The League

"I miss when everybody was just pissed at me about concussions..."

I love a good college football game, but coming from Portland and living in LA I’ve never been in a city with a pro football team. This usually leaves me feeling bitter and left out when people at work from places like Denver or Chicago start chattering about points and playoffs and fantasy teams. For the past couple of weeks, though, not watching the NFL has given me a wonderful, smug glow of moral superiority – I am no longer simply not watching the NFL because I don’t have a team; now I’m standing on principle and boycotting it.

From the outside looking in, here’s how I see it: The NFL is a (nonprofit!) organization that takes young men, some of whom have aggressive tendencies, and gives them huge sums of money and godlike celebrity status to play a game that routinely results in brain damage. I’m not saying this to try and apologize for the actions of thugs who beat the shit out of their loved ones at the drop of a hat; I’m saying this to make it clear that unless the NFL undergoes a lot of major structural changes, I don’t see this problem going away anytime soon.

I don’t think that anybody at the NFL is pro-domestic violence. I have no doubt that in even their most candid moments, every NFL executive thinks domestic abuse is horrible and needs to stop. It’s just that as an organization, the NFL really doesn’t have to do anything more than the bare minimum necessary to appear concerned about the problem – so why would they?

Right now, everybody hates the NFL, and their Ferguson Police Department-esque crisis management skills haven’t helped much. Multiple senators have written angry letters and, more importantly, one of the NFL’s largest sponsors released a tersely worded statement criticizing the league’s multiple PR disasters. Personally, I think it’s kind of cute that despite the billions and billions of dollars, like most other nonprofits the NFL is still apparently run by enthusiastic but undertrained volunteers.

So everybody’s angry, but not angry enough to stop watching football. In fact, everybody’s watching more football, probably because of all the free publicity the NFL is getting every day in pretty much every major news outlet. At a Ravens bar in Baltimore, there’s reportedly been an uptick in attendance by patrons who “…are wanting to see the Ravens fail.” Fortunately for the NFL, the people hate-watching the Ravens are also hate-watching commercials, and that’s the only thing that really matters.

Again, I think that if the NFL had a button they could push that would make their players stop beating their wives and children, they would have mashed it several hundred times well before now. If there was a cheap, easy fix to this problem, it would be swiftly implemented. But there isn’t a cheap, easy fix – the real solution would be to adopt a zero-tolerance code of conduct that would obviously see multiple popular players banned from the league every year. Axing peoples’ favorite players from the league is one thing that actually could get people to stop watching the NFL. Maintaining the status quo, on the other hand, costs nothing and has no real consequences besides a national guilt tripping.

Imagine if there wasn’t a law against not paying your taxes. The government still asks you to pay taxes, of course, but if you choose not to pay them all they do is send you a really nasty letter. Under those circumstances, would you really still pay your taxes? I mean, it’s just a simple choice between doing what is clearly the moral and responsible thing to do or having a bunch of extra money every week. But virtue is its own reward, right?

Sure, Anheuser-Busch said they were disappointed, because they undoubtedly were – domestic violence is horrible and the nonprofit they sponsor is not responding properly. But it’s not like Anheuser-Busch is seriously going to stop sponsoring the NFL. Too many people are making too much money for that to happen. And some folks may make a stink about it, but will they really be mad enough to boycott the company that makes their favorite beer for supporting the league that plays their favorite sport?

It’s easy for me to get on my high horse about this stuff because I don’t drink beer and I don’t watch pro football. But if the showrunners for The Americans got busted for dogfighting, would I really stop watching The Americans? If Sriracha manufacturer Huy Fong Foods bought airtime on Rush Limbaugh’s show, would I just eat my steamed rice and broccoli plain? If I found out Alison Brie was anti-vaccine, would I find a new standard for perfection?

Millions of people have deep, traditional, emotional connections to teams and players in the NFL, many of which aren’t involved in these scandals. At that point, it starts to become a question of just how egregious a moral offense has to be to get you to give up a part of your identity that brings you a lot of pride and joy. If the NFL was openly promoting domestic violence, I’m sure there would be a boycott – because everyone agrees that domestic violence is horrible and should not be promoted.


But the NFL isn’t promoting domestic violence; they’re just not doing enough to stop it. And they’re sorry about that – they’re super sorry, and they promise they’re going to try really hard to get better in ways that aren’t exactly clear yet. People aren’t going to start canceling their Fantasy Football teams just because the NFL sucks at crisis management. And as a result, the NFL will never have a compelling reason to try and prevent those crises in the first place.

When you love something a lot, it can be hard to walk away - even when it gives you a good reason to. 

Truman Capps is now less enthusiastic about LA supposedly getting a team. 

Asshole Army

This asshole probably doesn't even use his turn signals. 

A few years ago, back in Portland, I saw a distressing report on the local evening news. In one neighborhood, residents had come together and used donated supplies to build a little community garden that they all tended and harvested together. The garden had been a point of pride for the neighborhood, but the reason it was on the news was because the night before a bunch of vandals had come, knocked down all the fences, tore up all the planters, then stuck the garden’s hose into the dirt and turned it on, completely flooding everything.

Watching the residents of the neighborhood try to pick up the pieces of their destroyed garden, I found myself wondering, Who the hell does something like that? And then I immediately knew the answer to my own question: Assholes. Assholes would do something like that.

Whoever destroyed that garden didn’t have a personal vendetta against the community, or a longtime grudge against eggplant. The garden just happened to be there, and destroying something is always easier than creating something – and if you’re an asshole, it’s also preferable to just leaving it alone.

Assholes are everywhere. I am of the belief that assholes make up some percentage of the population of every country on Earth. Wherever there’s a group of people larger than 100, a certain number of them are just going to be assholes relative to everyone else. Their activities may vary from one culture to the next, but no matter where you are there’s always going to be a contingent of assholes united only by their desire to break shit, cause trouble, and get attention at the expense of everyone else.

It’s impossible to rid the world of assholes, but countries can control their numbers and mitigate their effects by investing in things like education, infrastructure, and jobs – because smart people who have opportunities in their lives are less likely to become assholes when there’s better, more lucrative alternatives. In America, our assholes shut down the government for no particular reason or carry assault rifles into restaurants, but they haven’t attempted genocide or mounted an aggressive terrorist campaign to overthrow the government. And they’re unlikely to, because the majority of the people here have enough other stuff going for them that these assholes’ antics will never infect more than a small, noisy percentage of the population.  

Bad things happen when a country loses control of its assholes. Nowhere is this more apparent than Iraq and Syria, where tens of thousands of young assholes have come together to form their own asshole country, which they’ve christened the Islamic State. The Islamic State practices such a violent form of assholery that even al Qaeda is appalled – because the Islamic State’s massacres and bombings and decapitation of journalists don’t have any greater purpose or agenda. They’re just being the biggest assholes possible so they can attract attention and, as a result, draw more assholes from other countries to join their big asshole army.

All the world’s bullies, angry losers, undiagnosed schizophrenics, and bitter outcasts are coming together under one flag, united by a hazy understanding of Islam and a very real desire to wreck the civilization we’ve spent thousands of years trying to build. I’m as much of a peace freak as any other Hollywood liberal, but if you ask me this sort of situation is the exact reason we have a huge and well-financed military.

I really don’t want another war in Iraq – because I don’t want Americans to die, because I don’t want Iraqis to die, and because I don’t want to pay for it. We’ve been bombing Iraq on and off for the last 20 years and it doesn’t seem to have turned them into a modern liberal democracy yet. More bombing probably isn’t the answer to their democracy problem, but it’s definitely the answer to their asshole problem. Because as much as I don’t want another war in Iraq, what I really, really don’t want is for the Islamic State to keep being a thing.

I mean, Jesus. Imagine if you traveled back to late September of 2001 and told people that in the future terrorists would have billions of dollars, US military technology, and their own fucking country. I agree with the assessment that these assholes don’t pose a direct threat to the US right now, but we’re already on their shit list and if we don't take care of this soon I'm sure they'll get around to being a threat to the US in due time. 

We’re never going to be able “destroy” the Islamic State the way the government wants to – I mean, we’ve been trying to “destroy” al Qaeda since I was in middle school and we’re not there yet – but I’m sure we and our Middle Eastern frenemies can kill enough of them to turn them from a terrorist country back into a smaller and more manageable terrorist group. When a herd of assholes grows large enough that it threatens the stability of multiple countries, that’s the cue for society at large to begin culling it.

If there was a way to solve the Islamic State problem that wasn’t a war, I’d support it. But there isn’t – they don’t want to negotiate. Assholes aren't capable of negotiating. All an asshole wants is to provoke a confrontation. In most cases the best course of action is to just ignore the asshole. But this group of assholes is too big - and too well armed - to ignore. 


Truman Capps thinks we should skip the War on Terrorism and jump straight to the War on Assholes.

Little Tokyo

You can tell this is an old advertisement because they clearly expected people to read all those words. 

I’ve been working full time again for a couple of months now, and it’s reminded me that no matter what kind of day I had at the office, I’m going to be completely worn out at the end of it. Even after slow days where I just spend eight hours slumped at my desk bouncing back and forth between Facebook and Reddit, I still drag myself up the stairs to my apartment like I just got home from a 36 hour shift at a factory where all people do is pick up bowling balls and set them down again.

Most likely it’s a psychological defense mechanism against being productive – if I convince myself that I’ve had a rough day at the office, then I’ve got an excuse to hit Baja Fresh on the way home and spend the evening playing video games instead of writing something. Whatever the case, pretty much every day after work I’m not interested in doing anything more ambitious than going home, closing my front door, and not opening it again until I leave for work in the morning.

Last Wednesday was an unusually busy day at the business factory, and as I left at 7:00 I got a text from my friend John, Owner of Milo. He wanted to get sushi and go drinking in Little Tokyo, which sounds like a really glamorous and cosmopolitan thing to do until you start thinking about how long you’re going to spend in traffic getting there and finding parking, and then whether this new experience will even really be worth the effort it takes to have it.

I know that I like my apartment. Spending the evening in my apartment will always be some base level of enjoyable. Little Tokyo, on the other hand, was a mystery – I’d never been there, so I had no idea whether spending my evening there would be better or worse than spending it at home. Most of the time in situations like these I figure it’s a safe bet to just stay home, since there are way more things that piss me off in the outside world than there are in my apartment.

