Hertz Doughnut

Chevy Chase OWNS that line, you bastards!

I’ve been having a real devil of a time finding a decent mechanic in this town.* Regular readers will remember that last summer I spent a large amount of money having The Mystery Wagon “fixed” by a friendly-yet-incompetent Russian mechanic who repaired my steering gear while simultaneously breaking my horn and permanently turning my airbag light on. They probably teach this “one step forward, two steps back” method of auto repair in shitty mechanic school as a means to make sure your customers always have something that needs fixing.

*I know I’m writing two car-related updates in a row; this is not a coincidence. Over the next month I’m going to gradually phase out the long winded, narcissistic rambling and pop culture-related updates and transition this into a blog about Subaru repair and maintenance. I know this may be upsetting to some of you, but the idea tested really well in focus groups. 

In the months since, I’ve gone to three or four different mechanics to try and repair the damage done by my first mechanic, all of whom have looked at my car and failed to fix the existing problems while diagnosing several new ones and either wasting my time or outright disrespecting me in the process. (All of them have had near-perfect Yelp scores too, so fuck you, crowdsourcing.)

The result is that I now know there are a laundry list of things wrong with my car and a laundry list of mechanics who I don’t trust to fix them. Further complicating the matter is the fact that some of the mechanics have dismissed the other mechanics’ diagnoses. I don’t know if I should believe Incompetent Mechanic 1 who says I need new engine mounts, Incompetent Mechanic 2 who says my engine mounts are fine but ominously pronounced my left front wheel “loose”, or if I should just trust neither of them being as they’re both incompetent and seem to have started learning English at about the same time I graduated from high school.

The upshot is that being caught in traffic is never boring now – I’m always on the edge of my seat, wondering both if something is going to go wrong with my car on this outing, and if so, which thing? Will it be the engine mounts, the left wheel, or maybe a last-minute upset in the form of a freak electrical fire? It’s like March Madness, except I lose every time and my car is the only thing to suffer a gruesome, career ending injury. 

This situation isn’t sustainable, so I’ve decided to bite the bullet and take The Mystery Wagon to the one mechanic in Los Angeles who I both like and trust: A man named Cal who did some minor repair work on my car over a year ago. The best thing about Cal is that he grew up speaking the same language that I grew up speaking (English) – this is a good skill to have, because explaining in detail what’s wrong with a car requires a lot of spot on subject-verb agreements if you want to make any kind of sense.

The reason I haven’t gone to Cal before is because his shop is 20 miles away from me in Culver City, and is only open for a couple of hours on Saturday every weekend. I need my car to get home from Cal’s, but I have to leave my car at Cal’s so he can fix it so that it doesn’t break down and prevent me from going to work, where I earn the money I need to pay Cal to fix my car. It’s a punishing cycle from which the only escape is a rental car.

After several weeks of procrastination (which probably didn’t do The Mystery Wagon any favors) I finally sat down today to book a rental car for the entirety of next week, which will hopefully be long enough for Cal to look at my car, explain to me in perfect English what very expensive repairs need to be made, and then make them. 

The results were frustrating.

There are two Hertz Rent-A-Car offices within walking distance of Cal’s shop, both of which are closed on weekends. I guess I can understand why – keeping your business open on weekends would be a surefire way to both better serve your customers and earn money, two things that spell certain death for any company. What this means for me is that I have to go clear to LAX to pick up a rental car after dropping off my only means of transportation with Cal.

It seems like the less car I have, the more driving I have to do. If I just didn’t get my car fixed I’d only have to drive a few miles to the office and back every day, but the second I get rid of my car for a week I’m faced with a unique set of problems which can only be solved by car possession.  

I’ve just now realized that having an old car is a lot like having a dog – it costs a lot of money, requires frequent attention, and under the right circumstances can completely turn your life upside down for a period of time.

On the plus side, The Mystery Wagon doesn’t crap all over the place – but at the same time, I’ve never had a cute girl run up to me in a parking garage and say, “Oh my God, your Subaru is so cute! Can I pet him?”

Truman Capps, for all his bitching, can’t imagine life without The Mystery Wagon.

This Space Left Intentionally Blank

It's one of those situations where I'm under the gun on a couple of writing deadlines and can either write a blog entry that's a shitty waste of time (well, moreso than they usually are, at least) or just hold off until I have the time and energy to make something worth reading. Naturally, I've picked the latter option, partially because I take pride in my work but mostly because it's way easier. 

Something will be here soon; in the meantime you can just head to BuzzFeed to read something edifying like "73 Tree Sloths Who Don't Give A Fuck".

Here In My Car

Sorry ladies - this image is probably a letdown for you after last week.

The Mystery Wagon doesn’t look like much or sound like much, and most of the time it doesn’t smell like much either, although occasionally I do get a burning rubber smell out of the A/C vent that I should probably have checked out. Fortunately, none of that cosmetic stuff means much to me because my car has a kickass set of power locks that I’m thankful for just about every day.

Take this morning, for example. I was on my way to work, waiting a red light by an elementary school, when I spotted a middle aged woman jogging across the street toward my car. She was wearing mismatched athletic gear and looked to be wheezing pretty heavily, most likely trying to catch up on a long-abandoned New Year’s resolution.

My left hand shot out like lightning and hit the LOCK button on the inside panel of my driver’s side door, and with a comforting KER-CHUNK every door in my car was immediately secured shut. Behind my Ray-Bans, my eyes followed her warily as she huffed and puffed past the hood of my car, hung a right, and continued south down the sidewalk past my passenger side door.

That one was a little too close for comfort.

When I first started driving I almost never locked my doors on the road, although a lot of this was because I lived in Salem, Oregon at the time. Salem isn’t especially pedestrian-friendly thanks to the fact that many of the streets have muddy, garbage-strewn shoulders instead of sidewalks; what few pedestrians you do see are usually tooling around in motorized scooters due either to old age or obesity. It’s not a terribly threatening environment.

My small town naïveté was put to bed shortly after my family moved to Portland, when I was giving my then-girlfriend a ride somewhere.

“Woah,” she said as we crossed the bridge into downtown. “You don’t lock your doors when you drive?”

“No,” I said slowly, trying to gauge if this was going to turn into a fight. “Am I supposed to?”

“I always lock my doors when I drive. In high school my driver’s ed teacher said that if you don’t lock your doors, homeless people downtown will jump into your car and force you to drive them wherever they want to go, and if you don’t they’ll, like, pee in your car and stuff.”

If she’d been talking about anything else, I would’ve laughed that notion right the hell off no matter how big of a fight it got me into. But I grew up in the suburbs, and when you grow up in the suburbs the notion of being trapped in a small space with a urinating homeless person is like double 9/11.

So I locked the doors – KER-CHUNK – and have been spontaneously locking them at intersections ever since, all based on one secondhand anecdote from a decidedly unreliable source four years ago. 95% of me knows it’s stupid, but 5% of me knows I’ll feel a lot more stupid when there’s a homeless person pissing in my backseat and demanding that I drive him to Santa Monica.

For the record, I don’t care what race you are, or even if you outwardly appear to be homeless – if you’re a stranger within 10 feet of my car I’m just going to assume you’re a homeless person and will take all the necessary steps to defend The Mystery Wagon from your pee. 

I think the most irrational part of this irrational fear is the idea that a person with no job and no home has some sort of urgent appointment on the other side of town. “I’m delivering the keynote at the National Association of Angry Streetcorner Schizophrenics luncheon in 20 minutes and I don’t have a ride! If I miss this speech it could really mess up my otherwise perfect life! My kingdom for a Subaru!”

Nothing betrays a sheltered upper middle class upbringing more than the assumption that every homeless person is A) crazy and B) absolutely desperate to fuck with you.

Most of my actual encounters with the homeless – with the exception of a dude who offered to blow me on the subway – have been limited to me pretending to not have any money and them muttering “God bless.” Even the guy who wanted to suck my dick was pretty gracious about it when I refused; he certainly didn’t strike me as the sort of criminal mastermind who’d hijack my car by threatening to pee in it.

Honestly, when I’m driving I act crazier than most homeless people probably are. I talk to myself constantly in the car, either practicing standup routines I’ll never do or rehearsing conversations with famous people I’ll never have – and that’s when I’m not singing along with one of the six songs on my iPhone that are in my vocal range. By contrast, the homeless people I see on the sidewalks are usually just standing there waiting for the light.

Maybe it’s my apparent insanity – not my power locks – that have warded off the legions of aggressive homeless people in need of rides over the years. For all I know they could have hilariously out of touch myths about me:

“Woah, you get close to cars at intersections? My driver’s ed teacher said that if you get within ten feet of a car, a dorky college educated Subaru-driving yuppie will pull you inside and force you to ride around with them, listening to their unfunny, derivative standup routines and terrible singing.”

Maybe I don’t need to lock my doors anymore. If I just wear a tinfoil hat when I drive I’m pretty sure nobody would want to get into my car – and maybe people wouldn’t tailgate me as closely, either.

Truman Capps was so well brought up that if a homeless person did jump into his car he’d probably drive the guy to his destination just to be polite.

Dirty Laundry

I did a Google image search for 'fluff and fold' and I got this as one of the first results. Now I REALLY don't trust these places with my laundry.

I restrict my wardrobe to jeans and Mossimo T-shirts for a couple of reasons. The first reason, as many of my female friends have politely reminded me over the years, is that my fashion sense is terrible. Reducing my wardrobe to one type of pants and varying colors of the same T-shirt means that I don’t have to start my day off with a bunch of nerve wracking decisions about which colors match with which.

For the record, President Obama reportedly does the same thing, limiting himself to only blue or black suits, so he can preserve his decision making capacity for the rest of the day. Admittedly, his decisions are usually matters of diplomacy and national security while mine are simply how much blood splatter I can sneak into a trailer in spite of ESRB regulations, but it’s as good an excuse as any to wear basically the same thing every day.

The other reason I keep my wardrobe simple is because even after living on my own for six years, what I don’t know about laundry could fill a warehouse. I know that you’re supposed to put detergent in before the clothes and I know that you’re supposed to separate whites from colors* (which I usually don’t do, because it’s more work), and that’s about it.

*Taken out of context, “I know that you’re supposed to separate whites from colors” is one of those lines that could really make me look bad. Fortunately I’ve written plenty of things that make me look bad in context, so hopefully none of my enemies dig this deep. 

The merits of cold water versus hot water? No idea. Bleach? I’m not sure where in the process it gets used, although I have heard that it’s a bad idea to drink the stuff. Ironing? I know of it. I remember staying home sick as a child and watching Due South with Mom while she ironed clothes. More recently, I remember seeing friends my own age iron clothes and immediately revising my opinion of them.

Hold up. This motherfucker knows how to iron his shit? Clearly I have underestimated him.

The two rickety washers and driers in the basement of my apartment complex only have a couple of different settings, but even those confuse me. The washer, for example, has a WARM water setting, and since that seems to give you the best of both the COLD and HOT settings for the same price, I can’t see why anybody would use anything else. The drier has a NO HEAT option, which I imagine is there if you like your clothes damp and cold but still want to know that they’ve been bounced around for an hour.

Mossimo T-shirts, jeans, and the sheets on my bed can all be washed using my limited breadth of laundry knowledge and come out of the drier with no ill effects. I know that my more delicate wardrobe options – dress shirts, pants with creases in them, my one nice sweater – require different, more intricate treatment that I will no doubt screw up, so I just don’t wear them. I guess I’d prefer to have nice clothes in my closet and not wear them instead of having no nice clothes because I ruined them with my ham-fisted attempts at washing. Either way I’m not dressing nicely, but at least my way I still have nice clothes if I need them.

