Trader Joe's

It's like India in my freezer - and in this case, that's actually a good thing!

I don’t make any bones about the fact that I am, by and large, a disgusting lazy bachelor, but I’ve always prided myself on the fact that I eat relatively few frozen dinners compared to my disgusting, lazy contemporaries. This isn’t to say that the non-frozen meals I’m eating are especially fancy – go through my garbage and you’ll find a lot of extra large containers of Ralph’s brand peanut butter that have been all but licked clean – but at least I have some influence over those meals’ preparation, even if all I’m doing is spreading peanut butter onto bread and perhaps drizzling Sriracha on top of that if I’m feeling particularly fancy. (Seriously, try it.)

Even though I’m lazy and a sucker for convenience, because of my upbringing I’ve always been wary of frozen dinners. My mother is at least twice as good a cook as Gordon Ramsay (and three times as profane in the kitchen) so there were never Hungry Man TV dinners in our freezer. Whenever a news report about the obesity epidemic came on NPR she would blame it on the popularity of preservative-laden, salty, prepackaged frozen foods.

As a result, I’ve always distrusted preservatives, which is why I never really went in for frozen dinners. Mind you, I can’t actually name any preservatives (other than salt), nor can I articulate specifically why they’re bad – to me they’re just an invisible monster that lives in food and must be avoided at all costs because Mom said so a few times in the late 1990s.

What makes this stupid is that while my mother prepared all of our food more or less from scratch, my diet is still jam packed with preservatives – it just so happens that these aren’t the ones I was conditioned to hate as a kid. Diet Coke, cheap pasta, store-brand peanut butter… I’m scared to look at the lists of ingredients in these staples, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m just slowly embalming myself.

Last month, though, my roommates and I threw a party, and being as we’re all grown ups now I decided the party merited some classy grown up appetizers. This put me in a bind – I either had to spontaneously become a good enough chef to cobble together classy grown up appetizers from scratch or compromise all of my values and buy frozen classy grown up appetizers at the supermarket.

I decided almost immediately to compromise all of my values, as I often do when it’s between my values and doing something I don’t particularly want to do. On my way out the door I decided to at least buy my classy grown up appetizers at Trader Joe’s, both because they would probably have fewer preservatives than the ones at Ralph’s and also because Trader Joe’s happens to be two blocks away from Baja Fresh.*

*I’m always thinking two meals ahead.

While I had eaten plenty of food from Trader Joe’s – most of the ingredients in Mom’s incredible food came from there – I had never actually been to one before last month. I just knew it as a mysterious place from whence all natural hippie food came. When I was a kid I thought Trader Joe was just some guy my Mom knew who really liked quinoa. 

Shopping at Trader Joe’s for the first time was really no major shock, though. Being from Oregon I’ve seen my fair share of organic supermarkets; what really blew my mind was that most of the food at Trader Joe’s was so cheap that even I, with my 1960s era expectations of what things should cost*, was impressed.

*I pretty much feel like everything should cost $5 or less. This is probably why I struggled with economics in college.

An employee with Predator-style dreadlocks helped me find the frozen food aisle and the classy grown up appetizers I was looking for. Before I could leave, though, my eyes fell on the frozen dinner selection, and my life – and eating habits – changed forever.

Trader Joe’s sells frozen all natural microwaveable Indian meals for less than $4.

Let me repeat that: Trader Joe’s sells frozen all natural microwaveable Indian meals for less than $4. Checkmate, pessimists! Here, finally, we have a food that satisfies all my requirements for what food ought to be: Quick to prepare, convenient, relatively healthy, free of nefarious preservatives, and Indian. I have finally found my bachelor chow. 

Knowing that these products exist has gone a long way to simplify my shopping routine – now I just drive to Trader Joe’s every Sunday, grab seven or eight frozen Indian dinners, and proceed straight to checkout. The one complication is that it’s kind of difficult to look the cashier in the eye while buying a tall stack of frozen dinners and nothing else, but I’ve gotten pretty good at lying to save face.

“Ha ha, I bet this looks pretty sad, doesn’t it! This is actually my second time coming here today; when I was in earlier I bought a bunch of heirloom tomatoes and kale and a wheel of asiago cheese and some fresh salmon, but when I got home and my girlfriend found out I forgot these Indian dinners she loves she made me come right back out here to get them. Women, right? Can’t live with ‘em- Ah, you know the rest. Good times!”

Now that between one third and two thirds of my daily meals are all natural microwaveable curry, my peanut butter and discount pasta intake has declined sharply. I’m eating more food with real food in it and far fewer preservatives, even if that means I’ve now become the microwavable dinner-eating slob I swore I’d never become.

I guess compromising on all your values can be a good thing, so long the values you’re compromising are ill-informed and don’t really matter that much to begin with.

Truman Capps is going to look back at the archives and tally up how many blog updates he’s written about grocery shopping.

Drips

I've got to say, I respect Donald Duck for always trying outlandish solutions to his problems even though they've been blowing up in his face every single time for the past 75 years or so.

Here’s what happens in every Home Depot commercial ever made: A young, attractive couple is flummoxed by something that’s wrong with their new house or apartment. They then go to Home Depot, where they look at paint swatches with the happiest Home Depot employee in the world, and then go back to their home, which they transform into domestic paradise in about five seconds and everybody lives happily ever after.

Whenever I see one of those commercials I briefly start to get jazzed about the idea of going to Home Depot, buying a couple gallons of beige paint, and finally giving the walls of my bedroom the fresh coat they’ve been crying out for since The Matrix Reloaded was in theaters.

But then I remember that that Home Depot commercial cleverly edited around the part where the beautiful couple has to spend like $300 on painting supplies, or the part where it takes them all day just to move their furniture and tape around the windows, and then halfway through painting they realize they forgot one crucial thing they need so they have to go back to Home Depot, and then they have a huge fight in the parking lot, and then painting takes way longer than expected and the job drags out for months and when they’re done it looks pretty terrible, and they break up like a month later.

My approach to home improvement is to make a list of all the things I don’t like about my living space and then try as hard as I can to start liking those things.

Sure, the carpet is so old that I’ve started buying rugs to cover it up, but just think about how many up and coming actors and writers must have tracked that filth onto it! Who knows – maybe Channing Tatum used to live here before he hit it big. That could be Channing Tatum’s filth! The walls of my room don’t need a new coat of paint – they have character! Every scuff, scratch, and leftover nail is like a unique story from a previous tenant!

Look, I’ve painted a couple of walls in my time, and I’m going to let you in on a little secret that nobody at Home Depot will tell you: Painting sucks. It’s the worst thing ever and everybody hates it. It’s much easier for me to change my opinions to suit my surroundings than it is to change my surroundings to suit my opinions.

Unfortunately, when my showerhead started leaking last week it was one apartment defect that I couldn’t simply get used to. I know this because I spent a week listening to my shower dripping in the next room, trying desperately to find something soothing or otherwise enjoyable about the sound so that I could have an excuse not to take action on it.

Growing up, I remember watching multiple different cartoons where Daffy or Porky or Sylvester or Micky or Donald is tormented by a constantly dripping faucet while trying to sleep, going to greater and greater lengths to try and silence the leak until finally breaking down into tears and admitting defeat, bested by indoor plumbing. If possible, I wanted to avoid that cliché.

I Googled up a WikiHow article about how to fix a leaky faucet, crossing my fingers it would miraculously be an extremely simple solution. (Step 1: Check under your sink. Step 2: Flip the ‘leaking shower’ switch into the OFF position.) My heart sank when I instead found a fourteen-step tutorial which took for granted that I would own both a wrench and a power drill, and included cryptic instructions like Shut off the water to the shower.

As a stopgap I grabbed an empty gallon jug and an old funnel for the kitchen and then set it up under the showerhead to catch the drips and minimize the noise. For a week, this worked pretty well – every morning before I showered I would empty out a gallon’s worth of the night’s drippings.

Before long, though, the guilt at wasting all this water – even if it was just the disgusting sludge that passes for drinking water in Los Angeles – started to creep up on me, so I reluctantly began to investigate just how an apartment dweller such as myself would go about shutting off his water.

I can’t tell you what a relief it was when I found out that there was no way for me to shut off the water, giving me a free pass to call maintenance to fix it. Had there in fact been a way for me to shut off the water I would’ve felt obliged to try and fix the leak myself with inadequate tools, wasting a bunch of time and money and probably breaking the shower or injuring myself in the process. I would’ve given up and called maintenance anyway; this just expedited the process.

On Friday I got home from a freelance job to find that the maintenance man had come and gone while I was out – and, like the home improvement fairy, he had taken my old shower head... 

 

...and replaced it with one from the captain’s quarters aboard the Starship Enterprise.

Damn it, Jim, I'm a writer, not a plumber!

 

After months of handing hundreds of dollars to mechanics just to try and keep The Mystery Wagon functional, it’s pretty refreshing to get something fixed and find it even better than it was before it broke.

I can’t say enough good things about this showerhead – it creates a wide and plentiful stream of water with pressure so strong that I feel like I’ve run afoul of the Birmingham Police Department in the 60s. The only way my shower experience could improve at this point would be if Alison Brie was there to hand me fresh towels every morning.

That being said, the showerhead still leaks.

Now, though, the drips are smaller and quieter than they were before. Home improvement is a war of attrition, and I’ll take whatever wins I can get – especially if they come with a new showerhead.

Truman Capps is big on water conservation, but not when he’s taking a 25 minute shower.

Black Helicopters

Homer: "I'd give anything to get into the Stonecutters!"

Lisa: "What do they do there, Dad?" 

Homer: "What do they do? What don't they do? Oh, they do so many things, they never stop. Oh, the things they do there. My stars!" 

Lisa: "You don't know what they do there, do you?" 

Homer: "Not as such, no." 

Just moments after the House of Representatives finally, grudgingly, reluctantly, Paul Rudd in that one scene in Wet Hot American Summer-ingly passed a budget that would fund the government for a few more weeks and postpone financial catastrophe for a few more weeks after that, the House stenographer approached the microphone at the head of the House floor and began to yell at the assembled Congressmen.

From NPR:

“He will not be mocked," the stenographer, later identified as Dianne Reidy, yelled into the microphone at the chamber's rostrum. "The greatest deception here is that this is not one nation under God. It never was. It would not have been. The Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons. They go against God."

Okay, so, first off: You had basically every dipshit who just shut down our government for no reason and tried to blow up the world’s economy in one room, and you decide to throw your career away so you can yell at them about Freemasons!?

For three years these asshats have been holding up virtually every function of government, up to and including funding for disaster victims and legislation explicitly intended to prevent violence against women. I, along with at least 90% of America, would love an opportunity to scream at the House of Representatives, even for just a few seconds, and you decided to talk about fucking Freemasons and Jesus and shit!?

But I don’t know. Maybe she choked under pressure. Maybe she went up there with every intention of telling Louie Gohmert and Raul Labrador to lick her middle nut, but then she got overwhelmed by the moment and wound up saying what she did. I mean, at the very least she yelled at Congress, even if she didn’t yell the things I would’ve wanted her to yell. That gets a B-, at least.

If, on the other hand, she was just trying to sell the world on some deep seated conspiracy theory she’s held for years, last night was just about the worst possible time to do it, because if the past two weeks have done anything they’ve shown us that every conspiracy theory is bullshit.

Whatever nefarious group you say is secretly running the world – Freemasons, the Illuminati, Zionist Jews, Muslims, the United Nations, Majestic-12, aliens – has either been having a really bad couple of weeks or just doesn’t exist. The world’s largest economy came within hours of defaulting on trillions of dollars’ worth of debt, something so unprecedented that experts couldn’t even agree on which terrible thing would happen first. What kind of self respecting secret society of Satan-worshipping, world-controlling billionaires would let that happen on their watch?

Suppose you believe there’s a clandestine shadow government that controls every level of our society, run by a cabal of unfathomably wealthy elites. You’re convinced that they’ve spent decades and billions upon billions of dollars to forge Barack Obama’s US birth certificate and install him in the White House as their Manchurian Candidate. They even orchestrated false flag operations like 9/11, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Marathon Bombing to further their evil goals, executing them so perfectly that the vast majority of the populace and the international news media believe them to simply be tragedies perpetrated by terrorists and the mentally ill.