That night, though, my chronic Fear Of Missing Out kicked in and I before I could say, “No, sorry, I’m tired from a long day of trying to make kids buy violent video games,” I said, “Yeah, sure!”

I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the sushi restaurant we went to, but it was underneath a parking garage at the bottom of a grimy concrete staircase that led down from the street. Personally, I’ve always been of the belief that you shouldn’t eat raw fish that you find in the basement of a parking garage, but when we walked inside the restaurant it turned out to be a classy, fancy looking place where we sat at a glowing bar and ate sushi and bacon wrapped asparagus.

Afterward we’d achieved a pretty solid sake buzz, so we left the restaurant and wandered to a nearby bar to keep it going. All of the bar’s 20 or so customers were squeezed into one corner, where an MC with a microphone and a laptop was running a boozy, public game of Cards Against Humanity.

He was midway through reading the prompt on the black card – When tripping on acid, [BLANK] turned into [BLANK] – when he spotted us standing in the doorway.

“You guys should play! Come grab some white cards!” To sweeten the pot, he added, “There’s prizes!”  

He gestured to a table behind him where the evening’s prizes were laid out. Like all good bar contest prizes, these had been picked up at garage sales – lots of 8 track tapes, old T-shirts with obscure slogans on them, some novelty action figures. But the crown jewel of crappy prizes lay at the center of the table.

“Holy shit,” John breathed. “Is that Jurassic Park on laserdisc!?”

“We have to play now.” I said. “Because we need to win that piece of home video technology history. We’re not leaving here without it.”

We collected 15 white cards, then collected two drinks, then sat down and started to play, delivering white cards to the MC in response to his prompts and crossing our fingers that the drunk patrons judging each round would find our antics amusing.

After a couple of unsuccessful rounds, the MC took a break from Cards Against Humanity to play a couple of rounds of trivia in exchange for free drink tickets.

“Alright,” he muttered into the microphone, one and a half empty beer glasses standing sentry beside his laptop. “I’m just gonna keep giving clues until somebody shouts out an answer, okay? First question’s about shipwrecks. This ship sank in November of 1975…”

I cupped my hands to my mouth and yelled, “The Edmund Fitzgerald!”

The MC, immediately followed by everyone else in the bar, gawped at me.

“Holy shit, man!” He exclaimed. “How the hell did you know that? Did your parents force you to listen to lots of Gordon Lightfoot growing up?”

“Yep!”

A waiter delivered John and I two free drink tickets as the MC moved on. “Okay. Next question. Not about shipwrecks. This sniper killed multiple people from a tower in Austin, Texas, in the 1960s.”

“Lee Harvey Oswald!” Somebody in the bar yelled.

“Nope.” The MC said.

“Lee Harvey Oswald!” Someone else yelled.

“The answer is still no.” The MC said.

I leaned over to John and murmured, “It’s Charles Whitman.”

John cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “CHARLES WHITMAN!”

Again, the MC and everyone else gawped at us. He threw up his hands.

“Jesus! Okay, two more drink tickets for the history major table over here, I guess. Let’s just go back to Cards Against Humanity.”

The waiter dropped off another two drink tickets for a total of four. John looked at me and shrugged.

“Well, I guess we’re getting wasted tonight.”

“It would be wrong not to.”

We put away a couple of Jamison shots in the course of the next few rounds of Cards Against Humanity, none of which we won. Finally, the only prize left on the table was the Jurassic Park laserdisc. We drunkenly hung on baited breath as the MC pulled the final black card.

“This one’s for the grand prize, everybody,” the equally drunk MC slurred before reading the card. “[BLANK]-man was the superhero we neither wanted nor needed.”

We scanned our white cards and quickly agreed on the best one, which made the phrase: “Drinking Alone Man was the superhero we neither wanted nor needed.”

After delivering our card to the judge, I went to the bathroom. When I came back the MC was announcing the winner, but I didn’t pay attention until John grabbed my arm and looked at me, wide eyed.

“We won.” He gasped.

“We won the laserdisc!?”

I looked to the MC, who, seemingly unable to believe how many prizes he’d awarded to the same table in the same night, was extending the black and red laserdisc sleeve toward us.

We spared no expense. 

I’d had a legitimately exhausting day at work, the sort of one where I typically feel the only remedy is to spend the entire evening sprawled on my bed watching HBO. And yet, after a busy night of interacting with people and earning alcohol through trivia, I felt even more recharged than I would’ve if I’d just stayed home and been Drinking Alone Man.

That night, John and I were the B-plot in life’s great sitcom. And just like a sitcom, I learned something from the experience: Sometimes, when you’re telling yourself you’re exhausted, the only thing you’re really too exhausted to do is your job. Anything else is fair game.

And the next time I turn down weeknight plans to stay home, at least now I know I can watch Jurassic Park – as soon as I get a laserdisc player.


Truman Capps also won a VHS copy of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it was post-shots so he can’t remember what the prompt was.

BoJack Horseman

An alcoholic horse is an alcoholic horse, of course, of course...

The first episode of Netflix’s new animated series BoJack Horseman opens with the show’s namesake, anthropomorphized horse and washed up 90s TV star BoJack Horseman (Will Arnett), being interviewed by Charlie Rose about what he’s been up to in the 18 years since his enormously successful family sitcom Horsin’ Around went off the air. BoJack, who by his own admission is “incredibly drunk”, has this to say when asked about his commercially successful but critically reviled show:

“Look, for a lot of people life is just one long, hard kick in the urethra. And sometimes, when you get home from a long day of getting kicked in the urethra, you just want to watch a show about good, likable people who love each other. Where, y’know, no matter what happens, at the end of 30 minutes, everything’s gonna turn out okay.”

The Hollywood BoJack Horseman lives in is populated by both humans and anthropomorphized animals who mostly behave like humans (driving cars, drinking lattes, hating themselves), although their animal side shines through from time to time. BoJack’s no-nonsense agent and sometimes girlfriend, Princess Caroline (Amy Sedaris), is a pink cat whose corner office is decorated with a desktop scratching post. BoJack’s professional rival, sitcom star Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins), is a relentlessly optimistic golden retriever who keeps a pile of tennis balls in the trunk of his BMW.

But it’s BoJack who seems to have the most trouble reconciling his animal side with his human side. He’s a wild stallion who refuses to be put out to pasture – arrogant, overbearing, deluded and selfish, constantly drunk and seeking attention, always on the lookout for a new groupie to bang. Over the years this behavior has alienated nearly everyone around him save for Todd (Aaron Paul), a (human) stoner who wandered into one of BoJack’s parties five years ago and has been sleeping on his couch ever since.

BoJack is struggling to write a tell-all autobiography intended to make America love him again, and in the first episode his editor at Penguin Publishing (who, naturally, is a penguin) hires ghostwriter Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie, yes, that Alison Brie) to shadow him and get the book finished on deadline. Over the course of the 12-episode first season, hijinx ensue as BoJack tries to set the record straight on his life story and his legacy.

But the thing that really caught me off guard and made BoJack Horseman one of my favorite TV shows of the year* was that beneath all the raunchy shenanigans, there’s some serious emotional weight and resonance to this series. By the end of the season I felt a real connection to most of the characters – and that’s quite an achievement when one of the show’s catchphrases is “Eat a dick, dumbshits!”

*The opening title sequence deserves some credit too. 

So many popular TV comedies seem to be centered around a man who behaves like a child and the trouble everybody around him goes through trying to clean up his messes – Family Guy, Home Improvement, The Cleveland Show, The Simpsons, American Dad, Married With Children, Two and a Half Men, Eastbound and Down, and so on. Strictly speaking, that’s not a bad thing. But still, every week on Family Guy you know Peter Griffin is going to create some disaster that his entire family will have to set right – and you know that next week they’ll still be there waiting for him to do it again.

The first few episodes of BoJack Horseman follow that standard sitcom formula. BoJack insults a Navy SEAL (who, naturally, is a seal) on TV, causing a national controversy that his friends have to solve. BoJack lets a Lohanesque former costar stay at his house, forcing his friends to intervene before her hard-partying lifestyle brings them both down. BoJack goes to comical lengths to torpedo one of his friends’ lifelong dreams because he doesn’t want him to get too busy to hang out.

But just shy of the halfway point of the season, it starts to become clear that this isn’t a show where, at the end of 30 minutes, everything’s gonna turn out okay. There’s very strong continuity between episodes – BoJack’s ottoman remains charred throughout the season after being lit on fire in an early episode, an LA landmark partially destroyed by BoJack on a drunken bender stays that way in all subsequent establishing shots, and most importantly, everybody remembers all the crappy things BoJack has done to them from one episode to the next.

That’s the genius of BoJack Horseman – it uses the standard sitcom trope of a boorish, self-destructive clown, but it actually shows the clown the consequences of his actions. As the show goes on and BoJack realizes that the world he lives in isn’t as simple and forgiving as the sitcom world where he made his fortune, he has to try to mend fences and become a better, more mature person – and because he has no idea how to do that, the process is as hilarious as it is emotionally involving,

The critics have not been kind to BoJack Horseman – the general consensus is that it’s a stale carbon copy of Family Guy, American Dad, The Cleveland Show, and so on. And that’s not a surprise, since most of these critics watched pre-release screeners from Netflix with only the first couple of episodes on them. If you went to write a review of a magic show but left before the magician pulled the rabbit out of the hat, you’d probably be a neighsayer too. 

Truman Capps can only imagine how enthusiastic furries must be about this show. 

Ferguson

"Does anybody else notice that we look like the bad guys in an 80s action movie?"

Throughout my suburban upbringing, the police were less of an organization and more of a concept – a vengeful god that people were always threatening to call down in order to bring justice to kids doing skateboard tricks in the cul-de-sac after 9:30 or the neighbor who let his dog shit on other peoples' lawns. What cemented the fearsome mystique of the police was that for how often people threatened to call them, they seldom actually followed through and did it. On the rare occasions that I did see a police car in my neighborhood, it was always a sure sign that one of the retirees living in the tract mansions up the street had finally deployed the nuclear option. (Or that one of my octogenarian neighbors had died in the night and somebody had to take a report.)

