Dumping Trump

IT LOOKS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE MY HAIR SO SHUT UP ABOUT IT. 

I think it’s absolutely disgusting that a major department store would use a celebrity with such a controversial lifestyle just to shill products and make money. I mean, what happened to responsibility or ethics in the American business community? Whatever this partnership might do to generate ‘buzz’ or drive sales, it’s hazardous to our nation’s moral health. Enough is enough – let’s boycott JC Penny until they quit using Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson.

Wait, what? Oh, sorry, my B – I got the right set of talking points and approximate flavor of butthurt, but the wrong side of the political spectrum.

In case you missed it, Donald Trump has been a full bore high-octane piece of shit for the past 20 years or so without so much as a coffee break. Over the past few years he’s supported virtually every conspiracy theory du jour regarding President Obama’s motivations and heritage to the point that the only thing separating him from a guy pushing a shopping cart and screaming obscenities at traffic is a business suit and approximately three billion dollars. (Honestly, the only reason he hasn’t made a tinfoil hat yet is because he doesn’t want to mess up his hair.)

Trump’s bullshit reached a dizzying height on Election Night, when he took to Twitter to make a variety of allegations about voter fraud, lament the death of America, and encourage another civil war in order to protect us from the tyranny of food stamps, healthcare, and government assistance for poor people.

Much like one of the poor people he hates so much, Donald Trump actually works two jobs – in addition to being a full time crazy person, he’s also a television personality with his own brand. Recently, he’s partnered with Macy’s to sell his Donald J. Trump collection of overpriced dress shirts,ties, jewelry, and cologne – but strangely, no toupees or Trump-branded .45 hollowpoint rounds to stockpile in anticipation of the coming Trump-branded civil war.

In the wake of his crazy Election Night tweets, though, a large coalition of liberal and progressive consumers have started earnestly signing petitions – the largest of which has over half a million signatures – demanding that Macy’s drop Trump as a business partner because of his comments. So far, Macy’s has refused, and now the Huffington Post and Reddit’s politics section are abuzz with talk of a boycott.

Don’t get me wrong – I hate Donald Trump. He’s got all the politics of every geriatric Medicare-hating Medicare-receiving Tea Partier, plus money, plus attention whenever he wants it, plus a hairstyle which has been unfavorably compared to mine.*

*For the last time: Donald Trump has a combover. He’s grown out hair on the sides of his head and swept it over dramatically to conceal a bald spot. I have a wave. It could not be more different. Now stop telling me I have Donald Trump hair.**

**And while we’re at it, stop telling me I have Justin Bieber hair. Even if there are some similarities from time to time, I’m older than Justin Bieber. If anything, Justin Bieber has Truman Capps hair.

But just because Donald Trump is a shitty guy who uses his platform as a reality TV show host to say terrible, stupid things doesn’t mean that Macy’s should be guilt-tripped into firing him, any moreso than JC Penny should be guilt-tripped into firing Ellen DeGeneres because she’s a lesbian.

You could argue that the two situations are different – Ellen DeGeneres was born a lesbian and can’t do anything to change it, while Donald Trump tries very hard every day to be the biggest and loudest asshole on Earth, and for that malicious intent he supposedly should be fired.

The thing is, even though Trump chose to be horrible and Ellen didn’t choose to be gay, both Macy’s and JC Penny chose to go into business with them. And I’m pretty sure these two national department store chains didn’t make those decisions lightly. It’s not like JC Penny signed a contract with Ellen and only found out she was gay when they saw it on Drudge Report later. I’m sure somebody at Macy’s has watched The Apprentice.

Macy’s went into business with Donald Trump precisely because he’s a controversial figure. Whether people love him or hate him for his post-election tweets, they’re talking about him – and, by extension, they’re talking about Macy’s four days before Black Friday. Even if half a million people boycott Macy’s (they so won’t), the free publicity will still be great for them. It’s not a political statement, it’s just business.

Macy’s is capitalizing on Trump’s propensity for controversial statements to make money, yes. That would be morally questionable until you remember that the only reason Macy’s is there is to make money – and that JC Penny made a similarly shrewd business decision with Ellen DeGeneres. 

There’s a groundswell of support for the LGBT community, so JC Penny picked a popular gay TV personality to be their spokesperson – not necessarily because it was the right thing to do, but because they ran the numbers and knew it would make them money as the majority of Americans finally start to appreciate lesbians as more than just stock porno characters.

If Macy’s partnered with the Aryan Nation, that would be worth boycotting. If Macy’s partnered with Joseph Kony, you could boycott that with my blessing. Hell, if Macy’s partnered with Chris Brown I’d boycott the fuck out of it.

But Donald Trump isn’t hurting anyone. He’s not inciting violence. He’s just a gasbag who’s famous for being a gasbag, and if you’re looking for somebody to draw attention to your company and give you free publicity you really couldn’t do much better than him.

Besides, the Donald J. Trump brand provides a valuable service to America by giving Donald Trump fans the opportunity to dress and even smell like Donald Trump so that the rest of us can quickly identify them for social isolation and subsequent mockery.

Truman Capps totally put Chris Brown in the same analogy as Joseph Kony and the Aryan Nation.

Smear Mud On Your Ass

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This movie has had far too great of an influence on my moral code.

I still remember the days when, if you wanted to say something racist, you had to first say, “I’m not racist, but…” then lower your voice, glance around, and then say something obliquely racist, like “So I saw somebody sideswipe a car in the parking lot at Target and the driver was Asian,” or “I saw someone embarrassing himself on the dance floor and it was a white guy who was apparently named Truman or something.”

Those were just the rules – first you had to insist that you weren’t racist, because in all likelihood you weren’t, and then you quietly and delicately rehashed an event in which you saw a person living up to an ugly racial stereotype. It was PG-13 racism for the 21^st century, with no nasty words and the guilty acknowledgment that it was wrong to be talking about this sort of thing in the first place.

That, I think, is about as un-racist as America is ever going to get: People still know and think about the stereotypes, but they feel incredibly guilty whenever they privately discuss them with other people. It’s impossible to eradicate racism, but when you take all the fun out of it people are way less likely to engage in it as much.

What I’ve noticed over the past couple of years, though, is that racism seems to be coming back in what is arguably the stupidest possible way.

There’s the bar owner in Atlanta who uses his reader board sign to call the president and Michael Jackson the N-word* and compare them to monkeys, or the girl in Sacramento who hoped that the N-word would get assassinated in his second term, or the old white couple in Michigan who lynched an empty chair in their front yard after Clint Eastwood compared the president to an empty chair.

*As a student of Louis CK I know that it’s dishonest of me to write ‘N-word’ instead of the actual term, but I’d just as soon people not be able to Google ‘hair guy’ followed by a racial slur and be directed straight to my blog.   

The one thing all these events have in common is that the people responsible for them all insist that they aren’t racist. After their initial shock that their racially charged displays have drawn media attention, they bend over backwards to make it explicitly clear to the press that they aren’t racist, but are just exercising their First Amendment rights to make a political point. 

Protip: A good way to avoid being accused of racism is to not lynch chairs in your front lawn or splash racial slurs all over your place of business or Facebook page. I’m not sure exactly what political point these people were trying to make, but don’t blame us for thinking you’re a racist when the medium you use to convey your message is so damn racist.

If you want my opinion, I think these people are all pretty racist. Not Strom Thurmond racist, mind you, but on the Racism Spectrum™ I’d put all three of them somewhere between Drunk Mel Gibson and Angry Michael Richards levels of racist, which is definitely an above-average level of racism.

Now, I can safely say that these people really piss me off. And it’s not because they hate the president I like so much – hell, it’s not even because they’re being racist. It’s because they’re being racist but they’re too chickenshit to actually own up to the fact that they’re being racist!

Racism is toxic and stupid, but there isn’t a law against it – it’s completely protected under the First Amendment. It’s not like saying, “I’m not racist,” is some sort of cop out to avoid jail time. It’s something that you say when an offhand comment or bad joke you’ve made gets taken out of context and blows up in your face.

If you’ve taken the time and energy to cover your home or business in racial slurs and imagery, damn it, be proud of that shit! I’m not saying racism is anything you should be proud of, but you’ve clearly thought out and prepared your message in advance. It’s not like you’re on the fence about race relations; if you’re racist enough to turn your front lawn into a public tribute to lynching, why can’t you just admit that you’re racist? You’ve already carried the racist ball to the 5-yard line, at that point why the hell wouldn’t you just make the racist touchdown?

Sure, maybe they’re scared that if they admit to being racists they’ll face reprisals from the black and non-racist community. Thing is, whether you admit that you’re racist or not, you’ve still got a huge racist display in front of your home or business. Everybody already assumes that you’re racist; by saying that you aren’t you’re only lying to yourself.

I’ve never been to a KKK cross burning, but I imagine when they do they aren’t chanting, “We’re not racist. We’re not racist,” the entire time. I’m pretty sure that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t end every speech with, “But seriously, guys, I’m not anti-Semitic.” Osama Bin Laden’s last words weren't, “I don’t really hate America! 9/11 was just me trying to prove a point!”*

*Speaking of Osama Bin Laden being dead, happy Veterans Day, everybody! 

Racism is fundamentalism – to be racist you have to assume that every single member of a given minority group behaves in the same shitty way. You can’t half-ass fundamentalism. If you’re a racist, and you want to be racist in public like these people, then you need to understand that the tradeoff is that normal society isn’t going to be happy to see you anymore. You’re going to have to find a new group of friends. Spoiler alert: Most of them sell guns out of the trunk of their car and have some pretty interesting tattoos.

That’s what I find the most shocking about these racist displays – it’s that members of the neoconservative movement, which historically prides itself on eschewing the liberal value of ‘political correctness’, are so concerned with what other people think of them.

It all comes back to that invaluable lesson from Wet Hot American Summer: “If you want to smear mud on your ass, smear mud on your ass. Just be honest about it.”

Truman Capps hates white people.

Don't Call It A Comeback

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"You are a sad song, played on the ugliest guitar."

During Mitt Romney’s concession speech last night – in which he made the first truthful statement of his campaign by acknowledging that he had lost – I couldn’t help but remember the final scene in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, wherein a battered robot acknowledges his inability to have human emotions and is then lowered into a vat of molten steel, giving one final thumbs up to the radical right before he melts away into political obscurity.

In a way, I almost felt sorry for the guy. While he was purposefully secretive about his tax returns and all over the map with his policies, you can’t argue the fact that Mitt Romney really wanted to be president. In any other regard it would be a tragedy that a man would spend seven years and millions of dollars chasing a dream and then not catch it. But then you take a look at how he ran his campaign and you think, “Yeah, well… What did you think was going to happen!?”

What I like best about this is the various bloated gasbags and religious extremists running the Republican Party have accepted that they very clearly got smacked down at the polls and are now spending the day after Election Day stumbling from one cable news network to another in a disappointed haze, trying to process what went wrong.

“It’s a perplexing time for many of us right now,” said Sarah Palin, who is also perplexed by cottage cheese and how the light in the refrigerator always comes on right when you open the door.

“I was wrong,” said Newt Gingrich, referring not to his defense of 'family values' as a philanderer who’s been married three times but instead to his prediction that Romney would win. “Republicans are going to have to take a very serious look at what happened and why did it happen and why were we not more competitive at the presidential level.”

Here, Newt, let me give you some Cliff’s Notes for that ‘serious look’, whenever you get around to it: When your party’s most qualified candidate after a brutal primary is the guy who won’t release his tax returns, writes an op-ed titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” and says he doesn’t care about 47% of Americans in a room full of people who have HD cameras in their fucking telephones, there is a good chance that you won’t win the election.

“While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other, the reality is candidates from all corners of our GOP lost tonight. Clearly we have work to do in the weeks and months ahead,” said Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Clearly, he says. Clearly they have work to do. What do you think made it clearest, Senator? Was it President Obama’s 12 point lead among women, or the fact that GOP frontrunners for the Senate in red state hellholes like Missouri and Indiana suddenly lost after trying to explain circumstances under which women getting raped wasn’t really so bad?

In fact, based on the success of marriage equality ballot measures in Washington, Maryland, and Maine versus the senator who coined the term ‘legitimate rape’, I’d say that ‘redefining’ marriage is way more popular than redefining sexual assault.

I see the GOP as a whole as a mirror of Mitt Romney – if you look at their campaign strategies over the past 18 months and completely forget their policies, they totally deserve an A for effort. These guys wanted to win so hard that they got extremely creative – voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting, an obstructionist Congress, Romney-led conference calls for CEOs about how best to encourage employees to vote Republican, a war chest funded by Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers, and Karl Rove… Remember how the bad guys in The Mighty Ducks had all that money and corporate support and dirty tactics?

And do you remember how the Ducks won anyway?

