Check It

"It's a hard-knock life for us..." 

I didn’t get angry when I read TIME’s reprint of the op-ed written by 19-year-old Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang, in which he bravely takes a stand for white men everywhere by decrying the notion that white privilege exists. Part of that was because, as a privileged white male myself, it was kind of interesting to hear somebody try to stick up for us, even if all of his arguments were ill informed and hypocritical. But mostly, I just felt sorry for him, because Tal Fortgang sounds a lot like I did when I was a 19 year old with an opinion column.

If you ever find yourself holding a college newspaper, do yourself a favor and steer clear of the opinion section. Flip the paper over and start doing the back page Sudoku instead. If you’re really interested in hearing what the opinion columnists have to say, find the paper’s masthead, write down all of their names, wait five years, Google those names, and read whatever they’re writing then. I promise you it’ll be much, much better than what they were writing when they were undergrads at a college paper – and the writers will probably be very thankful that you avoided their early stuff, too.

I applied for an open opinion columnist position at my college paper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, when I was 19. I had been writing this blog for a year or so and although at the time I had little interest in print media or research or current events or even journalism itself, I figured that having an opinion column would be a good way to expose a greater audience to the overwrought, wordy bullshit I was writing at the time and drive traffic to my blog. I got the job because nobody else applied.

I wrote a lot of crap. I packed my columns with big words because at the time I thought it made me sound smarter, I halfheartedly supported my opinions with weak, hastily thought out arguments, and my research and fact checking were so poor that once the paper had to issue a retraction on my behalf. I got a bunch of hate mail, a few scathing write-ups in the campus conservative paper, and a parody of one of my columns – written by someone else under my name – published in the campus’s humor magazine, in which I was skewered as a spoiled, arrogant kid who didn’t know what he was talking about.

The following year, I didn’t reapply for the job.

I wasn’t a bad writer – my writing at the time just happened to be bad, because I was still learning how to write and things have to be bad before they can get better. It was an embarrassing, humbling year, but I learned a lot and I think I’m a much better writer now because of it. I don’t like knowing that there’s bad work out there with my name on it, but I take comfort in the fact that, no matter how ill informed my opinions were or how confusing my prose was, it was only read by a few thousand people. And even they didn’t care too much because they knew college op-eds are mostly bullshit anyway.

Tal Fortgang’s column reminds me a lot of the ones I used to write – full of impressive vocabulary, poorly thought out reasoning, and a heaping spoonful of self righteousness. There are a few differences, of course: Tal goes to a much better school than I went to, he appears to be the sort of college Republibro who starts every argument with “I’m a libertarian, so…”, and for some reason his clumsy, racially charged column was republished in one of the most widely circulated magazines in the world.

In his column, Tal explains that he’s sick and tired of being told by his nonwhite classmates to “check his privilege” because his race and gender have had no bearing whatsoever on his success. He feels that his only privilege was that his hardworking grandparents “…[came] to a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character."  

That claim is mind-blowingly ignorant. The only way you can possibly think that the United States is a colorblind meritocracy where anybody who works hard can succeed is if you ignore pretty much every available statistic about poverty, income inequality, education, violence, law enforcement, incarceration, and voting rights. 

Tal’s grandparents doubtless worked very hard to build his family’s fortune, but they had the distinct advantage (or even, I don’t know, privilege) of being white people in a society run by white people. Nobody handed them anything on a silver platter, but nobody lynched them or organized violent mobs to keep their children out of school, either.

Tal Fortgang is clearly intelligent. But he’s also clearly 19 years old. He wrote a crappy opinion column where the central argument is built on a gaping logical chasm – whenever I did that, my column would run in the paper barely anybody read, I’d get some flak in my inbox, and that would be that. But instead, TIME picked up the column, and now Tal has managed to piss off basically everybody who doesn’t write for Breitbart.

I hope that after all this dies down, everybody forgets the name Tal Fortgang – for Tal’s sake. Every good writer has churned out mountains of crap, and it would be sad for him to spend the rest of his life answering for one stupid thing he wrote a few months after moving out of his parents’ house - that could prove be a real disadvantage. 

Truman Capps tried very hard to work “Chiggidy check yo’ privilege before your wreck yo’ privilege” in here somewhere, but he failed.

1997 - 2014

On a Saturday evening sometime during my senior year of high school, in the general vicinity of my 18^th birthday, my main bro Alexander and I went to the supermarket to grab a case of Fresca and some gummi bears for a night of Dungeons and Dragons. On the way out to the parking lot we were talking about the Voynich manuscript – a famously cryptic ancient text written in an unknown, indecipherable foreign language, which we had been debating the origin of since we read about it on Wikipedia earlier in the day.

“What if it doesn’t even mean anything?” Alexander speculated. “What if it was just some Renaissance-era asshole trolling future historians by writing a fake book of gibberish?”

“I don’t know, man.” I sighed as I unlocked the light blue 1997 Subaru Legacy that my parents had recently given me the exclusive right to drive. “It’s a mystery.”

Alexander shrugged and opened his door. “Well… Into the ‘ol Mystery Wagon, I guess.”

*

On Friday The Mystery Wagon started overheating during a 15-minute drive, on level terrain, on an overcast 60-degree day. It had done something similar to this two weeks before, after which my mechanic flatly told me that if this kept happening it would cost me so much to fix the problem that I’d be better off just getting a new car.   

If you’re even a casual reader of this blog, you probably know at least a couple of things about me: I spend a lot of time consuming peanut butter and watching television, I prefer certain cast members on Community to others, and I love The Mystery Wagon more than life itself. Something I observed two years ago (shortly after paying a Santa Clausesque Russian mechanic $1100 to replace my steering gear) was that The Mystery Wagon was about the closest thing I had to a pet, like a beloved dog that needed to have a different internal organ replaced every one to three months.

Just about everything in my life changed when I moved to LA. I left my friends, family, and pretty much every other familiar thing behind to move to a place where I had one cousin and nothing else. The Mystery Wagon was the one piece of my life in Oregon that I was able to bring me with me – the car I learned to drive in, the car I drove to band practice, the car that conveyed my friends and I to and from Mexican food thousands of times throughout high school.  

The silver lining to living in a car-oriented city like LA was that I got to spend an awful lot of time sitting in The Mystery Wagon during those first several months. So no matter how lonely I was, or how godawful hot it was, or whatever demoralizing or infuriating thing happened to me at my internship, I could count on being able to climb into a safe, familiar piece of my home at the end of the day for 30 minutes to an hour of alone time, depending on traffic. I talked through a lot of my problems and sang along to a lot of Jefferson Starship in two and a half years.

Forget that thing about it being a dog. The Mystery Wagon was more like a big, rolling security blanket that pulled slightly to the right.

*

This past Friday I was able to make it back to my apartment in The Mystery Wagon with the needle on the temperature gauge pointing as far above the ‘H’ as it was possible to get. As I pulled onto my street, I optimistically noted that at least the engine wasn’t making any funny noises and wondered if maybe the only problem was that my temperature gauge was broken.

I pulled up to the curb, shut off the engine, and got out of the car to go inside. As I closed my door, the engine unexpectedly gave off a choking, tortured groan and a cloud of white vapor began to billow from under the hood. Dropping to my hands and knees, I saw a steady trickle of engine fluid coming from under the car and running down the street into the gutter.

Over the phone, my mechanic recommended I take the car to a specialist he knew on Monday – and told me I probably shouldn’t drive it anymore until then.

*

In late March, while going through my receipts for my accountant, I added up all of The Mystery Wagon’s maintenance costs and discovered that in 2013 it cost me about $1700 to maintain a car that Kelly Blue Book said was worth $1300, tops. At the time, I wisely decided to just file that information away and not take any steps whatsoever to prepare myself emotionally for what was bound to happen.

Logically, I always knew this day would come. But I had a crazy fantasy that maybe I could keep The Mystery Wagon running just long enough for me to get one of my scripts in front of the right person and become an overnight sensation, kind of like Lena Dunham except I wouldn’t have to get naked. Then, with all the money that would be pouring in, I could afford to extend The Mystery Wagon’s life indefinitely with a brand new engine and bodywork.

“That famous writer Truman Capps is so humble!” My fantasy fans would say. “He still drives the old car he brought to LA because he wants to remember his roots. And also because he’s developed a weird personal connection to an unfeeling inanimate object.”

*

Monday morning AAA towed The Mystery Wagon to a small auto shop in a terrible place called Van Nuys, where I explained the problem to the mechanic and then took an Uber home. That afternoon the mechanic called to inform me that my timing belt and water pump needed to be replaced, which he estimated would cost about $700.

I looked numbly at my bedroom wall and fell back on my age-old Mystery Wagon coping mechanism: Insistence that Subarus (or at least, my Subaru) are magical, immortal beings that last forever.

“Do you think I could drive it for a few more years if I replace the pump and the timing belt? I mean… It is a Subaru, after all.”

“The engine is very old, Mr. Capps. You could spend $700 to fix this and your transmission could go out two weeks later. You should probably spend that money on a car that you know you can count on.”

“But... It’s a Subaru!”

“Yes,” the mechanic said slowly. “But it’s an old Subaru.”

*

On Tuesday I leased a grey 2014 Prius C – an experience deserving of its own blog update, later. Tuesday evening I picked up The Mystery Wagon from the mechanic, who offered to give me $300 for it once I’d cleaned all my stuff out of it. On Wednesday I did a fair amount of crying and stress eating.

On Thursday morning I got into The Mystery Wagon and drove to a self-service car wash in North Hollywood, where I spent a few bucks to pressure wash as much filth as possible off of the car. I’d wanted to really polish it with a chamois, but the vending machine that sold them only took cash and there weren’t any ATMs around. Instead, I got into The Mystery Wagon for the last time and drove to Van Nuys.

The mechanic counted out $300 on his front desk as I signed the section on the pink slip that transferred legal ownership of The Mystery Wagon from me to him. He told me he was going to try and fix it up and then donate it to his church, where it’d be given to a family that needed transportation.

“That’s good. It’s a really good car.” I choked, pulling down my Ray-Bans in a vain attempt to hide the fact that I was tearing up. “I hope it… I hope it makes somebody else as happy as it made me.”

“Uh huh.” He said, rightfully feeling very awkward about the situation he was in.

I took one last look at my car, turned my back, and walked away.

*

That afternoon I called my friend Denmark to talk about the events of the past week:

“I didn’t get this upset when my grandparents died, or when my ex girlfriend and I broke up. I made it through 9/11 without shedding a single tear. But now I’m going to pieces over a fucking car? How stupid is that?”

“Yeah, but it’s not really a car, though,” He mused. “It’s everybody you ever hung out with in that car. It’s everywhere you ever went in that car. It was part of you.”

I should’ve held out for more than $300.

55 Inches

On a sunny day the TV doubles as a mirror. 

My apartment has a large living room with hardwood floors and a huge picture window that lets in a lot of natural light. The furnishings are pretty eclectic since they’ve been cobbled together from things my roommates own plus whatever crap previous tenants have left behind. Our couches, for example, come from a former roommate who moved out but didn’t want to try and get them down the staircase. And there’s two pieces of art on our walls of unknown origin – an abstract painting that’s essentially a splotch of red paint on a white canvas and a mysterious Impressionistic painting of a French street scene in a frame with a built-in spotlight. Sometimes I look at it and wonder if my roommates and I are one Antiques Roadshow appearance away from becoming millionaires.

