Hair Guy Reviews: Community S4E1, 'History 101'


 Above: The entire cast of NBC's Community.

I thoroughly enjoyed Community’s recent return to the airwaves after an eight month break. It’s no secret that Community has had a rough couple of years – looming threats of cancellation, a hiatus, the firing of creator/showrunner Dan Harmon, and the recent departure of Chevy Chase – and there was a lot of concern among fans that this season would be a hollow shell of what the show once was. As far as I’m concerned, however, it was a tour-de-force of modern television, filled with electrifying moments that I’ll remember forever.


The episode started off strong with Alison Brie walking into frame and making her first appearance of the new season. Not long after, I was elated to see Alison Brie walking down a hallway with the rest of the cast, smirking mischievously as she announces her plans to ‘do senioritis’ in this, her last year at Greendale Community College.


One of Community’s strongest features from the get-go has been the ‘bad girl’ streak explored by Alison Brie’s character as she tries to break away from the straight laced academic lifestyle she’d built for herself in high school. This subplot succeeds precisely because it often involves closeups on Alison Brie with a sly grin and a twinkle in one or perhaps both of her flawless blue eyes, and more of that theatrical magic was on display last Thursday.    

 Showrunner Dan Harmon (left) made headlines for his frequent clashes with outspoken cast member Chevy Chase (center).



The quality really picks up as the episode gets underway, when Alison Brie and some other character break into the dean’s office per her goal of reckless senior hijinx. After first speculating about some adorably mild pranks, Alison Brie does a spot-on impression of Greendale’s dean (whose name escapes me at the moment) and flounces over to his desk to complete her plan of surreptitiously rearranging his desk.


Not long after, some other character convinces Alison Brie to instead fill the dean’s car with unpopped popcorn and Alison Brie obliges. As she and whoever else she’s with at the time shine mirrors into the open sunroof of the car to pop the popcorn, she beautifully muses about her time at Greendale and how boring her post-graduation life as a hospital administrator will be. 

Just as Friends redefined women’s hairstyles and Will & Grace made homosexuality mainstream, Community has undeniably changed society’s attitude toward hospital administrators. I know I used to think of hospital administration as a rather drab (yet necessary) life of paperwork and bureaucracy. However, ever since Alison Brie’s character first stated her intention of becoming a hospital administrator I’ve begun to see hospital administrators not just as healthcare professionals who manage the day-to-day workings of hospitals, but as real people with dreams, friends, tragic flaws, raven colored hair that flows like water and shines like the sun, hobbies, sensuous smiles, and infectious laughter the likes of which could tame a savage wildebeest. I’d go so far as to say that I’ve fallen deeply in love with hospital administrators.


Robert Greenblatt (above) chair of NBC Entertainment, has drawn ire from fans for his last minute decision to delay Community's premiere from October until February.


As with every episode of Community, there were a lot of nuanced details waiting to reward the more attentive viewer. For example, did anybody else notice how Alison Brie was parting her hair on the right side? Or that ensemble she was wearing! A lavender cardigan, floral top, and a black skirt which matched the black straps of her signature backpack – I wonder, was that an intentional choice?


That’s the beauty of Community. With an outstanding cast of Alison Brie, even the smallest details just seem to pop. 

Dan Harmon was replaced as showrunner by David Guarascio and Moses Port, seen here at the 2010 Emmy award ceremony. Guarascio and Port previously worked on popular sitcoms Just Shoot Me! and Happy Endings.


Of course, this episode was not without its flaws. Chief among them was the frankly baffling decision on the part of the writers and director to include several scenes which did not feature Alison Brie at all. No, I’m not referring to scenes where Alison Brie is simply in the background – scenes which, while frustrating, still allow us to study her from afar – I’m talking about scenes in which Alison Brie simply is not present on camera.


Throughout the history of television, programs have suffered for lack of Alison Brie – I Love Lucy, MASH, All In The Family, Happy Days, The Cosby Show, Taxi, Moonlighting, Seinfeld, Frasier, The Office, Arrested Development, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad are just some of the otherwise excellent programs crippled by an Alison Brie deficiency. So for Community, a show that has Alison Brie on contract, to not maximize Alison Brie’s screentime is a creative decision I will never quite understand. To quote President Eisenhower:



Every second of television that is filmed without Alison Brie in front of the camera represents, in a final sense, a theft from those hunger for charm and are not charmed, those who long for a vivacious, tight-sweatered girl next door type but must learn to do without.



 World War II hero and NATO commander Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th President of the United States.

This may just be a sign that the show is changing. After all, Community started as just a show about Alison Brie going to community college, but in subsequent seasons has grown increasingly eccentric and self-referential. This has afforded Alison Brie many enjoyable opportunities to steal America’s collective heart in a variety of different settings (and equally enjoyable costumes), but anyone who watched Thursday’s episode can’t argue that things have changed since Dan Harmon departed.


Everyone at work on Community is incredibly talented, from the writers to the new showrunners and even the cast members who aren’t Alison Brie. But the show, while good, has lost something intangible, and I begin to worry that if NBC’s dismal schedule results in Community continuing beyond this season that it might just lead to more episodes that are light on Alison Brie – episodes that would eventually drag down the fond memories of Alison Brie’s performances in the spectacular first two seasons. 

 The decision on Community's future will most likely be made here, in the 36 story skyscraper that houses NBC's West Coast headquarters.



I’m not saying I want the show to end, but perhaps it could restructure. The other cast members could be set free to pursue their own other projects – which I would gladly follow – while Community could become a show that focused more closely on Alison Brie.


They could call the revamped Community something like Just Brie Yourself, or Brie At Last, Brie At Last, Thank God Almighty, Brie At Last, or maybe just The Alison B. Schermerhorn Variety Half-Hour – provided the producers are willing to Chang the show’s name.


Truman Capps thinks Gillian Jacobs is pretty cute too.

Dorner


I was really hoping he'd give a shout out to my blog in his manifesto, but noooooo...

As you’re probably well aware, I have a whole lot of opinions, and since I have a blog I’m honor bound to talk about them all the time. I know not all of my 9 readers agree with everything I have to say, so I hope my following radical opinion isn’t too much for you:

I think that, as a general rule, you probably should not kill people.

So know that I’m not on Christopher Dorner’s side in all this. I like cops, and even if I didn’t I wouldn’t think it was okay for somebody to go around hunting them and their families like animals. I don’t quite understand how a killing spree lends credibility to your word, or how becoming a murderer to prove you’re not a liar is supposed to restore your good name.

As much as I want Dorner to be caught, though, I’m also just fascinated to see where this goes. It’s like we’re in the second act of an action movie right now. I won’t go so far as to say ‘you can’t make this stuff up’, because you can – right now it’s like we’re in Shooter meets Serpico meets Law Abiding Citizen – but I never expected life to copy art so closely.

A strong, charismatic soldier and cop who joins the LAPD to do good but is kicked out and has his life ruined by a (supposedly) corrupt system turns his skills against his former masters in a suicide mission of revenge. I cannot wait until two and a half years from now when the book somebody writes about this is made into a movie with LL Cool J and William H. Macy.

I think one of the reasons it’s easy to catch yourself pseudo-rooting for Dorner is because he seems like such a nice guy once you forget about the fact that he’s a murdering psychopath. In almost every picture of him on the news he’s wearing a military uniform and smiling warmly – a combination that’s certain to win you a lot of fans in America.

Compare that to the pictures of other murderers – James Holmes with his glassy eyes and orange hair and Lee Harvey Oswald posing awkwardly with a rifle in his backyard looked like the grown up versions of the weird-smelling kid who lived on a farm and got fleas from his dog in 4th grade. Dorner, from his charismatic smile to his support for various progressive causes (and love of The Hangover) seems like the sort of guy you’d want to hang out with if he wasn’t busy ambushing public servants and their families with an assault rifle.

Because ultimately, I think a lot of people believe his allegations about a culture of brutality and corruption within the LAPD. I’m of the belief that most cops are generally honest, hardworking people trying to serve justice in a system that is frequently broken and unfair, but I’ll also admit that I don’t think an organization as big as the Los Angeles Police Department could change a 50 year history of racism and corruption in one fell swoop. From what I’ve heard, I would assume that some divisions are more corrupt than others, and Dorner was in one of those divisions.

What I find so frighteningly satisfying about this is that in some regard Dorner is doing what we all wish we could do. Right now pretty much everyone in America thinks that the system is broken, unfair, and corrupt – we hate our elected representatives more than we hate Chris Brown and the Department of Justice apparently considers freedom of information activists and state-licensed marijuana growers more worthy of prosecution than the people who destroyed the world’s economy.
And here in the middle of that – when the people running the system can’t even agree on whether our country should pay its bills on time or not – is a man who was wronged by a broken, unfair system and decided to violently fight against it. The Michigan Militia has probably been collectively jerking off to this story for three straight days.

A lot of folks on the Internet have been jerking off to the story too – white suburban 15 year olds on Reddit have begun to hold him up as some sort of folk hero, and I’ve read that some Internet supporters have taken to calling in false sightings to the LAPD in order to take the heat off of him, while a group of civilly-disobedient ex-Marines have publicly offered him shelter.  

When you forget that he shot a newly engaged couple because one of them had committed the cardinal sin of being related to one of his enemies, or that he’s carried out his vendetta against the Los Angeles Police Department by shooting cops from the Torrance Police Department and Riverside Police Department who have zero connection to his case, I guess it’s easy to see him as a modern day Robin Hood.

But while his actions are reprehensible, they’ve also succeeded in restarting the conversation about corruption, brutality, and racism in the LAPD – by which I mean starting the conversation among celebrities and rich people who make campaign contributions instead of just the Latinos and African Americans in low income areas who have been having this conversation for years.

Dorner’s surprisingly detailed and sourced allegations, as well as the LAPD’s decision to bravely shoot up two neighborhoods while searching for him, have brought the department under intense public scrutiny. The police brutality case that resulted in Dorner’s dismissal has been reopened, and the victims of the mistaken identity shootings are about to make it rain lawsuits.

So just over a week into his rampage, Dorner has achieved at least one of his goals – he’s begun to reform a corrupt institution by holding up its shortcomings for the world to see. That’s good.

You know what would be better? If we could find a way hold the authorities accountable without having to shoot a bunch of people.

Truman Capps hopes for a swift resolution to this manhunt, because his apartment is getting buzzed by something like four police choppers a night.

All Of The Lights

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At long last, the power to light your home like a German disco is in your hands.


As much as I love my new apartment – spacious, affordable, bug free, in an awesome neighborhood, with a private bathroom so I don’t have to be sociable every time I have to pee – it is not without its shortcomings. Namely, there are no overhead lights in my room, so the only way to light it is with a bunch of lamps. This means that whenever I want to turn the lights off, I tragically have to walk around my small room turning off each lamp individually, a monotonous task that can take up to ten seconds on a bad day.



To understand why this is so upsetting, you have to recognize what a big role sloth plays in my day-to-day routine. As I’ve mentioned before, I put in ten hour days at the office – I leave the house a little after 8:00 AM and get home around 7:00 PM, and I have to be in bed by 11:30 PM to get a full night’s sleep. I only have four and a half hours to myself every night, and over the past year I’ve started calculating the usage of those four and a half hours down to the second.



Naturally it was unacceptable that I should be wasting up to 30 seconds per night walking around turning lights on and off – time that I could be spending feeling guilty for not writing something, or watching that Django Unchained shootout scene again. So this weekend I went to the Apple Store in Santa Monica and bought a set of Philips Hue lightbulbs.



Philips Hue are energy efficient LED bulbs that use 80% less electricity than standard lightbulbs and can replicate any shade of white, as well as any other color in the visible spectrum. What’s more, they come with a wireless bridge you can plug into your router which allows you to use an app on your phone to turn your lights on and off or set their color depending on your mood:







 


If you’ve got white people problems, I feel bad for you son – I’ve got 99 First World Problems but my lights aren’t one.



