Friends For Life

The look on Kim's face says, "I've made a huge mistake." 

Do you ever wonder, after all of this commotion and drama, if Kim Jong Un even likes Dennis Rodman? It’s been established that Kim is a big fan of Rodman’s work on the court in the mid 1990s, but admiring somebody’s athletic prowess and actually enjoying their company are two very different things. They might have bonded initially, but The Worm has visited North Korea four times now, and pretty much any American will tell you that it doesn’t take very long to get sick of Dennis Rodman.

Haven’t we all had situations like that? You get introduced to somebody in a social setting – at a barbecue, perhaps, or while watching the Harlem Globetrotters play basketball with your totalitarian regime’s national team – and in that limited timeframe you both really hit it off and you walk away feeling proud of yourself. It’s difficult making new friends, even if you live in a country where everybody is required by law to love you beyond all reason, which is why it feels so satisfying to meet a person you actually can connect with.  

What you don’t think about is that after only one meeting you’ve got a distorted view of who that person is – you only experienced a tiny sliver of their personality, and they were probably on their best behavior anyway because they wanted to make a good first impression and not get summarily executed or sent to one of your gulag-cities.

I’m sure Dennis Rodman seemed pretty cool to Kim Jong Un when they first met, what with all the bowing and praise and defending Kim on national television. And they have at least a little in common – both enjoy drinking to excess, and are also both convinced that they’re gods (although in Kim’s defense, he’s had an entire political apparatus telling him that for his whole life).

But since that first meeting, Dennis Rodman spent the better part of a year telling everybody who would listen about how great of friends he and Kim Jong Un are. He completely rebranded himself from “washed up former basketball player and obnoxious asshole” to “Kim Jong Un’s best friend for life and obnoxious asshole.” I don’t care who you are – it’s got to be pretty creepy to be on the receiving end of all that love from somebody you chatted with one time, for a couple hours, via an interpreter.

Let’s say you met me at that barbecue and we had a good time chatting about TV and current events. The next day you look up the blog I mentioned and see that I’ve already written an update about how good of friends we are. Over the next few months I write a number of additional updates about how you’re my friend for life, how you’re so humble and nice and nobody gets you the way I do.

Maybe, while visiting your house, I get into a drunken, screaming argument with my other friends when they suggest you aren’t as great as I say you are. No matter who you are, I think sooner or later there comes a point when you quit feeling flattered and start feeling very uncomfortable about the fact that you’ve accidentally let a crazy person into your life.

On a propaganda level it’s extremely valuable for Kim Jong Un to hang out with Dennis Rodman in public, but I can’t help but think that since this last trip, which ended with a tearful press conference followed by a trip to rehab, the novelty of befriending an American basketball star has begun to wear off.

*

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be kind of sweet if Kim Jong Un and Dennis Rodman actually were really close friends? That wouldn’t make up for the concentration camps, widespread malnutrition, or the fact that Kim Jong Un routinely threatens to shoot nuclear missiles at us and our allies, but on a strictly human level wouldn’t it kind of warm your heart to see a 6’7” black American and the portly, moon-faced dictator of a country that hates America form a deep and lasting friendship over the objections of the rest of the world?

Yes, they’ve both lived very different lives and don’t even speak the same language, but they share the unique distinction of being mocked and derided by almost everybody. The world can seem like a pretty cruel place when Americans turn your father into an evil, pidgin-speaking, ronery puppet, or when the entire editorial board of The Washington Post calls you a washed up propagandist. Under these circumstances, can’t you see Rodman and Kim coming together like two heavily bullied 6^th graders eating lunch together at the loser table in the cafeteria?

“That’s okay, Kim,” Dennis said, wrapping a sinewy, tattooed arm around the dictator’s slumped shoulders as silent, bitter tears rolled down his cheeks and onto his PB&J. “I’ll be your friend.”

Rodman has been to rehab twice before, but it just doesn’t seem to stick. Kicking alcoholism requires a strong support system, and Dennis Rodman has managed to estrange himself from just about everybody who isn’t being paid to put up with his bullshit.

But this time around, Rodman’s got a friend for life. And while I can’t say much about Kim Jong Un as a leader or a statesman, who knows? He might be a really good sponsor.

Truman Capps thinks the best way to gauge Kim and Rodman's relationship is to wait and see if North Korea starts building huge Dennis Rodman statues.

I Feel The Earth Move

 Adult entertainment? I didn't know natural disaster-oriented porn was a big thing in the 70s...

Whenever I try to convince my job-seeking Portland friends to start looking for work in LA, they always give me a long list of reasons why the city I live in is supposedly the worst place on Earth, either due to sprawl or smog or the fact that it’s completely infested with Californians. Recently, though, one of my friends shot down my LA sales pitch in a way I’d never heard before – “I’d never move to LA because I’m really scared of earthquakes.”

I snorted, shaking my head. “Oh, come on,” I laughed. “Everybody knows earthquakes aren’t real!”

I mean, yeah, I acknowledge that earthquakes exist, but up until recently I never took them all that seriously. In the Pacific Northwest, earthquakes are about as rare as sunny spring days and racial diversity, so while I grew up learning about earthquakes in school and watching news footage of earthquakes happening elsewhere, they were never exactly real to me.

There was a 5.6 magnitude earthquake in Oregon in 1993, but according to my mother I slept right through it as the entire house shook around us. There was another earthquake, considerably shorter and weaker, during broad daylight when I was in middle school, but it happened after second period when all of us were on the way to lunch, so if I felt any actual shaking I probably dismissed it as the result of 400 middle schoolers stampeding toward cheap pizza.

The closest I ever got to actually being cognizant of an earthquake as it happened was several dozen rides in an earthquake simulator exhibit at OMSI throughout my childhood. The simulator was a walk-in replica of a living room – chairs, a couch, coffee table, shelves – that a hungover college-aged volunteer would lead you and half a dozen other people into before stepping out and closing the door.

Soon after the door closed, a radio on the counter would switch on and start playing the Carole King song “I Feel The Earth Move”: 

I feel the Earth – move – under my feet

I feel the sky tum-b-lin’ down…

At this point, machinery under the floor of the fake living room would go into action, generating small vibrations that rattled the knickknacks on the shelves. Immediately, Carole King’s voice on the radio would be replaced by the Emergency Broadcast System, which listed a bunch of useful earthquake safety tips as the intensity of the shaking grew and grew until the fake overhead lamps were swinging back and forth. After a few seconds the earthquake would stop, the college volunteer would open the door, and then it was usually time for a hot dog in the cafeteria.

At any carnival or amusement park this would be mocked as the lamest ride of all time, but OMSI, being a science-oriented children’s museum, could get away with it because it was educational and taught kids about what to do in an earthquake. At least, that was the intent. About all I got out of the exhibit was a messed up impression of “I Feel The Earth Move” – since my only experience with the song growing up was in the earthquake simulator, in my mind the chart topping 1971 single is just two lines followed by the Emergency Broadcast System alarm and safety advice.

I was well aware of LA’s reputation for earthquakes when I moved here, and for the first few months I remained on edge, tensing up every time my windows rattled even though it was usually just because my roommate was prancing around the living room playing Dance Central. After awhile, I figured that maybe Los Angeles had gotten all the earthquakes out of its system before I moved, and shortly thereafter I put seismic activity out of my mind entirely to concentrate on getting a job.

This past Friday I awoke with a jolt at 5:30 AM to find my entire bedroom in motion – picture frames rattling against the wall, halfassedly constructed IKEA furniture wobbling like Jello.

For fuck’s sake. I thought. This is way too early for Dance Central.

It dawned on me that not only was I no longer living with my Dance Central loving roommate, but that we also don’t even have a TV or XBox in the living room. When I realized that what I was experiencing was an honest to goodness, this-is-not-a-drill earthquake I had absolutely no coping mechanisms to fall back on.

“Aaaaaauuuuuuuughh!” I yelled. Meanwhile, my mind raced to try and remember the earthquake safety tips from the OMSI simulator. 

Okayokayokay uhhhhh I feel the earth move under my feet I feel the sky tumblin’ down boooooooooooooooooooooop this is the emergency broadcast system something something something fill your bathtub with water something something something hey grandma can I get a hot dog

I have no bathtub to fill with water, rendering the one earthquake safety tip I could remember from OMSI totally useless. I also remembered from school that you should take cover under your bed during an earthquake, but since I have a captain’s style bed that wasn’t an option either, so instead I decided to just lie completely still and be scared and see how that plan of action worked out for me.

The earthquake ended a few seconds after it began. There was no noticeable change in my room – the plastic William Shakespeare action figure on my desk didn’t even tip over – but I laid awake for the next five hours anyway, just to be ready in case there was an aftershock.

Earthquakes are officially real to me now, and I don’t mind telling you that they’re pretty scary. That said, just about every region of this country has a thing that tries to kill people, and based on what I’ve seen so far I’d much rather take my chances with earthquakes than hurricanes, polar vortexes, tornadoes, and West Nile Virus. Just to be prepared, though, I’ll probably go back on the earthquake simulator next time I’m in Portland – and I’ll be sure to take notes.

Truman Capps also vaguely remembers "I Feel The Earth Move" from a Muppets music video.

Unfitspiring

In the hospital, when they tell you you have a hernia, GET ANGRY AT THE HERNIA. 

Every January I do the same halfhearted flirtation with the idea of making this the year that I develop an exercise regimen, stick with it long enough to get hooked on fitness, and become roughly as attractive as the male lead in any given Nicholas Sparks movie. The flirtation ends when I remember that fitness is kind of clingy – it wants to see me every day, for a lot longer than I want to see it, and it doesn’t want to let me hang out with my old friends peanut butter and cheese anymore.

Everything I find off-putting about exercise is summed up by the “fitspiration” picture trend – viral image macros that feature blunt, tough love exercise advice superimposed over pictures of somebody’s abs. If Facebook is any indicator, these pictures are really helpful to people who have committed to getting into shape, but whenever I see one I just feel like I’m being rather aggressively shamed by an extremely beautiful person, and about the only thing I feel inspired to do is eat an entire tub of sour cream just to piss off the sexy girl in yoga pants calling me lazy.

I mean, look at some of these: 

In your FACE, single parents!

We reward dolphins with food too! Are you saying you're better than dolphins?

Cheese curds. Crunchwrap Supreme. Philly cheesesteak. Reuben. Eggs Benedict on a waffle. Everything on the menu at Baja Fresh. FUCK YOU, LIAR.  

