Introverts

This image has been attached to several articles about introverts, because apparently introverts love sweaters and hate peripheral vision.

Everybody’s talking about introverts these days, whether they’re posting that viral TED Talk about how between half and two thirds of all people are introverts, or just posting that BuzzFeed article with all the three second looping gifs that generally approximate things introverts do. Now people are ‘coming out’ as introverts all over the place, and I just want to go on the record here: I was an introvert before it was cool.

It’s weird seeing society come around to the idea that there’s nothing wrong with people wanting to spend time alone, because I’ve spent a big part of my life making up elaborate excuses to spend time alone because I don’t want people to think I’m some kind of depressed hermit. I’d give you examples, but I don’t want to blow any of my better cover stories.

Now that it’s socially acceptable to say, “I just want to be alone right now because of who I am,” introversion has lost some of its luster. After all, sneaking around is half the fun! Back in the day, being an introvert was like having an affair with yourself – you’d make up fake plans or illnesses to dodge your friends so you could spend the evening having a steamy tryst with some Indian takeout and season 3 of Frasier.

By and large, social interaction is really exhausting for me. Conversation in particular is a big source of anxiety. I’m obsessed with showing the other person that I’m invested in what they’re saying – even if I’m not, and in LA that happens pretty often because fuck the webseries you just booked nobody cares – which means that I devote a lot of energy to nodding, looking appropriately thoughtful, and periodically making statements to demonstrate that I’ve been listening, such as, “Wait, Desiree just stole your waterskis? Oh my God, I’d be pissed too!”

I really do enjoy talking to people – that’s why I take conversation so seriously, I guess – but putting my best foot forward gets pretty taxing after awhile. Couple that with a loud environment (hate loud noises) with lots of other people (hate crowds) and inadequate seating (hate standing up) and you’ve got the perfect recipe for me wanting to go home at 9:30.

When I finally started drinking my junior year of college, part of the reason I went from zero to alcoholic in a matter of months was because alcohol made all of the difficult things about social interaction a lot easier for me. At Taylor’s, a couple of pint glasses full of Potter’s whiskey with a squirt of Diet Pepsi was all it took to make me an extrovert for the evening – and a grumpy introvert with the runs the following morning.

In LA the drinks are smaller, more expensive, and less effective. After two Jack and Cokes I’m just as introverted as before, but now I’m out $20 and feeling guilty for having spent it. Meanwhile, I’ve got some guy aspiring actor/comedian talking to me and he’s clearly just doing bits from his standup act in lieu of actually being engaging, my feet hurt from standing up all night, and all I can think about is how nice and quiet my room must be right about now.

It’s at this point that I reach what I call the Introvert’s Bar Dilemma. If I’m not having fun after two drinks, it becomes a gamble: If I have a third drink, I might loosen up enough to enjoy myself and have a great evening, but I definitely won’t be able to drive home for awhile. Ordering Drink #3 is basically doubling down on my plans for the evening – it’ll either be the moment the night gets awesome, or it’ll be the mistake that dooms me to spend the evening drunk, bored, and trapped at the bar, hiding in a bathroom stall and Googling up “how to get sober as fast as possible” on my phone.

Of course, I’m too risk-averse to be much of a betting man, so most of the time if I’m not feeling it after two drinks I’ll just call it quits and go home. Then I usually spend at least an hour of the evening hating myself for bailing on a room full of drunk sexy people my age so I can take my pants off, watch Netflix, and eat something covered in Sriracha.

You can show me every image macro about how healthy and normal introversion is and I’ll believe every word of it, but I’m still going to have a little existential crisis whenever I spend a Friday night sitting on my roof with my laptop tinkering with a screenplay instead of going out and having as many youthful LA experiences as I can.

From my roof on Fridays I can see limos and high performance sports cars winding their way down from the hills past my apartment, heading for bars and clubs on Ventura Boulevard. I know that those cars are full of douchecanoes, and that I would have no fun whatsoever if I followed them to where they were going. Still, part of me wonders if I should go out anyway, even though I’ll hate it, just for the sake of having a spontaneous experience while I’m young.

One of my biggest regrets from college is that I spent two years being uptight and stuffy about drinking and parties when I could have just lightened the fuck up and had a lot of awesome, memorable, potentially embarrassing experiences. I’m scared that I’m making that same mistake now, and that in 20 years I’ll be regretting the fact that I spent the best years of my life in a 12 by 12 room performing rather bleak self analysis.

Knowing as I do now that introversion is totally normal doesn’t do a lot to help my guilt about not going out more often – but that’s fine, because feeling guilty for basically no reason is one of my favorite hobbies. What does help, though, is knowing that at least half of the human race is in the same boat as I am.

On my roof this past Friday I looked up from the limos and sports cars in the street and spotted a guy my age standing on a third floor balcony outside his apartment up the street from me, smoking a cigarette and looking at the same cars I was. After a couple minutes, he stubbed out his cigarette, stepped through a sliding glass door back into the warm light of his bedroom, and sat down in front of a computer.

Suddenly my alone time didn’t feel quite as lonely.

Truman Capps wonders how many introverts Netflix has created.

Vacation Notes

I walked into a bar on Burnside and found five dudes drinking PBR and playing Celtic music. This is the most Portland picture I have taken in my whole life. 

I do a pretty good job of faking responsibility – I’m polite, I pay my bills, and I don't wear sweatpants in public. Patrick Bateman had a “mask of sanity” – I have a mask of adulthood. The one place that my perfectly constructed grownup disguise falters, however, is at airport security.

Most of you have never seen my belt, because it’s usually covered by my shirt. If you were with me when I went through airport security – where I have to take off my belt – you’d understand why I make sure my shirt covers it: It’s frayed, twisted, and falling apart after years of diligently holding my pants up. I could go to Macy’s and buy a new one, but I would hate literally every element of that activity and it’s considerably easier to just wear a shitty (but functional) belt that nobody ever sees.

Until I go to the airport.

I don’t have a wallet, either – my old one fell apart in my pocket something like two years ago – so when I empty my pockets into the tray I just pull out a stack of plastic cards, loose change, and two condoms for the Department of Homeland Security and everybody in line to see and silently judge. “Yes, as a matter of fact, that condom does expire next month. You can either laugh at what that implies about my social life, or be inspired that I still have some hope.”

I have friends who are vocal opponents of the TSA full body scanners – they go on Facebook around the holidays and remind everybody that it’s fully legal to opt out of the scan, which is an unconstitutional warrantless search. I totally agree with them in principle – the scanners are an intrusive, ineffective, overpriced boondoggle that should be removed immediately.

That said, I never opt out of the scan, because if you opt out a TSA agent takes you aside and runs his gloved hands briskly all over your legs, arms, torso, and inner thighs. It's a no win situation – I’m a big believer in standing up for my Constitutional rights, but I’m also a big believer in people not fucking touching me unless we’re planning on using one of the ancient condoms in my pocket.

The scan used to make me uncomfortable, knowing that some minimum wage earning TSA lackey was in a nearby booth looking at a digital image of my naked body, but I don’t really care anymore. That guy’s job is to look at naked dudes all day; my unimpressive physique is simply adding to his misery. My nudity is its own form of protest. Fuck the police.

*

You really can’t appreciate just how Portlandy Portland is until you move away. When you actually live in Portland you can acknowledge that it’s a pretty goofy place, but until you spend some time elsewhere it’s impossible to see the forest for the hipsters.

On this trip back I began to realize just how spot-on Portlandia really is. One evening I visited a friend of mine who works at an ad agency and lives with five other people in a beautiful house off Hawthorne where the monthly rent is like $14 and a beaver pelt. She’d recently moved back to Portland from LA, and we were discussing the differences.

“Last Tuesday I got sick and had to stay home from work,” she said as we ate organic ice cream with locally grown ingredients. “I left my room at like 10:30 AM and all my roommates were still here. I don’t even know if they have jobs.”

Later that evening we wound up at her house and I found myself chatting with one of her roommates. She was explaining to me about how she’d majored in philosophy before dropping out when I decided to get to the bottom of the mystery and asked her what she did for work. Her response to this question was basically identical to that of every other young Portlander I talked to during this trip:

She shrugged and said, “Oh, I do massage therapy work three days a week.”

Listen: If you ever need a massage, get yourself to Portland. This city is full of people who would gladly give you a massage on Monday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday before 2:00 PM, provided you don’t have a problem with nose piercings.

*

July 19^th marked two years to the day since I arrived in Los Angeles. This makes two July 19ths in a row that I’ve been in Portland for my anniversary of leaving Portland – but my experience this time couldn’t be more different than it was last year.

When I visited Portland last summer I was in a really, really bad place, both literally and figuratively. I had just signed a one year lease on a one-bedroom apartment in North Hollywood and was rapidly realizing that I’d made a huge mistake. It was too damn big and in a lousy neighborhood to boot – and, worst of all, it was full of cockroaches, which is arguably the only thing I hate more than people touching me.

The bad place I was in physically had put me in a bad place emotionally – I was isolated from all my old friends in Culver City, despondent about the state of my life, career, and my writing, and driving myself truly insane speculating about how many cockroaches were scuttling around my baseboards while I slept.

So coming home to Portland was incredible for me – I was surrounded by some of my oldest and best friends and loved ones, and in contrast to the dusty apocalyptic sprawl of North Hollywood, Portland had never been more beautiful. After ten days, leaving to go back to LA was almost impossible. I started tearing up as I went through security, which means the TSA guy running the scanner got to see me naked and crying at the same time. (Fuck the police.) 

This year, my life is better in every conceivable way. I’m in a great, bug-free apartment, I’ve built an incredible network of good friends and creative collaborators in my neighborhood, and in spite of the fact that I’m currently unemployed my writing career is actually going better than ever before. Right now my only source of anxiety is that I don’t know when the good times are going to end.

It’s never going to be easy to leave Portland, or all the people here that I love, but every year it gets less difficult. And that, I think, might be the only piece of my adulthood that isn’t an elaborate facade. 

Truman Capps is going to spend the rest of the day vacuuming cobwebs out of his blog. 

Kristin Getting Married

Somehow I managed to not screw it up.

Thanks to my Dad for the video, and to Kristin and Kyle for picking me over literally hundreds of more qualified officiants in the greater Salem-Keizer metro area.

(There's a little bit of a hiccup in the ceremony around 5 minutes in when one of the groomsmen almost faints off camera, but even that doesn't stand in the way of true love.)

Truman Capps is going to do the best he can with updates for the rest of the month, but right now this blog is competing for attention with a small army of family, friends, and food, so...

SnapChat

 Not that I'm in any position to critique anybody's fashion, but why wear tall socks when you're not even going to bother with clothes?

SnapChat is a smartphone app that lets you take a picture or video and send it to one or more friends who also have SnapChat. Once opened, the picture or video will delete itself in a matter of seconds. This app seems to have been designed specifically so people could send pictures of their private parts to one another without fear of them being leaked onto the Internet. Since I don’t know anybody who wants to see my private parts, I never bothered downloading the app.