When I got to high school, I found that kids there had practically turned provoking the police into a sport. They had a game called Commando where one team would try to get from one end of the neighborhood to the other by any means necessary – alleys, backyards, parking lots – while the other would prowl the streets in their parents’ BMWs and Dodge Denalis trying to hunt them down and tag them before they got there.

I never participated because sometimes neighbors called the police, at which point it was every man for himself. I heard that once the police caught a couple guys from the waterpolo team hiding under some lady’s deck, and they yelled at them for a solid 20 minutes before calling their parents.

No, I wanted no part of that. Growing up white in the suburbs, having a policeman yell at you is about the scariest thing imaginable.

The unauthorized senior class tradition was to spraypaint the word “BOOYAH” on the road leading up the hill away from campus. Every year the principal threatened to invoke the police, and I guess my senior year she was finally serious about it. Due to a crippling lack of school spirit I wasn’t out painting the hill, but the legend goes that they had just finished painting the "H” when a couple police cars silently crested the hill and then hit their lights and sirens.

Most everybody put their hands up and surrendered, but one girl dove into her Mercedes and raced off doing 85 down a winding two lane road past golf courses and rural mansions. The cops chased after her for several miles until she got caught at a roadblock, where she surrendered and was peacefully taken into custody.

The next day at school it was all anybody could talk about, and the intensity of the police response grew to Grand Theft Auto proportions throughout the day – first she’d only been chased by one cop, but then it was three cops, and by eighth period apparently they’d had a police helicopter following her. I called bullshit at that point, because I couldn’t imagine that the police would even have a helicopter in a town like Salem.

Whatever the details, the girl who led police on a high speed chase still walked at graduation a couple weeks after. That fall she was in my freshman class at the University of Oregon. She currently works as a personal trainer.

I wonder if that’s how things would’ve panned out if she’d been a black guy.

A couple years before that, during the summer when I was 16, Alexander and Brent and I found a small watermelon in a park. For whatever reason, we spent the afternoon running around downtown Salem photographing the melon on bus benches or drab concrete plazas between municipal buildings.*

*And do bear in mind this was before Facebook, Instagram, and smartphones – we were taking these pictures on a digital camera, and back in those days we weren’t doing it for the regrams or pins or upvotes or likes, we were doing it because we were bored, goddamnit.

Eventually we wound up outside of a grey windowless building made of concrete slabs that housed police headquarters. Wandering around outside in search of something funny to photograph our melon in front of, we stumbled upon a pair of jet black heavily armored trucks parked around the side of the building. Our jaws dropped – because who the hell knew our suburban police department had tanks!? These things certainly never showed up in my neighborhood after somebody’s house got TP’d.

“C’mon!” Alexander said, grabbing the melon and starting toward the armored monstrosities with Brent in tow. “Let’s put this on one of the tanks and get a picture!”

“Woah, woah, no, guys!” I shouted, gesturing to a security camera mounted on the wall pointing at the vehicles. “What are the cops going to think when they see two random guys messing with their tanks?”

They paused to consider that. Then, Brent started pulling the collar of his shirt up over his nose.

“We’ll just cover our faces!” he said, and immediately Alexander was doing the same thing.

“No, guys, that makes you more suspicious! Masks are always more suspicious! We’re all going to get shot!”

That persuaded them, and we settled for putting the melon just outside the security camera’s field of view for the picture. No nearby policeman spotted us and opened fire. And even if one of them had seen us, and even if we’d had our shirts pulled up over our noses, and even if we’d been licking and dry humping the armored cars they wouldn’t have shot us. They probably would’ve yelled at us and told us to go the fuck home.

Because we were just three teenaged, unarmed white men in broad daylight. What would they want to shoot us for?



I think that throwing rocks at the police and burning your neighborhood to the ground are counterproductive ways to seek justice – especially when many of the people instigating these violent actions have come from outside of Ferguson. But then again, I’m a white guy who grew up in a white neighborhood in a white town in a white state, so I’ve got no frame of reference for the demons being exorcised in Ferguson right now. I’ve spent my life being protected and served by the police.

I imagine I’d feel differently if I’d grown up black in Ferguson or any one of the hundreds of towns like it. If I’d grown up attending failing schools, facing limited job prospects, and knowing that the deck was thoroughly stacked against me. If I – and everyone else I knew – had been harassed by a racist, violent, militarized police department for as long as we could remember.


Under those circumstances, I imagine I would’ve been out on the streets for the past two weeks too, because what’s happening in Ferguson would probably feel like the closest thing to justice my community was going to get.  

Truman Capps once had a police officer in traffic yell at him to turn his headlights on, and he's still pretty shaken up over it.  

The Expectables

Featuring Sylverster Stallone, Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, Terry Crews, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lorne Michaels, Dolph Lundgren, Kelsey Grammer, Judge Reinhold, Orson Welles, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Sting, the entire starting lineup of the 1998 St. Louis Rams, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen head! 

The wonderful thing about The Expendables series is that no matter how far you lower your expectations, it still finds a way to disappoint you. When I saw The Expendables 2 in theaters a couple years ago (on an OKCupid date, no less) I hadn’t seen the original, but I knew enough about the franchise to assume that it would be dopey, ‘roided out, gratuitously violent fun. And I was right about everything except for the fun.

None of these action stars are particularly good actors, but the old action movies they headlined were still great because they usually had a supporting cast full of talented character actors to carry some of the emotional weight of the story. The Expendables movies, on the other hand, are so frontloaded with old action stars that there’s no room for anybody who can really act, which is why much of the space between shootouts in The Expendables 2 is filled with closeups of stone faced old men growling exposition at each other.

And the shootouts aren’t much better, because The Expendables 2 is a remarkably inactive action movie. These movies are about a team of aging commandos who aren’t too old to kick some ass – however, the team of aging actors playing them actually sort of are too old to kick some ass, which puts some restrictions on the sorts of stuff they can do on camera. Clever editing and stuntmen do a lot of the work, but when the actual stars of the movie are on camera they’re usually doing one of the following four things:

1) Riding in cars, helicopters, tanks, etc shooting bad guys. 
2) Standing still swapping one liners. 
3) Standing still shooting bad guys. 
4) Walking forward at a leisurely pace shooting bad guys. 

But don't just take my word for it:


Sabba, the girl from OKCupid who I saw The Expendables 2 with, is now one of my main LA bros, and we made a point of seeing The Expendables 3 this week to see how it stacked up. I, for one, was surprised at how not-bad it was. I mean, don’t get me wrong – the movie is extremely bad. But it’s somewhat less bad than The Expendables 2, and that’s quite an improvement.

This time around, Sylvester Stallone and his team of gruff, aging mercenaries are hot on the trail of Conrad Stonebanks, a former Expendable who has since become an evil international arms dealer – because guys with names like ‘Conrad Stonebanks’ seldom go on to become pediatricians or real estate agents. When Stonebanks critically injures one of the Expendables, Stallone dismisses the rest of his team for their own safety and instead hires a bunch of new, young mercenaries with equally questionable acting abilities to take Stonebanks down for good.

Like the previous films in the series, the plot exists at the mercy of cameo appearances from pretty much every action star who had time to visit the set. As the script lurches from cameo to cameo the movie takes on a disjointed quality that feels more like watching a vacation video Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham shot while traveling around Bulgaria visiting old friends: “Ey, this scene is from the day Jet Li came to visit! Remember how much fun that was? There we are all standing around shooting blanks at those Bulgarian non-union extras! Oh, Jet Li, that guy’s a riot…”

In a movie with such a staggering number of celebrity cameos it was pretty much a statistical certainty that at least a couple of them would turn in good performances. Mel Gibson plays Stonebanks, a deranged, raving lunatic who everyone hates, in a role it feels like he’s spent the last ten years preparing for. Kelsey Grammer, who is inexplicably in this movie*, is a much needed breath of charisma after 25 minutes of looking at Sylvester Stallone’s shovel blade of a face. But it’s Antonio Banderas, playing a flamboyant, overeager mercenary, who really saves the movie by not taking it seriously and prancing his way through every scene.  

*Here’s my biggest disappointment: They cast Kelsey Grammer, a man famous not for action movies but for a 20 year career playing Dr. Frasier Crane, in a movie where dialogue only serves to deliver references to other actors’ work, and yet they didn’t make one single fucking reference to either Cheers or Frasier. I mean, what the hell, The Expendables 3? References are pretty much the only thing you do well! All you had to do was have him say “…but what do I know – I’m not a psychiatrist!”

It also helps that a number of these cast members are still young enough to run around and deliver the occasional unassisted roundhouse kick, which makes the action scenes considerably more engaging than they were in the previous movie. The finale, in which Expendables young and old level an apartment block and kill an entire country’s army, is actually pretty exciting – and made all the more amusing by the fact that it takes place in a fictional post-Soviet republic that I swear to God is actually called Assmanistan.

"Assman, Jerry! I'm Cosmo Kramer, The Assman!" 

So yes, The Expendables 3 is a bad movie, but it’s a much better bad movie than The Expendables 2. So why, then, does it only have a 35% positive rating from review aggregator RottenTomatoes, compared to The Expendables 2’s 65%? I’ve given it some thought, and I think it really all comes back to expectations.

Even though it was heavily promoted as mindless, campy, violent fun, I didn’t see the original Expendables. It got bad reviews, but I figured those were just from uptight critics who didn’t grow up with the movie Commando the way I did. When The Expendables 2 came out, most people who went to see it had sufficiently lowered their expectations after seeing the original Expendables, whereas I went into it blind expecting a level of quality that wasn’t there – so I was disappointed while everyone else was pleasantly surprised.

The only thing that can properly prepare you for the special kind of smirking, self-congratulatory bad of an Expendables movie is another Expendables movie. So having seen The Expendables 2, and knowing that this franchise isn’t above bringing the entire story to a grinding halt for ten minutes so Chuck Norris can make a Chuck Norris joke, I knew going into 3 just how little competent filmmaking I was in for and adjusted my expectations accordingly.


So here’s my advice if you want to see The Expendables 3 – do it, but only after renting another Expendables movie beforehand. If you don’t warm up first, you could seriously hurt yourself.

Truman Capps would undoubtedly lose in a fight against any member of the Expendables cast, including the malnourished Bulgarian children who worked as extras in some of the village scenes. 

Incumbents

It's really hard to find an image that sums up an entire country hating its elected representatives, which I guess is why there's so many artsy pictures of the Capitol building instead. 

