload of hot chocolate

Drink while wearing a Snuggie and watching AC360

This drink is warm, smooth, and intoxicating, just like Anderson Cooper’s eyes. You can practically feel him wrapping his arms around you and telling you everything’s going to be okay, can’t you?

RON PAUL

 
Moonshine

Served in a glass you made yourself

Mr. Paul is inexplicably still involved in the presidential race, scraping together delegates and winning oddly shaped states like Nevada and Maine. In honor of his libertarian commitment to private enterprise, enjoy some hooch that you made yourself without any big government tampering or intervention, from a glass that you personally forged. (If you lack glassblowing skills, sipping out of your own cupped hands has a similar ‘by the bootstraps’ aesthetic.)

MITT ROMNEY



Six oz warm piss

Poured by one of the Koch brothers into a $750,000 diamond studded gold chalice that, per an obscure tax loophole, is technically a church, granting tax exempt status to the drinker

This beverage is reflective both of Mr. Romney’s charisma as well as his wealth and the lengths to which he’ll go to not give any of it to the government he’s hoping to run.

(Note: If questioned about the drink, Mr. Romney will swear up and down that it’s champagne and not piss. But it’s piss. I mean, who are you going to trust, me or him?)

BARACK OBAMA








Classy absinthe

Serve with a side of dog

Everybody’s got a different opinion on absinthe – some people love it, some people hate it, and some people have it in their heads that it’s a terrible, dangerous drink that’ll rot holes in your brain and make you go crazy, even though the only evidence for that is either false or based largely on conjecture.

Point is, people will think what they want to think about absinthe, facts be damned. Now, personally I’d take absinthe over warm piss any day, but there’s no accounting for taste.

Truman Capps obviously studied the important things in college.

Public Transportation Fantasies

What you see here is a white person problem.
 
When I was back home in Portland in late December, my friend Josh and I were driving out to meet some friends – Josh in the driver’s seat because it was his car, and me in the passenger seat obsessively fiddling with the heater because life in Southern California had rendered me completely unprepared for the harsh Oregon winter.

We were behind a Hummer at an intersection when the light turned and the cars around us began to move. However, the Hummer remained stationary. I could see that the driver’s head was bowed, so he was either sending a text message full of atrocious grammar and emoticons or just praying for Ed Hardy to release a new line of Jersey Shore themed apparel, because those are obviously things that Hummer owners do on the regular.

The rest of the cars moved on and it was just us – the Hummer idling in front of the green light and us trapped behind it.

“Huh.” Josh said, after a couple of seconds. “Why isn’t he moving?”

I was silent, doing my best not to be a passenger seat driver. A few more seconds went by.

“What the hell is this guy’s problem?” Josh asked, exasperated now. “Does he just not see the light?”

Another two immobile seconds passed.

Josh threw up his hands. “I mean, why wouldn’t-”

I gave up on decorum. “Honk your horn! Honk at him! Push the center of your steering wheel! Why have you not been honking this entire time!?!”

Perhaps shocked by the outburst, Josh tentatively laid a hand on the horn, his car emitting a cautious, half-assed ‘beep!’ The Hummer owner jerked up out of his Axe-fueled coma and sped away, and we just barely squeaked through the intersection on a yellow.

This, I think more than anything, shows how the LA freeway system has changed me. (It also shows my friend Josh’s capacity for politeness – although he is admittedly from a very small town that I’m pretty sure doesn’t even have traffic lights, so he might’ve just been unfamiliar with the process.)

My daily commute to work, one way, is 20 miles across three different freeways and a mountain pass, during the course of which I have to merge across four lanes of dense LA traffic twice. This can take up to an hour in each direction, and to pass the time while sitting alone in my car I’ve almost unconsciously started talking to myself – kind of like Tom Hanks in Castaway, only somehow sadder because there’s not even a volleyball for companionship.

Most of what I say is running color commentary on the driving habits of the Angelinos around me, which usually takes the form of Michael Cera-style stammering, impotent rage.

”Oh, uh, oh, okay, you’re just going to pass me in the right breakdown lane and Tokyo drift into the space ahead of me? Okay, yeah, that’s totally safe. That’s, like, that’s super safe. I hope you have fun, y’know, being where you’re going before me. Yeah, that’s right, I did honk at you. Maybe you, uh, weren’t expecting that because of my Oregon pla- Oh, okay, there’s your third finger. That’s mature.”

I’ve never particularly liked driving, but I took it for granted as something I was going to have to do when I moved to Los Angeles. It comes with the territory – we get good weather, but in exchange we live in our cars. In New York you’re at the center of world culture, but you’re surrounded by filth and legions of starry eyed musical theater hopefuls.

Recently, though, I’ve been offered a way out of this mess in the form of an incredibly expensive and long overdue extension of the LA Metro system to Culver City, only a mile or two from my apartment.

I know what you’re thinking* – “What!? There’s a metro system in Los Angeles?” As it turns out, there is; up until now, though, it was so small that it was really only effective if you wanted to go from downtown to a few miles outside of downtown, which is great if you’re a rich person looking to buy meth but pretty damn inconvenient otherwise.

*God, how presumptuous is it for me to assume I know what you’re thinking? For all I know you could be an expert on public transportation. Forget I said anything.

With the Metro newly arrived in my neck of the woods, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks ankle deep in train and bus schedules, trying to figure out how long it would take me to get from Culver City to Burbank without using my car. The results, so far, are inconclusive, seeing as a lot of the new schedules aren’t online yet, but in my fantasies it takes roughly the same amount of time or less.