Most of my friends do have SnapChat, and the fact that I didn’t have SnapChat became a regular topic of conversation. A couple of times a week somebody would ask me if I had SnapChat, and when I told them I didn’t, they’d proceed to lecture me about how I absolutely needed to get SnapChat. Life without SnapChat, as they put it, was not a life worth living.

To me, SnapChat seemed redundant. Right out of the box my phone is little more than a highly advanced machine that allows me to take stupid pictures and send them to my friends. The big advantage to SnapChat, I guess, is that it would allow me to send my friends a grainy picture of my testicles that would delete itself mere seconds after they looked at it. And while that’s mighty enticing, it wasn’t enough to get me to try and remember my App Store password.

My friends insisted that I get SnapChat because that would be the only way they could share their SnapChat pictures with me. I was hesitant because I suspected that if I downloaded the app I’d just be opening the door to an avalanche of grainy pictures of my friends’ testicles, which isn’t the sort of thing I want to have on my phone – even if it’s only for three seconds before the image self destructs.

Eventually, it was my friend John who convinced me to download SnapChat. I didn’t put up that much of a fight, because he promised that if I downloaded it he’d send me tons of pictures of his mentally retarded homosexual Boston Terrier, Milo.

I love this dog more than any human I have ever met.

I figured that I could just quietly download SnapChat and use it as a private pipeline that would deliver cute dog pictures directly to my phone whenever I needed them. Unfortunately, SnapChat accessed my contacts and Facebook information when I downloaded it, and soon all of my friends knew that I was now able to receive their SnapChat pictures.

Within hours, I opened a picture that turned out to me one of my friends’ scrotums, pulled through the open fly of his jeans while sitting in a car.* The picture flashed on my screen for three seconds before disappearing forever – from my phone, but unfortunately, not from my memory.

*I’m not sure if he was in the driver’s seat or the passenger seat; if it were the driver’s seat, one wonders how many people he endangered pulling his nuts out while driving. If it were the passenger seat, one wonders who was driving while he was photographing his nuts. Also, you shouldn’t pull your nuts through the zipper of your jeans – that’s just a disaster waiting to happen.

I realize now that SnapChat has really revolutionized and reinvigorated America’s long dormant flasher community. From what I’ve heard, exposing yourself in public was kind of the 1970s equivalent of Harlem Shake videos – everybody was doing it, even if they didn’t really get why. At least a quarter of all the stories my Dad has told me about his college fraternity involve the word “moon,” “mooning,” or “mooned.”

SnapChat has essentially created an extremely convenient form of flashing. No longer do flashers have to drop big bucks on trenchcoats or spend hours hanging around in the bushes at the park. SnapChat makes it possible to show someone your nudity instantaneously no matter where you are – and because the dirty picture immediately deletes itself afterward even shy people can be flashers without exposing themselves to a wider audience than they mean to!

The problem is that I’m not really sure how to respond when one of my friends beams four seconds of unexpected nudity directly into my cell phone. “Thank you” doesn’t seem right, and “Wow, that sure is a penis!” doesn’t quite do the trick either. I suppose the polite thing would be to respond with some nudity of my own, but I don’t want anybody to see that – not even for a couple of seconds – unless I get a free meal and maybe some flowers.

Quite honestly, I don’t have any use for SnapChat. I don’t send a whole lot of pictures from my phone, and when I do they’re usually pictures that I want people to be able to look at for longer than a few seconds. I think I’ve sent maybe two SnapChat images since I downloaded it, one of which was just a picture of John’s dog Milo.

My friends, on the other hand, continue to send me images – and after receiving a selfie of one of my old roommates sitting on the toilet, I’ve recently decided to quit looking at them. Unseen images are already piling up in my SnapChat inbox.

So that’s what SnapChat is for me: An app that allows me to briefly see images of my (male) friends’ privates no matter where I am, for a couple of seconds at a time.

We live in an exciting era.

Truman Capps hasn’t received one picture of Milo so far.

Officiant Vignettes

Wait, is there TOUCHING too? 

Here is the sound a wedding officiant makes when the wedding is ten days away:

Hnnnnnnnnnnnghhhhhhhhhh

It’s kind of a throaty, gutteral whine – a cross between Marge Simpson’s disapproval sound and the sort of noise an anxious dog makes before a hurricane.

I usually make the sound while rocking back and forth, or with my head buried in my hands as the MS Word document titled ‘KRISTIN AND KYLE SPEECH’ blazes at me from the computer.

As the day that I have to deliver the speech grows closer – that prick the Earth just hurtling around the Sun with no regard for the fact that I’d like a little bit more time to proof this shit – I’ve caught myself making the sound in a variety of new environments. Yesterday I did it in the car. Three hours ago I lay face down on my bed and went hnnnnnnnnnnnnngggghhhhhhh for like two minutes. That may not sound like very long, but try it sometime and you’ll see.

Hnnnnnnnnghhhh.

*

List of words I cannot use in my speech:

SUCCESS – Can easily be flubbed into “suck sex.” Everyone laughs, I start crying, wedding ruined.

INSIST – Sounds too much like “incest”. Incest is not a concept people want to think about during a wedding.

PUBLIC – One letter away from “pubic.” Could possibly say “pubic” by accident. If not, perhaps unruly teenager or surly usher will loudly draw the comparison. Resulting disturbance implicitly my fault for shoddy word choice. Ceremony derailed, friend humiliated, wedding ruined.

SHTICK – Very similar to groom’s last name, could cause confusion among hearing impaired or audience members not listening closely. Could possibly mispronounce as “shit.” Difficult to enunciate into microphone. Avoid Yiddish entirely.

NAGGING – Might accidentally say “nigging”, a crude racial slur planted in my subconscious by a racist former roommate. Could cause extreme discomfort and embarrassment, moreso if one of the four black people who live in Oregon are in attendance. Video goes viral, disowned by family, wedding ruined.

*

I had assumed I would be delivering my speech from behind a podium. This was a reassuring assumption, however unfounded, because speaking from behind a podium resolves a lot of the anxiety a speaker usually has to deal with.

You can rest your hands on the podium, you can put your notes on it, you can have water in there, and if you get a boner during your speech, nobody has to know. Podiums are the public speaking equivalent of bumper bowling or tee ball.

A week ago Kristin told me there wasn’t going to be a podium – just me standing there with both of them right in my face looking at me, and the whole wedding party looking at me, and all of their friends and families looking hnnnnnnnnnghhh

I was all, “Woah, hold on. No podium? I’m not the strapping young public speaker I was in 2005! Throw me a bone, here!”

And Kristin was all, “I give literally zero shits about your problems because I’m still trying to coordinate every other aspect of this ceremony and reception.”

And I was all, “Hnnnnnnnnghhhh”

And Kristin was all, “What was that sound?”

And I was all, “I don’t know, but I’m not going to stop making it until after July 13^th.”

*

I never know what to do with my hands when I’m speaking. Four years on the speech and debate circuit and I still wind up making the same two gestures every time: Holding out my right hand at a 45 degree angle, palm out, while twisting 30 degrees at the torso, or holding out my left hand at a 45 degree angle, palm out, while twisting 30 degrees at the torso.

I’ll be the first to admit that this looks stupid – especially when I do it 50 or 60 times in the course of a five minute speech – but what alternative do I have? Have my hands hang limply at my sides? Clasping them in front of my belt buckle doesn’t work, because experience has shown that that position just increases my urge to hold one of my hands out at a 45 degree angle, palm out, while twisting 30 degrees at the torso.

Pockets are my friends. During the winter months I wear a grey hoodie that allows me to bury my hands in my pockets while I talk. During the summer months, I wear black gym shorts with big pockets I can put my hands in. (When I go out in public I pair these shorts with an old grey T-shirt and running shoes in order to give the impression that I just got back from the gym, which is just major league deception.)

I very much want to deliver this speech with my hands in my pockets, but then that would lend a really casual, Sammy Davis Jr. vibe to my best friend’s wedding, which probably isn’t what she’s going for.

*

I have been told that I frequently run my right hand through my hair when nervous or under pressure.

I cannot allow this to happen during the wedding.

If compulsively sweep my hair back during my speech, an unruly teenager could begin to lead the audience in loudly counting the number of times I’ve done it.

Video goes viral, gets featured on Tosh.0, wedding ruined.

I must break this habit before the wedding.

To do so, I need to practice my speech without running my hand through my hair.

At first, I considered putting peanut butter in my hair to discourage myself from touching it, but quickly dismissed the idea as it was both a tragic waste of peanut butter and could possibly attract ants.

Instead, I have decided to wear a hat when I practice my speech.

By covering my hair, I will be unable to touch it, and can break my habit.

Because I do not own any hats, I have decided to improvise, and have fashioned myself a crude do-rag out of an old T-shirt for rehearsal purposes.

Should I prove unable to break the habit in the next ten days, I will purchase a more formal do-rag to wear during the ceremony.

Truman Capps hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh

Violence Revisited

 The good guy is the one who isn't getting choked to death.

Video games’ stories – and the characters who drive them – have changed a lot in the past ten years. When I was in middle and high school, many popular video game protagonists were basically anonymous. Probably three quarters of the first person shooters that came out during my adolescence featured gruff, stereotypically angry space marines as their protagonists – characters who amounted to little more than an empty vessel to hold a gun and appear in cutscenes, most of which involved helicopter crashes.*

*For those of you who don’t know, a tried and true rule of video gaming is that when your character gets on a helicopter, that motherfucker is going to crash. I have probably boarded 100,000 virtual helicopters in 16 years of gaming; maybe four of them have landed safely.

Video games’ stories have changed a lot since then. The core audience for video games has grown up, and games have with them. In the past year alone I’ve played several video games that have had stronger stories and greater emotional impact than a number of movies I’ve seen, along with bar none some of the finest helicopter crashes yet.

The Last Of Us is one such game. It’s a tightly written, emotionally complex story, equal parts Children of Men and The Road, in which you play a middle aged smuggler with a shady past who is forced to escort a teenaged girl across the postapocalyptic United States. Along the way you’ll have to contend with hideous monsters – the mutated remains of humans infected with a parasitic fungus that caused the apocalypse 20 years before – as well as predatory human scavengers. 

The "violence is not the answer" crowd doesn't have an answer for this situation. 

The story of the smuggler and the girl, as well as the people they meet along the way, is powerful and heart wrenching. The performances are incredible and the atmosphere is spot on. It’s the sort of experience that leaves you emotionally exhausted when you stop playing for the day. After the credits rolled, I took a look at the statistics the game had recorded for me and discovered that my aging, emotionally conflicted smuggler had killed 716 people over the course of his trip across the country.

Tomb Raider is a story about a young woman empowering herself by killing several hundred heavily armed pirates. In Red Dead Redemption you play as a former outlaw who kills several hundred people in a quest to clear his name and leave his violent past behind. Bioshock Infinite is a game about love, loss, redemption, power, and self determination where it’s possible to sic a bunch of bloodthirsty crows on someone, set him on fire as they peck at his flesh, and chop his flaming head off.

We’ve reached the point where video games have the power to create protagonists that are every bit as compelling, believable, and empathetic as their onscreen counterparts. Recently, though, members of the gaming media have begun to point out that this newfound emotional complexity is undercut by the fact that video game protagonists, as a rule, tend to kill hundreds and hundreds of people in their adventures. It creates a sort of cognitive dissonance, because you’re basically playing as a really empathetic mass murderer. 