I know there’s no excuse for me to not learn how to do my own laundry when I’m A) an adult and B) an adult who spends 18 hours a day in front of a machine that can access any information in the world. The truth is that even if I knew how to wash delicate sweaters and iron nice shirts I still wouldn’t do it, because it looks like an uninteresting and time consuming process, and washing and folding the clothes I do wear is already enough of an ordeal, what with the finding enough quarters and the walking up and down stairs.

I was griping about this to my mother on the phone the other night.

“Somebody must’ve stolen some of my shirts or something, because it seems like I’m doing laundry more often than ever now,” I sighed, holding the phone with one hand and sifting through my upended piggy bank for quarters with the other.

“Y’know, if you hate doing laundry so much you could just take your clothes to a fluff and fold.” Mom suggested, probably in hopes of getting me to quit whining.

“So they fold my laundry for me? I like the sound of that. Not sure about ‘fluffing’, though. If that means what I think it means, I don’t want them doing it to my clothes.”

“You give them your dirty laundry and they wash and fold everything for you. It costs money, but you’ve got a job. I’d do the same thing if I lived in an apartment, honestly.”

Since she mentioned it I’ve been watching the pile of dirty clothes in my hamper growing and slowly giving the idea more and more thought. I’m no Vanderbilt, but I make enough doing what I do that I could probably support a mild cocaine habit – a moderate to severe professional laundry habit sounds both cheaper and healthier.

Something about it makes me uncomfortable, though. I just feel like 24 is a little bit young to start throwing money at every domestic task I don’t want to do. I mean, it’s not like doing my laundry is keeping me from doing anything truly important – I’m not exactly curing cancer in my non-working hours. Usually doing my laundry just distracts me from procrastinating about writing.

I’ve always been quite clear about what a lazy piece of shit I am, but hiring someone to do my laundry for me would be a brand new level of sloth. Once I go around that bend, what’s next? If you’re too lazy to do something there’s almost always a person who’ll gladly take your money to do it for you. Would I wind up hiring someone to carry me to the bathroom, or outsourcing this blog to India?

Fortunately, I don’t see myself taking my laundry to a fluff and fold – largely because the nearest one is a few miles away and I’m too lazy to spend more time in traffic than I already do. It looks like the only thing saving me from succumbing to my laziness is more laziness – that is, until I find someone who will drive my laundry to the fluff and fold for me.

Truman Capps will shamelessly pick up any quarter he sees – even one on the floor of a public bathroom – so he can add them to his laundry machine fund.

If It Stops At All

That happened.

I don’t want to ignite any controversy here, but I’m just going to come out and say it: I prefer Rick Springfield’s 1981 single “Love Is Alright Tonight” to his signature hit “Jessie’s Girl.” I know that this probably sounds like blasphemy to a lot of the Springfield purists out there, but I hope you can understand that this is merely a difference of opinion and that I mean no offense to anyone.

I had “Love Is Alright Tonight” stuck in my head for much of last week. For the record, it’s not an 80s pop hit about terrorist attacks, fertilizer plant explosions, poisoned envelopes, and shootouts – it’s just a song about a guy who’s eager to clock off work and take his girl out for a night of shenanigans. But as I grimly read casualty figures and listened to gunfire and explosions on the Boston police scanner, one line from the song kept echoing in my head:

"Everyone's sayin' the sky's gonna fall,
Don't know where it's gonna stop if it stops at all.
I know the world’s goin’ crazy tonight,

I hope it holds together for one more night.”

I took a pretty defiant tone in Wednesday night’s update – I was sad, but decidedly un-terrorized by the goings on of the week thus far. At the time, of course, I was only processing one terrorist attack and one unemployed Elvis impersonator sending poisoned letters to elected officials.

24 hours later, I found myself feeling sufficiently terrorized. The fertilizer plant exploding and wiping a town off the map was pretty scary, but what really did it was when I came home the following evening to discover that all the thoughts and prayers America had sent to Boston still weren’t enough to stop some terrible hybrid of The Town and Grand Theft Auto.

The root of my terror wasn’t the idea that terrorists might descend on Northern Los Angeles and kill me personally – while we do have a pretty nice Ralphs and a couple of Zagat-rated sushi places here in Studio City it’s still not the sort of high value target a terrorist dreams of. The root of my terror was that I didn’t know when the terrible things were going to stop.

I imagine that this past week was similar to what living in Australia must be like – everything was trying to kill us. If it could explode, it exploded. You remember that super deadly poison they made on Breaking Bad? Well, somebody’s been mailing it to people, so don’t touch any envelopes. The entire city of Boston basically reenacted The Siege, a crappy movie I thought was completely implausible until like three days ago.

Terror, I think, comes from uncertainty. On Wednesday night I was certain that everything was said and done – we were mourning the dead and caring for the injured and the authorities were investigating the bombing. Based on what I’d learned from 9/11, I figured we’d have a solid decade of sketchy intelligence and war crimes before anybody got brought to justice.

When I heard about the Texas explosion, though, my worldview changed. A horrific explosion coming right on the heels of another horrific explosion, outside of Waco, nearing the 20th anniversary of the Waco siege… I immediately decided that this and Boston were part of an ongoing terrorist attack coordinated by multiple American right-wing militias – otherwise known as a 2^nd-rate spec script for Homeland.*

*I’ve never watched Homeland, but if it’s anywhere near as intense as the news last week I might have to wait awhile before I start.

On Thursday night I stayed up until about 3:00 AM, monitoring live updates from Reddit about the manhunt in Boston and listening to streams of the police scanner through my headphones.

Sometime after midnight the name Sunil Tripathi started getting thrown around online – he was a missing Brown University student and somebody somewhere had heard his name on the police scanner as a possible suspect. Soon I was bouncing between several local news reports about his disappearance and watching videos made by his family begging him to come home, eagerly playing psychologist with my friends as I tried to figure out what had driven this ordinary American to terrorism.

On Friday morning I woke up to discover that the suspects being sought by the police were two Chechens, neither of whom appeared to have any connection to right-wing militias and neither of whom was named Sunil Tripathi. In the course of that day’s manhunt, I discovered that investigators in Texas had found no signs of foul play in the fertilizer plant explosion, and that Sunil Tripathi’s family had been understandably horrified that the Internet had baselessly convicted their missing son of terrorism based on the fact that he had a funny name and bore vague resemblance to one of the suspects. 

When people don’t have answers, they tend to make up their own – I know this because it’s exactly what I did.

The footage from the bombings on Monday was so horrible that it felt like something out of a really good albeit grim movie like Children of Men. When something else inexplicably exploded in the same week, I jumped to the most theatrical explanation – coordinated, nationwide terrorist attacks, because if I saw that shit in a movie I’d think it was both plausible and exciting.

Once I’d developed a plot, I needed characters, and right on cue the Internet gave me a bright if not slightly withdrawn Ivy League student who disappeared last month, leaving behind his phone, his wallet, and a vague note for his family. The idea that he’d left his university life behind to become a terrorist was so fascinating to me that I wished I’d written it – but since I hadn’t, I just did the next best thing and decided that it was real.

I normally pride myself on approaching life with a healthy skepticism, but in spite of that and a journalism degree I was still content to spin my own recklessly inaccurate account with virtually no hard facts to back any of it up, all so I could make sense of a senseless week. 

It was stupid. But people do stupid things when they’re scared. And that might be the most dangerous thing about terrorism.

The way the story actually ended on Friday was almost a perfect Hollywood ending. After one crazy day of occupation, the bad guy was caught alive and the army of police slowly marched out of Watertown as throngs of jubilant citizens lined the streets to cheer for them – looking an awful lot like spectators at a marathon.

Watching this on TV and listening to cops on the scanner congratulating one another, I heard the last refrain of “Love Is Alright Tonight” echoing in my head:

“It’s gonna be alright!

It’s gonna be alright!

It’s gonna be alright!”

Truman Capps has much higher hopes for next week. 

Terror

I’ve been working at my current job for longer than any of my other jobs. Sure, there was some part time work during college and a bunch of PA gigs when I first moved to LA, but I’ve been working at my ad agency for a full five national tragedies. That’s especially impressive considering that I’ve worked a bunch of jobs for months with no national tragedies at all.

Aurora, Clackamas Town Center, Newtown, Christopher Dorner rampage, and now Boston. With the exception of Aurora, which happened late at night on a Friday, I’ve learned about all the other tragedies the exact same way: Sitting in my office, listening to the clatter of keyboards all around me, ping-ponging between Reddit and Facebook to avoid working, when suddenly people start posting statuses about which city they’re praying for and I rush to Google for the details.

Every time, information is maddeningly slow and inaccurate at first, but throughout the day a progressively more horrifying picture is painted by trial and error as hard facts start to trickle out and falsehoods are corrected: No fatalities becomes two. He’s in San Diego, then he’s in Mexico, then he’s in Northridge. A suspect was arrested in the woods outside the school. There are five bombs. He’s in Big Bear shooting it out with the cops. My ex-girlfriend’s mother is one of the victims. 20 dead children. Just two bombs. He was using an automatic rifle. A Saudi was arrested. It was a semiautomatic rifle. The Saudi isn’t a suspect. The cabin is on fire. Pressure cookers.

Blowing up anyone, anywhere is despicable, but something about blowing people up at a marathon seems especially evil. A marathon is a celebration of athletic ability and not much else. The people who show up to watch are basically watching a slow, sweaty parade, but they still turn out in droves because there’s something impressive about a person running 26.2 miles.

Somebody went to that event and dropped off a couple of pressure cookers full of gunpowder and ball bearings at ground level in a crowd of running enthusiasts, and now an unspecified number of them don’t have legs anymore. That’s heartbreaking. As is the eight year old boy, the restaurant manager, and the Chinese student. They all just wanted to watch people running.

But through everything that’s happened in the past couple of days – the bombs, the suspicious packages, the pictures, the videos, the yellow journalism, the misinformation, and the sheer volume of things we don’t know – I’m really not feeling terrorized.

I'm very sad. I’m sad for the people who died and got maimed and their families, and for people in Boston, many of whom I imagine do feel terrorized, and I’m sad that the knee-jerk reaction was to blame this on Muslims with no evidence.

But I don’t feel especially terrorized. Truth be told, I don’t even feel a little terrorized. I imagine terrorists don’t have feedback cards like they do for the waiters at Red Robin, but if they did I’d give them a frowny-face and a 1 out of 5 in the ‘DID WE TERRORIZE YOU?’ department.

I watched a lot of news on Monday, but I also wrote up several pages of goofy copy lines for an iOS game ad campaign. Yesterday night my friend and I got drunk and watched Kingpin. Today I got frustrated when I repeatedly had to stipulate that I wanted my felafel to go when I ordered lunch.

These are not the activities of a terrorized person. I didn’t cry or curl up into a ball or develop a nervous tic. I was not paralyzed with fear of imminent violence. I felt bad - especially as more pictures from the day surfaced - but not afraid.

My officemate watched an episode of Friday Night Lights yesterday when things were slow. Today I passed an account executive in the hallway who, apropos of nothing, looked at me and laughed, “We’re all monkeys, Truman!” Unless they’re hiding it really well, my coworkers seem to be doing fine too. 

Maybe we're just numb to tragedy. 