I’m getting to the point in my life where I can see myself making the time to exercise on a somewhat regular basis, but I don’t think I’ll ever have the energy to dedicate every waking second to hating everything unrelated to exercise the way these images seem to want me to. The big confrontational block text in every fitspiration picture yells in my face that the only way to be truly healthy is to make health and fitness my lifestyle, but what I want to yell back at the guy with the bulletproof stomach is that my current lifestyle is working out pretty well for me.

I don’t want fitness to be a lifestyle; I want it to be a chore. That probably sounds like the wrong attitude, but let me be clear: I am fucking great at chores. I can empty the dishwasher in like five minutes. I take out the garbage like a champion. And if you step into my room, you won’t see any laundry lying around – because I folded that shit promptly after pulling it out of the drier, bitch!

I’m gung ho about chores, because I recognize that they’re unpleasant but necessary things you have to do to make life more livable. And the best part about chores is that once you do a chore you generally don’t have to think about it for at least another day or so.

That’s the role I want exercise to take in my life – a mindless, unpleasant task I can do every day to burn some calories and get the jump on my metabolism, which will no doubt grind to a halt in the next year or so. I’ve also got pretty realistic goals – I’m not so much interested in self improvement or physical perfection as I am in being able to have French fries be a part of my life on a semi-regular basis without getting fat.

I think fitspiration rubs me the wrong way because it’s designed to motivate you to want to change yourself, and I’m at a place in my life right now where I’ve lowered my standards enough that I’m satisfied with who I am and what I look like. I think that right now I’m in about as good of shape as I can ever realistically hope to be in, so I’m really only interested in exercise because I want to preserve this status quo for as long as humanly possible.

Now on the other hand, if fitspirational messages toned it down a bit they’d have a better shot at actually fitspiring me: 

For the past two weeks I’ve been alternating between brisk bike rides and a 7 minute workout I read about in The New York Times that always leaves me lying on the floor of my room gasping for breath, too exhausted to be concerned about how filthy my carpet is. It’s not enough to turn me into Matthew McConaughey, but it is enough to make me feel generally good – and isn’t that what exercising is really all about?  

Prevailing fitspirational wisdom seems to be that my body is a temple and exercise is about respecting it. All I know is that yesterday I drove past a Masonic Temple, and not only was it tens of thousands of square feet, it also had multiple people inside it and was being pressure washed by a group of Mexican custodians. The less like that my body is, the better, I say.

Truman Capps should do more updates where it's necessary to sift through lot of pictures of girls in yoga pants.

Livetweeting The Golden Globes

Hey, you! 

Do you like the Academy Awards, but wish that they were earlier in the year and less relevant?

Do you ever see something happen on TV and think, "I'd love to make a sort of funny remark about that but I just don't have the energy - I wish somebody would do it for me!"

Do you have three hours to kill this evening, starting at 5:00 PST?

Then come on down to @HairGuyLIVE, where I'll be livetweeting this year's Golden Globes with the help of my gossip columnist BFF @SabbaTheGossip! We'll be dishing about the dresses, the celebrities, our love for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the fact that we're still too scared to see Twelve Years A Slave, our picks for the top prizes, and crude remarks about Christina Hendricks' cleavage.

It's going to be the greatest thing I've livetweeted all year. Come and watch!

Truman Capps has never watched the Golden Globes before in his life.

Basketball Diplomacy

If we bring pro sports to North Korea they will DOMINATE the halftime shows. 

I was in elementary school in the mid 1990s, which according to Wikipedia was something of a magical time for the Chicago Bulls. I was as oblivious to pro sports then as I am now, but the Bulls were so popular at school that I still had some sense for the big players. There was Michael Jordan, the guy from Space Jam, Scottie Pippen, who had not been in Space Jam, and then Dennis Rodman, who I always figured was the Bulls’ mascot drunkenly playing with the team.

I’d seen Dennis Rodman on the news a lot – usually in handcuffs, once in a wedding dress – and my parents always spoke of him in the exact same tone they used when the dog had made a mess in the house. “Sophie took a Dennis Rodman in the living room; have we got any more bleach?” What’s more, every third grader in my class thought he behaved like a jackass, and you really need to be a special kind of dipshit for a room full of 9 year olds to think you’re immature.

After his suspension from the NBA in the late 90s, Rodman faded from the public eye for 15 years or so. No doubt frustrated that his dabblings in pro wrestling and reality TV hadn’t raised his public profile back to Chicago Bulls levels, Rodman did what anybody else would do and traveled to North Korea to become best friends with the country’s basketball-loving dictator for life, Kim Jong Un.

This generated a lot of controversy because Kim Jong Un has a pretty good track record of being kind of a dick, what with the famine and corruption and 200,000 people in forced labor prison camps and everything. But over the course of several trips to North Korea in the past year, Rodman has insisted that he’s just trying to ease tensions between the US and North Korea through sports, and that Kim Jong Un is actually a really nice guy once you get past the cult of personality and his fondness for publicly executing his family members.  

Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong Un’s bromance must be pretty strong because yesterday, during a satellite interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Rodman shouted the journalist down for suggesting that he advocate for the release of Kenneth Bae, an American sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea. Profane and near tears, flanked by a group of increasingly mortified NBA players who had accompanied him on this trip, Rodman defended his time in North Korea, saying that his “basketball diplomacy” would eventually open relations between North Korea and the United States.*

*In his defense, he was pretty drunk at the time.  

On some level you just have to admire Dennis Rodman for thinking that basketball is going to be the thing that’ll fix North Korea. For more than half a century the brightest diplomats, political scientists, and statesmen from South Korea, the US, the United Nations, and China haven’t had any luck, but maybe once the people of North Korea watch a former Celebrity Apprentice contestant dunk on their national team a few times they’ll come to their senses and let the capitalism flow in.

Honestly, if I was a North Korean, watching a bunch of NBA guys playing basketball in my country would just make me more angry at America. I mean, 10% of the country starved to death in the 1990s and food shortages continue to this day – making these poor people watch a bunch of American athletes in peak physical condition play a fast paced game of basketball feels sort of like we’re rubbing it in.

“Hey, you know why these basketball players are so tall? Because they’ve had adequate nutrition for their entire lives! Look how fast they can run and high they can jump – I guess regular, balanced meals give you lots of energy! Don’t you wish you could do that? Look, I know you haven’t eaten anything but tree bark for the past two weeks, but check out this layup. Life for you may be a daily struggle to find enough sustenance to keep your body functioning, but these guys are wealthy beyond your wildest imagination purely because they’re good at putting a ball through a hoop.”

Don’t get me wrong – I think sports can be a great way to foster peace between nations.* But I think that calling what Dennis Rodman is doing right now “diplomacy” is being a little bit generous. Really, he’s just taking a vacation in a pretty crappy place – I visited Salem during the holidays and you don’t hear me trying to pass it off as a diplomatic mission. 

*It's also a great way to foster riots, but that's mainly soccer. 

Diplomacy, I think, is usually the work of diplomats, and diplomats are usually not violent alcoholics who used to be married to Carmen Electra. A US-North Korea basketball game could probably be a good step toward peace, but you kind of need both countries to be behind that sort of thing for it to be really effective.

The government of North Korea goes to great lengths to make sure that all of its citizens hate America. A couple of basketball games are no match for a robust and pervasive propaganda apparatus, not to mention 60 years of revisionist history where the United States is responsible for even more travesties than we actually are.

From what I’ve read, the gist of a lot of North Korean propaganda is that Western capitalists are lazy, irresponsible buffoons. Instead of breaking down the barriers between our cultures, I feel like The Worm stumbling around Pyongyang is probably propping them up.

Truman Capps would still love to see a gritty reboot of Space Jam where instead of aliens it's North Koreans kidnapping NBA players.

Placeholder

I had every intention of resuming my regular update schedule today, but I just spent six hours writing something that honestly isn't all that good. I'll take another crack tomorrow.

Twitter Guy

"GUYS WHERE R ALL THE WORMS AT #worms #eatingworms #earlybirdgetstheworm #wormwednesday"

Whenever I try to catalog all the things I hate about Twitter, what usually tops the list is the fact that this website, which seems to have been solely designed for people who want to communicate one or two sentences to a wide audience whilst taking a shit, is now taken so seriously at every level of culture, media, and government that there’s pretty much no chance that it’s just a passing fad. We’re stuck with it. Twitter is important because we made it important. Shame on all of us.

I mean, look at broadcast news. You can turn on CNN and there’s Anderson Cooper sexily talking about some atrocity, and everything feels very somber and journalistic until suddenly he starts rattling off goofy Internet buzzwords that a couple of dorks in Northern California made up less than ten years ago:

“Over six million people were sexually assaulted by porcupines last year, a 14% increase from 2012. If you or someone you know was molested by a porcupine, you can contribute to our reporting by tweeting me at my handle @andersoncooper with the hashtag ‘porcupinerape.’ Throughout the day I’ll be retweeting the most relevant tweets as the hashtag continues to trend.”

If somebody from the 1990s – or for that matter, anyone during my junior year of high school – heard that, they’d probably think he was having an on-air stroke. Somebody call 911! That poor, beautiful man is saying nonsense words and making animal noises!

Except no, he isn’t – it’s almost 2014, and one of the main ways adults communicate now is through a bird-themed social network.

@HairGuyLIVE.

*

Over the past two years, at least half a dozen people have looked me square in the eye and said to me, with the intensity of a family member taking part in a tough-love intervention, “Truman. You need to start tweeting.”

And when I hear that, half of me immediately agrees, and appreciates the fact that this person is so invested in me and what I’m trying to do that they want to give me that sort of advice. But the other half of me – the half that lives in a ramshackle old house at the end of the street and refuses to let neighborhood kids play on its lawn – crosses his arms and grumbles something about how if Twitter was actually important it wouldn’t base most of its terminology off of the sounds birds make.  

It’s because of my crotchety side that I pride myself on being a member of very few social networks. I compulsively photograph my food, but I’m not on Instagram – usually I just send the pictures to my mother, because we’re both foodies and I’d rather be a mama’s boy than a hipster. As an act of defiance I will never join Google+, no matter how much they ruin YouTube trying to make me change my mind. And because I’m not wedding crazy and female, Pinterest isn’t really my deal. I mostly just use Facebook because it gives me everything I’ve wanted in life: A captive audience to whom I can show articles from The Atlantic.

