Territorial Animals

Hey, remember how funny it was when I wrote about the mouse in my house? Wanna read the piece I wrote for Feature Writing I about it? Well, good, because due to extenuating circumstances I'm unable to write an actual blog tonight. Enjoy!

When I stepped out of my room to take a shower, I was surprised to see my roommate, Cameron, standing on tippy-toe in the hallway in his underwear and a T-shirt, holding an open shoebox face down, his crazy eyes darting back and forth across the floor.

“We have a problem,” he muttered, his eyes not coming up from the baseboards.

“What?”

“I just saw a mouse run out of my room and down the hallway.”

My hand shot out and wrenched my bedroom door shut behind me, and then Cameron and I were both standing on tippy-toe in the middle of the hallway, back to back, scanning the hardwood for our newest roommate.

As a child, I had often dreamed of having a mouse living in my house, thanks largely to Beverly Cleary’s book The Mouse And The Motorcycle, in which a friendly mouse living in a Northern California hotel befriends a young human guest and drives his toy motorcycle around at night. As an only child with few friends, the idea of a house mouse seemed almost too perfect – a cute, furry little buddy who could play with all my toys; an acquaintance who I’d have to keep secret from my parents lest they call an exterminator. We’d be pals. I’d name him Patrick.

Fast-forward 15 years and there was Cameron and I in the hallway in our underwear, discussing the fastest way to find and kill this rodent.

“What, are you just going to drop the shoebox on him?” I asked, gesturing to the orange Nike box clutched in Cameron’s hands.

“Yeah,” Cameron said. “It’ll trap him so we don’t have to kill him and clean up a bunch of mouse guts.”

“We have to find him first,” I muttered, looking down the hall into the living room and groaning as I spotted trillions of dark spaces behind couches and under furniture where the mouse could hide. My roommates love crumbly, sweet foods like cookies and chips, and there were probably enough sugary crumbs in secluded nooks and crannies to sustain a mouse for years. “Oh, Jesus. We’re never going to find this guy. He’s like Keyser Soze.”

Cameron snapped his fingers. “That’s it! We need to get a cat.”

I glared at him over my shoulder. “Oh, yeah, great idea Cameron. Bring more fucking animals into my house. No cats.”

Some historians believe that the only reason humans started domesticating cats in the first place was to protect their homes from mice. After all, mice are one of the most commonly found pests in the world, and their history is neatly intertwined with that of humans. Originating in Northern India, mice spread to the Mediterranean in 8000 BC, and the rest of Europe about 7000 years later. The reason for the lag is generally believed to be the fact that there weren’t enough major agrarian human settlements in Europe to sustain mouse populations until then. Mice – history’s furry little freeloaders – go anywhere they can rely on humans to drop or store enough food for them to eat, and in return for our kindness they contaminate our food and spread diseases from typhus to rabies to the Bubonic plague.

And now, we had one in our house.

“I don’t think he made it all the way down the hall into your room,” Cameron said, shining a flashlight under my bed as I pulled my desk away from the wall and waited for something cute and disease infested to come running out. “He was walking, and by the time I followed him into the hall he was gone.”

“The little asshole was just sauntering,” I grunted, shoving my desk back against the wall. “Cocky prick.”

“I’m pretty sure he went into Jefe's room,” Cameron said, stepping back into the hall and looking at Jefe’s closed door, which sat kitty-corner from his. Jefe had a room strewn with stuff under which a mouse could potentially hide.

“Is Jefe home?” I asked, joining him.

“Yeah, but he’s asleep. And he’s got his girlfriend in there with him.”

This complicated matters.

I gritted my teeth. “Do you think they’re boning?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Definitely not, if she hears there’s a mouse in the room. We’d be cockblocking him.”

“The mouse would be cockblocking him.”

Male mice have remarkably large testicles when compared to the rest of their physique. While they can retract them into their bodies (a great party trick), mice frequently let it all hang out, so to speak, dragging their balls along the ground and leaving a trail of urine which activates females’ estrous cycle.

This fucking mouse was teabagging every flat surface in our house with his inordinately large nuts, no doubt attracting legions of horny lady mice for some sort of rodent orgy under our couch, which would result in each knocked up mousette, within three weeks, giving birth to a litter of five to eight new food contaminating, poop spreading, ball dragging monstrosities.