You know it’s a slow news day when one of the top headlines is something like “POLL: CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL HITS RECORD LOW!” If you’re going to devote front page space to the fact that Americans don’t like Congress, you may as well also run articles like “SCIENTISTS AGREE SUN STILL MADE OUT OF FIRE” or “ONE OR MORE PRO FOOTBALL PLAYERS WILL RECEIVE CONCUSSIONS IN THE UPCOMING SEASON!”

Everybody knows that everybody hates Congress. Hating Congress is a hallowed American tradition – polls show that the majority of the country has always hated it since opinion polling on Congress started in the early 70s. In fact, the only time a significant majority of people have really liked Congress was when their approval rating doubled to 84% in October 2001, a time when people loved anything that wasn’t actively exploding.

And Congress is really easy to hate. It’s pretty much an exclusive club where argumentative millionaires get paid six figures to work three days a week deciding what to spend everybody’s taxes on. The rules of the institution require both parties to make nice and compromise if they want to get anything done, so even when Congress is working right they’re making tons of people really angry. And when Congress isn’t working at all, they piss off up to 94% of the country.*

*Screw the news articles about how many people hate Congress – I want to read about the 6% of Americans who actually like Congress. Who are those people? John Boehner’s children? Muppets?

People are even more fed up with Congress than ever, and in the upcoming midterm election they’re most likely going to show their anger by reelecting 90% of the people they’re angry at. Because as it turns out, the US Capitol is a lot like a roach motel – lawmakers check in, but they don’t check out.

*

In his spare time, the Congressman tries to bring mysterious meth kingpin "Heisenberg" to justice.

Since 2010, Tennessee’s extremely conservative 4th District has been represented by an extremely conservative Congressman named Scott DesJarlais, a doctor who looks more like the guy who asks to see your ID outside a biker bar. He’s so conservative that National Journal called him the 4th most conservative member of Congress, so it should come as no surprise that he takes a “traditional” view of marriage and has legislated so unilaterally against abortion that he’s received a 100% rating from national pro-life groups.

What did come as a surprise was the news that while he was chief of staff at a Tennessee hospital in the 90s, DesJarlais had extramarital affairs with three other staff members, a prescription drug representative, and two of his patients. He wrote one of these patients multiple prescriptions for painkillers during their affair, and pressured the other one to get an abortion when he found out she was pregnant. He also encouraged his wife to get two abortions during the same general time period.

This information started to come out about a week before the election in 2012, but by the time all the details were known in mid-November, DesJarlais had already won reelection with 56% of the vote. DesJarlais apologized, explained to his constituents that God had forgiven him (phew!), and paid a $500 fine to the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners for violating their “Don’t fuck your patients” rule.

DesJarlais faced several primary challengers this week, and now that all the facts are in the open you might think that the staunchly Christian voters in his district would’ve thrown their support behind virtually anyone but Scott DesJarlais. Instead, it’s looking like DesJarlais narrowly won his primary, and will most likely be reelected for another two years.

Think about that for a second. The pro-life community considers abortion to be murder. In Thursday’s primary, voters had six other conservative, pro-life Republican candidates to choose from and they still picked the guy who’s on record encouraging two different women to have a total of three abortions.

If people won’t ditch a philandering, painkiller-dispensing family values Congressman with secret pro-choice tendencies, there’s not a lot of hope that tons of voters will suddenly start caring about more dangerous but vastly less interesting bad behavior like insider trading and lobbyist bromance.

*

Recently Gallup started asking a new question in their Congressional polling: What is the name and party of your Member of Congress?

While 85 to 90% of respondents disapproved of Congress, only 35% could actually name the person representing them. So while almost everybody can agree that Congress exists and that it sucks, only about a third of them actually know who’s in there doing the sucking.

What’s encouraging is that this month, for the first time ever, a slim majority of Americans disapprove of their own Congress members’ job performance – which suggests that up until now, two thirds of the people hating Congress didn’t even know who the hell they were hating, and the rest hated everyone in Congress except the three fucking people they had the power to get rid of.

The past few years of political dysfunction has so heavily eroded peoples’ faith in the government that just about every politician is pretty unpopular at the moment. And the consensus among pollsters seems to be that many of these angry people are going to voice their disapproval on Election Day by not voting in record numbers. Which makes it easier for incumbents to get reelected.

Still, it’s kind of heartwarming that even in these polarized, hyperpartisan times, the people of this country can always come together to keep 500 or so people from losing their jobs.


Truman Capps knows nobody clicks on his hyperlinks, and that's OK.

Summer Of '76

Apple I, 1976. 

I’m never getting married and I’m never having kids.

I mean, marriage and children are fine, of course – so long as the children aren’t sitting close to me on an airplane or in a movie theater – but along with pro sports and Crossfit they fall into the category of things that I think I can live a perfectly full and happy life without. I’ll gladly attend your weddings, not just because there’s free food but because I think two people promising to love one another forever is a beautiful thing. But for myself, I’m just not that interested in marriage or family life.

Of course, my Dad said the same thing to my Mom on their second date, and look how well that turned out.

*

Mom and Dad, third from the left. 

My parents got married on August 1st, 1976. Porn was still shown in theaters, Apple was just three nerds selling mail-order computer kits, and the world had only months before been exposed to the chart-topping majesty of Frampton Comes Alive! Ever the romantic, Dad picked the date because the first of the month would be an easy anniversary to remember.

They got married in front of a handful of friends and family in my grandparents’ backyard in Portland. Mom wore a nice white dress, Dad wore a Travolta-esque white suit. They made the wedding cake themselves – a sheet cake baked in a copper bowl they borrowed from my grandmother. Because they couldn’t get a justice of the peace to come to the house on a Saturday they instead hired a Unitarian minister, who insisted on performing a brief ceremony instead of just saying, “You’re married – let’s eat!” the way they wanted.

Their honeymoon was a trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Afterward, they moved into a small, crappy apartment in North Portland. They were both 22 years old.


*

As of today, my parents have been married for 38 years. That’s Three Mile Island, VHS killing Betamax, Iran-Contra, the entire run of the TV series Cheers, the end of the Cold War, the entire run of Frasier, the rise of the Internet, the entire run of The Office, and the acceptance of the word ‘twerking’ in polite conversation. The world is barely recognizable today compared to what it was in 1976, save for the fact that all the continents are in the same place and David and Kelsey Capps are still married.

That’s a pretty tough act for me to follow. It’s not that I’m scared of commitment – it’s that I quite honestly can’t comprehend a commitment of that size and scope. The longest friendships I’ve had only go back ten, maybe twelve years. At best that’s less than a third of the length of my parents’ marriage – and I wasn’t sharing a home with those people, much less raising a neurotic child.

Being with someone for 38 years is impressive under any circumstances. Doing it when the divorce rate stands at 50% – even higher for people who get married in their early 20s – is a goddamn miracle.

Well, okay, no. If 50% of people are able to do it I guess it’s less of a miracle and more of a lucky coin flip. But if I were to get married I’m pretty sure my marriage would wind up on the losing side of that coin flip.

*

I’ve never met anyone who I’ve loved more than I love myself. That’s not a pleasant thing to admit, but it’s the truth. Marriage is all about sacrificing some of the things you want in order to build a stronger relationship with someone you care about, and right now I’m about as open to the notion of compromise as your garden variety Republican Congressman.

Case in point: Recently I was talking to one of my married friends and he mentioned that in an argument with his wife of two years she’d asked him to stop spending so much time with his drinking buddies and instead spend more of it with her.

What is this, North Korea? I thought as he recounted this. This aggression will not stand, man. If I were him I’d be thumbing through the Yellow Pages for a divorce lawyer. Actually, no, I’d definitely use Google.

And then, much to my surprise, he finished the story with: “…so, yeah, I’m not going to be out at the bar as much now.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re actually going to do that?”

“Well, yeah, of course! I love my wife. I want her to be happy more than I want to hang out with my friends.”

The way that he said it, it was clear that he knew he was making the right decision. And that floored me, because until that moment I’d never considered that giving up something you love because someone else wants you to could be the right choice.

Did I mention that I legally officiated a wedding last summer?

*

It’s not that I’m some sort of selfish only child sociopath. It’s just that the two most important things in my life right now are my friends and my career, neither of which I’m willing to compromise on, both of which are usually the first thing to go on the chopping block in a marriage-type situation.

I’m certain that I’ll continue to have relationships with women whose lives and priorities line up with mine. And honestly, I haven’t even ruled out the possibility that I might change my mind on marriage somewhere down the line. I’m only 25, and against all odds there might be at least one woman in LA who watched The Wire and doesn’t have “Live, Laugh, Love” tattooed on her ankle.

Right now, though, I can’t imagine loving somebody the way my Mom and Dad love each other, and I’m sure as hell not going to legally promise to love someone forever if I’m not certain that I can make it at least 38 years. If I never meet someone who gives me that sense of certainty, I won’t feel like I missed out – I’ve got a lot of goals for my life, but marriage isn’t one of them.

But if, like my Dad, I happen to meet a woman who gives me a reason to add marriage to that list, well… I guess I’m pretty much fucked, aren’t I?



Truman Capps’ rice cooker only makes enough for one person anyway.

The Popularity Contest

Even if the Emmys took my advice and started an 'Outstanding Performance by Alison Brie' category, Community would probably still lose out to Mad Men. No justice. 

The thing to remember about the Emmys is that it’s basically a high school election where everybody votes for their favorite popular people; the only differences are that the campaign posters are better, there’s no term limits, and the popular people are the only ones who actually get to vote. When you tune in to watch the Emmys in August, you’re basically just watching the pep rally where Ashley gets elected ASB president for the fourth year in a row, except Ashley is Modern Family.

And since this is just like high school, let’s go ahead and gossip a bit about which popular people I want to win.


The biggest shock to me in this category was the fact that Shameless is apparently still on the air. I’ve never watched the show, but I’ve enjoyed William H. Macy’s performance in the trailers that I’ve seen online. Of course, it’ll be tough for him to compete with Louis CK’s heartrending portrayal of Louis CK or Matt LeBlanc’s carefully researched performance as popular television actor Matt LeBlanc.