I mean, Florida, for Christ’s sake! Florida, I’ve said some nasty shit about you, and even though I stand by most of it, I still apologize. The Florida legislature and Governor Rick Scott saw to it that 23% of the black electorate was disenfranchised and that the rest had to wait in line for seven hours to vote, and Obama still won the state.

People in the Deep South stood in line for seven hours – and not to get on Space Mountain or see a Transformer or eat a chicken sandwich, but to stand in a booth and vote for Barack Obama. That right there affirms something that I’ve always wanted to believe:

Americans – even the ones in Florida – are a lot more tenacious than we give them credit for.

Sure, voter turnout was only a little over half the country,* but the folks who showed up, showed up. They brought the necessary ID, they waited as long as they had to, and against the odds set up by jackass Republican state governments, they voted – perhaps emboldened by spite.

*I know a couple people who didn’t vote because, as they put it, they weren’t up to date on the issues. I totally understand and sympathize – it’s now harder than ever to obtain information about current events. I mean, who has time to get on their horse and ride to the nearest library to read up on the issues, or the patience to listen to the town crier explain the latest happenings? I just pray that one day the world will be linked by an easily assessable information superhighway – a series of tubes, perhaps – with which people can quickly access and digest information. Perhaps it would even be available on telephones! Surely, with the invention of this worldwide web of freely accessible information, the only remaining excuse for not voting will be, “I’m lazy and don’t give a shit.”

That, I think, was the real victory of last night. Sure, Mr. Obama has four more years and Elizabeth Warren is about to go Kaizer Soze all over Wall Street, but what was most heartening to me is that the majority of Americans wanted it this way. Despite the lies and the flashy ads, they could see that Romney and Co. were trying to feed them a shit sandwich, which they opted not to eat by an inarguable margin. We’re a smarter country than we give ourselves credit for, which is extremely easy for me to say now that my guy won.

If the Republicans hope to win another election, they need to bank on the electorate being intelligent and informed, not just blindly patriotic. That means a party platform unconcerned with gay people or birth control, an acknowledgment that Reaganomics doesn’t work, and a presidential candidate whose name is Jon Huntsman or Gary Johnson.

It’s my dream that one day the candidate I support can lose an election and I won’t have to worry about America turning into a militaristic theocracy. What last night told me is that that dream is a possibility, even if it takes until 2024.

Truman Capps promises a prompt return to dick jokes and stories about him being awkward in public – unless, that is, something interesting happens in politics in the next few years, in which case he’ll write about it and you’ll just have to deal with it.

Entemology Vignettes, Two

The only time I've ever given any though to joining the military is when I watch Aliens, because they make it look so damn cool. Even when they're all dying horrible, horrible deaths. 

Aliens is probably one of the greatest movies ever made, and whether I knew it or not, it became the model for the next couple months of my life. Ripley and the Colonial Marines wound up marooned on a shithole planet full of horrible, nearly unkillable monsters; I had ten and a half months left on a year lease in an apartment full of horrible, nearly unkillable monsters.

With over two weeks until anyone comes looking for them, Ripley and the Marines barricade themselves inside a building, shuttering all points of access and creating multiple fallback points. I did the same, systematically shutting off all access points and reducing my living space to an easily defensible perimeter.

*

Whenever I go to Home Depot I just immediately find the nearest employee, tell them what I’m looking for, and ask them where it is. I know that’s probably frustrating for them, but Home Depot is the king of the emasculating hardware store, and the deck there is completely stacked against me finding what I want.

When I can’t find something in a grocery store I at least know what I’m looking for – at Home Depot I’m usually looking for some vague tool that I don’t know the name or function of, so my options are to either search the entire store aisle by aisle or ask the nearest Orange Apron.

“I’m looking for sprayable foam.” I said to the Orange Apron one weekend in early August.

He stared at me blankly.

“Sprayable foam.” I said again. “That exists, right?” If it didn’t, this would not be the first time I assumed a gadget that I’d seen on an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise eight years ago was now real and feasible.

“Sprayable… Foam?” He didn’t seem to get it.

“Yeah. You spray it into cracks, and then it gets hard?”

He raised his eyebrows.

Oh Jesus it sounds like I’m describing anal sex.

“You know,” I said, trying to save face. “It’s like caulk.”

(Pronounced phonetically: Cock.)

I’m pretty sure he thought I was propositioning him, but eventually I found a can of Great Stuff – an expanding, hardening foam that you spray into crevasses around your house to block out drafts and insects.

*

I used my caulk liberally around my apartment, spraying foam into every crack I could find, but this didn’t stop the roaches from coming. In all likelihood I was closing the barn door after the roaches had run out – they had found a way into my apartment and were now breeding somewhere inside, and the only thing my foam was doing was ensuring that they couldn’t leave.

My kitchen was spotless, and since the invasion I’d all but quit eating in my apartment. Of course, food isn’t an issue for roaches – they can last months without a meal and munch on other dead roaches or their own children whenever they need a snack. The baits and poisons I’d set out didn’t seem to be doing much, nor did either of the two visits from the apartment’s exterminator, so I took the next most logical step:

I would surrender my living room and kitchenette to the roaches. They were willing to die for it in great numbers, so they’d damn well earned it. Even though I was still the one paying for it.

*

Roaches are generally nocturnal (They mostly come out at night… Mostly.), so every night after work I would race home against the setting sun in hopes of arriving at my apartment with time to scarf down a quick dinner – usually two slices of bread with peanut butter, eaten standing over the sink. After eating I would immediately wash all the crumbs down the sink and run the garbage disposal, wash my knife with hot soap and water, and scrub down every countertop for the nth time to eliminate any possible roach-attracting food source.

Then, as the light through my blinds grew orange with a spectacularly smoggy Los Angeles sunset, I would grab my laptop and water and retreat to my bedroom, shut the door to the living room, and tuck a towel underneath it to seal it.

Since my bathroom was adjacent to my bedroom, I could easily hole up in my anti-roach fortress all night without having to leave. Of course, the air conditioning unit was in the living room and I was scared to open my window lest a roach find a way to get in past the screen, so a lot of the already hot summer nights were sweat drenched, sticky nightmares right out of any given Vietnam War movie, complete with rampant paranoia and classic rock.

*

Even holed up in my room, a supposed ‘safe zone’, I still couldn’t go more than a minute without catching a flickering shadow out of the corner of my eye, assuming it was a roach, and having a brief heart attack.

Cockroaches pose no real physical threat to me – or to any human, for that matter. Sure, they spread some diseases that they bring up from the sewers, but unlike bedbugs or poisonous spiders they don’t actively seek out and attack humans. They just scurry around between the shadows, eating our refuse or theirs.

As an anal retentive person, though, the idea that something in my living space is out of my control – breeding, shitting, and cannibalizing prodigiously – is about as bad as it gets. Whether I wanted to or not, I found myself devoting a huge amount of my time to speculating about where the cockroaches were in my apartment, how many of them there were, what they were doing, and whether that speck on the wall was lint, a baby cockroach, or cockroach shit. (It was usually lint.)

For my own peace of mind I needed to eliminate any chance of me seeing anything that even remotely looked like it could be a roach. This is how I wound up spending most evenings during the hottest part of the summer in bed with my laptop, the covers pulled up over my head and tucked into the rim of my floor fan as a sort of primitive air conditioned tent.

Peasant families in Pakistan are being driven to PTSD by a neverending onslaught of American Predator drone attacks. Meanwhile, in North Hollywood, I was slowly being driven to insanity by a few inch-long insects living in my walls.

*

In Aliens, the titular Aliens eventually breach the perimeter and kill most of the Marines as Ripley and Newt make their escape in the shuttle. I woke up one morning in September to find a dying cockroach writhing on the floor of my bathroom and, the following morning, another one in my bathtub.

Game over, man! Game over!

*

I was running out of things to cram underneath my doors to block out the roaches. I made another trip to the Home Depot where I’d embarrassed myself the month before and bought a doorsweep, haphazardly sawed it down to the proper size, and haphazardly screwed it onto the bottom of the interior door between my bedroom and the living room, then used my bathmat to block off the route under the door between my bedroom and bathroom.

I was now essentially paying over a thousand dollars a month to lie in my bed with the covers over my head, sweating buckets every 105 degree night and trying desperately not to speculate about where and when I’d see my next cockroach. Between the body odor and the lack of cross ventilation, my room was an unpleasant place to be.

*

So there I was in late September, freshly back from Spider Man and staring at two cockroaches frolicking behind my toilet and officially reaching my breaking point.

For a stronger man than I, that breaking point would be him deciding that cockroaches ultimately didn’t scare him. He’d realize that cockroaches live virtually everywhere that humans do, and that in many parts of this country even the nicest of houses have the occasional roach. He’d realize that in life you just need to sack the fuck up and deal with insects, because if the worst thing that’s happening in your life is that you have a couple bugs in your house, you’re better off than most people on Earth – hell, you’re better off than most people in Los Angeles County.

My breaking point was the realization that my obsessive frenzy over household pests would never stop, because it’s just kind of the shitty, wimpy man-child I am, and that whatever it cost me to break my lease would be worth it, because I would be buying my peace of mind back.

*

Over the next 42 days I endured a couple of terse phone calls with my leasing company, put most of my small possessions in the freezer for 24 hours to kill any roach eggs, thoroughly wiped down all my furniture, and moved back into the Studio City three bedroom I lived in when I spent a summer working in Los Angeles a couple years ago. In the six years he’s been living here, my roommate Tim has never seen a roach.

After I’d moved everything else out of the old unit, I left all the mainstays of my five months in North Hollywood behind for the cleaning crew – Raid, boric acid, Bug Barrier spray, the jars I put over the drains to keep roaches out, the doorsweep I’d installed under the bedroom door. I may not get my security deposit back, but I don’t even care that much. I’m just relieved that it’s over.

In Alien 3, Ripley discovers that it isn’t over – an Alien egg came with her from LV-426 and now she has to shave her head and go through a bunch of clumsy new shenanigans on a prison planet or some shit like that. Although few movies stack up well against Aliens, Alien 3 is generally regarded to be bullshit.

I’ve never seen Alien 3, and I think I’m going to keep it that way. 

Truman Capps is a man of many phobias. 

Entemology Vignettes, One

Say what you will about their effectiveness; they smell DELICIOUS.

A little over a month ago, I swung by a hardware store on my way home from work. I hate going to hardware stores because they’re basically giant, full service reminders of what a truly useless human being I am – it’s economically viable to have an entire aisle dedicated to bendy pipes and faucets because a sizable chunk of men in America know how to use those items to fix their houses, and I am not one of them. The only way a hardware store could get more emasculating for me is if there was an entire department that sold videos of my senior prom.

It took some wandering, but I finally found what I was looking for: A two pound bag of cedar chips. I took it to the cashier and parked my Ray Bans on my head as I fumbled for my credit card.

“Ah.” The cashier said as he rang me up. “Doing some barbecuing this weekend, huh?”

I briefly considered trying to explain the real purpose of my purchase to him, but the sun was setting fast and time was short.

“Sure am.” I grinned, faking like I was manly enough to know how to grill meat.

Fifteen minutes later, as I ripped open the bag and began to scatter the cedar chips on the hardwood floors around the bed in my North Hollywood apartment, I thought to myself, “This is crazy. This is a thing crazy people do. I am doing this thing because I am crazy.”

Two days later I came home from a showing of The Amazing Spider Man to find two big cockroaches scuttling back and forth behind my toilet, clearly not giving a good goddamn that cedar chips are supposed to be a natural roach repellant.

And that was the exact moment I decided, “Fuck this shit, and fuck my lease. I’m moving.”

*

Cockroaches are the absolute worst things in the universe. They’re big, unsanitary, fast moving nightmares that shit everywhere and get into everything. They can lay hundreds of eggs per month, each of which can hatch into a dozen more little cockroaches, making them the only species to multiply faster than members of my high school graduating class.

Newly hatched cockroaches survive by eating the nearby feces and dead bodies of other cockroaches, although if there isn’t a ready food source the adult roaches will eat their young. The very existence of cockroaches, more than anything else, is my proof that there is no God (but possibly a Satan).  

I had discovered, six weeks after signing a one-year lease, that my one bedroom apartment was goddamn lousy with these cannibalistic, shit eating abominations.

*

I saw the first one in my first week in the apartment, just chilling in the bathtub like it wasn’t no thang. I dropped a shoe on it and my brain immediately went into damage control mode, assuring me that this was just a freak, random occurrence – roaches just come up through the pipes sometimes, dude. Don’t freak out. That’s the only time it will ever happen in your life. The apartment is not infested. Whatever you do, don’t start obsessing over this.

And so began the longest, most intense period of obsessing in my adult life.

*

I bought two or three different types of roach poison and sprayed it liberally around the baseboards of my apartment. Ordinarily I’d be paranoid about spraying poison around the place where I did a fair amount of my day-to-day breathing, but as I saw it the poison would either kill the roaches or kill me – either way, I wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore.