Yes, that’s right – in my public transportation fantasies. Those are things that exist, and I have found myself having them recently.

It doesn’t make any sense, because we all know that if there’s one thing I hate, it’s small spaces jammed with people, any number of whom could be touching me. But in London I fell in love with the Underground and its ability to take me pretty much anywhere in the city or suburbs, and I like to think that I could maybe rekindle some of those affections with the system here in LA.

In my fantasies, I wake up slightly later than I do now, shower, and head down to the local Metro station, which is 100% hobo free. The train, which is always on time and is built out of a special type of metal that never smells like pee no matter what happens, arrives, and I get on, find a seat, and read the whole way to Union Station downtown. There, I quickly and easily transfer trains in a once again completely hobo-free environment and read the whole way to North Hollywood, where I jump off the train and catch a similarly hygienic bus to take me the three miles from the station to my office, where someone has brought bagels.  

The same thing happens but in reverse on the way back, with the only difference being that I give up my seat for Christina Hendricks, who finds my chivalry adorable and strikes up a conversation with me when she notices that we’re both reading the same book, etc, the next morning we walk to the Metro from my place together, fade to black, credits, ELO song.

Of course, this dream is impossible, because it relies on Los Angeles’ public infrastructure to be clean, efficient, and hobo free, characteristics which are not among the city’s strong points.* There’s a reason that people who use public transportation here are looked on with a sort of bemused fascination by the rest of the citizens: They can’t be sure if you’re joking, poor, or just have some sort of genetic mutation that makes you incredibly patient like the most boring X-Man ever.

*However, LA is knocking it out of the park in the ‘number of palm trees’ and ‘girls with daddy issues who cancel plans at the last minute’ departments, so it’s not all bad.

What it comes down to is that I live in a part of town that I really love and I work at a job that I really love that unfortunately happens to be on the other side of a gigantic city, and whether I’m driving or taking the Metro some aspect of getting from one of those places to the other is going to drive me up the wall.

I just need to come to terms with the fact that most things drive me up the wall – if they didn’t, I’d take surfing lessons or join an intramural kickball league or do whatever people who don’t have blogs do.

Truman Capps is waiting for somebody to come up with a private door-to-door helicopter service that fits within his price range, which is probably about as likely as his Christina Hendricks scenario.

Gym Guy, Part II

To give you an idea of my general level of self confidence, I assume that I look exactly like this at all times.


The Planet Fitness in Inglewood was next door to a Vons supermarket in a relatively new shopping center that was completely encircled by a concrete and wrought iron fence, which offered decent protection from Inglewood’s robust criminal element and excellent protection from zombies, should a Dawn of the Dead situation have occurred while I was at the gym.

Sitting there in the parking lot, staring at the gym, my fears of getting shot in Inglewood subsided and my general gym-related fears returned. It was one thing to decide to go get a gym membership and get buff when I was sitting on my ass at home with pastries well within reach; here in a parking lot that was probably a shooting location for Training Day, it was a horse of a different color (and weight class).  

How can they guarantee that it’s truly a ‘judgment free zone’? What if you go in there and people start judging you anyway, silently? You know what you look like when you exercise. You’d judge you. And you know damn well they probably wouldn’t turn Helpful Dude away if he was willing to pay for a membership – their loyalty is to their shareholders, not dorky guys like you. Look, why don’t you just head into Vons, buy a couple pounds of thick cut bacon, head home, crack open a Strongbow, and just make this Sunday a tight butthole?

Sometimes I think I spend more time sitting in The Mystery Wagon psyching myself up to do things than I do actually driving it.

Since I’d already driven all the way to Inglewood, I reasoned that I’d probably hate myself for about a week if I didn’t go in and at least look at the gym. Of course, I knew I would probably also hate myself if I went in and started exercising only to get a cheerful lesson from The Helpful Dude. I was looking at self loathing no matter what I did, so on an impulse I threw open the door of The Mystery Wagon and started briskly walking towards the door of Planet Fitness – at the very least, I was burning some calories by walking, right?

I stepped inside and found myself in a fairly well appointed, spacious gym, full of incredibly ripped black and Hispanic men running on the treadmills and pumping serious iron on the weight machines.

I stood there on the threshold for longer than I’d like to admit, staring out at this vast room full of exercise equipment being used by minorities who were sculpted to perfection. Not only was I without a doubt the least athletic person there, I was also the only white guy.

Seeing as I’m from Oregon, I’m not used to being in situations where I’m the only white person, and I didn’t want this – me clumsily learning how to get into shape at a gym – to be the first time I had to shoulder the burden of being a minority and representing my race. Because, let’s be honest: I reinforce a lot of negative stereotypes about white people. I’m like the Flavor Flav of white people.

I mean, look at me – I’ve got no sense of style, I can’t dance, I’m weak, I’m awkward, I’m usually having serious anxiety about something, I have a blog, and I’m pretty much one bar mitzvah away from being Jewish. Sheltered white kids in the suburbs assume all black people are like Snoop Dogg; I didn’t want to give these working class urban folks the impression that all white people were like Truman Capps.

I feel like I owe my race more than that. Being white has benefitted me in innumerable ways – it’s kind of my duty as a white person to not fulfill all those stereotypes, but try as I might, I’m at my very whitest when I’m engaging in some sort of physical activity.