Look, let’s just face it: True Detective is going to win a lot of Emmys this year. It’s tough to say exactly which Emmys it will win, but this one will almost certainly be one of them. Unless, of course, the Academy is willing to forego the pleasure of a Matthew McConaughey acceptance speech and instead continue their plot to murder Bryan Cranston by suffocating him under a pile of Emmys. 


To be fair, I’ve had a hard time getting into Orange Is The New Black because I have a pretty strict “no used tampon sandwiches” rule for the shows that I watch. In fact, I’ve also never watched Girls, Mike & Molly, or Nurse Jackie, which makes me look like a pretty misogynistic TV watcher. I make up for it by being an unapologetic Veep and Parks and Recreation fanboy.

I think Amy Poehler is long overdue for an Emmy. Which feels like a pretty stupid thing to say, really, because opinions on whether somebody gets an Emmy or not should be based on the quality of the work they did in their submitted materials, not whether they’ve won before or not. And honestly, Parks and Recreation isn’t as good of a show now as it was in seasons 2 or 3, when Poehler lost out first to Melissa McCarthy and then Julia Louis Dreyfus.

But Leslie Knope has become a sort of cultural sensation – a spunky, positive, can-do girl power standard bearer. Amy Poehler deserves much of the recognition for that, and TV’s most prestigious and recognizable award just feels like the most logical way to give it to her.


Pardon my French and my imagery, but do you think we could possibly quit pissing Emmys into Modern Family’s open mouth for maybe one goddamn second and recognize Nick Offerman for the MacArthur Genius Grant-quality work he’s been doing on Parks and Recreation since 2009? It’s bad enough that he hasn’t gotten an Emmy for playing Ron Swanson, but it’s a slap in the face that in five years and six seasons he hasn’t been nominated once.

On the other hand, this is the first year that Modern Family hasn’t accounted for half of the nominations for outstanding supporting actor. In 2011, only two of the actors nominated in this category weren’t on Modern Family. And I’m not trying to knock Modern Family – I don’t watch regularly but I think the show and the people on it are hysterically funny. I just don’t think they’ve been funnier than everybody else on TV every year since 2009.

The concern I have is that in the eyes of a lot of the Academy members doing the nominating, Parks and Recreation is “The Amy Poehler Show.” They know the show just well enough courtesy of screeners and NBC’s billboards to be aware that Amy Poehler is on it and ought to be nominated, but they’ve never given the show enough consideration to appreciate the supporting cast.

I mean, Aziz Ansari’s name should probably have been on this list at some point in the past five years too, but like many other male supporting actors on sitcoms this decade he’s been a victim of the Academy’s push to nominate everybody with a penis who has so much as driven past the studio during filming of a Modern Family episode.


This award should go to Allison Tolman for Fargo, and if you disagree you’re wrong.


I haven’t watched Downton Abbey yet, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s probably not going to win this year. I loved House of Cards, but honestly I can barely remember it now that I’ve watched True Detective – and I think a lot of the Emmy judges are going to feel the same way. For me personally, True Detective wins on its merits as a series alone – the fact that it was a critical and pop cultural phenomenon is what I think can net it enough votes to scoop the award from Breaking Bad’s final season.


It seems like a pretty even match between five of these shows for this year’s Emmy for ‘Outstanding Modern Family.’ As much as I love Louie – and I do love Louie – I’m personally pulling for either Veep or Silicon Valley to walk away with the golden statuette bearing the likeness of Modern Family showrunner Steven Levitan.


Without question my vote goes to Fargo. But so long as we’re talking about Fargo, why the hell do the Emmys seem to think it’s a miniseries? I don’t know about you, but my parents raised me to believe that a miniseries was a one-time television event based on either history (Band of Brothers, The Pacific, The Kennedys) or an important work of literature (Roots, The Bible, Dinotopia). Nominees like Starz’ The White Queen or Lifetime’s Bonnie & Clyde fit that bill – the other four nominees don’t.

If it gets renewed for a second season, Fargo is going to come back with an all-new story and cast of characters. So it’s an anthology series, kind of like fellow nominee American Horror Story and exactly like True Detective, which is confoundingly nominated in the drama category instead. The other nominees, Luther and Treme, have been airing continuously for years. No matter how hard you squint, they don’t even remotely resemble a miniseries.

Of course, if the Academy was more rigorous in its definition of ‘miniseries’, Fargo probably wouldn’t have been nominated for anything, which would have been a crime. But on the other hand, how many good miniseries have been squeezed out of the miniseries category because the Academy has decided to turn it into ‘Outstanding Miniseries Or, Y'know, Whatever Else’?

This is emblematic of the Emmys’ greater problem – not only does TV keep getting better, but it keeps getting bigger too. The amount of really good TV has proliferated in recent years while the number of nominations per category has stayed the same, and since a good show can often be good and award-eligible for multiple seasons the field gets even narrower, leaving shows like Parks and Recreation, Community, and The Americans out in the cold.

Meanwhile, the very nature of the ceremony forces the Academy to categorize shows that defy categorization – are shows like Louie or Orange is the New Black comedies, or dramas? Apparently they’re comedies, which is why in the comedy writing category a heart wrenching 10-minute monologue from Louie about the loneliness and social stigma of being a fat woman is up against a roomful of guys writing a handjob algorithm on Silicon Valley.

The Academy could change this by nominating more shows per category, or perhaps somehow weighting votes against previous winners to keep shows from coasting to multiple wins on hype and legacy. And they’ve signaled that they’re at least giving it some thought. But until those changes get made, they’re just going to keep redefining the sacred, traditional institution of the miniseries to nominate whatever shows they can't fit elsewhere.


That’s a slippery slope, though – next year somebody’s probably going to want to nominate their dog as an outstanding miniseries. And it’ll still lose to Modern Family.

Truman Capps really does love and appreciate Modern Family, but their recent 'USC football in the Pete Carroll era' style winning streak has made him bitter. 

Step 2

This is going to be my room in about a year. 

Any writer will tell you that the process of writing something involves very little writing. I mean, yeah, eventually you do write things, but that only comes after a lengthy period of nonwriting and moderate to severe emotional anguish. Everybody approaches it differently, but my writing process is something like 2% writing and 98% lying facedown on my bed hating myself and everything I’ve ever thought of. Don’t worry; it’s natural.

The facedown self-loathing step in the process isn’t particularly enjoyable, but it’s the most important. Between Steps One and Three – “Thinking of something you want to write” and “Writing that thing” – is Step Two: “Figure out how you’re going to write what you want to write.” And that’s where the creative sausage really gets made. Step 2 is why there are more people who talk about wanting to be writers than there are writers.

It’s not that Step 2 isn’t fun. Step 2 is fun – eventually. Whenever you figure out how all the moving pieces of some portion of the idea you’re working on are going to fit together in a seamless and elegant way, you feel like the smartest person in the world. At the very least, you feel like you’re making progress. But when you’re struggling to put everything together in your head, you just want to throw in the towel on the whole writing business and go drive a garbage truck for a living instead.*

*With all due respect to the sanitation workers of the world, who I appreciate every time I throw something that has been in my nose into the garbage.

What makes Step 2 especially grueling for me is that even though I’m working, I don’t have anything to show for it. I’m basically just sitting completely still and thinking about stuff – and not just any stuff, but stuff that only exists in my mind. Even though winnowing through all the wrong ways to write something is about the only way to find the right way, it’s hard to feel accomplished doing it because you can’t just look over next to your desk and see a pile of discarded ideas lying there.

Wow, look at all the bad ideas I had today! I don’t know how many more bad ideas I’ll have to have before I get to the good one, but it’s at least nice to know that I’ve had this many so far and I won’t have to have them again.

I’ve tried working around this by outlining ideas on notecards, which is too much work and feels environmentally unfriendly. I also do some outlining in spiral notebooks, but that just makes me feel like I’m writing a manifesto.

For as long as I can remember my preferred method for dealing with Step 2 is just not writing anything – because you can’t be flummoxed by something you’re not thinking about. The fact that I get anything done at all is only because I spend a couple of minutes a day struggling to come up with something before immediately giving up. It’s like emptying the dishwasher by taking one plate out every night. The job will get done, even though it takes about a month longer than it should.

Unfortunately, this option doesn’t really fly at work. My office – by which I mean the four person cubicle of which I am currently the only occupant – has a whiteboard in it, and while jammed up on a video game trailer a couple of weeks ago I decided to start scribbling out threads of ideas on the board, if for no other reason than to look busy if my boss glanced in my direction. And then, miraculously, I raced through Step 2 in record time and was back at my computer writing again.

And I haven’t looked back since. I now spend most of my day at the office pacing back and forth holding a dry erase marker, periodically rushing over to the board and writing fragmented ideas down in squeaky block letters. Not only has made getting through Step 2 a lot easier, it’s also kind of exercise in a really broad sense of the word.

Eager to replicate this success on the homefront, I picked up a whiteboard and easel at Office Depot two weeks ago, and since then I’ve been uncharacteristically focused and productive. Now instead of coming home from work, taking my pants off, and mindlessly surfing the Internet until I fall asleep, I come home, take my pants off, and pace around my room, outlining things on the board as ideas come together. When the board gets full, I take a picture of it on my iPhone, erase the board, and keep going, referring back to the pictures later as I write at my computer.

I realize that writing everything down on a whiteboard, photographing the board, and then more or less transcribing the photographs into my computer is arguably the least efficient way to go about this process, but I can’t argue with the results.
It’s a lot easier to organize my ideas when they’re all staring me down from the same board instead of floating around in my head. Pacing stimulates the imagination. And when all else fails there’s the powerful chemical odor of the dry erase pens to get the creative juices flowing.

But honestly, I think the inefficiency of it is the biggest benefit. Because even though programs like Microsoft Word and FinalDraft make the writing parts of writing considerably easier, they make the non-writing parts a lot harder because they’re on my computer and are thus one click away from the Internet. My gut instinct response the second I run up against a brick wall in my writing is, Maybe checking Facebook and Reddit will help, and even though it never does I still try it every time.

My white board doesn’t have the Internet. It’s merely a blank surface where all of my bad ideas can exist just long enough for me to feel productive for having had them before wiping them away as if I’d never come up with something that stupid.


Truman Capps briefly gave some thought to painting his room with the paint that turns walls into dry erase boards, but realized that would probably make women even less likely to come in here.