Before you feel too sorry for these guys, remember that the enemies in BioShock Infinite are like Sean Hannity-level racist, so it's kind of okay.

In its defense, The Last Of Us is a game about survival at all costs. Every one of the 716 brutal stranglings, beatings, stabbings, and shootings I committed was an act of desperation where the only alternative was the death of my character and the young girl he was tasked to protect. Because of that it was easy for me to forget that I had killed the equivalent of my high school graduating class two times over.

The concern I’m seeing from gaming journalists isn’t that violence is present in games; it’s that gaming as a medium is being held back by a 20-year-old game mechanic which dictates that your progress through the story is governed by how many people you can kill. They feel that video games’ sheer body count is the only thing keeping them from becoming more like movies and achieving that level of legitimacy. That's a valid concern, and I really love that this is a discussion people are having.

The thing is, while video games have taken a lot of storytelling and thematic cues from movies for practically the entirety of the industry’s existence, they’re still video games – and video games have their own unique set of tropes and conventions to abide by. 

Not all tropes are good tropes.

No critic complained that Goodfellas wasn’t split up into a few dozen chapters, nobody said The Catcher In The Rye should have been written in rhythmic, rhyming verse, and nobody but me thinks that the collected works of Emily Dickenson could be improved by a helicopter crash. This is because these are all different storytelling mediums, each of which plays by its own distinct set of rules.

Video games are the only storytelling medium (short of the well respected “choose your own adventure” literary genre) that you can interact with. To keep players interested, developers have to give them a constant stream of problems to solve as they work through the story. Based on sales figures, the most popular problem to solve is, “Here are people. Kill them.”

If we’re going to compare modern video games to movies, why don’t we compare them to musicals? Because that’s their closest relative, if you ask me. Musicals tell a story with frequent breaks for everybody to start singing and dancing; video games tell a story with frequent breaks for everybody to start killing each other. That doesn’t make Singin’ In The Rain any less legitimate a work of art than Slaughterhouse-Five, and it doesn’t make The Last Of Us any less legitimate than any Academy Award-caliber movie. 

For better or for worse, people killing each other is good entertainment. You personally might not agree, but the vast majority of people who have lived certainly do. Odysseus killed more people in his adventures than Lara Croft, Bioshock's Booker DeWitt, or Joel the smuggler in The Last Of Us  – and he did it without the help of guns, crows, or a single crashing helicopter.

Truman Capps almost exclusively plays big budget shooters, which is why there is no mention here of the scores of indie and Nintendo games that have been extremely successful without violence.   

Mess With Texas

 Kicker of asses.

After the election I promised myself I’d avoid writing about politics at least until 2014 – I know a lot of you don’t find this shit as interesting as I do, and I already beat the political horse pretty well to death in the latter half of 2012. But there’s really no way I can write something that isn’t at least a little political after what happened in Texas last night, because never in my life have I had so much admiration and respect for a woman who in all likelihood was wearing an adult diaper.

Quick recap: Texas governor Rick Perry is arguably one of the worst people on Earth, and recently he convened a special session of the Texas legislature so the GOP could railroad through a bunch of radical legislation too crazy to be passed during the regular session, when it would’ve been necessary to gain support from Democrats to pass anything.

One of the GOP’s big aims for the special session was to pass an abortion bill that would’ve closed all but five of Texas’s abortion clinics, which would deprive hundreds of thousands of women in rural Texas of the access to a safe abortion that they’re guaranteed under federal law.

Using a bunch of parliamentary jujitsu, the minority Democrats were able to delay the vote until the last few hours of the special session, at which point Texas state senator Wendy Davis attempted to filibuster for the remaining 13 hours in hopes of delaying the vote until after the special session ended at midnight.

When you filibuster in Texas, you have to stand the entire time without so much as leaning on your desk, you must speak continuously about a subject germane to the bill being debated on the floor, and you’re not allowed to leave the floor for any reason whatsoever, up to and including going to the bathroom. Basically, if one person wants to hold up the legislative process in Texas, they’re welcome to do it for as long as they can stand, talk, and not pee. (Or pee where they’re standing. Politics is gross.)

So for twelve hours Senator Davis – once a poor single mother who went on to attend Harvard Law School – stood and talked continuously about why the bill was a bad idea, while every Republican in the room carefully scrutinized her every word and action for a slipup or violation that would allow them to end her filibuster and pass their shitty law.

I immediately take back everything I said last week about the pressures of being a wedding officiant – Wendy Davis just did the public speaking equivalent of an Ironman Triathlon while being nitpicked by a room full of fat, ugly, old white men who at one point tried to end her filibuster because she put on a back brace.

With close to an hour remaining before the end of the session, the Republican senators ended Davis’s filibuster on a technicality, but Democrats continued to run the clock with more parliamentary delaying maneuvers. Then, when the Republicans tried to call for a vote in the last ten minutes, the hundreds of assembled spectators in the gallery and the thousands of supporters outside resorted to Autzen Stadium tactics and caused as much ruckus as they could to prevent the vote until the legislative session ended at midnight.

That video is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a long time. As you may remember from my ill-fated trip to a town hall meeting, I think that our country’s biggest problem is that the people making laws are out of touch with the people they’re representing.

So to see an angry mob of ordinary Texans show up and simply yell so loud that the Republicans were unable to screw them over is almost as satisfying as that Saturday Night Live alternate ending for It’s A Wonderful Life where everybody goes and beats the shit out of Mr. Potter. This bill was so noxious that the people of Texas actively opposed it when their elected representatives no longer could. I’ve always thought it was amusing that Texas’ most conservative fuckwads go to work in the state’s most liberal city – I never dreamed it could be this beneficial.

I don’t think that this is how our government should work. I don’t think that democracy should come down to endurance contests, quibbling over whether a back brace is the same as leaning on a desk, and angry mobs disrupting legislative proceedings. The amount of time a politician can stand up and talk doesn’t have any bearing on whether his or her ideas are worth listening to, and nobody voted for that mob.

But I also don’t think that there’s any room for restrictive voter ID laws and excessive redistricting in a democracy, and the Republicans have been making use of those tactics for close to a decade now. Trying to take the moral high ground hasn’t gotten us anywhere. If the GOP can kill a gun control bill that 92% of the country approves of, it’s only fair play for a bunch of angry liberals in Texas to make too much of a ruckus for the Republicans to do their job.

What’s more, at least the Democrats crowdsourced their dirty tricks in Austin last night. If capitalizing on public discontent is what it takes to flush radicals out of office, so be it. The sooner that public sentiment destroys the Republican Party, the sooner it can be used to destroy the Democratic Party and then hopefully party politics as a whole.

The Republicans are still in control in Texas, and Prick Perry has already called another special session to get his way. It’s also pretty likely that Wendy Davis will be redistricted out of a job come the next election – without the Voting Rights Act the Texas GOP will be quick to exact revenge.

Of course, this won’t be a problem if she just runs for governor instead.

Truman Capps can’t think of anything he’d want to do nonstop for twelve hours.

Truman At The Wedding

 If all weddings were like the November Rain video, there wouldn't even BE an officiant's speech - Slash would just play a guitar solo and then everybody goes home.

Something you may not know about me is that I’m an officially ordained minister. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, it’s possible to become a minister for a new agey Protestant denomination in Arizona in a matter of minutes, all without having to answer any tricky questions about whether you actually believe in God or not. Something else you may not know about me is that in less than a month I’m going to be using my Internet minister powers to marry my best friend to her fiancée.

I’ve known my best friend Kristin for a good nine years now, and she’s been with her fiancée Kyle for a good four years now, and on July 13^th they’re getting married in a small town outside of Salem. In February Kristin asked me if I’d get ordained and officiate the wedding for them – both out of love for me and a desire to not have to pay anybody to do the job – and I agreed – both out of love for Kristin and a desire for as much attention as possible.

Agreeing to officiate your best friend’s wedding is really no sweat when the wedding is five months away. I seldom make plans more than a week in advance, so saying I’ll officiate a wedding five months down the road is like agreeing to buy somebody a beer at the first bar on Mars – it’s so far removed from anything in the here and now that it doesn’t even really make sense to worry about it.

It’s been four and a half months since Kristin asked me to do this for her, and I realize that now (or perhaps two months ago) would probably be a good time for me to figure out what exactly I’m going to say. What I’m learning from this process is that I’ll put anything and everything off until the last minute, right up to and including the speech commemorating the union of my best friend and the man of her dreams.

In my defense, things like this are pretty easy for me to procrastinate about – I had five whole months to write the speech at my leisure, and writing and delivering speeches is one of the only things I can be counted on to do properly. When Kristin and I were on the high school speech and debate team I wrote and delivered after dinner speeches on a regular basis, some of which won awards. Now I write two occasionally amusing blog updates per week. A five minute officiant’s speech delivered from a lectern with a script ought to be no sweat, right?

Now that the wedding is 20 days away, I can say with absolute certainty that it is not no sweat – it is, in fact, a great deal of sweat.

I think a lot of the reason people fear public speaking is because they’re afraid of humiliating themselves in front of a crowd. I think the reason I don’t have as much trouble with public speaking is because I know, due to my clumsy and awkward nature, that I’m going to embarrass myself no matter what, so I may as well stand up and get a few jokes in before that happens. In most cases, when you make a speech, the worst thing that can possibly happen is that you’ll make yourself look like an idiot, which, in the grand scheme of things, really isn’t all that terrible.

What I realize now that I’m staring the wedding in the face is that a wedding officiant’s speech is one of the few cases where there’s more riding on my performance than just my emotional well being or my chances at going to the state speech tournament.

If I screw up this speech, I’m going to screw up the most important day of my best friend’s life, in front of all of her friends and family as well as her husband-to-be’s friends and family. My poor performance will be immortalized not just on the wedding video but also in their families’ collective memory for the rest of their lives:

“Oh, Kristin and Kyle’s 20^th wedding anniversary is coming up! Remember how beautiful the ceremony was?”

“How could I forget? The cake, her dress, the flowers… If not for that Truman guy it would’ve been perfect.”

“You know, it’s funny, I actually repressed my memory of the ceremony so I wouldn’t have to relive Truman’s speech.”

“It was nice of Kristin’s family to hire that special effects house to cut Truman out of the video and edit in Hugh Grant doing that monologue from the beginning of Love Actually. It’s really helped me recover from the post traumatic stress.”

I’ve known since February that this will be the most important speech I’ll ever deliver, but only now, as I scramble to start writing it less than three weeks before it gets delivered, do I realize how difficult of a task it is to put into words the whole scope of my feelings about my best friend, her fiancée, and the life they’re about to start together. I once got a bronze, Oregon-shaped medal for a speech in which I mimicked hovering over a toilet seat to explain my germophobia; this speech will have to be at least three times as good as that.