When I moved in, my sole contribution to the living room was a small, black-varnished entertainment center from IKEA that I had bought for the 32 inch TV in my bedroom but no longer needed. For the first two months my entertainment center supported a big screen TV belonging to one of my other roommates, but then he left and took the TV with him.

Our next roommate – we’ll call him “Smiley” – had a big screen TV back home in Boston, and at his suggestion the three of us chipped in $30 apiece to have it shipped out here for our living room. At first, paying $30 to have a 50 inch HDTV seemed like a pretty good deal, but what Smiley neglected to mention when we made the deal was that he really didn’t want either one of us using the TV when he wasn’t around.

Smiley spent the next few months parked on our couch in front of his TV, chain smoking blunts and watching SportsCenter. He had another, smaller TV in his bedroom that was also always on and also always tuned to SportsCenter, so for much of the spring and summer of last year our living room was just a haze of marijuana smoke and echoing, slightly out of sync sports commentary. On the rare occasions that Smiley left the apartment and returned to find somebody else using the living room TV, he would voice his disapproval by sighing heavily, going into his room, and blasting loud music until whoever was in the living room gave up and left.

One time, in spite of the loud music, my roommate Briggon sat watching TV in the living room for nearly an hour until Smiley emerged from his room and said, “So how much TV watching do you think $30 gets you?” He then unplugged his big screen TV and took the cord back into his bedroom in order to ensure that nobody could watch the living room TV without his explicit approval.

When we evicted Smiley in August he took both of his TVs and pouted his way back to Boston, and we got our living room back. Only now our living room had no TV in it, and our replacement roommate, Travis, didn’t have one to contribute. My entertainment center just sat there, empty save for a couple of old issues of GQ that Smiley had forgotten to take with him.

Briggon and I both have smaller TVs in our rooms, and since pretty much the only thing either one of us wants to do at any given moment is watch Netflix, that’s where we spent most of our time. We’d go for weeks without seeing each other, only catching up when we both happened to be microwaving dinner in the kitchen at the same time. Sitting in our rooms watching TV was more entertaining than sitting in the living room watching our Impressionistic painting of French people, so our spacious and comfortable living room went largely unused for months.

Whenever we’d be making dinner at the same time, Briggon and Travis and I would talk about getting a TV, but always in vague if/then terms. “IF I get a big tax return this year THEN I might get us a TV.” “Yeah, IF I get that promotion THEN I should be able to buy a new TV in a couple months.” “IF Best Buy starts accepting unfinished scripts as payment THEN I’ll buy every big screen TV they have.” But because none of us ever had a spare $1000 burning a hole in our pocket, we never got much further than that – and our living room stayed as empty as an IKEA showroom after hours.

This past Wednesday was Briggon’s birthday, and I returned to the apartment that afternoon to find a brand new 55-inch LCD TV sitting on my entertainment center beneath the French painting, and my roommates sitting in front of the TV watching Skyfall with their mouths hanging open. It turns out Briggon’s boyfriend had gotten sick of listening to us endlessly waxing on about getting a TV and just went ahead and bought one for him as a gift. This is the benefit of having at least one roommate who’s capable of sustaining a serious relationship.

It’s been less than a week, but already the presence of a TV in our living room has completely changed the way my roommates and I live in the apartment. Now that there’s a big, shiny, high tech reason to go in the living room, everybody’s started spending more time there. Just last night my BFF Sabba and I stopped by the apartment on the way back from dinner to find Briggon watching the end of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. We sat down to join him for the last 10 minutes or so, and then spent the next hour sitting around gabbing while the movie’s Blu-Ray menu looped over and over in crisp, colorful HD.

Technology gets a lot of criticism for isolating us from other people – we spend more time interacting with screens and less time interacting with friends and family. I think that’s a valid concern. But at the same time, my roommates and I have only started seeing more of each other since 55 inches of screen showed up in our living room.

For example, we’ve quit eating our meals in front of the TVs in our bedrooms and started eating our meals in front of the TV in our living room. That may not sound like progress, but we’re now a considerably more social bunch of couch potatoes.

Truman Capps has HBO Go and an enormous TV to watch it on, which means he may well make it through the summer without having to go outside.

Real Genius

Call me crazy, but I don't want these guys to have access to every single piece of personal information I have.

Since last June my 2009 MacBook Pro has been suffering from something that I’ve taken to calling ‘Computer AIDS.’ Periodically, without warning, all of my apps crash, I lose Internet access, and the computer becomes unable to save any new information to the hard drive until I restart. I’ve gone to the Apple Store 20 or more times over the past nine months and I’m on a first name basis with Apple’s phone tech support people, but after trying pretty much every possible solution we’ve still got no idea what’s wrong with my computer or how to fix it. At this point I’m about ready to go all Dallas Buyers’ Club and just start importing black market Mexican RAM to see if that’ll change anything. 

In August my solution to the problem was to buy a brand new solid state drive, because Apple’s hard drives have a tendency to die on me every two years and I figured that was what was happening here. But the issues have persisted on the new hard drive too - even after reinstalling my entire operating system - and last month my contacts at Apple tech support finally told me to just take my MacBook back to the Apple store so they could determine whether the problem was being caused by my hard drive or something in my data.

I’m always hesitant to hand my computer off for some ‘expert’ to handle. My Dad is something of a technical wizard, and with his help I’ve been carefully backing up and transferring all of my data from one computer to the next for the past 15 or so years. This means that anybody with access to my computer can potentially read every single thing I've ever written, including the extensive library of video game fan fiction I wrote in middle school and various rambling, sappy screenplays I wrote to try and impress girls in high school. These aren’t the sorts of things that I want a complete stranger with wide, artificially created circular holes in his earlobes to be browsing through. 

Every time I meet with an Apple Genius I find myself thinking of ways that he could use his technical expertise to unlock darkness buried deep within my hard drive that I lack the technical know-how to hide. 

“…yeah, so when I hit ‘save’ Microsoft Word and FinalDraft crash, and then the whole thing pretty much locks up.” 

“Hmm. Alright, let me try this. I’m going to hold down the Shift key and tap the Command key 7 times in a row, which will activate a special program that charts errors and CPU usage. Oh, and it’ll also bring up an archive of every saucy image you’ve ever looked at on your computer.” 

“Wait, what!?” 

“Yeah, it’s mostly for analytics - it just keeps a log of everything you search for in Incognito mode and then saves high quality screenshots of… Oh. Uh… Wow, there’s a lot here.” 

“Could you please close the program?” 

“It can’t be closed until it loads every image, so… Um… Jesus. In six years I’ve never seen this much.”

“Okay, uh… Can we… Can we just focus on my computer problem?” 

“In all honesty, Mr. Capps, I think there are other problems that you should focus on.” 

The thing is, as a human being I’m pretty much useless without a computer - while I’m not technically inclined enough to be able to diagnose and fix issues like this one, I’m still pretty much dependent on computers for 90% of the things that I do (more than that, if they ever find a way to digitize peanut butter). I weighed the options and decided that I was willing to risk somebody discovering some of the less flattering aspects of my hard drive, because the only alternative was to start using a typewriter and reading books for fun. 

Besides, I reasoned as I walked through the mall on my way to my Genius Bar appointment. Even IF the Genius looking at your computer finds something incriminating, what do you care? It’s not the end of the world if one underpaid computer specialist reads the Jurassic Park sequel you wrote when you were in 6th grade or discovers some wayward piece of undeleted Internet search history, right? 

I entered the expensive chaos of the Apple Store and checked in for my appointment with a blue-shirted employee with an iPad, who directed me to have a seat at the Genius Bar and wait. I hopped up onto a stool, set my laptop on the bar, and idly watched the pack of nerdy male Geniuses helping the other customers with their computer problems. 

You’re too worried about this. I thought to myself, observing a bearded, heavyset Genius helping an old woman update her iPhone. These Geniuses probably have even more incriminating stuff on their computers than you do. If one of these guys finds anything sensitive he’s bound to be discreet about it - us nerds look out for each other, after all. 

A door behind the bar opened and from it emerged the most attractive female Genius I’ve laid eyes on in seven years of Apple ownership. She walked over and fixed me with a dazzling smile.

“Hey Truman, I’m Donna - I hear you’re having some trouble with your hard drive?” 

I remember after watching Her I had some rather wistful thoughts about having a beautiful woman help me organize my hard drive. Having experienced it firsthand, I’m not as crazy about the idea anymore. 

All the same, slamming my laptop closed and sprinting out of the mall would’ve looked weird, so I went ahead and launched into the extensive explanation of what had been going wrong with my computer. Donna listened attentively, laughing at my jokes and being generally charming. I was feeling pretty suave by the time I’d signed all the paperwork to officially check my MacBook in - until Donna said,

“It sounds like there might be a corrupted piece of data on your hard drive. But don’t worry - I’m on repair duty tonight so I’ll personally go through it and see what I can find.” 

I thanked her, we exchanged pleasantries, and then I watched helplessly as she picked up my ticking time bomb of potential embarrassment and carried it into the back room for analysis. Just my luck - the one time a beautiful woman starts talking to me at a bar, it’s because she wants to comb through 15 years of my unflattering creative output and smut.

Truman Capps has seen this episode before, and it ends with George breaking into the Apple Store to try and get the MacBook back, but then Kramer accidentally sets off the alarm and they get arrested. 

Not TV

"True Blood, The Pacific, Treme... Go ahead, first one's free, kid." 

Let me just make one thing clear: My childhood was not all fun and games. I know it seems like I’m the product of a functional, loving, stress-free upbringing, and for the most part I was, but there was definitely some darkness I had to deal with growing up that has affected me ever since then. This isn’t something I like to talk about a lot, but I think now is the right time for me to open up about one of the greatest ongoing tragedies in my life: 

My family has never had HBO. 

Not having HBO is the white people problem to end all white people problems. It’s a veritable white people humanitarian crisis. Since I was about 15 I’ve wanted nothing more than to have unfettered access to the creme de la creme of premium cable, but my cruel and unforgiving parents always said no, even when we were marathoning DVD after DVD of The Sopranos from Netflix. Their excuse was always that HBO was “too expensive,” probably because they were saving for retirement or my college fund, the cheapskates. 

So because of my parents’ neglect, I spent years stuck with basic cable, back in a pre-Mad Men time when basic cable wasn’t all that good yet. That meant that when I went off to college I was totally at a loss when all the other upper middle class kids would make references to Curb Your Enthusiasm or Flight of the Conchords or Game of Thrones - and if I can’t participate in pop culture references, then what’s the point of all this? 

There’s a lot of places in my life where I’m willing to settle for less - that’s why I do most of my clothes shopping at Target and drive a car that always feels like it’s one pothole away from collapsing like a beer can pyramid. Even when buying peanut butter, which is hands down one of my favorite spreadable substances, I’ll still buy the dirt-cheap Kroger brand stuff to save a couple bucks. But TV is different. I want the best TV money can buy (although if I could avoid paying for it that would be super.) 