Maybe, like most of my friends, you’re shaking your head that I’d buy something so frivolous and unnecessary. But look at it from my perspective: I love science fiction. Blade Runner is my shit. And now I can tweak the specific color and brightness of the lights in my living space to my exact preferences, save those settings, and then turn my lights on before I even get out of my car every night.



What I’ve realized recently is that a lot of recent technological developments aren’t so much entirely new inventions; they’re inventions that modify existing inventions to make them better. My car is old enough to get married in Alabama, but because of a miraculous tape deck adapter someone invented I can command my miraculous phone to play music and I’ll hear it through my car’s ancient speakers. Likewise, my lamps are either old, cheap, or both, but because of the bulbs in them they now put Captain Jean Luc Picard’s quarters to shame in the futuristic luxury department.



So my enjoyment of my new lighting setup isn’t strictly personal – I enjoy it both because I can turn my lights on without having to get out of bed, and also because every time I do I’m reminded of the true power of human ingenuity. (I try not to think about how we should probably be using that ingenuity to stop global warming instead of making fancy lightbulbs for lazy douchebags.)



Now that the lights are installed, though, I don’t know how much of a timesaver they really are – for every ten seconds I spend not having to walk around my room turning each light on or off individually, I spend another five minutes giddily fucking around with the color and brightness settings on my phone. I was trying to reduce the amount of time I spent illuminating my room; now I spend entire evenings turning the lights on and off.



What’s more, in less than a week it’s made me a total lighting snob. With my phone I now have access to a bunch of preset color and brightness configurations such as READING, CONCENTRATE, ENERGIZE (?) or RELAX. According to the website, each of these settings is scientifically proven to make you more effective at whatever it is you’re trying to do. I’m 80% sure that’s bullshit, but now I find myself hating the bright fluorescent lighting at the office because it isn’t the optimal color for concentration. All I need is a yoga mat and a bottle of Fiji water and I’ll be the most insufferable LA person ever to have lived.



Hue lightbulbs are pretty new, so there’s still kinks being worked out of the system. Sometimes, for example, the wireless bridge goes offline and needs to be reset. This is problematic for two reasons: One, my lights can only be controlled via the phone, so if the router bridge isn't working when I get home that means I don’t get to have lights that night. Two, the bridge is plugged into the apartment’s wireless router, which is in my roommate’s room, which means that if the wireless bridge breaks while my roommate is sleeping or masturbating, I’m up shit creek until he’s done.



I took the first world problem of not wanting to get up to turn off my lights and replaced it with the decidedly third world problem of sometimes simply not having lights – although it’s balanced by the extremely first world problem of being a lighting snob. In the end I think it averages out to a second world problem, and I’m okay with that.  

Truman Capps has already named one of his light settings 'Morning Mist.'

My Mind Grapes


"Leo Spaceman is a fine doctor, and a pretty good dentist."

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I realized that I wanted to write TV sitcoms on April 24th, 2008, at around 8:50 PM. I was sitting alone in my single dorm room at the University of Oregon, hunched over a tiny portable television that had been haphazardly plugged into my room’s ancient cable outlet, watching the 13th episode of 30 Rock’s second season.



The episode was called ‘Succession’, and it represented the culmination of the season-long battle between Jack Donaghy and his super-gay archrival Devon Banks (played by Will Arnett) for the position of CEO of General Electric. Meanwhile, Tracy Jordan sets out to create the world’s first pornographic video game, which porn-expert in residence Frank Rossitono maintains is impossible because of the uncanny valley effect, which makes computer animated characters far too creepy to masturbate to. 



After the second commercial break, everything is screwed up. Tracy makes great progress with creation of his porn video game, and Frank, realizing that Tracy will be successful at something he’d always thought couldn't be done, grows enraged that he hasn’t been similarly rewarded for his lifelong commitment to porn in a somewhat pervier take on Amadeus. Don Geiss, the CEO of General Electric, privately informs Jack that he will name him as his successor, but falls into a diabetic coma before he can formally tell the shareholders.



When Liz informs Jack that Geiss might be dead, Jack says the magic words, “We have to call Dr. Spaceman!”



As Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’ thunders in the background, we’re treated to a montage of Liz and Jack trying to discreetly hide Geiss’s body, Frank angrily destroying his porn collection, and quack physician Dr. Spaceman running through the halls of NBC headquarters in slow motion while wearing a cape, in a direct reference to Amadeus. 



I had never seen anything that beautifully constructed before – on the strength of great characters built over the course of two seasons, Tina Fey and her cronies had taken two stories about success and failure on two wildly different scales, built them to a climax, and mashed them up in a reference to a 20 year old movie about 18th century Viennese composers. Lying on the floor of my dorm, cackling and wheezing, I knew that this was what I had to do with my life.



Until then I’d enjoyed TV shows – syndicated Seinfeld reruns, The Office, and Scrubs before it began its agonizingly long march into mediocrity – but had never really considered it to be a career path I wanted to follow. I guess I thought that 22 minutes just wasn’t enough time to tell a story – sure, you could spin a quick yarn about the Fat Husband being horny and lazy and his long suffering Inexplicably Hot Wife having to save the day amid precocious comments from their Precocious Children, but I didn’t think the format could be used to create anything as memorable or impactful as a movie.



But 30 Rock, with its multiple season story arcs and its rapid fire jokes that build on top of other jokes and smash cut into yet more jokes, changed my perception. 30 Rock taught me that you could make something really sophisticated and hilarious on television so long as you didn’t mind low ratings and the constant threat of cancelation.



Dressing up as Kenneth the Page for Halloween was particularly frustrating, because it made it abundantly clear to me just how few people actually watched 30 Rock. Even at my office, with its full complement of young, tattooed, glasses-wearing hipsters, almost nobody knew who I was. This got more and more frustrating to me as the day wore on, because Kenneth had been a part of my life for seven years at that point, and I took it as almost a personal insult that people hadn’t even heard of him.
“Who are you supposed to be?” Yet another coworker asked me as we waited in line at the lunch truck.



“I’m Kenneth! From 30 Rock!



“Oh, right. I think I saw a couple episodes of that show. It was okay, but not as good as The Big Bang Theory.”



As all the blood vessels in my face burst, one of the human resources employees chimed in.



“What time is 30 Rock on?”



“Thursdays at 8:00.”



“Oh!” She said. “No wonder I’ve never seen it – that’s when Vampire Diaries is on.”



I had to go inside and sit alone in my office for a while.



I realize now that people not watching 30 Rock was frustrating to me in the same way that me not believing in God was frustrating to a particlar cadre of Christian students at my high school. 30 Rock enriched my life in countless ways and was always there for me – on Netflix or in syndication – whenever times were rough. I’ve heard that Christianity offers a similar experience, but with fewer double entendres and in the difficult 9:00 AM Sunday timeslot.



So naturally, 30 Rock’s series finale last Thursday was a big moment for me. I’ve known Jack, Liz, Kenneth, Tracy, and Jenna for longer than I’ve known some of my closest friends, and now they’ve all gone away at once. Closure is particularly difficult because of Alec Baldwin, who I associate so closely with his role on 30 Rock that when I saw the trailer for Rock of Ages my first reaction was, “Wow, sure is cool that Jack Donaghy took time off from Kabletown to be in this movie!” Every Capital One commercial from now on is going to be an emotional trainwreck for me.
 

As painful as it is to see 30 Rock go, the series finale was yet another reminder of why I want to work in television: I want to create characters who viewers can connect with and learn to love over the years as they grow older together. Then, I want to end my show in hopes that at least one fan writes an overly sentimental blog post about his bizarre attachment to flickering lights in a box.

Truman Capps doesn't know how he can emotionally handle 30 Rock and The Office going off the air in the same year.

#regrets


"Penispenispenispenispenispenispenis."

I absolutely love Facebook and I’m not afraid to say it. Sometimes it seems like I’m the only one – everywhere I look, people are bitching about how much they hate Facebook, saying that it’s ‘a waste of time’ or ‘creepy.’ I just think it’s a great way to keep in regular contact with people who I haven’t seen for years. That said, I might just not mind things that bother other people, seeing as I’m a serial procrastinator and sort of a creepy guy in general.

But I’m also aware of the inherent danger of posting stuff about yourself on the Internet – or maybe I’m not, seeing as I’ve been posting stuff about myself on the Internet twice a week for five years now. I guess what I’m saying is that I try to manage what I put on Facebook. As a matter of principle I don’t post status updates that are out-of-context song lyrics or vague, passive aggressive, emo statements, and the last Photo Booth self shot I posted was a picture of me face deep in a bag of cheddar cheese – an activity I am proud of to this day.

Facebook gives me at least some opportunity to control how people see me. In real life I’m a lost cause – I’m clumsy, I can’t think on my feet, about half of my jokes fall flat, and there is the constant threat of flatulence. On Facebook, though, I have a chance to extensively consider and rework every joke and relentlessly scrutinize every picture for imperfections, so what makes it onto my profile roughly approximates the sort of person I want to be (a cross between Joe Biden and Liz Lemon) rather than the person I am (a cross between a nerd and a dweeb).

Fortunately, even in the 21st century and despite the best efforts of the NSA, real life isn’t being permanently recorded. If you say or do something stupid in real life and nobody records it, eventually people will forget about it. It’s kind of Zen – if a tree says ‘yolo’ in the forest and nobody puts it on the Internet, did it actually happen? 

When you do something stupid on the Internet, though, that shit stays there forever. This is why I’m thankful every day that Facebook wasn’t around when I was in high school.

Social networking is amazing for a number of reasons, but one of the things I find most interesting about it is its ability to make all the worst parts of puberty more visible and completely unforgettable. If you don’t believe me, just go to any one of the websites cataloguing stupid shit people post on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram – you’re going to see a lot of screengrabs of teenagers doing stupid teenager stuff that they’ll be futilely trying to put behind them in a year or two.

Because who doesn’t want to forget at least some of the stuff they did in high school?  Hell – if I could go back in time Looper style and kick my 15-year-old self’s ass I would completely do it. I’ve spent years trying to forget the things I said, did, and thought back then, and the class of 2007 are pretty much the last people who can realistically do that.

I was too much of an elitist for MySpace in high school, and Facebook only started accepting high schoolers by the second semester of my senior year, when the worst of the hormones were over with. Nobody had heard of Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr didn’t exist yet. Hell, iPhones didn’t even come out until after I’d graduated. Some of my most awkward years went entirely undocumented - I was lucky

Thanks to hormones, a sizable chunk of teenagers are narcissistic, whiny assholes, and thanks to social networking today’s teenagers are the first to have a direct digital means through which to acquire attention. This results in creepy, awkward, and embarrassing antics which, unlike me and my friends’ creepy, awkward, and embarrassing antics, will be archived online to haunt them for all eternity.

The emo Facebook updates and the nauseating four panel Instagram posts are pretty terrible – they’re basically an open portal into a seething pit of angst and sexual frustration. And as much as I enjoy looking through that portal and relishing the fact that I don’t live in there anymore, I still feel kind of bad for these kids: I was able to leave all of that behind, but some of them could have one embarrassing moment that seemed like a good idea at the time circulating on the Internet for years. And sometimes the consequences are a little more serious than just embarrassment.

After the election, Jezebel helpfully posted screengrabs of some of the most virulently racist tweets about the guy who won the election and the fact that he was less white than the other 43 presidents. Outraged readers tracked down the racist tweeters’ identities and discovered that virtually all of them were high school students. This didn’t stop Jezebel readers from playing Internet free speech vigilante and contacting the students’ schools in pursuit of disciplinary action.