If you believe that, then you must now also believe that this dark, infinitely wealthy and powerful group was very nearly thwarted by a handful of morons who get their economic policy from WorldNetDaily and consider tri corner hats to be fashionable and effective forms of protest.

To borrow and modify a quote from The Joker, “This country deserves a better class of conspirator.”

I mean, I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but even so I’ve always been of the belief that “money talks” – Wall Street and big business have more influence over our political process than they let on. I never expected us to get too close to a default because default would be a disaster for rich people, unlike most other GOP policies, which are generally pretty benign so long as you aren’t poor, female, gay, a minority, young, unemployed, sick, in a union, or interested in voting.

Instead, last week a bunch of Wall Street executives had a private meeting with President Obama – the guy who they aggressively campaigned and fundraised against – and then got on the phone with the Congressmen they’d bankrolled who were running the shutdown and told them to knock it off.

But then the Congressmen said, “Just because you contributed to our campaigns doesn’t mean we have to listen to everything you tell us to do!” Admittedly that’s something I’ve always wanted politicians to say, but I was always hoping they’d do it over an issue like campaign finance reform or reducing military spending.

So the wealthiest people in the wealthiest country on Earth can’t control a minority of one political party in one house of Congress, some of whom they personally funded. Looks like I’m wrong – money doesn’t talk, I guess. Or maybe it just talks really quietly, or it talks at a specific pitch that can only be heard by sane people.

Knowing that there is no grand, evil conspiracy to control the world out there should probably be comforting, but instead I find myself scared. We can be pretty sure now that there isn’t a vast plot run by a devious few with unlimited funding to take over the world. We do, however, have irrefutable proof that there is a plot run by an ill-informed, reactionary few with unlimited funding to accomplish something – they’re just not entirely sure what that is yet.

What I wouldn’t give for the comforting sound of a black helicopter right about now. At least people with a plan have something to lose.

Truman Capps promises he’ll shut the fuck up about politics now that the shutdown is over.

September

 "Ba de ya/Say do you remember/Ba de ya/Dancing in September..."

(Photo by Wolfram Burner)

My grandmother died three years ago, toward the tail end of my final pre-season camp with the Oregon Marching Band. I got the news during a trumpet sectional, which ironically was being conducted in Pioneer Cemetery – a 150 year old frontier cemetery on the east side of the University of Oregon’s campus that had become less of a final resting place and, thanks to thick trees and poor lighting after dark, more of a refuge for students who wanted to get drunk or take a piss on the way back from a house party.  

During a break, I glanced at my phone and saw I’d missed a call from Mom, and when I returned it she gave me the news – grandma had passed away about half an hour ago.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah.” She said.

“Well, I guess it’s for the best.”

“Probably so.”

We said our goodbyes and I wandered back to the sectional, where I joined several of my bandmates in a spirited discussion about which movie titles sounded like they were describing bowel movements. (21 Grams, Gone In 60 Seconds, Operation Dumbo Drop, etc.)

Later that afternoon, approximating grandma’s time of death from what Mom told me, I tried to figure out exactly what it was I was doing when she died. Turning back the clock in my head, I realized that half an hour before Mom called me, when my grandmother’s life was ending, we were rehearsing one of our popular stands tunes – a cover of ‘September’, by Earth Wind and Fire.

The purpose for the sectional had been to teach the freshmen what the dance moves were for all of our repertoire. It occurred to me that while my grandmother – a woman who had witnessed the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, Watergate, and the dawn of the digital age – was breathing her last, her grandson was shaking his ass in sync with 25 other people in the middle of a cemetery.

As I write this, my 92-year-old grandfather is unconscious and running a fever, and staff at his nursing home expect that he’ll probably die within the next 24 hours. I can’t help but wonder what I’m going to be doing when that happens.

We moved my grandparents into an assisted living facility in 2004, after my grandmother’s frequent falls and increasing dementia became too much for my grandfather to manage on his own. My parents and I drove from Salem to Portland to visit them twice a month. Grandma, an overwhelmingly sweet woman whose memory had all but eroded at that point, loved the facility because of all the activities and friendly people. Grandpa clearly hated it.

After high school my parents moved to Portland so they could visit grandma and grandpa every weekend (and also because Salem is sort of terrible). Around this same time grandpa’s mental faculties went into a sudden and rapid decline – he became easily confused, sometimes forgot who grandma was, and would often try to leave the facility to go back to his and grandma’s house, which had been sold years before.

After he wandered out of the building and fell while trying to jump on a bus, we moved him and grandma into a special Alzheimer’s wing of the facility – a locked down, carefully controlled dayroom environment that was uncomfortably similar to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Every week, my parents would arrive, drop off a new batch of adult diapers, investigate the source of the odors in my grandparents’ room, and try to chat with them about what was going on. By this point, grandma was barely able to follow a conversation and grandpa didn’t always remember who my father was, so the conversations didn’t last too long.

In the years after grandma died, grandpa became even more disconnected from reality. One week he told my parents that he was planning a road trip with relatives who had died years ago; another week he mentioned that he was about to start college in Atlanta. Sometimes he seemed convinced that the nursing home was a hotel, and grew increasingly agitated when he was told he couldn’t leave.

The way I see it, what’s been happening to my grandfather – a World War II veteran who went on to become a gifted and respected anesthesiologist – is far, far worse than what’s going to happen to him in the next 24 hours. The idea that he’s about to die is a relief to me, and I’m sure that if he were still aware of his surroundings it would be a relief to him too.

I think one of the reasons I aggressively disliked Ricky Gervais’ new show Derek is that I just can’t buy the notion of a quaint, romanticized nursing home where cheerful old people peacefully live out their final years among quirky, dedicated staff. I spent a lot of time in a nursing home* over the past nine years, and there wasn’t a thing I saw there that made me feel anything other than crushing sadness and a panicky desperation to leave. It was a room full of scared, confused people waiting to die.

*I should point out that because I was away at school I didn’t spend nearly as much time there as my parents, whose diligence in taking care of my grandparents is truly commendable.

I have a lot of respect for Hunter S. Thompson – his writing, his journalism, and his suicide. At the age of 67, suffering from a myriad of health problems thanks to a myriad of lifelong drug problems, he penned a brief suicide note and shot himself. The note read:

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your (old) age. Relax — This won't hurt."

I really hope that I’m able to do something similar once my life reaches the point of diminishing returns. Taking your own life is an unpleasant thought, but after what I’ve seen I think it’s far more pleasant than waiting for your body to just give out and do it for you.

When it happens, I’d kind of like to be buried in Pioneer Cemetery, beneath future generations of college freshmen rolling their first joints and having clumsy sexual encounters in the dark, future trumpet sections shaking their asses to future pop hits.

This is what I’ve learned from my grandfather: I would rather be dead and close to the good parts of life than alive and trapped among the bad ones.

Truman Capps would gladly live forever if he could age as gracefully as Sandra Bullock is.

Notes On A Shutdown

"Hey, don't blame me - I voted for Gary Johnson."  

Alright, you know what? I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t give a shit that those World War 2 veterans weren’t able to visit the memorial in Washington DC. Not a single shit! I have nothing but respect for their service to their country, but the fact that they weren’t able to visit the World War 2 memorial has absolutely no emotional impact on me.

I mean, maybe it would if everything else was working, but the shutdown has created a situation where children dying of cancer are unable to be treated and Capitol Police are chasing down kamikaze drivers and self immolators without getting paid. In light of all that, I’m really not too upset that a bunch of elderly veterans’ vacation got ruined.

These people fought in the largest armed conflict in human history, for fuck’s sake – I think they can handle mild disappointment.

*

The recent salmonella outbreak in Foster Farms chicken, which was able to spread undetected thanks to FDA and CDC furloughs, is the part of the shutdown that has so far had the biggest effect on me.

Throughout my upbringing my parents warned me so much about the health risks of undercooked chicken that leaky packages of chicken breasts sometimes show up in my nightmares. Needless to say, I’m taking this very seriously and abstaining from all chicken for the duration of the shutdown. 

This creates problems for me because I’m surrounded by literally hundreds of different businesses where you can trade money for delicious hot chicken, usually wrapped in foil. Zankou Chicken! Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles! Birds, a restaurant in Hollywood that only serves chicken. As a lazy bachelor who doesn’t do a lot of cooking, this has really put the squeeze on my diet.

But I’m not taking my risks here – the outbreak originated in California, so to walk into a fast food restaurant in California and order chicken would be like playing some sort of reckless game in which your fate is entirely left up to chance.*

*Kind of like that game where two people drive right towards each other until somebody turns away – you know, the one they play in Footloose. What did they call that game, again?

Looking on the bright side, this has helped to curb my Baja Fresh habit, and now I’m saving a little more money. So I’ve resolved my budget deficit…

*

Do you ever get the impression our nation is run by a bunch of college freshmen? Because about the only thing Congress has been able to do this year is blow every goddamn deadline they have.

Remember back at the beginning of the year, when the Sequester was the worst thing that could possibly happen? Everybody – the media, the president, economists – told us in great detail how the spending cuts of the Sequester would kick kids out of Head Start programs and delay important medical research and make it rain dog blood unless Congress could pass a budget by March 1^st.

And then Congress didn’t pass a budget by March 1^st and the Sequester happened and was as bad as they said, and after a week or two the conversation changed to, “Okay, this Sequester thing sucks, but what’s really important is that the government doesn’t shut down in October. That’s going to be way worse than this.”

And as we got closer and closer to the shutdown everybody talked about all the terrible things that would happen if we shut down the government. And then that happened, and all the terrible things have begun to happen, and now everybody is saying, “Okay, this government shutdown thing sucks, but what’s really important is that the government doesn’t default on its debt next Thursday. That’s going to be, like, 17 trillion times worse than this.”

And now that we’re getting closer and closer to next Thursday suddenly there’s all this talk about how we might be able to go a couple days past Thursday before we actually default on our debt, and it’s like, maybe if you just wrote your fucking research paper now you wouldn’t have to figure out a new lie to get an extension from the professor, y’know?

It would restore nearly all my faith in our elected officials if just once we could resolve an impasse without it turning into an episode of 24 – everybody running and screaming and torturing each other until we barely save the day at the last second. But I guess that’s not going to be feasible for as long as 20% of our legislature is made up of people who touch themselves when they see Washington get destroyed in Independence Day.

*

I have to say, though, if this is what the collapse of Western Civilization is going to be like, I’m really not impressed. Yesterday I went out for poutine; today my roommate watched Ghostbusters in the middle of the afternoon. Unless things get significantly more fucked up in the next eight days I’m going to go ahead and say that economic catastrophe is by far the most boring type of catastrophe.

I’m not one of those dipshits who thinks that there’s nothing wrong with the world’s biggest economy failing to pay its credit card bill – I know a lot of people are suffering now, and that billions more will be if nothing changes by the end of next week. I would greatly prefer it if we avoid widespread suffering and turmoil.

But if we have to have widespread suffering and turmoil, this isn’t the kind I used to fantasize about in fourth period Spanish. If we default on our debt I don’t get to fashion crude armor out of street signs and bolt it to The Mystery Wagon and then drive around in a leather jacket with a shotgun scavenging for supplies and fighting mutant raiders. All that happens is everybody becomes really, really poor.

But I guess that’s still preferable to healthcare.

Truman Capps freely admits that he would be the first to die in a Mad Max style apocalypse.  

Overheated

 While not necessarily a great commercial for erectile dysfunction drugs, at least there aren't any fucking bathtubs in this one...

What I’ve come to realize is that The Mystery Wagon is basically a one and a half ton Tamagotchi with power locks and a cassette deck. In 5^th grade, the kids who had Tamagotchi virtual pets were always busy attending to their needs – the little keychain-mounted toy would beep whenever it needed to be 'fed' or 'walked' or 'played' with, and the kids would always rush to push the necessary buttons to keep their virtual pet in a good mood.

The Mystery Wagon is similar – whenever it needs something from me it activates a cryptic warning light, or vibrates and rattles at stop signs, or starts making a funny smell. Then, unlike Tamagotchi, instead of pushing a button I give my mechanic a bunch of money I don’t want to spend, which then restarts the countdown until the whole process begins again in a couple of weeks.