From where I’m sitting, Twitter looks like some bizarre attention-driven economy where several hundred million smartasses scramble to attract as many followers as possible in hopes of getting retweeted and favorited enough to draw even more followers. As popularity contests go, it’s even bigger than high school and only slightly smaller than the method by which the United States chooses its leaders. It’s a social network built entirely on shameless self promotion!

Unfortunately, the only ways to get ahead in Hollywood are shameless self promotion or being an extremely beautiful woman who everybody wants to have sex with. And because a Twitter account is considerably cheaper than a sex change:

@HairGuyLIVE

*

My blog is proof that I am capable of having a thought, fleshing it out, and following it through to its logical (or illogical) conclusion over the course of 1000 or so words with some profanity and creepy comments about Alison Brie scattered throughout. But it doesn’t do me much good in Hollywood because nobody here wants to read 1000 words, I can’t provide an accurate accounting of how many readers I have, and even if I could that number would probably be less than 200, even though I’ve been doing this for six years now.

Personally, I don’t mind that at all – I actually prefer it. This blog lets me tell jokes and share personal anecdotes with a small group of people, some of whom I know quite well, some of whom I haven’t spoken to in years, some of whom I’ve never met because they stumbled on this blog after Googling ‘hairy guys’ or something. It doesn’t matter to me that the vast majority of the Internet doesn’t have the attention span to read the shit I write, because most of the people whose opinions I really care about are already reading it.

But if I want to sway the opinion of someone who might be trying to decide whether he wants to pay me to write for him or not, I need to create a more attractive brand for myself than “Long Dense Updates; Few Fans.” And Twitter, where update length is strictly limited and attention has been turned into a carefully tracked commodity, is the perfect place.

One last time –

@HairGuyLIVE.

It’s the same shit you see here, except less volume and more frequency and it’s on your phone. Sometimes there will be pictures. I’ll probably call @SenRandPaul a dullard a few times. And while I pride myself on having written every single update on the blog stone cold sober, I make no such guarantee for my Twitter feed.  

So know that it hurts my very soul to say this, but you all should follow me on Twitter. And retweet and favorite my tweets when you like them. And tag me, and hashtag me, and Follow Friday me, and Throwback Thursday me, and Tumblr me and Livejournal me, and shower me in emojis and fan me with Napsters and serve me steaming bowls of Usenet.

2014 is the year that I will make you all sick of me.

Truman Capps hopes regular tweeting makes up for his increasingly spotty update schedule.

Let's Keep Duck Dynasty On TV Forever

I first heard Iggy Pop’s 1977 hit single “Lust For Life” in a commercial for Royal Caribbean  Cruise Lines when I was in middle school. It was and is a catchy song, and it seemed to fit pretty well with the happy, energetic people rock climbing and playing basketball on the big happy cruise ship. Next to me on the couch, though, Dad was shaking his head.

“You know this is a song about a guy who’s excited for his heroin dealer to show up, right?” Dad asked. I did not know that, and turning back to the TV I wondered if maybe the rock climbers were actually lying on a dirty mattress in an abandoned apartment in Baltimore and just sharing an unusually vivid hallucination about a cruise ship.

“These companies just appropriate rock and roll songs because they sound fun, but they ignore all the dark stuff that makes those songs what they are,” Dad grumbled, very Dadly.

So Duck Dynasty, then.

Everybody says that Duck Dynasty is the most popular reality TV show of all time, but they’re wrong. Duck Dynasty is obviously extremely popular – which is probably a sign that there’s widespread mercury contamination in America’s water supply or something – but it’s not a reality TV show. By patriarch Phil Robertson’s own admission, most of what happens on the show is set up or arranged in advance by producers. Rumor has it there are even scripts and table reads with the family before they start shooting, which makes it more of a really poorly written and acted sitcom than anything resembling “reality.”

So this family’s zany hillbilly antics, which the nation loves for their down-home authenticity and good Christian values, have actually been manufactured by a team of New York and LA-based reality TV producers, all of whom have no doubt Googled “best place to get cocaine on the bayou” at least once while on set.

But most reality TV is like this. During my short and illustrious career as a PA on a number of C-grade reality TV shows in late 2011 we put a lot of effort into staging events, telling the “talent” how to react to them, and covering our tracks after the fact to try and make it all look authentic.

Part of this is budgetary – to truly document reality, without stopping the proceedings every few minutes for retakes, you need a very large crew to be sure that there’s enough cameras to cover anything that happens at any time. Since basically every crewmember is in a union, that gets really expensive really quick. When you know exactly what everybody’s going to be doing, on the other hand, you don’t have to hire any more crew than you need.

And part of it is because reality is unpredictable – and usually not in the fun, silly way that people tune into these shows to see. The networks airing these shows are beholden to sponsors, and it’s in their best interests to make sure that the “reality” they’re documenting on these shows is friendly enough to make people want to buy things – and in Duck Dynasty’s case there’s also a half billion dollar merchandising empire to protect.

So when Phil Robertson, while talking to a GQ reporter, equated homosexuals with terrorists, or suggested that black people were totally happy in pre-Civil Rights Movement era Louisiana, or explained that he voted for Romney because he’d feel more comfortable walking around Salt Lake City than Obama’s hometown of Chicago, he unwittingly gave Duck Dynasty a long overdue shot of authenticity.

How different are the people who tune into Duck Dynasty on a regular basis from those Royal Caribbean executives? They put a catchy rock song in their commercial because the chorus – Lust for life! Lust for life! – sounds fun when you don’t listen to the other lyrics – With the liquor and drugs! And a flesh machine!

And everybody in America was content to watch a bunch of highly religious backwoods rednecks so long as A&E sanitized all the unpleasant parts of their social, political, and religious views. People in the suburbs wanted to enjoy all the quaint things about this conservative religious white family in the Deep South – accents, beards, guns, hunting, family, good Christian values – without confronting any of the uncomfortable and equally real aspects of that lifestyle, like racism and homophobia. Duck Dynasty viewers were perfectly content to believe that the Robertsons were The Beverly Hillbillies until Phil Robertson made it clear that they weren’t.

If you’re a Duck Dynasty fan and you quit watching it after this fracas, answer me this: What did you think you were watching? What did you think these people believed? You either already figured that they held these beliefs, or you assumed that an extremely religious and conservative family who has intentionally tried to isolate themselves from modern society held nuanced and tolerant views about sexuality and race.

I want Duck Dynasty to stay on the air for a good long time. I want the show to engage with this controversy. I want A&E to quit selectively editing the Robertsons’ life and instead show the whole picture of who they are, inviting viewers to draw their own conclusions about this goofy, eccentric, loving, and prejudiced family.

That would be a TV show that would make people think. And if we know anything about reality TV viewers, it’s that thinking is one of their favorite activities.

Truman Capps would be extremely amused if there was a Duck Dynasty in ancient China.

Places

I wonder, did grandma embroider that DeviantArt watermark on there?

On Saturday I was driving up Ventura Boulevard, sun blazing through my windshield, palm trees towering overhead, cruising past strip malls filled with sushi restaurants and medical marijuana dispensaries, when I had a shocking realization: When I go home tomorrow, I’m kind of going to miss all of this stuff.

I’ve been feeling like a pretty terrible Oregonian recently. It goes beyond my well-documented weather pussification – I now own a jacket that isn’t waterproof, I’ve finally gotten California plates for The Mystery Wagon, and I can’t remember the last time I referred to a freeway using anything other than just a number preceded by the word “the.” And then there’s the issue of what I call “home.”

I’m really sick of all the sentimentality that’s swirled up around the word “home” and transformed it from a versatile noun into fodder for squishy colloquialisms that get embroidered onto pillows and folky songs sung by groups of barefoot, overall-clad hipsters. For as long as I can remember I’ve rolled my eyes when people try to get all poetic about what home “is”, or what it “means.”

My definition of home is a lot more relative. Most of the time when I say the word “home,” I’m referring to wherever I can take my pants off at the end of the day without causing any commotion. It doesn’t get much more complicated than that. “I kind of have to take a dump, but I can wait until we get home.” When I said that on a college band trip the “home” I was referring to was a cramped room at a Holiday Inn Express in Sacramento that I was sharing with three other guys.

 

In college, Portland was my real home – I went home for Christmas, spring break, summer vacation, and at the end of those trips I was always going back to school. While I might have called whatever totally-not-built-to-code apartment I was living in at the time “home,” it was only home relative to campus and its surrounding bars. Eugene wasn’t my home; it was just a stonery cowtown where I was going to college. I always thought of Portland as my home because it was the place I would rather be – I missed it when I was gone.

Last week, while talking to somebody on the phone, I said this:

“I’m heading home on December 15^th, but we should hang out and chop it up when I get home on January 1^st!”

Takeaways:

1)   The phrase chop it up sounds a lot more natural when the drug dealers on The Wire say it, and

2)   I have no idea where my home is anymore.

Which is why, I guess, I found myself driving through the aesthetically unappealing, bike-unfriendly suburban LA sprawl that all Portlanders are expected to look down their nose at, the whole time trying to remember every detail in case I got homesick while at home.

Portland is, hands down, the most beautiful city in the world, and even if it wasn’t it would still be filled with lots of people who I love beyond all reason. Every time I come home to Portland it’s a greatest hits album of friends, family, and poor nutritional choice after poor nutritional choice. Portland will always be my home. But I also really love LA, and a whole lot of the people who live there. And in a lot of ways, LA is more of a home to me than Portland is.

For example, I’ve got no idea what’s new on Portland’s art scene and I’m in the dark on local politics. And God help you if you ask me for directions in Portland, because I really don’t know any of the streets or where they are – I mostly just navigate by using bars and restaurants as landmarks.* I’ve been calling LA home for about half as long as I’ve been calling Portland home, but only in one of those cities can I tell you how to find the freeway. (Although to be fair, it’s actually a lot harder not to find a freeway in LA.)

*“Hang a left at the bicycle-themed craft brewery, drive up past the bar that does the fire breathing stripper show on Wednesdays, turn right at the deep fried tofu food cart and then just keep going until you see the other bicycle-themed craft brewery.”

Now I kind of understand why people go to so much trouble trying to quantify what home is, even if the results usually come out sounding quaint and stupid. Honestly, the more I think about it, the most egregious offender – “Home is where the heart is” – actually kind of makes sense in my situation if you think about it in the most literal sense.