Yesterday I slathered on some sunscreen and went up to sit on my roof with a notepad to figure out what my speech was going to be about. It took me most of the afternoon, but by the time I fled back downstairs to avoid the clouds of mosquitos descending from the Hollywood Hills, I had scrawled the topic of my speech at the top of the page:

KRISTIN AND KYLE GETTING MARRIED IS A GOOD THING

Everything after this should be a piece of cake. I can probably wait another week or two to start writing.

Truman Capps is going to cry like a little girl for the duration of the wedding ceremony, by the way.

In Defense Of Miss Utah

I'm pretty sure there's a really beautiful woman under all those layers of makeup.

Beauty pageants are a bizarre and creepy world that I was uncomfortably close to for a few months in college, when one of my then-girlfriend’s best friends was competing in the Miss Lane County pageant. Everyone involved went to great lengths to remind us that this was not a “beauty pageant” – it was a “scholarship program,” in which young women spent thousands of dollars on makeup, hair products, clothes, and spraytans for a shot at a $750 college scholarship.

Ever since then I’ve taken a pretty dim view of pageants as a whole – not because I have a problem with judging and ranking women based on their physical characteristics, but because I hate being lied to.

This is a free country: If a woman wants to spend tons of time and money in hopes of publicly being declared more beautiful than other women, she should be able to do that. I just don’t know who pageant organizers think they’re fooling when they call the whole song and dance a “scholarship program” – I’ve received a few scholarships in my life, and none of them required me to parade around in a bikini in front of hundreds of people.

The only reason I bring all of this up is because of Miss Utah, who, in the Miss USA pageant a few days ago, gave a rambling, nonsensical answer to a direct question and became viral enough to wind up on my news feed. Let’s watch, shall we?

Fortunately for Miss Utah, this embarrassing gaffe hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as the last incoherent beauty queen Q&A viral video that came out when I was in high school. Maybe there’s just more stuff to make fun of on the Internet now than there was in 2007.

So you’ve got the gist of it – a professionally beautiful woman said something kind of stupid. It’s a thing that happens from time to time, and the proper response is to have a laugh and then forget about it until she does a web redemption on Tosh.0 six months down the line.

But this was not enough for Cosmopolitan contributor Rose Surnow, who took to Cosmo’s website on Monday to hold Miss Utah accountable for having the gall to say something stupid in public. Here are some highlights from Surnow’s article:

“The gorgeous 21-year-old Salt Lake City native was asked a simple question about income inequality and her wildly stupid answer has already gone viral. Poor creature--so beautiful, yet so simple.” 

“At this point Miss Utah literally stops talking because she is so flustered with PUTTING SENTENCES TOGETHER.”

“She is having such a hard time that the audience actually starts clapping to help her get through it. TO HELP HER GET THROUGH TALKING. Ay yi yi.”

“No, no, Marissa thank YOU. In a weird twist of irony, she actually proves her own point. We do need to "create education better" so beautiful dumb-dumbs like Marissa can speak English without international humiliation.”

You go, Rose Surnow! Hopefully all these vicious attacks on Miss Utah’s intellect will make her think twice before being nervous when answering a question in an internationally televised competition she’s spent the past several years preparing for.

But seriously, folks.

First, if you write for Cosmopolitan you immediately lose the right to call anything or anyone stupid. Cosmopolitan used to feature investigative journalism from the likes of Upton Sinclair and short fiction by H.G. Wells and Kurt Vonnegut; now it’s turned its back on that history to become a glossy sex manual that encourages its teenaged readers to pleasure their boyfriends with glazed doughnuts and once suggested it was impossible to transmit HIV from the missionary position. To criticize stupid people is to criticize the bulk of Cosmo’s readership.

Second, fuck you Rose Surnow, you nasty, frigid bitch.

Did Miss Utah say something stupid? Yes. The words that came out of her mouth made no logical sense, and in no way answered the question she’d been asked. Her answer could be copy-pasted into a Sarah Palin speech and match perfectly.

Does that make Miss Utah stupid? Not necessarily. Everybody says stupid things from time to time – just look at this blog, for Christ’s sake. Also, you’re more likely to say a stupid thing when you’re nervous or under pressure. Not only did Miss Utah know that the answer to her question was going to be judged against 49 other girls’ answers, she was also answering it on live TV.

Rose Surnow isn’t stupid. She knows as well as anybody else that Miss Utah was under a lot of pressure to give the right answer and simply choked, but she still went ahead and wrote a piece deriding her and calling her a “dumb-dumb”* to make this poor woman’s embarrassing moment even worse. 

*Really great writing there, Rose Surnow. “Dumb-dumb” – wow, I’ve got goosebumps! Then again, you’re writing for Cosmopolitan – you’ve got to know your audience. 

Rose Surnow, you’re worse than a bitch – you’re just a bully. You’re no better than the popular girls who laughed at your clothes in high school, or the guys in my middle school PE class who chanted “MVP! MVP!” every time I struck out in softball.

Furthermore, even if you’re balls-on accurate and Miss Utah is stupid, you’re still a pretty gigantic piece of shit for writing the slam piece that you did. So what if Miss Utah is stupid? At least she seems like a relatively nice person, which is one hell of a lot more than I can say for you, Rose Surnow.

The one good thing I have to say about beauty pageants, scholarship programs, or whatever the hell we’re calling them is that participants are coached on their manners and encouraged to be polite. Maybe Rose Surnow ought to join one of her local beauty pageants – who knows? She might learn something.

Truman Capps thinks jerking a dude off with a glazed doughnut is a shameful waste of a perfectly good glazed doughnut. 

Love Each Other

 I will now only associate this song with Arrested Development.

When people ask me what my favorite TV show is, I never say Arrested Development. I mean, it completely is my favorite TV show, but that kind of goes without saying, doesn it? It’s like when somebody asks you, “What’s one thing you could never live without?” You don’t say, “Oxygen,” because the point of the question is to find out your preferences, and since everybody needs oxygen that answer doesn’t really say anything about you, except that you’re a literal douchebag.

Arrested Development is everybody’s favorite show, at least in the dorky, writery circles that I move in. The show is so universally acclaimed that everybody in the orbit of the entertainment industry has seen it, and since everybody who has seen it has loved it, it’s just kind of a given that it’s everybody’s favorite show – so why even mention it?

When I tell people my favorite show is Mystery Science Theater 3000 or the first season of Workaholics we can have a discussion, because people have diverging opinions about those shows. When I tell people my favorite show is Arrested Development it usually just turns into a circlejerk about how good Arrested Development is, because perfection bears little discussion.

“Arrested Development is my favorite show.”

“Oh my God, same!”

“Which episode is your favorite?”

“It’s a 53 way tie between all of them!”

“Oh my God, same!”

“Same!”

“…Same.”

“Same.”  

 This is really creepy if you haven't seen season 4 yet. It's also really creepy if you have.

What I’ve always found most impressive about Arrested Development wasn’t the density or the characters or the callbacks, but the show’s consistency. The show ran for three seasons on Fox and they didn’t produce a single bad episode, which is an incredible feat for even great television shows.

30 Rock had plenty of clunkers, Community is notoriously inconsistent, and there hasn’t been a halfway decent episode of Workaholics in two years. Hell, we only made six episodes of Writers and at least two of them were terrible – and they were only ten minute episodes!

Arrested Development cranked out 53 episodes over the course of three seasons on Fox – intricate, deeply layered episodes with jokes about war crimes and incest – and every damn one of them was a standout.

So from that high bar, the first two episodes of season 4 were a confusing, boring slap in the face. Michael was unlikeable, the dialogue was choppy and weird, characters behaved oddly with no explanation, and I couldn’t for the life of me follow what was going on.

I was convinced that Mitch Hurwitz and his band of merry writers had flown too close to the sun – that the creative freedom afforded them by Netflix had created a cumbersome, unwatchable monster of a show that had ruined that beautiful consistency of the first 53 episodes.

It took a lot of goading from just about everybody I knew, but when I watched the rest of the series a week or two later, I saw what had actually happened: Mitch Hurwitz had used the creative freedom afforded him by Netflix to create a show unlike anything the world had ever seen before – a show tailored to Arrested Development’s audience of hyperaware fanatics who get off on narrative complexity.

The first two or three episodes of season 4 are confusing at first, but if you persevere and keep watching the show will eventually pull off its fake mustache and sombrero and reveal its true form as a modern masterpiece. 

"Gene Parmesian, howyadoin?"

 

In retrospect, I’m kind of embarrassed for expecting the show to parrot the format of its first three seasons on network TV. Arrested Development did things with the network sitcom format that no other show had done before; it stands to reason that they’d keep pushing the envelope with digital distribution by making a show that almost demands that you stop and rewind, freeze frame to read signs and articles, and rewatch previous episodes with new information. As somebody who spends most of his time thinking about sitcoms, this sort of thing is like porn for me.*

*Though not a substitute for actual porn.

What really stood out for me about season 4 was how little fan service there was. It would’ve been really easy to load every episode up with chicken dances and seal jokes to capitalize on gags from the first three seasons, but a few fleeting references aside the writers went to great lengths to create a whole new set of gags.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with Gob – my favorite Bluth, and the one with the greatest number of catchphrases and running gags. In season 4 we never see him on his Segway, he never does his chicken dance, he drops “I’ve made a huge mistake” one time, and for all intents and purposes “The Sound Of Silence” has replaced “The Final Countdown” as his theme song. (Either that or “Getaway, Getaway.”)

The greatest testament to the writers’ skill and the strength of his character is that I didn’t even notice these elements were missing until the second viewing, because I was so caught up in all of the new gags they’d built. If you’d told me in April that I would one day think “Same” was the funniest word in the English language, or that I would consider “Love Each Other” a viable option for a tattoo, I would’ve called you crazy.

To be sure, season 4 isn’t as consistent as the first three seasons. By focusing on individual characters in a vacuum, the show sets itself up for some weak episodes featuring characters who just aren’t as funny without their other family members. I can’t really hold it against them, though – given the fact that half the cast has successful film careers now it’s actually pretty incredible that Hurwitz created a show this good out of that many fractured schedules.

Weak episodes aside, 11 or 12 of the 15 episodes hold up almost perfectly against the original 53. What’s more, since everybody seems to have a different favorite character, focusing on each one individually means that now everybody has a different favorite episode. I thought the Gob and George-Michael episodes were the best, but I’ve had a number of detailed conversations with friends who prefer the Maeby, Buster, and Lindsay episodes – conversations that have led me to rewatch and critically reevaluate those episodes.

This was Mitch Hurwitz’s greatest achievement – he’s made it possible for two consenting adults to have a conversation about Arrested Development without it turning into a “same” circlejerk.

He’s made a huge success.

Truman Capps is pretty upset that Franklin Delano Bluth didn't make an appearance, though.

No Excuses, Play Like A Champion

Nothing has been replaced by a bunch of urgent Something - check back tomorrow.

Nothing Is Amazing

I’ve been having a hard time figuring out how to describe what happened to me at work last week. I don’t like the phrase “I lost my job” because it sounds so passive and makes me out to be a downtrodden victim, all shuffling out of the West Virginia coal mine with my pink slip in one hand and my lunch pail in the other, Bruce Springsteen watching from his car and writing a powerful, heart rending rock ballad about my struggle.