Yesterday I drove out to visit a friend at UCLA. It’s early October, so the temperature was a crisp 91 degrees, and to save time on the trip I opted to take Laurel Canyon Boulevard, an extremely steep and windy road through the Santa Monica Mountains. On an unrelated note, were you aware that high temperatures, steep inclines, and running the air conditioner at full blast have a tendency to make cars overheat?

As I neared UCLA The Mystery Wagon was chugging and rattling more than it normally does, and while waiting to turn left onto campus the engine outright sputtered and died on me twice. As I frantically and profanely tried to coax the engine on again, I saw that the temperature needle on the dashboard was pointed squarely at H.

I limped The Mystery Wagon into the nearest public parking garage on campus I could find, popped open the hood, and looked glumly at the steam pouring out of my radiator. There wasn’t much that I could do, because I wasn’t keen on the idea of fiddling with a steaming hot engine, so after a few minutes I closed the hood and left to go visit my friend while The Mystery Wagon cooled off.

For the next two hours as I hung out on UCLA’s (shockingly beautiful) campus I was preoccupied with thoughts of The Mystery Wagon. I knew that it had overheated because I drove over a mountain on a hot day; the problem was that the only way for me to get home was to drive back over that same mountain, and it was still just as hot out. At one point, while using the bathroom, I pulled out my phone and Googled “when your car overheats is it possible for it to catch on fire and kill you.” (According to some kid on Yahoo! Answers four years ago, maybe.)

I returned to my car to find it no longer steaming and popped the hood to try and prepare it for the trek home. I don’t know a lot about auto maintenance, but I did remember a Viagra commercial I’d seen where a handsome old guy’s muscle car overheats and he pours a bottle of water into the radiator in order to get home. As it happened, I had one bottle of water in the car and no better ideas, so I unscrewed the radiator cap, poured it in, and hit the road.

In the commercial, the silver fox who can’t sustain an erection drives home and suggestively parks in his garage while the narrator encourages viewers to talk to their doctors. I, on the other hand, was about a mile and a half down West Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills when the temperature needle started rising toward the H so fast that I wondered if The Mystery Wagon had popped some Viagra before we left.

I tried running the heater to vent the engine, but all that did was make me overheat just as much as the car was. Desperately, I pulled off the road onto the first sidestreet I could find – a narrow, windy, sidewalkless road in an extremely rich neighborhood full of gates, security cameras, and the occasional passing Lamborghini.    

After consulting with my Dad and my cousin over the phone, I decided to just suck it up and call AAA to tow me home rather than risk any further damage to my engine. When I pulled up my map to give my location to the tow truck driver, this is what I saw:

 

Yes, my car had broken down pretty much right outside the Playboy Mansion – this, I think, would make a much more fitting ending for that Viagra commercial. Hell, maybe this was The Mystery Wagon’s plan all along. Maybe it made a point of overheating where and when it did because it was trying to get me close to a concentration of Playboy Bunnies; a four wheeled wingman with a hatchback.

I suppose I could’ve tried to talk my way past the gate guard and then see if any of the girls at the mansion wanted to chat about the government shutdown or the finale of Breaking Bad, but instead I just sat in The Mystery Wagon for an hour and waited for the tow truck, waving to the tourists in the Hollywood Star Tours vans that drove by every five minutes.
Hey folks, if you take a gander to your left you’ll see a mostly-unemployed writer in a defective station wagon, and… Yes, it looks like he’s wondering if there’s more to life than this! Okay, and coming up on our right we’ve got Drake’s house!

Finally, the tow truck arrived – a big flatbed that I had to drive The Mystery Wagon up onto. Watching the driver secure the car in place with heavy chains and hooks I began to get the feeling that this might be the beginning of the end of an era.

For some time now The Mystery Wagon’s biggest mystery has been, “What the fuck is wrong with this car now!?”, but this is the first time it’s ever outright died on the road. Seeing your car strapped to a tow truck – the vehicular equivalent of a hospital gurney – is kind of sobering, because cars that have to go on tow trucks tend to be cars that are not long for this world.

I don’t want to buy a new car, both because fuck spending money and because I don’t know if I could love another car the way I love The Mystery Wagon. Some people have pets, a few might still have Tamigotchis, some people even have girlfriends, and I have a light blue Subaru Legacy. 

The engine makes funny smells, the A/C doesn’t always work, and it’s going to bleed me dry with maintenance costs, but it’s served me well for eight years – when the time comes, it won’t be easy to say goodbye. And I don’t even want to think about how much it’s going to cost to buy a burial plot and mausoleum big enough to fit a car…

Truman Capps has never felt like more of an LA douchebag than when he builds a sentimental connection with a big, unfeeling piece of metal and plastic.

I Was Alive

 Never before has a show so grim generated so many hysterical memes.

Before I even start this spoiler-tastic update about the finale of Breaking Bad, I just want to say how proud I am that a substantial portion of the American public is nerding out over a television event that…

1)   Was not sports

2)   Did not involve Kardashians or storage unit auctions

3)   Was scripted, and

4)   Was scripted very well.

Sure, our entire federal government may be held hostage by about 30 country-dwelling mouthbreathers, but damn if we haven’t begun to cultivate a refined taste in television! We may never stop being a nation of couch potatoes, but at least now it’s because there’s something good on TV.

*

I thought the finale of Breaking Bad was amazing. Yeah, motherfucker, I did just use the word ‘amazing’, and I used it correctly, because I was quite honestly amazed by how good that episode was. It’s not like I had low expectations or anything – my reaction to pretty much every Breaking Bad episode is ‘OMG WTF SO GOOD NEXTONE’ – but I’ve been burned by finales in the past.

I tend to hate endings that try to tie up every loose end. Case in point: Battlestar Galactica, where the writers capped off four dark, intense, complex seasons with a Wayne’s World-style “mega-happy ending” that put a nice friendly bow on several unresolved subplots and then filed everything else under “God did it.”

I’m a sucker for realism, and real life is often confusing and devoid of closure. For that reason, I loved the incredibly controversial finale to The Sopranos, and I’m eagerly awaiting a similar mindfuck when Sopranos-alumni Matthew Weiner ends Mad Men next year.

But it worked for Breaking Bad because Breaking Bad, thanks to its detail-oriented protagonist, has always kind of been a show about tying up loose ends, usually in such a decisively violent way that they never come untied. I mean, Walt and Jesse spend nearly half of the first season just trying to clean up the mess they made in the pilot! And that mess – disposing of a dead body and strangling a captive drug dealer with a bike lock – seems almost trivial compared to the messes they get into in subsequent seasons.

And because I’m a sucker for realism it was that ‘devil in the details’ theme that made it so enjoyable for me. Watching Walt and Jesse’s Keystone Kops approach to crime was fun; watching them frantically trying to cover their tracks was damn good television.

*

I remember that in the runup to the last eight episodes, when Walt had all but become suburban Scarface, the hot question among fans was “So, are you still rooting for Walt?”

Yes! Obviously! Of course I am! How could there be any other answer than the one I am giving you right now!?!

Walt’s actions became increasingly reprehensible as the series went on, but they were reprehensible in such a fun way! He used science and the occasional wheelchair-bound cholo to kill gangsters and gain power – at his best, Walt was like Evil McGyver, or Ted Kaczynski The Science Guy.

Debating the morality of his actions was fun, and also integral to the experience of watching the show, but nothing he did – up to and including poisoning a child and setting off a bomb in a nursing home on the same day – ever made me say ‘Well, that tears it – now I’m rooting for Hank!’

I was cheering for Walt until the end because I felt sorry for him from the beginning. Walt, a loving father, dedicated teacher, and brilliant chemist spent most of his life living with regret and feelings of inadequacy, teaching chemistry to disrespectful jocks while watching his old business partner get rich and famous running the company he’d walked away from years ago. And then, on top of that, he got lung cancer.

Watching Walt decide to quit taking life’s shit and transform himself into a badass meth cooking, sports car driving, hat-wearing alpha male was the realization of a certain power fantasy that every guy is acutely familiar with. Even Walt’s darkest activities were satisfying on some level, because it felt like he was finally triumphing over a world that had been beating him down and cruelly mocking him for years.

Walt’s confession in the finale – “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.” – hit the nail on the head. Walt’s tragedy was that despite his considerable genius and affable nature, the only thing he was truly good at was being bad. The fact that Walt was able to be bad for a year, and that he was able to become so successful, feared, and legendary as a bad guy, was perhaps the best luck he had in his life.

“I was really… I was alive.”

*

I watched the finale with my buddy John and his gay dog Milo, and afterwards we both talked about how surprised – and relieved – we were that the show had had a happy ending, because we had both feared that things would be a lot darker.

Just for fun, let’s take a look at what constitutes a ‘happy ending’ on Breaking Bad:

1)   Dead protagonist

2)   Protagonist’s family hates him and curses his name

3)   Protagonist’s longtime collaborator, rescued by protagonist from a squad of neo-Nazis using him as a broken-spirited meth slave, walks out of protagonist’s life forever

4)   Single mother is fatally poisoned by protagonist

5)   $80 million is lost to the sands of time

6)   Some poor Volvo owner in bumfuck New Hampshire has his car stolen

I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Truman Capps definitely isn’t the one who knocks.

V

Not pictured: Theft, automobiles.  

Over the past week there were several times that I stopped whatever it was I was doing – hiking up a virtual mountain, doing yoga, losing at golf, hunting elk, losing at tennis, diving for sunken treasure, chatting with my psychiatrist, losing at triathlons – to marvel at the fact that all of these pleasant, law abiding pastimes were present in a game called Grand Theft Auto. In a way, I think the series has kind of outgrown its name.

It made sense for the earlier games in the series because back then the only way you could interact with your environment was by fucking it up – and that was great fun! But in Grand Theft Auto V, developer Rockstar North has created a world so big, so beautiful, so detailed, and so immersive that I spent a creepy amount of time just living inside it – stopping at red lights, watching the sun set on the beach, taking mostly-nude self shots on the ingame smartphone camera…

Sometime around my second straight day of playing I spent about an hour just riding the subway around the city, in complete awe of the fact that they’d perfectly recreated the LA Metro experience right on down to seemingly getting the same guy to voice the cheerful public service announcements. (“Please do not urinate on other Metro passengers. Thank you for riding with us!”)

Don’t get me wrong – stealing cars and killing people is still a huge part of the game, and this game does it better than any of its predecessors. But the game itself is so huge now that not stealing cars and killing people is also a huge part of the game.

While playing the intense, crime-driven story missions I felt exactly like I was the star of a Michael Mann movie; when the mission ended and I spent an hour strolling down the beach watching the sunset it was like Gus Van Sant had unexpectedly stepped in as director.

Of course, they’ll never change the name. At this point people associate the name Grand Theft Auto more with free-roaming open world gaming than they do with motor vehicle theft. And that’s lucky, because I have no idea what else they could call a game like Grand Theft Auto V.

Doing Stuff V? Unstructured Activity V? A Bunch Of Things V?

A Work Of Art V?

*

Three times the male power fantasy, all for the price of one!

There are three playable characters in Grand Theft Auto V – Franklin, a likeable street hood, Michael, a bored ex-bank robber, and Trevor, a psychopathic meth dealer – who you can switch between at any time. Each character has their own business to attend to, and all three work together on a number of high profile heists. 

From a storytelling perspective, this kind of advancement is Important. Being able to jump between characters is a really fun gameplay device, but it’s incredible for the plot. Being able to walk a mile in each character’s shoes – or rather, steal a car and drive it a mile before flipping it over and crawling out of the burning wreckage in each character’s shoes – makes it possible to understand and empathize with each one, which is really saying something given the fact that all three characters do a lot of really horrible stuff a lot of the time.

The characters are so strong and the world is so immersive that I found myself changing my style of play based on what I thought each character would do – all with no encouragement from the game itself. While playing as Franklin, for example, I never hijacked cars or killed random people because he was such a decent guy in all his cutscenes that those didn’t seem like the sorts of things he would do.

Playing as Franklin, I once drove up to the weather station behind the game’s equivalent of the Hollywood sign to go exploring. There I bumped into a security guard who yelled, “Hey! You’re not authorized to be up here. Leave immediately or I’ll call the police!” And without even thinking twice I turned around, got back into my car, and drove away.