Save for one that scuttled in under my front door one evening and made me squeal like a 46-year-old menopausal hospital administrator at a Barry Manilow concert until I killed it, I didn’t see any more roaches in my apartment for the next few weeks until I left for a weeklong trip to Washington with my parents.

On my way to the car to drive to the airport at 4:30 AM, I saw several black, shiny roaches scuttling along the side of the apartment’s pool, as if to say, “Have fun worrying about us while you’re gone, Truman!”

*

Seven days later I got back to my apartment on a sweltering late July evening – the first of many completely unbearable summer evenings the San Fernando Valley had in store for me. I was checking my email when a roach made a beeline down a wall to my right. I promptly sprayed it with about a gallon of mint-scented Raid, then closed my computer, carefully checked my bed for roaches, crawled under the covers, and obsessed myself to sleep.

In the morning, I found three or four roach carcasses around my apartment. They’d penetrated my apartment but had been tripped up by the poison on the way in – the only question was, how many of them were left alive that I couldn’t see?

I spent the day at work Googling incredibly specific questions:

how many roaches means that your apartment is infested

what amount of roaches means that you should call an exterminator

does the white house have roaches

While I didn’t get any answers, I did learn everything that I now know about roaches – that is, every single horrifying detail. I lingered at the office, almost scared to go home, and Googled some more things:

extended stay hotel prices los angeles

do roaches crawl in your bed and bite you while you sleep

how to get a prescription for valium 

*

Truman Capps is doing yet another multiple part blog entry - sorry. 

Mean Streets

Now THIS guy is a professional. My guy could learn a thing or two from him.

It was about 12:30 AM this past Friday and I was making the mile long trek back to my apartment from a local tiki bar, feeling rather glib after three or four drinks that were boozier than Whitney Houston’s ex-husband and fruitier than Rick Santorum’s most secretive fantasies. It was a lively evening – Lankershim Boulevard was flooded with cars and the streets were full of people patronizing my neighborhood’s five bars, eight restaurants, and sixty-three medical marijuana dispensaries.

So there I am, marching up the street, looking forward to getting home so I could hop on Netflix and finish off season 3 of King of the Hill, when I heard a voice from behind me:

“Hey, man, hey! Hang on a second!”

I stopped and turned to see a guy in his early 30s running up to me, clad in loose fitting jeans and a freshly pressed collared shirt. In the three steps it took him to get close to me he looked over his shoulder two times.

“Hey.” He said again. “You know how to get to the Metro stop?”

“Oh, yeah.” I pointed up the street in the direction I’d been walking. “We’re on Lankershim right now. You just walk straight up a few blocks and it’s right there at Chandler. You can’t miss it.”

“Oh, cool, cool, thanks.” He glanced over his shoulder again. “You going that way?”

Yes, I was going that way, but I definitely didn’t want to go that way with him. It wasn’t out of any concern for my safety – keep in mind, there were mostly-sober people everywhere – but because I just didn’t have the energy to make stilted, achingly polite small talk with a complete stranger who would only be a part of my life for the time it took to walk four blocks.

Yeah, I’m heading this way. My name is Truman. Hi Grxfib, pleasure to meet you. Yes, I do live around here. I too enjoy a good pizza from time to time. No, I do not have a dog. Thank you for showing me pictures of your brother’s dog on your phone. Well, this is the Metro stop. Bye Grxfib! While I hope that the rest of your life is pleasant, your very existence is ultimately meaningless to me!

See? It’s exhausting.

“Uh, I am,” I stammered, pulling out my phone. “But I’ve got to make a phone call. You just head straight up Lankershim and it’s there. You can’t miss it.”

He nodded quickly, glancing over his shoulder six or seven more times. “Yeah, well, I think I’ll wait and head that way with you, just to be sure.”

Something inside me died. I’d made it perfectly clear that the only thing this guy had to do to find the Metro stop was walk in a straight line – in fact, I was so confident in his ability to find the street in question that I staked my reputation as a direction giver on the claim that he, a man I had never met, could not physically miss it, but he was still insistent on me escorting him there. This could mean one thing and one thing only:

He wanted to talk to me about either animal rights or Jesus – two things that I appreciate conceptually but have very little use for in my day-to-day life.

“I guess I can make the call later,” I sighed, slipping my phone back into my pocket and plodding up the street once more. Random Dude fell into a swerving, anxious swagger beside me, ever constantly craning his neck and throwing looks over his shoulder.

“Thanks man. I’m not from around here and I don’t want to wind up in a bad neighborhood, y’know?”

At the time, we were walking past a gelato shop adjacent to a childrens’ ballet studio, across the street from a community theater. Given these incredibly threatening surroundings I could understand why this 5’9 black man had sought out the toughest, most physically intimidating guy on the street – me – to protect him.

“I don’t think you have to worry about that in the North Hollywood Arts District.” I said.

“Oh, okay. Cool.”

And so we walked – him veering back and forth across the sidewalk and scanning 360 degrees for threats, me desperately trying to make small talk so as not to seem racist. Throughout our conversation he muttered a few details about being from Culver City, not knowing his way around the Valley, and needing to take the Metro home. For a stranger in this part of town, though, he seemed to know an awful lot of people – he exchanged greetings with three separate guys on our walk up the street, and I started to wonder why one of them couldn’t just walk him to the train. Looking on the bright side, he wasn't lecturing me about factory farms or the Second Coming.

We were one block away from the Metro stop, so close we could see it, when Random Dude began veering to the right.

“C’mon, man, let’s cut around this way.” He said, heading toward – I shit you not – a dark alley behind a Wells Fargo. The alley ran parallel to the street we were on; there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for us to cut through there to get to the Metro stop, save for being out of sight of about two dozen potential witnesses.

Holy shit. I realized, standing there on the corner and watching Random Dude inch toward the alley and nervously beckon me to follow him. He doesn't want to talk about Jesus. I think he's trying to rob me! That is adorable.

I shook my head. “No thanks. I’m going to walk around this way. Have a great night!”

I proceeded up Lankershim, and a second later he was galloping up beside me, exasperated and begging me to slow down. We crossed Chandler and arrived at the Metro stop – a huge transit center that spanned the entire block.

“Well, here we are!” I said as we walked past the throngs of people flowing out of the station. “Just head down that escalator and get on the Red Line, then transfer to the Blue for Culver City.”

He bobbed his head nervously, still checking over his shoulder. “Yeah, I think I’m going to take a bus. C’mon, let’s head to the buses.”

The bus stop was located on the far side of the transit center – an area with fewer streetlights that was totally deserted. I shook my head again and kept walking.

“There isn’t a bus to Culver City. You have to take the train.” I pointed to the station. “To do that you need to go over there.”

“Nah, I’m going to take the bus to my friend’s house for the night. C’mon.” He started to veer toward the dark parking lot that led to the buses.

“Alright, have fun walking over there!” I waved to him and continued up the street, and sure enough he kept following me.

At this point, I was getting fed up – we were moving out of the heavily populated, well lit part of North Hollywood and into territory where even this sad sack George Michael Bluth excuse for a criminal could rob me.

“The Metro is back that way.” I said, continuing forward.

“Yeah, the buses aren’t even running. I’m just going to chill at Denny’s up on Burbank Boulevard.” Perhaps noticing that I was keeping an increasing distance from him, he said, “Damn, man, get closer.”

I came to a stop outside a crowded Mexican nightclub and shook my head.

“Alright, you clearly know where the Denny’s is – even though you’ve supposedly never been here before – so you can get there on your own. I’m done.”

Desperation filled his eyes. “No. C’mon. Please. Please? Just walk me to the Denny’s.”

It's an odd emotion, feeling sorry for somebody who you're 80% sure wants to trade your iPhone for crystal meth. I almost let him rob me out of sympathy (and to alleviate some of my white guilt.) Instead, I took drastic action by entering the Mexican nightclub and starting a lively chat with the bouncer, which prompted Random Dude to finally disappear from my life forever.

I’m as surprised as you are at how calmly I handled the whole thing, but I can’t stress enough how pathetic this guy was. Say what you will about his intentions or his competence – he was by far the most memorable complete stranger I’ve ever been forced to make small talk with.  

Truman Capps apologizes for neglecting to mention this on the phone this weekend, Mom - it was such a nonthreatening situation that I forgot. 

Revenge Of The Mechanic And The Deathly Hallows, Part II

I still do this from time to time, but without a functioning horn it's just like I'm groping my car.

Again eager to avoid necessity for confrontation, I quickly tried to put things in perspective. In the grand scheme of things, I’m a white college educated insured working male with zero debt driving a car he got for free which happens to have one more red light on than it usually does. If anything, the constant presence of my airbag light was just a friendly reminder not to get into a head on collision, lest my airbag deploy to break my nose and Ray Bans and possibly save my life.

So I resigned myself to the fact that I would now just be The Guy With The Slightly Messed Up Car, doomed to forever explain to friends borrowing my car about how that light has been on for years, I don’t know why, I guess I could fix it but I don’t care enough, anyway just fill it with regular and no listening to Dubstep or Rush Limbaugh on my radio.

Then, on Sunday, I was waiting to turn left at an intersection when the light turned green and the person ahead of me didn’t move, head bent eagerly over his cell phone. I angrily mashed my horn, but there was no response – by which I mean, my car made no sounds. Now angry and frustrated, I tried several more times, raining blows down on the center of my steering wheel to no avail.

Ladies, if you want to know what impotence feels like, disconnect your horn and then get caught in traffic behind somebody who desperately needs to get honked at. Long story short, I didn’t make it through that light, but I did scream a lot of really nasty racial slurs about Russians that I made up pretty much on the spot.*

*”…BUNCH OF HAIRY CABBAGE LOVING BAD GUYS FROM THE EARLY JAMES BOND MOVIES!”

Every time I’d taken my car to the mechanic for repairs he’d fixed one part of it while breaking another, as if to create some sort of karmic – or carmic! – balance in the universe. An airbag light here, ill-aligned wheels there – that I could deal with. But disabling my horn? The one part of my car that allows me to let Californians know that they’re the world’s worst drivers? That inhibition of my aggression will not stand, man.

The following afternoon at work I listened to my customary pump up track before stepping out of the office with my phone. I was mad. I had been jerked around enough. I was full of piss and vinegar – mostly piss, but also some sea salt and vinegar chips from lunch – and ready with a carefully prepared tirade.   

“Hello?” My mechanic’s voice rang cheerfully from the other end of the line.

“Hi.” I said, darkly. “This is Truman Capps. You worked on my ’97 Legacy earlier in the week?”

“Oh, Truman!” He laughed. “How are you, my friend?”

Look how happy he is to talk to you! He called you his friend! You can’t be mean to him now! Look how polite and eccentric he is!

“I’m… Good. Well, I’m okay. It turns out, the, uh… The horn on my car isn’t working.”

In rehearsals, the line sounded way more dramatic. The call is coming from inside the house. The Omega Protocol has been activated. The horn on my car isn’t working. Now, it sounded more like a guy bitching about the poor quality of discounted repair on his used station wagon.

“Oh!” My mechanic exclaimed. “I know exactly what is wrong. You bring in, we fix car. No problem.”

The fact that he didn’t immediately apologize galvanized me somewhat, and what little remaining aggression inside me rallied.

“Yeah, well… Look, I, uh… This is just really frustrating for me. Because it seems like every time I bring my car to you, something else goes wrong with it. First, you know, it was the airbag light – which still isn’t fixed! – and then, uh, you forgot to realign the wheels, and now this. And it’s inconvenient for me to bring my car in for the day.”

I was hoping for the righteous nerd rage of George McFly at the end of Back To The Future. Instead, I was more like George McFly at the beginning or middle of Back To The Future.

“Okay,” My mechanic said, after a pause. “Can you bring in car tomorrow?”

“Uh… Yeah, sure.”

“Great. Thank you!”

We hung up, and I promptly felt terrible about what I’d said to the nice man for the rest of the day.

The following morning I dropped off The Mystery Wagon – again – and rode my bike to work – again. That afternoon, my mechanic called to let me know that they had to have a new horn shipped in from Oregon,* and that it would arrive Friday. When I went back to pick up my still-hornless car, my mechanic briefly apologized for the inconvenience, and while I thanked him for his efforts I made a point of not accepting his apology.

*If only I’d never moved to California, I’d have a horn right now. BULLSHIT.

I guess we all have a lot of ambitious fantasies about the sorts of people we’d like to be – cooler people, smarter people, thinner people, more famous people – whether those ambitions are possible or not. At the end of the day, I guess I don’t have what it takes to be the verbally abusive person I dream of being. But seeing as I know that I’ll never be a particularly gifted fighter or fast runner, either, maybe that's for the best.

Truman Capps took his car in on Friday only to find that the part didn't arrive from Oregon on time.

Revenge Of The Mechanic And The Deathly Hallows, Part I

Russia: Strong on Cossack Dancing, weak on Subaru repair.