Terrorists have set a pretty high bar for themselves. No matter what type of terrorist you are – Muslim, American, right wing, left wing – 9/11 is a really tough act to follow. When I was 12 I watched terrorists fly jumbo jets into buildings and people on fire jumping hundreds of stories to their deaths. You think a fucking bomb is going to terrorize me now? 

Maybe it's because I've spent half of my life watching my country violently, clumsily chasing terrorists all over the world that they're just not that scary to me anymore. I might change my tune if suspicious pressure cookers start showing up in Los Angeles, but until that happens I don't see the point in worrying about it. 

To be honest, I'm more terrified of what Congress will do to 'protect' us from terrorists than I am of the terrorists themselves.

Truman Capps will one day run out of post-disaster pessimism and just post cat pictures instead.  

The Shower

 "This is what grownups do all the time!" - Truman Capps, age 11. 

As a child, most of my impressions of adulthood didn’t come from my parents. Sure, my Mom and Dad were (and are!) my role models, but when I wondered what sort of person I’d be once I started living on my own I never pictured myself doing any of the things that my parents did – largely because they were married and had a child, which were two mistakes I never saw myself making.

To get a sense for what young, unmarried adults did I turned to TV sitcoms, where I quickly learned that adult life is primarily a series of goofy social events interspersed with boning all of your friends and working occasionally. As you can imagine, adulthood has been a big fat disappointment so far, although today I was fortunate enough to check one of the sitcom benchmarks off my list this afternoon.

(For the record, I didn’t bone any of my friends, so if that’s why you’re still reading you can leave now. Rest assured, though, that as soon as I do bone one of my friends the first thing I’m going to do is write an update about it.)

One of my friends’ girlfriends is pregnant and I was invited to the baby shower. This is pretty much the most grownup social event a person can attend because it pretty much requires you to know someone who has the biological capacity to be pregnant and the economic capacity to want to stay that way.

It’s also something I was really only familiar with through television. I had never been to a baby shower before, but Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer had. There was a baby shower on The Office, 7^th Heaven, and Friends*. Having never been to a baby shower before, I assumed I’d have a lot of comical back-and-forth about what to get the baby, attend the shower, take part in the hijinx, and be done in less than 22 minutes. All told, I wasn’t too concerned.

*DISCLAIMER: Friends blows.

I was at brunch* with my friends Kristin and Sabba this morning when I casually mentioned that I was attending a baby shower in the afternoon. 

“Aww,” Sabba said as our food arrived. “What did you get?”

“Oh, I got the eggs benedict waffle.” I said, snatching up my knife and fork as the waiter set the plate in front of me.

“No, idiot, what did you get for the shower?”

I shrugged, preparing to shovel poached eggs, lox, and waffle into my mouth. “I don’t know. I was just going to swing by Target on the way over and pick something up.”

Sabba and Kristin both looked at one another in a brief, exasperated panic.

“No you’re not.” Kristin said. “We’re going to Target after this and I’m helping you pick out a baby shower gift and also some V-neck T-shirts because I think you’d look really good in a…”

So about an hour later Kristin and I were at the Burbank Target, where we discovered that there was no record of a registry for the baby shower. This fucked up my plan to look up the registry, buy the cheapest item, and be done in five minutes.

“Now what?” I asked, panic rising in my voice.

“Now we go pick out a gift ourselves.”

I immediately realized that I was way out of my element trying to buy a gift for someone who hadn’t even been born yet.

I’m bad enough at buying gifts for my adult friends who I’ve known for years, and here I was trying to buy something for a person who isn’t even a person yet, depending on which state legislature you ask. That’s a lot to handle. It’s also kind of weird shopping for a gift and knowing that the recipient will probably piss, shit, and vomit on it at some point – possibly all three at the same time.*

*I’ve bought people 21^st birthday presents before, though, so this wasn’t my first time dealing with that situation.

Kristin led me to the ‘Baby’ section of Target – a place so far removed from anything I could ever want or need in my life that I hadn’t even known it existed until that moment – and we began to browse.

“Baby detergent.” Kristin said, stopping and pointing at a row of laundry detergent bottles with babies’ faces on them.

“Why do babies get their own kind of detergent?” I asked. “How much can you do to laundry soap to make it baby friendly?”

Kristin ignored me – she usually does, which is why we’ve been friends for so long – and grabbed two jugs of detergent: One blue with a boy’s face on it, and one pink with a girl’s.

“Is the baby a boy or a girl?”

“It’s a girl – but why does it even matter? It’s laundry detergent! I’m pretty sure liquid soap doesn’t give a hoot what gender you are. At least, mine doesn’t. Unless… Well, we all know I’m not the expert on domestic tasks. Maybe I inadvertently bought the wrong detergent for myself and now my clothes aren’t as clean as they could be for the money I’m paying.”

By the time I’d followed this idea through to its logical conclusion, we were standing in the checkout line with a bottle of pink baby detergent, along with three Mossimo V-neck T-shirts that I was being told to wear.

“Hold up, hold up.” I said. “I’m bringing someone detergent as a gift. People are going to be showing up with strollers and PlaySkool stuff, and I’m going to walk in with a bottle of detergent in a fancy bag. This is going to look like a prank.”

“Do you know anybody with a baby?” Kristin asked. “Because I do. Babies shit constantly, and baby clothes aren’t disposable. They’re going to be doing laundry a lot, and they’re going to be going through a lot of detergent. They can never have too much of this stuff.”

That’s the real adulthood lesson of the day – there comes a time that it’s actually a good idea to buy people what they need instead of what they want.

Ultimately, the shower itself was a great time – good food, wonderful people, and several gift bags that were significantly smaller than mine. Still, I made a point of leaving before they opened the gifts, because my mother’s feminist upbringing led me to believe that you shouldn’t give a woman cleaning supplies as a gift and stick around to watch the fireworks.
Truman Capps also got her a $25 Target gift card, but it wouldn’t have been as funny to include that in the body text.

The Apartment

 My father is chuckling at this reference, and that's all that matters.

One of my best friends is flying into town to see me tomorrow, which coincidentally is the same day that I foolishly promised some people I’d have a script ready for them. So between cleaning, writing, work, and laundry, today is a pretty huge crunch for me – one that could’ve been entirely avoided if I’d simply not procrastinated on any one of the various things I had to do before Thursday, which would have required a degree of adulthood I do not possess.

What this adds up to is not a lot of time for writing a blog. However, I’ve done a lot of meticulous cleaning and organizing to get my place into top shape to entertain guests, and since it’s looking this good I figure I may as well share it with the Internet.

So if you came here looking for a lengthy essay on a personal, cultural, or political matter that absolutely nobody cares about, I’m afraid I can’t help you today. If, however, you just want to look at some pictures of the room I live in, you’re in luck!

My bed is the first thing you see when you walk into my room, which was an intentional design choice on my part because of the statement it makes: "I am Truman Capps, and lying completely still is one of the things I do best." Also, my room is pretty small, so it's basically impossible to be in it without seeing my bed.

"That's art. Get it?" - Joel McHale in Ted. 

Adulthood is framing the shit on your walls.

My bed photobombed this picture of my lamp and Chinatown poster. (My old roommate in Culver City had a shelved lamp just like this. He hid $700 worth of marijuana inside the paper shade at the top.)

Rather than use my lamp for drug storage, I'm using it to display two prized posessions: My hardbound cover of The Great Outdoor Fight that my Main Bro Alexander got me for Christmas, and my newly-framed City of Los Angeles Business Tax Certificate, which by law must be displayed in my place of business. 

When I lie on my right side in bed, this is what I see. Not a coincidence. (Fun fact: As a copywriter at a video game-centric ad agency I was able to write off virtually everything in this picture on my taxes. SUCK IT, THE GOVERNMENT.) 

I proudly display a statuette of a supporting character from Mystery Science Theater 3000 next to my TV, yet I laugh at guys who own My Little Pony figurines. 

The problem with having a mint condition autographed VHS case for Time Chasers is that every time a woman sees it she just starts tearing her clothes off and then I have to DVR Parks and Rec because of all the frenzied lovemaking.

And this is where I do basically all of my writing. I know a lot of writers who say they do their best work at Starbucks, but I've found that I do my best work when I'm not wearing pants, which is why I'm not allowed at Starbucks anymore and have to do all my writing here.

Truman Capps promises a return to substantive content on Sunday. Unless he's too busy that day, in which case he'll probably do more of this shit and you'll just have to deal.

Wisdom From Marilyn

 I challenge you to find a picture of this woman with her mouth all the way closed.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that poignant quotes even existed before there were social media websites where we could share them – preferably as image macros with the words overlaid on some feelgood picture of a mountain or space or something like that.

When I scroll through my Facebook news feed these days I get a facefull of wisdom whether I want it or not. There’s Eastern philosophy from some of my hippier friends, professionally made Obama picture/quote mashups from the hardcore Democrats, historic and well-worded Supreme Court verdicts from my law school nerds, and rap lyrics for days.

But more than anything else, there’s that Marilyn Monroe quote.

That fucking Marilyn Monroe quote. 

I have seen at least two dozen – probably more – people post this quote on Facebook or elsewhere over the past couple of years, and every time I see it my blood pressure inches up just a little bit more, because to me the quote reads like this:

 

Marilyn Monroe was a great performer and an intelligent, beautiful woman who said a number of things that I find quite charming and witty. She was also a pill-popping triple divorcee who suffered from chronic flatulence, rarely bathed, and slept naked in a festering bed strewn with plates of old half-eaten meals.

Does that sound like the sort of thing you’d like to deal with on a regular basis? No? Well fuck you, because if you don’t like the thought of putting up with an unwashed, farting food-hoarder you’re the one with a problem, not her!

What pisses me off about this quote is that when people post it they seem to be taking it as carte blanche to do the sorts of things that any halfway decent upbringing would discourage a person from doing. Scream at you in the middle of a crowded restaurant? I told you I was out of control! Throw a cinderblock through your window after a fight? I’m hard to handle – that’s just who I am! Went to Afghanistan and taught Taliban recruits how to make suicide bombs? Hey, you knew what you were getting into, buddy!

Let me make something abundantly clear: Being an unreasonable, selfish reactionary isn’t a quirky personality trait; it’s a personality disorder, and while you shouldn’t be stigmatized for it you also shouldn’t be fucking proud of it.

Take a closer look at that quote: She freely admits to being out of control. When has being out of control ever been a positive thing? Have you ever used the phrase ‘out of control’ as a compliment? Oh my God, Trish, you won the Nobel Prize for Economics! You’re out of control. I just Googled the phrase ‘out of control’ and I wound up watching a local news report about a racecar that spun out of control and killed two people.

“But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”

How arrogant do you have to be to assume that after putting up with your gleefully selfish, impatient, out of control, and hard to handle behavior anyone is going to want to see you at your best? Protip: If you don’t have the common decency to moderate your undesirable characteristics for the people around you, don’t expect them to want to hang out when you decide you want to act like an adult for a little while.

I’m not faulting Marilyn Monroe – or anyone, for that matter – for having problems. Everybody has baggage. Everybody is a hot mess from time to time. What’s unacceptable is relishing all the worst parts of yourself and not even making an effort to change.

Let’s talk about me. I was picked on and taken advantage of a lot in middle and high school, and eventually I started dealing with a lot of my pent up aggression and resentment by occasionally lashing out at people in angry outbursts. I alienated some friends and burned some bridges with that behavior and it serves me right, because that’s an immature and unacceptable way to act. I’ve done a lot in the past couple of years to get that shit under control, but it’s an ongoing process. I’m embarrassed by it, but I’m also proud of myself for making progress and not just expecting the world to put up with my shit because I’m witty and fun occasionally. 