Racism, obviously, is a horrible thing, but if you expect anything particularly well reasoned or insightful to come out of a 15-year-old’s mouth you’re kind of setting yourself up for failure. I’m not saying that all 15-year-olds are horrible people all of the time; I’m saying that some of them are horrible a lot of the time, because being horrible is just a thing that happens when you're a teenager, and most teenagers grow out of it. What's sad is that one careless moment of being horrible could come back to haunt these kids years down the road when an employer or a grad school admissions official Googles their names.

Doing things that embarrass you is a big part of being a teenager. Unfortunately for today’s teenagers, it looks like being embarrassed by an extensive online archive of their formative years could be a big part of their adulthood.

Truman Capps takes a moment every day to be thankful that there are no Instagram pictures of him in high school wearing calf high socks, leather clogs, cargo shorts, and a marching band T-shirt.

Is This All There Is?


Imagine this, but with no Volkswagen.

When people tell me that they’re living vicariously through me, I always wonder if they know the full scope of the lame things that they’re vicariously doing. I hope nobody thinks that I’m spending every spare minute in a hot tub full of cocaine – more often than not, if you say you’re living vicariously through me you’re just vicariously eating plain white rice and soy sauce for dinner because I’m too lazy to walk two blocks to Ralphs to buy anything else.



Next month I will have been working at my ad agency for a year, which is the longest I’ve ever held a job. For a year I’ve been waking up early, asking coworkers about their children, discreetly poking my head into the break room to see if anybody brought doughnuts, feeling anxious whenever I take ten extra minutes of lunch, and competing for the parking spot closest to my office. I adult so hard it hurts sometimes.



I work from 8:30 AM until 6:30 PM, and with rush hour traffic I usually get home around 7:00. To get eight hours of sleep before the next day, I need to go to bed at 11:30, which leaves me four and a half hours of unsupervised personal time every day. I live around the corner from two awesome bars, and I’m one stop on the subway away from the sticky freakshow that is Hollywood, but I usually spend my evenings holed up in my room surfing the Internet.



Keep in mind, I take my laptop to work with me, and a big part of my writing process is surfing the Internet while I let ideas form. So basically, the only difference between my home and my office is that one of them doesn't let me take my pants off.



When I wake up for work every morning I look back at the prior evening’s activities and feel kind of shitty. Come on, Truman! I’ll think to myself as I dutifully brush my teeth. All you did last night was read the Wikipedia article about Hitler’s 50th birthday party and watch King Of The Hill. That’s lame even by your standards. Tonight after work you should go do something!



And then ten hours later I’m walking out of the office and thinking, Man, I can’t wait to get home and get cracking on that Wikipedia article about maritime disasters! Some part of my subconscious will remind me of the promise I’d made that morning, and my response is always a very whiny, But I’m tiiiiiired!



I feel sort of irresponsible being tired from doing my job. I mean, my job is to sit in an office and do the only thing in the world I’m good at – write things. As jobs go, that’s pretty cushy – I mean, some people have to drive buses or take care of the mentally ill or be President of Mexico, all jobs that I’m sure are way harder than mine. If a bunch of English dudes can mine coal all day and then promptly go be in one of the world’s greatest brass bands, you’d think I’d be able to write all day and then have the energy to go get drunk in Hollywood.

I like to pretend that I’m saving all my outgoing adventurous activities for the weekend, even though I know it’s bullshit. As early as Wednesday I’ll start eagerly anticipating the coming weekend the way I used to anticipate Christmas as a kid, fantasizing about doing wild and weird things with my friends all over town. But every weekend the same thing happens: I spend half the weekend sleeping, half of it hanging out with my friends at some low key parties or bars in my neighborhood, and the rest of it kicking myself for not doing laundry when I had the chance.



I’ve got a great job, my finances are in awesome shape, I’ve made lots of new friends and professional connections, and above all I’m actually really happy as much as 85% of the time. I just kind of thought life was going to be a little more than this.



Days and weeks have started flying by and running together to the point that I’m having trouble telling my memories apart. And I’m not going to be a curmudgeonly 24-year-old forever. I’m scared that one day I’m going to blink and I’ll be a curmudgeonly 44-year-old who loves Wikipedia, Netflix, and being a professional homebody.



Time’ by Pink Floyd is one of the scariest songs there is – the gist of the lyrics are that if you don’t chase your dreams, they’ll get away from you and then you’re up shit creek with a wasted life, crushing regret, and, presumably, awful teeth (they were writing for an English audience, after all.)



Listening to ‘Time’ on a regular basis was what got me to Los Angeles, and it’s what keeps me writing most nights, even when I’ve been writing all day. I’m not worried about letting my dreams get away from me – even though I could probably stand to spend a little more time writing and a little less time thinking about what a cute couple Emma Stone and I would make – but I am worried about letting youthful shenanigans get away from me.



What I’ve discovered about being in my early 20s is that I’ve still got a lot of the leeway I had in my late teens – older coworkers laugh knowingly when I come to work with a hangover, and I’m constantly reminded that I’m still young enough to be making some mistakes.



I just hope that I’m not making the mistake of not making enough mistakes, you know?



Truman Capps has learned more from idle Wikipedia surfing than he did in four years of college.


On Violence


God, I love violence. 

Django Unchained is an absolutely spectacular film, but there’s a three and a half minute segment in the third act that goes beyond spectacular and becomes perfection. For those of you who have seen the movie, it’s the part where – spoiler alert! – Django kills a bunch of white people, and then rap music starts playing and he kills more white people in slow motion. For my money, the entire movie could’ve been a slow motion shootout set to rap music and I probably would’ve liked it even more than I already do.

I should point out that the climactic shootout in a Quentin Tarantino movie was – spoiler alert! – incredibly violent. Bullets whistle in like artillery shells and fountains of bright red cherry puree erupt from white trash thugs’ chests and faces and spray all over walls that had been white once. If you’re on the fence about seeing the movie, let me assure you that you definitely get your money’s worth in the blood department (and also the racial slur department).

This scene is so beautifully shot, choreographed, acted, edited, and mixed that I searched for it on YouTube every day until last week, when I found it in HD, uploaded from a torrent. I saved the video before it got taken down, and I watch it a couple times a day. By my estimate, I’ve seen the same group of bearded white union stuntmen writhe and fall to the ground between 50 and 75 times now. Sometimes I plug in my headphones and watch it at the office for inspiration when I’m having writer’s block.

I get a touch of writer’s block on a fairly regular basis at work, because a lot of the game trailers and commercials I’m writing start to run together. I’ve written countless gunfights, stabbings, stakings, car crashes, acts of terror, and maybe two dozen drafts of scripts where the game’s protagonist watches as his family is brutally murdered – and since this is a popular gaming trope, I’ve done it for more than one franchise. Some days it seems like every trailer I write ends with, “SMASH CUT from the exploding bodies to a tightly edited MONTAGE OF GAME FOOTAGE.”

When I get home, I usually unwind from a day of writing about video games by playing video games. Recently I’ve been playing a really wonderful strategy game called XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where you command a squad of heavily armed special forces soldiers fighting bloodthirsty aliens who will rip your men to pieces if you’re not careful. Before that I was taking another run through Fallout: New Vegas, where you’re a post apocalyptic errand boy on a mission to find the man who shot you and left you for dead – a mission you accomplish by shooting a whole lot of squishy, blood filled people.

When you’re talking about violence in the media, you’re talking about my bread and butter. I’ve earned a lot of paychecks contributing to violence in the media, then turned around and used those paychecks to buy violent media to consume for myself. For better or for worse, I live, breathe, and eat violence in the media – and if my knowledge of biology serves, I suppose I probably crap violence in the media as well.

So my reaction to the president’s Executive Order #14 regarding gun violence - Conduct research on the causes and prevention of gun violence, including links between video games, media images, and violence – is, “About time! Let me know what you find out, bro; I’ll be in here watching that one scene from Django Unchained.”

The NRA seems to be of the opinion that it’s our violent media and not our readily available firearms at the source of our epidemic of gun violence, and that we should be controlling the media more tightly, not guns – an unexpected position from a lobbying organization whose board of directors is stacked with firearm manufacturers.

While I don’t support the censorship of violent media – I can’t quite remember my reasoning, but it had something to do with the Constitution and our fundamental right as Americans to free expression – I’m all in favor of research on the relationship between violence and the media. Because the more research we conduct, the more evidence there will be that there is little to no relationship between violent media and violence in society, and I can point to that research when people give me shit for watching the Django Unchained scene for the 76th time.

Writing about a person getting shot, watching a person get shot in a movie, or shooting a person in a video game does not make you more likely to go out and kill someone – just ask Japan, where everything from their films to their cartoons to their pornography is almost nauseatingly violent and their rates of homicide and attempted homicide are the second lowest in the world.

It’s true that many spree shooters played violent games and watched violent movies, but it’s also true that 100% of spree shooters have severe mental illnesses. Between Call of Duty and paranoid schizophrenia, I’d say schizophrenia is what makes you go shoot a bunch of people and Call of Duty is a hobby which happens to simulate shooting a bunch of people. 

That said, since a big part of mental illness is the inability to separate fantasy from reality, it would probably be helpful to keep the mentally ill away from violent media. So if you’ve got any ideas on how to completely isolate a person from violent movies, TV shows, and video games in the Information Age, please let me know.  Because from where I’m sitting, it seems like the only action more futile than trying to keep crazy people from getting guns in America is trying to keep them from seeing images of people using guns. 

Truman Capps likes the way you die, boy.

She's Not There


Not to speak ill of the dead, but I'd hit that.

Sometime in the past few years, everybody finally took Huey Lewis seriously and decided that it actually is hip to be square. That explains the nerd chic garbage that you see all over pop culture these days – gorgeous hipsters wearing ugly glasses for no reason, Star Wars-themed Adidas for $160 a pair, and The Big Bang Theory are ample evidence that formerly nerdy pursuits have now been repackaged as ‘cool’ for the in crowd. So no, I wasn’t that surprised when a star quarterback and Heisman candidate turned out to have an imaginary girlfriend who went to another school, because that’s Nerd 101 right there.    

I mean, shit, who didn’t have a fake girlfriend in another state at some point during school? In sixth grade I practically had a harem of made up girlfriends scattered all over the country – it was like a really pathetic version of Area Codes. Go ahead and laugh; I was a prissy, effeminate 12 year old and I had to do everything in my power so people wouldn’t think I was gay. Besides, all the other nerds were doing it too.

Sure, it was probably wrong of me to lie for all those years, but I had a large number of traditionally gay tendencies that I had to cover for – if anything, pretending to have a girlfriend in New Hampshire was just leveling the playing field.

As the resident expert on fake girlfriends, though, Manti Te’o made some choices that I found confusing.

When you invent a girlfriend, the sky is the limit. You can literally have any woman imaginable. He could’ve been going out with fake Scarlet Johansson, but instead he settled for a bookish, imaginary Stanford student named ‘Lennay’ with imaginary leukemia.

It’s your imagination, dude – why concoct a lie that’s more depressing than real life? He invented a fake girl and then gave her fake brain cancer – I’d hate to see this guy play Dungeons and Dragons.

“My character is a level one elf, but he can’t run very fast because he was born with one leg slightly shorter than the other, and he’s got crippling anxiety and self-doubt because his mother was addicted to elf crack and was always really neglectful and verbally abusive.”

Maybe Manti is just more sensitive than I am – when I was making up features for my imaginary girlfriends, it was usually just that they had big boobs. To her credit, I’m sure Manti Te’o’s imaginary girlfriend probably had a really unique imaginary perspective on her imaginary life as a result of her tragic imaginary disease.

Come to think of it, Manti may have completely changed the fake girlfriend game. By giving his nonexistent boo a life threatening illness, he had an easy alibi in case things ever got out of hand – the second people started asking for him to call his girlfriend and put her on speakerphone or invited her to the 6th grade dance, she could just die and that would be the end of it!