I don’t sound like a victim when I say “I got fired”, but then it gives the impression that I’m an unemployable lout who was smoking crack in the bathroom and had to be escorted out by security, which isn’t really accurate – both because my ad agency lacked a bathroom large enough to discreetly smoke crack in as well as security guards to escort me out.

Maybe “laid off” is the right phrase. After all, my entire department got the sack on the same day, which sounds an awful lot like a layoff until you remember that I was the only person in my department.

Look, hows about I just explain what happened and you can decide for yourself how to describe it:

Last Wednesday morning my boss had me stay in the conference room after dismissing all the other creatives from the morning meeting. A moment later our company HR rep stepped into the room, and I realized that my schedule for the rest of the week was about to get significantly less complicated.

My boss apologetically explained what we both had known for some time: Over the past couple of months, which are usually our busiest, he’s been struggling to find work for me to do* because fewer and fewer of our clients need copy written, and what little there is can usually be done by him. It didn’t make sense for them to pay me to sit around the office waiting to do whatever piecemeal work came down the pipeline, so they wanted to stop.

*This is most likely why he told me to download and play Bejeweled last week.

This was a good business decision on his part, because there really wasn’t any work for me to do for the past few months. I chipped in on some scripts and wrote up some copy lines, but the fact is that for the past year our clients have been asking for less and less copy. When I started at the agency there were three other copywriters and we kept pretty busy – we even had our own office! At the end it was just me sharing an desk with one of our media planners, scrounging for work to do and reading up on my Congressman's recent misdeeds. 

I’ve got nothing but respect and gratitude for my old boss and everybody at the agency. There was absolutely no logical reason for them to hire a 23 year old kid with no prior ad experience to write copy for them, but they did it, and as a result I’ve now got a big portfolio and over a year’s agency experience on my resume. If not for this job I’d either be a production assistant on America’s Next Top Anorexic or back in Portland begging my Mom to stop using my old room as her home office so I could sleep there again.

The second I moved to LA my only concern was financial stability – I was burning through my savings and I needed to set myself up with a steady paycheck as fast as possible before I could really focus on my writing. I would’ve been content to answer phones or walk dogs, but instead I wound up with a job where I had to write creatively every day. This was one of those rare situations the Rolling Stones don’t talk about where not only do you get what you want, but also what you need.

Now, though, I no longer have a job, just like pretty much everybody else in my generation. I put a lot of money into savings over the past 16 months, so I’ve got a long time until anybody tries to kick me out of my apartment. The agency is still going to use me on a freelance basis in the future when they need scripts written, and my boss is setting up an interview for me with one of our clients, so there are prospects on the horizon.

In the meantime, though, I – the most boundlessly lazy person I’ve ever met – have got absolutely nothing to do.

It’s amazing.

Yes, I know you should only say ‘amazing’ when you’re amazed by something, which is why I’m saying it now. After being either unemployed and nearly broke or fully employed and constantly exhausted for just shy of two years, being able to spend a couple of weeks doing nothing productive, without fear of eviction or starvation, is amazing.

I’ve been able to not only meticulously clean and organize my room but also maintain it for the past week, which is amazing.

I’ve been able to stay up until 3 or 4 AM every night and still catch up on lost sleep, which is amazing.

I’ve put a further 20-odd hours into Fallout: New Vegas, which is amazing.

I’ve discovered that my apartment has rooftop access, and have spent a couple of afternoons sitting up there on a lawn chair watching the world go by, which is amazing.

I’ve been able to wake up every morning knowing that I have no immediate or pressing responsibilities to worry about for the day, which is amazing.

This is not a sustainable lifestyle, even for someone as committed to sloth as I am. I know for a fact that sooner or later doing nothing every day is going to drive me stir crazy. Fortunately, I’ve got two pilots and a webseries that I’ve been working on, and now that I’m unemployed I can make those three projects my full time job. That, too, will be amazing, because for the first time since moving here I’ll be financially stable enough to dedicate myself completely to the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do with my life.

So whether I lost my job, or got fired, or was laid off, just know that I’m okay. I’ll miss my old coworkers and I’m excited to see where my career takes me next, but right now I’m doing nothing, and I couldn’t be happier.

Truman Capps can no longer play the ‘busy’ card to get out of writing a blog update.

Bejeweled

 The same praise you've always loved, now in video game form!

E3 is an annual video game trade show that is without question the single biggest event of the year for the video game industry, which makes it the biggest event of the year for my ad agency as well. Game developers go to E3 to show off their latest games and systems to a breathless army of neckbearded video game journalists in hopes of ginning up hype as well as the value of their publishers’ stock. It’s a bevy of demos, flashy presentations, and trailers upon trailers – so as one would imagine, the past few months have been pretty busy for me and my coworkers.

Now, however, we’ve passed the point of no return – E3 is next week, and any work that was going to go onto the floor at the Los Angeles Convention Center was finished and sent to client last week. The pace at the office has slowed way down, and there’s no greater sign of that than the fact that last week my boss told me to download the sensationally popular iOS game Bejeweled, which is made by one of our clients, and “Play it for awhile to familiarize yourself with the game.”

In spite of how much time I spend playing video games, I really don’t get a whole lot of variety in my experience. Every single video game jockeying for space on my shelf is some flavor of shooter, most of them with heavy science fiction influences. My favorite movies range from Boogie Nights to The Incredibles to Children of Men, but when I’m playing a video game the only experience that really interests me is one where I can shoot people with huge guns – almost as though there’s a Republican deep inside me trying to break out.

Not only is my taste in video games limited, but so is the way that I play them. Between handheld gaming devices and the exploding iOS gaming market, you can conceivably play a video game just about anywhere at any time, but I do all of my gaming the way I’ve done it since 1996 – sitting on my ass in front of a TV, at home, usually without pants on. Up until last week, I didn’t have a single game on my phone besides Words With Friends.

When I play a video game, I want to play an immersive, big-budget title with a great script and innovative gameplay. I play for experience – not the arbitrary points doled out in role playing games to determine your character’s level*, but the same sort of experience people seek when they go to the movies.

*”Tonight, on Let’s Guess Why Truman Is Single!”

iOS and handheld games tend to be simpler experiences that are usually a little lighter on story, often designed primarily to occupy quick patches of idle time throughout the day. It’s not really the type of experience that I’m after, and I’m also wary of the idea that I need to have entertainment locked and loaded at all times. Life is full of idle time and boring moments; I don’t want to spend all of mine staring at my phone.

But then, my boss told me to download Bejeweled – and fuck me, is that game ever addictive!

Everybody who’s familiar with Bejeweled can go take a break for awhile, because I’m about to give an exhaustive rundown of the rules and gameplay for the people who haven’t played the game:

You look at a bunch of jewels and try to match the identical jewels to score points.

Okay, everybody, come on back! We’re done with the rundown!

Yes, Bejeweled is simple – but so is the chemical formula for heroin.* Within 30 seconds of downloading the game on my phone and beginning to play, I realized that my life had changed forever. I had been a person with a bunch of hoity-toity reasons for why he didn’t play iOS games; now I was a person who played Bejeweled.  

*At least, it looks that way on Wikipedia – I don’t know shit from chemistry, so it could actually be the most complicated chemical formula in the world.

A lot of science goes into making junk food psychologically addictive – corporations have entire labs full of scientists who, through extensive study and focus groups, have concocted formulas that make the experience of eating potato chips and drinking Coke so fun for our bodies that it’s extremely difficult to stop, even when we want to.

Video games do the same thing, but instead of creating irresistible combinations of taste and texture to get us hooked, game developers bait us with sounds, colors, and positive reinforcement. Have you ever wondered why legions of people play Call of Duty more fanatically than any other multiplayer shooter before it? It’s because you’re always getting rewarded – the game is full of purposefully low benchmarks so that once you start playing you’re immediately bombarded with electric guitar sound cues and congratulations for having killed five people, or fired 100 bullets, or been called three different racial slurs by the same 12-year-old opponent.

At a visceral level it feels good to get praised every minute or so, no matter how trivial the thing you’re getting praise for is, and you’re naturally inclined to chase that feeling.

Bejeweled is that same science at work. When you match three jewels (the minimum number needed to score) into a chain, they cheerfully jingle. When you chain up four for a powerup, it’s a soft explosion. When you achieve a cascade – a chain reaction wherein the new jewels falling into place onscreen form chains of their own to net you even more points – it sounds like a slot machine fucking a fireworks display, and it’s glorious. As though that wasn’t enough, a deep voiced announcer periodically interjects encouragement like “GOOD!” or “EXCELLENT!” which gives the impression that God himself approves of your ability to locate and match jewels.

Getting the player hooked is a tactic as old as video games – remember how I spent like $40 on Galaga that time? – and I don’t really begrudge any game developer who uses relatively harmless psychological tricks to sell his or her (but probably his) product.

At the same time though, I feel pretty pathetic lying around my room matching colorful jewel sprites all evening when I could be feeling pathetic playing any one of the big budget Playstation 3 games I was addicted to before last week.

Fun is a hell of a drug.

Truman Capps will now return to playing Bejeweled.

Civic Engagement, Part 2

 Parks and Rec is surprisingly accurate when it comes to town hall meetings.

After some general housekeeping and band director-quality lame jokes (“…we’re all so glad you could make it to this town hall here in the best named city in America – Sherman Oaks!”) the Congressman’s staff started drawing raffle tickets out of a bucket to pick the lucky few who would get to ask a question.

They drew several times throughout the meeting and my number never came up (although the two numbers directly before mine did, and yes, that made me cry inside), so instead I settled in and glumly watched the line of wrinkled, hunched, foul smelling constituents waiting at the microphone, hoping that one of them had been following the news and would bring up the issue I was concerned with.

The bad news is that nobody pressed the Congressman on the fact that he had voted for a bill written by Citigroup lobbyists that essentially promised bailouts to investment banks that make risky bets. The good news is that the Congressman’s constituents held his feet to the fire on important issues like how expensive retirement homes on Ventura Boulevard are, why his healthcare is exempted from Obamacare (it isn’t), and the tyranny of noisy aircraft landing at Van Nuys Airport.

While Congressman Sherman may not be the most active legislator, nor a particularly competent Wall Street watchdog, he’s really good at graciously answering questions put to him by crazy people. Most of the issues that people brought up to him were either nonexistent or beyond his control, but he still did a very good job of not sounding condescending when he explained to a short fat man in a sport coat that there was nothing he could do to help him with local zoning issues.

In several of his answers, the Congressman fell back on some pre prepared talking points designed to please a room full of Southern California Democrats – digs at “my friends across the aisle in the Republican Party”, the announcement that he would be cosponsoring a bill with Senator Bernie Sanders to require GMO labeling,* and a number of references to how he wants to, “hold Wall Street accountable.”

*How to know you live in a liberal district: When he said ‘Bernie Sanders’ the entire crowd murmured in hushed awe as though he’d said, “My personal friend Jon Stewart.”

Of course, the Congressman isn’t holding Wall Street accountable, because as I mentioned he let Citigroup write their own regulatory legislation, which is a lot like letting a serial rapist write your company’s sexual harassment policy. I had in my hands enough documents to demolish all of his talking points, but without a winning raffle card I couldn’t utilize any of the information.

