Three Observations
Jerkface.
Writing Is Hard
Pretty much all great writers have some sort of vice. Faulkner couldn’t write a sentence unless he was submerged in a bathtub full of rum with a vodka IV in his arm and a gin and tonic for each hand, Charles Dickens loved making future generations of high schoolers miserable by writing mind bogglingly long and dull novels, and Edgar Allen Poe was really into cutting himself and listening to My Chemical Romance in his Mom’s Escalade. Why did they do these things? Two reasons: 1) Writers are, in general, losers, and 2) Vice is a great way to get around writer’s block. Between Diet Coke, cheap stir fry, and autoerotic asphyxiation, one would assume that I had enough vices to be able to write two blog entries a week, but more often than not I come right down to the wire trying to think of something funny to talk about.
When you maintain a relatively successful blog (and by “relatively” I mean relative to the success of Crystal Pepsi or Meet the Spartans) you start to look at the world through a different set of eyes, especially on Wednesdays and Sundays, provided that those are the days you update. I try to find the comedy in everything now – I did this before, too, but back then I’d just usually say “That’s what she said” whenever somebody finished speaking, and even though TWSS is quite possibly the finest thing ever created by humans, I doubt that you’d all enjoy seven paragraphs of sentences that involve the words “hard”, “long”, “moist”, “rough”, or “very large penis”. It’s easy to see something and think up some funny stuff about it, but what’s hard is to scrape together enough of that funny stuff to make an engaging and funny read. I carry with me a notebook in which I write down funny stuff I see, on the off chance that maybe it’ll grow into a fertile garden of humor that I can savagely and relentlessly harvest, spray with pesticides, and serve up for you in the Marie Callender’s of the Internet that most people call my blog. If that doesn’t get the creative juices a flowin’, I can at least admire its stylish moleskin cover and gloat about how cool I am for owning such a classy piece of writing paraphernalia.
Banana Chips – Worst Thing… Ever?
I’m trying to eat healthy, and I’m trying to save meal plan points, and I’m also going to college. These three combine to form a veritable dietary perfect storm that rains stale rice cakes and pelts me with brownish, overripe fruit that the University deems “fresh”. The other night I was hungry but I knew that if I ate another meal I would not only become slightly less attractive but also use up points that I would definitely need later in the week. I went down to the University market and poked around for awhile, looking for something good. Now, you’ve got to understand, the market at the University of Oregon is designed to give you school spirit, if you replace “school spirit” with “a nasty case of Type 2 diabetes”. Perhaps Wilford Brimley is part of our endowment. The point is, our market is 80% Hostess and 15% Little Debbie, and the last 4.5% is sort of like lard lollipops, where the sticks are made of bacon and the center is filled with heavy cream and Virginia Slims. I searched through all of this and finally found the .5% of the inventory that was not designed to rot teeth or block arteries. This section consisted of trail mix (good), and freeze-dried banana chips (which I’d never had before). They both cost four points, but the banana chips were marginally less fatty, so I picked them.
Let me tell you, even as I bought them I knew I was making a grave mistake. I mean, since when has something with all the moisture taken out of it been good? Maybe the moisture should have been left in there, because banana chips have an unsettling crunch to them, and an even more unsettling odor that you don’t want to smell coming from something that you’re putting in your mouth. If I had to smell banana chips at all, I’d want to smell them in the house of someone I didn’t like, or on a bomb that was about to be dropped on the factory that creates and exports banana chips.
I Hate The Sun
People in Texas always go on about how big everything is down there, when really the largest state is Alaska. This is probably because nobody would buy a pair of boxers that said “Everything’s Bigger In Texas, Almost To The Point Of Being As Big As Things In Alaska” and because neither one of Alaska’s inhabitants care enough to dispute the point with the state that brought us such travesties as El Paso, our current president, and El Paso. A fun fact that you may not know about state size, however, is that Oregon is the 10th largest state in the US. Pretty cool, huh?
Well, see, here’s the thing: It turns out that the Sun comprises 99.8% of the mass in the solar system, thus negating the importance of Oregon’s size or history, or of anything that has happened or is going to happen in your life. Ever. Whatever your dreams are – money, family, something involving mud wrestling – you’re going to get upstaged by that cocky jerk the Sun, because for all intents and purposes it is the only thing in the solar system. Every human, animal, nation, and geographic feature on Earth, not to mention every other planet near here, is statistically insignificant because we happen to be sharing the neighborhood with an unspeakably huge sphere made of nuclear explosions. Did I mention that in the next few billion years the sun is actually going to get bigger, to the point that it will start absorbing everything around it? Yes, you heard me - one day the Sun is going to eat our planet. Granted, after that it’ll get smaller, but not before ruining all our stuff. My advice to humanity is to try and pack a whole lot of living into the next five to six billion years, because before we know it the real culprit for global warming is going to come a knockin’.
Truman Capps is the only blogger on the Internet with the audacity to take on William Faulkner, bananas, and the Sun.