While we’re at it, I, like Marilyn Monroe, also fart a lot, but I think I balance that one out pretty well by bathing regularly and not eating in bed.

Having undesirable qualities is part of being human; taking steps to deal with them is part of being an adult. Using an old quote from a long-dead actress with a mental illness as an excuse to act like a child is just undercutting your own growth as a person – and more importantly, it’s annoying as shit for everybody around you who’s just trying to be in society.

There’s a quote by Marcel Proust that I wish people were posting instead:

“When you’re at your worst, you’re actually… I mean, when things are going badly for you, you’re learning more about… No, wait. That which does not kill you- No, that isn’t it either. Fuck it.”

-Marcel Proust (feat. Truman Capps)

Okay, I’ve never read anything by Marcel Proust and I never intend to, but here’s the quote from Little Miss Sunshine that helped me learn the basic gist of what Marcel Proust was all about:

Frank: “You know Marcel Proust?” Dwayne: “He’s the guy you teach.”
Frank: “Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he’s also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he uh… He gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life, because they made him who he was.”

-Little Miss Sunshine

If you’re selfish, impatient, insecure, prone to mistakes, out of control, and hard to handle, you’ve got your work cut out for you. And as you start dealing with those things – an ongoing process that will only end when you die – I think that your “best” will keep getting better.

Or if you don’t want to do all that work, at least think up your own justification for being an insufferable human trainwreck instead of just stealing Marilyn’s. If you’re not going to stop sucking, the least you could do is suck originally.

Truman Capps' entire argument falters when you realize how much he loves quotes from Hunter S. Thompson.

The Gamer

Okay, but in all seriousness, that NES controller staff is pretty cool, right? No way I'm the only one who thinks that.

On Monday I stumbled into work like a sleep deprived zombie, bought a package of trail mix for breakfast from the vending machine, and then slumped in front of my laptop at my desk, beginning my morning-long countdown until lunch – otherwise known as my standard Monday routine. Presently, one of my coworkers stopped by on her way to the coffeepot to chat.

“How was your weekend?” She asked, once we’d dispensed with the usual ‘case of the Mondays’ banter.

“It was great,” I sighed, already nostalgic. “I played Bioshock Infinite the entire time.”

(Bioshock Infinite is a newly released steampunk-oriented first person shooter that is simply beautiful in just about every way it’s possible for a video game to be beautiful. My agency designed a lot of the cover art.)

“Wow,” she said. Mind you, this wasn’t the same ‘Wow’ as ‘Wow! You cured polio!’ – it sounded more like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know it was possible for one person to eat an entire deep dish pizza in one sitting.’ “That good, huh?”

“It’s spectacular,” I said – and it is, so go buy a copy, goddamn it. “But I’m kind of in a gaming crunch – I need to finish Bioshock because one of my friends loaned me Max Payne 3, and I want to try and finish that so I can play Far Cry 3 before The Last Of Us comes out next month.”

“Wow,” she said again. Wow, that’s a lot of used heroin needles in your garbage! “I didn’t know you were such a gamer, Truman.”

I did my best to laugh it off, but to be honest, I hate being referred to as a ‘gamer’ almost as much as I hate the term ‘gamer’ in the first place. Serves me right for talking about my high rate of video game consumption, I guess – if I really didn’t want to be called a ‘gamer’ I could’ve just told her I spent the weekend rollerblading or being interested in baseball or whatever it is people my age do instead of playing video games.

I don’t like the word ‘gamer’ because it’s outdated and carries with it a lot of fairly toxic associations. Even as someone who spends his days alternating between selling and playing video games, when I hear the word ‘gamer’ the image that springs to mind is a heavyset young man between the ages of 15 and 30. His trenchcoat and Reddit T shirt are stained with Cheeto dust, but he’s too busy pulling on the Mountain Dew Code Red clutched in his grubby, sweaty hand to care, the shadow cast by the brim of his fedora concealing all but the worst of his neckbeard and acne.

That description used to be a lot more accurate than it is now. Back when the term ‘gamer’ was first applied to people who played video games*, it was an insular hobby practiced by a vocal – and often fragrant – minority. Video games were gaining in popularity, but they were still far enough outside the mainstream that there were frequent news reports and occasional Congressional hearings about the likelihood that games were turning ‘gamers’ into brainwashed, violent sociopaths. Controversy aside, the word ‘gamer’ back then referred to a group of eccentric hobbyists, like Civil War reenactors without all the direct sunlight and moving around.

*Wikipedia tells me that the word ‘gamer’ was originally used to describe people who played chess by mail and pen and paper war simulators, which is possibly the only thing nerdier than trying to beat Super Metroid in under 20 minutes in hopes of unlocking a fabled ‘nude mode’.

Back then, the gaming world was so small that the people in it could be easily classified by one catch-all word. Sure, there was some diversity to the people who played – a celebrity here or there, and even a woman this one time – but most of them were antisocial nerds. I for one was much more interested in finding every star in Super Mario 64 than I was in making friends or learning to ride a bike.

But things are different now. 56% of American households have at least one current generation game console. Video games routinely feature the voices and likenesses of A-list actors like Patrick Stewart, Ellen Page, and Liam Neesons. The game industry has a TV channel, not to mention Congressional lobbyists. Hell, Felicia Day’s claim to fame is that she is able to play video games while simultaneously being completely charming and adorable.

The word ‘gamer’ suggests that playing a video game is such a niche pursuit that it defines you as a person, like big game hunting or a sex addiction. But while that might have been true 30 years ago, it isn’t now that practically everyone plays video games.

Hell, my parents are both hopelessly addicted to Angry Birds – does that make them ‘gamers’? Does that define them any more than their friends, their careers, or their 36-year marriage? “Oh, there’s Kelsey and David – did you hear that they’re gamers? And their son is a real jackass.”

I’ve bought one new video game a month for the past three or four months, and I own so many that I’m starting to have storage problems. But when you ask me to describe myself, the word ‘gamer’ doesn’t even pop into my head. I love stories, and right now video games are telling more complex, beautiful, and involving stories than they ever have before – stories that have an added emotional impact because I get to take an active role in their telling.

If I were to make a list of dire problems in the world, I’d put ‘inaccurate terminology being used to describe people who play video games’ pretty close to the bottom of that list. But at the same time, when we marginalize video game players we run the risk of marginalizing the art form as a whole.

With all that being said, I don’t bear any ill will toward people who use the word ‘gamer’ – which is lucky, because a quick CTRL + F on my blog reveals that I used the word two times in my update about Tomb Raider last month. As it turns out, a catch-all phrase is pretty handy – even when it’s inaccurate.

Truman Capps would gladly go tradesies for a PS3 copy of Crysis, if anybody is interested.

Biopsy Shock Infinite

You'd rather look at a picture of a Reuben than a picture of a biopsy. I know this because I Google Image Searched 'biopsy'. 

PREVIOUSLY, ON HAIR GUY

“I notice you have very fair skin,” my doctor, who is Indian, said toward the end of the exam. “Do you have any moles?”

In retrospect, I probably should’ve refused to give him any information because racial profiling isn’t cool, but at the time I went along with it, and next thing I knew I had my shirt off and he was poking at a mole on my back.

“Hm.” He said. “It’s probably nothing, but I’d like to get this biopsied.”

Biopsy (n) – A procedure where a dude with a knife cuts off a chunk of your fucking skin.

AND NOW, HAIR GUY (IN HD WHERE AVAILABLE)

In retrospect, I’m not sure why I showered before my biopsy. I guess at the time my reasoning was that having a piece of my skin cut off was kind of a big deal and I ought to be presentable – also, the entire room would be medially sterile and I didn’t want to look out of place.

Showering before I left, though, gave me no time to make lunch for myself, so by the time I arrived at my doctor’s office in Sherman Oaks I was absolutely starving. I still had 15 minutes until my appointment, so I grabbed a Reuben to go from a nearby deli and carried it into the doctor’s office with me, planning to eat it (and the side of potato salad) in the waiting room during the obligatory 20 minute wait before any doctor’s appointment.

“Hey Truman,” the receptionist said as I walked in with my brown bag. “We’ve got a room ready for you. Come on back.”

“Oh.” I said, my heart jumping into my throat at the prospect of not being able to eat my Reuben while it was still hot. “I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to eat today before I came over – is there any chance I could just scarf this down real quick before I go back?”

She shrugged. “Oh, you can just bring it with you and eat it in the exam room.”

As she led me down the hall to the exam room, I found myself questioning the safety of allowing a person to eat a smoked meat sandwich covered in drippy thousand island dressing in the room where he was about to have a surgical procedure. Had my doctor done his residency in Tijuana? Or was the reasoning just, “Fuck it, it’s his insurance provider’s money – if he wants to get fatty pastrami particles sewed into his back, let him. The customer is always right.”

None of these concerns, mind you, stopped me from demolishing that Reuben while I waited in the exam room. I had to eat quickly, though, because I really didn’t want my doctor to walk in and see that I was eating a buttery red meat sandwich during a doctor’s appointment.

“How’s it going Truma- Oh. Is that a Reuben? Okay, we’ll just skip the blood pressure today – you’re eating a reuben in the middle of a visit to a medical professional; that gives me a pretty good idea of what your blood pressure must be.”

Fortunately, I’d long since eaten my sandwich and disposed of the evidence before my doctor came in, shook my hand, and, after some light small talk, told me to take off my shirt and lie face down on the examining table. He was wearing a polo shirt and slacks, probably from the Tommy Hilfiger ‘Outpatient Surgery’ collection.

I was lying there, a small section of my back numbed, Elton John’s ‘Rocketman’ playing on Pandora, when it occurred to me just how weird this whole thing was. Even after two visits my doctor was pretty much a stranger to me – I didn’t know his first name, and as I thought about it some more I realized I had kind of forgotten what his last name was too. Meanwhile, this guy I basically didn’t know was cutting off a piece of my skin to preserve in formaldehyde.

At least, I assume that’s what he was doing – thanks to local anesthetic and the fact that my back is located 180 degrees away from my face, he could’ve been doing basically anything back there and I would be none the wiser. For all I know I could have a tramp stamp now.

Midway through the procedure, Doctor Somethingsomething mentioned that he needed an extra set of hands for a moment, stepped out of the room, and came back with the receptionist in tow to pass him instruments while he worked. 

I feel like that was a pretty weird moment for both her and I – 20 minutes ago we were pleasantly chatting over the fact that I brought a Reuben to a doctor’s appointment, and now she was watching as someone cut a hole in my back. A part of me wondered: Was she a nurse moonlighting as a receptionist due to short staffing, or a receptionist moonlighting as a nurse? I really hoped it wasn’t the second one, because I’d want way more than minimum wage if I were watching a guy get his back cut open.   

Once everything was finally finished and the receptionurse had gone back to work the phones, the doctor set about bandaging me up.

“Alright, Truman, we’re almost done.” He said, smoothing medical tape along my back. “You’ll need to change this dressing twice a day. You’ve got someone who can help you do that, right?”

“Um…” I sighed. “No.”

He clucked his tongue. “Really? No girlfriend or family or anything?” Now that I’ve cut a hole in your back, I’m going to cut a hole in your heart!

“Not really, no.” I said. Realizing how depressing that sounded, I added, “I can do it myself, though! I’ve gotten really good at doing things alone.” Realizing how much more depressing that sounded, I opted to just shut my dumb mouth before I did any more damage.