Because that’s the downside to having an imaginary girlfriend – sooner or later, the 8th graders who call you a fag in the locker room every day are going to start demanding proof, and that’s really hard to provide. 8th graders won’t just believe a single grainy picture of a girl that you discreetly pulled off the Internet – they want facts that can be verified in order to determine whether what they’re hearing is true or false.

Fortunately for Manti Te’o, he wasn’t dealing with a group of hormonal 14 year old boys – he was dealing with every major news organization in the United States, and they are significantly less adept at separating truth from fiction. If there had been 14 year old boys in the White House Press Corps, we never would have gone to Iraq.

Lennay Kekua might just be the most successful fake girlfriend of all time, actually – because whenever somebody creates a fake long distance girlfriend, the absolute best case scenario is that everybody buys it hook line and sinker and is so captivated by your imaginary fairytale romance that it practically becomes folklore. Hell, CBS even went so far as to quote her on the air before the BCS National Championship – lest we forget, this is a totally imaginary person who never existed and a major news network ran a quote from her in primetime. So many people had so much blind faith in her existence that she may as well have been God.

Of course, all that success and attention just meant that Manti and Lennay had that much further to fall when the truth came out. And that’s where our experiences differ – no 6th grader ever invented a girlfriend so compelling that the entire nation fell in love with her and then had to explain himself once she turned out to be fake.

The worst case scenario in middle school was that people would figure out your girlfriend was fake and then they’d go right on back to calling you a fag. Because even they sort of understood that it was just middle school, and this was a thing that middle schoolers did.

Manti, though, is significantly older than a middle schooler, and now the entire country knows that he essentially spent the last few months playing with an imaginary friend. In the coming weeks and months, he’s going to have to answer a lot of awkward questions about why he did it. And it’s going to be awkward, because he made up a girlfriend for basically the same reasons any middle schooler would:

1)   He, a devout Mormon bachelor, wanted to deflect any rumors that he was gay, so he created a fake girlfriend with the help of his close male friend, and/or…
2)   …he just wanted some attention from his peers, and maybe the Heisman Committee.

Truman Capps is pretty sure nobody ever believed him when he said he had a girlfriend at another school – even in high school when he actually DID have a girlfriend at another school.

Getting Shot


 I think Mississippi is doing so well because everybody is dying of type 2 diabetes and heart disease before they can get sick with the flu.

On the ominous map charting how many states in America are experiencing severe flu activity, the only states where people aren’t keeling over in the streets and flooding emergency rooms are Mississippi and California. Take a good look, folks – this is the first and probably last time Mississippi will ever be healthier than the rest of the country.

To a germophobe such as myself, living in one of the only flu free states is a mixed bag of emotions. On the one hand, for the first time in my life I have this bizarre feeling of pride in being a California resident – our state’s low rate of flu infection means that thousands of Californians will live long enough to be killed in car accidents caused by other Californians’ terrible driving.

On the other hand, though, I feel sort of like I’m standing on the roof of that mall in Dawn of the Dead, looking at the parking lot full of zombies. Sure, things may be okay for us now, but sooner or later all that mess is going to find its way in, and then we’re all fucked.

The logical solution, of course, is to get a flu shot. Conditions are perfect right now – there’s no shortage of flu shots in California, and once administered the shot takes about two weeks to reach full effectiveness, which is fine because right now everyone around me is healthy. In two or three weeks, they may all be walking biohazards, but at that point the flu shot would have me covered.

The reason I’m not getting a flu shot is because I’ve got a lot of ethical issues about the process. Namely, I think it’s unethical to jam a really pointy piece of metal into my skin and shoot liquid into my blood, because that’s painful, terrifying, and gross. Jesus, just writing about it made me start sweating.

Modern medicine is great, don’t get me wrong – given a choice between a pill made by scientists or some naturopathic remedy you can only get from a kiosk at Whole Foods, I’ll take the pill every time. Science gave us antibiotics, nature gave us bears; who would you trust more? 

All I’m saying is, last year a dude jumped out of a gondola at the edge of space, fell 26 miles, broke the sound barrier, and survived – and this whole thing was bankrolled by a company that sells energy drinks. Meanwhile, we still haven’t found a better way to administer lifesaving drugs than stabbing people with needles?

On Star Trek: Enterprise, the doctor just had a little machine that he’d press into peoples’ necks to give them medicine. It didn’t matter what was wrong with you, either – every treatment involved getting tapped on the neck with this handheld box, whether you had a headache, lung cancer, or space gonorrhea. I know it was just a TV show – and a terrible TV show at that – but why can’t we do it that way? I want to get my medicine in the least pointy way possible. 

Humanity developing a pain-free method to deliver drugs to the bloodstream is far more likely than me developing a pair of testicles of a reasonable size and being able to handle five seconds of a brief stinging sensation.

My fear of needles knows no bounds. As a child, every shot I got was preceded by weeks of dread, fear, and desperately begging my mother not to make me get it. Unfortunately, my mother was a cruel, unfeeling woman who always insisted that her son receive all of the immunizations and vaccines necessary for him to live a happy and healthy life, so I would inevitably wind up crying and hyperventilating in a doctor’s office as an impatient nurse waited with a needle.

This wasn’t just a childhood thing, either – three weeks before leaving for college I had to get a tetanus booster, and my heart rate was so high immediately after giving me the shot that the nurse made me lie down for ten minutes because she was afraid I’d pass out if I stood up.

I’m not ashamed – pretty much everybody agrees that needles are scary. I just agree really emphatically. I don’t think there’s anything unnatural or weird about not wanting a foreign object to go inside your body.* Plus, it’s reassuring to know that I never have to worry about getting addicted to heroin. 

*There’s a "that’s what she said" in there somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I go looking for it.

But at times like these, it feels like a pretty chickenshit excuse when most of the country is sick and I’m willing to risk a prolonged illness because I can’t bear the thought of a few seconds of pain. (Well, that and the fact that the closest Walgreens that’s giving out shots is in Van Nuys, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit in traffic for 20 minutes just to get poked in the arm.)

I did get a flu shot in college a few years ago, during the swine flu scare. The reason I got over my fear of needles then was because I was motivated by a larger fear – death from a pig oriented disease (which would have a certain poetic justice to it when you consider how much bacon I eat.) I’m perfectly capable of facing my fears, but only as an alternative to facing other fears. Even when I’m being brave I’m kind of a pussy. If there was a shot that made cockroaches stay away from you, I’d get it in an instant – I don’t even care if they had to inject it right into my heart like in Pulp Fiction.

Sure, I’m scared of getting a really nasty upper respiratory illness, but not enough to face my fear of getting a needle jabbed in my arm. Because no matter how painful it is, nobody ever got off work because their upper arm kind of hurts.

Truman Capps is going to read this while sobbing infectious tears if he gets the flu.

Enchantment Under The Sea


 
No matter where you are in time and space, your torso will always be nice and toasty.

I was getting The Mystery Wagon washed yesterday afternoon when my friend Denmark called.



“Truman,” he said without hesitation. “What are you doing tonight?”



I shrugged, watching a crack squad of Latino dudes scrub birdshit off my car. “I don’t have any plans yet. Video games and pornography seem pretty likely, though.”



“My friend rented out a bar in Hollywood and she’s throwing a ‘50s theme party tonight. You should come. Dress like it’s the ‘50s.”



I was already waffling. “That sounds fun, but I don’t want to have to dress up like a greaser just to get drunk. I could get drunk in my apartment for free and pretend it's any decade.”



“Just suck it up, get a costume, and come. There’s going to be industry people there. I’ll see you at 8:00.”



Costume parties are difficult for me because I have a really limited wardrobe. I don’t own sweaters, I have no old timey suits, and my only pair of slacks is at the bottom of a box somewhere in my apartment. Just once I’d like to get invited to a costume party where the theme allows me to wear something I’ve already got in the house:



Hey everybody, I’m throwing a high school speech and debate themed party! Everybody dress like you’re at a speech and debate tournament.



Who wants to come to my place Saturday night? I’m throwing a 2011 theme party. Everybody dress like it’s 2011!



It’s Louis CK night here at Shenanigans’ Tavern and Grill! No cover charge if you show up wearing jeans and a black T shirt.



On top of that, I’m not really a fan of the 1950s or the fashions of the time. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of rolling up the sleeves of a white T-shirt and shoving a pack of cigarettes up under one of them – the last thing the world needs to see right now are my upper arms. Take my word for it – it’s all weird tan lines and flab up there.



I was sifting through clothes at a thrift store and wishing that this was an ‘80s theme party when it dawned on me that I could have the best of both worlds: I could dress as Marty McFly from Back To The Future.



“Oh, aren’t you clever?” I muttered to myself in basically the creepiest way possible.



To carry the whole thing off I needed a puffy red vest like the one Michael J. Fox wore in the film. After a look around the thrift store I was able to find a puffy red jacket, and I opted to just buy it and cut the sleeves off, because when the chips are down I’d much rather ruin a perfectly good piece of clothing than spend any extra time shopping.



At home I began haphazardly cutting the sleeves off of the jacket, which I immediately discovered was full of some sort of imitation goosedown that promptly filled my room like an impossible-to-vacuum snowstorm.



Oh, that’s cool, my conscience said. You’re just ruining a perfectly good down jacket so you can be a clever asshole at a party. I’m sure there aren’t any cold homeless people would’ve wanted that.



By the time the deed was done, my room looked like the aftermath of some sort of goose-on-goose fight club. Somewhat surprisingly, though, the jacket now looked one hell of a lot like Marty’s vest. It’s not often that I try something ambitious and succeed – usually I either fail or give up at the first sign of trouble.



I quickly pinned the frayed edges out of view and modeled the vest for myself in the mirror.



The most depressing thing about the phone mirror shot is the loneliness of it all - not only do you not have a real camera, but you don't even have a friend to take your picture for you.



Combined with a white shirt I’d also picked up at the thrift store it looked pretty good, but I was missing the denim jacket Marty wore in the movie. I’m a stickler for details, and I immediately became paranoid that without the denim jacket nobody would ‘get it’ and would assume that I was just some weird puffy vest-wearing guy who showed up without a costume.



It was already 7:40, so my options for denim jackets were limited. I Googled up the nearest Goodwill and called to see if they were still open.



“Yes,” the polite Hispanic woman on the other end said. “But we close in 20 minutes.”



I ran down to The Mystery Wagon, still wearing the vest and shirt, and hit the road as fast as I legally could, cursing every red light and anxiously watching the clock. With less than ten minutes to spare I arrived at Goodwill and pulled into the first vacant parking spot I could find, then sprinted across the vast parking lot to the front doors.



Holy shit. I realized as I ran. You’re dressed as Marty McFly, racing against the clock, running around a mall parking lot in the middle of the night. You don’t need the denim jacket – you already are Marty!



And that was a lucky thing, too, because after all that effort the closest thing Goodwill had to a denim jacket was a women’s denim hoodie, which I almost bought just so I could set it on fire.



I hopped on the Metro and walked the four blocks from the station to the bar, realizing halfway there that wearing red after dark in East Hollywood probably wasn’t a wise move. I crossed my fingers that any nearby gangbangers were cinephiles.



The party turned out to be pretty fun – poodle-skirt clad girls generally didn’t get my costume, but the various Fonzies and Buddy Hollies thought it was pretty funny. For awhile, it was all drinking, laughter, and good wholesome ‘50s fun.*



*Interestingly enough, even though there were probably a hundred people there, none of them were black. I guess black people don’t have as much to be nostalgic about from that time period…



I was talking to Denmark (wearing a cardigan and taped up nerd glasses) when his eyes focused on something behind me and he cracked up. I turned just in time to watch another Marty McFly walk into the bar. We locked eyes, potentially destroying the entire spacetime continuum.