Safety Dance


It all started several weeks ago, when I came home from the mall one Saturday afternoon to find my street full of cops, tow trucks, and totaled cars. As it turned out a drunk lady on her way home from brunch had come speeding up my residential street the way most assholes do and plowed into three other parked cars and a motorcycle.

Regular readers know that this sort of thing isn’t out of the ordinary for my street – only weeks before this incident a wayward car totaled the Camry parked 30 feet in front of The Mystery Wagon (RIP), and just about every other night we hear tires squealing outside as speeders slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid removing themselves from the gene pool.

Gathered at the edge of the street watching a procession of tow trucks hauling away the mangled cars, my neighbors and I all agreed that something had to be done to make our street safer before this happened again. My neighbors and I have this conversation every time there’s a car accident on my street. It plays out like a hyper-localized version of the gun control debate that erupts after every mass shooting.

First there’s Outrage:

“This street is too dangerous!”
“Seriously! It’s like, how can we even LIVE here!?”
“They need to at least put in some streetlights or something.”
“It’s like, HOW can they not put in STREETLIGHTS?”
“It’s like, I don’t even feel safe parking my car on this street anymore. It’s totally unacceptable!”

Then there’s Grand Plans:

“We really need to do something about this. Like, talk to the city council or something.”
“Yeah! We need to get, like, a speed bump. Or some streetlights.”
“If we had a speed bump, it’s like that crash wouldn’t have happened.”
“On Monday I’m totally calling the city council and I’m going to be like, ‘Hey. You guys need to, like, do something here, or somebody’s going to die.”
“You should do it! You should totally do it.”  

And then about four seconds later, when everybody starts to contemplate how much work it would be getting the city council to make substantial and expensive safety improvements to our street, we move on to the final stage – Immediately Giving Up:  

“Oh, hey, I forgot to mention, I got a callback for that webseries audition!”
“Ohmigod, that’s so great!”
“I know, right? It’s really just happening for me right now. I really think this is my year.”

This is how it always goes, because at the end of the day most people would rather take the calculated risk of leaving their car at the edge of a windy, unlit bowling alley for drunk douchebags than waste weeks or months fruitlessly wrestling with municipal bureaucracy.

But that afternoon, staring at the vehicular carnage, I found myself wanting to wrestle with municipal bureaucracy. Just about everybody on my street has had their car damaged in some way by a reckless driver, and I for one was sick and tired of living in fear.

Well, okay, maybe ‘fear’ isn’t the right word. But I was definitely sick and tired of living in mild concern. I wanted a speed bump and I was willing to fight for it, so I approached one of the cops watching the cleanup efforts and asked him how he’d recommend I go about getting a speed bump installed on my street. He took on a cautionary tone:  

“You’ll have to go through your neighborhood council, and if it picks up enough steam there they’ll take it to the city councilman for your area and see what he can do, but… It might be kind of tough getting anything done. If you want I can put you in touch with the traffic division and we could just patrol your neighborhood more often.”  

“Don’t worry, officer – I’ve seen season 3 of The Wire. I think I know how to deal with the city council.”

I didn’t actually say that, but I was so busy thinking it that I can’t remember what I actually said.

*



A few days later, after my roommate’s car got sideswiped by a hit and run driver in the middle of the night, I fired off an email to the transportation committee for my neighborhood council, laying out my case for a speed bump. The exchange spooled out over a couple of weeks and wasn’t terribly interesting, so I’ve whipped up a condensed version that covers the most important plot points:

The street I live on is dangerous because of drunk people speeding, so could we get a speed bump?
-Truman Capps

Thank you for your email, Mr. Capps. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints the city can’t afford to install a speed bump. However, we can add a new stop sign or ask the LAPD to do more patrols in your area.
-Studio City Neighborhood Council

I’m not sure how effective the police would be… I mean, the people doing all this damage represent only a tiny fraction of the traffic on my street, so the likelihood of the police being around to catch them when they’re doing it is pretty low. What if we raised the funds for a speed bump ourselves?

Sorry Mr. Capps, but because this is not an episode of Hey Arnold! there are various rules and regulations that make it impossible for you and your quirky neighbors to come together and scrape up the funds for a speed bump.

Well, shoot. What about streetlights? Or a speed camera?

Well, that’s a different bankrupt department’s responsibility, but if the city can’t afford to give you an oblong concrete lump they probably won’t be able to do anything that requires electricity or maintenance.

Okay... So… Earlier you said something about a new stop sign?

Actually, the city almost certainly won’t install a new stop sign that close to the other ones. But we can have the police come by more often!

My street is demonstrably unsafe, there’s a considerable risk to property and human life, not to mention a darecare center in the danger zone, and the city I pay taxes to can’t do anything to bring down the overall deathrap factor!? You know, all the other streets up the hill from us have speed bumps! Why is that? Is it because they’re upper middle class whereas my end of the street is lower upper middle class!? What the fuck is all this class warfare bullshit, asshole?

We’ve seen season 3 of The Wire too, Mr. Capps. Should we have the police come out more often or not?

Okay. I’m sorry for cursing.

I’d planned on burrowing into the red tape, keeping my eyes on the prize, and alternately jumping through hoops or fighting until I got my speed bump. But I got completely shot down on every conceivable front before even getting into the red tape. That said, I really appreciated that the City of Los Angeles wasted my time via email instead of in person.

*


This past Tuesday morning I was on my way to work when I coasted at three miles per hour through a stop sign at a right turn in my neighborhood, several hundred feet from my apartment. As I rounded the corner I saw a pair of LAPD officers standing on the lawn of the house – one was writing a ticket for an SUV idling at the curb, and the other one was stepping out in front of my car, waving his arms for me to pull over.

“You didn’t come to a complete stop at that stop sign. You just followed the car in front of you right on through.” The officer scolded, his pencil scratching as he filled out the form on his ticket book. “We’ve had some complaints about unsafe driving in this neighborhood…”

He trailed off for a second, looking at me. We realized it at the same time.

“Wait.” He said. “I think I talked to you a couple weeks ago. After that car crash!”

“Yeah.” I said.

“That’s pretty ironic.” He chuckled, handing me the ticket. “Just try to be more careful, okay bud?”


Truman Capps will be appearing in traffic court in Van Nuys sometime before August 8th.

Handshakes

Runner up in the "Creepiest Illustration Ever" competition. 

I have a really good handshake. I know this because a number of people have told me so, usually during or immediately after shaking my hand. A couple of people have even remembered this for an extended period of time and have brought it up weeks or months after our initial handshake. “Seriously, you’ve got a really good handshake.” And I’m proud of that – sure, I’ll struggle to make awkward small talk and forget your name the instant you tell it to me, forcing me to call you ‘man’ or ‘dude’ every time I see you for the rest of the time that I know you, but I can briefly squeeze your hand so well that you’ll remember it forever.

I’m good at handshakes because when I was seven years old my father spent 5 to 10 minutes teaching me how to do it right. My father gave me a lot of advice growing up and like any good son I didn’t pay attention to roughly 60% of it, but the handshake advice stuck because Dad made it clear that making a good first impression with your handshake will make all the difference in your professional life.

Of course, that’s kind of goofy. Well, Mr. Capps, I have my doubts about your qualifications for this position, but I had a visceral response when you touched my hand, so let’s get you a parking space and a W4! But it’s also true – I tend to take people more seriously when they have a good handshake, even if it’s just because I can look at them and know that they got the same object lesson from their Dad too.

Unfortunately, in LA at least, the very institution of handshaking is under attack. Here, being hip and edgy is the most important thing – it’s why everybody drinks kombucha, it’s why nobody shuts the fuck up about their yoga class, and it’s why the solid, simple, traditional handshake is slowly being replaced by a variety of trendy alternatives.

Take the fist bump, for instance. I’ve got no problem with the fist bump in and of itself – it’s like the high five’s laid back, more hygienic cousin. The fist bump is a perfect way for two friends to commemorate life’s little victories, like successfully loading a couch into the back of a pickup truck or taking a tequila shot and not vomiting immediately afterward.

Last week, though, I was introduced to a new project manager at one of my freelance jobs and instead of shaking my hand he just held out his clenched fist. It took me a second to realize that he was inviting me to bump it – just a couple of grown-ass men in a workplace environment meeting for the first time and bumping fists like their team just captured the flag in a pitched game of Halo 2.

Further complicating matters is the fact that I’m terrible at gauging when an ordinary fist bump is going to turn into an exploding fist bump. And that’s bad, because when two people bump fists and only one of them explodes it, the one who didn’t looks like a total nerdlinger – case in point. It’s just a new, totally nonverbal way for me to embarrass myself.

Fist bumps are still vastly preferable to the bro grab, a particularly insidious form of greeting that starts off masquerading as a handshake but then turns into a surprise hug halfway through. If you want to hug me, that’s fine – why the hell can’t you be up front about it, though!? Why do you have to lie to me with that outstretched hand, making me think I’m going to get to show off my superior handshaking skills, only to instead yank my arm toward you and ambush me with a hug that awkwardly squishes our still-connected hands between our bodies?

But whatever. Fist bumps, exploding fist bumps, bro grabs – if those were the only ways people were bastardizing handshakes, I wouldn’t even be writing this update right now. None of that is even halfway as infuriating to me as the Impromptu Secret Handshake.

Like the bro grab, it starts like a normal handshake: The other person extends his* hand, I firmly wrap my hand around it, but then all of a sudden his hand starts doing crazy acrobatics – sliding back out of my grip and interlocking fingers, slapping the back of his hand against mine, snapping…

*Yes, his, because it is only men who’ve pulled this shit on me. So good job women – you’ve got that going for you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure those intricate, highly practiced maneuvers look really cool when you and the friends you invented them with get together. Here’s the thing, though:

I don’t fucking know what your secret handshake is.

I’ve never shook your hand before. We didn’t discuss this ahead of time. I don’t even know you. Why the hell would you even think I would know all the steps to your own personal handshaking ritual?

So while your hand is going all Cirqe du Soleil, my hand is just hanging there like a cold 20 ounce strip steak. That makes me look like an idiot, and that’s really unfair, because in that situation you are the one who is an idiot. Although to be fair, you’re probably an idiot in most situations, since only an idiot would assume that I would just magically know the handshake you dreamed up with your CrossFit buddies two years ago, god fucking damn it.