My heart, after all, is inside of me – although I bet my high-cholesterol diet makes it wish it wasn’t – so it goes wherever I do. So when I’m in Portland I’m at home, and when I’m in LA I’m also at home. By that same logic I guess you could argue that I was also at home when I lived in a Nevada brothel for two weeks, but I wish you wouldn’t.

Simply put, I don’t really go home anymore; I’m just bouncing between a couple of great places that I love.

Truman Capps is sad to report that he can give pretty accurate directions in Salem.

A Matter Of Degrees

So far I haven't learned the true meaning of friendship, but the cold may last a few more days.

After an early-fall marching band practice during my senior year at the University of Oregon, one of the freshmen in the trumpet section, who had grown up in California, approached a group of us hardy, Oregon-born upperclassmen, anxiously rubbing his hands together and blowing on them.

“Guys,” he said to us, earnestly. “I can’t feel my fingers. I think I might have frostbite.”

We promptly burst out laughing, because at the time it was 44 degrees and brilliantly sunny, and most of us were wearing light jackets or none at all. This comment was so hysterical to us that we actually turned it into a running joke for the rest of the football season:

“Okay everybody, be sure to bundle up before we get on the motor coach – the driver has the air conditioning on and we don’t want any of you getting frostbite.”

“Whew, almost didn’t make it to rehearsal today. Last night I flipped my pillow over and the other side was so cold I got frostbite in my neck.”

“Don’t touch that beer! It only came out of the refrigerator two hours ago! What, do you want to get frostbite or something?”

By my senior year I had long since committed to the idea of moving to LA after graduation, so every time we made one of these jokes it reinforced the notion in my head that California must be a balmy, subtropical paradise, and when I moved there I would never be cold again for the rest of my life.

Looking back, it wasn’t that I was naïve about the weather in Southern California – I’d been to LA a dozen or so times and was aware that it could get chilly there on occasion. I’d just been so worn down after 22 consecutive Pacific Northwest winters that I wanted to believe it was true.  

Winter in western Oregon has a way of chipping away at your sanity like that. It won’t bury you under ten feet of snow or lay down a thick sheet of ice on all the roads (except that one time in 2004) – it’ll just be really dark, cold, and drizzly nonstop for seven or eight months, which, like certain enhanced interrogation techniques, may not technically be torture but can still do some serious emotional damage.  

Case in point: When I was a junior in high school we got a new band director from out of state who had visited Oregon with his family the previous summer and fallen in love with the clean air and scenery. He quit before the end of the first semester, because after three months of Oregon winter his wife threatened to divorce him unless they packed up everything and moved back to their home state – which, I should mention, was California. 

Perhaps it was because I had such a treasure trove of hilarious anecdotes about Californians being the ultimate cold weather pusses that I didn’t pack any winter clothes for my move to LA. No coats, no sweatshirts, no blankets, no flannel sheets – if it was designed to provide a barrier against low temperatures while simultaneously trapping body heat to maintain warmth, I left it in my closet in Oregon. I was confident that whatever it was that passed for “cold” in California would feel downright pleasant after what I’d grown up with.

Earlier this week I woke up to go on my morning (er, afternoon) bike ride and checked the weather before walking out the door. When I saw that the temperature was 58 degrees I took off my helmet and returned my bicycle to its space behind one of the chairs in the living room, because 58 degrees is way too cold for a bike ride.

Around the house lately I’ve been wearing two sweatshirts – a grey zip-up I bought at Target last November when temperatures began to drop below 60 degrees at night, a white hoodie I brought home from Oregon last Christmas on top of that. When I stepped outside a moment ago I pulled up both hoods at once. It’s currently 53 degrees.

Last night I walked into a bar and used clumsy, numb, half-frozen fingers to pull up the weather app on my phone, which told me that the temperature outside was holding steady at 46 degrees – or, according to that Californian freshman two years ago, two degrees above the temperature at which one gets frostbite.

These temperatures are so severe that people in LA have actually started talking about the weather instead of traffic for once. Newscasters are giving it the full weather emergency treatment, showing a lot of maps of the Southland blanketed by an ominous blue blob that supposedly represents cold temperatures. They’re already calling it The Big Chill.

Meanwhile, everybody in Oregon is laughing at us as they suffer through record low temperatures and snowfall unlike anything I ever saw while I lived there. It was -2 degrees in Eugene yesterday. Negative two degrees!

Meanwhile, everybody in the rest of the country is laughing at Oregon – snow is falling at a rate of one inch per hour in Maryland, and in northern Minnesota they just recorded a low of -35 degrees.  

Before the Crocodile Dundee-style “That’s not cold – this is cold!” circlejerk on Facebook reaches critical mass, I want to offer what I, a former cold weather snob, have come to accept about the winter:

When a person says, “I’m cold,” they’re not saying, “I am colder now than any other human being has ever been before,” they’re saying, “I’m cold.” The temperature anywhere else is irrelevant at that point, because even if it’s much colder in New Hampshire or Antarctica or Monaco that doesn’t make it any less cold where you’re currently standing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go buy a third sweatshirt, because I don’t want to run the risk of getting frostbite when I fly back to Oregon next week.

Truman Capps’ hair does not lock in as much heat as you’d expect.

"Eat My Dick"

Admittedly, airline food tastes a lot like dick anyway.

Over Thanksgiving our hearts were warmed by the touching story of Elan Gale, a reality TV producer who live-tweeted his attempts to mollify “Diane,” an unruly passenger on his flight to LA. First he sent her wine and condescending notes, but when she failed to heed his advice and sent him a snarky note in return, he had no choice but to tell her to eat his dick. Somehow, this didn’t improve her mood, and Gale reported that she slapped him after getting off the plane.

Well, okay, that last part actually didn’t happen. Or the first part, either. Or anything in the middle. After Gale’s livetweeting went viral, a number of commentators began to question the wisdom of spending several hours harassing an obviously upset woman by telling her to eat your dick. On Monday, in the face of mounting controversy, Gale admitted that the whole affair had been a hoax – Diane was not a real person, and telling an imaginary woman to eat your dick is apparently less of a faux pas than telling a real woman to do it.

Now, I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that even though Elan Gale didn’t actually tell a complete stranger to eat his dick on Thanksgiving Day, he’s still a complete fucking asshole regardless.     

I’d love to tell you that I’ve never fantasized about telling a woman to eat my dick purely to upset her, but that’s just not true. I actually spend a fair amount of my day fantasizing about telling people to eat my dick, and while the vast majority of them are men, a number of women also make the cut. Here’s just a partial list of women who I have pictured standing in my room so I can verbally abuse them and tell them to eat my dick:

1)   Senator Dianne Feinstein

2)   Jenny McCarthy

3)   Candy Crowley

4)   Sarah Palin

5)   Nancy Pelosi

6)   Michele Bachmann

7)   Every single anti-vaccine mommy blogger

8)   Betty Draper (seasons 3 through 5 only)

I wouldn’t say that I’m proud of this. In my defense, though, I’ve never even come close to actually telling a woman to eat my dick.* For one thing, I really don’t want anybody eating my dick – it sounds extremely unpleasant – and also that’s just a really nasty thing to say to a woman. Or any person, for that matter.  

*While drunk, or while playing Mario Kart, or while drunk and playing Mario Kart I may have in the past said, “Eat a dick,” but it was always in good fun, and I think the indefinite article takes some of the edge off of it.

Of course, Elan Gale didn’t actually tell a woman to eat his dick, but he really, really wanted the whole Internet to think that he did – so much so that he spent a six hour flight scribbling notes in different handwriting, snapping pictures of them, and making up an entire physical altercation between himself, Diane, and a gate agent in which he got to have the last laugh.

There was kind of a halfassed moral to the whole event – his livetweeting of the thing that he made up ends with the text of his final note to the woman who doesn’t exist:

“If you want to stop being a nasty person, just follow me on Twitter and read all of the nasty things me and my legions of Internet friends wrote about you! Like Gandhi said, ‘An eye for an eye works perfectly, every single time.’”

Gale invested considerable time and energy creating an imaginary situation in which he was the hero for shutting down a stranger’s immature behavior with even more immature behavior of his own. This is the sort of scenario that could only take place in a person’s imagination, because in my experience, if somebody is being rude and disrespectful to people who are politely trying to help her, being rude and disrespectful back to that person is unlikely to make things better for anybody involved.

Honestly, I’m glad for the sake of the flight crew and other passengers that this whole thing was a hoax – it would be bad enough to be trapped on a six hour plane ride with a loud, angry, spiteful woman; the last thing anybody on that flight would want is a narcissistic LA scumbag provoking her the whole time for Internet fame.

I feel like there’s enough real, tangible bad behavior going on in the world that we don’t need attention-seekers inventing more for their own benefit – and especially not on Thanksgiving Day.

C’mon, Elan Gale. That’s pretty trashy, even for someone who is responsible for the continued existence of The Bachelor. Thanksgiving is supposed to be about goodwill and giving people the benefit of the doubt, not encouraging people to tell everybody who gets on their nerves to eat dicks – have you never seen Planes, Trains, and Automobiles!?

People eat a lot of things on Thanksgiving. But dicks should not be one of them.

Truman Capps wants that quote carved on his headstone.

Quarter Century

I stole this image from the website of a road construction and maintenance company in Western Canada that happens to have been established in the same year I was born. My deepest apologies to the Canadian graphic designer I'm ripping off. 

A few minutes before midnight on November 26^th I wandered out of my room to make myself some dinner – because on the bizarre, semi-nocturnal sleep schedule I’ve taken to these past few months, I now eat my evening meal in the middle of the night. My roommates joined me in the kitchen as I applied peanut butter to bread, but our conversation came to a stop when the green luminescent clock on our oven hit 12:00, at which point both of them started alternately high fiving and hugging me, asking if I felt any different now that I was 25.

That’s sort of the go-to ironic question to ask somebody on their birthday, immediately after saying, “Happy birthday!” and before saying, “Well, I’ve got to run, but I just wanted to wish you a happy birthday!” It’s a pretty safe question to ask because we all take for granted that nobody feels inherently different on their birthday than they did the day before. It’s not like your body starts pumping out new chemicals when it realizes you’re wearing a party hat and eating sheet cake; there isn’t some exclusive set of feelings behind a velvet rope with a sign reading ‘YOU MUST BE THIS OLD TO FEEL THESE THINGS.’

This is why I’m so surprised to realize that I actually do feel different now that I’m 25.