Ideally, I’d walk into a bar near some HBCU college campus on trivia night and get drafted onto one of the teams. And even if my team didn’t win, we’d all have a great evening and buy each other drinks and get drunk together and bridge all kinds of cultural gaps.

That’s when I’m at my best – in a bar, drinking, answering questions about pop culture. I do white people proud when I’m in a bar. Not at a gym, though. Never at a gym.

What’s more, I could see other people filling out the membership paperwork, and I started to ask myself if I was really that committed to fitness. Did I really want to get up early every day and add 12 miles to my 40 mile a day commute so I could drive to the ghetto and work out in what is supposedly a judgment free zone just because of my own neuroses?

What I realized, looking at the gym, is that even though it was well suited to my psychological needs on paper, it was still far from the perfect gym for me.

The perfect gym for me, I now realize, is a room with one treadmill and one weight machine, and I am the only member. When I show up, the staff pulls curtains over all the windows, leaves, and locks the door behind them, and then I am exercising completely alone, where nobody can see me and even start to begin to think about how stupid I look, thus freeing me from having to think about how stupid they probably think I look.

“Can I help you, sir?” One of the staff members at the front desk asked, smiling widely.

“Nope!” I said, probably too loud, and all but ran back to my car and my boxes of pastries. 

Truman Capps anticipates the next step in this process being a P90X blog. 

Gym Guy, Part I


I passed this iconic doughnut shop on my way into Inglewood - Buster Bluth was not trying to eat it at the time, and Iron Man was nowhere to be found.


Our new roommate works at a coffee shop in Venice, and on Friday night she came home with three huge boxes of pastries and doughnuts that the shop had baked that day for a catering order that had been canceled at the last minute. The boss had given the excess delicacies to her, which she brought home to us, which is such an incredibly bro move that we’re considering giving her a freebie on next month’s rent.

The presence of three large boxes of pastries in your living room does certain things to your eating habits – I, for example, normally eat three times per day, but since the arrival of the pastries I now eat every time I walk through the living room and see that there are still pastries to be eaten. Also, I now find excuses to walk through the living room more often to check the pastry supply. It’s a vicious cycle that will probably set the landspeed record for getting diabetes.

It’s to that end that I started seriously considering the whole ‘go get a gym membership’ issue that I go back and forth on every month or so. When I was unemployed, a gym membership would’ve been lunacy – I needed that money to pay rent, and I consumed so few calories per day from my diet of white rice and soy sauce that I really couldn’t afford to use them doing anything but keeping my body running.

Now, however, my fortunes have changed – both in that I’m making money and that I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to consume 30,000 calories worth of fresh pastries in one weekend. Yesterday, as I shoved some sort of jam-filled delight into my mouth, crumbs cascading onto my unwashed shirt, I made a decision: I have to join a fucking gym.

As loyal readers will remember from my failed experiment with swimming, the main reason I’ve avoided gyms in the past is because of my arch nemesis, Helpful Dude, the friendly Adonis whose life begins and ends with protein shakes and body sculpting, and who posts Facebook status updates like, “UGH i havent been to the gym in like 3 days IM SUCH A FATTY lol :D”

The Helpful Dude is the guy who spots you (me) struggling to lift a ten pound weight, strides over with his perfect fucking smile, claps you (me) on the shoulder in a clear violation of your (my) personal space issues, and says, “Hey there, my name’s Ty. Looks like you’re having some trouble! Mind if I give you a couple pointers?”

It’s that sort of behavior that makes public exercise wholly unappealing for me. I know that I’m not well suited to movement in general – my friends have been quick to point out over the years that I look hilarious when I run, walk, stand up, blink, lift my arm, open garage doors, turn around, or reach for something on a high shelf – so I certainly don’t need some sexy, friendly guy who probably lost his virginity in 7th grade to tell me how stupid and out of place I look in this environment full of confident, well muscled Greek gods.

However, I had recently seen a commercial for a new gym called Planet Fitness which gave me some hope for potentially finding an environment in which I could sweat without fear of the predatory Helpful Dude. Planet Fitness is all about creating a ‘judgment-free zone’ in which ordinary people and self-loathing Louis C.K. types like myself can get fit without being preyed upon by grunting, squat thrusting lunkheads.

In a pastry-induced haze I stumbled to my computer and Googled for a Planet Fitness location near me. Now, Los Angeles is a gym crazy city, to be sure, but unfortunately most gym-going Angelinos are Helpful Dude types who specifically want a judgment-heavy zone in which to work out and show off, so there were not a lot of Planet Fitness locations to choose from. My options were either to drive 60 miles to a location in Orange County, or about 6 miles to a location in Inglewood.

Now, I knew that Inglewood had a reputation as being a kind of sketchy part of town. That said, I’d never actually been there, and a lot of parts of Los Angeles that had been really sketchy in the early 90s were now gentrifying and becoming fertile breeding grounds for hipsters, which, in my opinion is a slight improvement over crack dealers and drive bys. And even if Inglewood was sketchy, it’d be a small price to pay to be able to get fit without the presence of the Helpful Dude.

So I threw a pair of shorts and an old T-shirt into a gym bag, scarfed down a couple more pastries for good luck, and got in The Mystery Wagon to go check this gym out and maybe sign up for a membership so I could get good and swoll, Ryan Gosling style.