“Hm. Well, do your best, I guess. Since you don’t have anybody to help you change the dressing I’m going to want to schedule an early followup so I can make sure you don’t get infected.”

I took issue with the way he said that – like it was my fault that I don’t have anybody to change bloody dressings on my back. If that was such an important component of my recovery, why the shit didn’t he ask me about it before he cut me up? I mean, I didn’t even want a biopsy – he’s the one who thought my moles looked all weird.

I walked out of the doctor’s office with my back ramrod straight, a combination of bandages, stitches, and lingering anesthesia making every movement feel profoundly weird. As I struggled to get into The Mystery Wagon without pressing my bandages against the back of my seat, I reflected on how glad I was to have the whole procedure out of the way so I didn’t have to worry anymore.

Then I remembered that I was still going to have to wait and see if I had skin cancer or not and immediately went back to worrying.

Truman Capps changed his dressing this morning and it only took like 15 minutes.  

2Fast 2Carb Guy

This image text doesn't have a joke in it because Parks and Recreation cannot be topped.

Well, I’ve been carb-free for over a week now and I’ve already noticed some changes! Namely, I’m hungry all the time, I have cravings for foods I’ve never craved before, I’m eating a lot of food that tastes like cardboard with sriracha on it, and I hate pretty much everybody, including people who haven’t even been born yet.

I’ve quit looking at the low carb diet my doctor recommended last week as a calculated nutritional program to reduce weight – at this point I see it as a calculated nutritional program to reduce human joy. I quite honestly give no shits whether I lose weight or not now; I’m just sticking with it because I refuse to crap out on such a short term, small potatoes challenge.

In the midst of a post-mealtime hunger flash last week I caught myself thinking, “Damn, this low carb diet is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” I started hating myself before I was even done having the thought – not eating rice, pasta, and bread for 12 days is really the hardest thing I’ve done in my life?

Curious, I set to work trying to think of what was the actual hardest thing I’ve done in my life. After a few minutes I was still drawing a blank – the closest thing I could think of was getting up for an 8:30 AM Spanish class every day during winter term of my freshman year of college.

So I’m not saying that not eating certain foods is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life – I’m just saying it’s roughly as hard as waking up early, and that shit’s no picnic.

Maybe it’s my fault for not taking the time to truly understand what I’m doing to my body. I didn’t really do a lot of research about low carb diets because I figured I’d just wind up reading a Men’s Health article by some hot guy named Chad with a whole bunch of stats, percentages, and chemistry buzzwords.

On day 3 of your low carb high prot diet your body is going to start pumping a huge amount of floogobyne. Now, without the big hargotrone rush your body generates whenever you put carbs in your system, those floogobyne chains will dive bomb your fuckodyne receptors, which means your shit will be purple for three days.  

The bulk of my research, as discussed last week, is me frantically Googling foods before I eat them to make sure they don’t have carbs in them. After a week, I’ve quit Googling foods and have just started assuming that if it’s a food I desperately want to eat, I can’t have it.

After discovering that I can’t have the food I want, I sit around being hungry and angry for awhile, go eat a bag of frozen vegetables,* and then go back to being hungry and angry.

*”Hey Truman, why don’t you grill up some skirt steak and greens?” Because I work all day, asshole! Let me know when I can microwave a steak in five minutes.

I’m well aware that the advantage to the low carb diet is that you get to eat all the fatty meat and cheese that you want. What I’d never realized, though, is how much fatty meats and cheeses gain from the carb-heavy foods I’m no longer allowed to eat.

Have you ever had a lettuce-wrapped cheeseburger before? If you haven’t, don’t. It tastes like you’re eating a $7.50 head of Iceberg lettuce that drips grease all over your hands and forearms from some completely untasteable meat. But whatever, right? Even when the burger is bad the fries usually make up for it. Except they don’t, because potatoes are full of carbs, so the side dish for your handful of bland greasy lettuce is a small bowl filled with cantaloupe that you will still be hungry after eating.

Again, I never read the Men’s Health article that explains how this diet works, but I assume depriving your body of carbs somehow makes it forget how food works. A normal person gets hungry, eats, and is no longer hungry because they’ve satisfied their hunger. A person on a low carb diet gets hungry, eats, and then remains hungry until they die or eat a grain of rice or something.

I ate an entire package of bacon last Sunday. I consumed the bacon throughout the day – slowly at first, and then gradually faster as I realized that no matter how fast I fried and ate the bacon I was still fucking hungry after eating it. I’ve got no problem eating a ton of bacon, because bacon is delicious, but since the act of eating it was doing absolutely nothing for me I could've just chewed a piece of bacon flavored gum and saved myself the trouble of degreasing a pan. .

Desperate, ravenous, and having eaten every carb-free food in the house, I made an emergency trip to the North Hollywood Diner for steak and eggs, where I suffered the indignity of asking if I could substitute hash browns for fruit. FRUIT. I’m still ashamed of myself, and that sassy 67 year old waitress is still ashamed of herself for serving me.

So I completely demolished some top sirloin, scrambled eggs, and fucking fruit and still felt like all I’d had was a glass of water and a saltine. I had all but licked the plate clean of carb free foods, and all that was left on the table was a little plate with two pieces of toast on it.

Driven to desperation, I grabbed the smallest piece and defiantly shoved the whole thing into my mouth, then paid my check and returned home to be slightly less hungry and still angry.

The following night, I was discussing this whole debacle on the phone with my friend Kristin, who’s been on a strict no carb diet for months and also has also done some research and other shit like that. When I mentioned the piece of toast, she gasped.

“Wait, seriously!?” She said. “You ate a piece of toast?”

“Um, yes.” I said. “What would I gain from lying to someone about my toast consumption?”

“Truman, you can’t cheat on a no-carb diet. Now that carbs are back in your system you’ve wrecked everything you were working toward all week.”

My first response wasn’t anger or disappointment, but joy:

“So since I fucked it up that means it doesn’t matter if I go eat some pasta, right!?”

With her convincing, I’ve decided to stick it out and starve until I see my doctor again on Saturday. In the meantime, though, I’ve figured out a new way to stave off hunger: Every time I want to eat food that is in some way nourishing, I’ll distract myself by fantasizing about traveling to Hell, tracking down Dr. Atkins, and sticking my foot clear up his ass for inventing such a fucking terrible piece of shit diet, and then I’ll grab the nearest devil’s trident and stab…

Okay, no, I’m sorry. I’m overreacting. I don’t really mean that.

I just…

I just want bread so bad, you guys.

Truman Capps is just going to be fat now. Just... Fuck it.

Tombs; Raiding

 

 Alternate title: Ass Quest.

The Tomb Raider series will always conjure a set of very specific, somewhat awkward memories among young men who reached sexual maturity in the late 1990s or early 2000s. The 17-year-old gaming franchise is defined by two hard and fast rules:

1)   The protagonist, lady archeologist/gunslinger Lara Croft, has enormous tits, and

2)   The games are almost always terrible.

Take it from someone who played a few Tomb Raider games in middle school: The main draw was never really the gameplay. The first couple of games got good reviews, but over the course of the next decade or so the developers spent most of their energy making the franchise a state-of-the-art cleavage simulator set against a backdrop of tombs to be raided. No matter how buggy or repetitive the games got, though, they were almost always big sellers.

In fact, the franchise was so popular that the Guinness Book of World Records named Lara Croft the ‘Most Successful Human Virtual Game Heroine.’ That’s kind of impressive until you realize that Tomb Raider is basically the only successful gaming franchise to have a female protagonist.

As of 2012, 48% of video game purchasers were female, yet the vast majority of major video game protagonists remain male (and white!), reflective of the fact that video games are, at their simplest, computer programs based on Dungeons and Dragons, and you don’t find a lot of women in that line of work.

Lara Croft has been something of a hero to a lot of female gamers, like a buxom, gun-toting Susan B. Anthony with an affinity for ancient treasure. In a market choked with games about angry, ‘roided out dudes massacring thousands of people (Gears of War, God of War, Modern Warfare…) Lara Croft was a beacon of hope that one day society would recognize that women could carelessly massacre thousands of people just as well as men.

The main reason Lara Croft became a hero to female gamers, though, was because there was no competition to speak of. Taken on her own, Lara isn’t a terribly interesting character – her most defining characteristic is the fact that she was the first video game protagonist that it was possible for men to masturbate to.

Thanks to the third person perspective, Lara’s ass is front and center of the frame for virtually the entirety of every game. Lara lets out a tortured, sexualized grunt every time she clambers up a rock and moans almost orgasmically whenever she drowns, falls to her death, gets impaled on spikes, is riddled with bullets, or is mauled by angry monkeys.

Even though her line of work often sees her fighting heavily armed mercenaries and mystical creatures she still goes into every adventure wearing tight short shorts and an equally tight T shirt. In later games, more powerful processors allowed Lara’s tight shirts to have plunging necklines and realistically modeled cleavage, which often received more attention from both the developers and the media than the lackluster gameplay. One of Croft’s co-creators was drummed out of the company early in the franchise’s history because he refused to add a code that would allow you to remove Lara’s clothes.

I’m kind of on both sides of this issue, because I hate the idea of women being reduced to mindless sex objects almost as much as I love boobs. I eventually quit playing Tomb Raider games because they sucked and because the Internet offered me many cheaper options to see a wider variety of boobs that were actually real.

Earlier this month, though, a new game developer shocked the gaming world by releasing a gritty, realistic reboot of the Tomb Raider series that against all odds is extremely good. Lara has been noticeably de-sexualized – her breast size in the latest game is at an all-time low – and recast as a recent college graduate shipwrecked on a cursed island, forced to find inner strength to survive the elements and defeat an army of crazed cultists who want her dead.

I bought the new Tomb Raider (appropriately titled Tomb Raider, not to be confused with the original Tomb Raider or the Angelina Jolie movie Tomb Raider, based on the game Tomb Raider) right after its release, and I’ve really been enjoying it. As someone who’s concerned with how women are portrayed in the media I love the fact that Lara’s struggle to survive is matched by her struggle to gain confidence in her abilities and discover who she truly is, and as a disgusting pervert I love the fact that even though they’ve reduced her breast size she’s still clearly a D-cup with a thin, waiflike frame, which is just delightful.

What makes me a little uncomfortable is that despite all the progress on Lara’s character, the game seems to take an almost fetishy pleasure in causing her harm. Cutscenes throughout the game show Lara having the absolute worst luck – she breaks through rickety floors and crashes unceremoniously onto the hard rock below, painstakingly removes a sharpened stick that’s pierced her side, gets beaten in the face by a gang of men, and is nearly raped, all in the first hour or so of the game.

A number of critics have called this out as a case of Same Misogyny, Different Game – Lara’s constant peril and pain is eroticized so a male fanbase can get off on damsel in distress fantasies. In a pre-release interview, a member of the development team stirred controversy by opining that players “will want to protect Lara,” because, y’know, women have to be protected by men.
Viewed as a whole, I think the Tomb Raider franchise says a lot more about men than it does about women. It’s the story of a tough, strong woman as told by a bunch of bookish, nerdy men who – while I hate to generalize – probably haven’t had an abundance of experience with women in their lives. This is what men in the late 1990s thought female empowerment was: Short shorts, huge tits, a shower scene at the end of Tomb Raider II…

I think that the latest Tomb Raider game is a really big step for men’s perception of women. Yes, men did sort of fetishize a young woman getting injured, but we got the body proportions right and nailed the ‘compelling character’ thing!