*

I’ve written in the past about my mixed feelings regarding my birthday. Because I feel uncomfortable throwing a party in my own honor, and also because I don’t like it when a room full of people sings to me, I’ve made a point of keeping my last few birthdays as low key as possible.

And by and large, I’ve succeeded – there have been no big parties and relatively few choruses of ‘happy birthday.’ My birthday wish for nobody to make a big deal about my birthday almost always comes true because I don’t plan a party and don’t tell people when my birthday is. And, like clockwork, every birthday ends with me sitting alone at my computer, feeling no different than I did the day before – in fact, not feeling much of anything. Every year, I take that absence of feeling to mean that I really just don’t care that much about my birthday, which is all the justification I need to do the same nothing next year.

I have no doubt that I would have spent this birthday eating Indian takeout while watching Deadwood or MST3k were it not for the fact that a bunch of friends and I spent the Saturday before my birthday shooting a script I’d written. Since most of the crew was our friends working for free, I figured the least I could do was throw them a kickass wrap party at my place. By chance, the best day to do it happened to be the day before Thanksgiving – November 27^th – and that’s how I wound up accidentally throwing myself a birthday party.

*

When I was a kid there was an episode of some children’s show – Shining Time Station, I think, or maybe it was Wishbone – that took place on one of the adult characters’ birthday, and he explained to the kids how as you get older birthdays are less about the presents and more about sharing memories and experiences with the people you love. At the age of 5 I wrote off that rather beautiful sentiment as bullshit, because everybody knew that birthdays were all about acquiring the latest and greatest Lego sets. The love of your friends and family cannot be assembled into a pirate ship, which makes it a terrible gift.

And 20 years later I was sitting on my couch, looking at my living room packed with boisterous partygoers and thinking to myself, Holy shit – all these cool, interesting, delightful people are here of their own free will, and while I did promise that there would be a little free booze and cheese dip, it seems like the main reason they came was because they’re my friends. And even if they did only come for the cheese dip, it’s cheese dip I invented and made myself, so if nothing else at least I know I’m really good at making cheese dip.

Five year old me would have been outraged by the gifts I received this year – a couple of photographs, some thoughtful cards, a particularly sweet text message. A dozen tiny yellow plastic pirates could not sail around a bathtub in any of these things, and yet they mean more to me than almost any other gift I’ve received in recent memory.

At one point my cousin and his girlfriend arrived with a birthday cake, and before I knew it candles had been lit and everybody was singing to me. In the past, this was my nightmare – when I was younger I would lie awake the night before my birthday, dreading the moment that I would be forced to try and figure out what facial expression to make as a bunch of people sang and waved burning baked goods in my face.

But this year it didn’t even bug me. Maybe it was because I’d been drinking for three and a half hours at that point. Maybe it was because I was too overwhelmed by the number of people in my life who care about me to feel anything other than a sort of generalized, all encompassing joy. Or maybe it was because I know from experience that my cousin’s girlfriend makes incredible cakes, and I was just too busy being excited to eat this one to go through any of the traditional awkwardness or embarrassment.

Truman Capps is, all things considered, glad that he was born.

With The Help Of His Robot Friends

 Crow, Mike Nelson, and Tom Servo, moments before accidentally destroying the Hubble Telescope on a dare.

Sometimes I get jealous when I read about how easy it is for preadolescent children to pick up and master new things – at that developmental stage a child’s brain is supposedly a big sponge for information, making it far easier for them to learn new languages and skillsets than it is for big, lumbering, stupid teens and adults. Had my parents dragged me to Chinese lessons or hired a college student to teach me how to code when I was a kid, my life could be completely different right now. But instead, I spent countless hours of my childhood watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, which means that the only thing I’m really an expert at now is making wiseass comments during movies.

Although I’ve got tons of warm, fuzzy memories of watching The Muppets as a child, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (or MST3k) remains the puppet show that has had the most profound impact on my life so far. It’s also worth noting that my life so far and MST3k’s life so far are almost the exact same amount of time – the first episode aired on a Minneapolis public access station 25 years ago today.* I was born three days later, probably because my Mom’s womb didn’t have a television and I wanted to watch what would become my favorite TV show.

*“Today” referring to November 24^th, because seemingly the only blogs I can’t finish on deadline are the time sensitive ones, God damn it.

I can’t say for sure when I first saw the show; in my mind, watching silhouetted figures heckling B-movies is just a natural part of life. It must’ve been sometime in the mid 1990s, because in the episodes I watched Mike Nelson had already taken over hosting duties, playing the role of an unlucky temp trapped in space by his mad scientist boss, where he’s tortured by an endless stream of bad movies with only two sassy robots as company.   

Lots of shows are funny, but no show is funny in the way that MST3k is. Soon after Mike Nelson was promoted from head writer to host, the show’s comedy took on a degree of smart, self confident absurdity that was way ahead of its time. My favorite example of this is a season 8 cold open in which Mike finds his robot friends, Crow and Tom Servo, in tears after a childish game gone wrong. As Crow tearfully explains: 

“Mike, we were playing dog and bear, you know? And Servo was chasin’ me, and I ran panicked over logs and through streams, maddened with primal terror, y’know? And I turned and raked my deadly claws against his howling snout, y’know? And I rose to my hind feet, towering, and still bellowing he came and I mewled and spewed gore from my wounds and snot from my flaring wild maw, and- And- And then we were locked like lovers, and then I was engirdled by moiled spotted hound-bodies and my entrails were hanging out and I tried a savage feral roar but alas my force was spent and I died! And Servo took it too far!”

Each episode of MST3k is densely packed with references to movies, TV, advertising, literature, theater, music, and current events of the 1990s, but to the best of the fan community’s knowledge, this monologue isn’t a reference to anything else. It wasn’t lifted from a Faulkner novel as a subtle in-joke for all the English majors in the audience. It was just something the writers thought would be funny – a robot emotionally naïve enough to take a heavy emotional stake in a game called “Dog and Bear” but articulate enough to describe what had happened with extremely vivid, dramatic language.

It’s very likely that you watched that video and thought, “This is stupid and not funny.” You’d probably say the same thing about this extended debate over the relative boldness of Mike’s new barbecue sauce, or the trio’s attempt to create ice sculptures so that their evil captor can try to pass her castle off as a cruise ship. What makes MST3k my favorite show is that the writers were no doubt aware that a lot of people would think these bizarre sketches were stupid and not funny, but they nonetheless fully committed to them because they thought they were funny.

This tactic earned the show a Peabody award, two primetime Emmy nominations for writing, a movie deal, and kept them on the air for eleven straight years – not bad for a no-budget Midwestern puppet show. MST3k didn’t go looking for an audience; they just marched to the beat of their own drum and in time an audience found them. That attitude is why I continue to churn out long form text-heavy blog posts when all evidence suggests that what people really want to see are listicles full of looping .gifs from Mean Girls.

I end almost every day by tuning into a Justin.tv channel that plays a continuous loop of all 197 MST3k episodes and then crawling into bed, watching Mike and the ‘bots mock movies and each other until I fall asleep. There’s just something I find extremely comforting about watching this show. It’s been one of my favorite things since I was a child, and no matter where I am – Portland, Eugene, London, LA, a whorehouse in northern Nevada – it makes me feel like I’m at home.

And it serves as a reminder: You can’t amuse everyone, so you may as well just concentrate on amusing yourself and count anybody else who gets amused as a bonus.

Truman Capps watch out for snakes!

Good Afternoon, Good Evening, And Goodnight

I guess it's about time we talk about this movie.

Elementary school can be a pretty tough time in a person’s life, because kids are both assholes and also prone to groupthink, which gives rise to a lot of pretty brutal teasing. Virtually everybody has some long-repressed memories of getting picked last in PE, or made fun of for their weight, or being followed around by classmates pretending to film them for a TV show.

Come on, you guys remember that last one, right? How kids would run up to you and say shit like, “I put a camera in your lunchbox to record you for the TV show,” or “We’re not really your friends; we’re just playing your friends on your show,” or hold up their hands like they’re holding a camera and say, “I’m a cameraman and you’re on TV!” Remember how at first it seemed kind of fun, but when it continued that way for months and months it got simultaneously less fun for you and more fun for everybody else?

None of you remember that? Seriously?

I guess that means I’m the only one here who was unlucky enough to be named Truman in 1998, when Jim Carrey decided to branch out and start taking dramatic roles.

What really bugs me isn’t that 75% of the people I meet mention The Truman Show in our first conversation; it’s the way they always phrase it: “Have you seen that movie The Truman Show?” As if in the past 15 years I still haven’t set aside two hours to watch a movie with my name in the title. Equally infuriating is how, after I wearily respond, “Yes,” the next question is almost always, “Do people ask you that all the time?”

No, you clever devil – you’re the very first one! Nobody else had ever noticed the parallel between my name and Jim Carrey’s film career until you came along. Congratulations! Here’s a cashier’s check for $11; that should be enough to buy you an extra large bottle of Go Fuck Yourself.

Recently, while browsing through Netflix, I discovered that The Truman Show is now available for instant streaming, because God forbid that movie fade from the public consciousness a little bit or something. Looking at Jim Carrey’s enormous, Joe Biden grin, I realized that the last time I’d seen The Truman Show we had to rewind the tape afterwards before returning it. Maybe all those people asking me if I’d seen The Truman Show weren’t so far off base – while I had seen the movie, I’d definitely watched it fewer times than plenty of people whose names don’t happen to be Truman.

Before starting the movie, I made sure to lock my door and turn the volume down low so that nobody would have the satisfaction of knowing what I was doing. Something about watching it felt vaguely self-serving. “Oh, I’m just going to spend the evening watching a movie about a dorky white guy named Truman with a rather distinctive hairstyle who discovers that the world revolves around him.”

In spite of all the misery The Truman Show has caused me for more than half of my life, I can’t bring myself to hate it. It’s just a really, really good movie. I can’t tell you how much I wish it wasn’t, because then people probably would have forgotten about it by now, but that’s life I guess – sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes Jim Carrey plays a character with your same uncommon first name in a movie and that movie just happens to be a quirky, fascinating piece of social satire about media culture.

It also has the unusual distinction of being way more relevant now than when it came out. When The Truman Show was released the first season of Survivor was still two years away. Today probably 80% of primetime TV consists of camera crews following people around and recording their private, unflattering moments, whether those people are celebrities, athletes, former celebrities, children, people with too many children, people who were recently children who are about to have children, people with the intellect of children, and people involved in the manufacture and distribution of duck calls.