I spend about 70% of my day constructing elaborate and detailed fantasies in which I cut the inconsiderate people in my day-to-day life down to size with angry, articulate, profanity-laden rants that shame them into changing their ways and doing the right thing.

For example, I was in line at the supermarket once and the lady ahead of me, having paid for her items, just grabbed her plastic bags and walked away, leaving her now empty shopping cart blocking the rest of the checkout aisle. This happened in April and I can feel my blood pressure going up just thinking about it.

At the time, I did nothing – in fact, I put the cart away for her, because I wasn’t about to leave it there. I then spent the rest of the week imagining what I should’ve done to bring this suburban terrorist to justice.

“Hey!” Truman yelled, pointing at Cart Lady’s back. “Where are you going?”

Cart Lady turned around slowly, not sure why she was being addressed. “Um, like, to my car, or whatever?”

Truman deftly kicked the cart toward her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Cart Lady felt a thousand pinpricks of cold sweat breaking out around her scalp. As a worthless draw on society who never used her turn signals and wasn’t even registered to vote, she had never considered that leaving her cart blocking the aisle was a flagrantly irresponsible thing to do.

“I…” She stammered. “I don’t know. I guess I thought-”

“No you didn’t.” Truman said flatly. “You don’t do a lot of thinking, unless it’s about yourself. Well, I’m from Society, and I believe I speak for all of us when I say you should put your fucking cart away, then go home and kill yourself.”

Everyone in the store burst into applause, including a newly-divorced Christina Hendricks, and Cart Lady sullenly grabbed her cart and all but ran out of the store. She killed herself that night, but it was okay because her apartment was subsequently leased to a hard working lower income Hispanic family at a reduced rate because she’d hung herself in the closet.

Of course, in reality, so much as giving that woman a stern look would probably cause me so much guilt that I’d kill myself. Unfortunately, I grew up an only child with parents who raised me to be generally polite and respectful toward strangers, so I’m not great at confrontation. I settle most of my interpersonal disputes by either internalizing my anger until I’m nauseous, or (in extreme cases) leaving a passive aggressive note and then fretting about my impoliteness until I’m nauseous. I go through a lot of Pepto.

Recently I dropped big money for a local mechanic to replace the steering gear on The Mystery Wagon. As you’ll remember, I was pretty enthusiastic about the experience, to the point of endorsing my mechanic’s services on my blog. This is because I wrote the update almost immediately after getting my car back, so my recommendation was fueled mainly by the fact that the mechanic was very polite and my car had not been filled with spiders when I arrived to pick it up.

In the couple weeks since then, I’ve discovered that I may have been a bit hasty in my recommendation. While it is true that my mechanic is outstanding in the field of being a polite, eccentric old Russian man, he’s actually kind of a crappy mechanic. All this would be fine if he ran a business where people pay money for him to be polite and eccentric, but unfortunately his entire livelihood is fixing cars.

When I got my car back a couple weeks ago, the red airbag light below my speedometer was on.

“Airbag light came on when we put car back together.” He explained, handing me my keys. “We not have time to fix by end of day, but bring car back in next couple weeks and we fix for free! Airbag light and any other problems you are having.”

How eccentric! How polite!

The airbag light wasn’t bothering me too much, but I quickly realized that whenever I tried to make an especially sharp turn my car would make a hideous grinding noise and vibrate like a cheap motel bed, which is generally not a good sign. So, the following Saturday, I dropped the car off with him again and gave him a rundown of the problems.

“Very good, very good!” He said, nodding eagerly as I handed him the keys. “We fix the grind, we fix the airbag light. No problems!”

That afternoon I walked out of a movie theater and found a voicemail from my mechanic.

“Hello Truman! I am calling to let you know your car is been fixed. We fixed steering gear; no more grinding noise. We also realize that we forget to realign your wheels last time, so we do it now. Is extra $80. Okay, goodbye!”

My brain called shenanigans immediately – wasn’t this supposed to be free? But the rest of me, eager to avoid a confrontation, politely reminded my brain that I’d signed off on the realignment as part of the initial slate of repairs – they’d simply forgotten to do it then.

And admittedly that was a huge fuckup on their part – forgetting to do their damn jobs – but I’m really in no position to get on anybody’s case about fucking up. I fuck up a lot of tasks far simpler than automotive repair. As a production assistant I once tipped over an entire craft services table full of food; all these guys had done was realign my wheels ten days later than expected. Yes, it was a fuckup, but it didn’t waste 20 Oreos and two bowls of M&Ms.

The following morning I retrieved my car and was so overjoyed at the absence of grinding when I left the parking lot that I didn’t even notice my airbag light was still on until I was halfway to work. 

My steering gear had been replaced, but now my own gears were starting to grind.  

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion in Part II!  

The Weird Uncle

"Hey, after dinner let's go shoot some bottle rockets in the backyard. Don't tell your Mom." 

When Clint Eastwood said, “We all know Joe Biden is the intellect of the Democratic Party,” I’m pretty sure he meant it as a diss, but in the debate on Thursday it looked like Biden actually was the intellect of the Democratic Party – as well as the balls. And the teeth. And the part that laughs in your fucking face when you try to lie on national TV.

I have always liked Joe Biden, dating back to a Daily Show appearance in 2007 when he was just a presidential candidate. Love him or hate him, you’ve got to admit the dude has got some serious charisma. A lot of people have referred to him as America’s weird uncle, which I consider to be high praise – I would be thrilled to one day be someone’s Weird Uncle.

Unlike the Creepy Uncle, who has to take a long route to work in order to stay more than 1000 feet away from schools and playgrounds, the Weird Uncle just does whatever the hell he wants to whether it’s a good idea or not. Weird Uncle buys a stolen motorcycle on Craigslist because it was cheap. Weird Uncle sets his garage on fire trying to distill his own whiskey. Weird Uncle gets drunk off said whiskey at Thanksgiving and starts telling awesome dirty jokes that make your parents nervous. I was born to be the Weird Uncle, but I can’t because I have no siblings, so instead I live vicariously through Joe Biden as he Weird Uncles all over the political establishment.

In my recurring fantasy where I go out to a bar with President Obama and Vice President Biden, I imagine Obama closing out his tab around 11:00, joking that Michelle is going to have his ass if he isn’t home ASAP. Turning around, Biden grabs my shoulder and leans close. “There’s a guy selling cocaine in the bathroom,” he whispers. “Order us some Jagerbombs. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

I think that Joe Biden and I are of a similar temperament – we both say a lot of stupid shit that we ultimately regret later, but we both mean well and are passionate about our convictions. The difference is that Joe Biden has somehow managed to have a long and fruitful political career and I’m just sitting here masturbating.

This is why I was worried in the leadup to Biden’s debate against Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s chiseled, tax and women’s reproductive rights-hating Adonis from Wisconsin. Because I feel a certain kinship with Biden, I was afraid that he would handle the debate the way I would – get frustrated after Ryan’s first rebuttal and spend the rest of the debate dancing back and forth across the stage, third fingers held aloft.

Because in my admittedly cynical worldview, I think that’s the only option left in this circlejerk of an election. I mean, Romeny and Ryan are just lying all over the fucking place and their constituents don’t seem at all concerned that the guys who want to run the free world for four to eight years can’t even maintain consistent and transparent policies for one. Shit, if facts don’t matter anymore why not just have the election be decided by sumo suit wrestling or competitive eating? At least that’d be one hell of a lot more fun to watch.

I usually leave work at 6:30, so I turned on the debate at 6:00 on the office TV, figuring I’d watch for half an hour, drive home, and finish the rest on YouTube. Instead I wound up sitting alone in the office until 7:30, too riveted by Biden’s performance to walk away.

One of the big reactions I saw on Fox News the following morning was that Biden was ‘unprofessional’ or ‘impolite’ because of how often he laughed, rolled his eyes, and talked over Paul Ryan. And honestly, I sort of agree – those theatrics wouldn’t fly in a high school speech and debate competition.

You know what else is unprofessional, impolite, and wouldn’t fly in a high school speech and debate competition? FUCKING LYING.

The Republicans wanted a professional, mature debate? Well, tough titties – you sacrificed any claim to civility or decency when you made PolitiFact’s Lie Of The Year™ a talking point and publicly admitted that your campaign wouldn’t be dictated by fact checkers. If you get to play fast and loose with the truth, we get to humiliate you on television for doing it. You’d think a party full of warmongering gun owners would have fewer crybabies, but apparently not.

You’ve got to fight assholes with assholes, and fortunately Joe Biden is just the asshole for the job – he’s smart, he knows his facts, he isn’t afraid to be crude or unprofessional, and thankfully he’s on our side. I wish there was another vice presidential debate – or a debate matching Biden up against Romney. Hell, if Joe Biden was a Duck fan I’d want to put him on ESPN Gameday.

Joe Biden is pretty good at lying himself – he once lifted a substantial portion of a 1987 campaign speech from a British politician without attribution, and claims to have had a private verbal altercation with President Bush that, by all accounts, probably didn’t happen. Even his performance in the debate, while more truthful than Ryan's, wasn't entirely on the level. 

I guess it’s probably unfair for me to favor the lying politician I agree with and hate the lying politicians I don’t agree with. The best argument I can make is that Biden lies less, and when he does it's more through overzealous exaggeration than anything else. In this election, having the least combustible pants is about as close as you can get to honesty.  

Truman Capps very nearly titled this update, 'Biden His Time'. 

Regarding Bronies

"BWAH!" - Hank Hill

Everybody knows that the Internet is an invaluable resource for the discovery and consumption of pornography, but you might be surprised to find out that it has other uses! Namely, it’s a great place for people with strange, disgusting, or otherwise unflattering habits and interests to meet and form communities with likeminded people who are also into weird stuff – and a great place for other people to laugh at these communities so they can feel better about themselves.

I would not know about Juggalos – the drugged out, redneck army of Insane Clown Posse fans who paint their faces like clowns and spray one another with cheap soda – if the Internet hadn’t shown me several ‘best of’ compilations of their stupidest antics. Nor would I know about Furries - if SomethingAwful.com hadn’t plunged into their message boards and posted pictures from Furry conventions, I would’ve gone my entire life without knowing that people like to dress up like animals and then have sex.

Hell, a few months ago a guy on Reddit nonchalantly mentioned that for the past three years he’s been masturbating into an old shoebox that he keeps at the back of his closet. Everyone else demanded pictures of the box for proof – because tons of people lie about that sort of thing – so he posted them, and everyone* looked, because who doesn’t love a freak show?

*I didn’t look. Admittedly, I’m curious, but I feel like I’ve built it up so much in my mind now that the picture would be a letdown. Also, gross.

This was how I discovered the Internet’s latest bizarre subculture: Bronies – or men between the ages of 14 and 35 who are inexplicably obsessed with the children’s television program My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. 

While the My Little Pony series in the 1980s was little more than an extended, super-saccharine toy commercial, the 2010 reboot has drawn praise from critics for its sharp writing, its message of positivity and friendship, and its well rounded cast of characters – all of whom, true to the source material, are brightly colored magical ponies with matching Hasbro merchandise.

What the critics, the show’s producers, and the eight year old girls at whom the show is targeted can’t explain is why heterosexual teenaged and adult men have been showing up to My Little Pony fan conventions in growing numbers, proudly displaying pony figurines they got from Happy Meals, or parading through malls dressed as ponies while singing songs from the series.

I wasn’t extremely popular in high school and on a day-to-day basis I still feel pretty dorky and uncool in a city full of beautiful gym rats with impeccable fashion sense, so at the end of the day, videos like this one are like heroin for me. You see a bunch of guys nerding out over a girl's cartoon show; I just hear a voice in my head saying, “YOU DON’T DO THIS. YOU ARE COOL. …RELATIVELY. YOU ARE WELL-ADJUSTED. …RELATIVELY.”

I’m not alone in taking guilty pleasure in videos of Bronies – as the Brony subculture grows, so does the Brony-mocking subculture. The Internet is a harsh mistress, and when she uncovers a weird subculture it usually isn’t too long before there’s a backlash against that subculture: Juggalos are widely mocked, while Furries have virtually been driven into hiding by a years-long hate campaign from the Internet mainstream.

As the online vitriol for Bronies grows, watching videos of their gatherings as a guilty pleasure has become almost all guilt and minimal pleasure. I don’t harass Bronies the way plenty of other people online do, but when I’ve come to the point of laughing at people who are different than I am to feel better about myself, can I really take any moral high ground over the people who laughed at me and called me a fag in high school?

The guilt only grows when you see that a lot of Bronies – particularly the older ones – are clearly autistic or dealing with emotional problems. The show’s bright presentation and messages of friendship and love seem to help them relate to other people and find friends; laughing at that is about as noble as laughing at a chemotherapy ward.

To quote the talking can of vegetables in Wet Hot American Summer, “If you want to smear mud on your ass, smear mud on your ass! Just be honest about it.” And God bless the Bronies, because they’re proud of who they are. When I was 16 you couldn’t pay me to prance around a mall dressed as a pony – you couldn’t pay me to do it now, either, nor will you be able to pay me to do it in 30 years, if man is still alive.