But my parents aren’t the only ones guilty of depriving me of HBO - HBO itself has also gone to great lengths to keep me from enjoying its violent, profane, sexy content. For four years now HBO has refused to offer their online streaming service, HBOGo, as a standalone product instead of just a supplement to their cable service. What that means is that if, like me, you don’t have cable* and instead watch all of your TV online, you can’t get HBO - unless, that is, you can get your hands on an HBOGo login.  

*Actually my apartment does have a basic cable package included in the rent, but it was set up years ago by some old tenant who has since moved on and all of the important login/password information has been lost to time. Because we don’t have the account information we can’t upgrade our cable to get HBO - and we also can’t cancel our cable, since we don’t know the name on the account we’d want them to deactivate, which means we’re pretty much stuck in cable purgatory watching Family Guy reruns and ESPN2. 

Since nobody under the age of 35 pays for their own HBO subscription, there’s now a television black market of sorts where 20somethings secretly swap and share their parents’ HBOGo logins to get premium cable without the cable. For years I’ve been trying to find somebody willing to make one of these deals with me, but since I never bought drugs in high school I don’t really know how to find a clandestine supplier. 

Luckily, last week my friend Sabba offered me a life-changing opportunity to escape from cable purgatory - one of her friends would be willing to share his parents’ HBOGo login with me in exchange for an old Hulu Plus subscription I’d forgotten to cancel. As deals go, this was a no-brainer - trading access to Hulu Plus for HBOGo is like trading a bag of gravel and dog hair for Luxembourg.

Sabba acted as middlewoman, collecting my Hulu information and forwarding it to her friend, then sending me the HBO information. Hands shaking, I scurried to my computer to login and authorize my AppleTV for HBOGo.

And then I was in. 

For a good ten years I’ve found myself repeating the phrase, “Oh, I really want to watch that, but I don’t have HBO” every time somebody starts raving about some incredible show. Entering HBOGo’s ‘SERIES’ menu, I found myself staring at a decade’s worth of top-quality television that had previously been off-limits, all of it available instantly at the touch of a button. 

I blacked out and came to sprawled on my bed 12 hours later, halfway through an episode of Lucky Louie. I had demolished a season and a half of Eastbound and Down, two episodes of Vice, and rewatched a couple of midseason episodes of True Detective. Normally I make a point of only marathoning one show at a time, but the sheer range of options was too much for me to handle - I fought the urge to run out and buy 5 more TVs so I could watch it all at once. 

I started building a viewing schedule in my head, mentally organizing my days to allow for maximum HBO consumption - Eastbound and Down and Bored to Death in the mornings, Boardwalk Empire and Oz all afternoon, an HBO Original Movie with dinner, Six Feet Under before bed… I figured I’d have to give up on most of my other goals and aspirations in life in order to accommodate this schedule, but that was okay, because the only goal I really cared about anymore was “Be Person Who Spends Entire Life Watching HBO.”

But the following morning I woke up to find that the pearly gates had slammed shut - when I tried to log in, HBOGo took me to a dark screen with a tersely worded message informing me that too many devices were logged into the account at once. As it turns out, Sabba’s friend had shared the password with more people than just me, so HBO and I are kind of in an open relationship at the moment. 

And I guess that’s fine, since I can watch HBO in the middle of the day when the other suitors are at work. It might actually be a blessing in disguise, since getting kicked out of HBOGo for a couple hours will give me an excuse to eat and bathe. Still, I really wish I could have an exclusive relationship with premium cable - I just don't wish it enough to actually pay the premium. 

Truman Capps is probably going to give Carnivale a miss. 

Quaker State

never forget

Back when I was panicking over the fact that my apartment complex apparently has all the structural integrity of a Jenga game in an earthquake, I realized that my renter’s insurance had lapsed and wound up frantically renewing it in the middle of the night. After all, some of the furniture in my room has since been discontinued by IKEA, so if disaster strikes I’d want to be compensated for the loss of something irreplaceable like my Malm or Henmes. 

In the aftermath of the St. Patrick’s Day earthquake I got a letter from my insurance company in the mail that informed me that my policy didn’t cover earthquake damage. They had, though, included an application for a cheap earthquake insurance policy that the state of California forced them to sell. Now, had I received this letter before the earthquake, I probably would’ve immediately applied for as much coverage as possible, up to and including a service where, should an earthquake destroy your building and kill you, the insurance company sends somebody to the scene to dispose of all your pornography before your loved ones can find it. 

But as you’ll remember from my previous blog about earthquakes, actually experiencing an earthquake firsthand really mellowed me out on the subject - once I was done screaming and running out of the building, that is. The strongest earthquake in the past six years had been little more than a citywide nuisance, and I found myself wondering if it was really worth paying $84 for insurance against something that had woken me up a little early and forced me to re alphabetize a few DVDs that fell off my shelf. 

In fact, the exact words I used when discussing the matter on the phone with one of my friends were, “Besides, it could be years until there’s another earthquake.” 

After a couple of days’ deliberation I decided it was probably better to be safe than sorry, so on Friday I filled out the application and stuffed it and a check for $84 into an envelope. I was going to take it to the mailbox right then and there, but I couldn’t find a stamp - which is a problem I run into every one of the four times per year I have to send something through the mail. I was in a hurry to get on the subway and meet somebody downtown, so I just left the sealed, addressed, and decidedly un-stamped envelope on my desk, propped up against an empty can of Diet Coke so I would remember to get it stamped and posted the next day. 

None of this was on my mind at the bar downtown - until, while standing at the bar trying to place an order, I suddenly felt myself losing my balance. 

Am I drunk already!? I wondered as I tried to regain my footing. I only had one drink… Wait. I left it on the table when I went to the bathroom. Oh my God, did somebody put something in my drink!? Am I being roofied!? 

My eyes fell on a 30something businessman in a suit who was standing with some work buddies a few paces away and, from the look of confusion on his face, seemed to be going through the same sort of inner monologue I was. We made eye contact and shared a look as if to say, Wait, is it you doing that? 

Then I saw the beer sloshing out of the pint glasses on the bar and heard the wine glasses hanging overhead tinkling together and realized that I was experiencing my second earthquake in as many weeks. 

The great thing about being in an earthquake with a room full of drunk people is that nobody really takes it too seriously, even if they maybe should be. Pretty soon after the shaking started, somebody held his drink aloft and yelled, “EARTHQUAAAAKE!” Except he didn’t yell it like he was scared and trying to warn other people that an earthquake was happening; he yelled it like “Earthquake” was a football team that we were all tailgating for.  

The rest of the bar yelled “EARTHQUAAAAKE!” in response - myself included, because if you can’t yell “EARTHQUAAAAKE!” during an earthquake then when can you yell earthquake? The bartenders all dropped what they were doing and braced themselves against the bar, ducking their heads in case a wayward bottle of Knob Creek fell off the top shelf behind the bar. 

The shaking slowly subsided and then everybody kept right on drinking. This earthquake hadn’t felt as strong and jarring as the one before, so I wasn’t too worried - but I still deemed it a harrowing enough experience to warrant a $6 basket of french fries. 

I was stepping out of the bar a little later when I got the following text from my roommate: 

Please note that our last text conversation before this one ALSO happened in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake.

With the knowledge that this earthquake had been stronger than the last one, and that an even stronger earthquake could occur at any moment, I could only think of three things: 

1) I was currently surrounded by very tall concrete buildings. 

2) Because I had ridden the subway downtown my only way to get home was to venture deep into the Earth’s crust, where I would be surrounded by millions of tons of stone, dirt, metal, electrical wiring, and water mains, not to mention closer to where fucking earthquakes come from. 

3) My earthquake insurance application was sitting on my desk, as opposed to being processed by my insurance company.

It was a tense ride home. I spent the entire time eyeballing the fixie-toting hipsters and homeless people sitting around me, uncomfortably aware that these would be the last faces I would ever see if The Big One collapsed the tunnel around us and turned the subway car into a pee-smelling tomb.

When I got back to the (non-destroyed) apartment my roommate was pulling together some old glowsticks and bottled water while watching the news. It turns out the earthquake had originated 40 miles south of us in Orange County*, where it had burst a few water mains and forced Disneyland to close for the night. After talking a bit and agreeing that two earthquakes in two weeks is just too damn many earthquakes, I went to take a look in my room and see if my uninsured belongings had been reduced to a pile of balsa wood splinters and spilled Sriracha.

*This further validates my theory that nothing good comes from Orange County. 

When I opened the door, everything was still in place. The only sign that an earthquake had happened was that the envelope with my application in it, which I had left propped against a can of Diet Coke, was now lying face down on my desk. 

I woke up early the next morning specifically so I could get the application in the mail as soon as possible. And then, in the interests of disaster preparedness, I bought $12 worth of stamps so I can mail my renewal out immediately when the time comes. 

Truman Capps knows it’s only a matter of time until there’s an earthquake while he’s on the toilet. 

Rich Mahogany of OKCupid

Hair Guy Dating: Six Sexy Tips To Make The Perfect OKCupid Profile!

When you want a dating experience that is OK at best, you want OKCupid. 

Hey ladies – are you interested in using the power of online dating to transform your boring, depressing 20^th century love life into a boring, depressing 21^st century love life? Of course you are.

OKCupid is a wildly popular free dating site that uses statistics and algorithms to match up its members. From the outside looking in, it can be an intimidating environment. Fortunately, though, you’ve got me – as a nearly three-year veteran of the site I’ve looked at thousands of girls’ profiles, so I know what works and what doesn’t to find the man of your dreams.

DISCLAIMER: None of these tips are sexy.

1) HELPFUL PHRASES

When you first create your OKCupid profile, you have to fill out a bunch of different fields with information about yourself – a self summary, what you’re doing with your life, favorite movies, and a few other fields designed to flesh out your personality for prospective mates. This can be a pretty tall order, so here are some handy phrases to fall back on:

I’m really not good at writing about myself. LOL! – A disclaimer like this is a great way to start your profile. Upon reading this the horny, stoned guys browsing OKCupid at 2:30 AM will lower their rigorous standards for grammar and diction a bit to give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s also important to include LOL to make it clear that you can laugh at yourself – out loud, if necessary. 

Live. Laugh. Love. OR Hakuna matata – Having trouble crafting a self summary that gives a well rounded picture of you as an individual? Either one of these mass-marketed expressions that appears on T shirts ought to do the trick. 

Living it! – This allows you to answer the What I’m Doing With My Life prompt without having to acknowledge the fact that you don’t even go on auditions anymore if they conflict with your shifts at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.

2) YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY ANCHORMAN QUOTES

 

Still struggling with your self summary? Try saying that you’re “kind of a big deal,” that you have “many leatherbound books” and your apartment “smells of rich mahogany,” or perhaps, “People tend to like me because I am polite and rarely late.” Flesh out other sections of your profile with anecdotes like “Milk was a bad choice” or “60 percent of the time, it works every time!”

 

These are quotes from the movie Anchorman, and if you aren’t using them you’re missing out on what most women on OKCupid have already discovered: Nothing turns a man on more than a quote from a heavily quoted movie that came out 10 years ago. Don’t ask me to explain the male psyche – there’s just something really sensual and alluring about a woman who doesn’t seem to have been to the movies since 2004. 