To reiterate: I deferred to the authority of a power tripping rent-a-cop, while carrying a rocket launcher and a heavy machine gun in my inventory, in a video game that is explicitly about committing crimes.

*

 This part is not fun.

There’s a mission you may have heard about in Grand Theft Auto V where, playing as the certifiably insane Trevor, you graphically torture an innocent man for trivial information at the behest of corrupt government agents. The scene is fully interactive – you get to choose your torture implements and then use them, executing button commands to electrocute the victim or forcibly extract a tooth.

There’s no way to skip it, and it’s absolutely horrible in just about every way. I played it with the sound off and my eyes closed.

This segment of the game has been pretty widely condemned in the gaming press. I really, really wish that they hadn’t put it in the game, but at the same time I respect that they did.

Following the torture sequence, Trevor disobeys the order to kill the detainee and instead drives him to the airport so he can escape. Along the way, Trevor launches into a remarkably articulate monologue about the ineffectiveness of torture – that the act is little more than an excuse for unbalanced people to get their jollies.

The developer didn’t just put this segment in the game to be controversial – they put it in as political commentary, which is as effective as it is gruesome and disturbing.  Video games are beginning to tackle social and political issues the way movies and TV do – this, also, is Important, even if it’s unpleasant.

*

They should have sent a poet. 

Do you know that old saying about the three blind men in the room with an elephant? I don’t either, but as I understand it has something to do with the fact that each blind guy touches a different part of the elephant, and thus each one has a different impression of what the elephant is.

The blind guy who touches its trunk thinks of the elephant as something entirely different from the guy who touches its ear, and both of them probably have a much higher opinion of elephants than the poor bastard who gets too close to its butt.

Grand Theft Auto V is that elephant – it’s so big that everybody experiences it differently. For some people it’s about heists, for others it’s about street racing, or playing the stock market, or climbing mountains, or robbing convenience stores, or sitting on your character’s in-game couch watching in-game TV and smoking in-game marijuana, or cruising the Interstate and listening to 90s hip hop and a right wing talk show hosted by Danny McBride on the car radio.

For some people, it’s a crass, profane murder and torture simulator. Those people aren’t strictly wrong; they’re just focusing on the elephant’s butt.

Truman Capps isn’t proud that he completed 75% of the game’s missions and activities in one week. Well, maybe a little proud.

Hair Guy: Behind The Follicles (Part 2)

In part two, Truman's friends, associates, and collaborators talk about the dark side of Internet celebrity - as well as redemption.

Mike Whitman

Friend, collaborator

“Look, I love the kid, but he’s the reason we had to scrap season 2 of ‘Writers.’ We were shooting on location in Singapore and most mornings it took four amaretto sours just to get him out of his trailer. I tried to get him to cool it but he said he had it under control – he called the stuff his ‘Blog Juice.’

“Two months into production, some idiot handed him a Harvey Wallbanger, and next thing we know he’s disappeared on some kind of bender. In three weeks I think he drank pretty much all the coconut rum in mainland Europe. At that point we were so far over budget that the company shitcanned the whole show and sold the rights to Chuck Lorre. And that’s where ‘Mike and Molly’ came from.”

 LAPD Report

Arresting officers: Gadbury and Winston

“Light blue Subaru Legacy pulled over at 1500 hrs for driving erratically. Driver identified himself as ‘Truman fucking Capps’, failed field sobriety test, and refused breathalyzer. Search of car turned up nine empty bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

“En route to station for booking, Mr. Capps repeatedly informed officers that his ‘blog’ had received ‘over one hundred and forty’ hits last year, and that he would use said blog to launch a smear campaign against the department unless he was released immediately.

“Mr. Capps wrote one blog in custody, which dealt primarily with the quality of NBC’s fall lineup for that year. He was subsequently involved in a jailyard altercation with another inmate (Fernando Torres, awaiting trial on gang-related charges) stemming from a dispute over the quality of the TV program ‘Whitney.’”

 Kristin VanderSchick

BFF

“We finally found him on the boardwalk at Venice Beach, brown bagging a bottle of birthday cake flavored vodka and offering to write personalized blogs about tourists for $10 a pop. He was actually pretty open to the idea of rehab once we told him the clinic had broadband Internet and no cockroaches.

“Of course, in the blog he wrote about going to rehab he said it was his decision. At least, I think that’s what he said; it was one of the serious ones and I honestly don’t think anybody reads those.”

Aaron Sorkin

Writer, The West Wing, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, The Newsroom

“Truman. Yes. I remember him. We both started at Betty Ford in the same month. During one of our first group sessions he said he hit rock bottom while “…trying to steal a vodka cranberry from a grandmother at an Indian casino.

“I started talking to him afterwards to set his terminology straight before he embarrassed himself like that again. Like most Americans he didn’t understand that the term ‘Indian’ is not only factually incorrect but also an insult to a once proud civilization decimated in a slow four-century holocaust so we could build strip malls and suburbs. The only reason we call Native Americans ‘Indians’ is because Christopher Columbus was carrying a passport that said ab partes Indie. You know what that means? ‘Toward the Indies.’ When he hit Antilles, he just assumed that was India and started calling everybody he saw an Indian. It was one innocent mistake by the son of a middle class weaver exploring the secrets of an unknown world. What I don’t get is why we have to keep making that same mistake over and over again. Half a millennium later it’s not an innocent mistake anymore. ‘Indian.’ It’s an offensive and insidious form of oppression that’s codified in our laws, our institutions, and our consciousness – Manifest Destiny 2.0.

“But yeah, that was the only time we talked. You said he had a blog?”

Niko Popovic

Owner, MegaFast Dry Cleaning 

4633 Commercial St, Salem, OR

“In Old Country, we have a saying: Show me man who makes no mistakes, I show you chicken penis. Is a good saying back home; difficult to translate to English. But point is true: All people make mistakes. All people deserve second chance. Forgiveness. Shot at redemption. 

“Were boxes of drycleaning bags stacked in front of emergency exit door? Yes. Was mistake. Fire marshal sees the boxes, he is not pleased, he gives us fine. We pay fine, learn from mistake, think matter is settled. Until months later, receive letter from Mr. David at insurance company – says his son saw the violation, and now we pay higher premiums. Mr. David was very proud of his son Mr. Truman.

“I am not fan of Mr. Truman. 18 years later, I do not forget. He does not forgive me, I do not forgive him. He is real chicken penis.”

Alexander Jasper

Main bro

“The day I picked him up from rehab, he was all about change. Changing his life, changing his image, changing his blog. He was just so excited, you know? 100% committed to one thing and one thing only: Writing long-form biweekly essays about current events or things that recently happened to him. It was that passion for mildly amusing anecdotes that saved his life. No doubt.

“There’s not much I can say about everything that came after that. The year in Jamaica, getting his Associate in Commercial Underwriting, converting to Islam, his writing camp for disadvantaged upper middle class white kids from the inner suburbs… That all got covered pretty heavily on the news. I’m not crazy about all the changes, but hey – it’s his life, and it’s his blog.

“All I’m saying is, I’m never going to get used to calling it ‘Hair Lion’.”

 Alison Brie

Actress, Community, Mad Men

“Who?” 

Truman Capps returns from San Andreas on Wednesday. 

Hair Guy: Behind The Follicles (Part 1)

-->

I won’t be able to make any updates this week because of some pressing engagements in San Andreas. Instead, I’ve had my staff conduct a number of interviews with members of my inner circle to create a definitive oral history (giggity) of Hair Guy from its meager beginnings through its turbulent middle years until today. Enjoy, and I’ll see you next week!

Tom Wilhelm

Associate professor

University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication  

“I first met Truman in… Gosh, I guess it was late 2007, probably October or November. He was in one of my freshman lectures that year, but he stuck out to me because he was a regular fixture at my office hours. One afternoon when he came in he was pretty agitated, and when I asked him what was wrong he explained it to me in great detail. Apparently he’d wanted to buy a sandwich from some food truck at the street fair, but after waiting in line for ten minutes he found out they only took cash, and he didn’t have any. He was halfway through this rant about how it was the 21^st century and vendors should be willing to accept payment in all forms when I stopped him and said, ‘You should start writing this down.’

“I was only saying it because I wanted him to stop talking and just ask me about the midterm, but I guess he took it to mean he should start a blog or something. Wait, is he still writing that? Is that what you guys are talking to me about?”

 Jefe Gottlieb

Classmate/trumpet player

Oregon Marching Band

“We were in the same hotel room the night before the away game at Washington our freshman year, and while the rest of us were doing shots Truman was talking about how he didn’t drink because he preferred to enjoy life without ‘chemical enhancement’ or some shit like that. And when he finally finished, I just go, ‘You know what, Truman? You should start a blog where you say stuff like that all the time. I bet lots and lots of people would read it because your opinions are so good!’ And he just started nodding and got really quiet for the rest of the night.

“I don’t think he got that I was being sarcastic. I thought it was pretty obvious. I mean, everybody laughed after I said it.”

Usher

R&B/hip hop artist and performer

“We were taking it easy backstage after a show sometime in 2008. Maybe it was the Here I Stand tour; it’s fuzzy but I’m pretty sure we were in Stockholm. So it’s just me and the fellas – my manager Russel was there, Malik and Jaybird were there, a couple of girls from the club the night before, and Truman. And all night he’s just blabbing about how he wants to do a writeup of the tour for his bog, and how he thinks his bog might get more hits if he added more of an urban flavor.

“So finally I go, ‘T, what the fuck is a bog? You say you have a bog?’ And he’s like, ‘Not a bog – I’m writing a blog.’ And I go, ‘Oh, whatever.’”

David Capps

Truman’s father

“No, I didn’t support his decision for the first couple years. I wanted him to go into the family business – we’re an insurance family, not a writing things and putting them on the Internet family. Insurance underwriting is in our blood. And Truman had natural talent. When he was six years old I gave him a policy renewal from a mid-sized drycleaner downtown – y’know, just for fun – and 20 minutes later he’d assessed them a 3.2% increase in premiums over a fire code violation from the previous fiscal year that I hadn’t even noticed. It was beautiful. He was like the Mozart of analyzing and mitigating risk for small business policies, and he threw it all away for a blog.

“Eventually I came around. He’s my son and I love him, and I want him to be happy. But I still sit up some nights, looking at policy limit documents and wondering what might have been.”

Jessica Pazinski

Ex-girlfriend

“The blog was definitely a strain on our relationship. Even when it wasn’t an update day you could tell he was thinking about it. We went to the Saturday Market once, but the entire time it was obvious that he was just trying to think of a way to distill the experience into a thousand or so words and a barely-relevant picture from Google Images.

“Finally, at dinner one night, I gave him an ultimatum: Me or the blog. I don’t think he was really listening, because he spent most of his next blog talking about how his chicken Caesar wrap didn’t live up to his expectations. It must’ve affected him, though, because he started hitting the amaretto pretty hard after we split up. But you’ve probably heard all about that already.

“Also, I just want to go on the record as saying that he was really bad in bed. Seriously. I cannot make that clear enough.”

Staff Sergeant Reggie Bishop

1^st Battallion, 3^rd Infantry Regiment

“We were on patrol ten klicks outside of Da Nang when suddenly the treeline just lights up – Charlie was fucking everywhere, man, and we’d walked right into an ambush. Blackjack and McCoy went down right away – five’ll get you ten they were dead before they knew what was happening – and I had to drag Fitzsimmons back behind the fire line after an RPG took off his leg. Later he bled out on the chopper back to Saigon.

“Truman was riding the M60, but we weren’t getting any covering fire. So I crawl back to his foxhole and damn if the little shit isn’t sitting there with his MacBook Pro, trying to hammer out some blog update while the fucking [racial slur deleted] were dropping mortars right on our heads!

“I smack him so hard his helmet falls off and yell, ‘What the fuck are you doing!? Where’s our fire support!?’ And he goes, ‘I know, I’m sorry – I just need to get this thing finished and uploaded before midnight so it still goes out on Wednesday.’

“A lot of good men died that night because of Truman. But damn if that wasn’t the most mildly amusing blog post about ‘Community’ I’d ever read.” 