“Our doors aren’t flush with the ground!” I snatched the shoebox out of Cameron’s hands and began tearing it into wide strips.

“Hey!” Cameron blurted out as I started taping the strips of cardboard to the bottom of my door, creating a hopefully insurmountable mouse barrier. “I was going to use that to catch the mouse!”
I snorted and tore off more duct tape. “You think this guy is going to come that close to getting caught and then stick his nose out again? He’s like Osama Bin Laden now – we’ll never find him. We’re in this thing for the long haul, and if we’re going to win we’ve got to secure our borders.”

Cameron shot a glance back down the hall to the inviting gap between his door and the floor, then held out his hand. “Here, man, quit hogging all the cardboard.”

A protective layer of cardboard laid across the gap between my door and the floor, I retreated into my room as Cameron went to the store to buy mousetraps. My room still felt permeable, so I shredded another box and duct taped a second layer of cardboard to the inside of the door gap.
Feeling somewhat more secure in my mouseproofed fortress, I went to the Internet and began looking up mouse repellants. Mice, it seems, are terrified of artificial fruit smells and strobe lights. For longer than I’d like to admit I speculated about the cost and quality of life impact of transforming my room into a German discotheque, but instead settled for flicking the lights on and off a few times while playing ‘Der Kommisar’ and called it good.

When Cameron returned and I ventured into the house to help him lay traps, I realized that I felt naked and vulnerable outside of the safety and security of my room. This made mealtimes difficult – eating in my room was a strict no-no, as the crumbs would attract ants and possibly more mice, but eating in the kitchen or the living room would make me a big target for a hungry, rabid, urine-spreading mouse.

With every bite of my mid-afternoon Pop Tart, I’d frantically glance down toward the floor, expecting to see a tiny, red eyed, huge balled mouse clambering up my pant leg, mouth foaming, his whiskers twitching maliciously.

“Hey, Truman!” I could imagine it squeaking. “I’m going to rape you!”

Nowhere was safe. This mouse was my Vietnam.

As I lay in bed that night, covers tucked in tightly around my body to prevent unwanted entry, I wished that I’d bought the $120 Rodent Strobe I’d seen online and listened for the telltale snap of the mousetrap that would signify the end of our little chess game.

Fifteen years ago, I would lay awake in bed wishing for a mouse, and now I was waiting to hear one die. The difference, I suppose, was that I knew now that the mouse was not necessarily friendly. It was not visiting because it was curious about humans, or because it wanted to ride my toy motorcycle. The mouse was here in search of food, food that was rightfully mine, and his quest would contaminate my possessions with whatever muck he had crawled through to get into my house in the first place. All the mouse was doing was leeching off of me, and potentially making me sick in the process. He was a parasite – a cute, fuzzy little parasite, but a parasite nonetheless, and it was either him or me.

I woke up at 7:00 the next morning to find that the traps were still empty. When I returned from my shift at work at 11:00, I found Eli and Cameron sitting silently on the couch, drinking beer, their eyes vacant with the so-called ‘thousand yard stare’ of combat veterans.

“We got the bitch,” Cameron muttered, taking a pull on his Pabst. “We saw it happen.”

Eli and Cameron had been watching TV when the mouse came out from behind the monitor and run along the baseboard to a trap, drawn by the smell of the peanut butter bait. He went after it headfirst, and the wire bar snapped down across the bridge of his nose, snapping his face in two.

“It was fucked up,” Eli said. “He didn’t die right away, either.”

“Did you at least put him out of his misery?” I asked.

Eli and Cameron stared at their beers and didn’t say anything.

“You just sat there and watched him die!?”

“Well, what did you want me to do?” Cameron exclaimed. “It was really gross and I didn’t want to go near it. And I don’t have any of my guns.”

I went back to my room, thankful I hadn’t been home to see the gruesome display, and shut the door. The mouse was dead and gone save for a bloodstain on our carpet, his 24-hour reign of testicle dragging terror at an end, and our home was once again safe.

Although, to be honest, I didn’t feel so great about my victory – a tiny creature had entered my home in search of warmth and negligible amounts of food, and my response was to crush his skull with a spring loaded wire trap. What did that say about me?