3) A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND ANCHORMAN QUOTES

It’s good to have several pictures on your profile to give guys a good sense of what you look like and prove that you’re not Catfishing them. The ideal mix is as follows: One or two of your most heavily photoshopped headshots, a fuzzy picture of you at an outdoor music festival wearing sunglasses so large they cover half of your face, a full body picture of you at Disneyland standing very far away from the camera, and a picture of you among a crowd of 15 of your identical-looking friends in Vegas.* Pictures from photo booths at parties are acceptable, but only if you and your friends are all holding fake moustaches under your noses.

*NOTE: This picture should always, ALWAYS be captioned, “Obligatory Vegas pic!”

Alternately, just post several webcam pictures of you and your cat in different parts of your bedroom. No warning signs there.

4) FAMILY FIRST

I can’t count the number of times on OKCupid that I’ve found a woman who is smart, witty, outspoken, beautiful, and seemingly perfect for me, except for one glaring, fatal flaw that stops me dead in my tracks from messaging her: Nowhere on her profile did she mention how important her friends and family are to her.

I’m sorry, but I feel like this is common sense: If you don’t make it clear on your profile that you love your family and your friends, how are eligible bachelors supposed to know? Do you expect us to just assume that your entire social circle and emotional support system is important to you? No thank you – I’d rather play it safe than wind up on a date with a psychopath who’s completely blasé about her friends and family.

 

 

5) SHOW YOUR TROJAN PRIDE

If you attended or are currently attending the University of Southern California, don’t be afraid to make that the central theme of your entire profile. Perhaps tastefully bookend your self summary with “GO TROJANS!!!” at the start and “Fight On” at the end, or list “SC FOOTBALL!!!!!!!!!!” alongside your friends and family as some of the things you couldn’t live without.

At the very least, make sure you post the standard picture of you in an oversized USC jersey wearing a backwards SC baseball cap while doing duckface and throwing up the ‘V for Victory’ sign in front of your sorority house. It’s just common courtesy – you should always be as upfront as possible about having gone to USC so guys know what they’re getting into.

6) ABSOLUTELY NOTHING YOU PUT ON YOUR PROFILE MATTERS BECAUSE GUYS WILL MESSAGE YOU CONSTANTLY NO MATTER WHAT

For men, OKCupid is like a catalog of all the currently single women in a given area. But for women, who are vastly, vastly outnumbered by men on the site, OKCupid is a door. When you open that door, raw, unfocused, anonymous male attention rushes in like blood from that elevator in The Shining, and it never stops.

My BFF Sabba created a fake OKCupid profile. She didn’t fill out any of the personal information, didn’t answer any of the thousands of questions the site uses to match users up, and only uploaded one picture – a photo of an office chair in a bathroom.

In the past week this profile with no information on it save for a picture of a chair has been visited 74 times and received four messages from guys, one of whom even sent his phone number. 

 

So really you can put just about anything on your profile and be good to go. If you want to hear from some dudes, you’ll hear from some dudes. Even if you’re just a chair in a bathroom. 

Truman Capps' friends and family are the most important thing in the world to him.  

Shamrock Shake

See, because the earthquake happened on Monday.

A couple of weeks ago r/LosAngeles led me to an article decrying the city’s lax earthquake safety standards for buildings. While San Francisco has been leading the way, setting rigid structural standards for new developments and forcing landlords to renovate every old building in the city that isn’t up to codes, Los Angeles has opted for a considerably cheaper “let’s all just hope for the best” strategy.

The article went on to explain that even though LA is built on several fault lines and is famous for its earthquakes, there are still thousands of buildings in the city that will fall apart faster than Halle Berry’s acting career in the event of a particularly strong earthquake. The most structurally unsound of these buildings, apparently, are “dingbat” style apartments.

At the time I didn’t know what a dingbat apartment was, so I entered the word into Wikipedia and found myself staring at a picture of an apartment that looked unsettlingly similar to mine. It turns out that while supporting two or more stories’ worth of apartment complex on a couple of load bearing pillars is good for creating some cheap parking spaces, it also means that in the event of an earthquake the second floor can turn into the first floor pretty quickly.

It didn’t take me too long to recover from my previous brush with seismic activity, because while it was definitely more earthquake than I had ever been aware of before, it also wasn’t even strong enough to knock over the action figures on my desk. The trauma of seeing my IKEA bookshelf wobbling slightly in the corner faded away about a week after the event. But all of that forgotten earthquake anxiety came rushing back as soon as I discovered that I'm living in a building as ill-equipped to deal with earthquakes as I am.

You know when you’re waiting for a text message and you think you feel your phone buzz in your pocket, only to find out once you check it that it was just your mind playing tricks on you? It turns out the same thing happens when you’re waiting for your horrible death in a natural disaster. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve felt the opening vibrations of an apartment-shattering quakepocalypse 40 or 50 times, only to wait for a second and find out that it’s a passing helicopter or somebody jiggling their leg under the dinner table or a particularly fat neighbor climbing the stairs to the third floor.

So that was the state of mind I was in at 6:25 AM on Monday, when I woke up to my entire room violently shaking and rattling – books and DVDs raining down off of my bookshelf onto the floor, picture frames swinging off kilter on the walls, the Shakespeare action figure on my desk toppling square onto its back. Shit just got real.

This earthquake was quite a bit stronger than the one I’d been in before – to all of you Oregonians reading along at home, it honestly did feel comparable to the OMSI earthquake house I referenced in January, the main differences being the absence of Carole King and the presence of an absolute conviction that I was going to die right then and there.

It occurred to me that for all the time I’d spent worrying about earthquakes over the past couple of weeks, I hadn’t spent any time thinking about what I’d do if an earthquake actually happened. I’m not good at improvising, which is why the emergency plan I came up with on the fly was, “Stumble into the nearest doorway; scream.”

The shaking was over after about five or six seconds, but I knew it was only a matter of time until the Scotch tape and popsicle sticks holding my apartment upright snapped and the whole building collapsed around me. I snatched the nearest pair of pants and sprinted out the door of my apartment without even bothering to put them on first, reasoning that I’d rather be alive and immodest instead of buried under rubble wearing pants.

I fumbled my way into my jeans on the stairs and emerged into the alley outside my apartment to find the building still standing and a bleary eyed neighbor from the ground floor surveying the scene through her doorway.

“Hey.” I gasped, too wired off adrenaline to care that my fly was down.

“Hey.” She said. “Pretty scary.”

One floor up, both of my roommates cautiously emerged onto the catwalk of our decidedly not-destroyed apartment and looked down at me.

“Hey.” I said, noticing that all of the load bearing beams I had been so concerned about looked no different than they had at any other point in the past year or so I’d been living in this building.

“Hey.” My roommates said.

I sighed and threw up my hands. “Earthquakes, right?”

It was a 4.4 magnitude quake that originated a few miles away from me. Even though it was the strongest earthquake in LA since 2008, there were no reports of deaths, injuries, or structural damage from anywhere in the city. About the worst thing it did was deprive a few million people of another hour of sleep on a Monday morning.

This wasn’t a natural disaster so much as it was just a natural nuisance. And it’s reassuring to know that if nothing else, my apartment is at least structurally sound enough to withstand a nuisance. 

Truman Capps wants his mother to know that his building survived the Northridge Earthquake, which means it's probably quite a bit more structurally sound than he gives it credit for so please don't worry about me. 

Crash

I'm using the poster from this 1997 David Cronenberg movie about people who get turned on by car crashes because I don't want to give that OTHER movie called Crash any more credit than it already got.

My two roommates and I share a single parking space in the carport beneath our apartment on a first-come, first-served basis, but I’ve long since given up on competing for it. It’s a narrow alley and a tight turn into a small spot, and The Mystery Wagon isn’t well suited to that sort of nimble maneuvering.* It is not a compact car, even if I pretend it is when I park at the mall. If The Mystery Wagon had an OKCupid profile, it would list itself as “Curvy.” (“Hobbies: Leaking engine fluids.”)

*I’ve already managed to scrape the shit out of both sides of the car trying to eyeball a perfect 90 degree turn between stuccoed apartment blocks in the middle of the night. I’m too cheap to spring for bodywork on a car this old, so I’m telling myself that it makes the car look battle tested and resilient, like Galactica in season 4.

The good news is that there’s plenty of curb parking along my street. The bad news is that my street is one of the biggest and busiest streets in the Valley, and my apartment is right at the point where it transforms from a three lane artery into a windy suburban road that snakes up into the Hollywood Hills. There’s no streetlights or sidewalks and lots of blind corners, which of course serves as an invitation for enlightened individuals to race up this street as fast as their soon-to-be-repossessed sports cars can go.

Tuesday night I was ass-deep in some True Detective when I heard a high performance engine roaring down out of the Hills, which is fairly common since 70% of the people who enter or leave the Hollywood Hills are assholes. What really caught my attention, though, was the sound of tires squealing followed by a dull crash. 

 

All of these assholes are suspects. 

The Mystery Wagon’s Blue Book value is remarkably low because the Kelly Blue Book people quite unfairly don’t include categories like “awesome memories” and “owner’s undying love” in their assessment. This makes my car is extremely easy to total. I stumbled into some pants and sprinted out the door, heart in my throat, praying that if indeed some drag racing jackass had destroyed my car that he would at least stick around for me to dress him down verbally for his reckless behavior, and then not beat me up after.  

Running onto the dark street, I found a midsize sedan had, by the grace of Joe Biden’s smile, bashed into the rear of a Honda parked maybe 25 feet in front of The Mystery Wagon. Two neighbors were already there, one helping the driver out of the car while the other called AAA for her on his cell phone.

I took stock of the situation and leapt into action, leaving the business of making sure the car’s elderly driver was okay to my neighbors as I opened my flashlight app to examine my car, just to be sure. That was sort of a futile enterprise – my car has a fair amount of cosmetic damage that’s 100% my fault; it’s not like one additional scratch from somebody else was going to make a whole heap of difference.

The driver explained what had happened – she’d been on her way up the street when a sports car came barreling down the center of the road in the opposite direction, forcing her to choose between a head on collision with a moving car or rear ending a parked car. She made the right choice – she wasn’t injured and her airbag didn’t even deploy. The other driver was long gone, no doubt idling in a CVS parking lot and snorting some speed off a Lil’ Wayne CD he kept in the center console for that purpose. 

Probably this one.

The woman’s car was blocking about half of the street, but it was also banged up badly enough in front that it couldn’t be moved, further narrowing my already narrow street. Meanwhile, the flow of douchebags into and out of the Hills continued – now they’d just zoom up the street, slam on the brakes at the sight of the accident caused by one of their own, and inch through the small opening between the crack and the curb before resuming their breakneck speed.  

Sensing the potential for a second, followup accident, we agreed somebody ought to call the police to direct traffic. My two neighbors were both already using their phones – one on the line with AAA arranging a tow truck, the other helping the woman call her daughter to pick her up – which left me on cop duty.