Sure, I could’ve stood up and started yelling at him, but no matter how right I was, and no matter how well sourced my documents were, as soon as you start yelling at a member of Congress and waving supposedly incriminating paperwork around you start to look like a crackpot conspiracy theorist, and all the facts in the world won’t change that. My righteous civic virtue had been dealt a nasty case of whiskey dick.

I held out hope that I could maybe get a chance to speak with him afterward – it wouldn’t be quite the same as a public shaming in front of everyone at the town hall meeting, but at the very least I wanted him to know that somebody out there was keeping track of his votes. Unfortunately, the second the meeting drew to a close 25 old people who hadn’t been called up to ask questions jumped out of their seats and rushed the Congressman as fast as their decaying bodies would let them.

I hung back as they formed a tight knot around him, both due to crowd anxiety and because I figured that if one of them was going to assassinate him they would probably do it then and I wanted to stay out of the crossfire. In spite of all the anger I’d felt toward the guy over the past few weeks, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him as he tried to be polite to this mob of crazy, cranky old people clamoring for his attention.

“Congressman!” A fat middle aged Chinese-American man hollered, holding out a business card in a chubby hand. “I went to college at one of the top schools in China – if you need advice on China policy I’d love it if you’d give me a call. Can I get a picture with you?”

Congressman Sherman took the card. “Sure, in just a minute here-”

At this point an angry old man in a leg brace stepped up to him, wagging his finger. “I’ve called your office six times and I never got a call back!”

As the Congressman and his staff tried to defuse this moment, the China expert handed his camera to a nearby geriatric, stood beside the Congressman, and smiled. I saw the resulting picture on the camera’s viewscreen – a blurry shot of the China expert with a dorky grin standing next to Congressman Sherman, who was facing away from him and arguing with leg brace man.

The China expert took the camera back, looked at the image, and, seemingly satisfied with the proof that he had been in the general vicinity of a Congressman, departed with a smile on his face. That picture of him and the back of a low ranking lawmaker’s head would no doubt wind up proudly displayed on his Facebook page, and that made me sad.

The knot of old, deluded people followed the Congressman as he worked his way out of the elementary school and down the street toward a waiting towncar. All along the way he was shaking hands and doing his best to placate the mob, but the second he got to the car he hopped in and shut the door as fast as he could without catching a wrinkled hand in it. To be honest, I couldn’t blame him.

I’ve never had anything resembling idealism about politics (save for a couple of hours in middle school when my Mom and I watched the season 2 finale of The West Wing) but up until yesterday I had been under the impression that if people like me kept an eye on their representatives’ voting records and challenged them at town hall meetings we could at least remind them that their constituents were paying attention. But it turns out that even that very limited goal isn’t possible.

Crazy people show up to town hall meetings in such impressive numbers that they pretty much dilute the effect of sane, well informed people with legitimate questions to ask. And there’s really nobody to get mad at about that. Nobody has time to take questions from 300 people, so picking questions by lottery is about the only fair way for the Congressman to hear from a sample of his base. The Man didn't stifle my voice on Sunday; everyday, common, regular American citizens did.

After all’s been said and done, I can really see the appeal of sports now. Sure, the stakes aren’t very high, but that’s kind of what makes it bearable. If your team loses, nothing else in your life will go to shit, and it definitely won’t leave you feeling depressed and hollow afterwards.

After two hours with the oldest, craziest people in California’s 30^th district, I wanted nothing more than to just watch some ‘roided out overpaid celebrities tossing a ball around for awhile. 

Truman Capps has given some thought to calling the Congressman’s office, but that would be a lot like pissing in the ocean: Ultimately meaningless, and only really enjoyable while drunk.

Civic Engagement, Part 1

I know what you're thinking, and yes: He used to be an accountant. 

I spent two remarkably depressing hours of my Sunday sitting in an elementary school auditorium, the youngest person by a good 20 years in a standing-room-only crowd of rich older Jewish people and poor older Latinos. We were all there because we wanted to talk to our Congressman, Brad Sherman, who has been representing various chunks of the San Fernando Valley since Starship Troopers was in theaters. With the benefit of hindsight, this was a really shitty way to spend my Sunday afternoon.

With the exception of college football, I’ve never really been able to get into sports because I’ve never been invested in the outcomes. A team winning or losing a game doesn’t really mean anything outside of bragging rights for the fanbase, and bragging rights really only matter to me when I can rub it in everybody’s face that my college has the best football team ever.*

*I also do genuinely enjoy the pace and strategy of a football game, even if my comprehension of the rules is about the same as a stereotypical sitcom girlfriend’s.

Politics, on the other hand, has a year-round season, no time outs, fewer rules, and real, tangible stakes for victory or defeat. Maybe it’s just more relatable for me – I can’t really get invested in sexy, young overpaid narcissists who spend all of their time perfecting their physical abilities, but I’m totally onboard to follow frumpy, old overpaid narcissists who spend all their time yelling at each other on C-SPAN.

In politics, though, both teams suck pretty badly, so most of my analysis is extremely critical of just about every player on the field. Pro athletes may make enormous piles of money, but at least they work every day and in some cases knowingly give themselves brain damage for that paycheck – members of Congress get upwards of $170,000 a year to work three days a week, and most of them were already brain damaged to begin with.

So I was excited when I found out Brad Sherman was having a town hall, because I thought it would give me a chance to take my Congressman to task for his shitty governing – namely, the fact that he recently voted yes on a Wall Street regulatory bill that was pretty much written by Citigroup.

I spent most of last week preparing for the meeting – carefully rehearsing the wording of my speech and printing out New York Times articles and highlighting relevant sections in case he challenged my facts. I had imaginary debates with him in the privacy of my car, carefully selecting the most Aaron Sorkinesque retorts for the imaginary excuses he would make at the hypothetical town hall meeting I was attending in my mind.

“I didn’t vote for Citigroup, Congressman – in fact, none of us did! … You didn’t answer my question, sir! … You don’t like my tone? Well, I don’t like your job performance! … Don’t interrupt me, Congressman – those shenanigans might work in Washington, but they won’t fly here in the Valley!”

Some people paint words on their chests and stand shirtless in the snow at football games; I get in my car and pretend I’m having a testy exchange with an old Jewish guy I’ve never met. Fandom is a weird thing.

On Sunday I showed up to the school half an hour early, my professionally highlighted notes tucked into an equally professional-looking blue folder, and signed in at a table by the door manned by some of the Congressman’s staffers.

“And did you want to ask the Congressman a question today?” One of them asked as I signed my name on the sheet.

“Yes,” I said, my eyes no doubt gleaming with the raw excitement of civic engagement. “Oh my, yes.”  

“Okay,” the staffer said, handing me a red paper raffle ticket. “We’ll be holding a drawing. If we call your number you can ask the Congressman your question.”

I stood there in the doorway numbly holding my raffle card, trying to wrap my mind around the idea that I might not even get a chance to ask my carefully researched, rehearsed, and highlighted question.

“Wait, um… That… That kind of fucks up my plan.” I muttered helplessly, but by then the staffer was helping a 90 year old man in a Hawaiian shirt pick up a pen to sign his name.

I figured that my odds of getting to ask my question were even worse if I just went home, so I made my way into the auditorium and took a seat near the front. Over time, the seats around me began to fill with old people who in some cases were as angry as they were senile (“Why isn’t there an American flag in this room!? Does that son of a bitch just think we won’t notice!?”) and I started eyeballing the nearest emergency exit on the off-chance somebody started shooting.

By the time every seat in the auditorium had been filled, the combined age in the room was hovering somewhere around 6000 years old. It was at this point that Congressman Sherman made his entrance.

My Congressman does not have the self assured swagger of former Ohio representative Dennis Kucinich, nor the rock hard ass of Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan. He seems like a nice man and I don’t doubt that he wants the best for America, but watching him shuffle up to the microphone in an ill-fitting grey suit I couldn’t help but get the impression that this guy was on the Congressional B-squad; the legislative equivalent of a 4^th string placekicker. 

 

Not every Congressman can be Frank Underwood. 

Truman Capps has somehow managed to turn a story about attending a Congressional town hall meeting into a two part update, if for no other reason than to simulate for you just how boring the ordeal really was. 

Patriotic Pee

I bet she peed on Christmas, too!

 

I guess I don’t really know how I’m supposed to react to Lena Dunham. To me, she’s a lot like Justin Bieber for young, artsy, creative urbanites – I pretty much went from not knowing who she was to getting tired of hearing people talk about her within the space of a day, which was more or less the same reaction I had when Justin Bieber came on the scene.

Mind you, I don’t resent Lena Dunham; she seems like a nice lady. I understand that she made a movie that Judd Apatow liked so much that he made HBO give her a sitcom, which admittedly is kind of the dream for me, so good for her! It’s just that I never watched Tiny Furniture and I’ve never seen Girls, so all I really know about her is what I’ve gleaned from the massive hype machine that surrounds her every action and creative decision.

Whenever I’m party to a conversation about Lena Dunham, for example, somebody always brings up how “important” it is that she gets naked all the time on her TV show, because “it’s really brave of her to do that when she isn’t even all that good looking!”

That line of thinking always strikes me as pretty stupid. For one thing, I don’t think we should be treating the act of being naked as some kind of landmark accomplishment, because if you look at it in terms of sheer effort it’s actually considerably easier to be naked than it is to wear clothes. Furthermore, I don’t think being naked and average looking is any more noteworthy than just being garden variety naked. (I also think she looks pretty cute when she puts on a nice dress and covers her tattoos.)

But really I’m in no position to have an opinion on Lena Dunham because of how little I know about her. This update isn’t about what I think of Lena Dunham; this update is about freedom.

This past Monday was Memorial Day, a day on which we pay our respects to our nation’s wartime losses by posting patriotic images on Facebook or by thinking about posting patriotic images on Facebook and then forgetting to actually do it. On Monday, Lena Dunham sent out the following tweet:

To my knowledge, this is kind of Lena Dunham’s thing: Being awkward and talking about bodily functions. I can relate – I’m awkward, and while I have never peed in two Starbucks bathrooms on the same day I have definitely peed in a Starbucks bathroom before, so I get the gist of what she’s describing.

But then, this:

The butthurt is chronicled in full over on Twitchy, which is apparently like BuzzFeed for people who have the word “NObama!” saved into their phone’s autocorrect.

As far as I can tell, the source of the controversy is this: Lena Dunham, like the filthy terrorist whore she is, exercised her First Amendment rights on Memorial Day.

So first, the obvious point: Memorial Day is the day we remember the men and women who died fighting for our country – a country that prides itself on freedom for everybody. Freedom to believe what you want, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, freedom to own guns, freedom from background checks if you buy those guns on the Internet, freedom from being forced to quarter soldiers in your home without pay, and the freedom to write about your bodily functions on the Internet on a national holiday.

So, y’know, there’s that. But then, this isn’t strictly a First Amendment case, because nobody’s saying that Lena Dunham should be arrested or deported for what she wrote.