Mice, it turns out, are territorial creatures, usually sharing a dwelling space only with a few females and whatever offspring they’ve created who aren’t old enough to move out and find a new couch to live under. If two males are held in close proximity for long enough, they’ll eventually turn violent, and one will kill the other.

Maybe we had more in common than I had thought.

Truman Capps will give you a fresh update on Sunday.

12/26

lol boxing day

Every Christmas, after the presents and the dinner and the movies and the free-flowing nog, I want to go sit in a room full of radios, tuned to every station on the FM band, and just wait. I imagine they’d all be playing Christmas music, because, after all, pretty much the only reason to have a radio between October and December 25th is so you can check if Christmas is still coming up. If you turn on the radio and you hear campy songs, almost all of which involve snow, you’re in good shape.

I want to sit in that room full of radios, all blasting Christmas music, and wait for the moment when all the station managers hit the big red button that says ‘STOP PLAYING CHRISTMAS MUSIC’, and they all switch from playing songs about goodwill and harmony and snow to regular songs about doing drugs and fucking chicks, which, let’s be honest, are certifiably better, morality be damned.

Does it happen at midnight, when the 25th becomes the 26th? Do other stations stop earlier? Do some lone holdouts continue past midnight, desperately trying to cling to as much Christmas as possible? Do they have to turn two keys simultaneously, like launching a nuclear missile? Is there a big to-do about it, like the closing ceremony of the Olympics, or does it just seamlessly switch over from ‘Feliz Navidad’ to ‘Like a G6”?*

*This applies mostly in Eugene, where every commercial radio station has the same four song mix tape, and two of the songs are ‘Like a G6.’ (It’s a bunch of people rapping about airplanes, Dad.)

When I was a kid, I, like all kids everywhere, hated December 26th. My birthday and Christmas were once again light years away, and I had nothing to anticipate except for returning to school in January. Fischer-Price could market that feeling of hopeless dejection and call it My First Hangover.

Right now, though, I’m loving my December 26th. I walked downstairs this morning and the radio was playing ‘Smoke on the Water,’ which, no matter how you slice it, isn’t a Christmas song. Hell, after six weeks of hearing ‘Frosty the Snowman’ covered by every artist under the sun, I probably would’ve wept openly if I heard a Lady Gaga song – and my tears probably wouldn’t turn into blood until at least the second chorus!

TV will be back soon, and when it is the detectives won’t be investigating murdered Santas and the happy go lucky sitcom types will be able to move on with their lives, having now discovered the True Meaning of Christmas. My parents and I can watch movies without feeling obligated to pick something with a Christmas theme. People everywhere will stop wearing Santa hats.

I don’t hate Christmas – I’m just not as patient with it as everyone else. Up until about December 10th it’s all good fun, but a major holiday can only invade every aspect of your life for so long before you start wishing for everything to go back to the way it used to be.

When I was younger it wasn’t like this, because when I was younger the things that I wanted were tangible and usually within my parents’ price range. Back then there were broad categories of things that I wanted: Basically anything with ‘Lego’ written on it, or any video game with guns in it, or any movie with an explosion on the cover. The massive buildup to Christmas was intense and glorious for me as I watched the presents pile up under the tree and tried to anticipate what I was getting. The movies and the music and the Christmas specials were all just signposts on the road to getting all that stuff, and I welcomed them.

Now, though, I’m a grown up, and there are only three things I want in the whole world:

1) For Taco Tuesday to be every night.
2) A job in the entertainment industry.
3) Christina Hendricks.

I can ask for them all I want, but my chances of getting them were just as good as my chances of getting the Little Tykes motorized jeep that I asked for every year between 1992 and 1997. Back then, it was my parents’ own common sense preventing me from getting what I wanted. Now it’s the economy and several state and federal laws regarding kidnapping.

It’s a difficult thing, trying to write a comedy blog update about how glad you are Christmas is over, because I know loads of people my age and older who go absolutely ape shit for this holiday starting in September, and I’d hate for any of them to think that I’m dissing them or that I’ve missed out on the True Meaning of Christmas.

Because I feel like I do know what Christmas is all about, and I appreciate and celebrate that, but I’m so damn good at it that I can get all my appreciating and celebrating done faster than the rest of the Western world, and then I’m just sitting there at the finish line, looking at my watch and wishing they’d quit playing fucking ‘White Christmas’ on the radio.