Tune in Sunday for part 2! 

Rewards

This is a pretty lame reward. Unless they filled it with nacho cheese.

My entire life adult life is just a series of ongoing attempts to bribe myself into being a better person by giving myself “rewards” for achieving goals. This may sound like a reasonable way to live, but you have to understand that the rewards are always unhealthy food covered in cheese and the goals are always extremely achievable, to the point that it’s really not even accurate to call them goals. ‘Errands’, maybe.

“Returning that DVD of The Wire, huh?” A doting, grandmotherly voice in my head says as I jump in the car. “Y’know, on your way back from Blockbuster you could swing by the Baja Fresh on Riverside and pick up some lunch.”

“What?” Another, more rational and Dad-like voice in my head shoots back. “You’ve got no job, car and computer repairs are bleeding you dry, and there’s a cupboard full of significantly healthier food at home that you already paid for!”

“Yeah, but lunch at Baja Fresh could be your reward!”

“You’re driving six miles to the video store and back again! This isn’t an event that needs to be commemorated with a burrito, Truman!”

The Dad-voice always beats the Grandma-voice on facts, and yet I always wind up in line at Baja Fresh to claim the reward I earned by sitting in my air conditioned car for half an hour.

For the record, this wasn’t how I was brought up. My parents never bribed me to do anything – when they wanted me to do something, they asked me to do it, and then I would do that thing whether I wanted to do it or not because they were my parents and I figured they probably had a good reason for asking me to do it. I was pretty much Butters from South Park: Rewards didn’t even factor into it, I just didn’t want to get in trouble.  

One time my Mom did offer me money in exchange for learning my multiplication tables, a market-based solution for the fact that I was lagging behind most of my class (and the rest of the state) in math. I can’t remember whether it worked or not, but I also can’t remember what six times seven is, so it probably didn’t.

And yet today I reward myself with food every time I do something even slightly good. I’m pretty much a bipedal Golden Retriever.

I understand the point of rewards when they’re given to you by somebody else – it’s an incentive for you to do something that benefits them. Sell enough of our real estate and we’ll give you a new car! But the whole point of a reward system falls apart when you’re the one giving rewards as well as receiving them.

Why do I feel the need to reward myself with a burrito for returning a DVD? If I don’t return the DVD, I get charged a late fee – that right there is all the incentive I need to return it on time. Plus, a burrito at Baja Fresh costs like nine times the Blockbuster late fee anyway, so even if I kept The Wire for an extra week it would still be cheaper than returning it on time and getting a burrito after. I either need to find a cheaper source of burritos or a better source of motivation.

Over the past nine days I’ve been working my way down an impressive two-page checklist of goals to achieve, all of which are refreshingly challenging and important for a change. Among other things I’ve locked down solid final drafts for both of my pilots, finished a 60-page story bible for one of them, signed on at a creative recruiting firm that connects freelance copywriters with ad agencies who need them, sent materials to literary agents, hosted a party, and organized the file structure on my computer for the first time in about twelve years. I pretty much finished all my unfinished business from the Summer of George in a little over a week.

I’m proud of myself – a strange, alien feeling that I’m not used to. I worked harder for myself this week than I’ve ever worked at any of my paying jobs, and was happy to be doing it, too. If you stand far enough away and squint, I almost sort of look like an adult.

Except that I’m not – I just quit motivating myself with food and instead motivated myself with a video game.

Grand Theft Auto V comes out tomorrow – the latest and greatest installment in my favorite video game series, set in a virtual reimagining of Los Angeles. The first trailer debuted only a couple of months after I moved to LA, and I’ve been impatiently, frantically, desperately waiting to play the game for just about the entire time I’ve lived here.

In a way, it’s kind of a milestone for the whole Hollywood Adventure so far. When I watched the first trailer I was an unpaid intern with no job prospects. I wasn’t even sure I’d still be living in LA when the game came out – I had good reason to worry that I’d have blown through my savings and moved back in with my parents by then. But that didn’t happen, and I think the best way to celebrate my progress in real LA is by going on a virtual crime spree in fake LA.

The only reason I busted my ass on my career all last week was so I could spend all of this week sitting on my ass playing GTAV without feeling guilty for being lazy. I did a summer’s worth of good work in nine days, but only because I was bribing myself with a new video game. I’m not a Golden Retriever anymore; now I’m just a 13-year-old with a rich stepdad.

Still, I’m not complaining. The work I needed to do got done; why I did it isn’t important. If Grand Theft Auto gives me the motivation I need to do my job, so be it. Every writer has a process, and mine has the added benefit of not giving me severe liver damage – so in your FACE, F. Scott Fitzgerald!

Unfortunately, they only release a new Grand Theft Auto game every four or five years. Unless I can find another equally compelling reward, my output is probably going to slow down to JD Salinger speed.

If I could convince Baja Fresh to make me a foot long, bacon-wrapped burrito and have Alison Brie serve it to me I’m pretty sure I could write the Great American Sitcom in one weekend.  

Truman Capps wrote this update while sitting at a diner eating a patty melt as a sort of preemptive reward for writing this update.

Forgetting

Last year on 9/11 I came pretty close to forgetting.

Like any other weekday I woke up, briefly lay in bed trying to think of a compelling reason to call in sick to work, then dragged myself into my shower, then my car, then the office. After a trip to the vending machine for some breakfast trail mix I plonked down at my desk for my morning ritual of putting off pressing assignments to surf Reddit and Facebook for a couple hours.

Everything on my news feed looked like business as usual – sports talk, statuses about pumpkin spice lattes, somebody posting 743,000 pictures of their toddler.

And then, scrolling a little bit further, I landed on a huge picture of Flight 175 plowing into the side of the South Tower, an enormous black and orange fireball blooming toward the sky, an entire scrapyard’s worth of twisted debris and burning paper plummeting toward the ground below.

The picture had been posted by a girl I went to high school with; somebody I had spoken to maybe four times in my life. Above the gruesome image of mass murder she had included a quick message, almost as an afterthought:

“never forget”

I had been having a perfectly nice morning, going about my life, quietly aware in the back of my mind that this was the grim anniversary of a grim day, when I was suddenly and unexpectedly confronted by horrifying imagery of death and destruction. An ordinary morning interrupted by disturbing images of violence – in a sense, it was kind of like reliving the actual day.

Naturally, I was extremely grateful to this girl for helping me relive one of the worst days in American history. I mean, if not for her, I probably would’ve spent my entire morning being happy or some stupid bullshit like that.

I don’t think we’re in any danger of forgetting 9/11. Twelve years after the fact I’m no closer to forgetting the images of jumbo jets crashing into buildings and people jumping hundreds of stories to their deaths than I was on 9/11 itself. And that’s a damn shame, because those are the things about that day I’d like to forget.

Terrorist attacks, by their nature, are designed to be memorable. They are arguably the world’s crudest and most brutal form of advertising – “This is who we are. This is what we’re capable of. Fear us.” A terrorist attack that is easily forgotten is a marketing failure for the terrorists. With limited resources, they have to make a big impression that lasts as long as possible in the popular consciousness.

So I think that when we spend a day replaying footage of the attacks on TV and splashing image macros of rubble and burning buildings all over the Internet in the name of never forgetting, we’re just helping the terrorists’ viral marketing campaign. 3000 people dying on live TV was bad enough; how much longer will we have to watch it in reruns and syndication?

Of course, we’ll never be able to truly forget what happened that day – it was a defining moment in our history, and we owe it to the dead to acknowledge that it happened and try to learn something from it. What I wish is that we could remember it as more than just a single date for sadness and mourning.   

I’ve heard a lot of people suggest that 9/11 be made a national holiday, and with all due respect to their opinions, I really hope that that doesn’t happen.

For one thing, I don’t think that giving everybody the day off is going to generate any more reverence for the event. I don’t know a lot of people who spend Martin Luther King Jr. Day thinking about civil rights*, and while I do know some people from military families who go to cemeteries on Memorial Day, most of my friends and I treat it as an extra day for drinking and grilling.

*This is probably because I don’t know a lot of black people.

9/11 is still painfully fresh in our memories, but children born after 9/11 are already in middle school. They didn’t experience the event firsthand and they’ve never known a pre-9/11 world. To them, it’s a solemn piece of history, just as much as the Civil Rights Movement or Vietnam is to us. If 9/11 becomes a national holiday I think it’ll take one generation before most kids will remember it as little more than a day off from school, which might actually count as the sort of forgetting we’re never supposed to do.   

More importantly, I think that reducing our acknowledgment of the tragedy to one single day of intense, public sadness isn’t the right way to go about it. 9/11 is bigger than one day; a lot of the most valuable lessons we learned from it came months or years after the fact.

9/11 kicked off a decade of warfare, corruption, and insanity that we are only just now beginning to recover from. Remembering and honoring the heroes and victims from that day is important, but it’s also important to remember the mistakes we made in the aftermath – like blind faith in government, the surveillance state, and drone diplomacy – so we never make them again.

It’s encouraging to me that twelve years later, Americans refuse to be led into a war without adequate intelligence, we’re angry about being spied on, and less frightened of terrorist boogeymen than ever before. In that regard, 9/11 really has made us stronger. More importantly, it’s made us smarter.

Learning from our mistakes, I think, is the greatest honor we can give to the dead.

Truman Capps hopes you like his comedy blog where he talks about Syrian intervention and cultural attitudes toward terrorism.

Punishment

 Tomahawk missile test, 1986.

Part of me really wants us to go to war in Syria. That part of me, after seeing the pictures of dead civilians and bombed out cities and crying children with no legs, wants cruise missiles to obliterate Syrian military bases and chemical weapons depots. It wants Army Rangers to parachute into Damascus and take Bashar al Assad into custody, ideally slamming his profoundly ugly face into a couple walls along the way. It wants medics to take care of the injured people, engineers to rebuild homes and schools. Part of me just really, really wants America to go be the good guy and save those poor people. 

Because seriously – how fucking cool would that be? Somewhere in the world, people are being hurt and oppressed by a dictator, but then the United States, with its considerable wealth and high tech gadgetry, comes to dramatically save the day. That’s what Batman would do, and who doesn’t want our foreign policy to be more like Batman? 

I think these sorts of feelings exist in most men – a sort of macho, patriotic male id that talks and acts like a 13-year-old boy who’s rented every action movie at Blockbuster Video. The inner 13-year-old says that every war has good guys to help and bad guys to kill, that killing the bad guys means the good guys win, and that Tomahawk missiles are always 100% accurate. 

Most men disregard their inner 13-year-old, because they understand that he lives in a very simple and clear cut world that does not exist. The men in charge of the most powerful military in human history, on the other hand, have given that 13-year-old a two liter bottle of Mountain Dew and are listening very intently to all of his opinions. 

That, I imagine, is where Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Obama got it in his head that Bashar al Assad needs to be ‘punished’ for his use of chemical weapons against his own people. 

Chemical weapons are bad because they kill people, and killing people is bad. Evidently chemical weapons are more than 100 times as bad as conventional weapons, because Assad used those to kill about 100,000 Syrians punishment-free. Only after he killed about 1000 Syrians with chemical weapons did President Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, begin planning to shoot missiles into Syria as punishment.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner in chief’s rationale for attacking Syria is that we must punish Assad for using chemical weapons because it will show the world that using chemical weapons is evil. It will also show the world that killing 100,000 innocent people is totally cool so long as you don’t use chemical weapons to do it. 

Of course, we’re not 100% sure that Assad is the one we should be punishing for the chemical attacks – at least, that’s according to Nobel Prizeident Obama’s chief of staff, who took a break from exhorting us to punish Assad’s wrongdoing to admit that the administration doesn’t have “irrefutable, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence” that the wrongdoing is actually Assad’s fault, saying "This is not a court of law. And intelligence does not work that way."

So, for those of you keeping score at home: When deciding whether or not to convict someone of tax evasion you must be convinced of their wrongdoing beyond a reasonable doubt. When deciding whether or not to shoot missiles into a sovereign nation, on the other hand, you can just kind of go with your gut. 

Whether or not Assad is responsible for the attack (as opposed to the heart-eating, al Qaeda-affiliated rebels) I think we can all agree that he’s a pretty terrible person, and that if ever there was a person who we would like to be punished, it’s him.