In every situation I’ve been in where it’s been necessary to call for help, I always go through an intense internal debate about whether the situation in question is an honest-to-goodness emergency or not. I had it hammered into me from an early age that 911 is for emergencies only, and I couldn’t be sure if this situation, which involved no injuries, dead people, wildfires, earthquakes, or racially motivated riots, constituted an emergency by LA standards.

Playing it safe, I called the LAPD’s non-emergency number instead, where I received the following message:

“Thank you for calling the Los Angeles Police Department non-emergency number. All operators are currently busy. Please call again later, or if this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. The following message is for the hearing impaired…”

The one-second pause that followed felt like an eternity to me as I eagerly tried to guess how a historically sensitive and politically correct organization like the LAPD would attempt to communicate with deaf people via phone. Then I got my answer:

“BEEPBEEPBEEP-BEEPBEEP-BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP-BEEP-BEEPBEEPBEEP-BEEPBEPBEEPBEEPBEEP…”

“Hey,” one of my neighbors said as yet another Maserati squealed around the woman’s car in the road. “Any luck with the police?”

“BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP-BEEPBEEP-BEEPBEEPBEEP…”

“Um.” I said. “No.”

 "Deaf people, right?"

I hung up on R2D2, dialed 911, and explained what was happening to three different dispatchers. By the time I was done, not one but two tow trucks had pulled up, which was fortunate because the one thing this situation needed was more stationary vehicles blocking traffic. The tow truck driver from AAA took charge.

“Okay,” he said to me, my neighbors, the woman who’d crashed, her daughter, and the other tow truck driver. “Do we know whose car this is?” He pointed a stubby finger at the parked car she’d smashed into.

We shook our heads.

“Alright. Ma’am, what I’m going to have you do is write down your information and phone number and leave it under the car’s windshield.” He turned to me. “You live on this street?”

“Yeah.”

“Put your number on there too. That way the car’s owner can talk to somebody in the neighborhood who was around when it happened.”

Two minutes later, the woman handed me the scrap of paper where she’d written her name, number, insurance information and a brief apology to the Honda’s owner. In the small space left below her message, I drew a line and proceeded to write:

I’m Truman – I live at [address] and I was on the scene. [Phone number]

I almost instantly hated what I’d written – I was on the scene, like I’m fucking Jack Bauer or something. The owner of the car was going to come downstairs in the morning to find his vehicle trashed and a note pinned to the window from some old lady and Truman, his neighbor who was on the scene. This would not do.

I crossed out the words I was on the scene, but then realized that he’d still be able to read them when he found the note – now he’d just know that Truman was on the scene, but had then gotten self conscious about the phrasing and crossed it out, which was somehow even more embarrassing. Also, now I was out of space at the bottom of the page, so I had no room to write a replacement message. 

As I confronted the very real possibility that I would have to ask this woman to re-write her information on a new piece of paper (“I’m sorry ma’am – even though I’m a professional writer, this one sentence proved too much for me.”) the car’s owner miraculously appeared at the end of the street, and he and the woman were able to exchange information in person.

Eventually, a tow truck loaded up the woman’s car and hauled it off, reopening my street to the flow of men with fast cars and tiny penises. The woman’s daughter drove her home, and the owner of the parked Honda shuffled back to his apartment to call his mechanic.

One and a half True Detective episodes later, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize.

“Hello, this is LAPD dispatcher five-five-two. You called to report a vehicle collision on your street?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But that’s over now. They towed the car away, like, over an hour ago.”

 
“So you don’t need police assistance?” 

“Nah, I think we’re good at this point.” 

“Thank you, sir.” 

She hung up, and that was that. 

 Truman Capps’ car is currently parked in the exact space where the Honda got hit – because lightning never strikes twice… Right?

The Tap Project

 

Nobody is a bigger fan of helping children in third world countries get access to clean drinking water than I am. Well, except for Matt Damon, or the tens of thousands of international NGO employees working to bring potable water to impoverished communities, or the millions of people who have donated any sum of money to the cause. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that even though I totally support people in third world countries getting clean water, I’m not going to play that UNICEF “don’t touch your phone” game everyone is posting on Facebook.

Back in college I ate a fair amount of Yoplait Light, both because it was extremely cheap and because it was one of the few dairy products I could trust to not give me digestive shenanigans in class. I soon noticed that around Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, Yoplait would put pink foil tops on their yogurt containers instead of the ordinary silver ones. The text on the packaging encouraged customers to mail the pink foil lids back to Yoplait, because for every lid they received they would donate 10 cents to Susan G. Komen.

My grandmother was a breast cancer survivor, and for a little while I gave some thought to hoarding my yogurt lids and mailing them to Yoplait to cure cancer, even if it sounded kind of like the sort of thing Howard Hughes would do in his later years. I assumed that General Mills would donate 10 cents per lid to breast cancer research until the charity drive ended, the only limit to their altruism being how many people sent in lids. If they got two lids in the mail, they’d donate 20 cents – if they got 300 million lids in the mail, then they'd have to donate $30 million, right? This seemed like a good way to contribute money to a good cause without, y’know, contributing money.

What stopped me was the fine print on one of the lids: 

"General Mills will donate 10 cents to Susan G. Komen, up to $1.5 million."

General Mills had decided ahead of time that $1.5 million was all the money they wanted to donate to breast cancer research in a given year. And that’s great – good for them for wanting to use some of their money to help people! But here’s why I spitefully threw out all of my lids:

If you’ve already decided that you’re willing to donate $1.5 million, why don’t you just donate the fucking money up front and forget about the whole pink lid thing? Why is your charity incumbent upon my willingness to mail you garbage!?

That brings me to the UNICEF Tap Project – a slick social media program where UNICEF donates money for clean water projects in impoverished countries based on how long participants can go without touching their phones. 10 phoneless minutes, for example, is enough to provide a one-day supply of clean water to a child in need. In theory, the longer we fortunate first world people go without our electronic luxury goods, the more humanitarian aid gets delivered to less fortunate third world people.

In practice:

The statements made on this app are for illustrative purposes only. For every minute a user refrains from touching his or her phone, she/he will unlock a small portion of a sponsor’s donation.

And then, at the bottom of the legal page:

Subject to the pledged limits from our generous donors and sponsors.

The project’s two sponsors have pledged a combined total of $175,000. If you and me and everybody we’ve ever met locked all of our phones in Fort Knox for a year, theoretically racking up hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pure water, the communities in need would still get $175,000.

And while I don’t have any evidence to back this up, between you and me, I feel as though that $175,000 is going to get donated whether people touch their phones or not.* I mean, I find it kind of hard to picture a UN employee yanking a bottle of water out of a Pakistani child’s hands just because a systems administrator in Wichita started playing Angry Birds before his ten minutes was up.

*One of the sponsors, Giorgio Armani Fragrances, is already going to donate $500,000 no matter what. 

I’ve been wrestling with whether or not to write this update for a couple of weeks now, because what the hell am I really trying to accomplish here? Blow the lid off UNICEF’s insidious plan to give children water? Shame my friends for being compassionate? Suggest that $175,000 somehow isn’t going to help a whole lot of people in need?  

What UNICEF is really trying to do here is raise awareness about water insecurity – a noble goal which they seem to be succeeding at, based on the number of Facebook and Twitter posts I’ve seen about this project over the past month or so. If you’ve taken part in the Tap Project, you’ve contributed to a good cause. I guess I just want to temper some of the stronger enthusiasm I’ve seen from people gearing up to save the world by going phoneless for extended periods of time.

When all is said and done, the only person who really benefits from you not touching your phone is you. If you feel so strongly about this issue that you want to abandon your phone for a week, that’s your choice – but you should know going in that what you’re really doing is controlling the distribution of a pre-pledged donation, two and half tenths of a cent at a time. If you want to help that badly, you could do more, faster by making a direct donation through UNICEF’s site.

Hey, maybe I’ll look like less of a charity Grinch if I put a link here. 

Much respect to UNICEF and everybody involved for raising awareness for a worthy cause - I just want to raise awareness about how they're raising awareness. 

Truman Capps is waiting for the UNICEF program where every time a person in a third world country drinks a glass of clean water, a person in America gets a new phone.

Her

I mean, Spike Jonze had to know this was coming, right? 

I put off seeing the movie Her for as long as possible, only watching it – via an Academy screener that I obtained through totally not-illegal means – a few hours before the Academy Awards on Sunday, where it won Best Original Screenplay. I really, really wanted to see the movie sooner, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it was going to put me in a weird place emotionally.

This is, after all, a movie about an introverted, single writer living in LA who spends most of his spare time surfing the Internet and playing video games until he falls in love with his computer. To me, that sounded like less of a love story and more of a personalized cautionary tale, especially because I already spend the majority of my waking hours looking at and touching my laptop.

I spent way too much time in high school and college obsessing over the fact that I didn’t have a girlfriend, and it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve been able to chill the fuck out and really enjoy being single. I was scared that Her would undo all of that – watching a movie about a lonely guy who resorts to dating software would throw me into a partner-seeking frenzy similar to that of an unmarried woman in her mid 30s who keeps seeing her friends’ baby pictures on Facebook.

The good news is that seeing Her didn’t make me desperate to run out and find someone to be in a relationship with – it was just a beautiful, brilliantly scripted movie that I already count among my favorites. The bad news is that now I catch myself daydreaming about dating a vivacious, hyperintelligent computer program that sounds like a beautiful woman.

It started in the first half hour of the movie. After Joaquin Phoenix first activates his Operating System (named Samantha), one of the first things she does is offer to help him clean up and reorganize his hard drive, instantaneously reading thousands of documents, archiving his best writing, and deleting all the unnecessary files.

I’ve been meaning to clean up and reorganize my hard drive since I was 16 years old, and somehow, even without a steady 9 to 5 job, I still haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve had some emotionally fulfilling relationships with women before, but none of them streamlined my file structure or sifted through 11,000 of my emails.* Advantage: Operating System.

*Maybe that’s okay, though, because there were some things on my hard drive that I definitely didn’t want them to see.

And as a Wikipedia addict, the benefits of being in a relationship with an entity that literally knows everything are hard to ignore. Who wouldn’t want to date somebody who can compose music on the fly and offer informed insight into pretty much any topic under the sun? Provided the OS in question wasn’t a know-it-all and just let its universal knowledge come up organically in conversation, I feel like we’d never run out of things to talk about – and more importantly, we would be absolutely unstoppable at pub quiz nights.

Best of all, unlike most things from science fiction that I daydream about, AI this advanced could realistically exist in my lifetime. Inventor and Google engineer Ray Kurzwell estimated that it’ll take about 15 years for us to develop the technology that would make AI like Samantha a reality. I’ll be 40 at that point, and if development keeps pace with Kurzwell’s predictions my midlife crisis is going to be bananas.

So here’s the flip side of the coin: What I’m basically describing is a relationship with a woman who I own as property, serves me like a personal assistant, and can be turned off at will.*

*I’ve discovered over the years that I’m actually extremely good at turning women off, but not in the same way, and always by accident.

Her captures the giddy, addictive feeling of falling in love better than any other movie I’ve seen. And as everybody who’s been there before knows, in those first couple of months your relationship is pretty much the most perfect relationship anyone has ever been in. The bulk of the movie takes place during that period, so of course it makes dating a computer program look like a dream come true.*

*Like a responsible movie, Her eventually does address those issues, but I can’t really talk about how without giving too much away.