A producer I used to work with pulled this shit all the time, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done was smile and not shove him into traffic as, post-shake, he kept clutching my hand so he could slowly walk me through the moves step by step:

“Alright, so then you go out and back, lock the fingers, snap, let go, bump it, grab again, thumb to the left, thumb to the right, and then bring it in! It’s easy!” He grinned as his meaty, clammy hand manhandled mine through every step.

“Oh, yeah! Okay, that makes sense. I’m sure I’ll get it next time.” I smiled through gritted teeth. Thank you so much. I can only imagine how greatly the knowledge of this new handshake will enrich my life. I’m so excited to be able to share this with you.

I take handshaking seriously because you only get one shot at a first impression, and I try pretty hard to put my best foot forward when I meet new people. (All bets are off if I’m drinking.) But now that my long practiced handshake is being replaced by forms of contact that require you to demonstrate coolness, I’m giving more and more people the first impression that I’m clumsy, awkward, and out of touch.

I mean, that’s an accurate impression. I’d just prefer that people have to talk to me for a couple minutes to find that out, y’know?


Truman Capps has yet to find a type of social situation that doesn’t upset him.

Hair Guy Lifestyle: 10 Ways to Give Your Kids an Honest-To-Goodness 70s Summer!!!

Editor’s note: Inspired by this blog post that recently went viral, I’ve decided to give both mommy blogging and aging Generation Xer nostalgia a shot!

1) LET THEM WATCH TV!!
Plenty of it – but only the TV Land channel! I want my kids to watch The Love Boat, The Carol Burnett Show, The Jeffersons, Charlie’s Angels, My Three Sons, The Bionic Man, $100,000 Pyramid, and my favorite, All in the Family! Seriously, what little girl in the late 70s didn’t want to be a bigoted old blue collar man who has to confront and grapple with his casual prejudice toward those who aren’t like him on a weekly basis?


2) EAT WHATEVER YOU WANT!!
There will be no more pantries full of organic vegetable chips and non-GMO graham crackers. No more refrigerators full of anti-pesticide fruit, free range eggs, and cold pressed juice. This will be the summer of Frito-Lay and red dye #5, cool summer evenings with an even colder pitcher of sugary red Kool Aid, fried bologna sandwiches, lighting up a Newport Full Flavor over the kitchen sink while the kids are eating breakfast, five pound bricks of solid MSG for dinner every night, Bicentennial commemorative tumblers full of melted down lard, and long thick rows of cocaine on a glass coffee table cut with a Diners Club card and – OMG – inhaled through a $2 bill!!

3) SMUTTY ALBUM COVERS FOR DAYS!!
To heck with CDs and MP3s – I’m talking about a big crate full of LPs next to the TURNTABLE, stocked with hits like Abraxas, Live at the Sex Machine, and - naturally - Whipped Cream and Other Delights! And then I’m going to leave my son alone in the house for a couple hours while I run to the liquor store. If that doesn’t make him a music lover by the end of the summer, I don’t know what will. ;-)


4) LONG BEAUTIFUL HAIR!!
This summer, everybody in this house is letting their hair (yes, ALL OF IT ;-D) grow long, free and TOTALLY UNTAMED!! I’m taking all the razors, scissors, clippers, and shears and replacing them with hair picks, mustache combs, and hairspray so flammable and laden with toxic chemicals that I had to buy it out of some guy’s van in a parking lot after dark!

5) WHAT THE HELL IS RECYCLING!!
Put your shoes on, everybody! I’m going to gather up all our carefully separated cardboard, waste paper, plastic, yard debris and compost and dump it with the rest of our trash into some big black non-biodegradable plastic garbage bags. Then we’re getting into our two and a half ton wood paneled AMC station wagon, waiting in line for an hour to fill it up with heavily-leaded gas, and driving down the Interstate to dump our garbage at the feet of the first crying Indian we see!


6) SEND THEM STREAKING!!
What’s that? You’re hot and sweaty under all that polyester I’m forcing you to wear? Fine, you can take it off – but you have to take EVERYTHING off. And then you have to run through that neighborhood council meeting as fast as you can! I’ll be waiting around the block with the car. If you get picked up by the fuzz, though, you’re on your own – don’t you dare narc on mommy or I’ll throw your lava lamp and pet rock on the bonfire with the rest of my bras!



7) I AM NOT A CROOK!!
Yeah, you heard that right, kiddos – I’m officially resigning from being your Mom. Sorry, but this is just the best thing for America. What’s that? You’re confused? Hurt? Scared? Betrayed? Doubting an institution you once thought was infallible? Well, I guess you’re going to have to spend the rest of the summer on a long and painful healing process! Oh, if you get hungry there’s a cheese log in the refrigerator – BECAUSE CHEESE LOGS WERE A POPULAR SNACK IN THE 70S!!!

8) THROW A KEY PARTY!!
Have fun at your sleepovers, kids! Mommy and Daddy are gonna have six other couples over tonight, put all of our car keys in a bowl, then crack open a case of Billy Beer and just see where the evening takes us! No, we’re not going to talk about it in the morning. No, nobody has to kiss on the mouth. Yes, I CAN tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue! ;-P



9) DON’T WORRY, IT’S JUST A POLICE ACTION!!
Okay, here’s the deal: Each of you gets a card. There’s a number written on that card. And every night we’re going to sit by the radio – that’s right, the RADIO – and if you hear somebody read the number on your card, you have to go to Vietnam! I don’t care how hot it is. I don’t care that you want to play Mine Crafts. I don’t care that it’s a bloody, pointless, unwinnable war. Experiment with psychedelic drugs! Listen to some Creedence! Keep your rifle with you all the time because Charlie’s fuckin’ everywhere, man!



10) GO FOR A BIKE RIDE!!
Yeah, the front wheel is considerably larger than the rear wheel – DEAL. WITH. IT!!! All the cool European urban elites rode penny-farthings back in the 1870s and they survived, so you will too! You don’t have to put on sunscreen. You don’t have to call home. Just GO! Ride down to the town square to hear the latest reports from the Franco-Prussian War or hit the museum to make fun of the Impressionists! Just try not to get polio – after all, not everything from the past was all fun and games. ;-(

Truman Capps can only imagine what parents of the 2050s will do to give their kids an honest to goodness 2010s summer. 

State Of The Blog

A more relaxed update schedule might give me more time to find good header images instead of shit like this. 

When I was in high school, my technologically-inclined friend Michael started a blog, which was a fairly novel concept at the time. It wasn’t about any one thing in particular – he posted science and technology stuff, funny pictures, anecdotes about marching band, a cell phone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution, cats, humorous notes on the college application process – but over time, his blog started getting some attention, eventually pulling in thousands of hits per month by our senior year.

At the time we were a few months from graduation and I was giving some thought to starting a blog of my own, trying to weigh the amount of work I’d have to do against how much attention I could get for doing it, which was a calculation I made a lot back then. I decided that it wouldn’t be worth the effort to write blogs unless a lot of people would read them, so in our College Writing class I asked Michael what he did to get so much web traffic. I’ll never forget what he told me:

“It’s really simple: The secret to getting lots of hits on your blog is to just keep putting stuff up there regularly. If you do it for long enough you’ll start picking up tons of readers. That’s all it is.”

That made sense to me – it was 2007 and thanks to MySpace it seemed like everybody was posting shit on the Internet. You didn’t necessarily need higher quality shit to stand out from the crowd – you just needed the assurance that your shit would arrive on a regular basis instead of petering out after a month or two the way 95% of blogs do.

So when I started writing this blog as a college freshman a few months later, I went into it grimly determined not to be one of the 95% by setting an ironclad update schedule and sticking to it religiously: Two updates a week, every week, whether I had anything to write about or not. It was pretty grueling a lot of the time – I mean, as grueling as sitting down and looking at a glowing rectangle can be – but fortunately I had virtually no social life as a freshman so I had plenty of time to write.

As I’d labor through updates about residence hall food or football games that Blogspot’s web traffic monitor told me basically nobody was reading, I would think to myself, “Hang in there, Truman – a year or two of this and thousands of people are going to be reading your blog every day!”

*

What Michael neglected to mention to me, I think, is that while posting regularly is a good way to grow traffic to your blog, it doesn’t work quite as well when what you’re posting is just long blocks of text. People didn’t like reading in 2007, and thanks to Upworthy, Buzzfeed, and a litany of phone apps that allow you to endlessly swipe through pictures of potential sexual partners, they’re even less enthusiastic about it now.

This past Christmas, one of my friends in Salem asked me how many people read my blog, and I estimated it was about 200. Then, when I got back to LA, I actually looked at the data and it turns out I was vastly overestimating – it’s probably closer to 100 readers. That’s about the same number I had in college when I was posting two updates a week like clockwork, and it’s held steady over the past two years when I’ve been blowing deadlines left and right.

Clearly, the frequency of my updates has nothing to do with my readership. And maybe it’s the journalism major in me, but every time I miss one of my arbitrary, self-imposed deadlines to post a blog update that roughly 100 people will eventually read, I still feel this sickly, clawing panic inside me that I’m a failure as a writer. I’m not exactly crazy about that feeling, and I’d like to stop feeling it.

“If at first you don’t succeed, lower your expectations.” That’s what the tagline on the DVD case for Tommy Boy says, and it’s in that spirit that I’ve decided to reduce my output to one blog update per week.

*

Churning out two updates a week for several years was instrumental in making me the writer that I am today. But now that I’m writing for a living and trying to work on three or four other passion projects at once, it’s locked me into an arrangement where I have to choose between pulling myself away from writing something else to write an update or blowing it off and feeling shitty about it all week.

Writing one update, bit by bit, over the course of the week, is a much more realistic target for me right now. And it’s also a much more enjoyable experience than pacing around my sweltering bedroom in my underwear trying to churn out 1000 words in the course of one afternoon, which for whatever reason was the way I’d been operating up until recently.

That initial calculation I made – that doing this would only be worth it if loads of people read it – is bullshit, and I’ve known that for some time. I like having 100 readers. Honestly, that’s all the attention I really need right now. One day I’d like to be writing for a larger audience. But at this point, writing for all 100 of you makes me feel like a success.

So thanks for that. I’ll see you sometime next week.


Truman Capps really needs all that extra time to spend staring at blank FinalDraft documents and trying to will scripts into existence.