If you happen to be one of the few people who isn’t the subject of a reality TV show there are plenty of do-it-yourself options thanks to smartphones and YouTube. Hell, even if you have an old phone and no Internet access you can still count on the NSA to be an audience for your private moments.

Those kids following me around pretending to record me weren’t just being dicks; they were being dicks and accidentally predicting the future at the same time!

What this means is that it’s very possible that The Truman Show is only going to get more popular as time goes by. That’s unfortunate for me, but I guess if I have to have my name forever attached to a movie it may as well be a good one.

Truman Capps’ show would probably get worse ratings than anything on NBC.

A Life More Ordinary

See, I was hoping for an experience more like this, where you get to rob and threaten innocent minimum wage earners. 

What I like about video games, and Grand Theft Auto games in particular, is that they give me the opportunity to live a reckless, dangerous, exciting life the likes of which I’d never pursue on my own. Recurring gripes on the blog aside, I’m pretty happy with the life I’m living, but sometimes when I get down about how much time I spend in my apartment staring at a screen it’s fun to fire up my PS3 and pretend to be somebody more exciting – and way easier than actually going out and being somebody more exciting.

Grand Theft Auto Online is the multiplayer component of Grand Theft Auto V – it sets you and up to 15 other players loose in the vast open world of GTAV to tackle difficult missions together, or coordinate convenience store robberies, or race against one another, or go skydiving, or play tennis, or find rare and exotic cars, and to date none of that ever happens in GTA Online because everybody is too busy running around machine-gunning each other to death at first sight.

Remember in Ghostbusters when that asshole from the EPA forces them to shut down their containment unit, thereby releasing hundreds of angry poltergeists into New York City? That’s basically what Grand Theft Auto Online is. It’s created a vast playground full of opportunities for dickery and populated it with the mature, well-reasoned luminaries who comment on YouTube videos.

I experienced this firsthand. After my avatar “arrived” in Los Santos (the game’s equivalent of LA) and completed a few tutorial missions I was set free to do as I pleased. While cruising toward a nearby race in the game’s version of a 2011 Dodge Challenger, a thousand or so virtual dollars in my virtual pocket, I spotted a white blip ahead of me on my radar, representing another player heading in the same direction I was.

I stepped on the gas and he started to come into view ahead of me at the end of the street, driving some kind of SUV. Pulling my headset mic down to my mouth, I said, “Hey, can you hear me? Are you heading to that race over by the airport?”

The SUV spontaneously whipped into a 180 degree handbrake turn, throwing up a huge cloud of white tire smoke.

“Oh, showing off, huh?” I said, growing closer. “Well, those sorts of tricks won’t serve you very well when we’re on the racetra-”

His Uzi chattered and a hail of tracers plowed through my car’s windshield and straight into my avatar’s face. My character’s lifeless body must have fallen against the horn, because it blared incessantly as my Challenger coasted off the road and smashed into a bus bench. While waiting to respawn I watched my attacker scurry over, pull my body out of the driver’s seat, and speed off in my car.

I respawned a few blocks away, standing in an urban plaza that was the spitting image of Pershing Square. I was completely willing to write off my first brush with death as harmless shenanigans until I saw that the thousand virtual dollars I’d earned playing the tutorial races were no longer in my pocket – as it turns out, any money you don’t deposit into an in-game bank can be stolen from your corpse when you die.

I ran for the street, looking to jack a car so I could hunt this guy down and get my $1000 back. On the way there I decided to get into the spirit of things with some trash talk.

“Hey xXquestforglory69Xx – that was my car and my $1000, and I’m going to find whatever rock you’re hiding under and kick OH FOR CHRISSAKE!” I yelled as another player – this one clad in a bikini with bright blue hair – gunned me down with an assault rifle from halfway up the block.

I respawned further away, this time in the relative safety of a golf course in faux-Beverly Hills. I took a moment to glance at my character’s bank account information, only to find that in addition to having had my $1000 cash stolen, most of the $2500 in savings my character had started with were gone too, because every time I died a substantial hospital bill was debited to my account.

Grumbling something about how this wouldn’t be a problem if the game had been set in Canada, I had my character jump a low retaining wall and jog toward the nearby facsimile of Rodeo Drive so I could boost a car and exact my now-cold revenge. On my way toward a parked sports car, I heard sirens blaring nearby and spotted a white dot on the radar barreling in my general direction.

“Oh no.” I muttered, diverting my course away from the car and toward a cobblestoned pedestrian path between expensive shops instead, hoping to avoid whichever homicidal maniac was in the area.

Moments later, a bright orange city bus driven by another player screeched around the corner, three police cruisers in hot pursuit.

“No no no no no.” I chanted, my thumb pummeling the X button to make my character sprint. By this point, the psychotic bus driver had spotted me on his radar, and as I watched him come careening down the street towards me I knew exactly what he wanted to do.

“NonononononononononononononoNONONONONO…” I whimpered, sprinting up the pedestrian path with several terrified computer controlled civilians. Running was my only choice; my character’s one weapon was a handgun weaker than most four letter words.

Behind me, the bus mounted the sidewalk, mowing down multiple virtual shoppers and lamp posts before finally slamming into me, killing me and dragging my lifeless corpse for a few meters before depositing it in a bloodstained heap on that staircase from Clueless.

 Riiiiiight about there.

In the month or so since then my luck has improved a bit. By perfecting my defensive driving abilities and memorizing lots of escape routes, I was able to stay alive long enough to earn just enough cash to buy my avatar an in-game apartment, which basically serves as a safe zone where you can store your cars and nobody can kill you. There’s a kitchen with some red wine in it, which makes your screen blurry after your character has had a couple drinks, and a big screen TV where you can watch what the other homicidal maniacs on the server are doing from a safe distance. 

Best of all: No carpet to worry about!

Now whenever I fire up Grand Theft Auto Online my character spawns in the safety of his apartment, protected from random vehicular homicide. More and more often, I really don’t take my character that far outside of his apartment – even with better weapons I’m usually preyed upon by 13-year-olds who have invested way more time in this game than I have, and there still doesn’t seem to be much interest in any of the cooperative play that the game was designed for.

I’ve only played a couple times in the past month, but both times my avatar – a daring, ruthless criminal mastermind the likes of which I would never be – just meanders into the kitchen, drinks a couple glasses of virtual wine, and then slumps in front of the TV to watch what other players are doing.

Either art copies life or I’m just so lame that it’s contagious.

Truman Capps has not found a way to eat peanut butter in game yet.

Manic Carpet Ride

I'm surprised this carpet isn't dirtier, what with all the sand and adventuring and proximity to un-housebroken tigers.

As of the first of this month, I’ve been living in my apartment for over a year now, and there hasn’t been a single day that I haven’t woken up, glanced at the floor of my room, and thought to myself, “I really need to do something about this fucking carpet.”

I love love love my apartment. The past year that I’ve lived here has been fantastic, and I attribute a lot of that to the fact that I’m living in a bug free apartment where I have my own private bathroom – because you haven’t truly lived until you’ve taken a dump with the door open while your roommates are home.

I’ve taken a lot of care to make my room something of a sanctuary for myself – a quiet, clean place I can retreat to after a stressful day of returning a DVD to the video store and going to Baja Fresh. On the rare occasions when I actually have done a hard day’s work, I look forward to coming home to my room, with its movie posters that I actually bothered to get framed and its color coordinated Ikea furniture.

What I don’t look forward to is the cumulative hour or so I spend each night glancing at my carpet every few minutes, thinking, “I just really should do something about this fucking carpet.”

If only the carpet in my room could talk, I’m sure it would tell some pretty crazy stories about the things it’s seen over the years. Looking at it, I’d guess that most of those stories would include subplots about tenants who never wipe their feet and frequently drop sticky things on the floor. That’s the tragedy of a carpet’s life – from day one, gravity is working against it.

I suppose there are probably dirtier carpets in the world, but that’s not important to me – what’s important to me is that the carpet I have is dirty, and as you’re all no doubt aware I have a really hard time existing in close proximity to things that are dirty.

Every night I’ll be on the Internet or writing or watching TV or… Actually, yeah, those are the only three things I ever do.

So I’ll be on the Internet or writing or watching TV and every half hour or so I’ll stop what I’m doing to take a look at my carpet, as if to just confirm that, yes, it’s still dirty, it hasn’t gotten appreciably dirtier in the past half hour, but I still need to do something about it.

I vacuumed a lot at first, but the cheap-as-shit vacuum in our apartment was mostly good at pushing the lint and filth around on the carpet around rather than actually sucking it up. Going to plan B, I went back to Target and bought the two cheapest rugs I could find to cover the dirtiest parts of my carpet. Sadly, the rugs aren’t big enough to cover every stain and blemish*, and even the ones that I can’t see still bother me because I know that they’re there being dirty even if I can’t see them. It’s like The Telltale Heart meets an episode of Monk.

*”I really need to do something about how small these fucking rugs are.”

When I was working full time I often thought about renting a steam cleaner, or hiring a carpet cleaning service, or having the carpets replaced, or setting small controlled fires to clear the worst of the damage, but every one of these solutions would’ve required me to spend half my weekend moving all the furniture out of my room and then back in. Since I was short enough on free time as it was back then, I just kept on procrastinating, and spent what little leisure time I had staring ruefully at my dirty carpet.

Now I’ve got all the time in the world and no job, but I’m not in any hurry to start spending money getting my carpets steam cleaned when that same money could be used for more pressing concerns, like food and bimonthly trips to the mechanic so he can bolt whatever has fallen off The Mystery Wagon back on. My car and my carpet are equally dysfunctional, but I don’t need my carpet to get to and from Trader Joe’s – I’m pretty sure it’s not one of those flying ones, anyway.

Talking to my parents on the phone last week, the issue of my 25^th birthday at the end of the month came up, and Mom asked me if there was anything I particularly wanted. Every other year when this question comes up I hem and haw and ultimately don’t have an answer, but this year I happened to be gazing at a particularly dark patch of dirt on my carpet when she asked.

I was shocked to hear myself say, “Actually, I need a new vacuum cleaner, because the carpets in my room are pretty gross,” I managed to cut myself off before I also requested a LensCrafters gift certificate or season 3 of NCIS on DVD.