As I pulled off the 405 at the Inglewood exit, the first thing I saw was a homeless crackhead wrapped in a beach towel stumbling across a set of old railroad tracks, fumbling with a bag of Lays potato chips in his shaky hands.

“Well, this is off to a great start.” I sighed.

Inglewood is not gentrifying. It’s the opposite of gentrifying – by which I mean, this city is so completely fucked that you could shoot an 80s postapocalyptic action movie there. At every crosswalk along streets lined with cash advances services and bail bonds offices I halfway expected to see a bunch of mohawked punks in leather jackets with switchblades and Uzis. I didn’t catch sight of any, but maybe they were all hiding inside some of Inglewood’s decaying hundred year old bungalows, all of which were fully enclosed by steel bars, either to keep the meth addicts out or the meth cooks in.

On the plus side, knowing I was going to be getting out of my car in this neighborhood was really getting my adrenaline pumping, which was definitely good cardio.

Truman Capps will return on Wednesday with Part II!

Reefer Discontent


Admittedly, us pro-legalization folk don't have the most credible advocates...


This may come as some surprise to you, but back in middle school, in spite of my liberal politics, I was actually quite the little social conservative. I used to get offended when people made fun of George W. Bush (being president is a hard job!) and was a big believer in abstaining from all sexual activity until marriage, thanks to the squad of churchy high schoolers who taught my abstinence based sex ed classes as well as an unconscious understanding that sex wasn’t going to be something I had to worry about for a very, very long time.

I was also well acquainted with the insidious dangers of marijuana, a gateway drug that was used to fund terrorism in a way that the public service announcements didn’t make entirely clear. However, even in 2002, when my post 9/11 bandwagon patriotism had essentially converted me into a miniature, overweight Sean Hannity with braces, I was still in favor of legalizing marijuana.

I recognized that it was incredibly dangerous, but I knew that plenty of other dangerous drugs like alcohol and cigarettes were legal forms of tax revenue, and I couldn’t see why we weren’t legalizing it so we could at least earn money to pay for the War on Terrorism and control distribution of the drug so terrorists would quit making money off of the stuff.

So, to recap: An ill-informed reactionary twelve year old who couldn’t multiply fucking fractions had a more rational and levelheaded drug policy than the Ivy League-educated 50-year-old with a couple of degrees who is currently President of the United States.

In the intervening years, I’ve learned how wrong I was about basically everything – George W. Bush was, is, and always will be a douchewhale, premarital sex is as awesome as it is rare, and marijuana, like Earth, is mostly harmless.* I mean, duh. (I still cannot multiply fractions.)

*That report I linked to was a government study commissioned by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, which he predictably ignored.

I learned these things by living my life for ten years, which is why I’m surprised that Barack Obama – who has lived longer than I have and is significantly more intelligent than I am – seems committed to seeing the drug banned and its users punished, states’ rights be damned.

I like President Obama a lot. I think he’s an excellent speaker and I’m a fan of healthcare, financial industry regulation, ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and any number of other things he’s done. I think he ran a great campaign in 2008, and 2012 seems poised to top it. And while I’m no sports authority, I’ve seen some pictures of the man playing basketball, and I’m convinced he’s by far the most ballin’ president in American history.

But forgive me if I get a bit snippy when the guy who’s got a brief history of cocaine use and a long history of cigarette use appoints a Bush-era moron to run the DEA, reverses his campaign promise to leave marijuana issues up to the states, and starts cracking down on licensed, tightly regulated, highly profitable dispensaries and grow operations.

I really can’t understand Obama’s position on this issue. I would get it if this was Bush or Clinton – they were both perfectly willing to ignore logic in favor of the status quo. But the reason Obama got my vote in 2008 wasn’t because of hope – it was because of common sense. He was campaigning to invest in American infrastructure, end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and leave marijuana alone, all of which are pretty damn good ideas for running America, if you ask me.

So the fact that in the past few months he’s gone all 1984 with drug raids, refused to discuss the issue with the public, and tabled any discussion of legalization with South American diplomats is really confusing to me, because these strike me as the sort of Republican-style reactionary politics I thought we could count on the executive branch to avoid, at least for four years.

I mean, President Obama is pro-choice, for Christ’s sake. This guy is willing to say he’s okay with giving women the choice to kill their unborn children if they want to – which is enough to get you straight up murdered in a big chunk of America – but he’s suddenly going all Nancy Reagan on businessmen growing marijuana for medical purposes, which is way less controversial.

He fought an incredibly bloody legislative battle to lay a framework for America’s first ever comprehensive healthcare plan in spite of all kinds of outcry, but marijuana legalization, which 50% of Americans support, is just too much to ask.

He’s worked to increase transparency and make government more accessible to Americans, but even when large numbers of us start asking why he’s breaking his own promise and superseding state law to go after people growing a plant that alleviates the pain and suffering of people with all kinds of illnesses, he flatly ignores us.

All I can think is that there’s got to be more to this – he’s playing some kind of Machiavellian, Atreides vs. Harkonnens political long game to sway some moderate Republican anti-pot voting bloc in order to win reelection in November, at which point he’ll quietly ease off on the pot crackdown so chemo patients can, y’know, eat again.

And call me a blind, Obama worshipping idiot, but if that is the case, I’d actually forgive him for it. A few months of ignorant, backwards drug policy is a small price to pay for four years of Mitt Romney not being president – because let’s be honest, if he won the election, marijuana would be the first of many things that would become illegal.