Truman Capps wishes he could just watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles at Christmas as well as Thanksgiving.

Five Guys

There's enough calories and fat for five guys in this picture, I tell you what.

Oregon and the West Coast in general are, in my opinion, severely lacking in terms of food that can flat out kill you if you eat it more than twice in your life. Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles combine to form this sort of new age hippie trifecta which suggests to the rest of the country that we all only listen to bands who play instruments made out of wood from trees that died of natural causes and only eat things that are as healthy as they are bland and flavorless.

Oh, sure, there are the minor exceptions. California has In-N-Out and its bacon food carts and the Pacific Northwest has Burgerville (which still barely counts because they serve a salad with hazelnuts in it, which sounds a damn lot like healthfood if you ask me) and Mike’s Drive In, but to really appreciate how far behind we are in terms of junk food, you have to just take a look at some of the options available in the rest of the country. Before long, one gets the idea that congestive heart failure is, in the Southeast and Midwest, less a medical condition and more a lofty goal not unlike knighthood.

Steak ‘n Shake, for example, combines the least healthy meat item with the least healthy dairy item. From my (limited) research I’ve seen no evidence of them offering a steak milkshake, but given that there are around 500 locations, each one featuring a cramped kitchen fully stocked with both steaks and milkshake ingredients, the law of averages states that sooner or later there’s going to be a Resident Evil style accident which combines the two and brings about the downfall of civilization.

Or there’s Texas’s own Whataburger, which serves biscuits and gravy, pancakes, and a burger with triple meat and triple cheese. At, say, In-N-Out, a burger with triple meat and triple cheese is a secret menu item, the sort of backdoor deal that you have to know about in advance and ask for with a special codename. In Texas, the only thing you have to do to get this skyscraper of meat is ‘please.’

And who can forget the East Coast mainstay White Castle? While many fast food restaurants have shunned their inherent grossness in recent years, White Castle fully embraces it, presumably with a creepy, sweaty hug. In spite of this, I’ve never heard people rave so much about something that so consistently gives them diarrhea, save for perhaps Battledip Galactica.

And before anybody gets their feathers ruffled, I’m not hating here – I’m saying I want to have these options available to me in Oregon. I eat fast food rarely, which, according to Science, is about the healthiest way to eat fast food short of not eating it at all, and in my eyes if I’m going to treat myself in a way that’s basically giving my body the finger, I want to do it right.

One chain I’d heard about a lot in recent years was Virginia-based Five Guys Burgers and Fries, which has been getting all kinds of great reviews from magazines and newspapers throughout the greater Washington D.C. area. Wikipedia told of its commitment to fresh vegetables, organic meat, and great service, tenets which were causing the chain to expand roughly as fast as its patrons’ waistlines.

I had heard Five Guys food was incredible, standing in stark contrast to its name, which is horrible. Who, when asked “Where did you get that burger?”, wants to tell their friends, “From Five Guys”? It sounds like there’s some sort of anonymous assembly line process in a parking lot, where five mysterious gentlemen who hopefully have food handler’s licenses are cobbling together burgers and fries out of whatever they can scavenge from the surrounding landscape. I mean, come on, folks – this is food service. The idea is to make your business sound reputable. What’s next? “Crackhead Under a Bridge with Oral Herpes Burgers and Fries?”

Recently I was overjoyed to find that Five Guys had made its way to Portland, evidently having missed the rumor that all we do out here is worship the sun and eat bean sprouts. Accordingly, not long after I got home for break my friend Lizzie (who you may remember from a horrible TV show) and I set out to West Linn in hopes of sampling the Five Guys there and seeing if it would harden my arteries with cholesterol in a new and delicious way.

No chain better defies the logic that fresh food is somehow better for you – Five Guys is as fresh as it gets, and the bags they handed Lizzie and I with our food in them were so greasy that you could practically rub them on your elbows to moisturize.

Five Guys is notable for having all kinds of toppings available for their burgers: Grilled mushrooms, grilled onions, Jalepenos, green peppers, and A-1, to name a few, all of which are free. Is this a great idea? Yes. But it’s also basically socialism, and as I discovered, the fact that most burger chains charge me 50 cents to add Jalepenos is the reason that I generally don’t get Jalapenos on my burgers, and, consequently, don’t get severe heartburn shortly after leaving the restaurant.