Great Scott.



He was too short and had black hair. His vest was a real vest – not a mutilated jacket – but it wasn’t puffy at all. But the motherfucker was wearing a denim jacket.



Before we could say anything, a girl spotted him and shouted, “Hey, it’s Marty McFly!”



She and her friends all squealed and crowded around him, asking for pictures, and I just kept drinking. 

Truman Capps will revive this costume when he's rich enough to afford a DeLorean. 


The Biggest Douche In The Universe

-->
"I regret that I have but 14 collars to pop for my country."


In an increasingly cloistered and withdrawn society, Craigslist is the one great equalizer – it’s basically the largest and most public means by which you can invite a complete stranger into your home to buy your couch for $50, or be filmed having sex with two fat chicks for $50.



Craigslist gives you the opportunity to meet people you’d never even come close to meeting in your day-to-day life by stripping personality and social status away and reducing everybody to what they’re buying or selling – I wouldn’t ordinarily hang out with a couple of obese chain smoking Mexican dudes I’ve never met before, but if they’re going to sell me a minifridge for $80 cash I’ll totally drive to their house. It’s proof that capitalism really can bring people together.



My roommate Tim and I are currently in the market for a new roommate, so we’ve posted about our apartment on Craigslist and gotten a fairly healthy response. Near the middle of last week a seemingly normal guy named Neil contacted us because he was interested in looking at the room, and we invited him to come by for a tour on Friday. Little did Tim and I know that Neil was, in fact, The Biggest Douche In The Universe.



After spending ten minutes on the phone coaching him on how to find our apartment, he texted that he’d arrived and I went to the door to let him in. Stepping out onto the walkway leading to my complex’s stairwell, I laid eyes on Neil for the first time – a moment I’ll never forget.



I couldn’t tell if he’d bought a pair of acid wash jeans and disheveled them himself, if they were a normal pair of jeans that were just so disheveled that they looked acid washed, or if he’d made some kind of special order at Fred Segal for a pair of heavily disheveled, acid wash Wranglers.



He’d popped the collar on his sport coat and the skinny tie around his neck was knotted loosely, falling nonchalantly across his flannel shirt. He’d used approximately a quart of Pomade to grease his dirty blonde hair into a faux hawk, and he glided up to me on a noxious cloud of Old Spice, his blinding white smile contrasting his artificially orange skin.



“Hoo-wee!” He grinned, extending a massive hand with sausagelike fingers. “It is cold out here!”



What I wanted to say: Listen, chucklefuck, it’s 53 degrees right now. Where I come from, we break out the sombreros and cabana shorts and start making rum drinks with fruit in them when it’s 53 degrees.



What I actually said: “Sure is! Hi there, I’m Truman.”



I ushered him in as he explained to me that he was Neil, Biggest Douche In The Universe. He met Tim, and we showed him around the apartment as he explained to us about how he was launching his own cell phone technology company, and their ‘top secret’ product that was about to go global was going to completely revolutionize the industry and make him rich – which explains why he was looking for a rent-controlled room in the San Fernando Valley.



I had started steaming some broccoli over rice for dinner just before he arrived, and as he walked into the kitchen he stopped, sniffed the air, and grinned.



“Okay,” he said. “Now be honest: Which one of you farted? Did one of you fart?”



I pointed to the steam rising from my rice cooker. “That’s broccoli. That’s what broccoli smells like.” Unlike you, I don’t subsist on a diet of Red Bull and cocaine.



Tim and I showed him the room and explained about rent, utilities, Internet, etc. As we wrapped up, Neil nodded with a cocksure grin, surveying our apartment, and let loose with this gem:



“Yeah… So I’m thinking of scoring some OC ass tonight.”



Tim and I glanced at one another in a moment of confusion. Were we having a simultaneous stroke, or did this guy just segue from ‘the laundry room is downstairs on the left’ to ‘I was thinking of driving 50 miles to Orange County to try and get laid’?



“Oh, are you?” I said, for lack of any better response. Oh, you get your ass in Orange County? I prefer San Bernardino ass, myself. Helluva drive, but you can’t beat that quality!



“Yeah,” he said, bobbing his head proudly. “I’m just getting sick of these stuck up LA bitches, you know? They’re all uptight and think they know shit, but they’re just boring.”



“I’ve noticed that about LA bitches.” I said, in hopes of drawing this quote factory out as far as I could.



“Chicks in OC are more laid back. I mean, all there is to do down there is surf and suck cock anyway, right?”



He burst out laughing and I joined in. “Totally! That’s all I did last time I was down there.”



As Tim desperately tried to wind the conversation down to get this piece of shit out of our home, I tried to imagine the sorts of passive aggressive notes I’d have to leave for Neil if he moved in.



Neil – PLEASE wipe off the coffee table after you and your friends do lines. IT’S NOT THAT DIFFICULT. – Truman



That bail bondsman called when I was trying to take a nap. PLEASE PAY HIM so he’ll stop calling us. Please and thank you, Neil. – Truman



Neil,
Woke up this morning to find a dumpy blonde girl with hair extensions crying in our kitchen. Did you really tell her you were Channing Tatum’s manager!? Her name is Tricia and the way she tells it her father was never really there for her back when she was growing up in Wyoming. Anyway, she didn’t have a ride home and you didn’t pick up the phone so I had to give her a ride back to Irvine. Protip: Abandoning a one-night stand in the morning doesn’t work so well when you do it AT YOUR OWN APARTMENT.

-Truman
PS: Cocaine. Coffee table. How many times do I need to remind you!?!



“Thanks for your time, bud.” He said as we trekked up the hall to the door. “Lemmie know when you make a decision, alright?”



“Sure! Will do. Goodnight, Neil!” Although I’ll level with you: I’m really hesitant to put myself in a living situation where I’ll feel forced to intervene in attempted date rape on a regular basis.



I shook his gargantuan hand again and watched as he walked out the door and down the stairwell toward his car. Once he was as far from me as possible, I stepped out onto the walkway and looked down at him.



“Oh!” I said, as loud as I could. “And good luck with the Orange County ass!”



Neil chuckled nervously, ducked into his car, and drove out of my life forever.

Truman Capps readily admits that broccoli does have a rather farty odor when you steam it. 

BREAKING: NRA's Wayne LaPierre Holds Second Conference


NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre is the author of several books on gun ownership, including 'Chicken Soup For The Depleted Uranium, Armor Piercing Soul' and 'Are You There, Glock? It's Me, Wayne.'


WASHINGTON D.C. – National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre called an impromptu press conference earlier today in the wake of his widely condemned comments on Friday, in which he suggested that the only way to adequately protect our nation’s students would be to place armed guards in every school in America.

LaPierre took the stage at the NRA’s national headquarters in Washington D.C. shortly after 2:00 PM on Sunday, his blazer bulging oddly with what analysts have confirmed were between three and eighteen concealed handguns. Following his opening remarks, he began by addressing the controversy surrounding his statements on Friday.

“We at the NRA are well aware that there has been some criticism of our Friday press conference. I’ve heard it suggested that our call for Congress to create an army of armed guards to defend every school in America – at a cost of approximately $18 billion – was ‘ill timed’, ‘unproductive’, or a ‘public relations disaster’.

“However, we will not be swayed by this smear campaign perpetuated by liberal rags like the New York Post, which on Saturday called me the ‘craziest man on Earth.’

“Not only is this a baseless personal attack, but it’s also woefully inaccurate – as we stated on Friday, the craziest man on Earth is currently arming himself and planning an attack on one of our nation’s many defenseless elementary schools at this very moment, and could strike at any time.

“To the owner of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch, I ask you: Would the craziest man on Earth have a gun this awesome?”

At this point in the conference, Mr. LaPierre reached beneath his podium and produced a gold-plated AR-15 assault rifle – the same model that has been selling in record numbers since the NRA’s Friday conference – which he then posed with for the reporters’ cameras.

He then stepped briefly off the stage and handed it to a Washington Post correspondent in the front row, where he reportedly said, “Here, pass her around so everybody can get a look. I call her ‘Sasha.’ She’s loaded, so you’ll want to keep the safety on.”

Once back at the podium, LaPierre resumed his remarks as reporters began to pass the gun around the room.  

“That being said, we at the NRA have listened to your comments, although we may have misheard a few because we’ve all been firing our guns pretty much nonstop since 9/11 and that can get pretty noisy. After some careful consideration, we’ve decided that our proposal for armed security guards in all of America’s schools was, perhaps, somewhat ill-thought out. To that end, we’ve devised a new, vastly more feasible strategy to defend our children.

“It’s a well known fact that there are currently roughly 300 million guns in circulation in the United States,” LaPierre continued, his face flushing and voice quavering slightly on the words ‘300 million guns’. “These figures are the shame of a nation. With our infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, we are more than capable of doubling that number – and why haven’t we?

“It is the stated position of the National Rifle Association that we cannot stop gun crimes by disarming our citizens and leaving them defenseless, but instead giving all Americans the means to defend themselves against armed criminals. The solution is not fewer guns, but more guns. So in the wake of this tragedy, it’s time to get serious.

“We hereby call on Congress to fund American gun manufacturers so they can immediately begin wholesale, year-round, 24 hour a day manufacture of firearms, to be distributed freely among the American public. By our own estimates, this legislation could bring the number of firearms circulating in the United States up to approximately 900 million, or…”

Mr. LaPierre, appearing flustered, paused for a moment to loosen his tie and dab perspiration from his forehead. “Or, uh… Three guns for every American.” He then exhaled slowly and bit his lip. “Oh. Oh my.” At this, Mr. LaPierre bowed his head and spent the next 20 seconds breathing heavily, seemingly in an attempt to compose himself.

“While these numbers are undeniably reassuring and quite stimulating,” LaPierre continued, “we believe that this is only the first step toward securing our children, who at this very moment are being targeted by thousands of deranged psychopaths who are probably way worse than Adam Lanza.

“Ultimately, if our government is truly concerned with the well being of its citizens, it should take every step to protect them by dedicating 100 percent of our gross domestic product to firearm manufacture and production.”

LaPierre used his tie to wipe more sweat from his brow as he continued. “Were we to start down this path tomorrow, by 2020 we could achieve a total of…” He closed his eyes and grunted softly. “1.6 trillion guns in circulation in the United States.”

At this point, Mr. LaPierre began to speak more quickly, the pitch of his voice rising desperately, his hands tightly gripping the edges of his podium, knuckles turning white.

“This is an unprecedented quantity of firearms, the likes of which the world has never seen. So, so many guns.” He swallowed heavily. “I mean, we couldn’t… There’s no way we could even store them all. All those guns.”

LaPierre, now red in the face, stripped off his tie and tore open the collar of his shirt with a savage grunt. “Oh, yeah.

“By our calculations, every square foot of dry land in America would be covered in a thick layer of… Guns. This will act as a physical deterrent to our nation’s many psychopaths, because now, if they want to come after our kids, they’ll have to… Have to…”

LaPierre hung his head and squeezed his eyes tightly closed, all but whimpering his next words: “If they want to come after our kids, they’ll have to swim through an ocean of guns!

Breathing heavily now, Mr. LaPierre took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, trying to draw together some composure before issuing his closing remarks.

“We at the NRA stand by this plan, because we believe that nothing is more important than the well being of our nation’s children – that is, besides literally unlimited access to as many guns as possible.

“I am aware that this new plan may also draw ire from the spineless liberal minority. And to them, I say this:

“I am not out of touch, I am not insensitive, and I am not crazy. I am merely a loyal American who believes in defending the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment, which grants me the right to own guns.

“To carry those guns on my person.