But whatever you do, don’t call this pot crackdown some element of President Obama’s grand, evil scheme to unite the whole world under the banner of socialism and put all of his opponents in front of Death Panels, terrorist fist bumping Michelle the entire time.

Why? Because if Barack Obama wanted to enslave the world, he’d want to ensure that no grass roots movement sprang up trying to stop him – and how better to keep people pacified and uninterested in fighting than by giving them easy access to a drug that makes you want to sit around, eat Doritos, and watch South Park all day?

Truman Capps apologizes if he misused the word ‘ballin’.

Hit And Stay


It was exactly this exciting.


I hit a skateboard-riding hipster with The Mystery Wagon this afternoon. I usually try to think of a snappy or intriguing way to start the blog in order to draw the Facebook crowd to Blogspot, but never before have I had a dynamite hook like this one just drop into my lap. And to think, all I had to do was hit some poor soul with my car to do it!

I’m pretty fond of my apartment complex, all things considered, but my biggest complaint is that the alley behind the units where we all park is a real nightmare – it’s cramped, there aren’t any clearly delineated parking spaces, and it’s always full of the neighbors’ kids scampering around and playing, which is awesome for them* but bad for the guy trying to move his car without inadvertently ruining somebody’s quinceanera.

*I am so fucking jealous of the kids who live in my apartment complex. There’s probably about 20 of them, none of them any older than 13, and every weekend and afternoon after school they’re out there in the alley sprinting around, screaming, shooting each other with squirt guns, playing football… These kids are having literally the perfect childhood. They’re getting exercise, they live on the same block as all their best friends, they’re two miles away from a beach, it basically never rains… Lucky bastards. Some of us had to grow up in Oregon and be fat, but they don’t even know.

Particularly treacherous are the narrow easements between the building that allow access between the alley and the street. Not only has the challenge of making the tight, blind turn into a narrow easement resulted in several people scraping up their cars (myself included), but when it spits you out at the street you’ve got basically no idea who’s coming up the sidewalk because you’re hemmed in by buildings on both sides. My solution is usually to go really slowly and think happy thoughts, which had been working like gangbusters until today.

I was inching out from between the buildings at about two miles an hour, looking first to the left to see if there was anybody coming up the sidewalk from that direction. Fortunately, there wasn’t – unfortunately, a couple of 20something hipsters on longboards were zooming up the sidewalk from the right, not paying attention, and I only saw them when they were right in front of me.

They saw me at the same time that I saw them, and we all three shat bricks. I jammed on the brakes to slow my two miles per hour of momentum, and one of the two hipsters hopped off of his skateboard, scrambling out of the way. I’m not sure whether the other just fell off of his skateboard in fright or if the bumper of my car actually nudged him off – the point is, I watched a guy collapse against the hood of my car and then slide out of view, which is a pretty disturbing thing to see on a Sunday afternoon when you’re trying to go to the mall.

The hipster who’d recovered gaped at me and I gaped back.

Holy shit! I thought. This is so going in the blog!

Here’s how shitty of a person I am: For about a tenth of a second, I found myself just sitting there in the car, running through my escape options. Worst case scenario, I had slightly nudged a guy who whizzed out in front of my car, and my immediate reaction was to fret about how long it would take me to grab my passport before hitting the 405 South towards Mexico and get a job as an emcee at a donkey show in Tijuana or something. Basically, I don’t so much have a ‘fight or flight’ reflex as I have a ‘flight, possibly while screaming’ reflex.

But I overpowerd my fear, shut off the car, and hopped out, spouting all the post-accident bullshit I could think of, most of which included the word ‘sorry.’

The hipster who’d gone down was lying on his back on the sidewalk, eyes shut, taking some deep breaths. His friend and I probably didn’t do him too many favors by hovering over him and saying, “Are you okay? Are you okay? Should we call 911? Are you okay?”

Presently, he sat up. “I’m good, man, don’t worry. I should’ve been looking.” He turned to his friend. “Dude, give me a beer.”

His friend produced a beer from his pocket – a useful friend indeed – and handed it to him. “Beer makes everything better,” he grinned.

Even though it wasn’t my fault, I still felt bad. These guys were both being really friendly about the whole thing and appropriately self-medicating with beer, and I felt bad that I’d been a party to their otherwise awesome Sunday getting suddenly more complicated and painful. Plus, how the hell do you leave a situation where you’ve almost run somebody over?

”Well, uh, sorry about the whole ‘almost ran you over’ thing. I guess be more careful next time? So, uh… Bye! Good luck not getting hit by any more cars!

“Hey,” I said as the fallen hipster got to his feet and took a long pull on the beer. “I’ve got some more beer inside. Let me grab you one; it’s the least I can do.”

Both of these guys weren’t going to turn down beer, so I scampered back into my apartment and threw open the fridge. In there we had one of those huge bottles of some craft brewed Porter that one of our friends had bought and left at the house weeks ago. I grabbed it and ran back outside, where both hipsters were getting ready to remount their boards, seemingly no worse for wear.

“Here’s this.” I said, handing them the beer. “It’s a Porter, so… Yeah.”

They were both impressed at the quality of the beer and thanked me several times as I headed back to my car. Before I got in, the dude I’d almost hit/slightly nudged shook my hand.

“Sorry again.” I said. “Enjoy the beer.”

He laughed. “It’s cool. Don’t trip.”

I got back into the car, congratulating myself on yet another successful human interaction. “Y’know, I won’t trip! Have a great day!”