Five Guys’ décor is comprised of sacks full of potatoes, fresh off the truck from Idaho or whatever other Godforsaken place potatoes come from. Maybe they put them there because there isn’t space in the storeroom, or maybe they put them there so that the proprietor can point to the sacks of potatoes and say, “See? I told you we were hardcore.”

Also, perhaps most interestingly, Five Guys has open boxes of complimentary in the shell peanuts for customers to eat while waiting for their food. As an appreciator of both peanuts and free things, I love this, but the placement is somewhat inconvenient for me – being as Five Guys is a fast food restaurant, you’ve got at best five minutes to enjoy your peanuts, and furthermore, I don’t want to fill up on free peanuts when I’ve just put down $10 for a burger and fries that even on their own sit heavy enough to make Michael Moore break a sweat.

All I’m saying is, I think the world would be a better place if it were more like Five Guys. The University of Oregon should let me pick as many classes as I want for no additional charge and everywhere, from the library to churches to the entire State of Oregon, should provide complimentary peanuts.

Truman Capps’ arteries were horrified to learn that there is a Five Guys maybe three miles away from his house.

Reading

With a cover like that, how could this book NOT be great?

I find that I constantly overestimate my work ethic and ability to get things done, which would be fine if I had just met myself, but after 22 years of constantly setting goals and then failing to achieve them, it’s sort of embarrassing that I don’t know myself better. At this point, I feel like I’ve proven to myself that I’m not to be trusted with the responsibilities I give myself, and I really should just be delegating these tasks to other, more competent people.

Every year at the end of fall, winter, or spring term, I set out with a number of lofty goals for myself to achieve over the break. Applications to be filled out, people to contact, Worthwhile Books™ to read; just a big ‘ol laundry list of things that I didn’t have time to do over the course of the school year and thus should take care of now that I’ve got a big and uninterrupted expanse of free time.

To give you some idea of how this usually works out, here was my to do list for this break:

1) Contact folks at Roundhouse Kick Entertainment to see if my old job is still waiting for me
2) Apply for the NATAS Scriptwriting Internship
3) Apply for the NBC Page Program (Burbank)
4) Continue work on novel
5) Write screenplay for short film

And, having been home for a week now, here’s what I’ve accomplished:

1) Eat 9 oranges
2) Bathe
3) Catch up on 15 Community episodes in two days
4) Try out 5 Guys Burgers and Fries
5) Achieve ‘Fame’ within the New California Republic*
6) Introduce my parents to Robot Chicken
7) Clear Vault 3 of psychotic drug dealing thugs*
8) Try an Old Fashioned

*Listed item occurred in Fallout: New Vegas, where I am far more responsible and accomplished and better at lockpicking than I am in real life.

Hell, I’ve been so busy not achieving my goals I haven’t even been able to do the things I thought would be distracting me from my goals – I still haven’t watched season 4 of Mad Men or become a regular at the local bars like I had thought.

But – and let’s all be sure to appreciate the gravity of what I’m about to say – I have read a God damn book.

Yeah, that’s right. With words in it. No pictures. Almost four hundred pages long. And yes, for your information, it was about zombies, but I think you’re missing the point: A book. Which I read.

To be honest, it’s sort of embarrassing – this is the first book I’ve finished since this summer. And to be honest, the book I read over the summer was a screenwriting tutorial; I can’t even remember the last fiction book I read. It might have been The Stand, which I finished lying on a beach next to The Ex Girlfriend back when she was The Girlfriend, if this gives you any idea of the shamefully small amount of reading I do.

Keep in mind, I want to be a writer. For a writer to not read things is a lot like being a surgeon who doesn’t like to cut people open, or an airline pilot who hates to fly, or a pacifist serial killer. You’ve got to take at least a passing interest in the stuff you want to do – otherwise the suggestion is that maybe you don’t really like this stuff as much as you thought.