“And to walk naked through my gun cellar in the middle of the night, rubbing my guns sensually along the shaft of my erect penis.”

At this, Mr. LaPierre abruptly left the stage, snatched his gold AR-15 from the hands of an Associated Press photographer, and stormed out of the building. 

At press time, LaPierre was last seen hurrying into a room at a nearby Motel 6, his semiautomatic rifle cradled lovingly in his arms.  

Truman Capps quite honestly hopes Wayne LaPierre gets Lou Gehrig's Disease. 

Total Committment


"Mandrake, I suppose it never occurred to you, that while we are chatting here so enjoyably, a decision is being made by the President and the Joint Chiefs in the War Room at the Pentagon. And when they realize that there is absolutely no possibility of being able to recall the Wing, there will be only one course of action open: Total commitment."

On Thursday night I found out that one of the victims in the Clackamas Town Center shooting was a woman who I had known a few years ago. On Friday I found out about the Connecticut massacre five minutes before the company Christmas party and holiday cookie decorating contest. Today I’m lying in bed reading reports of a murder suicide in Vegas, a North Carolina double shooting, simultaneous shootings at both a trailer park and a hospital in Alabama, and a shooting in a mall parking lot here in LA, and I’m giving some thought to buying a gun.

In the rollicking nuclear holocaust comedy Dr. Strangelove, a deranged American general, dissatisfied with the stalemate of the Cold War, orders his bomber wing to advance into Russia and attack several targets with their nuclear payloads. He does this because once the US government realizes that they can’t recall his bombers, their only option will be “total commitment” – ordering a sneak attack against Russian targets to prevent a full scale nuclear war. He’s essentially forcing the government’s hand: Now that some American bombers are going to attack Russia, the only option, as unpleasant as it may be, is for them to order all of their bombers to attack Russia to knock out their nuclear capabilities and protect as many Americans as possible.

There’s a fascinating article by Jeff Goldberg in The Atlantic that I read about a day before I discovered my connection to Clackamas and two days before Connecticut. The gist of the article is that while gun control is great in theory, implementing more restrictive gun control measures now is pointless, as there’s an estimated 300 million guns floating around in a country of 315 million people.

Goldberg points out that violent crime rates in America are at a 40 year low while there are a record number of concealed carry permit holders – eight million, and that’s not counting residents in Vermont, Wyoming, Alaska, Arizona, and parts of Montana who don’t need permits to carry guns. On a state-by-state basis, gun crime holds steady both before and after the passage of concealed carry legislation. On average, concealed carry permit holders commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population. Several near massacres have been averted thanks to other gun owners who killed or incapacitated the attacker.

With nearly a 1:1 ratio of guns to people in this country, we need to come to grips with the fact that anyone who wants a gun can get one and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. 40% of legally purchased firearms are bought at gun shows, where there’s no need for a background check or a waiting period. Or you can buy or steal one from one of the 47% of Americans who own guns.

So we can’t stop crazy people from getting guns. Can we stop crazy people from being crazy?

In all likelihood, no. Due to budget cuts, state-run mental hospitals have been shut down, and America’s three largest treatment centers are in county jails in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. If you’re mentally ill and can’t afford treatment, your best option is prison – and when I say ‘best’, I mean ‘better than murder suicide.’

The answer, of course, is for the government to provide affordable mental health care to citizens, which isn’t going to happen because the people who pitch a hissy fit whenever somebody suggests in any way limiting access to firearms are the same people who pitch a hissy fit whenever somebody suggests in any way increasing access to affordable healthcare.

Americans are more concerned with the ability to own guns than their own physical and mental well being. They’re more concerned with their Second Amendment right to guns than they are with their First Amendment right to free speech – the uproar about Bob Costas’ gun control comments seemed far larger and louder than the one about the National Defense Authorization Act and its provisions for indefinite detention of American citizens.

I wrote about gun control a few massacres ago, in July. At the time, I said, “I have absolutely no desire to own [a gun] myself, because I don’t see the point in owning a gun when crime rates have been in free fall since 1991.”

I’ve changed my mind: I do see the point in owning a gun.

Total commitment.

The government will be unable to pass any meaningful gun control legislation, and even if it does it can’t prevent violence.

The government won’t be able to provide adequate mental healthcare to citizens because the one thing people hate more than dead women and children is paying a marginally higher tax rate to provide social services to the needy, some of whom might not be white.

The media won’t stop saturation-level coverage of massacres, plastering photos of the shooter across the airwaves, reading excerpts from his manifesto, and leading every story with the killer’s name and body count, effectively turning each shooter into a role model for other potentially violent sociopaths with access to guns.

I don’t want to own a gun. I don’t want to carry a gun. But I really don’t want to get shot at the supermarket because of our society’s current combination of media hype, nonexistent mental health services, and easily accessible firearms.

Right now, I feel as though total commitment is our only option.

PSYch


It's official: Tuxedo shirts are in again!


As a general rule, I try to avoid viral videos much in the same way I try to avoid actual viruses. The logic here doesn’t come from some hipstery refusal to participate in something that everybody else on the Internet is participating in, but rather a form of self-defense against everybody else’s fandom. Bear with me, here.

Let’s say that you’re like me, and you spend most of your day bouncing around between Reddit, Facebook, The Huffington Post, and various other news/content sources instead of working. You see a post about some awesome new music video that’s starting to go viral, and you watch it and enjoy it heartily – not only is the video well executed, but the song is catchy as hell.

Over the coming weeks, though, the video’s popularity grows and you begin to see it more and more – first all of your friends post it on Facebook, and then their friends, and then your parents email it to you wondering if you’ve seen it yet. Then comes the inevitable onslaught of parody videos and flashmobs, and by the time it’s all over you’ve seen the damn video and heard the damn song so many times that any enjoyment you’d ever derived from it is gone, replaced by a cold, weary, all encompassing hatred.

Except none of that happens, because if you’re really like me, you see the post about some awesome new music video that’s starting to go viral and you skip it entirely, and instead go to WorldStarHipHop.com to watch videos of poor people beating the shit out of each other on buses. I generally avoid all contact with a viral video until months later, once its popularity begins to wane. At that point, I can enjoy it without the accompanying phenomena to make me sick of it.

To that end, have you guys heard of that Gangnam Style video!? I just watched it last week, and it’s awesome! He dances like a horse!

I have a lot of respect for natural showmen (and showwomen – fuck it, showpeople), because that ability to get up and act outlandish in front of a huge crowd is something I could never do. So naturally, I became an immediate fan of PSY, the Korean popstar responsible for Gangnam Style.

Forget the fact that he seems to be a really friendly, humble, unassuming dude despite being an international superstar - after thousands of years of human civilization, the guy up and invents a dance move that nobody has ever done before. I mean, come on – how could you not love the guy?

As it turns out, it’s actually quite easy to not love PSY. In fact, a huge chunk of the conservative echo chamber outright hates him. And no, it’s not just because he engaged in friendly interactions with President Obama at a recent holiday concert in Washington DC – it’s because PSY apparently sang a couple of anti-American songs at a concert in South Korea back in 2004.

It’s just typical conservative bullshit as always – they’re probably just taking a couple of PSY’s edgier old lyrics out of context and blowing them way out of proportion so they can slam Obama for associating with him. I mean, apparently PSY didn’t even write the controversial lyrics he sang – he was just doing a cover of another band’s song! And he even apologized! Look:

“While I'm grateful for the freedom to express one's self, I've learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I'm deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted. I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words.
While it's important that we express our opinions, I deeply regret the inflammatory and inappropriate language I used to do so."

God, classic PSY – full of subdued, classy eloquence. Aw, shucks – since we know he’s sorry anyway, let’s take a look at those controversial lyrics, just to see how lame this whole hullaballoo is!

‘Dear American’, by N.EX.T.
All those fucking Yankees been torturing Iraqi captives and
All those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers
Kill them all slowly, kill them all painfully


Fox Nation: 1, Hair Guy: 0.

In PSY’s defense, this was in 2004. It was way easier to hate America in 2004. I kind of hated America in 2004. We’d just reelected the same incompetent shitslice to our highest office and were basically scratching our heads as Iraq turned into Cannibal Holocaust. And the South Koreans had even more to be pissed about – a year or so before that performance, a US military truck ran over two South Korean teenagers and the military court let the drivers off scot free.

But at the same time, crap, dude! That’s basically the worst possible thing you could say! If Khalid Sheik Mohammad had been at that concert he probably would’ve been up front in the mosh pit grinding on Fred Phelps. You couldn’t have thought of a better way to alienate 350 million potential fans if you’d tried.

I have a hard time knowing how to feel about this. I used to hate America a little. PSY used to hate America a lot. Now I love America a lot, and PSY presumably loves it less than I do but at least enough to feel bad about singing a song about torturing American children to death. I guess I still love PSY.

I don’t doubt that PSY is sorry for saying what he did – hell, I bet you $35 that even if you presented him with an eight year old American girl when he was onstage saying that stuff he still wouldn’t have tortured her to death. That said, knowing that the guy frolicking around Seoul on an imaginary horse was onstage calling for the deaths of the fucking Yankees’ daughters and wives a few years ago kind of detracts from the innocent, carefree fun of Gangnam Style.

Despite my best laid plans, Gangnam Style has been kind of ruined. But at least it wasn’t ruined by overexposure – it was ruined by the guy who created it. PSY giveth, and PSY taketh away.

Truman Capps still hasn't listened to Call Me Maybe all the way through.

War On Christmas


Keep in mind, this guy says Christianity isn't a religion.

Here in LA, the temperatures have dropped all the way to the mid 60s, families are going to vacant lots and shelling out $100 or more for long dead Douglas Firs imported from Oregon, and it’s fully possible to spend an entire day driving around a mall parking lot in search of a parking space. That can mean only one thing – the holidays have arrived, which means my atheist brethren and I must resume our War On Christmas.

For the past few years now, right wing butthurt over a perceived ‘War on Christmas’ is as much a part of the holidays as cable reruns of Elf or trying to figure out what the fuck Kwanzaa is. If you ask me, though, a war that only happens one month out of the year isn’t really a war. It’s more of an annual skirmish or a yearly brouhaha, and I wish Fox News would pick up on that because I really want to hear Bill O’Reilly say ‘brouhaha.’

Recently, an old Christmas essay written by Ben Stein has started to pop up again in email forwards and on some of my conservative friends’ Facebook pages. The thesis of the essay, in keeping with the Christmas spirit of love and joy, is that atheists like me are responsible for every single terrible thing that has happened to America in the last 40 years:

Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her 'How could God let something like this happen?' (regarding Hurricane Katrina).. Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, 'I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?'

In light of recent events... terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said okay.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

So here’s what Ben Stein thinks is wrong with America: Freedom of religion and not enough child abuse. Merry Christmas, everybody!

We have ‘In God We Trust’ printed on our money, public officials are sworn in with their hand on a Bible, all of our presidents have been Christian, and approximately 85% of Congress is Protestant, Catholic, or Mormon, but Ben Stein thinks that because there is some popular support for an increasingly secular government in our country, God has reneged on the ‘unconditional love’ thing and completely forsaken us to deal with terrorists, hurricanes, and Honey Boo-Boo.

Here’s a question for you, Christians: If you really think God is such a petty, passive-aggressive douchebag, why do you worship him? Do you actually believe that the all loving deity who created the entire universe is going to get his jimmies rustled by the fact that some Americans don’t want Him to be a part of their government?

It’s not like secular government is some kind of newfangled atheist conspiracy – trust me, I’m on all the atheist conspiracy mailing lists and the separation of church and state wasn’t one of our ideas. Our Christian founding fathers put that stuff in the Constitution, and they believed in it so strongly that they put it right at the top of the page, directly above that oh-so-popular part that says you get to have guns.