I’m just not sure I understand how shooting a bunch of missiles at Syria is supposed to effectively punish Assad. It’s been made clear(ish) that the goal here isn’t regime change, but simple punishment – to "...make sure that the Iranians, Hezbollah, and others understand that you cannot ... pursue weapons of mass destruction," in the words of White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. The missiles won’t be targeting Assad – they’ll just destroy military targets and infrastructure over the course of three days as a show of force. 

Naturally, even though these are “precision” strikes against military targets, there will be some collateral damage – not just because Assad is stationing his troops and military equipment in residential areas but also because collateral damage is kind of America’s deal. We accidentally murder innocent people all the time with 100 pound missiles fired by Predator drones that are within a mile of their target – if you think our luck is going to be any better with 3000 pound cluster bombs fired from hundreds of miles away, you’re more gullible than I was in 2008 and 2012. 

So President Barack Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize – which, lest we forget, is awarded to those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses,” – is going to punish Assad for killing innocent Syrians by launching an attack that will kill innocent Syrians. 

Given that Assad has already killed enough innocent Syrians to fill Michigan Stadium, I doubt that us killing a few more innocent Syrians, however accidentally, is going to deter him all that much - let alone Iran, Hezbollah, or anybody else.  

I just hope that when one of the missiles my taxes paid for lands slightly off-target in a Syrian neighborhood, the force of the explosion sucking the air out of civilians’ lungs, the fires burning the flesh off their bones, that they understand in those final excruciatingly painful moments that there are no hard feelings. We're just trying to send a message, is all. 

Truman Capps thinks those “Change” posters are pretty ironic right about now.

The Summer Of George

I'm right there with you, bro. 

These past three months, whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I immediately launch into a condensed, fifteen second rundown of the past two years of my life, kind of like a boring, low-stakes version of those little recaps they show before new episodes of Breaking Bad. The rundown starts in July of 2011 (“Two years ago I moved to LA to become a TV scriptwriter…”) meanders through a few milestones along the way (“…it turns out most of the prostitutes at the ranch thought I was gay, so it wasn’t even an issue!”) and ends in June (“…and then I got laid off.”)

Inevitably, somebody asks me what I’ve been up to since then, and most of the time I give the most brutally honest answer I can: “Summer of George.”

This is probably pretty confusing to people who didn’t spend their formative years watching syndicated Seinfeld reruns, so for their benefit I’m going to paste in the relevant sections from the extremely detailed Wikipedia article covering this particular episode:

"George discovers that he has a severance package from the New York Yankees that should last him about three months, so he decides that he is going to take full advantage of three months off and become very active." 

My entire perception of time has been shaped by summer vacation. From my childhood well into my adolescence, the way I pictured a calendar year in my head looked kind of like this:

Like most kids, I wasn’t crazy about school. I had it in my head that I would be a lot better off in life if the public school system would just leave me the hell alone so I could pursue my own interests – I reasoned that I could do something much more meaningful with my youth if I wasn’t being forced to waste so much time on lost causes like PE or multiplying fractions.

Every summer, then, was the only time every year that I had the chance to live life the way I wanted to live it. Briefly freed from the terrible burden of a comprehensive taxpayer funded education, I had few responsibilities or obligations and all the time in the world to experience everything I’d missed over the past nine months.

I don’t even need to tell you that I wound up spending every summer in front of my Nintendo 64, do I? I mean, I’ve been writing this thing for like six years. You probably saw where this was going two paragraphs ago.

So getting laid off at the beginning of this summer was like a mulligan for me. As a kid, I squandered my spare time because I was a kid and I didn’t have much else going on. But as an adult, I’ve got actual goals to chase – scripts to write! Friends to collaborate with! Story research to do! Without the terrible burden of a paying job in an air conditioned building, I could quit working 8 hours a day for someone else and start working 8 hours a day for myself.

“Meanwhile, instead of living a very active lifestyle as he had planned, George becomes incredibly lazy. He never changes out of his pajamas, and feels too weak to even come to Jerry's apartment, asking Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer to instead visit him or talking to Jerry on the phone to know what's going on over at his apartment.”

I read about an experiment where they put a rat in a cage with two buttons – one which dispensed food and one which fired off an electrode implanted in the pleasure center of the rat’s brain. The rat more or less mashed the pleasure button until he starved to death.

I’ve been thinking about that dead, happy rat a lot this summer. When I wake up at 1:00 on a Tuesday, glance at the FinalDraft document on my computer, and decide to turn on my PlayStation instead to ‘organize my thoughts.’ When I orchestrate little errands to run just so I’ll have an opportunity to stop at Baja Fresh on the way home. When I order another $12 drink even though I have no income and I’ve blown through my budget for the day.

What I’ve realized is that on a primal level I just want to spend every waking moment shuttling from one pleasurable activity to the next until it's time for bed, and without a job to keep me on track that's pretty much what I'm doing: 

"I haven't written anything today, but it's so pleasant and breezy up here on my roof... Hey, I bet it would be even more pleasant if I had a can of Strongbow... Now it's even nicer on my roof because I'm buzzed from that Strongbow! I bet it would be even nicer if I had another Strongbow... Now I'm drunk on my roof! This would be great if I wasn't getting hungry. I should go inside, cook some rice, and start writing. Ooh! Or I could walk to In-N-Out, because eating a burger while kind of drunk would be amazing..." 

This isn’t to say that I didn’t do any writing over the past three months – my pilots are locked into place and the wheels are turning on a lot of exciting projects. But when I look at my creative output in relation to the sheer, breathtaking amount of unstructured time I had at my disposal this summer I feel like I could have done one hell of a lot more writing and one hell of a lot less not writing.

My plan was to start actively looking for work in September, because that seemed like the logical time to end my summer staycation. But as August drew to a close and I started to feel the claustrophobic panic I used to feel at the end of every summer vacation, I began hedging my bets.

“Well, I’m not out of money yet.” I thought. “Maybe I’ll take September off too. I mean, Grand Theft Auto V is coming out on the 17th, and who the hell is going to stop me if I want to not work for four months instead of three?”

But before I could hit the pleasure button again, I got an email from my old agency – there’s been a lot of new work coming down the pipeline, and would I possibly be available to come in to do some freelancing for them this week?

And so I found myself going through an oddly familiar September routine: On the day after Labor Day I painfully dragged myself out of bed far earlier than I wanted to, ate a breakfast I was too tired to taste, and went to work in a building full of people I hadn’t seen in three months.

For better or for worse (probably better), my Summer of George is over. I had a lot of fun, but in true Seinfeld fashion I’m not sure if I learned anything.

Truman Capps was in the pool, Jerry! 

Maid Man

No maid has ever smiled as much as the maids in promotional photos for maid services.

This morning I jolted awake at the crack of 11:30 to the sound of my phone ringing and buzzing on my headboard. I grabbed the phone and then embarked on the challenge of using a touchscreen interface while still 75% asleep.

“Hello!?” I croaked into the phone once I’d gotten it working.

The voice on the other end was an older woman’s, speaking English with a heavy Hispanic accent. Between poor reception and the fact that I was still regaining consciousness, I had to ask her to repeat what she was saying several times until I was awake enough to understand it:

“This is the maid. Your door is locked. Can you let me in the apartment, please?”

I stammered out half a dozen apologies, threw on the first pair of pants I could find, and ran to the front door. When I flung it open I was promptly blinded by the unrelenting light of California’s midday sun, but I could still see the silhouette of our maid in the doorway – petit, older, Hispanic, clutching a bucket full of cleaning supplies.

“Hi!” I exclaimed, realizing as I do every time I see her that even though this woman has been cleaning my apartment monthly since January I still can’t for the life of me remember her name. Since I couldn’t offer a personalized greeting, I figured the next best thing would be yet another, more detailed apology. “I’m so sorry about all the confusion on the phone just a second ago!”

She laughed warmly and shook her head as she walked in. “Don’t worry about it. You can go back to sleep.”

“Here, hold on.” I said, rushing into our sweltering living room to turn on the air conditioner for her. “Can I get you anything? Do you want some water, or something to eat?” I hesitated for a second, mentally taking stock of the food that I currently had on hand. “Okay, well, I mean, I mostly have peanut butter, but if you’re hungry you can have as much of that as you want.”

She smiled again, already getting set up in the living room. “No, thank you. Don’t worry. You can go back to sleep.”

This interaction – which I have with our maid every time I’m home when she comes over – fills me with white hot loathing for everything about myself and the life I live.

In the past year or so, both because I’ve been living in an extremely diverse place and listening to copious amounts of Louis CK, I’ve started to become more aware of race and class. This newfound “awareness” usually manifests whenever I start to feel good about myself.

For example, I could take stock of my life and think:

“Wow, Truman. You were able to hold down a job for almost a year and a half and also save money so that you could take time off to write when they finally laid you off! You should be proud of yourself!”

And then, before I’m done thinking it, this other, more confrontational thought comes up and dumps my original thought’s books:

“So a white man from an upper middle class family with a college degree he didn’t even fucking pay for, living in the richest country on Earth, was able to briefly hold a decent white collar job? Fuck a doodle do. You know what? Give me a call when you encounter an obstacle greater than your own laziness and insecurity and then we can talk about being proud of yourself.”

I’m pretty sure that I’m blowing the whole ‘white privilege’ angle a little bit out of proportion, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling self-conscious whenever I drag myself out of bed at noon on a weekday to open the door for a Hispanic woman three times my age so she can clean my apartment top to bottom while I lounge around my room reading The Atlantic and thinking conceptually about possibly doing some writing.

I get self-conscious because I feel like I’m rubbing it in her face:

“Oh, you’re here to clean? Thank you so much. Even though I am currently unemployed by choice, light housework is still so far beneath me that I’d rather have you do it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I was up pretty late last night marathonning some Sopranos episodes, so I’m going to go back to sleep.”

Our maid is the mother of a friend of a friend who cleans apartments to make extra money. We pay her $60 – rolled into our rent – to come once a month and clean our living room, kitchen, other common areas, and both bathrooms, and she does such a good job at it that it almost hurts. Right now our apartment is so clean that you can smell the bleach from outside.* On top of all that, she is, based on my few interactions with her, a really lovely woman – warm, outgoing, smart, quick to laugh, and fluent in English.

*As a germophobe I take a certain pleasure in the smell of bleach. To me it says, “Anything that could possibly make you sick in this apartment is currently dead as dogshit.”

So it’s not like she’s some barefoot, illiterate woman who we’ve tricked into working for us – she set her own price, and whenever she’s around we always go out of our way to thank her and compliment her on the great job she does. She has a wonderful, loving family, some of whom I’ve met, and seems to be a generally pretty happy person who just happens to clean apartments in her spare time because she needs the money.

So why the hell do I feel so bad about what seems to be a fair and mutually beneficial business relationship!? Is it some kind of ingrained liberal thing that I’m incapable of seeing a non-white person do manual labor for me without feeling crushing guilt? Isn’t it culturally insensitive in its own right to feel sorry for someone just because their life isn’t like yours?

I’ve given it some thought, and I think this is what it is:

Because of how I am, having a clean apartment means the world to me. Being able to have an apartment that’s cleaner than I could ever make it without having to lift a finger is, to me, worth a lot more than the $60 our maid charges for her services. I could look at this as a really great deal, but instead, again because of how I am, I choose to feel like I’m taking advantage on her based on a few hundred years of history that I am both powerless to change and 100% not responsible for.

You know that phrase, “Never look a gift horse in the mouth”? A spotless apartment at a great price is a gift horse and I’m looking it square in the mouth anyway – and since there’s nothing bad in its mouth, I’ve instead started to invent my own equine dental problems to fret over when really the only thing I should be doing is trying to wake up a little earlier on weekdays.

Truman Capps can scarcely imagine how guilty he would feel if, in addition to being himself, he were also Jewish.  

Death Of A MacBook

Enormous magnifying glass for screen sold separately.

Being my personal computer is not an easy job. I spend most of my day on the computer, either scouring the Internet for funny gifs or occasionally writing, and my response to even the slightest slowdown in service is to start yelling obscenities at my screen. I guess it’s because of this high-pressure Swimming With Sharks-style atmosphere that my MacBooks have been committing suicide like clockwork every two years.