I don’t even pretend to make the excuse that I’m too busy reading for my classes to read other stuff, because I’m not – I never read for my classes. In fact, there’s plenty of times that I’ll find myself just sitting in front of my computer, bouncing back and forth between Facebook and Wikipedia in search of something interesting, with at least three books I’ve been meaning to read lying in a box by my desk. Reading just doesn’t occur to me, much in the same way rubbing a housecat under my arms doesn’t occur to me when I step out of the shower.

In my defense, books have let me down a lot before. Some books have spiffy titles and eye-catching covers, but once you get beyond that the writing itself is cumbersome and juvenile. And don’t get me wrong – I love cumbersome, juvenile writing, because it reminds me that bad writing gets published all the time, so I’ve definitely got a shot at success. But I’m not especially inclined to spend a few weeks plugging away at cumbersome, juvenile writing to get to the end of a book, even if I paid $15 for it.

And even the elite cadre of books that I’ve finished haven’t always done so well, either. I can’t tell you how many of the paperback detective novels that I devoured throughout high school ended with the writer tap dancing his or her way through a hasty climax, clearly sick of writing the book and eager to shove this turd of a manuscript out the door. Characters infodump on one another to quickly and unglamorously reveal the last few twists and turns of the story with the help of some last minute retcons:

“I knew he was a serial killer because I heard him say it to you at the lake because I put a secret listening device there when everyone thought I was sleeping and I’ve already given the police a copy of the recording and they told me to tell you that you were cleared of all charges and I love you let’s get married.”

Books, you see, are difficult like that. While writing a screenplay or an episode of a TV series requires you to keep the plot turning at predetermined points and wrap the whole thing up in a certain time, there are no such rules for books. They’re free to meander and be boring in the middle, or to have characters disgorge monologues about shit absolutely nobody but the author cares about.*

*Like a blog or something. Disgusting.

And ending a book is difficult. It’s like landing a plane – you’ve got to bring subplots, main story, and character development to a graceful stopping point, all at the same time, without turning the whole mess into a big flaming clusterfuck that kills a bunch of people. Few authors can pull that off. God knows I can’t.

So for me to have read a book means not only that I was able to pull myself away from the computer and the TV, but that I was able to forgive the written word for its past betrayals and risk getting my heart broken again by a slapshod ending.

Learning to forgive, I think, is at least one major accomplishment for Christmas break.

Truman Capps would like to point out to any interested parties that Stephen King is the only author who consistently tells kickass, engaging stories that don’t turn into flaming clusterfucks at the end, in case you didn’t gather that from my recent status update.

Critics vs Zombies

I call it the perfect storm.

If you look around, you might notice that there’s more zombies about than usual. The movie Zombieland, AMC’s The Walking Dead, the zombie-themed Halloween episode of Community, four separate shelves of paper and hardback novels at Powell’s Books, and a plethora of video games - Plants vs Zombies, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Dead Nation, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 (not joking), and Barbie Horse Adventures: Dead By Dawn (joking).

Zombie-oriented pop culture is everywhere these days, it seems. Nobody really noticed when it showed up, but bit-by-bit it infected more and more seemingly unlikely forms of media (the comedy show about a community college? The video game about cowboys?) until there arose a great and massive horde of zombie media that severely outnumbered the unzombied parties, which are, at this point, consist only of 19th century Romantic literature and the movie How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

Oh, wait. Look out, Stella, Romantic literature is a zombie!

A lot of critics, particularly in the gaming arena where zombies have become the most prevalent, have criticized the abundance of zombie stuff on the market right now. They say it’s a cop out – people looking to spruce up their video game (or some long dead author’s book) have taken to pushing the zombie button in a vain attempt to make what they’re doing trendy and interesting.

You know what I say? I say that when zombies are routinely shoehorned into cultural products of virtually any genre, just for the hell of it, then there are almost enough zombies in our pop culture.

You’ve got to understand, this is the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for since high school. Me and Alexander and Brent loved zombies. We bought the zombie board games and played the original Dead Rising in spite of its severe commitment to sucking, and we agreed that the running zombies in the new Dawn of the Dead were way better than garden variety zombies, and we had our Zompocalypse Escape Plan memorized, prepared, and practically rehearsed*, in spite of the fact that we were barely able to organize our own prom night.