The Internet has taken to vilifying and mocking these guys because they’re brave enough to not give a shit about what society thinks men should act like – because who’s a better judge of manliness than people who spend hours on the Internet anonymously trolling people they’ve never met?

I think that the driving force behind these Internet jihads is a large pool of people like me – nerds who want to feel better about themselves – who just happen to be more aggressive and dicky about it. Hell hath no fury like an army of angry nerds blowing off pent up aggression, and unfortunately it usually winds up directed at weird, harmless subcultures who aren’t hurting anyone, like Juggalos, Furries, or now Bronies, except that Juggalos are actually a harmful subculture that does hurt people but whatever.

Interestingly, the one weirdo who escaped the Internet’s wrath is the guy who’s been masturbating into the same shoebox since 2009. He told his story, he posted his pictures, Reddit was grossed out by them, and everyone went on their way. Hell, now he’s practically a B-list Reddit celebrity – the Internet’s equivalent of Tom Bergeron.

So if you’re keeping score at home, kids, on the Internet it’s more acceptable to hoard your own semen than it is to like ponies. 

Truman Capps will never watch My Little Pony for fear of enjoying it and becoming a part of the fanbase. 

The Debate

"You sit on a throne of lies." 

It’s pretty stressful being on Barack Obama’s mailing list. Normally, I can deal with email spam and junk mail in my inbox – my landlord has thoughtfully provided a big plastic bin under the mailboxes specifically so we can throw away the coupon books and spraytanning leaflets that make up 90% of all mail – but mail from Obama is different. Even though I know he didn’t write the messages, and that it’s really no different from anybody else asking me for money, I’m powerless when I see shit like this:

Of course I am, dude! You know I’m with you! I write nice things about you on my blog and fantasize about hanging out with you post-presidency and shooting the shit about healthcare reform while watching SportsCenter! I’m so sorry I gave you the impression that I wasn’t with you! How much money would make you think I was with you again?

 

Oh my God, really? No, thank you, Mr. President! I’ve done so little, but you’ve personally seen to it that I’ll have healthcare for the next two years and ended Don’t Ask Don’t Tell! I mean, you also paved the way for indefinite military detention of American citizens and are killing fucktons of Pakistani teenagers with drone strikes, but you are so fucking cool I don’t even care.

He’s taking such a loose, conversational tone! It’s almost like I actually have a black friend! Who also happens to be President of the United States!

The letters are worse, because they look so nice that I can’t bring myself to throw them away. I almost want to frame them and hang them on the wall and pretend that they were sent to me personally.

“You see that letter? Michelle Obama sent me that letter. What? No, of course it’s not a form letter. See how they use my name at the start there? DUH.”

I am exactly what Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter talk derisively about whenever somebody sticks a microphone in their face – the early 20s Hollywood liberal who’s been completely suckered into the Obama Cult of Personality. I follow his policies pretty closely and I think he’s a pretty good president in a lot of ways and a pretty terrible president in a few ways, but job performance aside, the dude is undeniably the coolest president this side of Teddy Roosevelt.

SO WHY THE FUCK CAN’T HE LOOK MITT ROMNEY IN THE EYE AND SAY, “DUDE, LITERALLY EVERYTHING YOU JUST SAID WAS A LIE”!?!

I’m a registered Independent because I still haven’t forgiven the Democrats for their milquetoast showing from 2000 until 2008. For eight years the GOP’s best and brightest were strutting around the world starting wars, cutting taxes on the rich, and fingerblasting the environment while the Democrats stammered helplessly, Jim Lehrer style.

But in the past few years, what with the healthcare and the Bin Laden getting shot in the face, I was getting to like the Democratic Party again, as opposed to just voting for them because they were the neutered, simpering lesser of two evils.

I mean, Jesus, people, did you watch the Democratic National Convention? That shit was like the end of Top Gun! Everybody was slick and charismatic and happy! In spite of their prior animosity, Iceman gave a huge speech about how cool Maverick was, and then they hoisted Maverick up on their shoulders and everybody was like, “Let’s go fly some fucking fighter jets to the White House, already!”

I was so jazzed after that, and Obama’s resulting bump in the polls, that I was giving serious thought to filling out the paperwork and knowingly opening myself to the junk mail avalanche of formally joining the Democratic Party.

And then, the debate. A 90 minute trainwreck where the dude who publicly stated that he’d put Big Bird out of a job still somehow won.

One of my coworkers pointed out that Obama lost because he was prepared to debate the facts and was caught off guard when Romney started lying his face off. Which would make sense if Mitt Romney hadn’t been lying hisface off for well over a year. Obama either didn’t have the facts to call Romney out on his falsehoods – shame on you, Mr. President – or he simply didn’t want to call Romney out – shame on you again, Mr. President.

The good news about all this is that Obama is still going to win this election. Mitt Romney won a big, televised debate, yes – but so did the liberal version of Mitt Romney in 2004, and look who won that election.

President Obama is polling around 70% among Latinos and between 97% and 100% among African Americans – it’s not like these voters are saying, “Damn, Mitt really schooled Obama on Medicare – I think I’m voting for Romney now!”  Mitt Romney has been a shitty candidate for months upon months – the fact that he took a 90 minute vacation from sucking at the debate is not going to swing this thing.

I don’t think the debate swung any undecided voters, because I don’t believe in undecided voters. We have two incredibly polarizing presidential candidates. I’ve never met anyone who’s ambivalent about Barack Obama – likewise, I bet the Romney campaign wishes more of their base was simply ambivalent toward their candidate instead of outright hostile or dismissive. For a big chunk of the electorate, the presidential election is as simple as voting for the guy who’s pro-life, and no amount of debating or campaign commercials are going to change that.

What this debate did was show us Barack Obama standing on a stage and letting Mitt Romney call him a liar. That won’t change the course of the election, but it will dampen enthusiasm among Obama’s supporters – the people he’s been successfully begging money off of based on the strength of his charisma and their faith in his leadership.

I’m not as excited now when I see his name in my inbox. All I can think is, how can I trust this guy to stand up to Wall Street, Iran, and China when he can't even stand up to one dorky, Mormon millionaire? 

Truman Capps doesn't want PBS to lose funding, but he'd be perfectly happy if Jim Lehrer gets fired.

The Roaring Twenties

Not only would I never go, but I'd probably also consult the fire marshal regarding the lack of clearly marked exits.

At 23 I’m the second-youngest person working at my company, and only because a middle manager in my department hired an assistant who was born three months after I was. As a result, I have a lot of friends at the office who are in their late 20s and early 30s who find my low age quaint and endearing, like I’m an old Amish woman selling hand churned butter.

A couple of weeks ago I was over at a friend’s apartment, playing with his mentally retarded Boston Terrier and chatting with his fiancé, when I mentioned that I was 23.

“You’re 23!?” She shrieked. Turning to my friend John in the kitchen, she yelled, “Why didn’t you tell me you were bringing a 23 year old into our house?” Back to me: “What are you doing sitting around playing with our dog? It’s a Tuesday night! You should be at a blacklight party or something! Make the most of your age! Sooner or later you’ll have to settle down and be boring like us.”

They’re both 29.

I think people nearing the golden twilight years of their 30s tend to romanticize the idea of being in their 20s. I’m pretty sure I’ll be one of them too, since about half of this blog now is me waxing poetical about years gone by.* That being said, with the benefit of being in my 20s now, I can say that while I’m having a great time, they don’t seem to be the highlight reel of debauchery and shenanigans that my elders expect them to be.

*”Oh man, remember when I was in college? Boy, I didn’t appreciate Taco Tuesdays enough at the time! Here, let me tell you about more of the differences between Portland and Los Angeles!

Take, for example, this article from Thought Catalog, the sort of blog that, if it had a home office and a print edition, would be based in Williamsburg and would call itself a ‘Zine,’ because the publishers live life at such a fast pace that they simply don’t have time to sit around saying shit like ‘maga.’ According to the author of ’21 Ways You Should Take Advantage Of Your 20s’, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do if I’m going to make the most of the next seven (almost six!) years:

11. Stay up late. In your 20s, you’re all, “Let’s go to another bar!” “Who wants to eat at a diner?” “Have you guys seen the sun rise from the High Line?”…When you get older, this becomes, “What are you doing? Go home. Watch Parks and Rec and go to sleep.”

This one put me on the defensive from the get go because it looks like they’re trying to knock Parks and Recreation. What’s more, I love staying up late, but what’s being described here is staying out late, of which I am not as big of a fan.

Staying up late is playing Mario Kart, or making a last ditch suicide charge for Australia in Risk, or inventing a Starship Troopers drinking game (ideally with your friends). Staying out late is all standing in line to get into obscenely loud and crowded bars, or standing in line to get a drink at an obscenely loud and crowded bar, or standing around holding the drink with nowhere to sit because the bar is obscenely crowded and not being able to participate in the conversation because it’s obscenely loud. The first season of Parks and Recreation may have been weak, but at least I was sitting down when I watched it.

19. Take road trips. Sitting in a car for days on end isn’t something your body was designed to do forever.

Bitch, please. I mean, we’ve established that I like sitting down, but I don’t love it so much that I want to do an 18-hour sitting marathon with sparse and inadequate toilet facilities just to get through Nebraska. San Francisco is only a six hour drive from LA, but I opted to go with the 50 minute plane ride instead, because my 20s are apparently precious and I don’t want to waste a big chunk of them getting to and from places in the most inefficient way possible for nostalgia’s sake.

12. Savor those 20s hangovers. They are a gift from God so that you’ll always remember what your tolerance level is. Your hangover recovery time is like flippin’ Wolverine in your 20s. You wake up, feel like death, pull on some shades, gulp down coffee or maybe a bloody Mary and whine about your headache over brunch.

How dare you. Trivializing how I felt after my Funeral Party junior year, or Franzia Friday as a senior, or December 28^th of last year as ‘a gift from God’ is like calling the Khmer Rouge ‘a bunch of awesome dudes with machetes!’ Sure, I was able to suck down approximately two quarts of Potter’s whiskey on a Taco Tuesday and bike to class the next day at 10:00 AM, but only because I would pound three quarts of water before bed. That was a thing I definitely can’t do now, and even then there were some mornings where I woke up vowing to never drink again.

On a related note, what the hell is this brunch thing people keep talking about? I hear about it from the New York and San Francisco crowd all the time, and last time I checked, brunch requires you to get up before noon on a weekend. I like eggs and pancakes as much as the next guy – fortunately, Denny’s serves breakfast all day, and the one by my place is so low key they probably wouldn’t mind if I snuck in some champagne for my orange juice.

7. Play a sport you played in elementary school. Kickball, dodgeball. There are leagues for these games now. Get on it.

Ah, elementary school kickball. When my team was kicking I always made a point of standing at the absolute back of the kicking order and then letting everyone cut in front of me after they’d kicked so I never had to go, and when we were fielding I usually found a good spot in the deep outfield and hoped that everyone would forget I was there until class was over and I could eat lunch. I hated kickball so much that I got good at avoiding playing it. As I recall, my not playing kickball average was almost unrivaled all through elementary and middle school, and my streak continues today, as I have not so much as seen a kickball game in approximately ten years. Joining a kickball league now would seriously jeopardize my chances of getting into the Avoiding Playing Kickball Hall of Fame. 

16. Avoid Burning Man.

This is… Actually, I totally agree with this one.

5. Enjoy all the sex marathons you’re having in your 20s, dudes.

Duly noted. Next time I’m slogging through one of my triweekly sex marathons I’ll try to look on the bright side.

Truman Capps, world’s youngest curmudgeon.

San Francisco

I took a buttload of pictures and videos on my phone while I was up there with the intention of editing them into a snappy montage, but my phone refuses to sync up with my computer until I update iTunes, and iTunes refuses to update no matter how much I yell at my computer and flip off the screen, so until I figure this out you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Whart a vacation, Mark!

In retrospect, I wish I’d gone to Sioux Falls. Or Detroit. Or Little Rock. Or Elizabeth, New Jersey. Or either one of the Kansas Cities. Or anywhere in Florida. San Francisco was a shitty destination for this trip, because from pretty much the second I arrived in the city I was wishing desperately that I lived there, and now that I’m back in LA enjoying another 95 degree evening I still wish I lived there.

When you think about it, the way we do vacations doesn’t make any sense. We go to places like France, or Hawaii, or San Francisco so we can unwind and relax, but inevitably we always have to return to wherever we came from, which usually pales in comparison to wherever we were vacationing. Really, if you want a vacation that improves your state of mind, you should go someplace worse than where you live, because then when you go home you’ll realize how lucky you are to live wherever you do.