So be patient, ladies. Give it a couple more years and I’m sure we’ll have all the kinks worked out of your role model.

Truman Capps thinks that ‘Tomb Raider’ is a really, really terrible name for a major gaming franchise.

Carb Guy

This fucking carb bastard is laughing at me. OHHOHOHOHOHOHOHOH

As a child my primary interests were Goldeneye 64 and sour cream, a combination that resulted in me being a fat little son of a bitch with a terrible haircut for the first 13-odd years of my life. Then, puberty threw me a bone* and I hit my growth spurt, so by the time I got to high school I was still aesthetically unappealing in a lot of ways, but no longer overweight.

*There’s a boner joke in here but I’m not going to go looking for it.  

Today, I pride myself on being a relatively lean adult, even though I really have nothing to be proud of. It’s not like at the age of 12 I took the initiative and devised a fitness regimen to get into shape – I just sat around being alive until my hormones made my height more appropriate to my weight. I guess you could say I’ve got a fat little boy deep inside m- OKAY NEXT PARAGRAPH

Since I never did anything to stop being fat, I don’t have any particularly good eating or exercise habits, and my continued thinness is pretty much dumb luck thanks to my metabolism. But I know that won’t last forever, and I’m afraid that when it shuts down I’ll gradually revert back to my prior fatness, kind of like Flowers for Algernon but with an all-you-can-eat Indian lunch buffet.

To that end, I’ve been trying to be healthier this year – I’ve been walking a mile or two at lunch every day, I’ve cut my Diet Coke consumption drastically, and I’ve eaten more salads than I’d care to admit. Through it all, though, my weight has steadfastly remained the same.

Maybe it’s a sign from the universe that some higher power needs me to be exactly this weight, per some intricate plan beyond human comprehension. As a child I was too heavy to fulfill my destiny so the universe made me my current weight; now all attempts to decrease that weight are in vain because the universe needs me to be exactly 175 pounds.

What’s more likely is that I’m fucking something up, so when I went back to the doctor for a followup appointment yesterday I brought the matter up with him. His suggestion was, “Why don’t you try cutting carbs for the next two weeks?” 

Here are some of my Google searches from the past 18 hours:

what are carbs

what foods have carbs

does peanut butter have carbs

how many carbs does peanut butter have

do they make peanut butter without carbs in it

have alison brie and dave franco broken up

What I’ve learned is that pretty much every bachelor food I subsist on – pasta, rice, sandwiches – are choc-a-bloc full of carbs. I’ve also learned that cutting carbs will make me ‘irritable’ for a couple of weeks, because apparently carbs are natural mood enhancers. This does not bode well – I’m pretty irritable even when I’m shoving open faced peanut butter sandwiches and Safeway Select egg noodles into my face, so I might have to join a fight club for the next couple of weeks or something.

I don’t know if this is nine hours of carb-withdrawal talking, but I already hate everything about my new diet.

I’ve spent my time in LA trying as hard as I can to not be an LA guy, and then today when one of my coworkers asked me what I wanted for lunch I found myself saying, “I don’t know – I’m cutting carbs, so maybe a lettuce wrap?” Hey baby, I can give you a ride to lunch in my white convertible 1983 Chrysler LeBaron, so long as you don’t mind me calling my life coach from my car phone. Cocaine’s in the glove box – help yourself!

I also hate calling them ‘carbs’ – as though my fast paced, healthy lifestyle doesn’t allow me to slow down long enough to say ‘-ohydrates’ every time I explain to somebody what I can’t have. Hell, for all my Googling I’m still not sure I could tell you what carbs are – my best explanation is, “They’re like science things in your food that make you happy but also fat.”

I grew up in a family of food lovers, and I always figured that when the time came for me to lose weight I’d just start exercising aggressively so I could keep my preferred diet more or less intact, probably because I always assume that the future version of me is going to be a much smarter, more responsible person than I ever will be. Regular readers will recall that even the thought of exercise is enough to trigger an existential crisis for me, to the point that I’d rather take a shower with John Boehner than go to the gym.

I’m still an overweight 11 year old. I hate sweating and I’m slowly customizing my room so that I can control my lights, TV, and computer without getting out of bed. For me, being lazy isn’t a bad habit – it’s a lifestyle choice. The fact of the matter is that my passion in life is writing, and that activity only rewards people who spend a whole lot of time sitting perfectly still and staring at a screen.

To a lazy person, not doing something is almost always preferable to doing something. So the choice between getting a gym membership, carving time out of my day to go there, and building a workout routine or simply not eating bread, rice, and pasta isn’t really a choice at all.

I guess what I’m saying is, if I’m an asshole to you in the next couple of weeks, it’s not because I’m a dyed in the wool asshole. It’s just because I don’t have enough carbs, and for that reason it’s actually really irresponsible of you to get mad at me because it’s a medical condition beyond my control.

Wow. Actually, this no carb thing is kind of like a ‘get out of shame free’ card! The only way this could be better would be if I was eating a big, fluffy croissant right now.

Truman Capps apologizes to all LeBaron owners.

Luck Of The Finnish

This, apparently, is Ireland.

A couple of months ago I wound up talking to an Irish girl in a bar. This was a pretty big win for me, because as far as I’m concerned Irish is basically the best accent a girl can have, immediately followed by English (Elizabeth Hurley style), Australian, English (Daphne from Frasier style), and then any other accent that isn’t South African.

I’m talking to her about her time in the States and I decide I want to impress her with my rudimentary knowledge of Ireland, so I say, “Are you from Northern Ireland…” At this point, I realized that alcohol has rendered me incapable of remembering the name of the country that makes up the rest of Ireland, so I smoothly finished the sentence with, “…or Regular Ireland?”

Fun fact: The Irish are extremely proud of their home country, to the point that referring to the Republic of Ireland as ‘Regular Ireland’ is considered ‘extremely disrespectful’, and anyone who does so is an ‘insensitive bastard’ who, rather unsurprisingly, goes to bed alone that night.

Experiences like this give you some idea of how knowledgeable I am of Irish culture. Essentially, if it’s something to do with Ireland that wasn’t mentioned in The Departed, I don’t know it, and as someone who doesn’t drink beer and prefers bourbon to whiskey I’m unlikely to take a crash course anytime soon.

So I guess you could say that the amount of enthusiasm that goes into Saint Patrick’s Day in this country is sort of confusing to me.

Now before anybody throws a potato at me, let me say that I’m all about taking pride in your country. My mother’s side of the family comes from Finland, and you’d best believe I rub it in everybody’s face when Finland cleans up at the Winter Olympics. So I get why Irish people go nuts for Saint Patrick’s Day – they’re celebrating their heritage.

What I don’t get is why everybody else suddenly decides to become Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day.

Last Saint Patrick’s Day, I was awakened at 9:00 AM to Celtic music blasting through the apartment from my roommate’s bedroom. I poked my head into my roommate’s room to see him at his computer playing League of Legends in a green shamrock T-shirt, his hair dyed bright green, a case of Guinness at his feet and a bottle of Jamison standing sentry beside his keyboard.

“Hey dude!” He hollered over the music, briefly glancing away from the screen. Noticing my shellshocked expression, he explained, “It’s Saint Patrick’s Day.”

“Yeah, I figured it was.”

“I’m gonna hit some house parties, then head to the bars in Culver City. I’m one-sixteenth Irish, so this is like the biggest day of the year for me.” He said, mashing buttons on his keyboard as Celtic music gave way to Dropkick Murphys.

The Irish playlist continued throughout the day, and ultimately he wound up getting too drunk to go out, so he just spent the evening at home alone, gaming drunkenly with green hair.

Thing is, I’d never known that he was at all Irish before that. He’d never mentioned Irish heritage or culture – let alone the country of Ireland – before, and were he presented with an Irish girl in a bar he would probably have cockblocked himself in more or less the same way I did. Likewise, I never heard another mention of Ireland or the Irish after Saint Patrick’s Day.

I’m not looking down on people who want to get drunk on Saint Patrick’s Day or anything; I just don’t get why people feel like they have to scrounge up some practically nonexistent Irish heritage to justify it.

If you’re Irish and your homeland and culture are a very meaningful and active part of your life, yeah, go ahead and represent. If you’re not Irish and you really don’t care either way but just want to get drunk, yeah, go ahead and get drunk – I’m sure they’d gladly accept another drinking buddy – but don’t bullshit everybody else and pretend you’ve been Colin Farrell for the other 364 days of the year.

When you only want to be Irish on the day that all the other Irish people are getting drunk, you’re essentially a fair-weather fan. Irish people have had a pretty rough time in the past century – at least, Jack Nicholson said they did at the beginning of The Departed – and Saint Patrick’s Day is them celebrating that they managed to get through all that shit. Showing up and acting like you were a part of that struggle when you can’t even find Ireland on a map is like skipping out on helping a friend move but then showing up in time to help eat all the post-move pizza.

Again, you should feel free to party on Saint Patrick’s Day, but if you’re not Irish, don’t pretend it’s your party. Just take part in the festivities; don’t pretend that it’s somehow about you, you selfish son of a bitch. It’s like going to somebody else’s birthday party and spontaneously claiming to be their twin to poach some attention.

When I drink on Saint Patrick’s Day, I don’t drink because of some celebration of a vague Irish heritage I’m pretending to have; I drink because I love drinking. And when you think about it, getting drunk without any solid justification is pretty much the most Irish thing a person can do.

Truman Capps loves a good potato.

Meet The New Boss

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"You've got to be joking. THIS is the biggest book we have? We need a way bigger book than this!"

UPDATE 1.18.15 - I no longer stand by the comments in this update. After nearly two years Pope Francis has made it clear that I was too quick to judge - while his previous comments about homosexuality still erred on the side of dickish, his humility, his words on the environment, and his focus on income inequality have really impressed me. Count me as Team Pope. 

I like to think that the real reason Pope Benedict resigned wasn’t exhaustion, health concerns, or the fact that the people he worked with were a bunch of dicks – I like to think that he’s just experiencing a belated midlife crisis. Now that he’s quit his old job he’s going to ditch the Popemobile for a cheap muscle car and start smoking weed and pumping iron in his garage. Vatican Beauty, we’ll call it.

No matter the reason for his departure, I was really happy to see the old Pope go, because he was a real piece of shit. In the wake of his departure I had hoped that the Vatican, much like the Republican Party, would try to update its image and message by choosing a Pope who’s more in touch with the 21^st century. Much like the Republican Party, they disappointed me by trotting out some Latino dude with a raft of backward ideologies. (Hopefully Pope Francis hydrates better before his first blessing.)

I guess what we learned here today is that if you expect a hypertraditional, conservative 1600 year old organization to throw you for a loop, you’re gonna have a bad time.

I’m well aware that Pope Francis has done some good things in his life. He’s said a lot on behalf of the poor, and depending on who you talk to he helped a lot of people escape from Argentina’s military junta* back in the day. On top of that, he’s the first Jesuit pope, and from what I hear on the Internet, Jesuits are pretty big on knowledge and education, which also is a good thing.

*Depending on who you talk to, he also helped a lot of people get kidnapped by Argentina’s military junta. Until there’s more conclusive proof, though, my mostly-forgotten training as a journalist compels me to give him the benefit of the doubt.  

But he also called the prospect of gay people getting married, “…a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God,” and I’ve got to say, fuck you if you think that. I try very hard to empathize with people whose opinions I don’t agree with, but I find homophobia truly disgusting and offensive, particularly when it’s coming from someone who’s devoted his life to an organization that claims to represent charity and love.