I officially became an Apple customer six years ago, when my father bought me a MacBook for college. Like me, it was both pearly white and slow to wake up from sleep mode, and I loved it very dearly. Perhaps the feeling wasn’t mutual, because late in my sophomore year, nearly two years after I’d received the computer, the hard drive made the sort of record scratching sound you hear on TV when somebody says something risqué at a party, and then about a quarter of my data and all of my music was gone forever.

That summer, as I began the slow recovery from the hard drive crash, my father sat me down at the dinner table for a very blunt, man to man talk about the facts of life.

“Truman,” he said to me. “I tend to be of the opinion that laptops really only have an effective lifespan of three to four years.

“Yeah, I saw that article you emailed me.” I said.

“Also, I need a laptop. So I’m going to keep your MacBook and buy you a MacBook Pro, and that’s the last damn laptop I’m buying you.”

And so, in August of 2009, my MacBook Pro arrived. Like the spaceship in Independence Day it was both technologically advanced beyond my comprehension and also made completely out of metal. As I turned it on, filling my lungs with that new hard drive smell, I felt pretty good about the idea of keeping this tank of a machine running for the next several years.

Two years later I had just arrived back at my Culver City apartment from a Christmas trip to Portland when I pulled out my MacBook Pro and turned it on only to see a blank white screen, the outline of a file folder, and a big old question mark. This is not the sort of thing you want to see on the machine where you keep every single piece of writing you’ve done in your adult life.

A trip to the Apple Store and a new hard drive fixed that problem, and then it was smooth sailing for approximately two years until July, when my MacBook Pro developed some sort of advanced stage computer-based Alzheimer’s.

Ever since downloading the latest Apple operating system, my MacBook has literally begun to forget how to be a computer. I have to reboot several times a day now because every few hours virtually every app on my computer spontaneously shits the bed in its own special way – iTunes won’t play, Firefox won’t open, and worst of all, nothing in Word or FinalDraft will save. This would be great if I used computers as part of some Zen exercise where after every day of writing the slate was wiped completely clean, but unfortunately I’m kind of a stickler about being able to have access to my data from one day to the next.

Like the last two times this sort of thing has happened, I contacted Apple support. And, after two phone calls with Apple tech support, three trips to the Apple Store Genius Bar, and a consultation with an Apple support specialist who gave me his personal number and extension, here’s what I’ve found out: My MacBook Pro is dying in a way that no Apple product has ever died before.

Every time I explain my computer’s symptoms to a new tech support professional, their response is a long, helpless pause, followed by a few logical solutions I’ve already tried (“Have you turned the computer on and off?”) and a few House-style Hail Marys once there’s nothing left to offer. (“Have you tried painting it blue?” “No.” “Try painting your laptop blue. “Will that help?” “I mean, it might. Worst case scenario, you have a blue MacBook Pro that still doesn’t work very well.”) Whatever my MacBook has is the laptop equivalent of AIDS in 1983.

This is pretty frustrating for me. A functional computer is about the only piece of equipment I need in order to make money, and on basic principle I think it’s kind of shady that a top of the line computer made out of aircraft-grade aluminum has the same lifespan as an American-made car.

On the other hand, though, I always knew this day would come. My MacBooks have done this to me twice already, and my Dad made it pretty clear that laptops only last a few years. I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to get a new laptop, but having already squeezed two consecutive free ones out of the old man I wanted to try and postpone this day for as long as possible – or at least until I was filthy rich.

What really sucks is that I’m just going to replace this defective MacBook with a new MacBook, which, if history is any guide, will probably become defective by 2015. If any other product had let me down this consistently I would’ve started buying from the competition long ago, but with laptops I don’t really have any choice.

ChromeBooks are useless to me for a variety of reasons that aren’t terribly amusing, and from what I’ve heard I’m probably better off with my defective, half dead, four year old laptop than I would be with anything running Windows 8. When it comes to computers, my only viable option is to keep buying from the people who have been screwing me for six years.

So when you see me out and about with my MacBook Air in the coming months, don’t call me an Apple fanboy. I’m really more of a hostage.

Truman Capps will revisit this subject in two years.</i>

The Amanda Show

This is where it all started to go bad. 

Full disclosure: I never really watched The Amanda Show when I was a kid. In fact, so long as we’re being honest, I never even paid too much attention to All That. Amanda Bynes was not on Doug, Rugrats, Salute Your Shorts, or Home Improvement, so I honestly had no idea who she was until she started to go absolutely batshit crazy last year. After some research, I found out that she was a former child star who had recently retired from acting at the age of 24 so she could focus more on drug abuse, erratic behavior, and run-ins with the police.  

It seems like every celebrity meltdown begins with them getting pulled over, doesn’t it? Mel Gibson first started explaining his complex and nuanced opinions about the Jews during a traffic stop, and it was traffic violations that briefly landed Paris Hilton in jail. Maybe there’s something about contact with the LAPD that makes famous people go crazy – like what blood in the water does to sharks.

Whatever the reason, last year Amanda Bynes made headlines by racking up a number of tickets and citations, and was arrested after sideswiping a police car while drunk. After being charged with a DUI she asked President Obama via Twitter to fire the cop who arrested her. She spent the rest of the summer causing so much trouble on the road that I think I might be the only person in Los Angeles who she didn’t hit with her car at some point.

In October, after being spotted talking to herself at the gym, Bynes moved to New York to become a fashion designer. During this same period she started sending out increasingly bizarre Tweets, such as, “I want @Drake to murder my vagina.” Over the next few months she flooded her Twitter feed with bizarre self shots documenting new hairstyles and piercings, threatened to sue any media outlet that wrote about her, and chucked a bong out the window of her 36^th floor apartment. Somewhere in there her agent, publicist, and lawyer all quit.

Last month, Bynes found her way back to LA, where she set fire to a can of gasoline in her neighbor’s driveway and, at long last, was arrested and sent to a psychiatric hospital. Five days ago she checked into a new clinic to continue treatment.

If I’ve learned anything from social media, it’s that the rate at which people melt down is far higher than I had previously assumed. It seems like every month somebody in my newsfeed is going ballistic about something, calling out an ex by name, or penning vague screeds about all the people who have wronged him or her. And the more I see of that, the more I start to wonder – would this person be melting down right now if nobody was looking?

The past year of Amanda Bynes’ life has been pretty rocky for her what with all the car crashes and arson and stuff, but it’s been just great for entertainment news and gossip sites, which are considerably more tenacious and thorough in their coverage than the White House press corps. Every time Amanda Bynes left her apartment in a weird outfit she was unwittingly putting dinner on the table for dozens of paparazzi and TMZ.com systems administrators.

I can’t really blame the media for covering Amanda Bynes’ antics, and I can’t blame people for following the antics so closely.* A phrase my Mom uses from time to time is, “It’s tough to quit watching a trainwreck.” I’m not sure how many bonafide train wrecks my mother has witnessed in her life (Portland’s rail lines must’ve had lax safety standards in the 1960s), but I get the sentiment – disasters are fascinating, even the personal ones.  

*I mean, I’m writing a blog entry about it, for God’s sake, so if anything I’m part of the problem.

And really, if we’re going to take pleasure in somebody else’s misfortune, who better than a celebrity? This is somebody who was a TV star before she hit puberty, who has enough money to rent a highrise Manhattan apartment and just chuck perfectly good bongs out the window whenever she wants to. It’s not like we’re laughing at some one-legged orphan who just found out he has AIDS; no matter how bad her life gets, she’s still got it better than virtually every other human being who has ever lived.

The sticking point for me is that this trainwreck has been coming for a good long time, and somewhere along the way somebody probably should have tried to stop it. 

When Amanda Bynes was 13 years old, she had her own TV show. To put that another way, Nickelodeon gave Amanda Bynes pretty much unlimited attention for three straight years at the worst possible time in her development as a person. Attention is like crystal meth for teenagers; being the star and namesake of a national TV show at that age must’ve been like going into Heisenberg’s lab and just eating fistful after fistful of blue meth.

So I’m not saying that TMZ shouldn’t be covering her meltdown, or that we shouldn’t be watching that coverage, but can we at least stop acting so surprised that she’s not behaving like a normal person? What’s going on in her life is a tragedy, but given the way she grew up it would’ve been more surprising if this didn’t happen.*

*Case in point, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. How is he so un-crazy!?

The thought provoking way to end this update would be for me to say, “Let’s just focus on how to prevent this from happening in the future,” but that’s pretty unrealistic. Amanda Bynes was a talented and charismatic young actress, and talented and charismatic young actresses tend to get famous. The only surefire way to prevent this sort of thing from happening is to keep your children out of showbusiness at all costs – so if you’re down to deny your kid’s dreams and aspirations, go right ahead, I guess.

Sometime in the next five years, I’m predicting that Justin Bieber will be pulled over by the LAPD. I really hope that by then Amanda Bynes is in better shape.

Truman Capps thinks Amanda Bynes could do a lot better than Drake.

The Funniest Movie Ever

I've been tossing out references to this movie for the past year; I may as well just write a blog about it and get it over with. 

There are a few things that I always do on a first date. I always pick a bar that’s centrally located, so that nobody has to drive too far. I always limit myself to two drinks or less, because three is the number of drinks it takes for me to start self sabotaging. And I always, always ask, “How do you feel about the movie Wet Hot American Summer”?

Even as somebody who compulsively ranks everything, picking the funniest movie ever made is pretty much impossible. It isn’t exactly fair to try and rank any one comedy above all others, because there are so many different ways a movie can be funny. I think Rushmore is absolutely hysterical, but it’s not the same kind of absolutely hysterical as Superbad, Shaun of the Dead, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or Ted.

I mean, what’s funnier: Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzmann waging an escalating prank war, Mark Wahlberg doing cocaine with his magical teddy bear, or Principal Rooney’s secretary pretending to be Principal Rooney while Cameron pretends to be Sloan’s dad? Every one of them makes me turn blue in the face laughing. I mean, I guess we could analyze how blue my face gets, and decide that the movie that makes my face bluest is the funniest, but that seems like an awful lot of effort and asphyxiation for relatively little gain.

So I’m not saying that Wet Hot American Summer is the funniest movie ever made. That would be a copout statement. What I’m saying is that when I’ve had a rough day and I just want to relax and laugh until my face is at its absolute bluest, I always go for Wet Hot American Summer.

Wet Hot American Summer, released in 2001, is set at a Jewish summer camp on August 18^th, 1981 – the last day of camp. Throughout the day, we follow a number of camp staff members, teenaged counselors (played by actors in their late 20s, naturally), and campers as they all try desperately for one last shot at summer love. (They also have to save the camp from getting crushed by Skylab as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere.)

It’s a really weird movie.

WHAS is the product of a bunch of brainy comedy nerds from NYU who, in the mid 90s, briefly had a sketch comedy show on MTV called The State where they did exactly the kind of “you either get it or you don’t” comedy you’d expect from a bunch of philosophical recent art school graduates living in New York. In one sketch, a guy shows up at the Last Supper and delights the guests by threatening to dip his balls in the food, much to the chagrin of Jesus. In another one, two guys rub their asses on $240 worth of pudding.

So let me reiterate: Wet Hot American Summer is a really weird movie.

The weirdness is enhanced by the fact that it plays things pretty straight for the first half hour or so. At first it seems like it’s just going to be a goofy parody of 80s summer camp movies, but then the punchlines and visual gags start getting more and more bizarre until by the end of the movie a can of vegetables is passing out life advice and an eight year old is getting married to a woman in her late 30s on the rebound. Understandably, Wet Hot American Summer didn’t perform very well at the box office – and critics weren’t crazy about it, either.

If you ask me, that’s because the movie was ahead of its time – it was unlike anything the world had ever seen before, and people just weren’t ready for it. Coming out in September of 2001 didn’t do it any favors, either. But today, in an era where seemingly the only way to sell bodywash is with non sequitirs, shirtless dudes, and explosions, WHAS has become a cult classic. 

Next time you see some guy on the bus with spacers in his ears, glasses from the 70s with no frames, and jeans so skinny they look like two condoms stretched over his legs, go ahead and start talking to him about movies – I guarantee you he loves this movie as much as I do. Fortunately, I don’t really run with that crowd; unfortunately, that means I have a lot of friends who really, really don’t like Wet Hot American Summer.