If I’d gone to St. Louis for the weekend, I would’ve eaten some good barbecue, looked at an arch, and almost gotten stabbed by a meth addict, and upon returning to LA I’d think to myself, “Gosh! It’s so nice and toasty here, even in October, and there’s fewer racists, and the smog is giving that sunset such a beautiful orange hue!”

But no – I went to San Francisco, ate some spectacular seafood, looked at some breathtaking panoramic views from the city’s enormous hills, and almost got stabbed by a meth addict when I took a wrong turn through the Tenderloin District on my first day in town.

Awhile ago I wrote about how I liked the idea of living in a densely populated, culturally rich, walkable city like New York, but didn’t think that I could handle the rampant filth, humidity, and nonstop East Coast lifestyle. What I realized this weekend was that all the stuff I like about New York – tall buildings, strong local culture, the increased likelihood of living in an apartment directly over a bar – was available in San Francisco the whole time without a lot of the New York bullshit like a constant odor of garbage or rats the size of horses and roaches the size of rats.

When I wasn’t with friends, I was mostly just out walking around seeing the sights and enjoying the fresh air and absence of freeways and police helicopters. On Saturday I took a bus out to Haight-Ashbury and walked through Golden Gate Park, and then, needing to get to North Beach ASAP in hopes of catching the Oregon game, I hopped onto a city bus so crowded that I thought I’d inadvertently joined in some sort of Guinness World Record attempt.

I’m pretty sure that this bus was the most densely populated neighborhood in the city – every square inch of space was occupied, including the steps down by the doors. I was flattened up against the greasy plexiglass partition between the driver and the rest of the bus, held in place by the asses of three separate elderly Japanese businessmen sandwiched in behind me. Come to think of it, it might have been their crotches – I didn’t have the range of motion to look behind me, nor would I want to if I did.

Now, as soon as I saw this situation I prepared myself for some serious Stranger Bitching – that is, the awkward moment where you’re in an unpleasant situation with a group of strangers and one or several of them starts going verbally postal for lack of anything better to do. While waiting in a huge line at a post office in Hollywood I watched a fat old man yell, “WHY DON’T YOU HIRE MORE PEOPLE!?” thirty or forty times at the one clerk on duty, and I myself was once nearly mauled by whiny rich people waiting for shuttle buses at a celebrity wedding.

But I was shocked at how silent this bus was. Every time someone needed to get off, the mob as a whole worked together to make space for them, and most of the departing passengers shouted, “Thank you, Driver!” as they left, to which he replied, “You’re welcome!” to every one of them.

Standing there, my cheek pancaked out across the glass, I was suddenly concerned that I’d missed my stop and the bus had taken me clear to Canada, or some alternate reality California where people actually behave like adults.

LA has a way of making everybody who lives here at least a little bit pissed off most of the time, because everybody is either suffering from road rage or has been yelled at by somebody who has road rage. Even if you’re having a good day, you’re still kind of having a shitty day. Living here wears you down after awhile, and then 40 years go by and you’re standing in line at the post office, yelling at people just because you can.

Living in San Francisco doesn’t seem like as much of a grind – constant uphill walking and insane real estate prices be damned. All of my friends I saw who lived in the city could walk to work, and every one of them lived in some sort of eclectic neighborhood with its own unique set of bars, restaurants, and schizophrenic homeless people. It’s the hip, urban, sitcom lifestyle I want, with the added bonus of there being a hot girl in Ray Bans on every corner.*

*I mean, seriously. They should just rename the place ‘San Wayfarers’ and get it over with.

What San Francisco doesn’t have, though, is an entertainment industry – a huge oversight on its part, if you ask me – and my ultimate goal in life is to write sitcoms, not live in a beautiful city that I find aesthetically pleasing. (If I wanted that, I never would’ve left Portland, which remains the greatest city in the world.)

My only hope now is that I can get what I need from LA and get out before I’m the guy in line at the post office, shaking his fist and yelling for yelling’s sake.

Truman Capps spent most of the weekend wishing he had a walking stick to get up and down hills.

The Mechanic

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 I guess I could leave my apartment and take a new picture of my car, but I've got a rule about not wearing pants after work unless it's an emergency.

I think I’ve made this clear before, but if not, I’ll say it again: Every car in automotive history, with the possible exception of DeLoreans and the Ghostbusters’ car, is vastly inferior to my silver 1997 Subaru Legacy, The Mystery Wagon. Sure, other cars may be faster, or more stylish, or have a functional left rear seatbelt, but The Mystery Wagon trumps them all for two reasons:

1)   It has character. It’s seen a lot in the past 15 years and 164,000 miles, and you can tell when it chugs up a hill or the turn signal starts inexplicably blinking faster or slower that it’s dutifully ready for more. My car is like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon – it’s too old for this shit, but that won’t stop it from killing Gary Busey if need be.

2)   It’s incredibly reliable. This car was heavily used when my family bought it ten years ago, and since then it hasn’t given us so much as an ounce of trouble. It starts when I need it to, takes me where I need to go, and waits patiently outside, no matter how hot it is, until I’m ready to go back. I have plenty of friends with far newer cars who’re always running into trouble on the open road, but The Mystery Wagon and I get along just fine.

It’s fortunate that The Mystery Wagon, like an ideal woman, is so low maintenance, because my understanding of automotive repair, like my understanding of women, is nonexistent. A year ago my mechanically-gifted cousin gave me a brief crash course on how to check the oil, which I promptly forgot, and to this day I don’t know how to increase the air pressure in my tires.

I’ve heard the argument that, that living in a car-centric city, I should have some basic automotive know-how just in case disaster strikes and I get stranded on the 405 in the middle of the night. I’m of the opinion that nothing I learn from Wikipedia or a book ending in For Dummies will help me much if something goes so wrong with my car that it won’t even run – nobody’s ever fixed a broken transmission by popping the hood, waving away some smoke, and loudly observing that he’s nearly out of windshield wiper fluid.

Not knowing how to fix my car may be shortsighted, but it also frees me from rubbernecking and trying to out-jargon everyone else the next time one of my friends or coworkers talks about car trouble. “Sounds like you’ve got a crack in your, uh… Fan belt. I bet you, like, three dollars it’s a cut-and-dried fan belt issue.” If I get stranded on the 405 in the middle of the night, my plan is to lock my doors, call Triple A, and spend the next 45 minutes wishing I had a gun.

This past Friday I walked out of CVS and noticed a long, winding puddle underneath my car that had not been there when I parked five minutes ago. Carefully squatting in such a way that I didn’t have to touch the pavement, I noticed fluid dripping from several locations underneath The Mystery Wagon. Now, as stated above, I know nothing about cars, but I know that if I were leaking fluids I’d want to get it checked out, so I drove my incontinent car home and started poking around on the Internet in search of a good mechanic.

The one advantage to the San Fernando Valley is that thanks to strong car culture the place is positively lousy with mechanics. I still did copious homework, though, because I didn’t want to wind up with a lousy mechanic.

I think I’m a lot like most Americans in having no damn idea how cars work, and I’m well aware that a lot of mechanics capitalize on this to overcharge people for unnecessary procedures and parts they don’t need. When I first moved to LA, two months after Mom got The Mystery Wagon a full tuneup at a mechanic in Portland, the guys changing my oil at Jiffy Lube tried to scare me into $550 worth of maintenance that I both didn’t need and couldn’t afford.

With Yelp on my side, I was able to locate a mechanic a quarter mile from my apartment who had something like 65 5-star reviews. Figuring those credentials were as good as it could get, I took The Mystery Wagon in for a checkup.

The place is run by an eccentric old Russian guy and his eccentric Russian sons – mind you, these are fun Fiddler On The Roof Russians, not terrifying Eastern Promises Russians. After checking out the car, the owner took me back to his office and, with the help of various cost spreadsheets on his computer, laid out the damage.

“Your car has leak in three places. Rear seal needs replacing – is no big deal. But your steering gear also needs replacing – is more expensive. Total cost is $1300 – but because is big job, we round down to $1100.”

To an incredibly frugal person like me, the only thing that can soften the blow of learning that I’m about to spend $1100 on something is hearing that news in a goofy accent. Hell, if a guy from South Africa gave me the bad news I probably would’ve given him an extra $20 just to say “Fookin prawns!”

I made an appointment to drop the car off before work on Tuesday – because what the hell else could I do? I had the money and I couldn’t not fix my only lifeline to the world outside of the greater North Hollywood/Burbank area. I had no choice but to trust the 65 Yelpers who said these were honest, hardworking Russians who had committed zero atrocities in former Soviet republics in the 1990s.

In retrospect, Yelp reviews of mechanics may very well be bullshit. After all, the reviewers don’t know how to fix their cars – that’s why they went to a mechanic in the first place. So they really have no way of verifying if they’re getting screwed or not – the rating is all based on pricing and friendliness.

If the Russians were screwing me, though, they were really sweet and gentle about it. The owner kept the shop open late so I could pick up my car after work and he walked me through all of the work that they’d done, encouraging me to come in soon for a free post-op checkup. Most impressive was that when I got in the car to drive away I found that they’d set my clock to Daylight Savings Time, which I had never been able to figure out how to do.*

*By which I mean, I had never been able to give enough shits to try to figure out how to do. 

I don’t like spending large amounts of money, particularly when it’s on something intangible – I didn’t see the guys pull the guts out of The Mystery Wagon and replace them with newer, better guts, so at first glance it’s like nothing changed except for the time on my clock.

But I’m as neurotic as I am cheap, and if there’s one thing I’ll pay big money for, it’s peace of mind. And I got that.

As he walked me out to the car, the owner said, “Otherwise, everything in car looks fine. Is very good car. Subaru! Very reliable!”

“Yeah,” I sighed, dreamily staring at my dusty chariot. “Is very good car indeed.”

Truman Capps encourages all of his Southern California readers to use Pacific Motor Center for all their autotmotive needs!

Rap Halliburton Superstar

That's me on the right, doing a thing I'm not 100% proud of.

My mother loves to tell a story about me from when I was around seven years old and we were both in the car driving somewhere. We’d come to a stop at an intersection – I don’t remember where specifically, but since we were in Salem I’m sure we were within spitting distance of a church, an adult shop, and two meth labs – when a tricked out Honda Civic with tinted windows pulled up next to us, the driver blasting aggressive, bass-heavy rap music.

The way my mother tells it, I covered my ears and said, “Mom, that music makes me want to hit people.” So yes, in case you were wondering, I have been a crotchety 65-year-old WASP for my whole life.

I aggressively hated rap music for most of my childhood and adolescence. I thought it was noisy, abrasive bullshit that required no real musical skill to produce, and as I got older I found a lot of the lyrics to be pretty offensive, too. As far as I was concerned, it was just a loud bassline and a lot of swearing – and while I’d always had a healthy appreciation for creative usage of profanity, I was of the opinion that whoever decided to call it music should go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

Like most sheltered suburban upper middle class white kids I grew considerably less pretentious in college, where I was exposed to a wider variety of rap music and came to realize that like any other genre of music there’s both good and bad examples. Good rap has incredible artistry and depth, and in many ways is sort of a modern form of poetry, and even bad rap can be fun sometimes. I also realized that, as a classic rock fan, I really can’t talk down to anybody about offensive lyrics – literally every song written between 1965 and 1980 was either about heroin, dirty sex, or, in the case of Brown Sugar, both (and also slavery).

All that being said, I still don’t enjoy rap music.* Now I just don’t write it off as ‘not art’ simply because I don’t like it.

*With the notable exception of remix artist and all around genius Girl Talk. It’s like the only way I’ll actively listen to and enjoy rap is if a white guy from Pittsburgh mixes up all the best parts from 100+ songs into a big urban smoothie for me.

My conspiracy theorist anarchist rapper friend Jonathan Denmark understands and respects this – he’s from Oklahoma originally, so he’s got plenty of friends who like him but can’t quite wrap their heads around why he spends so much time and money on aggressive music videos and complex, avant-garde stage performances.

On Monday, Denmark called me while I was at work.

“Truman.” He said. “You’re still coming to my show tomorrow, right?”

“Of course.” I said, immediately.

“Cool.” He said. “Want to dress up as a Halliburton oil worker again and come onstage during my set?”

“Of course.” I said, less immediately.

A week after Denmark and I met on a commercial shoot, he’d recommended me to one of his friends who was looking for a freelance copywriter to work at a small video game ad agency. Since Denmark is indirectly responsible for every paycheck I’ve cashed since February, I can’t in good conscience not help him out when he needs it, even if that means becoming the centerpiece of an incendiary rap performance about FEMA concentration camps.

“Awesome.” He said. “It’s really simple. All you need to do is stand there and be awkward.”

“I’m your man. I’ve been preparing for this role my entire life – especially when girls are around.”

“Oh, yeah, speaking of girls. My backup dancer might grind on you a little bit while you’re up there. She’s a sweetheart; her name’s Machete.”

“Of course it is.”