*Alexander and Brent, who both had guns in their houses, would secure as many firearms and family members as they could, efficiently dispatch the infected family members, and then make their way to my house. Once they had killed any of my infected family, I would beat cheeks to the Salem Library – a solid concrete building with very few entrances – with the other survivors and barricade us inside while Alexander and Brent went to WinCo to loot as much food and supplies as necessary for the long haul before coming back to the library to kill any zombies that might still be inside. I know I sort of look like the weak link in this plan, but my cultural contributions to our fortress would be invaluable.

And all of this used to be weird. It’s like we liked some really obscure band that most people thought was too violent or had no cultural value, but now, all of a sudden, that band has gotten really popular and everyone has started to appreciate it. Only here there’s no downside – zombies haven’t sold out or started doing drugs or released a concept album with really cryptic and poetic liner notes. Zombies just keep being awesome, and they’re profitably awesome enough that people keep finding uses for them. In your face, Queens of the Stone Age.

A lot of film critics allege that zombies, namely of the George Romero, Night of the Living Dead-onward variety*, exist as a satiric metaphor for the overindulgence of capitalism, mainly because seminal works like Dawn of the Dead are about mobs of zombies desperately trying to break into a barricaded shopping mall and get at the people inside.

*The other type of zombies are the legendary cursed ones from Haitian mythology, which aren’t nearly as cool because there isn’t an abundance of shotguns or chainsaws in Haitian mythology.

Critics can say that all they want – hell, it might even be true – but all I know is that when I watch The Walking Dead, I don’t scream “PEACE, BITCH!” when a zombie’s head gets blown off because I enjoy the subtle irony of the situation as it pertains to the economy. I scream “PEACE, BITCH!” because killing zombies is damn good entertainment. They, along with Nazis, are the only cannon fodder you can’t possibly empathize with, making it all the easier to be enthusiastic as they get disposed of in all sorts of gruesome and spectacular ways.

Even if you’re not into the good old ultraviolence, zombies make stories better by putting the characters into increasingly dire circumstances. A bunch of people in a building surrounded by flesh eating monsters always do more interesting stuff than people under most other circumstances – friends become enemies, enemies become friends, cunning last minute plans are thrown together, and something like 60% of the time at least two people start boning for basically no reason.

If Sex in the City was about four materialistic, whory bitches in a coffee shop surrounded by bloodthirsty zombies, you damn bet I’d watch that show. I just can’t guarantee I wouldn’t be rooting for the zombies.

So I say, bring on the zombies. Let’s have more movies, TV shows, and video games wherein the driving force behind the story is pungent, oozing, flesh hungry walking dead who need to be destroyed at all costs, as opposed to vampries, who want only to seduce mousy women and reinforce Christian values about love and marriage.

Truman Capps got in an awesome one-two punch at Sex and the City and Twilight, and hopes that he made at least one teenaged girl cry.

Duck Tales

DO WANT

I have, from an early age, had an inexplicable aversion to people in big mascot suits. Actually, come to think of it, I guess it’s pretty explicable, because I plan to spend the bulk of the following paragraph explaining and analyzing in great detail the basis for my aversion, before segueing into why the University of Oregon has the greatest mascot ever, primarily because he doesn’t trigger this fear in me. Spoiler alert.

Disneyland was a stressful experience for me in my youth, the whole time spent hoping that a gigantic mouse or dog wouldn’t come over and try to interact with me. This wasn’t because I was scared of them, necessarily, but because I was scared of something far more ominous, which still haunts me today: Awkward social situations.

So Mickey Mouse, let’s say, comes over to say hi to me. I would find this upsetting because I was in on the gag, so to speak – I knew that he wasn’t the real Mickey Mouse. I knew that there wasn’t a real Mickey Mouse. And I knew that there was nothing special about a man in a mouse suit. But at the same time, it was this guy’s livelihood; he was going to great lengths, sacrificing his own dignity, even, to entertain children by leading them to believe that they were palling around with the real Mickey Mouse. I wouldn’t want to make him sad by showing that I wasn’t fooled by his costume, so I’d have to act excited to see him and try to have an enjoyable experience. But the thing is, even when I was six, I interacted with others primarily through conversation, and Mickey Mouse can’t talk, or otherwise at all express himself beyond waving his arms around a little bit. So in essence, my time at Disneyland when I was a child was peril fraught because I was terrified that I might have to act entertained by an awkward game of charades with a nonunion actor in a poorly ventilated suit modeled after a cartoon character I wasn’t even all that fond of, when really all I wanted was some funnel cake and another turn on Star Tours

Why, yes, it is very hard being me. Thanks for asking!