Every relationship is like dating Samantha at the start – when you’re first getting close to somebody they’re full of mysteries and surprises and hidden traits and talents that seem miraculous. Of course, that all wears off down the line and then you actually have to start making sacrifices and putting in effort to make things work. (Historically that’s where I stumble.) I think Her is able to capture that so realistically because by and large it’s a movie about an ordinary relationship – there’s no Hollywood ‘meet cute’ or contrived situation where somebody has to run through an airport or make out in a thunderstorm. If Samantha were human, most of Her would be a really boring movie about two people bonding over similar interests.

So that’s how I’ve come to the conclusion that a living, breathing human being would make a better partner than cloud storage and a sultry voice. Maybe I’ll change my mind somewhere down the line, but for the next 15 years at least I think I’m just going to keep trying to make it work with women.

Truman Capps realizes that Her probably did put him in a weird emotional place after all, seeing as it made him want to date software for 48 hours.

Plenty Of Bartenders

We need more good men like you, sir. 

The Departed is one of my all-time favorite movies for a myriad of reasons. I love the soundtrack, the hard-hitting editing, the standout performances from every member of the cast, and the masterfully convoluted story – but what really makes the movie for me is how many infinitely quotable lines it has, most of which can’t be repeated in polite company.

There’s one particular line from The Departed that I come back to on an almost daily basis. Late in the film’s second act, an abrasive, angry detective clashes violently with his fellow officers and, when rebuked by his captain, threatens to quit the police department.

Calling his bluff, the captain shrugs and exclaims, “World needs plenty of bartenders!” Except because the movie is awesomely set in Boston, it sounds like, “World needs plentya bahtendahs!”

I love the line because it’s a really simple and eloquent way to tell somebody to quit bitching and get back to work. It pops into my head every time a Congressman starts whining about how hard his job is, or some rapper dedicates a big chunk of time to calling out his haters. Hell, I even mutter the line out loud when I feel myself getting kind of huffy about a freelance writing assignment:

Oh, what’s that? You don’t want to make the changes the client wants you to make? Well, world needs plenty of bartenders, asshole! Nobody’s forcing you to keep pursuing this career path that you’re incredibly lucky to be on. No, I’m serious; go be a bartender. See how much you like a job where you have to stand up and deal with the general public for up to eight hours at a stretch. I’m sure you’ll find that far more rewarding and enjoyable than making those revisions on page three, you feckin’ pissah.*

*The part of my brain that belittles me into action is from South Boston.

It’s worth noting that the character who actually says, “World needs plenty of bartenders!” is played by Alec Baldwin. It’s worth noting that because when I read that Alec Baldwin has declared that he’s leaving public life forever, all I wanted to do was throw that line right the hell back in his face.

Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way: Alec Baldwin is extremely talented. I think his face should be on postage stamps in honor of the incredible work he did on 30 Rock, and even when he’s in movies that I hate – holla back It’s Complicated and To Rome With Love! – he’s one of the highlights.

But with that said, Alec Baldwin is also an insufferable asshole.

Case in point: He’s the only person I’ve ever had to stop following on Twitter. When I signed up for my old account a couple years ago, he was one of the first people I followed, but within two weeks I’d unfollowed him because it seemed like every damn day he was getting into a new, angry flame war with some troll account that had eight followers and no profile photo.

I mean, what does cussing out some 15 year old on Twitter accomplish for you, Alec Baldwin? At the end of the day, he’s just some guy trolling celebrities on Twitter, whereas you remain Alec fucking Baldwin. You have everything to lose and nothing to gain from launching these countless personal crusades against strangers, and yet you keep doing it, to the point that a person who is one of your fans who specifically followed you on Twitter so he could hear what you have to say was forced to stop following you.

This is why I didn’t buy it for one second when Alec Baldwin, in a 5000 word New York Magazine cover story, blamed everybody except himself for his problems and announced that he is officially “retiring” from public life. Oh, don’t worry – he’ll still act; he’s just not going to be a celebrity anymore.

I’m sure that’s what Alec Baldwin genuinely wants right now. Right now I genuinely want to quit drinking Diet Coke. But 20 minutes from now, when I have a mouthful of Sriracha and rice, the only thing I’m going to want is a Diet Coke – and after a few months to a year of “retirement” from public life, the only thing Alec Baldwin is going to want is to turn on the news and see journalists, politicians, and celebrities buzzing about something that he said.

Being famous in and of itself does not make you a public figure. The first tabloid article I ever saw about Philip Seymour Hoffman was reporting his death; Daniel Day-Lewis does not pen opinionated political screeds for the Huffington Post. It’s not like the nation’s attention was foisted on Alec Baldwin post-Red October against his will – he earned that attention by being outspoken and opinionated for 20 years.

To be fair, Baldwin argues that he’s no longer seeking the spotlight because today’s media environment is more predatory and negative than it used to be. That’s not untrue. But let’s not forget that he’s making that argument in a lengthy magazine article in which he calls out numerous other public figures by name – Rachel Maddow is “a phony who doesn’t have the same passion for truth off-camera that she does on air,” Joe Scarborough is “neither eloquent nor funny.”* These are not the actions of a man who seeks a quiet retirement from public life.

*I mean, he’s right about Scarborough, but still.

Not being a public figure anymore is as simple as shutting the fuck up and keeping a low profile. Alec Baldwin knows that. And instead, he chose to announce that he no longer wants the public’s attention or the media’s criticism by taking to a public forum to personally criticize several members of the media.

Listen to me, Alec Baldwin: The world genuinely does need a large quantity of bartenders. In fact, there’s a sticky little dive bar tucked into the strip mall around the corner from my apartment that’s so poorly lit nobody would even see your face. They open at 7:00 every morning, and I’m sure if you had a couple of references you could pick up some daytime shifts there pouring drinks for the alcoholics and refilling the condom machine in the bathroom in total anonymity.  
Does that sound like something you’d be interested in?

Truman Capps would not put it past Alec Baldwin to read this update and get extremely upset about it.

Greywater

I'm making another TV show - or trying to, at least - and I could really use your help. 

Our House

I'm going to start glancing at an imaginary audience from time to time and see if anybody notices.

When I was a kid I remember noticing the striking differences between the types of movies I watched and the movies my parents watched. Pretty much every movie I ever brought home from the video store was either an extended series of action sequences or an extended series of fart jokes. You can’t even imagine what a boon the Austin Powers movies were back then.    

Mom and Dad would always rent their own movies, to be watched after I went to bed. These movies were very different from mine, and they often had cryptic titles like The English Patient or Eyes Wide Shut, which did very little to explain what the movie was actually about, unlike the titles of the movies I was renting. Cliffhanger was about people fighting on a mountain, frequently hanging off of cliffs; Delta Force 2: The Columbian Connection was about the second time Chuck Norris went on a mission with the Delta Force, this time in Columbia. 

I could usually hear my parents watching their vaguely-titled movies from my bedroom, and from an early age I realized I wasn’t missing much – the movies my parents watched were extremely boring. Most of them just seemed to be about people sitting around talking (and occasionally having sex) in a variety of rather dull, non-exploding locations. No car chases, no guns, no crashing helicopters or nameless thugs having their heads smashed into urinals for the sake of a good catchphrase – like most members of Congress, my parents’ movies were all talk, no action.

I remember lying in bed listening to the seemingly endless muffled dialogue seeping through my walls and being dumbfounded that people found that interesting. “Who the hell wants to watch a bunch of people talking?” I wondered. “I see people talking every day. Am I actually supposed to start liking this crap someday?”

Looking back, I can only imagine that a show like House of Cards would have been my kryptonite.

It is, after all, a show that consists almost entirely of people sitting in rooms talking to each other, walking down hallways and talking, talking to each other on phones, talking to each other about when they can set up meetings to talk with other people, talking in motorcades on the way to go talk to people, and sometimes, for variety’s sake, texting or having threesomes.

And the things that they talk about! Trade sanctions, committee appointments, parliamentary procedures, lobbying scandals, campaign finance… It’s like they made a list of all the driest, most complicated, least sexy issues currently facing our government and said, “Let’s make a tense political thriller out of that stuff.”

I’m not complaining – if I was, I wouldn’t have smashed through the second season in about five days. If anything, I think it’s a testament to how great House of Cards is that it can turn everyday C-SPAN fodder like entitlement reform into some seriously riveting television. 

Admittedly, that doesn’t work all the time. For example, I couldn’t really get invested in the Chinese trade war from the middle of the season because the only negative consequence seemed to be an energy crisis that made it prohibitively expensive for people to turn on their air conditioners. Since virtually everybody on the show is pretty wealthy, this “energy crisis” felt less like a crisis and more like a mild inconvenience for the one character who didn’t have a six to seven figure salary.

But that’s the beauty of House of Cards – even when the plots start to sound like the sort of things political science and economics majors talk about when they’re stoned, the show holds your interest because it’s always fun watching Frank Underwood do stuff, even if that stuff isn’t really all that interesting on its own merits. Secretive trade negotiations with a Chinese billionaire normally aren’t my idea of riveting television, but Frank, with his scheming and his manipulation and his constant stream of barbecue-oriented analogies, makes it fun.

The main criticism of the show that I see online is that it isn’t realistic. Frank’s ascendance is implausible, Washington doesn’t run completely on back channel favors, nobody that high profile could get away with that much for that long... Those are all valid points – and so long as we’re pointing out things on TV that aren’t realistic, any high school teacher cooking meth would be arrested or killed in a matter of weeks, an unknown standup comedian with no real job couldn't afford a huge Manhattan apartment, and dragons aren’t real.

House of Cards isn’t about exposing the true inner workings of our political process; it’s about watching Frank Underwood awesomely attain as much power as possible while winning as few elections as he can. If you honestly think a show like that is going to be a true-to-life snapshot of Washington DC then you’re probably also wondering why nobody seems to notice Frank talking to the camera all the time.

My seven-year-old self would be absolutely disgusted that I find this show gripping, exciting, and supremely enjoyable. Maybe this is the sign that I’ve finally reached adulthood, and it’s time for me to get a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and start using phrases like “I need to go run some errands,” or “Time to balance my checkbook!” If nothing else, I should at least watch The English Patient and see how I feel.

Truman Capps likes to pretend that Ferris Bueller grew up to become Frank Underwood. He presumably turned evil somewhere in college.

Own It

"Stampeding cattle... Through the Vatican!"

There aren’t a lot of good things I can say about the Ku Klux Klan – except perhaps that they’re the people to talk to if you want tips on what sort of bleach you should be using – but I really do have to applaud them for at least owning up to the terrible things that they believe. Anybody in 2014 who still puts on a uniform that represents 150 years of intolerance, racism, and terrorism isn’t going to try and walk back their ideology to save face.

Believe me, I’d much rather the KKK just not exist. But since they do, I at least appreciate the fact that they’re up front with this stuff so that everybody knows what they’re about.