He laid out the details in an email later that day – at the appointed time in the show, I’d go to the back of the bar, put on the orange, oilstained Halliburton jumpsuit Denmark bought at Goodwill, and then muscle my way to the front at the start of the next song and stand completely still onstage without showing any emotion. My entire job was to stand still for three minutes. I spent the next 24 hours picturing all the ways that I could fuck it up.

My anxiousness reached a fever pitch as I arrived at the bar on the night of the performance. More than anything else, my role in the show didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I didn’t get what me standing around in an orange jumpsuit and helmet would contribute, other than making a room full of people think I was weird – something I am perfectly capable of doing in street clothes without some girl named Machete rubbing her privates all over me.

If I learned one thing in college, it’s that on some level, alcohol can solve all of your problems. Two incredibly strong $9 Jack and Cokes later, Denmark was onstage rapping to a packed house while I was clumsily crouched behind the cashier’s booth, fighting against both time and my own blood alcohol content as well as the stubborn, rusted zippers on the jumpsuit.

I’d just gotten fully outfitted when it was showtime. Suddenly – thanks either to mid-range bourbon or my innate method acting skills – I was a Halliburton oil rig worker. I was mean, I was angry, Dick Cheney was my boss, and my job was to stand the fuck on that stage for three minutes.

I barged through the packed hall without so much as an ‘excuse me’ – stone cold badass – and planted myself onstage. And inexplicably, the crowd went nuts. Never before have I entertained so many people simply by standing around looking bored. I very well may be a natural. (Denmark’s energetic performance and Machete’s dancing probably helped, too.) When the song was over, I left the stage, went to the back of the bar, and quit being a Halliburton employee.

I don’t like rap, but I love watching great performers, and Denmark is absolutely one of those. And watching the rest of the show, I realized that I was really glad to have been a part of it – the bizarre, shared, angry energy between Denmark and the crowd was intoxicating. The alcohol I drank also was intoxicating.  

This morning I sent Denmark a text message to let him know how much I’d enjoyed the show and how happy I was to be able to help him out. He responded immediately:

“Next time you’ll be dressed as a riot cop. So… Prepare for that.”

Perhaps I’ve found my niche in Hollywood – putting on costumes and standing completely still during underground rap shows. It’s an easy job and a great way to meet groupies; the only downside is that if I get too demanding I can be easily replaced with a mannequin.

Truman Capps will post the video of the show as soon as it’s edited.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

Hats: An integral part of every vacation.

My father is a studious and professional white collar worker who drinks dry gin martinis, reads nonfiction books about physics, and MacGyvered a crude sous-vide for my mother out of an old beer cooler and a couple of plastic bags. All of this restrained, buttondown maturity flies right out the window the second he goes on vacation, though.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, the moment Dad got home from work on the night before we left for a family vacation he’d always burst through the door and shout, “Look out, everybody – here comes Vacation Guuuuuyyyyyy!” He’d then pump both fists in the air and waggle his ass back and forth, and Mom would do the same thing while yelling “Vacation Guuuuuyyyyyy!”, and I would always think to myself, “More people would understand me if they could just see what my home life was like…”

Vacation Guy is basically just Dad, except he drinks beer at lunch, jokes around with tour guides and waiters at restaurants, and wears a tan colored TravelSmith sun hat and cargo pants with legs that zip off at the kneecap to turn into shorts. He bought this very practical ensemble for our trip to New Zealand and Australia when I was in fifth grade, and has worn it on every subsequent vacation whether the destination requires it or not. France, Napa Valley, Washington D.C., Montreal, New York City – if the Capps family is there, the patriarch is going to be wearing a hat and swapping smartass remarks with the waiter at the airport Chili’s.

Vacations were just a fact of life when I was growing up – my parents loved to travel and I was more than happy to go along for the ride. (It didn’t hurt that they usually pulled me out of school for these vacations, too.) At the time, I just sort of assumed that that was a thing that all adults did – work really hard all year to save up money, take some time off, put on their dorky hats and practical pants, and just go.

That idea faded as I got older and realized that I’d be lucky just to have a dismal, soul crushing job to take time off from in the first place, let alone enough disposable income to spend on tickets, hotels, and the all-important hat. When I settled on moving to Los Angeles I figured that basically nipped the vacation issue in the bud. Who needs to go on vacation when you live in a city with beaches, three amusement parks, 340 days of sunshine a year, and a thriving adult film industry?

This summer, I discovered the answer to that question: Me. I am the person who needs to go on vacation when I live in a city etc. I’ve reached the point that I desperately need to leave LA for a little while.

Los Angeles is arguably America’s second most reviled major city (we’re coming for you, Detroit!), and I think it’s kind of an unfair characterization. Sure, we’ve got pollution, sprawl, crime, and roving herds of Kardashians foraging for attention, but save for the infestation of surgically-enhanced Armenians I think you’d find a lot of those problems in most other big cities. The uncomfortable fact is that when large numbers of humans start sharing the same space, things get gross really quickly. Sure, I’m not crazy about LA, but unlike most of my friends in Oregon who refuse to come visit me here, I don’t think it’s an open trench full of blood and pubic hair.

The thing that’s getting to me is that LA is so enormous that you can go for months or years at a time without ever leaving. I’m not even kidding – between late December 2011 and July 2012, I didn’t set foot outside of Los Angeles County (save for a 45 minute jaunt to a beach just across the Ventura County line so I could dump fake oil on a five year old girl without getting arrested. Long story.)

It doesn’t help that absolutely everything here looks the same, making me feel kind of like I’m trapped in the Matrix. Also, did I mention that it’s been 95 degrees every day for the past five weeks? Or that it’s been 95 degrees every night for the past five weeks? Temperature here is somehow unrelated to the presence of the sun.

What’s more, I feel kind of like my career is stagnating. I’ve got a great job that I love, but I’m starting to worry that a daily routine and the financial security to order guac whenever I go to Chipotle is making me complacent. I could very easily spend years writing video game trailers; I’d be making good money and lousy headway into the entertainment industry, which is why I came to this open trench full of blood and pubic hair in the first place.

After a little over a year, I’m feeling burned out and not 100% thrilled with my progress thus far. So I’ve decided to take a vacation to clear my head and reassess what the fuck I’m doing with my life.

Friday after next I’m going to be taking a day off work and flying to San Francisco for the weekend - yes, while I hate flying, the one thing I hate more is spending six hours driving through Central California; if I liked the smell of cowshit I’d just go to Corvallis. BURN.

I don’t know what I’m hoping a quick trip to the setting of The Room is going to do for me, if anything at all. At the very least, it’ll be a break in my routine, which is definitely going to be good for me from a creative standpoint. I haven’t been to San Francisco since I was 16, and unlike San Diego it’s the closest city that isn’t going to be hotter than a phoenix’s asshole.

This is really the first official vacation I will have taken as an ‘adult’ – my ten week study abroad boondoggle with The Ex Girlfriend does not count – so I’m hoping to avoid any major missteps. My TravelSmith hat is in the mail and I just picked up my zip off cargo pants from the drycleaners.

Truman Capps is planning on taking the 'So I Married An Axe Murderer' reality tour.

On Apology

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I'd rather vote for this thing than Mitt Romney. (So would Rush Limbaugh.)

I’ve read more headlines with the words ‘DOUBLE DOWN’ in them this year than I ever have before – except, perhaps, during the flurry of press coverage in those magical few months after KFC debuted their Double Down sandwich. To be honest, I miss those days – simpler times when doubling down, in the popular consciousness, meant you either had the biggest balls at the blackjack table or a really terrible case of the meat sweats and impending gas.  

Now it seems like everywhere I turn somebody is doubling down on something in a non-sandwich oriented way. Michele Bachmann doubling down on her allegations of a nefarious Muslim conspiracy deep inside the United States government, Geraldo Rivera doubling down on the idea that young black men wearing hoodies are totally asking to get shot, Harry Reid doubling (and subsequently, like, tripling and quadrupling) down on his claim that Mitt Romney hasn’t paid taxes since Drumline was in theaters… It’s what happens when unimaginative print journalists cover obstinate dickhole politicians.

In gambling, doubling down means that you’re putting everything on the table. In fast food, doubling down means you’re about to eat a sandwich made entirely out of meat. And in politics, it looks like doubling down means that you said something shitty that got a lot of attention, and you’re so dead set on not apologizing for it that you just keep saying it until Kim Kardashian goes somewhere in a bikini and the media forgets that you said it in the first place.

The other day, Mitt Romney attacked President Obama over a statement sent out by the staff of the US embassy in Egypt in which they apologized for an inflammatory American anti-Islam video. As Romney put it, the statement constituted Obama sympathizing with people who were attacking the United States, per the president’s supposed habit of, “going around the world apologizing for America.”

When it came out that Romney was not only wrong (as usual) but also politicizing a wave of violence that killed four American diplomats, Romney doubled down on his statement, arguing that, “When our grounds are being attacked, and being breached… the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation. And apology for America's values is never the right course.”

So Mitt Romney isn’t going to apologize for attacking the president for apologizing for America, even though the apology in question didn’t come from Obama but rather a bunch of embassy staffers who were legitimately scared that they were about to get stormed by an angry mob, which happens from time to time in that neighborhood.

Here, by the way, is the sniveling capitulation of American values that President Obama/the US Embassy in Cairo made on Tuesday:

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

What a bunch of fucking pussies, am I right? They may as well have just fashioned the American flag into a pair of short shorts and taken a dump in the Liberty Bell. Condemning religious intolerance and reaffirming our dedication to free speech as a tool for rational and mature discourse – who do you think we are, fucking Canada or something? Jesus Reagan Ayn Rand Glocks for everyone!

But overlooking the fact that Mitt Romney is holding Obama’s feet to the fire for something he didn’t say, why are anybody’s feet being held to any fire in the first place? It’s not like they were apologizing for freedom, or muscle cars, or private enterprise – they were apologizing for blatant racism and religious intolerance, which I thought 21^st century society had agreed were bad things.*

*Offer void for homosexuals in the South and Midwest.

I mean, what the fuck is so bad about apologizing, anyway? Is the prevailing wisdom in politics that it’s a sign of weakness to admit that you made a mistake? Call me crazy, but if I had to decide who I wanted to have access to about 5000 nuclear missiles, I’d much rather it be the guy who’s got the sack to tell the world he made a mistake than the guy who will gladly ignore common sense and every fact that gets in his way if it means he gets to be right.

I don’t think that President Obama should go around the world and apologize for America – fortunately, he’s never done that. But when I see how indignant people get at the very idea that someone would go to a foreign country and apologize for something America has done, I start to get worried.

Look, I seriously love America – and not just on the Fourth of July and 9/11, but every damn day. It’s a fucked up country that has way too much Florida, but it’s my country and I’m proud of that. But with that being said, the idea that we have nothing to apologize for is crazytown bananapants. Vietnam, Iraq, Iran-Contra, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, secret bombing campaign in Cambodia – these are just off the top of my head.

This idea that it’s somehow un-American to apologize for America creates a culture which assumes that our country is infallible, which is basically nationalism, and since I go to great lengths not to use the N-word on the Internet, I’ll just say that nationalism has a way of escalating quickly.

I’m not saying that the United States needs to go around begging forgiveness from every other nation on Earth. I just don’t think we should look at apology as a failure. Apology is a key part of diplomacy, and as far as foreign policy is concerned I think diplomacy works a lot better than shooting people.

That’s yet another subject where Mitt Romney and I disagree – in the course of his doubling down, Romney criticized Obama’s foreign policy by saying, “Ever since FDR we've had the capacity to be engaged in two conflicts at once, and [Obama] said no, we're going to cut that back to only one conflict."

You heard it here first – according to Mitt Romney, two wars are better than one. “Blessed are the peacemakers” apparently doesn’t apply in an election year. 

Truman Capps suddenly has a stronger-than-usual craving for fried chicken and bacon.  

The Restroom Attendant

"Don't shit where you eat" works both ways, you know.

One of the most popular bars at the University of Oregon was called Rennie’s Landing, and it had quite possibly the worst floor plan imaginable for an establishment where hundreds of people went every night to get blackout drunk.

For one thing, it had a giant staircase connecting the upstairs bar and the downstairs bar, which is just asking for trouble when the bar’s signature drink was basically a pint glass full of vodka and a splash of Tampico. Not only were the stairs a magnet for personal injury lawsuits, but I also watched one of my friends vomit all over them on his birthday, which created an interesting cleaning situation for the staff.

The worst thing about Rennie’s, though, wasn’t the stairs, or the lack of space, or the inadequate climate control, but the bathrooms. For the entire two stories’ worth of bar, which on any given Saturday night was packed with upwards of 250 people ingesting booze and cheesy bacon fries, there was only one tiny bathroom per gender.

I can’t speak to the women’s bathroom, but the men’s consisted of one urinal, broken soap and paper towel dispensers, the world’s wettest floor, and two toilets which were never not overflowing with shit – and as if to add insult to injury, there weren’t any stall doors, either. One got the impression that the staff had given up cleaning the bathroom at about the same time America gave up on Vietnam. The difference is that nowadays Vietnam’s economy is booming, while that bathroom is still giving people PTSD.