Victory Lap

This was also a bumper sticker, and it was on basically every minivan and SUV in my neighborhood.

“Gayness is wrong!”

This happened in my 5th period science class back in the fall of 2004. In the chaotic few minutes between the bell ringing and our teacher slouching up to the front of the class to call roll, one of my friends and I had picked a fight with a cluster of half a dozen or so girls who were very excited about Measure 36. Measure 36 was a ballot measure that sought to amend Oregon’s constitution to ban same sex marriage, and like many popular people at my high school these girls went to a local conservative church that had taken a great interest in seeing Measure 36 become law.

Honestly, it was a waste of time. My friend and I pulled arguments verbatim from The Daily Show – all men are created equal, separation of church and state, two dudes being married to each other doesn’t have any effect on you – while the girls just vomited up the talking points they’d been coached on in their youth group:

“Marriage has always been between a man and a woman! It’s important for society!”

“In Greece and Rome they had gay marriage and those societies fell apart!”

“Marriage is about having babies and two men can’t have a baby, so they shouldn’t be able to get married!”

We got cut off mid-pointless debate when our teacher called the class to order so she could take roll. By chance, one of the girls we’d been debating with was the first name on the roll sheet.

“Ashley?” Our teacher said, eyes locked on her clipboard.

And Ashley raised her hand and, instead of ‘Here’ or ‘Present’ said, “Gayness is wrong!”

*



The following month, with the election two weeks away, the matter came up again during free time in my algebra class. Again, I was outnumbered:

“Gay marriage has been against the law all through history! If we change it now, then why not make murder legal too?”

“It says in the Bible that it’s against God’s plan!”

“Don’t you think it’s weird for two guys to be doing that stuff?”

The debate was getting heated and my bespectacled algebra teacher rose from his desk to address the class and try and restore some order:

“Look…” he sighed. “All I’m gonna say is this: If we allow gay marriage, pretty soon we’re going to have to let people start marrying their dogs.”

*


On November 2nd, Measure 36 passed – 57% of Oregon voters (1,028,546 people) voted that marriages in Oregon could only be between a man and a woman.

The following morning as I took my seat in Wind Ensemble, the trombone player sitting next to me seemed to be especially chipper.

“It’s a good day today.” He smiled.

“Why?” I asked.

“Measure 36 passed last night!” And he did just the slightest hint of a fist pump.

“I don’t think that’s anything to be happy about.” I said.

He snorted and shrugged. “Well, it passed, so that’s that.”

*

Earlier this year, when a legal challenge to Oregon’s ban on same sex marriage came before a federal judge, Oregon’s attorney general announced that she was refusing to defend the law because it was unconstitutional. In response, the National Organization for Marriage frantically filed a last-minute motion to intervene in the case and defend Oregon’s same sex marriage ban.

NOM argued in a brief that they had been in contact with several Oregon county clerks who wanted to defend the amendment but were unwilling to come forward publicly because of “…grave concerns about possible threats, harassment, and retaliation should they do so.” The judge denied NOM's motion to intervene, and earlier today overturned the amendment. As you read this, same sex couples in Oregon are getting married. 

Generally speaking, it shouldn’t be a cause for joy when people are scared to express their opinions.

But given how fucking smug and self righteous that movement was, with their cherry picked Bible verses and their vague pronouncements about society and their bullshit slippery slope arguments, all wrapped up in a cavalier disregard for the rights of millions of their fellow human beings, I’ll make an exception in this case.

Y’know, openly advocating for gay marriage wasn’t exactly a popular activity at my pretty conservative high school – especially coming from the guy who a lot of people assumed was gay anyway – but that didn’t stop me from standing up for what I believed in. On the other hand, now that the tables have turned there’s a conspicuous silence from the 1,028,546 Oregonians who were so passionate about their cause that they amended the state constitution to match their personal religious beliefs.

Odd, that.  

Ten years is a long time, and over long periods of time people tend to change their minds about things. I for one said and thought a lot of really stupid shit when I was 15 that I no longer agree with. I’d wager good money that a big chunk of those million-odd voters and the kids I bickered with have evolved on the issue over the past ten years – and not just in the fake way that Democratic politicians conveniently “evolve” on gay marriage when the demographics suit them, either. I’m talking about real, painstaking personal growth over the course of years – and good for all of them. Changing your long-held position on an issue takes character.

But as for the un-evolved ones – the people who went crying to the National Organization for Marriage for help because they can’t abide gay people getting married but are too scared to say it out loud – I say let them stay in the closet for awhile and see how they like it in there. If you think that your interpretation of your religion is such hot shit that it gets to preclude thousands of people you don’t even know from having happy, loving relationships, maybe that’s something you should be ashamed of.

I guess that’s kind of a petty, vindictive thing to say. But I’ve been waiting to say it for ten years, and it feels pretty good.


Truman Capps is almost as excited for Oregon’s LGBT community as he is about having the last laugh in several decade-old arguments.

The Dealership

I went with grey because the last thing this town needs is another black Prius. 

I was anxious when I walked into a Toyota dealership late last month to see about leasing a brand new Prius. This was the first time I’d ever paid for a car and most of my expectations for the experience were based on one Seinfeld episode and a survey I’d read showing that car salesmen narrowly edged out members of Congress as the least trustworthy people in America. That said, people who work in in advertising were voted only marginally more trustworthy than Congress, so I guess you shouldn’t put too much stock in anything you read here. (Not that you did anyway.)

As The Mystery Wagon’s health waned over the past year I knew that sooner or later I’d have to take the plunge and buy a car. It wasn’t something I was looking forward to because to me, the entire car-buying game is a shit sandwich – and not just because of my well documented aversion to spending any amount of money on anything.

I wasn't going to buy a used car because at the time I was already driving a used car that was a Pandora’s box of expensive maintenance issues. I didn’t want to spend a substantial amount of money to just get a new box full of new maintenance issues for me to discover one by one.

I don't have any debt and I'm not going to take any on, so buying a new car was out of the question. Plus, even if I did have $25,000 cash just lying around I wouldn’t spend it on something that’d be worth half as much money in four years, especially when I could just invest it in 3576 chicken Baja bowls at Baja Fresh that would bring me endless joy immediately. 

This was how I decided that I wanted to lease my next car. Owning a car means nothing to me, but having a car is important because LA. This made leasing the best choice: I’d be able to drive a brand new car for three years at used car prices, all maintenance would be covered by the dealership, and I’d be able to write off all of my monthly payments on my taxes because freelancers get enough tax breaks to make Mitt Romney’s head spin.

I don’t remember how long it took me to figure out what kind of car I wanted to lease. First I did a Google search for Cheapest hybrid car and then I did a Google search for Best hybrid car gas mileage and both Google searches told me it was the 2014 Prius C, at which point I knew that was the car I wanted to lease. So I can’t say exactly how long it took, but 15 to 20 seconds is a pretty good guess, depending on my connection speeds that evening.

I did all this decision-making during the emotionally fraught 48 hours after The Mystery Wagon gave up the ghost and started bleeding antifreeze in the street. When I got the diagnosis on Monday afternoon that my car was dead my brain graciously pushed all of my complicated feelings aside for the time being so I could focus on getting a new ride ASAP.

That evening I called my accountant to fact check what I’d read online about being able to use my leased car as a tax writeoff, and at the end of our conversation he gave me the number of a friend of his who was a salesman at a Toyota dealership in Culver City. He claimed this guy was an honest, straight-shooting salesman who wouldn’t try to fuck me. Moments earlier I had been Googling queries like Common mind games used by car salesmen and Is there a list of car salesmen who won’t try to fuck me, so I appreciated this hookup.

It was 90 degrees the following morning as I made my way to the subway station for my 45-minute trip to Culver City. I had spent most of the previous night doing extensive research and price comparisons online, but as I got closer to the dealership I began to feel less and less prepared. What if my research was wrong, and leasing was actually a terrible idea? What if the supposedly honest salesman I was supposed to meet was actually just so good at mind games that he’d fooled my accountant into recommending him? What if the Prius I wound up leasing was filled with spiders?

John, my salesman, was a friendly older black man with an immaculately trimmed grey beard. After exchanging pleasantries we hopped into the Prius for a test drive, where I promptly embarrassed myself with a show of pretty terrible driving. After eight years of driving an enormous station wagon I’m used to having to stomp repeatedly on the gas and mash on the brakes to get any results. The significantly lighter, more agile, and newer Prius requires a much softer touch, so I spent most of the drive jerkily accelerating and jolting to a stop like a 15 year old trying for his learner’s permit.

“So… What are we thinking?” John asked as we walked back into the dealership, sounding not unlike a guy dropping his girl off after the third date. So… Can I come upstairs?

“I like it a lot. I, uh… Yeah, I want to buy it.” Yeah, please come upstairs and fuck me.

We sat down at his desk, he pulled out some paperwork, and I prepared myself for Mind Games.

But the Mind Games never came. There was no upselling, no drama, no last minute disasters that drove up the cost of my car. We agreed on a down payment and monthly rate that was within my range, I sat on a comfy chair beside a popcorn machine for 45 minutes, then wrote a check, signed a bunch of paperwork, and drove off the lot in my new Prius, decidedly un-fucked. The only downside is that, having met an honest car dealer, now I probably have to reconsider some of my assumptions about members of Congress. 

The window between realizing that I needed a new car and actually getting one was so small that I didn’t even have the time to freak out about it, which is usually how I prepare for major life events. And I think that’s fortunate, because if I had more time to make this decision I probably would’ve stretched the process out over the next ten to fifteen years while I compared prices and read how-to guides.

Instead, for the first time in my life, I’m driving a brand new car. It gets 53 miles to the gallon, syncs up with my iPhone automatically, and is the same shade of grey as most of my Mossimo T-shirts (because it’s important to accessorize). But my favorite feature as I drove off the lot was the knowledge that I wouldn't have to take this car to the shop anytime soon. 


Until 36 hours later, when a woman pulling her SUV out of the Russian daycare next door to my apartment smashed into my bumper and did $1800 worth of damage. Kind of a bummer, but now I know: Car salesmen are A-OK, but you've got to look out for rich soccer moms. 

Truman Capps sincerely hopes that returning this car to the dealership in three years will be less emotionally taxing than parting with his last car was.