What’s more, Ben Stein’s logic completely ignores the fact that terrible things have been happening in this country for as long as it’s been here, regardless of our religious makeup.

Throughout the 19th century there was a widespread series of religious revivals known as the Second and Third Great Awakening, which championed Protestant morality and ideals. Church membership surged, temperance leagues were founded, and Christians preached openly against sin and religious skepticism.  

In this same period of time, a foreign power invaded the United States and burned down the White House, there was a year with no summer, and the common use of a somewhat controversial business practice known as slavery.

Hell, let’s look at more recent disasters. George W. Bush was about as Christian a president as we’ve ever had – he opposed marriage equality, abortion rights, and stem cell research on religious grounds, and 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Recession all still happened on his watch.

I’m not trying to use any of these tragedies to prove that Christians are somehow amoral or that God isn’t real; I’m just saying that terrible things happen regardless of whether you say ‘happy holidays’ or ‘merry Christmas.’

And for the record – even though I say this every year – I love Christmas. It’s an inherently awesome holiday no matter what you believe in. It’s a cheerful, festive time where you get to see your family (whether you want to or not) and exchange gifts with the people you love. That’s bigger than any religion.

And that’s why this annual War On Christmas bullshit really gets to me – it’s now become a new Christmas tradition to shit all over atheists like me, and my mother, and my father, and my late grandmother, and my grandfather, and three of my aunts and one of my uncles. We’re all Americans, and we all love this country to varying degrees, but there’s a sizable faction that wants to make us feel like outsiders for what we don’t believe. Christians, take note: This is what being marginalized is.

I really think that Christmas brings out the best in people – the problem is that it has to bring out the worst in people first. For the entire leadup to the holiday we’re so busy fighting over mall parking, which gifts go to whom, who sits where at the dinner table, and which religion is actively destroying Christmas that by the time we actually get to the holiday we’re so worn down from all the conflict that we love each other out of exhaustion, if nothing else.

Truman Capps gladly acknowledges that the vast majority of Christians are fine people who don’t participate in the misguided defense of Christmas, just as there are some atheists – most of them Redditors – who are actively waging war on Christmas with a withering campaign of snarky Facebook posts and Neil DeGrasse Tyson quotes.

Decadence


Accidentally finding pictures of underground metal bands is one of the many joys of the Internet.

The numbers are in: As of 2011, America’s birthrate is the lowest it has ever been. Our birthrate is so low that for the first time in a long time, we’re having fewer babies than the French and the British – although that may just be because a majority of Americans have gotten so fat that nobody wants to have sex with anybody anymore, out of mutual disgust and fear of exercise.

From where I’m sitting (usually in front of my computer, due to fear of exercise), it doesn’t seem like America’s birthrate is declining, but that’s largely because most of the girls I went to high school with are apparently having some kind of contest to see who can have the most babies in the shortest amount of time. (Several girls are tied for first place with two babies apiece, but it’s still very much anyone’s game.)

The statistics, however, don’t lie. Birth rates dropped sharply with the onset of the recession, and they’ve stayed low since. As of 2011, there were only 63 births for every 1000 women of childbearing age. I don’t know how we pulled that off when we’re still one of the world leaders for teen pregnancy among industrialized nations, but somehow we did it.

When I first read this information I didn’t react all that strongly, largely because I couldn’t think of a witty thing to post about it on Facebook. But the issue of America’s ‘baby bust’ has been a subject of some discussion, most notably by Ross Douthat in a New York Times opinion column titled ‘More Babies, Please’*, wherein he laments the decline in our birthrate as the result of Western ‘decadence’ found in rich nations, wherein married couples with the stability and financial means to have a baby opt not to in favor of dedicating all that time and money to something that doesn’t habitually shit itself and require a college education.

*This was actually the rejected title for Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.

Other columnists have argued against Douthat’s point – Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic pointed out that the birthrate is tied to a number of factors that aren’t decadence, while Ann Friedman at The Diet New Yorker suggests that babies, not the lack thereof, are the real decadent move. 

Me, though? I still can’t get my head around why we’re whipping ourselves into a moral panic over the fact that people aren’t having babies. Sure, it’s important for our country’s future that the next generation be large and robust enough to take care of our whiny, entitled generation after we hit retirement age, but demonizing not having children seems like taking things a bit too far.

I never want to have children for three reasons:

1)   I love money and personal independence.
2)   I could never love something that vomited or urinated on me.
3)   Having a child is simply creating a person that you will one day have to explain 9/11 to. I don’t think I could handle that.   

Yes, my reasons for not wanting a child fit Douthat’s point completely – they all involve the words ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘money.’ Hell, it’s the very definition of the self centered worldview he’s rallying against. What I’m saying is this: If any decision you make should ever be completely self centered, shouldn’t it be the decision about whether you’re going to create a human being, spend two decades raising it, and play an integral role in its life for the rest of yours? Shouldn’t you make sure that having a baby is going to be a thing you want to do? And if you decide that you are too ‘self centered’ for a kid, isn’t it better that you figured that out before having one?

Now, I don’t know this firsthand, but I have reason to believe that having a child turns certain aspects of your day-to-day life upside down, such as all of them. Is it really such a dick move to look at the life you’ve spent 20 or 30 years building for yourself and say, “You know what? I don’t want this turned upside down. Everything is rightside up at the moment and I like it that way.”

If not having children is selfish, it’s the most victimless kind of selfishness there is. If you weigh the odds and decide that you don’t want to have a kid, you’re very selfishly not bringing a child into the world who you’re emotionally unqualified to raise, a child who, as a direct result of your shitty parenting, would probably become a terrorist or a serial killer or a Congressman or something.

We should definitely make it easier for families to have children – federally mandated paid maternity leave, anybody? – but at the same time we shouldn’t look down our noses at people who decide not to have children. To children or not to children is a personal decision from top to bottom; societal pressure shouldn’t even enter into it.

Because there’s really no reason for that pressure to be there. It’s not like every human needs to be out there fucking up a storm to perpetuate the species – there’s over seven billion of us, for Christ’s sake. At this rate, we’re in danger of perpetuating our species into extinction.

All I’m saying is, a few less babies here or there isn’t going to screw us that badly in the long run. If anything, it’ll make air travel a lot more bearable.

Truman Capps likes the idea of the Capps hair gene ending with him.

...Or No Deal




Whenever I meet an actor at a party I immediately feel a sense of overpowering relief. Normally, I do pretty badly at parties where I don’t know anyone because there’s nothing really to do except make small talk all night, and I’m almost as bad at small talk as I am at most other things that aren’t writing a blog and sleeping constantly.

It’s just kind of stressful for me to be interested in all these little tidbits about a person I really don’t know, particularly because small talk is almost never interesting. It’s one thing if the person I’m talking to is an astronaut or a professional wrestler or something, but if it’s some girl going to CSUN and studying to be a hospital administrator I can only ask so many questions about school, where she lives, and what she likes about hospitals before I’ve completely run out of things to want to know about her.

When I meet an actor, though, I’ve always got a set of talking points that I can fall back on the second there’s a dry spot in the conversation. Have you been on any auditions lately? Are you taking any classes? Have you done any commercials? Have you done any stage work? Are you in SAG? Have you ever done porn?*

*This one is usually after my third drink.

There are usually some pretty good stories to be had along this line of questioning, because struggling actors have a wide range of really bizarre and interesting experiences in their day to day working lives. What always throws me for a loop, though, is when I meet an actor from something I’ve actually seen or heard of.

Tonight, for example, I was talking to an actress at my cousin’s birthday party – and since there was no alcohol at the party I was doing an okay job of not completely embarrassing myself.

“I haven’t been acting much recently,” she explained as I loaded up on more brie and pita chips than my lactose intolerance would want me to. “I’ve been doing a lot of receptionist work since I finished my last acting gig awhile ago.”

“Oh,” I said, through brie. “What was your last gig?”

“I was one of the suitcase girls on Deal Or No Deal.”

I very nearly did a spit take with a mouthful of creamy soft rind French cheese – which would’ve been just as embarrassing as anything I could do under the influence of alcohol.

“Oh my God, that’s awesome!” I exclaimed, before asking that age old question that has stumped philosophers for generations, “What’s Howie Mandel like in person?”
I never watched Deal Or No Deal so I’m not really sure what it was about, but if the 350,000 promos I saw for it between 2006 and 2007 were any indication, it appeared to be a show where beautiful women walked around carrying metal briefcases for 22 minutes at a stretch – and one of those women lives in the apartment downstairs from my cousin’s girlfriend, apparently.*  

*What’s more, not only was she on the show, but she was one of the four suitcase models selected to be on the casing for the official Deal Or No Deal slot machine in Las Vegas!

Meeting an actor who’s been in something you’ve seen (or at least were aware of) is a lot like bumping into one of your teachers at the grocery store in elementary school. There’s a moment of cognitive dissonance, seeing the lady who made you stay in at recess because you didn’t write your name on your homework standing there trying to decide between Prego or Safeway Select™ pasta sauce.

She goes to the grocery store? But I go to the grocery store! We both have the same kind of experiences!?

Somehow I just can’t shake the impression of television that I formed when I was a child: That if you were on TV, even if it was only once, you had been absorbed into a vast and wealthy secret society that would care for you for the rest of your life. You lived in a nicer house, you drove a nicer car, you had servants, and guacamole was free at every Mexican place you went to.

I’ve been in LA for nearly a year and a half and am acquainted with quite a few people who have been on TV and struggle to pay rent on a month-to-month basis, but it still surprises me every time I meet another one existing in the same normal person social circle as me. Part of this is because I’m endlessly gullible and stupid, but the other part… Here, you know what? Let’s do a paragraph break first.

The other part is because even though Hollywood doesn’t consider these people to be celebrities, on a strictly personal level, they’re celebrities to me. Pop culture played a huge part in my childhood growing up in crappy, boring small towns – I didn’t know anyone who had even been close to being on TV, so I figured that anyone who had been on TV was truly special and different from everyone else I knew.

If there’s one thing Los Angeles is good at – besides serving as a magnet for all of America’s girls with daddy issues – it’s systematically eliminating childlike wonder and joy. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to meet a bit player from Star Trek Enterprise at a party and not have to run outside and text my parents immediately.

But for now, it’s kind of fun to meet a girl who carried a briefcase on primetime TV at a family member’s birthday party and immediately feel like you’re Robert Evans.

Truman Capps has no idea what he’ll do if he ever meets a pornstar at a party.

24


If this year as half as intense as any given day in this guy's life, I'm going to need to retire.

Celebrating your birthday when you’re still getting established in a new city is kind of a tricky maneuver. Back in Oregon – particularly in high school – I was surrounded by people who I had known for most of my life, so even if they couldn’t say exactly what day my birthday was on, they had enough memories of awkward elementary school bumper bowling parties to know that I had a birthday in late November.

Yesterday was my second Los Angeles birthday, but it was significantly different from the first. Last year I’d only been in town for a couple of months and, thanks to my rather consistent unemployment and generally antisocial behavior, only had a few friends, all of whom had come with me from Oregon and knew about my birthday.

In the year since then, though, everything has changed. I’ve been working at a career-type job for nearly ten months and have become so ingrained at the company that I’ve actually started to learn my coworkers’ names, and I’ve been lucky enough to make a number of new friends who, having only known me a few months, don’t know when I was born.

That put me in kind of an awkward position in the leadup to my birthday. On the one hand, I didn’t want to seem overly secretive by letting friends and coworkers find out about my birthday through Facebook. On the other hand, how the hell are you supposed to tell people that your birthday is coming up?

“Hey guys! How was your weekend?”

“Not that great. I had to take my wife to the hospital on Saturday night because she thought she was going to have a miscarriage. Everything turned out to be okay. I think it’s just weighing on her pretty hard now that she’s in the second trimester, and that’s when she lost the first baby. I’m just trying to be supp-”

“My birthday is coming up! November 27th! So… Y’know. I’m excited.”