My parents, bless them, granted my critically lame birthday wish, and earlier this week I came home to find that UPS had delivered a brand new Dyson vacuum that is pretty much the carpet cleaning equivalent of Seal Team Six. It rolls and pivots on a single, Chip Kelly-sized ball for optimal maneuverability, sucks harder than Terminator Salvation, and did more for my carpets in ten minutes than I did in a whole year of pensive worrying. 

Mind you, it still looks pretty bad. (This would've been more effective if I'd thought to take pictures of the carpet BEFORE I vacuumed it.)

This is not how I saw myself entering my mid 20s – asking my parents for household appliances as gifts, getting excited about the engineering of vacuum cleaners, attaching my sanity to the relative cleanliness of my carpets. It’s not particularly glamorous, but I can’t argue with the results – now, looking at my carpet gives me a certain sense of accomplishment. “Good for me for doing something about that fucking carpet.”  

Despite my best efforts, adulthood just might be sneaking up on me.

Truman Capps’ definition of ‘adulthood’ is apparently, “Wring your hands over a problem until your parents bail you out.”

Video Days

"Blockbuster, the video rental chain that's been pummeled by the rise of digital and on-demand entertainment, said it will close its 300 remaining U.S. stores by early January." - Chicago Tribune, 11.6.13

There was a Hollywood Video in the strip mall on Commercial Street, near the intersection with Kuebler Boulevard, where Mom would take me sometimes if I wanted to rent a movie while we were out doing errands or on the way back from a trumpet lesson. Their selection wasn’t especially good, but they could usually be counted on to get video games and new releases sooner than the competition. I rented Fighting Force 64 there and racked up a good $5 in late fees playing it.

There was another Hollywood Video a few more miles down Commercial, across the street from a Fred Meyer and next door to a Taco Bell. We didn’t go to that one as much because it shared a cramped, heavily congested parking lot with several other businesses. Mom called it The Parking Lot of Doom, and refused to take me there unless I absolutely couldn’t find the video I was looking for anywhere else.

(My Main Bro Alexander’s family had a much warmer relationship with that particular Hollywood Video than I did. Once, in middle school, he bragged to me, “They love us at that Hollywood Video. We had like $30 in late fees and they just made them all disappear.” I was jealous then and I’m jealous now.)

But the video store I went to the most occupied a spacious end unit in a strip mall a mile or so from my house. It was called American Family Video, and most summers throughout my childhood about the only exercise my fat ass ever got was walking there five or more times a week.

*

I don’t know if American Family Video was actually a big location, or if it was a regular sized store and all my memories of it were just created when I was a smaller person. What I do know is that when you walked through the door, past the loss prevention scanner and the counter that ran along the entire front of the shop, it felt like the biggest, most exciting place in the world, full of entertainment possibilities. 

 

 Long, white balsawood shelves ran back into the store, creating aisles that were a veritable art gallery of home video box covers. Delta Force 2 and Invasion USA always caught my eye, yet for some reason I never rented them. The box for Hellraiser scared the crap out of me, but I still bravely visited the HORROR! section every time I went so I could steal a glance at Jennifer Love Hewitt’s enormous breasts on the cover for I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. The SPECIAL INTEREST! section, home to titles like American Pimp and Legends of the Kama Sutra, was always beyond my comprehension. 

 

Normally I stuck to the ACTION! and COMEDY! sections, which occupied two or three long aisles on the lefthand side of the store adjacent to the NEW RELEASES! wall. This was where the Austin Powers movies were. Commando. Independence Day. It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World. The Blues Brothers. Three Amigos! The Fifth Element.

Regular videos came in sturdy, dark blue plastic cases, and for a couple bucks you could take one home for five days. The cases for new releases were an aggressively ugly shade of orange, and they only let you have those for a day or two at a time. Whenever you rented something they’d have you sign an almost comically huge receipt – nearly the size of the VHS tape you were getting – and give you a copy to take home. Ten receipts got you a free rental, and for years my family collected our receipts in stacks on top of the TV.

*

Over the years, Alexander and I would routinely spend an hour or more circling the store, picking up movies and holding impassioned debates about whether to rent them or not. One summer we spent the better part of a week arguing, both inside and outside of the video store, about whether we were going to watch Brotherhood of the Wolf. (We wound up watching Blood Simple instead. I loved it, but I don’t think Alexander gave it a chance.)

One week in 6^th grade I rented The Living Daylights and, for reasons I will never fully understand, watched it after school every day for five days until I had to return it. (To this day I consider it a criminally underrated Bond film, as well as vastly superior to License to Kill.)

One time I had rented some other action movie that happened to have the trailer for Cliffhanger at the beginning. I was so blown away by the trailer that I ejected the tape and ran back to the store to rent Cliffhanger instead. I was extremely disappointed – during the two mile round trip to and from the store I’d built up some unrealistically high expectations that no Stallone film could live up to. I have distrusted trailers ever since.

That being said, this remains one of the greatest trailers ever made. 

*

The DVD! section appeared in the early 2000s and metastasized over the years until the DVDs were sharing the same shelf space as VHS tapes. Not long after that, the DVDs didn’t have to share anymore. The few VHS tapes that remained were relegated, along with their big clunky boxes, to the CLASSICS! section, which had become the catch-all for movies that hadn’t been reissued on DVD yet.

Around the time I entered high school my Dad, ever the early adopter, signed us up for a clever service that would mail us DVDs in bright red envelopes and let us keep them for as long as we wanted before returning them. Their selection was far beyond anything any of the video stores in Salem could offer us, and in time the receipts on top of our television yellowed with age, and then got thrown away.

*

American Family Video closed late in the summer of 2007, just before I left for college and Alexander left for basic training. They held a firesale to get rid of all their stock, and we drove out to pick over the remains of ten years of childhood memories. I bought Road to Perdition, The Squid and the Whale, and Punch-Drunk-Love for less than $15, total.

They were selling the big white shelves for $20 a pop. By the time we got there somebody had already bought the cardboard cutout of Minnie Mouse they kept in the corner near the FAMILY! section.

*

As much as I love being able to access all eight seasons of Wings instantly from my PS3, part of me is always going to miss the days when entertainment made you come to it. Video stores were the last hurrah for our hunter-gatherer roots – entertainment was something you had to go out, find, and bring home.

Maybe it’s raining. Maybe the store doesn’t have your first choice. Maybe their parking lot is a disaster. Is the store even open right now? These first world problems somehow made movies that much better, because you had to overcome something before you could spend the rest of the day on the couch.

Truman Capps was never a Blockbuster guy.

The Wire

 If you haven't seen the show you may not know this, but these are two of the greatest TV characters ever.

Whenever I hang out with my friends at a bar or a party or in somebody’s living room, sooner or later we wind up talking about what TV shows we’re watching – that, probably, is why I’m friends with those particular people. Everybody will gush about whatever it is they’re marathonning at the moment – Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Community, Homeland – and everybody else in the group who’s been watching those shows too will join in the gushing.

Sooner or later somebody will turn to me and say, “So Truman, what are you watching?” And these past few months it’s been my sincere pleasure to answer that question by saying ever-so-nonchalantly, “Oh, I’ve just been watching The Wire.”

The Wire is a police procedural that ran for five seasons on HBO. Practically nobody watched it, but since its conclusion in 2008 the show has garnered such pervasive critical acclaim that the only thing most people do know about The Wire is that it’s supposedly the best TV show ever made.

What this means for me is I get to be incredibly smug as everybody asks me about the show like I’ve just gotten back from Shangri-La, or a weekend of playing flag football with Jesus.  

“I’ve heard great things about that show – I really want to watch it!”

Well, you really should. It’ll completely change your outlook on life and American society – at least, it did for me.

“Isn’t it Barack Obama’s favorite show?”

Oh – you hadn’t heard?

“Everyone says that show is incredible but I’ve never gotten around to watching it…”

Why not? Don’t you want to appreciate good television?

The reason that lots of people want to watch The Wire but haven’t gotten around to it is because it’s a really fucking hard show to watch. It’s slow paced, the story is extremely complicated, there are well over 100 recurring characters, it’s depressing as all hell, there’s so much street slang that you need to watch it with subtitles and an Urban Dictionary search window close at hand, and most of the main characters spend their time trying to navigate crushing bureaucracy instead of getting into shootouts or car chases. Hell, the vast majority of the police characters never once fire their weapons in the entirety of the series.

Don’t get me wrong – the show is exciting, enjoyable, full of fascinating characters, darkly hilarious, and deserving of all of its praise, but it is not fun to watch.

Even at its darkest and most depressing, Breaking Bad was always fun in some sense – Walt and Jesse had a very enjoyable way of solving problems, even if it wasn’t necessarily enjoyable for the two hundred-odd people who got killed along the way. That was what that show was about: Walt and Jesse solving problems with science and violence.

The Wire is a very different show. It’s not meant to be fun to watch – series creator and asshole-genius David Simon has said as much in multiple interviews – but rather to showcase everything that’s wrong with the city of Baltimore and, by extension, America.

Spoiler alert: There are a lot of things wrong with the city of Baltimore and America.

Watching TV has never been this much work for me before. Even when I was in the thick of the series, fully wrapped up in the show’s world and obsessed with its characters, I still had to psych myself up to watch an episode. This is because terrible things happen to good people on virtually every episode of The Wire, and some nights it was more appealing to just not watch an episode and spare myself the emotional trauma at the expense of not knowing what happens next.

Honestly, The Wire is less of a TV series and more of a pilgrimage. It requires your full attention – there are no flashbacks and precious little exposition, so you have to listen closely and be prepared to rewind, and forget about trying to surf Facebook while you watch. It also requires patience – the Baltimore Police Department doesn’t even start running the eponymous wiretap until halfway through the first season.

But like any good pilgrimage, in good time your efforts will be rewarded.

Well, actually, that might not be true – I’m not an expert on pilgrimages. For all I know, thousands of people could’ve gone on pilgrimages and thought they were bullshit afterwards. I’ve never been on a pilgrimage and only have a conceptual idea of what one is so I probably shouldn’t be comparing it to a TV show about cops and heroin dealers. Let’s try this:

The Wire does not go out of its way to be welcoming or accessible, but if you commit to it and watch it the way it wants you to and put up with some of the slower season 2 subplots about the stevedores, it will absolutely draw you in and entertain the shit out of you with an epic story about complex, well drawn characters on both sides of the law.