Actually, scratch that – I’m sure several thousand people who own first edition copies of Bill O’Reilly’s hardboiled crime novel are saying that. But I digress.

The issue here isn’t really whether Lena Dunham should be allowed to say what she said; it’s whether she was being disrespectful to the people who died fighting for our country when she said it on Memorial Day.

I’m a big believer in free speech, but I also wouldn’t fault anybody for being pissed at Lena Dunham if she’d been truly disrespectful to our service members’ sacrifices on Memorial Day. If her tweet had been…

“What’s funnier than a dead soldier at the Battle of Shiloh? A dead soldier at the Battle of Shiloh in a clown costume! #VivaChavez”

…then not only would I sympathize with the butthurt, but I’d be experiencing a little butthurt of my own. But here’s what the tweet actually said:

“Happy Memorial Day! I've already peed in two different Starbucks bathrooms!”

There’s no foul language in this tweet, no sexual content, and nothing seditious. In the first sentence, she wishes her followers a happy Memorial Day; in the second sentence she gives her followers a quick rundown of the places she’s urinated so far.

If Lena Dunham had just tweeted, “I’ve already peed in two different Starbucks bathrooms!” I doubt there would’ve been any backlash because nothing in that sentence is explicitly about Memorial Day. Sure, she’d still be tweeting about going to the bathroom on a national holiday, but studies show that 97% of tweets are sent by people going to the bathroom, so I don’t think hers would’ve stood out much from the crowd.

Likewise, had Lena Dunham simply tweeted, “Happy Memorial Day!” I’m pretty much certain there wouldn’t have been any backlash, because “Happy Memorial Day!” is what you’re supposed to say on Memorial Day.

What seems to be offending people is that Lena Dunham said the words “Memorial Day” and “pee” in the same tweet.

Jesus fucking Christ, guys - your three favorite things are guns, war, and rugged individualism and you're pitching a fit because a woman went to the bathroom on a holiday? Get the fuck over it.

Truman Capps has only peed in one sushi restaurant bathroom today.

The Friendzone

If you do a Google Image Search for 'friendzone' you'll find thousands of images like this one - by "nice guys", for "nice guys."

I gave “nice guys” their due on Wednesday, but I’m only half done. A generation of “nice guys” has ensured that “nice guy” terminology has found its way into the mainstream, and so long as I’ve got my angry pants on I may as well throw cold water on something else a lot of other young men spend a lot of time obsessing over: The fabled “friendzone.”

The greatest fear of “nice guys” and regular guys alike is winding up in their unrequited love’s “friendzone,” a platonic prison from which supposedly nobody can escape. I hear guys roughly my age griping all the time about painstakingly getting close to the object of their affections only for her to think of him as a buddy instead of a boyfriend, at which point she tortures him by confiding in him about all of her relationships with guys who live outside the zone.

The “friendzone” is so frequently discussed that it even has a verb now – “friendzoned” – which I hear in one permutation or another just about every week, usually from a mopey guy working his way through his third $9 Coors:

“Well, fiddlesticks. I really thought Sloan and I were going to be an item, but she friendzoned me faster then a flapper dancing the jitterbug! Okay, but seriously, what decade are these examples coming from?”

Look at that phrasing – “she friendzoned me.” It’s stupid for two reasons: 1) It makes a woman’s friendship sound like some malicious attack, and 2) It operates under the assumption that the woman had any choice in the matter – that she just decided not to go out with you as casually as she would order a side salad instead of fries.

I’m far from a relationship expert, but what little I do know is that relationships require a lot of time, energy, sacrifice, compromise, and painful control of flatulence. I certainly wouldn’t want to subject myself to all of that unless the other person was somebody I really cared about and wanted to be with – and just like last week, I’m inclined to believe that women behave more or less the same way.

So she didn’t choose to put you in the “friendzone” – if you’re in the “friendzone” she just doesn’t like you enough to date you. Ouch, right? Sorry.

The reason very few guys ever “break out” of the “friendzone”? It’s not because women are fickle creatures with some unspoken code about never dating a guy they’re friends with; it’s because if a woman doesn’t have a romantic interest in you right off the bat it’s pretty difficult to convince her to develop one.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m shitting on my own gender, because I’m not trying to. I’ve lived all of this – over the course of my life I’ve spent so much time in the so-called “friendzone” that I’m probably eligible for jury duty and in-state tuition there by now. It’s an unpleasant, frustrating, extremely emo place to be – and the whole reason it exists is so men can blame women for putting them there.

I view the “friendzone” in the same way I view religion – it’s a narrative created by men to answer questions they couldn’t answer themselves. In this case, the question was, “I like this woman and she’s being nice to me – why doesn’t she want to fuck me?” The real answer, “She doesn’t like you like that,” is a tough pill to swallow and it begets a lot of other unhealthy questions like, “Why doesn’t she like me like that?”, “What’s wrong with me?”, and worst of all, “How can I change to make her like me?” To save face, men came up with, “She’s a thoughtless bitch who misinterpreted your signals as signs of platonic friendship and put you in the friendzone, all through no fault of your own. Now go read a Tucker Max book.”

Unlike religion, which when used in moderation can bring people joy and foster a sense of community, the notion of a “friendzone” isn’t helping anyone. Right now we have a nation full of young men who honestly believe that if they aren’t careful the woman of their dreams could decide to target them for platonic friendship at any moment. Men who are in the “friendzone” subject themselves to emotional torture trying to figure out what made the woman decide to put them there, and how they can possibly break out.

The world is full of women, and no matter who you are there are always going to be women who don’t want to be with you, and it's profoundly unfair to try and fault them for that. It's not their fault and it's not your fault - it just is. Fortunately, there are also always going to be women who do want to be with you. 

When you get spurned by a woman who doesn't want you, you've got a choice to make: You can either concoct a story about a mystical zone of friendship and lock yourself inside of it to be miserable, or you can accept the fact that she doesn't like you (alcohol makes that easier) and go find someone who does.

Truman Capps has-

Oh, I almost forgot – ladies? Hi there. I’ve been passing out advice to guys for the past two updates and I’m scared it might look like I’m throwing my gender under the bus to score points, so I wanted to give you all a protip as well:

When you make plans to go out with a guy, you really need to take punctuality a little bit more seriously. Yeah, I know, you’re putting on makeup – maybe try putting your makeup on sooner or scheduling your dates later so that the guy doesn’t wind up sitting in the bar alone for 45 minutes getting sidelong glances from the bartender while you text updates like, “ok leaving now!!!” or “arrgh i can never find parking in hollywood :/”

Men might construct elaborate misogynistic excuses to explain why women won’t fuck them, but at least we show up on time.

Truman Ca-

Also! Ladies! Lip rings: Don’t get them. Seriously; eww.

Truman Capps has no doubt made an enemy of every plus-sized male fedora owner in America at this point.

Nice Guys

 If you're looking for a "nice guy", check under one of these.

There’s a term that gets tossed around all the time in Reddit comment sections, Facebook status updates, and idle male chatter that makes me roll my eyes hard enough to cause serious ocular damage. The term is “nice guy”, and it’s done more to tarnish the reputation of sexually frustrated young men than any Judd Apatow movie – and as a sexually frustrated young man, that really offends me. I’m mad as hell, and I’m going to spend the next 950 words explaining why I’m mad!

For the uninitiated among you, men use terms like “nice guy” when discussing their (usually unsuccessful) relations with women. Here’s an example:

“Sloan and I hang out at the mall and talk on the phone all the time, but she just started going steady with that jerk Chad who works at the travel agency! I don’t get why girls always date bogus losers but never nice guys like me – they avoid me like the Noid! I also don’t get why it’s apparently the 1980s in this example.”

The gist of it is that “nice guys” believe themselves to be love’s long suffering martyrs: Despite the fact that they’re nothing but respectful and courteous to the women in their life, those cold-hearted bitches never think of them as anything more than friends. Hang around a group of younger men long enough and you’re bound to hear a “nice guy” griping about being trapped in some girl’s “friendzone” – a sexless place where cruel women imprison “nice guys” and force them to watch and listen as they get their hearts broken by one douche boyfriend after another.

What disgusts me about “nice guys” is that they seem to believe that men who are polite should be allowed to have sex with whoever they want to, and that any woman who doesn’t play ball with that notion is a manipulative bitch who has emasculated them. In that regard, self-proclaimed “nice guys” are really Al Bundy-style chauvinist assholes.

I hold doors open for people, recycle, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ use my turn signals, make eye contact with waiters and laugh at their jokes – even the ones that aren’t funny.* I’m a nice guy. And when I’m trying to describe things about myself that I believe make me attractive to the opposite sex, the fact that I’m nice doesn’t even make the list because there isn’t anything hot about common courtesy!    

*”Ha ha ha! Did you hear that, guys? The dessert special is Very Berry Cobbler! It rhymes and it’s descriptive of the dessert’s fruit content!”

“Hi, I test my smoke detectors every six months – can I buy you a drink?”

“You may not know it to look at me, but I’ve never once eaten somebody else’s lunch out of the fridge at work. Mind if I have a seat?”

“Hey baby. I always make sure to park less than six inches away from the curb to ensure that my car doesn’t impede the flow of traffic. Want to get out of here?”

I’m going to say in all seriousness something that will make a lot of my readers laugh harder than any other line I’ve put on this blog in five years: I, Truman Capps, have some idea of what women want.

Women want to be with someone interesting. I know this because I want to be with someone interesting, and I’m of the controversial opinion that men and women are not only members of the same species but also are looking for similar things in a romantic partner.

“Nice guys” who are reading this: Suppose you know a girl who really, really likes you. Her greatest point of pride is the fact that she has good manners. She doesn’t have any particular interests, doesn’t read or watch much TV, no real goals or aspirations, and her only hobby is being nice.

“What did you do this weekend?”

“I was nice! I went to the park and was nice to people, and then I got lunch and was really nice to my waiter, and then I just went home and was nice alone for a couple of hours before going to bed early. Thank you for asking! How about you?”

Would you really want to invest a huge amount of your time and energy in that person? If the answer is no, then why the hell would you expect a woman to be bowled over by you when “niceness” is the one thing that supposedly sets you apart from other guys?

Being nice is pleasant, but not interesting. It’s possible to be nice and interesting – holla back, Ryan Gosling! – but between the two, interesting is the real panty dropper. Women date assholes because assholes tend to be interesting enough to make up for their lack of niceness.* Full stop. That’s the secret. Where’s my Nobel Prize?

*The vast majority of the women I know are dating guys who are so interesting, wonderful, and nice that I wish I was dating them.

The good news for “nice guys” is that everyone is interesting. My advice to any “nice guy” desperate enough to listen to pickup tips from the single guy with a blog would be to take the time you spend on the Internet talking about how unappreciated your “niceness” is and invest it in the qualities and activities that you think make you interesting.

Sooner or later you’re bound to meet a woman through this activity (provided your interesting activity isn’t competitive helicopter dicking) who shares your interests, and then you’ll discover that being in a relationship with someone you care about is its own can of worms.

I hope that at no point in this update I’ve given the impression that I consider myself an expert on women, because I’m far from it. I think a lot of this ought to be common sense, but it seems like every day I see some “nice guy” claiming that all women are stupid or evil because he’s been rejected by a few of them, opting to write off 51% of humanity when the common denominator in all of his failures is him.