To be fair, he’s said that homosexuals should be treated with respect and compassion, but last time I checked, it’s not terribly respectful or compassionate to declare that two people who love each other getting married is an evil Satanic conspiracy.

I really don’t think we should just run around declaring things Satanic conspiracies all willy nilly. That’s a pretty hefty charge. I mean, if you want to call something a Satanic conspiracy, go ahead, but at least reserve the term for things that are actually sort of evil, like wars and social injustice. Or child molestation. Or an organization that systematically covers up child molestation and shelters child molesters and knowingly places them in situations where they can have contact with children, thereby facilitating further molestation, and goes to great lengths to discredit victims of molestation who have come forward. I think stuff like that is way more evil than Portia de Rossi and Ellen DeGeneres.

Long story short, fuck you Pope Francis, you crusty old bigot. I’m sorry to be so tough on you on your first day on the job, but I was going to say this about you sooner or later and I’d rather just get it out of the way now.

I’ve always been surrounded by Catholics. My parents’ best friends (and my godparents) are Catholic, and they’ve been a source of constant joy (and occasional noogies) for essentially my entire life. One of my close friends in high school was Catholic, and she and her family had no problem inviting into their home a 16-year-old outspoken atheist jackass who had a lot of well rehearsed liberal talking points about the War in Iraq and various gay marriage debates. The family of one of my Catholic friends from college has let me stay with them in Sacramento multiple times on my road trips from Portland to LA – and once, when they found out they wouldn’t be in town when I came through, offered me the keys to their house so I’d have a place to stay.

Some of the most wonderful, caring, outgoing people I’ve had the pleasure to meet have been Catholics. I’ve never once heard one of these Catholics make some derisive comment about the notion of two guys who love each other getting married, or lament the fact that there are women out there taking birth control pills. The Catholics I know don’t really care about that stuff, because it has very little to do with whether you’re a good person or not, and it has even less to do with their personal relationship with God.

The Pope may have spent his entire life studying Catholicism, but I think he could learn an awful lot about the religion from the Catholics I know.

Truman Capps wants to sneak into the Vatican with a suitcase full of gay porn and hide it all over the place.

Hugs

 Thanks to this image, my blog is now banned in Mississippi.

I’m getting pretty goddamn sick of hugging. If I could push a button and change one facet of human interaction, it would be to reduce worldwide hugging by about 70%. No, wait – it’d probably be to make people quit posting passive aggressive Facebook updates like “SO SICK OF ALL THIS DRAMA. UGH.” But if I could change two facets of human interaction, it’d be passive aggressive Facebook updates, immediately followed by hugs.

I don’t take issue with the act of hugging itself – in spite of my well documented personal space issues, I still enjoy a good hug between family members, friends, or two dudes after a protracted absence (commonly referred to as a ‘bro grab.’) The reason I want to get rid of hugging is because it’s absolutely out of control now.

Maybe this is just an LA thing, but has anyone else noticed that everybody hugs everybody these days? What used to be an expression of affection between people who knew one another really well has now become just an overly invasive handshake.

I’ve been hugged by people right as they’re introduced to me, before I have any time to ascertain who this person is or if they’re the sort of person I want to wrap my arms around and press against my body. (What if they’re a suicide bomber? How would I know before it’s too late!?) Once, I even got hugged by a manager at a production company after showing up for a job interview. Didn’t even get the job.

It pisses me off because in the past few years I’ve gotten really good at handshakes, to the point that a lot of people compliment me on how firm and reassuring my handshake is. My handshake is so damn good that sometimes I worry it oversells the experience of knowing me – my strong, well-practiced grasp is reminiscent of a go-getting, adventurous salesman who drinks Ketel One at lunch and knows things about horses, not a guy who writes a lengthy anti-hugging manifesto on the Internet.

But if there’s one place that you should oversell yourself, it’s in a first impression. And now that a significant number of the people I’m meeting want to hug me right off the bat I’m kind of at a disadvantage, because I’m not great at hugging.

While handshakes are pretty simple – touch hands, squeeze, let go – hugs are a minefield of variables to overanalyze.

Do I keep my ass pointed awkwardly out and only bring in my upper torso, or is it socially acceptable for my genitalia to be that close to your genitalia before I even know your last name?

Is a one-armed hug acceptable? I usually have a drink in my hand when I’m meeting people and I’m reluctant to risk $9 worth of Old Fashioned by swinging it around behind somebody’s back while I hug them, so I go for the one armed hug – but is that the equivalent of a limp, moist handshake?

How tight do I squeeze, and for how long? A very loose, brief hug seems distant and noncommittal, while a very tight, long hug is attempted murder. A short, tight hug seems like the way personal trainers greet one another at Jamba Juice. A long, loose hug is straight out of Buffalo Bill’s playbook.

When you hug someone, you’re basically saying, Come here – experience me! This is what I smell like, this is what my clothes feel like, and here’s my upper torso so you can tell exactly how flabby I am. A hug turns me into a tactile, sensory experience, and I’d rather not be one of those – at least, not to a complete stranger.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to turn down a hug. No matter how ironclad your reasoning for not wanting to hug somebody, if somebody comes up with their arms out and you say, “No, thank you,” you’re going to be the asshole.

Since it’s impossible to take a principled stand on the hug epidemic without looking like an enormous tool, I’ve been forced to play ball. I now go into most social situations with the grim understanding that I will probably have to hug a few strangers before the night is through.

This is particularly difficult when dating. I’d say roughly 80% of the women in LA want to go for a hug at the start of the evening, while 20% have some trepidation about pressing their body up against a guy they barely know. The 20% who don’t want to be hugged are definitely the ones I have the most in common with, but what drives me up the wall is that I usually only find out that they don’t want to hug me after I’ve tried to hug them and been awkwardly shot down.

I think hugging is amazing in the proper time and place, but much like cupcakes and the word ‘amazing’, it’s being overused to the point that it doesn’t have meaning anymore. What do we have left for affection if you greet your best friend the same way you greet your new mechanic?

Why should we have to pretend that we want to be best friends with everybody we meet? Is it so wrong to meet someone and think, “You know, I’d really rather get to know you before wrapping my arms around you and shoving my entire body up against yours.”

I'm not saying we should be rude - I just wish we could save our affection for the people who really deserve it. I mean, look at England! They've forgone all emotion for years and they're doing just fine.

Truman Capps will immediately forego everything he’s said here if he meets Alison Brie.

Doctor Feelgood

 

We have a lot of fun here, but let's not forget that this was actually a pretty good TV show.

To be completely honest, I’m really happy with where my life is at the moment – and before you get pissed at me for gloating, keep in mind that I have pretty low standards. All I’m saying is I think I’ve made a real 180 from the emo, existential blog posts of six months ago. Every day I write things for money and then return to an apartment with zero cockroaches in it, and the various extracurricular projects I’m working on seem to be taking off. I feel pretty good about myself right now, and my natural and time-tested response to those emotions is to lie awake at night worrying that I’m dying of some horrible disease.

As far back as I can remember I’ve been a hypochondriac. Diseases are like monsters in your closet – silent, malevolent killers that can torment you without warning – except they’re actually a real thing and pulling the blanket over your head probably won’t stop them.

I’ll never forget the all-encompassing terror I felt when I first found out about diabetes – because what disease is scarier to a 7 year old than one where you’re not allowed to eat candy and have to get a shot every day? Diabetes would be an amazing disciplinary tool if it wasn’t a very serious and life threatening condition: So help me, Billy, if you don’t clean your room this instant I will give you so much diabetes!

As I got older and began my slow march to what is now a symbiotic relationship with the Internet, I became familiar with dozens of terrible diseases as well as a website called WebMD, which I believe exists solely to convince people like me that they have those terrible diseases.

SYMPTOM CHECKER

Your light cough is experienced by millions of Americans every day and is a ubiquitous symptom of the common cold. In rare cases, it is also associated with the early stages of the Marburg virus, where you go insane and vomit up your liquefied organs. PERSONAL TRAINERS HATE THIS MAN CLICK HERE FOR THE #1 SECRET TO A FLAT BELLY

This usually leads me to go to Google for a second opinion, where I type in extremely specific search queries like…

if you cough six times in two hours and don’t currently have a runny nose but had a runny nose last month but no cough then does that mean that you have the Marburg virus

…which usually just creates more questions than it answers. Depending on how much I’m panicking, I then go for the last line of defense and call my Mom, a biology major who worked in a hospital laboratory in the mid 1980s and is thus the foremost medical authority I know (and the only one who will take all my calls).

“Mom, I have a light cough but no runny nose. Does that sound like Marburg virus to you?”

“…Jesus, Truman.”

Note that nowhere in this process do I go to a doctor. Unlike most hypochondriacs, who waste doctors’ time with as many unnecessary appointments as their insurance will allow, my fear of disease is tempered by an equal or greater hatred of invasive medical procedures, from needles to tongue depressors to the doctor touching me in pretty much any way.

The best case scenario for me is one where I go to the doctor, he takes one look at me (without me having to take my clothes off, naturally) and says, “Holy shit, Truman, you’re the healthiest person I’ve ever seen – even healthier than vegetarians and people who exercise! Get out of here, you rascal!” And then he gives me a coupon for In-N-Out.

Unfortunately, every doctor I’ve gone to seems slavishly bound to the Hippocratic Oath and insists on examining me very thoroughly, much to my chagrin. In my last physical before leaving for college I mentioned offhand a vague medical concern regarding – how shall I put this? – my hindquarters, and next thing I knew the doctor was rather thoroughly examining my hindquarters with his gloved finger. The good news is that I didn’t have cancer like I’d thought; the bad news is that a man I’d met half an hour ago had to rummage around in my asshole to tell me that. Needless to say, that was my last trip to the doctor.

And that brings us back to now. My life is good and I’m happy, and in every movie I’ve seen that’s usually a sign that the bottom is going to drop out soon, so I scheduled a physical with a doctor in Sherman Oaks in hopes of moving this story along into the second act.

Based on my previous experience, I was careful to only ask medical questions which I knew wouldn’t result in his fingers doing any spelunking. The good news is that my lungs work, I’m not overweight, my blood pressure is okay, and I miraculously don’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.

“I notice you have very fair skin,” my doctor, who is Indian, said toward the end of the exam. “Do you have any moles?”

In retrospect, I probably should’ve refused to give him any information because racial profiling isn’t cool, but at the time I went along with it, and next thing I knew I had my shirt off and he was poking at a mole on my back.

“Hm.” He said. “It’s probably nothing, but I’d like to get this biopsied.”

Biopsy (n) – A procedure where a dude with a knife cuts off a chunk of your fucking skin.

“Really?” I asked, panic creeping into my voice – both at the prospect that I could have melanoma and the prospect that I would definitely have to endure physical pain in the near future. “I don’t even get that much sun. I was always kind of an ‘indoor kid’, you know?”

He sat down next to me on the examining table to explain.

“When checking for melanomas, we use the ABCDEF system – we ask if the mole is asymmetrical, if it has irregular borders, different colors, a diameter of more than 6 millimeters, if it’s evolving over time, and if it’s funny looking.”

“Funny looking,” I said, thinking the term sounded just a tad subjective for 21^st century Western medicine.

“Your mole is asymmetric and funny looking, so I think it’s safest to get it biopsied, just to be sure.”