Better still, when you’re done you can join that elite, hallowed society of people who’ve watched The Wire and say ostentatious things like, “If more people watched The Wire, America would be a better place,” or “I think if we sent six million box sets of The Wire to Haiti we could really make some changes down there.” 

Truman Capps hopes to Christ somebody reads this and watches The Wire so he can have somebody to talk about The Wire with.

Dog Stories: Into Barkness

And the award for "Best Blog Title I've Ever Thought Of" goes to...

Looking back, I can see how some of my previous stories about my interactions with dogs would give the impression that I don’t like dogs very much. This isn’t true – I love dogs, broadly speaking. What leads to trouble is the fact that most dogs seem to delight in doing things that upset to me to my very core – pooping indoors, barking like crazy for no reason, eating garbage, eating poop, rolling in poop… Look, the fact of the matter is, if you spend a lot of time seeking out excrement to consume or cover yourself with, we’re just not going to get along – that’s true no matter what species you happen to be.

There are some dogs – the ones who don’t do six disgusting things before breakfast – who I really like for their obedient, good natured, playful demeanor. But there is only one dog that I truly love, moreso perhaps than any other creature I’ve ever met.

That dog is my friend John’s four-year-old homosexual Boston Terrier, Milo.

This update features approximately .01% of all the pictures and videos I've taken of this dog. 

You know how every love song takes on a completely new meaning when you’re in love? Well, every Purina commercial I used to scoff at – “Corn!? Chicken!? It’s a dog, for Chrissake, it will eat literally anything!” – suddenly makes sense. A $40 bag of dog food that’s probably more nutritious than anything I’ve eaten this month is an understandable expenditure, provided that the dog that’s going to be eating it is Milo.

Flag on the play! Unnecessary cuteness.

Unlike larger dogs bred for hunting, Milo has no instinctual desire to cloak himself in the scent of other animals, which means that he doesn’t eat or roll in shit. Unlike smaller dogs bred for purses, Milo almost never barks, and is neither super skittish nor afflicted with ‘little dog syndrome.’ He’s just a quiet, well behaved, playful little guy who doesn’t do that many disgusting things and is extremely happy basically all the time.

Except for when he's maintaining a laserlike focus on food.

Milo is proof that it’s possible to be so damn ugly that you come full circle and wind up being adorable. His eyes bulge so much that they actually protrude from his skull, and because of the weird shape of his nasal passages he’s constantly snorting and sneezing, which means that it’s basically impossible for him to sneak up on anything. Sometimes Milo’s nose gets plugged up, which poses a problem because Milo doesn’t seem to understand that he can breathe through his mouth. Whenever it happens he starts wheezing loud enough to rattle the windows, and John has to drop everything to pry his mouth open so he can get a breath.

I probably could have just posted this and skipped writing the blog.

Milo is also gay. I’m not just saying this to be flippant or because I’m exaggerating something for comedic purpose – Milo tries to mount and hump a goodly number of the other male dogs he meets, perhaps because he wants to show the world that being neutered hasn’t slowed him down.

"HeyheyheyheyHEYHEYHEYHEYHEY!"

Everybody loves and supports Milo no matter what, but recently he’s proven to be the aggressive, predatory homosexual that Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann seem to be so scared of.

When one of our friends brought her tiny Chihuahua, Luigi, to John’s Fourth of July party, Milo’s reaction was immediate. His ears perked up, he started sneezing faster, and his eyes bulged so hard that they developed a red tinge around the edges from the strain. You could call it love at first sight, except that it wasn’t – Milo just really wanted to fuck that dog. 

 

Hungry Like The Terrier. 

Luigi is tiny and skittish, characteristics that made him completely defenseless against Milo, who is lean and seriously committed. Within three minutes of Luigi arriving at the party we had to pull Milo off of him, Luigi yelping and whimpering, Milo’s face contorted into his wide, crazy grin, eyes burning with lust. 

 

Let that sink in.

We separated them for a few minutes, gave Milo a good scolding, and went back to our revelry for a few minutes until Luigi started yelping again and we had to run back in to pull Milo off of him. This cycle continued for the next eight hours, and at no point did Milo show any sign of growing tired or giving up. He’s like the Terminator of gay dogs. 

"It can't be reasoned with! It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear!"

We were all sitting around in the living room as the evening wore down when suddenly Luigi came scampering around the corner, howling and wailing, Milo in hot pursuit and gaining fast. Luigi streaked past all of us, making a beeline for his owner, Julienne. She jumped to her feet and reached out to scoop him up and get him out of Milo’s range.

Luigi leapt forward and Julienne managed to catch him by his front legs. As she hoisted him up into the air, though, Milo jumped as well and wrapped both of his front legs around Luigi’s lower torso, dangling off of him like he was the last chopper out of Saigon, his furious erection on display at eye level for all of the party guests. Once we’d pried the two loose, Julienne decided it would probably be best for Luigi to go home. 

You dog, you.

I didn’t know that dogs could wrap their front legs around things. I was fully unaware that dogs’ front legs had the necessary joints to perform that sort of action until I saw Milo doing it, swinging like a pendulum from Luigi’s hindquarters, amorously gagging on his spit all the while.

Really, that sort of surprise is kind of emblematic of my whole relationship with Milo. I didn’t know that dogs could have mood swings. I didn’t know dogs had audible farts. I didn’t know that walking my friend’s dog when he had to stay late at work could be the high point of my day. But then, I met Milo. 

The best part is, he’s not my dog. He’s John’s dog. Two days ago John told me he woke up to the sound of Milo throwing up, eating it, and throwing the same stuff up again. It was a disgusting thing that I heard about but didn’t have to see in person or clean up, which is probably why I’m not too bothered by it. 

Dramatic zooms make everything better. (Feat. John)

This, I think, is proof that while I like dogs, I’m not currently cut out to own one. Being Milo’s weird uncle, on the other hand, is just the right amount of dog for me.

Truman Capps will lose his shit if he ever meets a human named Milo.

Agents

 "What would you say is the... Target audience for this script, Mr. Anderson?"

I think the movie Barton Fink is generally unbearable, but one scene in particular redeems the movie for me. When the pretentious and neurotic playwright Barton Fink bumps into his literary idol W.P. Mayhew (a boozy, irreverent F. Scott Fitzgerald analog played by Frasier’s dad), the two strike up a conversation about writing that perfectly describes why I do it:

Barton Fink: “I’ve always found that writing comes from a great inner pain. Maybe it’s a pain that comes from a realization that one must do something for one’s fellow man – to help somehow to ease his suffering. Maybe it’s a personal pain. At any rate, I don’t believe good work is possible without it.”

Mayhew: “Mm. Well, me, I just enjoy making things up.”

I am incredibly passionate about making things up and I pretty much always have been. I think a lot of the reason I have so much trouble with numbers is because I daydreamed through a lot of elementary school math lessons and as a result have a pretty unstable foundation of math skills.

I remember the day in fourth grade that I doomed myself to never fully understand fractions. I remember the word ‘FRACTIONS’ written on the board, I remember my teacher beginning to explain to the class what fractions were, and then I remember an extensive fantasy I had about how cool it would be if my best friends and I all had dune buggies that we could race and use to fight aliens. Eight years later I got half the math questions on the SAT wrong.

Sitting around making stuff up is clearly all I want to do with my life, which is why I think writing is a good career choice for me – that and the fact that it rewards people who spend a lot of time indoors and sitting down, which happens to be my favorite combination of location and body position.

After two years of sustained, concentrated making stuff up I’ve finally finished two TV pilots. Normally, this is the point in my writing process where I say, “Wow, these are great! I guess I should figure out how to sell them!” and then put them on my shelf and forget about them forever while I start writing something new.

I’m really good at writing stories, but I’m terrible at doing anything with them afterwards. It’s not that I don’t want to see my work come to life; it’s just that convincing somebody to invest a bunch of time and money and energy into something that I thought of requires extensive and well coordinated self promotion, which, like fractions, is something I find far less interesting than sitting around making stuff up. I’d rather be dreaming up new stories than begging complete strangers to read my old ones.

Unfortunately, I made the questionable choice of moving to Los Angeles specifically so I could make a career out of selling things that I made up. The fun part is over. I need an agent.

I’ve avoided the agent-getting process so far because I’ve always felt like it was a stereotypically LA thing to do, like yoga, or not rolling your eyes when somebody talks about yoga. It seems like every creatively minded person in town is on a quest to find an agent – or a better agent – and maybe it’s some deep-seated hipster instincts I picked up living in Portland but I don’t want to join the herd.

The problem is that an agent is the only way that my scripts will go from things I made up to things that actually get made. Right now I could have written the best two pilots in the world (I haven’t) and it still wouldn’t mean anything because accolades from my parents and writing buddies aren’t enough to get production companies to read them.

As a matter of policy, pretty much every production company only reads scripts that come to them from agents. To get an agent, I need to find a talent agency that’s currently looking for new writers to represent and send my scripts to them instead. As I’ve found out, there are a number of talent agencies that will now only read scripts that come to them from managers. The entertainment industry has really maximized the number of rejections you can receive.

Even just trying to figure out which agencies I might want to get rejected by is difficult because a lot of them have websites like this. Do not adjust your browser; that’s actually what their website is. No submission guidelines, no ‘About us’ section, no accolades from clients – just a big logo, as if to say, “Fuck you for wanting to pursue a career in entertainment.”

I mean, the whole reason to have a website is so that potential customers can access information about your business! The only information I get from this website is that an entity called ‘Benderspink’ exists somewhere on Earth.

Maybe the real reason I’ve lollygagged on getting an agent is because, like fractions or dating, it’s a largely fruitless uphill battle. These agencies have given every indication that they don’t want my business – they’ve built walls out of bureaucracy and cryptic web design to make it more difficult for clients to find them. I guess it’s not hipstery, nonconformist rebellion – it’s just that I really hate when people play hard to get.

Of course, if it really pissed me off that much I could get rid of my apartment, pack my bags, move back home and get a job as a cashier at the Honeybaked Ham at Salem Center. It’s not like I’m the only guy who likes making things up; the world is not in danger of running out of neurotic writers with poor fashion sense. The agencies put those walls there so that people will climb them; the ones who make it to the other side are the ones who are really serious about this.

That said, please note that the website for a Honeybaked Ham kiosk at a mall in suburban Oregon furnishes way more information about the business than the website for a world class talent agency. I’m just saying, is all.

Truman Capps wants any Benderspink employees reading this update to know that he totally wrote this on opposite day.