So I drove off to the mall, windows down and fresh sea hair blowing through The Mystery Wagon, watching in my rear view mirror as the two hipsters made their way down the sidewalk again, passing the bottle back and forth.

I hit a guy with my car and then used craft brewed beer to smooth things over. I solve my problems Portland style.

Truman Capps is still not a beer drinker, but he appreciates its use in diplomacy.

The Sweet Genius Of Workaholics


From left to right: Me, Other Friend Brent, Main Bro Alexander.


If you were to go through the massive ‘Stories’ folder on my hard drive wherein I have a digital copy of every piece of fiction I’ve written or attempted to write since I was 13, you would see a lot of fascinating things. You would see a large amount of Mary Sue-style fan fiction from my middle school years, innumerable halfassed screenplays that are bad in ways not previously thought possible by science, and more than a few attempts from my early college years to condense my high school life and experiences into a poignant and funny novel. (The last thing you would see would be me running up behind you with an axe to kill you in order to preserve the secrets of just how embarrassingly horrible 90% of my creative output really is.)

But before the whole axe thing, if you looked closely at the stories and screenplays I tried to write about high school and adolescence, you’d see that they all started with some approximation of, “So there are these three dudes, and they’ve been best friends forever.” (Another prevalent theme was, “So there are these zombies and we have to kill or hide from them,” and “So there was this video game and here are some stories I made up about the characters in it.”)

I kept revisiting the ‘three dudes’ trope for a couple of reasons – for one, it makes it pretty easy to tell a funny story with snappy, character driven comedy. It’s not hard to create three distinct, well fleshed out characters, and three dudes as opposed to two allows for two of them to be able to team up and isolate the other when the occasion calls for it, which is a good conflict.

However, more than all that stuff – most of which I thought up three minutes ago – I found myself unconsciously gravitating to stories about three dudes because most of what I write about is inspired by things that happen to me, and most of the things that happened to me in high school happened in the context of me and two other dudes; namely, My Main Bro Alexander and our Other Friend Brent. We called ourselves the Flying All Star Trio, and no, since you’re asking, most of our adventures together didn’t involve women.

As much as I eschew most traditional masculinity by not playing sports, referring to myself as a feminist, or using words like ‘eschew’, I’m a big fan of male bonding and bromance, largely due to my bromantic experiences in high school. It’s why I’m a fan of movies like Superbad - they’re about guys who, despite all their failings and lameness and assholery, really love one another beyond reason. There’s an understated sweetness in blind, unconditional friendship.

That is why I believe that Workaholics, the character driven slacker sitcom on Comedy Central, is probably one of the greatest shows on television at the moment. At the very least, it’s a lot better than The Office, and their first season was arguably more consistently hilarious than this season of Community, at least so far.

The show’s premise is this: There are these three dudes and they’ve been best friends forever, and having recently graduated from college they now live together in Rancho Cucamonga, California, working 9-5 in a dead end job as telemarketers and spending most of their time outside of work doing their best to forget that they’re supposed to act like adults now. Most episodes revolve around the trio’s farcical adventures at the office or at home as they try to either avoid work without getting fired or reclaim some semblance of the coolness and social status they’d had in college.

It would be really easy for this show about three young white males partying and being irresponsible to turn into some shitty, American Pie Presents: The Workaholics! travesty, but thanks to the considerable talent of the show’s writers, who are also its stars, most of the comedy is character and dialogue driven, and I’d wager they’re sober for at least three quarters of the writing process. The scripts are pretty tightly structured and almost always build to an unexpected and funny conclusion, which is really saying something when you remember that in the second episode of the series, one of the protagonists inadvertently exposes himself to a child while wearing a coat that looks like a grizzly bear.

The characters, despite their general laziness and misanthropy, are way sweeter and more redeemable than those on other slacker comedies like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia because through thick and thin, these guys love each other and frequently go to great, illegal, and sometimes disgusting lengths to show it. What’s more, like the guys in Superbad, it’s easy to find one of them whose personality you identify with, which makes it far easier to get invested in the three dudes and what happens to them. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a phenomenal show in its own right, but it’s more of a freak safari through the darkest parts of human nature than a show with protagonists who you want to succeed.

At the risk of getting too up my own ass with analytical bullshit, I think Workaholics is, perhaps unintentionally, probably more in touch with my generation and the kind of shit we’re dealing with than any other show I’m aware of.

Much like me and many of my friends, the three dudes on Workaholics all grew up in suburban, upper-middle class environments and were raised to understand that they would definitely attend college after high school because, with college degrees, they would definitely get good jobs and be successful.

Like many of my friends (and me for the six months before I got lucky and stumbled into an advertising job), they graduated to find a dismal job market where the best their degrees could get them was shitty work for shitty pay and no benefits.

Everything they’d been taught about how to be a grown up turned out to be wrong, and in response they smoke weed on their roof, form a wizard themed rap group, go on an all-night bender with their boss’s autistic younger brother, and generally reject adulthood and all its trappings. I mean, can you blame them?

It's just a refreshing counterpoint to a show like How I Met Your Mother, in which all the of the 20something protagonists are successful enough right out of college to afford spacious Manhattan apartments and multiple cab rides per night. While that, too, is a great show, it can be kind of stressful to watch people in roughly your age group going to bars and fancy parties all the time when you're facing the prospect of eating white rice and ketchup for your next ten meals.