I can’t say the same for Kansas’ Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which has been hard at work safeguarding the principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism by overwhelmingly approving a bill that will allow any individual, group, or private business to refuse service to gay couples or individuals if “it would be contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

This broadly written bill would make it legal for pretty much any state employee – from a justice of the peace to a police officer – to refuse service to gay people if they feel that rendering that service goes against their religious beliefs. The bill would also make it legal for restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and just about any other business to deny service to gay people, or even prevent them from entering the property, leaving them to conduct their business at some separate (but presumably equal) institution.

If federal-level politics are the NFL, then state-level politics is college football – everything there moves faster and is more interesting because about half of the people in any given state legislature are certifiably insane. That explains how a bill legalizing discrimination and clearing the way for segregation got passed in America in 2014.

The author of this bill is state Representative Charles Macheers, a self-proclaimed Reagan Republican with a degree from the self-proclaimed second best law school in the country.* And nobody in the Kansas House of Representatives is more concerned about discrimination than he is.

*Rankings not compiled by the dean of the school, on the other hand, are a little bit harsher.

Says Macheers, “Discrimination is horrible. It’s hurtful … It has no place in civilized society, and that’s precisely why we’re moving this bill. There have been times throughout history where people have been persecuted for their religious beliefs because they were unpopular. This bill provides a shield of protection for that.”

You see, Macheers’ bill, which makes it legal to discriminate against any gay person purely on the basis of who they want to have sex with, is actually intended to prevent discrimination against Christians, who as we all know are often the target of considerable prejudice in this country, particularly in places like the Midwest.

By making it legal for Christian businesses to refuse service to gay customers without fear of being sued for discrimination, Macheers’ bill supposedly aims to allow Christians to freely practice their religion – a core tenet of which appears to be, “THOU SHALT NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES RECEIVE MONEY FROM GAY PEOPLE.”  

The bill has drawn national attention, and Macheers has taken to the Internet to reassure everyone that if any anti-gay discrimination happens as a result of this bill, it’ll be a completely unintended side effect of his attempts to protect Christians in a country with 44 consecutive Christian presidents and a paltry 477 Christians in Congress.

Now, it goes without saying that Charles Macheers and his buddies in the Kansas House are a bunch of old, dimwitted crackers, at least a few of whom doubtless have a stack of carefully hidden men’s fitness magazines in their attic. It also goes without saying that if your religious convictions prevent you from doing business with a certain group of people, you probably shouldn’t be in business in the first place.

But that’s not really what pisses me off. What pisses me off is that in the face of rapidly growing support for LGBT rights, conservative opponents are too chickenshit to even own up to what they're doing anymore.

Charles Macheers disguises his anti-gay bill as a pro-Christian bill. A coalition of religious organizations files a brief opposing gay marriage but insists that it is “False and offensive” to suggest that they are anti-gay. 13 conservative groups urge the RNC not to drop its opposition to gay marriage but “Deeply regret the insinuation that we have treated homosexuals unkindly personally,” even when three of the groups are classified as anti-gay hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Here’s a hot tip, social conservatives: If it really hurts your feelings that much when people call you a bunch of crusty, ignorant old bigots, maybe you should quit trying to deny millions of Americans rights that they’re guaranteed under the 14^th Amendment.

You have every right to try and advance your backward, prejudiced agenda, but you don’t get to have it both ways. Either join us here at the “Marry Whoever You Want, It Doesn’t Matter” party or keep fighting to have a 21^st century democracy play by your idiotic Biblical-era rules; you can’t act like you’re totally fine with gay people so long as they aren’t getting their fag cooties all over the precious, totally infallible institution of marriage. Nobody buys that line anymore.

The Ku Klux Klan’s brand of hate, while equally despicable, is at least ideologically honest – they aren’t trying to strike some moderate tone to avoid public backlash while quietly pushing the same prejudice as before. They proudly, unabashedly believe the shitty things that they believe, and while that’s not necessarily deserving of respect, I wish all of this country’s other bigots would at least take notice.

Truman Ca-

Whoops! Hold the phone. Turns out the KKK isn’t a racist group anymore; now they’re just a bunch of white guys who like to hang out and adopt local highways.

Truman Capps is still pretty happy that today's hate groups are less violent and more whiny.

PSH

In November of 2011 I started working for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brother, Gordy, making $200 a month writing the newsletter for the screenplay competition he runs. We never met in person - he called me on the phone once to tell me I was hired, and everything else we did through email. It was a pretty brisk, businesslike relationship, so we never got a chance to really chat and acknowledge the fact that I was talking to a direct blood relative of my all time favorite actor.

No matter how much I thought about it, there wasn’t really a non-awkward way to bring it up in an email. Okay, I’ll change the Screenplay of the Week heading to Arial Bold, and also in Boogie Nights did Paul Thomas Anderson tell your brother to half hug himself in the background of those scenes, or did he come up with that posture himself while he was preparing for the role? Plus, I imagine everybody made a big deal when they found out they were related, which seems like the logical equivalent of being asked if I’ve ever seen The Truman Show.

Eventually I got my advertising job and resigned my post, because as exciting as it was to be one degree from Philip Seymour Hoffman, it wasn’t exciting enough to make me enjoy wrestling with Constant Contact’s buggy, unintuitive layout system. In our last email exchange, Gordy thanked me for my work and extended his warmest wishes for my future in the industry. In my response I told him it had been a pleasure working with him, and neglected to mention how hard I always laugh at the look on his brother’s face when Bunny Lebowski offers to give The Dude a blowjob for $1000.

One week ago, shortly after hearing the news, I found that Gordy’s email address was still on my computer and spent 20 minutes trying to write him a message. I gave up when I realized there was nothing worth saying to him. I didn’t know his brother any more than the rest of the indie film-going public, and a heartfelt “I’m so sorry for your loss” coming from a former part time employee he’d never met wouldn’t do anything to heal the pain of losing someone so close under such terrible circumstances.

The email wouldn’t be about him; it would be about me. Because for a very long time one of my biggest aspirations as a writer had been to write a script so good that Philip Seymour Hoffman would act in it, and now my fleeting contact with his brother was as close as I was ever going to get to that goal.

*

I don’t want to know how much heroin was in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s apartment, or how gaunt he looked at Sundance, or what cryptic statements he made before his death. I don’t want to see pictures of his body bag being wheeled out of his apartment. I don’t want to know what brand of heroin killed him.

But I do know these things. I know them because even though I had all these high-minded sentiments about giving this man and his family privacy in death, I still clicked on links about his death that featured tabloid phrases like ‘NEW DETAILS SURFACE’ or ‘HEAR SUNDANCE ATTENDEES’ STORIES OF…” Morbid interest always overrides conscience, I guess.

Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t chase the spotlight – he didn’t have messy public divorces or run ins with the cops or controversial outbursts to apologize for. The fact that he was an amazing – yes, amazing – actor was the only thing keeping him in the public eye. Maybe that’s why I went looking for the uncomfortable details of his death; it was the only glance into his personal life we ever got.

*

Some of my friends have complained about all the mourning and remembrances for Philip Seymour Hoffman, the general sentiment being, “He died with a needle in his arm. He got himself hooked on heroin, he fucked up – we shouldn’t be celebrating that.”

I can see see where they’re coming from – Philip Seymour Hoffman absolutely fucked up. Far be it for me to tell anybody how to live their life, but I think it’s a mistake to do heroin, particularly if you have kids. And while I don’t want to speak for the dead, I feel as though Philip Seymour Hoffman would agree. As much as I don’t want to call attention to the stories about his last days, none of them paint a picture of a man who’s particularly excited and proud to be addicted to heroin.

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but I didn’t love Philip Seymour Hoffman because he was a heroin addict. In fact, I didn’t even know he had a drug problem until a week ago. I’m mourning Philip Seymour Hoffman because he crawled deep into every character he played and always gave a standout performance, even if many of his roles granted him little screentime in which to do it.

What I hope is that in the next several years, long after we’ve all gotten the mourning out of our system, that we talk about Capote, or Punch-Drunk Love, or Mission Impossible III, or Along Came Polly, and leave the unpleasant business of how he died to a short footnote on Wikipedia.

Truman Capps hopes nothing bad happens to Chris Cooper before he gets a chance to read the dozens of scripts he’s sent him.

America The Beautiful

"I'm tweeting." 

If 24-hour cable news networks are legitimate journalistic entities, then Kelsey Grammer is a legitimate psychologist.

We can all agree that Kelsey Grammer is extremely good at appearing to be a psychologist – he’s so good at it that he did it for 20 years and won a bunch of awards. That being said, it would be a really bad idea to consult Kelsey Grammer for any actual psychological advice, what with the drug abuse and the four divorces and the Michele Bachmann endorsement. That said, I’m sure he’d still be much better at diagnosing your mental and emotional problems than cable news is at actually reporting on current events.

Cable news networks seem to be less concerned with being news networks than they are with looking like news networks. This is probably why CNN quit the investigative journalism game, laid off journalists and has begun to restructure their programming to focus on "attitude" rather than news, or why MSNBC cut away from a member of Congress talking about the NSA to cover Justin Bieber's arrest in Miami. Sure, the content isn't news, but thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of flashy graphics and high tech studio toys, it sure as hell looks like news.

These days, the desperate hunt to find something to talk about that can be convincingly dressed up as news has driven cable news networks to just take a gander at what the Internet is doing and report on that. This isn’t to suggest that newsworthy things don’t happen on the Internet – they do. But these usually aren’t the things getting reported on.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why we’re all talking about the “controversy” over Coke’s Super Bowl commercial.

The commercial features shots of Americans drinking Coke, set to “America the Beautiful” sung in several languages. Some people on Twitter took umbrage at this and quite racistly rumbled about a boycott. Cable news networks, which can sniff out ignorant racists on the Internet the way sharks can smell blood in the water, found the tweets, had the sexy communications majors they call “journalists” talk about them, and now a commercial that used languages besides English is apparently "controversial."

So first, to address this “controversy”: If you have a problem with the fact that people in the United States speak languages besides English, you can go fuck yourself. That’s pretty much it. I could explain about how this country doesn’t have an official language, or how the English language is the product of multiple foreign languages blending together over time, or how incorporating other languages into the commercial was actually shrewd marketing intended to get minorities to drink more Coke, which is free market capitalism at its finest, but I won’t, because if you’re offended at the very existence of languages other than English then you’re honestly too stupid to be reasoned with, and your only recourse is to go somewhere far away and fuck yourself until you stop being so stupid.

But the thing is, this isn’t even a controversy. Take a look at this article from CNN – notice they’re very careful not to give any indication of how many people were sending these racist tweets. Are those four tweets representative of tens of thousands of similar ones, or are they just the best of the 35 tweets Public Shaming dug up out of the 400 million-odd tweets sent on any given day?

This is not a newsworthy controversy. In fact, it's not really so much a controversy as it is a few people on Twitter saying ignorant, racist stuff because sending tweets is easy and doesn’t cost anything. That’s not news; that’s just something that happens on the Internet on a daily basis. There are over 300 million people in this country and just about anything is bound to piss a few of them off enough to pull out their phones and send some racial slurs to their 11 idiot followers. Is that news now? Is there going to be a special report every time somebody in this country gets pissed off about something? If so, expect a CNN report about this update in the next few hours.