Best case scenario, everyone feels weird. Worst case scenario, people feel obligated to try and buy you presents without knowing you that well. And since I don’t feel a particular need for mismatched haircare products or $10 Barnes and Noble gift cards,* I opted to keep my birthday on the DL and let everyone find out through Facebook.  

*Barnes and Noble Gift Cards: When you have to give a gift to a bookish white person you don’t really know that well, accept no substitutes. 

From time to time I toy with the idea of taking my birthday off of Facebook entirely, just so the whole day goes by with only a minimal brouhaha, if any brouhaha at all. I might receive fewer baked goods, but people might also come to see me as a mysterious figure existing outside of time and space, which might be a fair trade in the long run.

I guess I just don’t see my birthday as that big of a deal, or even something worth a huge amount of thought and celebration. It’s not like being 24 years old is a really noteworthy achievement – it’s actually physically impossible to not be 24 at some point in your life, provided you don’t die before you’re 24.

If I lived in Afghanistan, or Somalia, or somewhere in the Deep South with neighbors who didn’t appreciate the seven months of nonstop political commentary on my Facebook page, living to be 24 would be a really big deal, and I’d be more inclined to get excited and tell everybody.

“Hey, everybody! Who’s got two thumbs and hasn’t been murdered by warlords for 24 straight years? This g… Wait is that a Predator drone GUYS RUN OH SHI”

All I had to do to be 24 was just be for 24 years, and it really hasn’t been all that difficult, save for 9/11 and the day I found out Santa wasn’t real. I’d feel pretty self conscious throwing a party in honor of myself; if I were going to do it, I’d want it to be for something bigger than simply aging.

I might just have an unusually pessimistic attitude toward birthdays because I’ve got a lot of shit that I want to get done in my life as soon as possible, and I’m competing against people who did it faster and better than me. At age 20, Orson Welles was directing a Haitian-themed stage adaptation of MacBeth on Broadway. At 23, Paul Thomas Anderson had a short film at the Sundance Film Festival. Seth Rogen was writing for Freaks and Geeks when he was 17 years old – keep in mind, this is a high school dropout stoner we’re talking about.

One of my greatest fears, right up there with cockroaches, is the notion that I’ll spend 30 years sitting in an office thinking really hard about writing and never doing much more than crapping out a couple of blog updates on a mostly regular basis. So to me, birthdays are less a cause for celebration and more a cause for panic – a reminder that I’ve spent yet another year of my life not being an enormously successful writer.

I think that constant, pervasive fear of an ordinary life is a great thing – it’s what motivates me and keeps me from getting complacent. But I really need to learn how to take a day off from looking at what I haven’t done and focus on what I have, and if there’s any day to do that, it probably should be my birthday.

I’ve decided that next year I’d really like to try and meet everyone halfway with the enthusiasm about me being older. I’ve got a lot that I should be celebrating – particularly a whole mob of great friends who blew up my Facebook with greetings yesterday – and it’s about time I quit being neurotic and recognize it.

After all, aging isn’t completely terrible –the older I get, the more acceptable it is for me to be as crusty and jaded as I am, and that’s well worth a party.

Truman Capps is going to go right out and rent a car.

10,000 Hours

This is the face of 10,000 hours of computer programming.



I’ve talked before about how terrible I am when it comes to reading – last year I read one book, and so far this year I’ve been on track to read zero books. To put that another way, so far this year I’ve read the same number of books as a 9 year old girl in rural Pakistan. When you think about it, that’s kind of impressive – just as Malala Yousafzai was an inspiration to girls everywhere for pursuing literacy in the face of hash religious opposition, I’m sort of an inspiration to lazy douchebags everywhere for resisting literacy in a city full of bookstores and libraries.

Last week, though, I decided that maybe I should make some effort to not squander 16-odd years of education, so when I found myself in the vicinity of a Barnes and Noble I went in and picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s nonfiction book Outliers, which I vaguely understood to be about numbers or some shit like that. After a week of reading, I think a better title for the book would be, Holy Fucking Shit Is That True? And Other Stories Of How Malcolm Gladwell Is Smarter Than You And Everyone You’ve Ever Met.

The main gist of the book is that, in fact, you really didn’t build that – at least, not on your own. As Gladwell explains, the reason that some people are successful isn’t strictly that they’re smart – it’s that they’re smart enough and happened to have been born at the right time.

For example, all the computer revolution billionaires were born between 1952 and 1956 into rich families with access to early computer programming classes, allowing them to be programming masters in the 1970s when personal computing began to take shape. Nine of the richest people in human history were Americans born in the 1830s, which allowed them to be experienced businessmen in 1870s when our economy began to explode. I could give you shitty, condensed examples all day, or you could go read the book.

The part that really captivated me, though, was a chapter in which Gladwell explains that studies show the only reason anyone has ever been a master at something is because they put in 10,000 hours of practice at it. The symphonies Mozart wrote as a child weren’t particularly good or original, but they were practice – so by the time he was a young adult, he’d put in 10,000 hours of practice at music and was one of the most gifted musicians of all time. Bill Gates grew up in such an environment that he could invest 10,000 hours of his adolescence on programming, meaning he was a master programmer at the exact time the world needed master programmers.

The second I read that chapter I began doing very sloppy math, trying to figure out how many hours I’d spent writing from my childhood up until today. No matter how you slice it, the number doesn’t come out to 10,000, and I immediately hated myself for the wasted hours of my childhood and teenage years that I spent not writing.

In fourth grade I routinely blew my 30-minute post-lunch recess playing tag with my friends instead of sitting inside and writing – over the course of 170 days in an Oregon school year, that’s 85 hours wasted! In seventh and eighth grade I went to school an hour early every day for jazz band – AKA 415 hours of wasted writing time, if you count weekend competitions and sectionals. If I’d opted out of my senior prom and just written something instead, I’d be six hours closer to mastery – hell, even if I skipped prom and spent the time punching myself in the face I’d still probably have had a better time.

That got me thinking. There’s 8765 hours in a year and I’ve been alive for almost 24 of them – that’s 210,360 hours, give or take a few, that I’ve had at my disposal to dedicate to the mastery of any given discipline under the sun. I’ve been unaware of the 10,000 hours rule for virtually all my life, but it stands to reason that out of 210,360 hours of life I’ve probably spent 10,000 on a couple of different activities, making myself a master purely by accident.

Assuming that I sleep 8 hours a night – I don’t most weeknights, but if we count childhood naps and weekends where I sleep ten hours or more, I think it averages out – I’ve spent 70,080 hours of my life asleep. So I can safely say I kick ass at sleeping. I’m the Mozart of sleep. This isn’t really so impressive when you remember that every other 24 year old on Earth has roughly this same level of mastery, so I don’t stand out that much unless I’m competing against insomniacs – and even then, all it takes is one narcoleptic or a person who’s been in a coma to blow me out of the water.

By that same logic, I’m also a real prodigy at watching TV, surfing the Internet, and eating peanut butter straight from the jar. Unfortunately, these skills aren’t exactly in high demand. I doubt I could start a business where people paid me to look up stuff on the Internet for them, nor could I fill the Hollywood Bowl with spectators eager to watch me eat peanut butter.

It’s comforting, though, to know that I have the ability to be the best at anything in the world, provided I can spare 10,000 hours to practice it. At this point, I figure I’ve probably logged around 8750 hours at writing, so I may as well just see this thing through. If I get fed up with it, though, I’ll just take 14 months off work and get really, really, really, really good at knitting.

Truman Capps is probably the world's foremost authority on hearing jokes about The Truman Show.

On Bribery


That's not exactly a subtle bribe...

Not only was Mitt Romney ill-qualified for the presidency – over the past couple of weeks, he’s proven that he’s ill qualified to be denied the presidency as well. Honestly, though, you can’t blame him – here’s a guy who for his entire life has had the financial means to have everything he wanted, and the first time he gets denied something just happens to be on national television after spending a billion-odd dollars and seven years telling America how badly he wants that thing.

His most recent response to his loss was to suggest that the only reason Obama won was because he offered voters “gifts” in return for their support – free contraception for women, immigration reform for Latinos, student loan forgiveness, and free healthcare to name a few. While the comments were condemned by Republicans hoping to run for president in 2016, they more or less mirrored comments by Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh on and after Election Day – Obama won because he “bribed” voters with lavish, taxpayer funded gifts like healthcare.

Yes, Obama bribed America with healthcare – because if there’s one thing that’s of great concern to the country that invented the tobacco industry and considers eating chicken sandwiches political activism, it’s their long term health and well being.

As far as I’m concerned, healthcare is the most important issue in America today, but it makes for a really shitty bribe. See for yourself: Next time you want to get a table at a crowded restaurant, sidle up to the hostess and murmur, “Hey, if you can find us a table for two by the piano player I’ll use a variety of mandates, subsidies, and tax credits to expand the availability of healthcare while creating state-run insurance exchanges to allow individuals and businesses to compare prices while bringing down overall costs.”

I’m sorry, but if you want to bribe me into letting you run my country for four years, you’ve got to bring something better to the table than, “I promise to make it somewhat harder for you to go bankrupt and die of a preventable disease!” You know what a bribe is? A bribe is, “On my first day in office, I will sign the Free $20 Applebee’s Gift Certificate For Everyone In America Act, and I will see to it that every American has access to their own brand new dirtbike and XBox 360 by 2015 – if y’all help a brother out in the midterms, that is.”

Promising to give Americans access to affordable healthcare isn’t bribery; it’s just an attempt to make the state of social welfare in the richest nation on Earth competitive with that of countries like Oman and Kyrgyzstan. A plan where people don’t die of preventable diseases isn’t a gift, it’s modernizing America by bringing us at long last into the 20th century. When someone finally gives us universal healthcare our response shouldn’t be, “Thank you,” it should be, “What the fuck took you so long, assholes!? Fucking Rwanda had this shit figured out years ago!”

That’s what makes me so angry whenever I hear Republicans bitching about how so many Americans feel like they’re ‘entitled’ to healthcare. Of course we’re entitled to healthcare! It says right there in the Declaration of Independence that life is an unalienable right, but fucking Croatia has a lower infant mortality rate than we do? You can’t bribe someone by offering them something they were supposed to have all along.  

To accuse President Obama of bribery you’ve got to kind of forget what democracy is about in the first place. No matter what role you think government should play in daily life, it’s obviously there to serve the people on one level or another. You could argue that virtually any candidate’s political position is bribery – isn’t a political campaign just encouraging people to vote for you because your policies will be more beneficial for them?

If you run for president on a platform of going to war with Iran, you’re bribing people who are scared that Iran is going to attack us. If your platform is outlawing abortion, you’re bribing social conservatives. If your platform is giving every man, woman, and child in America a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, even Dick Morris could predict that you’re going to lose, because people vote for the person who they think has their best interests in mind. Is it any surprise that so many rich people voted for the really rich guy?

And so long as we’re talking about bribery, remember that Mitt Romney was promising an across the board 20% tax cut for everyone in America. He was essentially offering to pay people to vote for him, and he still lost.

I get it, though – losing sucks, the Republican Party had turned on him before Florida was even finished counting ballots, and for the first time in several years, Mitt Romney doesn’t have to monitor his comments in case they’ll make people less likely to vote for him. He’s going to cut loose and say some stupid shit. He’s earned it.

But to say that Obamacare is just some sort of gift being tossed to a nation of whiners too lazy to even afford their own car elevators? Come on, man. Freaking Canada has healthcare. Anybody obsessed with ‘American Exceptionalism’ should be concerned when Canada is better at something than we are. 

Truman Capps should probably go to the doctor more so he can get the most out of his parents' insurance.