In those moments, aimless and unemployed Millennials can look to the reassuring glow of Workaholics and know adulthood isn't going anywhere, so we and our bros can take our time getting there if need be.

Truman Capps has probably alienated most of his readers by suggesting that anything is funnier than Community.

People Living In Competition


"[expletive deleted]"


I hang out with my Oregon friends Dylan and Holly two or three times a week. On Monday nights we download and watch the latest episode of Mad Men from iTunes because we don’t have cable, on Tuesdays we go to one of the several Mexican restaurants in our part of town for cheap tacos, and usually at least one evening out of the weekend is spent together in close proximity to pizza and alcohol. This, kids, is what happens after you graduate from college and move away: Now that you no longer live within walking distance of 30 drinking buddies, you begin to get very close to the friends you have, whether they want you in their life that much or not.

Dylan and Holly are a power couple – they started dating in December of our freshman year at the University of Oregon, making their relationship roughly as old as this blog (although far more consistent in terms of quality.) I, with my somewhat spotty dating record, can scarcely wrap my head around the concept of having a significant other in your life for that long without them donating your DVDs to charity or humiliating you at your senior prom or revealing that they’ve had a secret boyfriend at the US Naval Academy for the duration of your relationship (all true stories!), but I think Dylan and Holly have made it all these years for two reasons:

1) Both of them are significantly more mature than I am, and
2) They work out any latent aggression toward one another through relentless, brutal, unending competition.

Both Dylan and Holly played sports in high school and, in college, each tried to outdo the other with extracurricular activities and classes. On top of all that, there’s the constant games – in virtually every competitive board or video game, these two are constantly going head to head, working out whatever subconscious frustrations they may have with one another by aggressively trash talking and trying to drive the other to ruin in a friendly game of Bananagrams.

This usually spells disaster for me, because a sibling-free childhood and an adolescence full of arts rather than sports has made me a fairly noncompetitive person. I do not have an unending thirst for victory in all things. In most games I play I lack the willingness to give it all up for the big win because I simply don’t care enough – Coach Bombay would not be pleased, at least in the first 80 minutes of The Mighty Ducks.

It’s good that I don’t care if I win or lose, because I lose a lot when I play against Dylan and Holly, whose entire lives together have essentially been a grueling, four year crucible of competitive things. When I join in any of their reindeer games, the best I can usually hope for is third place – and I’m okay with that.

That all ended two weeks ago when, after watching Mad Men, Dylan said, “Oh, yeah, we downloaded Mario Kart 64 on the Wii. You want to play a round?”

Long dormant fires ignited deep within me. I nodded curtly, grabbed the Gamecube-style controller, and began flexing my thumbs.

As I’ve mentioned before, my parents and I played Mario Kart 64 every night for a good five to seven years of my childhood. After awhile, we didn’t even call it Mario Kart. We just called it Kickin’ Butt. It would always start after dinner.

So, Dad would say, folding his napkin. Who wants to get their butt kicked?

And away we’d go to the gentle curves of Luigi Raceway, the snowman-littered peril of Frappe Snowland, or the sulfur-scented shitstorm of Bowser’s Castle, with its fucking Thwomps and 90 degree turns and narrow rope bridges over lava, trading PG-13 trash talk all the way.

Again, this was virtually every night for years of my impressionable youth. None of us knew back then that Mario Kart 64 would stand the test of time so well, and that it would forevermore be a staple of drunken college shenanigans. My parents were not aware that these nightly sessions were slowly but surely turning their young son into a seasoned Mario Kart master at an early age. I was like one of those Asian cello prodigies whose parents force them to practice for hours every day from an early age, except unlike them my skill is completely awesome.

This was where I forged a competitive spirit.

That ‘one round’ of Mario Kart we were going to play that night, when it was already late and all three of us had work in the morning, quickly turned into us playing every single level in the game until well after midnight as soon as Dylan and Holly noticed that my skillset and competitive spirit in this particular game was significantly higher than in any other facet of my life, which, in turn, made them more competitive.

Dylan and Holly are Mario Kart masters in their own right – before they were even dating they would regularly play against one another in the dorms, sprinting to the N64 and tackling one another to try and be the first to pick Yoshi and potentially cop a feel on the way – so for arguably the first time in our friendship, we were playing a game where we were evenly matched and similarly fanatical about winning. That led to unprecedented levels of trash talk.

On that first night, Holly clocked me with a red shell within inches of the finish line, opening up the win for Dylan instead of me. I sort of blacked out for a moment, and when I came to I was in the midst of saying several things to her so offensive that they’d make Rush Limbaugh blush.

To Holly’s credit, she was unfazed, and proceeded to fling most of that language back at me in the next race.

What I learned that night, and in the two dozen or so Mario Kart games we’ve played since that night, is that this game, which was designed for children, brings out some of the filthiest, foulest, rudest language and behavior among adult friends.

That, I guess, is the nature of competition – wanting that arbitrary goal so badly that at a moment’s notice your mouth can open and all kinds of potentially friendship-ending language can pour out. Maybe that’s what scared me away from competition before – in sports, in academics, in most other games.

But not in Mario Kart 64, where my parents unwittingly have turned me into a monster of 150cc Bowser proportions.

Truman Capps hates Rainbow Road so much.

In Defense Of Advertising


See, how could advertising be bad when... Wait, shit, I got the wrong 60s throwback TV show.