Here’s another indicator that this isn’t a controversy: Not only did a Republican senator tweet about how much she loved the ad, but so did The Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation. This group is basically the conduit through which the Koch Brothers’ money flows to the Tea Party. If the people who shut down the federal government to try and thwart affordable healthcare don't have a problem with "America the Beautiful" being sung in multiple languages, who the hell does? 

Pretty much the only public figure CNN could find to corroborate the angry tweets was Allen West, who raged at length on his blog about how foreign languages promote a “Balkanized” America and the fact that there weren’t enough soldiers in the commercial or something. If you don’t know who Allen West is, he’s a former Tea Party congressman who served his South Florida district for one term before being voted out of office.

So basically, some cranks on Twitter, plus a Congressman so shrill and reactionary that people in Florida thought he was too crazy to represent them, are mad that other languages exist, while the vast majority of Americans, including the Tea Party’s own financiers, don’t give a rip. That may not look like much to you, but to 24 hour news networks it looks like a solid three days of almost news.

Truman Capps mainly uses his journalism degree as an excuse to get up on his high horse about what does and does not constitute "real news."

Truman At The Gay Bar

 This is an actual picture from the bar where I spent last Saturday night.

Two weeks ago I got a phone call from my BFF Sabba, who was in the process of planning her birthday:

“Truman!” She exclaimed as soon as I picked up. “I found the perfect bar for my birthday on Saturday!”

“I thought we were going to that classy English pub in Hollywood,” I said.

“No! Change of plans! I’m having my birthday at a gay bar now!”

“Uh-”

“It’s called Oil Can Harry’s! They have karaoke, and my birthday is on disco night!”

I sighed and hung my head. “Okay… But what if, instead of doing that, we did something, y’know… Enjoyable?”

“No! This is going to be so fun!”

“I respectfully disagree.”  

And that’s the story of how I went to a gay bar last weekend.

I’ve actually been to a number of gay bars before – just not intentionally. When I was visiting Edinburgh one of my male friends and I inadvertently barhopped between several gay pubs because we were unaware that our hostel was in the middle of Edinburgh’s gay district. Until we realized our mistake I just assumed that the Scottish were much, much friendlier than the English, as well as more fond of really tight shirts.

I don’t have a problem with gay bars, or gay people for that matter – which is lucky, because if I did I would be living in the worst possible place and working in the worst possible industry. I am 100% supportive of the existence of gay bars. That said, I’m about 85 to 90% against me personally patronizing a gay bar.

For one thing, gay bars tend to be dark, crowded, hot places with loud music and hundreds of sweaty people dancing, and that’s just not an environment where I do very well. My claustrophobia and crowd anxiety don’t care if you’re gay or straight – they want you to maintain a respectful distance no matter who you have sex with.

Mainly, though, I think me going to a gay bar is just sort of dishonest.

In middle school there were a bunch of helpful eighth graders who made sure to remind me every time they saw me in the locker room that I looked and acted exactly like a homosexual. If that’s still the case, I don’t want to go to a gay bar and give people the wrong idea. It’s not that I assume that all gay people are horny sex fiends who won’t take no for an answer – my roommate is gay and he seems about as interested in fucking me as most of the women I’ve ever met – but because I don’t want to be a tease.

Ohmygosh, you’re so sweet, but actually I’m exclusively sexually attracted to women. I just happen to be hanging out in a gay bar tonight, even though there are a myriad of other bars that I could be in that are more reflective of my sexual preferences. Anyway, thanks for the drink!

On the night of the party I arrived at Oil Can Harry’s at 8:30 and immediately realized two things:

1)   This particular gay bar had a pretty strong cowboy theme – not that you’d know it to look at it from the outside. (From the outside the bar’s theme appeared to be either “Abandoned building” or “Fire code violation”)

2)   Sabba was nowhere to be seen and the bar was nearly empty, save for an extremely buff middle aged guy in a mesh shirt casually dancing to the song “Car Wash” on the stage in front of a deserted dancefloor.

Checking the event invitation on Facebook, I saw that Sabba had surreptitiously changed the start time from 8:00 to 9:00. This left me – as well as the out-of-town friends I’d brought along – to sit on old vinyl chairs at the edge of the room and watch the mesh shirt guy dance to disco hits for half an hour before the other guests arrived.

Things started to improve once Sabba showed up, thanks to a combination of her bringing a bunch of friends, the bar getting busier, me starting to drink heavily, and the fact that Sabba’s presence generally improves most things. The lights got dimmer and the dance floor got fuller, and while I don’t want to engage in any ugly stereotypes, gay people take their dancing very seriously.

The bar’s patrons were so busy dancing, in fact, that none of them paid any attention to me. Which is probably just indicative of their commitment to dancing, because I think I looked pretty good that night. I mean, who knows, right? They were probably just too intimidated to talk to me. That has to be it. Flamboyantly gay men are, after all, known for being extremely self-conscious and shy.

As the night wore on the crowd clamoring around the bar for new drinks grew larger. At first I hadn’t wanted to lead anybody on, but I also really didn’t want to wait 20 minutes for more alcohol. I figured that as a 25-year-old twinkish guy with great hair I was the gay bar equivalent of a girl with big boobs in a tube top, and it would be a shame if I didn’t use my masculine wiles to get expedited service from the bartender.

I wormed my way to the front of the pack of men at the bar and made a point of playing with my hair whenever I was in the bartender’s line of sight. But the asshole just ignored me and continued quite unfairly serving drinks to the guys who had been at the bar longer than me. It was probably because he could tell I was straight – and I don’t know what straight people ever did to this guy to earn this sort of discrimination, but the heterophobia was seriously not appreciated.

Shortly after midnight, as everyone in the bar launched into a chorus of “I Will Survive”, I decided it was time to leave. I’d enjoyed myself far more than I would have expected – even the gayest of gay bars is still a place where you can drink and hang out with your friends, after all – but I was getting tired, not to mention demoralized by the total absence of catcalls or pickup lines. Just because I’m not gay doesn’t mean I wouldn’t appreciate being objectified a little bit every now and then, you know!

On my way out the door and into the street the rotund, bespectacled bouncer smiled warmly and said, “Come back soon, sweetheart.” I probably won’t, but the very fact that he seemed to want me to kind of made my night.

Truman Capps was born this way.

Dog Stories IV: Reality Bites

This is what the dog in question kind of looked like, complete with the eyes that blaze red like the fires of hell. 

You never really expect to get bit by a dog these days. It’s not like it’s completely unthinkable or anything, it’s just that when I compile a mental list of bad things that could happen to me when I leave the house (as I’m sure all of us do) I find myself worrying more about getting hit by a car or shot by a crazy person or asked to sign an anti-GMO petition outside a supermarket. I never really worry about getting bit by a dog because that’s the sort of bad thing that always happens to other people, like mailmen and unlucky joggers.

I guess I’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, since most of the dogs I know are more wimpy and neurotic than I am. Service animals aside, dogs in the city don’t serve any real purpose outside of entertainment for their owners, and since animal bites aren’t most peoples’ idea of a good time I just sort of take it for granted that their bitier instincts have been bred out and replaced by an insatiable love for pig ears.

As you may have guessed, this misconception about dogs cost me pretty dearly.

A couple of weeks ago a friend set me up with a job interview at the West LA startup he worked at. I was hopeful as I drove to the interview – I’ve been out of the job game for some time now, and if nothing else this interview would provide me with something I could tell my friends about to try and fool them into thinking that I want to be a productive member of society again.

I parked in a garage adjacent to the building, signed in with a security guard in the ornate lobby, and rode a clean, quiet elevator up to the floor my friend’s company was on. The office space was airy and open, full of 20somethings pecking away at their laptops while sitting on a variety of chairs, ergonomic exercise balls, or beanbags. Arcade Fire was faintly playing through somebody’s MacBook speakers.

Close your eyes and try to picture the sort of environment in which you’d expect to get bitten by a dog. Compare that picture to the scene I’ve just described to you. This ought to give you some sense of how prepared I was for what was about to happen to me.

An underling ushered me into an empty conference room, where I sat on an IKEA chair at an IKEA conference table until my interviewer, the woman who would be my immediate supervisor if I were hired, entered the room, closed the door behind her, and had a seat across from me. I can’t remember her name, but let’s say it was Mrwwxb.

Mrwwxb and I spent 15 minutes or so having a lovely chat about my resume, my background, LA, Portland, the state of online media, and the company’s history. We were about to start in on talking about what my job duties would be when the door behind me rattled. The sounds of snorting and panting ominously seeped in from under the door.

“Oh, that’s just my dog – don’t worry about her,” Mrwwxb sighed. “She’s a little terrier and she’s super protective of me so every time there’s somebody she doesn’t know in the office she freaks out and tries to bite their ankles and stuff.”

Now do you see how this story is coming together?

This probably should have been a warning sign for me, but all I took away from it was, “Oh, there’s a small dog in the office.” Mrwwxb did say that her dog tried to bite peoples’ ankles, but when I heard it I assumed it was a joke or a figure of speech or a lighthearted exaggeration, because if this woman’s dog actually did have a habit of biting strangers she obviously wouldn’t bring it to a stranger-rich environment like an office, right?

I mean… Right? Right?

Eventually the dog quit nosing at the door, and after another 15 minutes or so Mrwwxb’s questioning was complete. All told, I feel like it went pretty well. Mrwwxb left to jump on a conference call while another employee showed me around the office floor on my way out. During the tour, Mrwwxb’s dog was nowhere to be seen.

I was standing near some couches, talking with my friend who’d set me up with the job, when suddenly I felt a sharp, stinging pain on my left ankle and turned around to see a little black terrier with its fucking jaws clamped onto my lower leg.

This came as a surprise, particularly because there had been no barking whatsoever before the bite. The main reason I don’t concern myself with dog bites is because when a dog starts barking at me I usually take that as a cue to put some serious distance between myself and its mouth, and I would’ve done the same thing in this situation had I been given a chance. Instead, the dog just snuck up from behind me and brutally attacked without warning like some canine George Zimmerman.

So to recap, I got bit by a dog – a thing that would be unexpected under almost any circumstances – during a job interview – which if you asked me to list the circumstances under which dog attacks might occur would still be pretty close to the bottom of my list.

A gaggle of coworkers descended on the dog and dragged it away, while another gaggle showered me with apologies. I found myself at a loss for how to respond – on the one hand, I was still technically being interviewed, and it would behoove me to leave a good impression.

On the other hand, though:

One of the main reasons human beings started living in cities and developing societies in the first place was to protect themselves from animal attacks, and here I had just been sneak attacked by an aggressive, stranger-hating dog that for some reason had been allowed to roam freely throughout a public office space. This wasn’t just a slight against me; it was a slight against 7000 years of human civilization.

In the end, I decided not to loudly accuse everyone in the room of destroying civilization. I accepted their apologies through gritted teeth and limped out of the building as quickly as possible, scanning all of the shadows on the way to my car on the off-chance some other employee had decided to let his pack of wild dingoes play in the parking garage that day.

I never heard from the company again – nor did I ever receive any sort of apology from Mrwwxb – but that’s fine by me. As much as I’d love to be gainfully employed, I'd rather it be at a company that is at least capable of managing a small dog.

Truman Capps will gladly burn any bridge that has a crazed, biting dog at the other end of it.