On multiple occasions I’ve tried to show Wet Hot American Summer to friends who hadn’t seen it, only for them to sit in confused silence for an hour and 40 minutes, silently judging my taste in comedy as I wheeze and gasp at jokes I’ve heard dozens of times already. Opinions afterward have ranged from, “I don’t think I got all of it,” to “Fuck you, Truman.”

I don’t want to use the phrase “you either get it or you don’t” to describe Wet Hot American Summer, both because I already used it a few paragraphs ago to describe The State and also because I think it kind of stigmatizes not liking a movie, which is pretty elitist. “There are a select few who get it, and you, with your plebian assessment of Wet Hot American Summer, have proven that you are not one of us. Why don’t you run on home and watch something on the CW?”

What it really comes down to is a matter of taste and personal preference. I have a number of friends who I had always assumed would hate the movie, only to find out that they’ve been watching and loving it for years. Wet Hot American Summer is a jumble of stories, homages, and jokes that resonate with some people and don’t resonate with others, and it’s tough to explain why.

I love Wet Hot American Summer because I love absurdist comedy and 80s pop culture, as well as just about every actor in it. Like Dazed and Confused it follows a bunch of different people throughout one day, which is a storytelling tactic I like. But most of all, at the center of all the profanity, gay sex, and some of the best montages ever put to film, the movie has real heart and emotional weight.

It’s easy to empathize with the dorky counselor who’s hopelessly in love with a girl who’s way out of his league, or the guy so desperate to lose his virginity that he runs full tilt for miles back to camp, or the girl who can’t quite break away from her emotionally distant, openly unfaithful jock of a boyfriend. For how crazy and absurd everything gets, it’s all built on some very real emotions – just like Ted, Superbad, or any other good comedy.

So when I ask girls how they feel about Wet Hot American Summer, I do it because, whether they loved it or hated it, it always turns into a pretty lively conversation about taste.

Also, if they tell me they haven’t seen it, then I’ve got the green light to start passing off jokes from the movie as my own.

Truman Capps would’ve posted this on August 18^th, but a shitty Internet connection and Breaking Bad conspired to blow this once-a-year opportunity.

Bachelor Chow

Flavor? I love flavor!

If I could have access to only one of the zany inventions from Futurama, I know exactly which one I’d pick. I’d forego the spaceships and jetpacks and and Lucy Liu robots and go straight for the Bachelor Chow, which is basically just cheap, generic, no-preparation food for slobbish lazy guys who live alone. That shit would change my life.

Sure, we’ve got Top Ramen and microwave dinners and other stuff that serves the same general purpose, but it lacks the bluntness. Bachelor food today still tries to hide its real purpose behind careful labeling, which makes it infinitely more depressing to buy.

Like “family size” frozen dinners – seriously, Stouffer’s? You know from your marketing data and I know from experience that the people buying your “family sized” frozen mac and cheese aren’t busy parents on the go who need a quick meal to feed their family – they’re just lazy single guys who are particularly hungry that night.

Or how they’ve started putting twice as many M&Ms in one bag and calling it “sharing size,” which is just bullshit. Nobody shares sharing size M&Ms; they just scurry off alone and gobble down two servings of M&Ms like Gollum. Calling it “sharing size” doesn’t do anything but create an awkward situation with the cashier. “Yeah, I know that this is two peoples’ worth of M&Ms. My friend is waiting for me at my apartment, and we’re going to share them when I get there, I promise.”

If Bachelor Chow were a real thing, there wouldn’t be any of that embarrassment at checkout, because Bachelor Chow doesn’t try to hide what it really is. “Why yes, I am buying Bachelor Chow. Well, since you ask, I’m buying it because I’m a bachelor and I want something cheap and plentiful that I can use to stave off hunger a couple times a day without having to take time out of my busy schedule to turn on the stove.”

When I was growing up I never would have imagined that I would one day have this attitude. As a child, eating was a really exciting experience because my mother was and is the best cook in the world, which meant that every meal was some new and exotic culinary adventure – or it was just burritos, but that was okay with me too because burritos are awesome. 

Now that I have to plan and prepare my own meals, eating is pretty much just a chore. I don’t have enough foresight and maturity to give any thought to what I might want to eat until I’m actually hungry, at which point I briefly survey my food supplies, choose the meal that I can prepare the fastest, and eat it in my room in front of my computer.

There are usually three things on the menu at my apartment:

Sometimes I cook up some Ralph’s brand macaroni* with Paul Newman red sauce (and a generous squirt of Sriracha). This is tasty, but it’s my least preferred option because, since I was raised by a pair of insurance professionals, I am physically incapable of leaving the kitchen while the stove is on. For that reason, cooking pasta means I have to spend 15 to 20 minutes of my long, rambling, unstructured day standing in the kitchen making sure the apartment doesn’t burn down, which is more responsibility than I want to have. 

*When buying dry pasta I only buy either macaroni or penne, purely because bite sized pasta is less work to eat. The More You Know!

More often I make some white rice with steamed frozen vegetables, which I eat with soy sauce (and a generous squirt of Sriracha). The main advantage to this meal is that once I get everything set up in my rice cooker I just hit ‘cook’ and walk the hell away until dinner is ready half an hour later. The downside is that I eat this meal so often that I get pretty sick of it. Usually that doesn’t stop me from making it, because I’d rather eat the same meal for a fifth time in the row than spend 20 minutes making pasta.

Most of the time I wind up eating three pieces of whole wheat bread with peanut butter spread on them. I was writing a script on a deadline earlier this year, and for those three months I’d say this was pretty much the only meal I ate, because I could prepare it lightning quick and always count on it to keep me filled up.  

To be fair, calling it a “meal” is a little bit of an overstatement – it’s really just a ritual I perform when I want to stop being hungry for a few hours. I’ve eaten so many pieces of Orowheat with Jif on them that I can’t even taste it anymore. Honestly, it doesn’t even count as “eating” – it’s just desperate, grudging, consumption to keep starvation at bay.

I really do love food, and believe it or not I also enjoy cooking. But when I was growing up, food and cooking were always social activities – for a long time I did my homework at the kitchen table while my Mom cooked, and we ate dinner together as a family every night. (Occasionally we’d watch TV during dinner, but only for special occasions, like when Ken Jennings was on Jeopardy!)

For me, the people you’re eating with are as important to the meal as the food itself. Right now, I’m at a place in my life where I eat most of my meals alone, so I don’t really see the point in pulling out all the stops to prepare an extravagant meal when I’m going to be the only one enjoying it. Why spend an hour making a casserole for one when I’d be just as happy stuffing my face with peanut butter or pasta or steamed broccoli in half the time? 

If only Bachelor Chow existed, I wouldn't even have to choose between peanut butter, pasta, or steamed broccoli. A man can dream, can't he? 

Truman Capps has already had several people tell him to get a crockpot.

 

Orthodontea Flashbacks

"Just lie back and relax while I fill your mouth with metal appliances that will probably be there until you die."

It was a granola bar that did it to me – one of those really chewy Nature Valley ones. Yes, granola bars are at the top of the list of foods they told me not to eat all those years ago, but I couldn’t help myself. Nature Valley’s most popular flavor of granola bar has a thick peanut butter crust on the bottom, topped with the bare minimum amount of granola necessary to give the appearance of nutritional value, and I can’t resist peanut butter in any of its forms.  

I bit into the bar and the thick, rocklike peanut butter drove down over my lower front teeth, promptly colliding with the thin wire of the permanent lower retainer nestled back there. The orthodontic work my parents had paid thousands for ten years ago was sturdy, but it was no match for the bulletproof peanut butter Nature Valley armors their granola bars with, and the wire snapped loose.

My mother was pretty poor when she was growing up, and throughout my childhood she made a point of drilling it into me that she and Dad would provide for me no matter what. “You’re going to have straight teeth and a college education,” she would always promise me.

My teeth had a few awkward gaps, but they were far from crooked. I suppose my parents were concerned that any imperfection would be a target for middle school bullies, and equipped me with braces in hopes of sparing me that misery. What they failed to realize was that I had so many qualities that made me a glaring target for middle school bullies that the state of my teeth was really a moot point.

With this in mind, I would have rather they skipped the braces and instead applied that cost to HBO and a gaming computer so I could make the most of the years until I could take advantage of that much vaunted college education. But of course, nobody asked me.

When my parents took me to the orthodontist, he looked at my mostly-okay teeth and diagnosed me as a person in need of braces – a diagnosis that I’m sure was in no way affected by the fact that my parents would spend the next three years giving him money to apply, adjust, and maintain said braces and their accessories.

If you never had braces and want to know what it was like, you can simulate the experience pretty easily. First, make a list of every food and beverage that you like. Then go to the top of the page and label the list, “FOODS YOU CAN’T EAT WITH BRACES.” Once that’s done, all you have to do is have some guy you barely know stick his fingers in your mouth every month or so and you’re pretty much there.

My teeth looked more or less the same when the braces came off, but I appreciated my parents’ effort to straighten them out nonetheless. The orthodontist set me up with the permanent retainer behind my lower teeth, as well a removable retainer for my top teeth.

“So you’ll want to wear this whenever you aren’t eating or drinking for the next year or two, and then just at night after that.” He explained as I popped it in.

“And when do I stop wearing it?”

He looked confused. “Excuse me?”

“I mean, how long until the retainer has done its job? How many years until I’m not a person who wears a retainer anymore?”

He considered the question and shrugged. “You’ll probably just want to wear it a few nights a week for the foreseeable future.”

I spent the car ride home trying to think of any adults I knew who still had retainers. Were my teachers and friends’ parents all going home every night, watching Joey and popping in crusty old plastic retainers after dinner? “Well, when I got my braces off in 1974 my orthodontist told me I’d need to wear this thing at night for the foreseeable future, so…”   

Still, I was mindful of the money my parents had spent in an attempt to ‘straighten’ my teeth, so I kept up with the retainer at nights for the rest of high school. Once I moved on to the college education I’d been promised, my retainer and its little blue case eventually got lost among my possessions. I haven’t worn it for a good three years and my completely unflappable teeth don’t look any different than they did the day I got my braces off.

The permanent retainer, on the other hand, has been in my mouth for a little over ten years at this point. If it could talk I’m sure it would share some pretty interesting anecdotes about every meal I’ve eaten in the past decade. “40% of what this motherfucker eats is peanut butter. Half the time there isn’t even bread; he just spoons it into his mouth. He clearly doesn’t need his teeth for this diet, so what the hell am I doing here?”

Alas, if only I’d stuck to regular peanut butter instead of the brittle, hardened version Nature Valley uses, that retainer might still be with us today.

On Wednesday I found an orthodontist in Sherman Oaks and made an appointment to have my mouth fixed. I was either ten years older or 25 years younger than everybody else in the waiting room. I guess most people my age have already lost their retainers and given up – I would have too were it not for a bit of loose, sharp metal jabbing my tongue every time I tried to talk.

The orthodontist, a softspoken Asian man with a number of degrees from USC plastered on the wall, had a look at my lower retainer and then we had a chat about what to do.

“Well,” I said. “I’ve had the lower retainer in for over ten years now. It doesn’t bother me at all, but on the other hand, I think that if it hasn’t done its job in ten years, it probably never will. I mean, don’t you think there comes a point when we should just be content to let teeth be teeth? My mouth clearly wants to be the way it is right now, and I know from experience that no amount of metal and plastic is going to change that, so what if we just take the lower retainer out and be done with it?”  

“Hm.” The orthodontist said, glancing at my X-rays. “I think we ought to just replace it with a stronger one to keep everything in shape.”

Part of me wanted to say, “Fuck it! Straight teeth are my parents’ dream, not mine. Take the thing out and let nature take its course!”

But then I thought about how much money my parents had poured into my mouth, and considered the crushing guilt I would feel if I had the retainer removed and undid all the work they’d spent so much on.

“Well, okay then.” I said.

The orthodontist lowered the chair and snapped on some gloves, and only afterward did I get my bill and see that the procedure had cost me $400.

Now it looks like my parents aren’t the only ones who’ve invested in the straightness of my teeth.

Truman Capps doesn’t floss.