If you’re “nice” because you expect something in return, you’re actually kind of an asshole – and not even the cool, dangerous type of asshole who gets laid.

Truman Capps apologizes profusely to his mother for using the term 'panty dropper' in his blog.  

Beginnings And Endings

How many times have they all gathered around a computer to watch something on this show? 

Late in the seventh season of The Office, Michael Scott quits Dunder Mifflin so he can move to Colorado with his fiancée. Sitting in a hotel bar waiting to meet with the man who will replace him as manager, he winds up unwittingly striking up a conversation with the man who will replace him as manager, played by Will Ferrell. Each oblivious to the other’s identity, they talk about work and their mutual love for the Olympics. (“I always wanted to do an animal Olympics.” “What happened?” “Life happened. Plus the monkeys would win everything.”)

At one point, Will Ferrell’s character lifts his glass in a toast. “To beginnings and endings!”

Michael Scott raises his own, dutifully trying to one-up him. “And middles, the unsung heroes!” 

Now that we’ve seen the full scope of what The Office had to offer us, that quote rings especially true. When The Office began it was a clumsy, hollow copy of the English series; when it ended it was a clumsy, sentimental copy of itself. But an awful lot of funny shit happened in the middle that made us forgive the show for its rougher edges.

The series finale of The Office was not a great episode. “The Injury”, “Michael Scott Paper Company”, or most of the Christmas episodes would’ve blown it straight out of the water in a quality contest, but I guess we can forgive that because it was an ending, and it’s almost impossible to make people laugh when you’re also telling them that a bunch of people they’ve known for 9 years are going away forever.

I didn’t like the finale because I don’t like long goodbyes. I don’t like long goodbyes because they open up the door for a whole lot of sentimentality, which I really don’t like, and which The Office has been trading in pretty heavily for the past couple of seasons now.

In the middle of the series, when The Office was at its best, it was a show about a bunch of people who didn’t have a lot in common and in many cases didn’t even like one another, their ordinary workplace gripes complicated by an incompetent manager who wanted everybody to be friends. 

When Oscar got sick of looking at Angela’s picture of babies playing musical instruments (back before the writers had truly committed to making her a crazy cat lady), Michael’s response was to make Oscar wear the poster like a shirt as a compromise – that way Angela could keep her poster in the one place where Oscar couldn't see it. In the process, they both wound up more miserable and angry at each other, and it was hilarious, because miserable people are one of the funniest things in the world. 

As the show drew to a close, though, the writers felt the need to start making everybody be friends. Phyllis and Stanley suddenly had a deep connection, Angela and Oscar moved in together to raise her baby, and the entire staff demanded an inexplicable goodbye dance party with Darryl before he left.

It’s really sweet to see people we’ve invested in over the past decade begin to come together and love one another as we love them. But it’s not terribly funny, and when it is it isn’t nearly as funny as those people squabbling over the thermostat and barely tolerating their micromanaging boss. And I think sitcoms should always be as funny as possible.

That’s why a finale – especially for a show that’s been on as long as this one – is basically a no-win situation. The Office was at its best when it was reveling in mediocrity and failure, commemorating trivial victories with sidelong smiles or foil tops from yogurt containers. But when everything comes to an end, everybody – even the cynics like me – wants to see that the characters we love are achieving their dreams and living happily ever after.

Endings aren’t so much about laughs as they are about closure, so maybe I shouldn’t be judging the episode on how funny it was.

I’m glad Angela and Dwight got married. The show has been setting them up for basically its entire run; I would’ve set Greg Daniels’ house on fire if they threw all that away in service of some godawful spinoff like The Farm, which NBC thankfully didn’t pick up.

I’m glad Jim and Pam worked things out and moved to Austin. I didn’t like the way the writers handled Jim and Pam’s tension over the course of the season – the whole thing felt kind of manufactured and then tied up pretty neatly in a matter of minutes – but them leaving Dunder Mifflin to do something hip, cool, and edgy is kind of what the show has been building to for years. 

Seeing Michael come back filled me with giddy, childlike joy, which was promptly replaced by giddy, childlike confusion when he only delivered two lines before disappearing. I’m well aware that the finale was about the show and not about the long absent Michael, but this is the guy who made the show what it was – he couldn’t have at least made a hilarious best man toast before disappearing back into TV legend?

I didn’t like Nellie simply being handed a baby for two reasons: 1) I’m pretty sure there’s a number of well justified state and federal laws preventing you from just grabbing a momentarily wayward infant and declaring yourself its mother, and 2) Who the fuck is Nellie and why was she ever on this fucking show!?!

Stanley carving a bird version of Phyllis was the one sentimental moment that really got to me. (Well, that and Michael having two phones full of pictures of his kids – along with two phone bills.) 

I love that Kevin – who in earlier seasons showed a natural aptitude for cooking – bought a bar, and I stand by my belief that a show about Kevin’s bar would be the best possible spinoff, especially if Oscar and Phyllis were patrons. That said, they’d need to up Kevin’s intelligence a bit; am I the only one who liked him better back in season 3 when he was a perverted rock and roll dullard instead of the mentally handicapped child he’s been in recent years?

Toby has been one of my favorite characters for the entire series – although, like Kevin, I preferred him when he was just a put upon loser and not a total creep – and I was pissed that his ending didn’t match the happiness of the others. I know I said a lot about mediocrity and failure earlier, but Toby is the one person who I wanted to see become an inexplicable success – a rich, world famous author with a supermodel wife to make up for nine years of torment at Michael and Andy’s hands. 

Image by Zack Wallenfang.

Ryan and Kelly’s ending was hands down the funniest and the truest to what the show was initially about – people stuck in a rut. They deserve each other, and they’re doomed to spend their lives falling in and out of love – not that they seem to care.

I was sorry to see so little of Clark Duke and “Plop”, the two fresh faces added at the beginning of the season. I enjoyed the addition of two younger, saner straight men into the maze of traditions, inside jokes, and love triangles (hexagons?) that had developed by season 9; I would’ve gladly had Nellie shipped off to Siberia for the season to give them more storylines and more time at the end. 

The ending of The Office was as good as it possibly could be. These characters, along with we diligent viewers who’ve ridden the show out through thick and thin, deserved a happy ending, and we got one. It wasn’t hilarious, but it couldn’t be happy and hilarious, and given the choice I’m glad that they went for happy in spite of all my earlier grumblings about sitcoms needing to be funny.

The Office is now a part of television history. In years to come, kids are going to discover The Office in weekday syndication and fall in love with it the same way I did with Seinfeld. Episodes of The Office are going to inspire some of those kids to become TV-loving comedy nerds, and the finale is not going to be one of those episodes. And that’s fine. 

The finale succeeded at completing The Office, so that when we go back to those stellar episodes from seasons 2, 3, 4, and 5, we can know that everything turns out okay in the end for (almost) everybody. And knowing that, maybe we can laugh all the harder when we watch these people sniping, bickering, and getting their feet caught in George Foreman grills. 

No matter how funny miserable people are, it’s always funnier when you know they’ll be okay in the end. 

Truman Capps has probably written more blogs about The Office than any other subject.  

Dry Hot San Fernando Valley Summer

Cheap rent, laid back nightlife, artsy cafes and galleries, hell on Earth for half the year. 

Something that I’ve complained and written many a blog about is the fact that summers in LA – particularly the San Fernando Valley, where I live – are roughly equivalent to getting a Dutch oven from planet Earth. Between the triple digit temperatures that inexplicably persist after sundown, stagnant smoggy haze that settles into the city like cottage cheese, or body odors on the Metro that are also reminiscent of cottage cheese, summer is the time that all the worst things in LA get worse.

I have very few coping mechanisms for LA heat. Summer in Oregon was just a six week break between rainstorms; a mild, peaceful, and beautiful time that every year entices hundreds of vacationing Californians to move north with no foreknowledge of what the other 10 and a half months are like. Every summer there’s usually one unbearably hot week in July during which I would lie on the floor in front of a fan moaning – and then, before you know it, it would start raining again.

If you live in Oregon and want to get an idea for what I’m dealing with this summer, park your car in direct sunlight at the beginning of that unbearably hot week in July and then, after about three days, go sit in it with all the windows rolled up. For the most authentic LA experience, fart a couple of times, listen to a looping CD of a police helicopter, and don’t get out of your car until late October.

I’d love to lie on the floor in front of a fan moaning for five months at a time – that’s actually my plan for retirement – but unlike my lazy childhood summers in Oregon I have bills to pay now, so every summer I have to find a way to beat the heat.

Two summers ago I sublet the same apartment I’m currently living in for two months between my junior and senior year of college while I worked nights logging and capturing footage for a ghost hunting reality TV show. This meant I had to sleep during the 105 degree days in an East-facing room that was as far as possible from the apartment’s sole A/C unit in the living room.

At first, my strategy to beat the heat that summer was to go into the living room with my roommates and stand in front of the A/C unit in my underwear. Unfortunately I couldn’t sleep out there since my roommates needed the living room during the day, so before long I just lay in my sweltering room and allowed the heat to beat me, hoping that either the sun would get tired of ruining my life or I’d grow to love my Arrakis-style environment.

It was a character building experience, and like most character building experiences I’d do just about anything to avoid repeating it. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about that – my 40-year-old apartment complex doesn’t have central air,* and even if I could fit comfortably inside our refrigerator I doubt I could live in there all summer long.   

*There are only three things that have ever made me consider the possibility that there might be a benevolent God taking care of our race: Pretzel bread sandwiches, Alison Brie, and central air conditioning. 

The only cooling technology in our apartment is our aforementioned wall-mounted AC unit in the living room, which effectively cools about 40% of the apartment and sounds like a bus crash doing it. I’ve experimented with box fans, which have proven to be very useful for blowing hot air around the apartment and not much else.

I was fully prepared to just move back to Oregon for the summer when I discovered the existence of portable air conditioners – mobile A/C units that cool down a room without having to be painstakingly (and dangerously) mounted in a window. The only downside is that getting a portable air conditioner requires you to spend money, something I have a well documented aversion to, but in this case I hate sweating far more than I hate spending.

Once purchased and installed, my brand new portable air conditioner looks like this:

I can’t help but think that there could be something a little more elegant about this design. You don’t see a lot of enormous collapsible ductwork anymore these days, and having a contraption that looks like an iron lung in my room has taken some getting used to.

But I really shouldn’t bitch about appearances – this thing keeps my room so frosty cool that it could look like Rick Perry’s big dumb face and I’d still love it. The machine blasts cool air and vents the hot air in my room back outside via the big tube; I get a certain assholey satisfaction from knowing that I’m making the outdoors slightly hotter in order to make my space cooler.

Now that I have such precise control of my climate, though, the rest of the world is an even bigger letdown than before. My room already has TV, the Internet, video games, and a private bathroom – now that I can turn it into a walk-in meat freezer at the touch of a button I can’t see any reason to leave until October, short of a pretzel bread sandwich or Alison Brie.

Truman Capps prefers climate control to social interaction.