Honestly, though, it’s unfair to criticize a bar too much for having a gross bathroom. A bar, after all, is a place where people go to dump poison into their bodies to inhibit motor functions – if I went into a bar bathroom and saw that it wasn’t covered in human excrement I’d probably be worried that they were watering down the drinks.

I’ve been to several bars in LA with bathrooms that I’ve found to be far worse than the aromatic little sweatbox at Rennie’s Landing. These bathrooms were all larger and cleaner than the one at Rennie’s – what made them so terrible was the presence of a restroom attendant.

I’d seen restroom attendants on TV and in movies, but I’d always sort of assumed they were some kind of shared fictional plot device dreamed up by the film industry, like bombs with multicolored wires or being able to enhance the resolution of security camera footage. It seemed like too pointless and demeaning of a job to actually exist: ”Your job is to stand in a bathroom all night, watching guys pee and handing them paper towels.” That’s not a job. That’s cruel and unusual punishment.

Last night I went to the bathroom at one of my local bars to find a smiling black guy in a snappy suit and fedora holding the door open for me, standing beside a little tray full of gum, mints, candy bars, mouthwash, and condoms – along with a tip jar.

“Hey man,” he beamed. “How’s it going?”

“Great!” I lied – what I actually meant was, “Really bad, because now a complete stranger is going to make small talk with me as I pee.”

This guy was really committed to earning his tip. As I went to the sink, he lunged in front of me and turned on the tap, then snagged two paper towels from the dispenser one foot away and held them at the ready until I was finished scrubbing. He didn’t push the soap dispenser for me, though, which I thought was odd – if I can’t be trusted to turn a faucet and grab a piece of paper, why am I suddenly on my own when it comes to pushing the soap button?

As I dried my hands, he gestured to his little table full of snacks and goodies. “Can I get you anything?” He asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “If I’m going to buy something and put it in my mouth, I’d just as soon not get it from the one room where everyone in the bar goes to take a shit.”

He grabbed the wet towels from me and threw them in the garbage, and then went to open the door for me. I could feel the tip jar staring me in the face, and I knew I had no choice. I pulled a $1 bill out of my pocket and stuffed it in the cup, and resolved to not go to the bathroom for the rest of the night.

I get that America is a culture of tipping, and unlike Mr. Pink I’m completely happy to play ball – I tip fairly at restaurants in spite of the fact that I still don’t know how to calculate percentages, and I make a point of tipping bartenders well because never in history has it been a bad thing to have a bartender like you.

The thing is that waitressing and bartending are jobs that need to be done for the food service industry to work, and tipping is how we reward good service and ensure future good service. Restroom attending, on the other hand, seems to exist only because of tipping. I may not be particularly good at a lot of things, but I’m dynamite at going to the bathroom without assistance.

But I can’t not tip them, mainly out of pure sympathy. It also doesn’t help that every restroom attendant I’ve seen has been some type of minority, and as an extremely white liberal I can’t help but feel a gigantic amount of white guilt that it’s 2012 and there’s still a black guy whose job it is to stand in the bathroom all night just to make sure my piss is as pleasant as possible.

The bathroom is the one place in the bar that I don’t want service. Now, if there was a guy walking around who would give me hand sanitizer after I touched the bar and save my seat when I got up and drive me home in my car if I was too drunk, I’d tip the shit out of that guy.

In the bathroom, though, I’d tip extra just to be left the fuck alone.

Truman Capps is usually feeling white guilt for something, no matter what he’s doing.

Eastwood Variations

Well, uh – thank you, thank you – I, uh… I’m sure you’re all wondering, I mean, “What’s the president doing out here in Gettysburg, like, right after the battle?” Because, you know, there’s even still some dead guys out over there that you can see, if you look. I don’t know who’s, uh, who’s going to be cleaning those up, am I right, folks?

[Hold for applause]

So, anyway, I’ve got Jefferson Davis sitting here, and he’s – I was going to ask him a couple questions. But – you know about – I remember, uh, it was forescore and seven years ago that we got this whole, you know, that we started America, and now you’re out here and you’re just, uh, with the Civil War.

So, uh, Mr. President of the Confederacy, what do you say to people? Do you just – you know – I know – people were wondering – I mean, about your radical interpretation of states’ rights? Because that’s not really… If you read the Constitution, you’ll see some… All Men Are Created Equal, you know, is what I thought this country was about.

What’s that? What did you say?

Well, I like my hat just fine, thank you very much. You know who else liked my hat? Your mom, last night!

[Grab crotch]

No, Britain, it’s my turn to talk. You’re crazy. You’re as bad as Ireland.

[Hold for laughs]

So I was saying, I think that, you know, in the history of, uh, the world, there’s just… Well, there hasn’t been a struggle as totally democratic as this one, that we’re, you know, the fight we’re doing right here. I think it’s maybe time – what do you think – for maybe Indian people to run India.

And I think it’s that time. And I think if you just step aside, Britain, and India can kind of take over. You can maybe still use one of our elephants. A small one. Not that big grass guzzler you’ve been using to go around, uh, trying to get us into World War II and stuff.

What? Oh, you’re hungry?

[Hold for more laughs]

So I – so I’ve got some Jewish folks here…

So, uh, Sinners, what do you, uh, think that you’re going to say to God, when he’s got you there? In, you know, in Hell. Because he’s angry. I mean, you guys are going to be sinners in the hands of an angry God, and that’s – I thought – you know.

But you thought sinning was okay. You know, I mean – you thought that was something worth doing. You didn’t check with Catholics to see how sinning has been working out for them. I mean, most of them, you know, they’ve been in Hell for ten years. Or eternity.

Of course, we all know Pope Benedict XIV is the intellect of the Catholic Church.

[Hold for laughter]

Kind of a grin with a body behind it. I’ve got to hand it to him, I have to give credit where credit is due – I’m digging on the hat.

I, uh, I’ve just got one thing that – I’ve been thinking, you know – I want to say this, to, uh, to America, and, you know, listen up, fellas: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. And, uh, I’ve got Miss Lewinsky here to answer, uh, to answer some questions, and…

What? Well, I can’t do that to myself. If I could, you know, you and I wouldn’t be in this mess.

[Hold for laughs]

So anyway, we’re going to have – yes, you and me, Mr. Gorbachev – we’re going to have a little chat about this wall. And then, I just wondered, what do you say to people when they – you know, when they come up to you and they ask about the wall? And why you’re not tearing it down? Or, you know, you could open… There’s the gate here. You could open this gate. Or you could tear down the wall.

You won’t tear down this wall. But you think the war in Afghanistan is okay. You know, I mean – you think it’s something worth doing. You didn’t check with the British and see how they did it.

Because, you know, quitting, it’s never… I’m not one. I’m not one of them. But America wants me to, and, you know, I think there’s so much to be done, and I think that Vice President Ford is a good guy that can come along. I would just, you know, I would like to say something, ladies and gentlemen, that I think is very important. It is that I am not a-

What was that, Bernstein? Don’t you start. You’re getting as bad as Woodward.

You know what, Bernstein? I’m gonna quote, uh, I’m gonna quote a man you might have heard of, he was – they called him Abraham Lincoln, when I say that your mom and I, well, we did a little breaking and entering in a hotel last night too.

[Grab crotch]

But I think it is important that you realize, that you’re the best in the world. Whether you’re meek or hungry or a peacemaker or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. Okay, just remember that. And I’m speaking to everybody out here. It doesn’t hurt. We don’t have to be…

What?

I do not say that word anymore. Well, maybe one last time.

Alright: I start it, you finish it.

THIS IS MY BODY…

[Audience: THIS IS MY BLOOD!]

[Grab crotch]

Truman Capps is legitimately scared that Clint Eastwood will see this and not be amused. 

ASMR

This is what passes for drugs these days.

I once read about an experiment where scientists wired up a bunch of labrats with little electrodes in the pleasure centers of their brains, and then installed two buttons in their cages: One button would dispense food while the other would activate the electrode and make the rat orgasmically happy. As soon as the experiment started, the rats promptly began mashing the pleasure button for days at a time, only stopping when all of them finally starved to death.

What can we take away from this experiment, which I’m pretty sure was real but I also might’ve just read about in a Michael Crichton book?

1)   Scientists have perfected a way to streamline the masturbation process and they aren’t releasing it to the general public, the bastards.

2)   Living things, regardless of species, will do any amount of stupid shit to feel good.

If you want more proof of the latter, just last night I was at a party with a guy who was singing the praises of bath salts – the loophole-exploiting designer drug that occasionally makes you eat peoples’ faces.

“Bath salts are awesome,” he sighed. “It’s like doing coke and ecstasy at the same time. Of course, it’s illegal now – that guy in Miami ruined it for everyone. I do it all the time, and I’ve never eaten anybody’s face!”

Relative to going into an alley, buying a package of a powder labeled ‘NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION’, and then snorting it up your nose, ASMR doesn’t really seem all that crazy. Relative to normal human activity, though, it’s a little bit goofy.

ASMR – or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response – is yet another one of the stupid things I’ve discovered on the Internet at the office when I should’ve been hard at work writing video game trailers. The best way to describe it is an indescribable, generally good feeling, usually accompanied by chills and a tingly scalp.

Apparently it’s a lot like drugs without the drugs – to get an ASMR reaction, all you have to do is watch a video with sounds and images that trigger an ASMR response in your brain, and thanks to YouTube’s thriving ASMR community there’s about a thousand options to choose from. What makes it weird is that all of the videos are a lot like this one.

The most common triggers for ASMR are people whispering and soft, tactile sounds, which makes for without a doubt the creepiest thousand videos on YouTube. Seriously, just search for ASMR on YouTube and see what you find – don’t be shocked if you wind up watching a video of somebody whispering into their webcam for ten minutes, or pretending to give you a haircut while whispering about their day. Don't be even more shocked when you see that these videos have hundreds of thousands of views.

You may not find yourself getting all tingly watching the videos, though – ASMR apparently doesn’t work for everyone. If you’ve got ASMR, a video of a girl with long fingernails whispering and caressing a bowl full of uncooked macaroni is a little slice of heaven on Earth; if you don’t have it, it’s like you’ve stumbled across a milquetoast form of fetish pornography for Amish people.

It’s tough to be certain what percentage of the population ‘gets’ ASMR because there’s been no scientific study of it whatsoever. The ASMR community only really got started a few years ago, when people who had previously been reluctant to talk about their random and indescribable pleasurable feelings took to the Internet to tell strangers about them instead.

In fact, ASMR is so outside the mainstream that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page – any entries on ASMR get deleted and redirected to the page for ‘cold chills,’ because by Wikipedia’s standards, without any medical studies or scientific proof, ASMR is just a fancy name for people watching weird, monotonous videos on the Internet.

Do I have ASMR? To be honest, I can’t really be sure.

Since I first discovered ASMR at the office, I was reluctant to watch a video there – while my coworkers and I once looked up topless pictures of Denise Richards during a debate over the quality of her boob job, I still would’ve felt a bit weird watching a 15 minute video of a girl with red fingernails squeezing a plastic bag in full view of my officemates.

I only remembered ASMR late on Friday night as I was getting ready for bed. I pulled up the video of the girl and the bowl of macaroni and was overjoyed to discover a tingly and numb sensation all over my body. The catch is that I was drunk at the time, so it’s difficult to say how much of it was new-age creepy feel good videos and how much of it was bourbon – otherwise known as ASMR Classic.

When I woke up in the morning, the macaroni video was still open on my computer, and it took me a second to remember why I’d capped off the first Friday of a three day weekend watching a girl fingering a bowl of dry macaroni. When I remembered about ASMR, I decided to watch the video again with the benefit of sobriety and see where it got me.

I felt a little bit tingly and slightly happy in spite of my hangover, but not tingly and happy enough to watch the video for more than a few seconds before turning it off. I’ve watched a lot of fucked up things on the Internet in my life, but something about ASMR videos is so profoundly unsettling on a primal level that I can’t watch for more than a few seconds at a time unless I’m good and liquored up.

So my ‘real’ ASMR experience, unfettered by booze, was a slight tingling sensation in my scalp – which, mind you, only occurred after I read on the Internet that watching ASMR videos gives some people a tingly feeling in their scalp.

I’m not going to be like that old fogey Wikipedia and say that ASMR isn’t real, but I think for a lot of people it might be the ultimate viral placebo – they read that ASMR videos make some people feel happy and tingly, pull up an ASMR video to test it out, and wind up subconsciously making themselves happy and tingly.

I’m not judging either way – but when it comes to my own recreational activities, I’m willing to risk liver damage if I don’t have to watch a girl caress a bowl of macaroni for six minutes. 

Truman Capps is a little insulted that the macaroni video has well over five times as many views as Writers.