Recently, a stupid person wrote a profane, inflammatory, ill-informed screed on the Internet, and for maybe the first time ever, it wasn’t me. Then, in response to a profane counterpoint that I consider well-informed because I agreed with it, he did it again. The gist of it is, Hamilton Nolan over at Gawker says that creative people should not go into advertising because it’s essentially allowing corporations to buy our creativity and use it for evil.

Nolan’s comments remind me of the worldview of a number of students in my journalism classes at the University of Oregon. One branch of the journalism school was an advertising program, and in class discussions about ethics some of the more self-righteous ‘true journalist’ types would make a lot of bold statements about how advertising was an evil, corrupting influence because its sole purpose was to convince people to give money to big faceless corporations. Most of the students making these arguments were wearing clothes from Urban Outfitters or American Apparel and usually within reach of a Starbuck’s cup.

The retort I always wanted to make but never did for fear of jeopardizing my already low chances of sleeping with any of the more self-righteous girls in the class was, “Okay. We’ll get rid of all advertising everywhere because it’s so evil. Then what?”

What would happen, of course, is that the economy would tank, thousands of creative professionals would lose their jobs, and television and magazines, which primarily exist as vehicles to show people advertisements, would cease to exist, throwing anywhere between a few hundred thousand a few million people out of work, depending on the breaks.

I’m not saying that advertising is universally good. Advertising as a whole, when compared to the Red Cross, high school science teachers, and the US Navy SEALs, comes up dead last. Advertising isn’t particularly altruistic, outside of some public service announcements (which often serve as something of a backdoor promotion of the agency’s creative talent), and exists largely to make money. It’s not a global force for good. (That title rests with the Navy, who paid the Campbell-Ewald agency around $800 million for the new slogan, campaign, and overall rebranding.)

But advertising also isn’t evil. Trust me, it’s got its negative elements. I’d say the fact that virtually every teenaged girl in America has an unhealthy obsession with her weight is probably a frontrunner for the most negative. But advertising is a business, like any other business, and most businesses have negative aspects.

Both of my parents work for insurance companies. Insurance companies are really good at denying coverage to sick people, but I never heard anybody in my classes calling the very idea of insurance evil. I’m not aware of a general disdain for hydroelectric power, even though the St. Francis dam collapse was the second-greatest loss of life in California history.

Advertising is a part of capitalism, plain and simple – companies can build as much shit as they want, but if nobody knows that the product is out there, what it does, or why they should buy it, the company may as well not have made anything in the first place.

A lot of Nolan’s argument, though, is specifically that creative people shouldn’t get into advertising, because they’re somehow cheating themselves by making a living off of their creativity. Here’s a quote:

”Do not go into advertising. Your creativity, as trite as it sounds, is worth more than that corporation will ever pay you.”

Damn, really? God, if only I’d known that when I wrote my rent check the other day!


Yeah, but in all seriousness, I wonder if Mr. Nolan knows who pays the lucky creative types who don’t go into advertising and instead are able to sell their novel or screenplay or sign their band to a record contract. It’s a big, faceless corporation like Viacom or Disney, who is paying you because they want to take the product of your creativity and use it to make a huge amount of money.

In order for a creative person to truly keep from disgracing himself in Hamilton Nolan’s eyes, he or she would have to refrain from pretty much every opportunity to make a steady living off of their work, because if you work in a creative field you’re all but certain to wind up in the man’s employ at some point, since faceless corporations tend to be the only entities with enough money to finance the extravagance of film production or printing hundreds of thousands of books or getting a roadie to take the fall for the cocaine they found in your lead guitarist’s carry-on bag.

Yes, unless you’re playing guitar in the subway for pocket change, selling copies of your self-published fantasy novel at a Renaissance fair, or toiling away at a job you hate and being creative in your spare time solely for your own enjoyment, Hamilton Nolan thinks you’re a sellout and a dupe. Remember, if your creativity benefits you in any tangible way, you’re doing something wrong and should stop immediately.

I’ve loved writing for as long as I can remember. It’s basically my favorite thing, and probably one of the only things I’m good at. And let me tell you something: The past month I’ve been working in advertising has been hands down the best time I’ve had since moving to LA, and by far the most creatively fruitful.

When I was a production assistant, I took orders, brown nosed producers, and moved furniture, tasks which were in no way creatively stimulating and did nothing to enhance my writing abilities, for about $100-$125 a day in a city where gas costs $4.30 a gallon.

At the ad agency, I work with a bunch of other writers on a daily basis, brainstorming and collaborating. Many of the writers I’m working with have written in the entertainment industry before and still have contacts there, unlike any of the PAs I worked with. My coworkers respect me and appreciate my work, and I’m paid very well. And, on top of all that, this job makes me incredibly happy.

Is that really so offensive to you, Mr. Nolan – that I’m happy and financially stable? That I’m growing creatively, and doing more writing on a daily basis than I ever could have in virtually any other field?

Because if it does, well, I guess you’re entitled to your opinion. But my opinion is that you’re just kind of a shitty person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Well, no – maybe that’s an unfair characterization. You might’ve just been facing a deadline and desperately wrote the first thing you could think of, regardless of whether you agreed with what you were saying or not. I guess that’s the sort of thing that happens when you sell your soul and get paid to write a blog. I wouldn’t know, of course – I do this shit for free.

Truman Capps dreads the day when one of the public figures he insults on the Internet actually buys a plane ticket and kicks him in the nuts.