So not only has my doctor got my hypochondriasis cranked up to 11 and put me on the roster for an invasive procedure in the next couple of weeks; he’s also told me that part of my body fits the official medical definition of funny looking. Thanks, jackass – I’ve known I’m funny looking for years. 

I’ve never had a bad sunburn and I haven’t been experiencing any symptoms, so what little common sense I have tells me that this probably isn’t something I should be devoting a lot of my time to worrying about. And much to my surprise, it’s actually worked – while waiting to go get biopsied I’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining the happiness that led me to worry in the first place.

That being said, I’m still spending too much time comparing my mole to pictures of moles on the Internet, so the sooner some dude cuts a chunk of my skin off, the better.

Truman Capps always wants his doctor to be Zach Braff, but no luck so far.

I'm A Business, Man

In hundreds of years I hope to God that old PowerPoint clipart like this isn't considered art.

Throughout college I always talked about business majors in more or less the same way I talk about the state of Florida – a catch-all punchline to whatever derisive, snotty joke needs one. Some of my best friends were business majors, as was my father, but I’m not going to let a few good apples spoil a perfectly good opportunity to crack jokes about the legions of Axe-scented, wide brimmed baseball cap-wearing, this video appearing-in bros who made up the business program at the University of Oregon – no more than a business major would miss out on an opportunity to crack open a tall boy of Keystone at 9:30 AM.

Maybe I mocked business students because their course of study was intimidating to me. My major required me to write about stuff, which coincidentally is the only thing I’m capable of doing correctly more than 60% of the time. Business majors, on the other hand, had to learn about personnel management, micro and macroeconomics, and some form of calculus – I don’t even really know what calculus is, much less how to do it. Let’s face it: I’m about as well suited to run a business as your garden variety Floridian is to run up a staircase without having a heart attack.

So imagine my shock when I received a terse letter from the City of Los Angeles informing me that I owed them a few hundred dollars in business taxes. I’m still technically a freelancer at my agency – I’m on the books as an independent contractor (albeit one who comes in every day) and as far as the city is concerned, that means I’m running a business within city limits and have to be taxed as such.

I’m not incorporated. I don’t have an office. I don’t have employees. I don’t have a working printer.* I don’t even sell products. My entire business model is that I go to one specific ad agency five days a week to write things for them, they pay me, and then I take that money and invest it in Indian lunch buffets and wireless lightbulbs.

*This is code for, “I lost all of the necessary wires to connect my printer to my laptop, so now it’s just decorative.”

But I guess as far as the city is concerned, I’m the product that my business sells. And my business doesn’t have a name besides my own. Come to think of it, I don’t own a business – I am a business.

There’s been pretty widespread agreement that corporations aren’t people – so shouldn’t that be a two-way street?

I wouldn’t mind that much if being a business was somehow cool. Businesses get to do lots of stuff ordinary people can’t, like buy members of Congress and commit blatant fraud without any type of punishment. Hell, a lot of businesses get to pay fewer taxes – just ask Facebook and Bank of America. I, on the other hand, get all the worst parts of being a human and a business, at least until I can afford a corporate jet to write off or a hot secretary to have an affair with.

What makes this really sting is that I didn’t even want to become a business. It happened to me accidentally – I didn’t ask for this! I’m kind of like Peter Parker, except instead of being bitten by a radioactive spider and becoming Spider Man I just filled out a radioactive 1099 form and became Business Man, with the power to incur additional tax liability based on poorly written city ordinances. With great power comes great tax responsibility.

The accounting department at work pointed out to me that the best way for me to stop being a business and become a human again is to move to Burbank, which is not a part of the City of Los Angeles and thus would mean I wouldn’t get taxed for any ‘business’ I do there. Burbank, for those of you who don’t know, has the same bustling nightlife and social scene as Salem, Oregon, but with more expensive parking.  

I really don’t want to become a tax refugee, because that’s the sort of shit Mitt Romney would do. If Los Angeles wants to charge me additional taxes based on a warped perspective of who I am and what I do, I want to face those taxes like a man instead of running and hiding on the other side of I-5. Also, if I were to become a tax refugee I’d want to do it somewhere glamorous like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, or literally any location that isn’t Burbank – a city named after a dentist.

If I’ve got any conservative readers left I’m sure they’re laughing their asses off that the tax-and-spend liberal has suddenly been saddled with unnecessary extra taxes in Obama’s second term. For what it’s worth, now I suddenly understand all the complaining business owners do about unnecessary taxes – although I imagine they probably make a little more money every year than I do here at my company with one employee, one customer, and one product.  

I really wouldn’t mind paying this tax if it was being accessed accurately. If it were just a tax on people who sing Jefferson Starship in the car too much or accidentally turn on the garbage disposal instead of the kitchen light I’d be happy to pay it, because both of those are things that I do. How about a tax for people who are lactose intolerant but eat cheese anyway? I’d pay the shit out of that tax.

But taxing me as a business is just plain unfair – not so much to me as it is to all the other actual businesses out there. Operating a business takes dedication, long hours, and hard work, none of which I’m particularly crazy about. Taxing me as a business is giving me credit for work I don’t do – if we’re going to go about it that way, why not charge me an ‘enormous rippling biceps’ tax too?

Point is, business majors, I’m sorry. If any of you are interested in investing, I’d be happy to sell you a controlling interest of myself and see if you can manage me any better.

Truman Capps is going to have an awesome Christmas party this year.

Galaga Guy

 You need to watch out for the ones with blue wings. They'll fuck you right up.

Sometimes I think I have Benjamin Button’s disease – not so much in my physical characteristics (not that those are anything to write home about, either) but in my attitudes toward the world around me. I’m pretty curmudgeonly now, but as a child I was way worse. At the age of six I took myself very seriously, had little sense of humor, and thought video games were the stupidest thing in the world.*

*In my adolescence I hated rap music, and for my first two years of college I was too much of a prick to start drinking. Right now I think Dubstep is a joke. In 60 years I’m going to be the most awesome, well adjusted, open minded person ever, but it’ll be a long road getting there.

When I was six, though, video games weren’t nearly as big as they are now. At the time, there was Game Boy, there was Super NES, and there were enormous, hulking arcade machines, none of which interested me. Games like Super Mario Brothers, which shaped an entire generation’s childhood, struck me as a huge waste of time – at the age of six I had way better things to do, like roll Matchbox cars down a gentle dirt embankment or lie around wishing that Batman was real.

I quit hating video games – just like I quit hating alcohol and rap music – when I took a break from being judgmental long enough to actually try them. If you were to make a graph titled ‘AMOUNT OF TIME TRUMAN SPENDS OUTSIDE’, the line would take a precipitous dive in 1997, when my father bought a Nintendo 64 and I discovered a little thing called Mario Kart.

Looking back, I really regret that I missed out on retro gaming – particularly the simple yet excruciatingly difficult arcade games that have captivated nerds (and more recently insufferable hipsters) since the early 1980s. The games I play today are sophisticated, richly detailed, and fun. Retro arcade games are not any of those things – they’re tests of skill, endurance, and the human spirit, kind of like the Olympics but without all that pesky physical aptitude.

Today, almost everyone plays some form of video game, so they’re designed to be entertaining and accessible. Back then, very few people played video games, and they were designed to be digital feats of strength, complete with points and a scoreboard where your initials would live on next to your point total, taunting other challengers to try and beat your score. My initials have never been on an arcade game scoreboard, and I feel my life has been cheaper as a result.

So last night, when my friend John asked if I wanted to go with him to a cash-only bar in Koreatown that has a few dozen 1980s arcade games that charge 25 cents a play, I said, “Fuck yes!” (Because my weekend was bound to involve drinking and video games in one way or another.)

The bar (Barcade) was in a run down, almost enthusiastically dirty little storefront next door to a huge Laundromat and across the street from an imposing, three-story Kentucky Fried Chicken. 

Because fuck your arteries, that's why.

We pushed through some ratty curtains hanging in the open doorway to find a dark room lit primarily by the glowing electric cases and screens of the arcade games lining the walls – Asteroids, Track & Field, Pac Man, Paperboy, Centipede… Nobody checked our ID, either, making this bar officially heaven for the cast of any given John Hughes movie.

Having seen The King of Kong recently, my quarters and I immediately gravitated toward Donkey Kong. Whenever I try something new I have the misguided hope that maybe I’ll discover that I have a natural aptitude for it. After blowing 75 cents and flipping off a laughing 8-bit monkey, I acknowledged that I had no natural aptitude for Donkey Kong and moved on to the game next to it – a spaceship shooter called Galaga where your objectives are pretty much to move to the left and right and shoot everything.

I want to live in a world where everything is this simple.

My responsibilities limited to one joystick and one big red button, I found Galaga to be more my speed. After about a dollar’s worth of enjoyable games I discovered that my button mashing hand was starting to cramp up, so I figured it was time to walk away. Before I did, though, I happened to glance at the scoreboard and saw that on my most recent death I had only been a couple of thousand points away from the number 1 spot.

I realized immediately that the bar staff simply reset all the machines’ scoreboards every night, and immediately after that I realized that I didn’t give a shit: My initials were going to be at the top of the Galaga scoreboard tonight, goddamnit.

After a trip back to the change machine for a dozen more quarters, I went to work. I unconsciously moved left and right with my tiny white spaceship, lowering my wrist so I could mash the ‘FIRE’ button with the full downward force of my arm. I swore whenever a single laser or kamakaze enemy destroyed my spacecraft, feverishly plugging in another quarter as soon as the screen flashed ‘GAME OVER.’ Sweat poured off my forehead and down the small of my back into the waistband of my jeans.

Finally, though, my score in the top right corner matched and then exceeded the high score at the top center of the screen. When my final spaceship was destroyed a few thousand points later, I breathlessly scrolled through the alphabet to chalk up the letters TSC next to my score – 32,990 points. (Wikipedia would later tell me that the highest Galaga score exceeded 15 million, so ultimately none of this matters.)

I left the console and went to find John so I could brag. As I walked away, three portly Korean UCLA students walked past me in the other direction and I heard one exclaim, “Check it out, guys! Galaga!”

I hung back in the shadows, creepy as ever, to watch him play, hoping to hear him exclaim, “Damn, 32,990!? I don’t know who this TSC guy is, but he’s by far the greatest Galaga player ever to have lived!”

Instead, he plugged in a quarter and promptly began mashing the fire button faster than I had thought humanly possible. Enemy fighters had scarcely appeared onscreen before they met firey death at the hands of his lasers. Points rapidly began to pile up at the top right of the screen, and as he approached 30,000 I anxiously stepped outside the bar for some fresh air.

Under the warm and watchful glow of Colonel Sanders atop the KFC skyscraper across the street, I pondered my legacy. No matter how well I played, my score still would’ve been wiped when they unplugged the Galaga machine at 2:00 AM, but I had kind of liked the idea that I might at least stay on top until then.

On the other hand, I had eschewed video games for the first few years of my life, while my challenger inside had undoubtedly put in the time and effort to master the craft. If anything, it would be unfair for me to be the reigning champ when others had tried so much harder.

When I went back inside the Galaga machine was unoccupied, and my opponent had beat my score by about 13,000 points. I spent another dollar or so trying to get my initials back above his, but to no avail. Much like the world economy in the 21^st century, no matter how hard you try at something, you can usually count on there being an Asian who will put all of your efforts to shame.

  

My name is Truman Scott Capps, and on February 17^th, 2013, I was the second best Galaga player.

Truman Capps washed his hands several times after leaving the Barcade and still didn’t feel clean.