Pretty much all great writers have some sort of vice. Faulkner couldn’t write a sentence unless he was submerged in a bathtub full of rum with a vodka IV in his arm and a gin and tonic for each hand, Charles Dickens loved making future generations of high schoolers miserable by writing mind bogglingly long and dull novels, and Edgar Allen Poe was really into cutting himself and listening to My Chemical Romance in his Mom’s Escalade. Why did they do these things? Two reasons: 1) Writers are, in general, losers, and 2) Vice is a great way to get around writer’s block. Between Diet Coke, cheap stir fry, and autoerotic asphyxiation, one would assume that I had enough vices to be able to write two blog entries a week, but more often than not I come right down to the wire trying to think of something funny to talk about.
When you maintain a relatively successful blog (and by “relatively” I mean relative to the success of Crystal Pepsi or Meet the Spartans) you start to look at the world through a different set of eyes, especially on Wednesdays and Sundays, provided that those are the days you update. I try to find the comedy in everything now – I did this before, too, but back then I’d just usually say “That’s what she said” whenever somebody finished speaking, and even though TWSS is quite possibly the finest thing ever created by humans, I doubt that you’d all enjoy seven paragraphs of sentences that involve the words “hard”, “long”, “moist”, “rough”, or “very large penis”. It’s easy to see something and think up some funny stuff about it, but what’s hard is to scrape together enough of that funny stuff to make an engaging and funny read. I carry with me a notebook in which I write down funny stuff I see, on the off chance that maybe it’ll grow into a fertile garden of humor that I can savagely and relentlessly harvest, spray with pesticides, and serve up for you in the Marie Callender’s of the Internet that most people call my blog. If that doesn’t get the creative juices a flowin’, I can at least admire its stylish moleskin cover and gloat about how cool I am for owning such a classy piece of writing paraphernalia.
Banana Chips – Worst Thing… Ever?
I’m trying to eat healthy, and I’m trying to save meal plan points, and I’m also going to college. These three combine to form a veritable dietary perfect storm that rains stale rice cakes and pelts me with brownish, overripe fruit that the University deems “fresh”. The other night I was hungry but I knew that if I ate another meal I would not only become slightly less attractive but also use up points that I would definitely need later in the week. I went down to the University market and poked around for awhile, looking for something good. Now, you’ve got to understand, the market at the University of Oregon is designed to give you school spirit, if you replace “school spirit” with “a nasty case of Type 2 diabetes”. Perhaps Wilford Brimley is part of our endowment. The point is, our market is 80% Hostess and 15% Little Debbie, and the last 4.5% is sort of like lard lollipops, where the sticks are made of bacon and the center is filled with heavy cream and Virginia Slims. I searched through all of this and finally found the .5% of the inventory that was not designed to rot teeth or block arteries. This section consisted of trail mix (good), and freeze-dried banana chips (which I’d never had before). They both cost four points, but the banana chips were marginally less fatty, so I picked them.
Let me tell you, even as I bought them I knew I was making a grave mistake. I mean, since when has something with all the moisture taken out of it been good? Maybe the moisture should have been left in there, because banana chips have an unsettling crunch to them, and an even more unsettling odor that you don’t want to smell coming from something that you’re putting in your mouth. If I had to smell banana chips at all, I’d want to smell them in the house of someone I didn’t like, or on a bomb that was about to be dropped on the factory that creates and exports banana chips.
I Hate The Sun
People in Texas always go on about how big everything is down there, when really the largest state is Alaska. This is probably because nobody would buy a pair of boxers that said “Everything’s Bigger In Texas, Almost To The Point Of Being As Big As Things In Alaska” and because neither one of Alaska’s inhabitants care enough to dispute the point with the state that brought us such travesties as El Paso, our current president, and El Paso. A fun fact that you may not know about state size, however, is that Oregon is the 10th largest state in the US. Pretty cool, huh?
Well, see, here’s the thing: It turns out that the Sun comprises 99.8% of the mass in the solar system, thus negating the importance of Oregon’s size or history, or of anything that has happened or is going to happen in your life. Ever. Whatever your dreams are – money, family, something involving mud wrestling – you’re going to get upstaged by that cocky jerk the Sun, because for all intents and purposes it is the only thing in the solar system. Every human, animal, nation, and geographic feature on Earth, not to mention every other planet near here, is statistically insignificant because we happen to be sharing the neighborhood with an unspeakably huge sphere made of nuclear explosions. Did I mention that in the next few billion years the sun is actually going to get bigger, to the point that it will start absorbing everything around it? Yes, you heard me - one day the Sun is going to eat our planet. Granted, after that it’ll get smaller, but not before ruining all our stuff. My advice to humanity is to try and pack a whole lot of living into the next five to six billion years, because before we know it the real culprit for global warming is going to come a knockin’.
Truman Capps is the only blogger on the Internet with the audacity to take on William Faulkner, bananas, and the Sun.