Gearing up to come to college, I was afraid I would wind up in the same situation with our mascot, Puddles the Duck, as the marching band and the mascot fulfill similar duties and tend to stick pretty close to one another. I was worried because I had seen other college mascots and been sincerely creeped out by them, mascots the likes of…

Pistol Pete…


…Sparky the Sun Devil…


…And this hairy palmed bastard.

However, in my time spent at UO and around the Duck, I’ve found that he’s a huge exception to my childhood phobia for two reasons:

1) The guy inside the Duck has a great job. I don’t feel sorry for him in the slightest. While a Disney employee portraying Mickey Mouse has to contend with an army of screaming children and fat people from the middle part of the country for eight hours a day, the guy inside the Duck may as well be dressing up as Jesus when he walks around UO. All he does is crowd surf, mock the other team, and hang out with the world’s hottest cheerleaders, with a few thousand pushups thrown in for good measure.

2) The very structure of his uniform is such that he isn’t creepy. Most mascots are rendered with a simple, cartoonish smile that looks pleasant at a glance but becomes creepy immediately thereafter – for example, a guy broadly smiling on the bus seems nice at first, but when he’s just sitting there smiling for hours, you’re suddenly less inclined to sit next to him or have your kid pose for a picture with him. Puddles, with his wide eyes and open beak, looks like he’s constantly thrilled by everything around him, which is a damn infectious thing at a football game.

The other benefit to Puddles having an open mouth is that it makes him one of the few mascots who can eat things. (Please don’t make this sentence dirty.)

It may not sound like much, a sports mascot’s ability to consume items, but given the fact that mascots have only body language with which to communicate relatively complex messages about college football rankings and the BCS, the ability to eat is a valuable tool in a mascot’s arsenal.

Two years ago, when we went to Corvallis and utterly destroyed the Beavers when they were in line for their first Rose Bowl since 1967, the Duck ran up to the students after the game holding a large bouquet of roses and stuffed them into his mouth, then shook his head to empty the shredded petals and stems onto the ground.

This year at the Civil War, when it was clear that we were going to win, the Duck opened up a package of Tostitos corn chips and emptied them into his mouth, followed by several tortillas, which he then pulled back out of his mouth and tried to feed to the band director (with limited success).

And, just about every time I’ve seen him, the Duck has snuck up on at least one person and eaten their head. This is basically the funniest thing in the world. There is no greater joy than watching the Duck pose with a bunch of people for a picture and then stick his mouth over one of their heads right as they take the photo.

So maybe Old Dominion’s mascot beat the Duck in the Capital One Mascot Bowl, but so what? We all know who the real winner is: The mascot who could transform my fear of mascots into love, and who could make devouring children’s heads wacky and innocent again.

Truman Capps does not mean to suggest that the Duck is anything other than a real, freakishly large, seemingly immortal duck.

Deodorant

Where BO Man so often strikes...

When I go to the store, the only thing I’m thinking about is food. That’s my primary motivation to go to the store – find more delicious things that I’ll be able to eat. Eating is fun for me, like a very simple yet delicious arcade game, and going to Market of Choice to buy more food is like going to the front counter at the arcade to get more tokens. Buying laundry soap or a toothbrush doesn’t even factor into what I’m thinking about, because as soon as I go into an aisle that isn’t full of opportunities for me to eat stuff but rather to clean stuff, what I’m doing stops being fun and exciting and becomes a chore.

When I run out of Pop Tarts, I’ll gladly go right out to the store and buy some more, because then I get to play the game where I try to decide what bland fruit flavor I’ll be numbly shoving into my mouth on the bus to class every morning. When I run out of toothpaste, though, I think, “Ah, I’ll have to get more toothpaste when I go to the store.” And then, the next time I go to the store, I’m so busy deciding what kind of Newman’s Own pasta sauce to get that I completely space on the toothpaste.

And then, that night when it’s time to brush my teeth, I remember that I’m out of toothpaste and squeeze the completely flattened toothpaste tube as hard as I can, hoping that if I squeeze with enough intensity it’ll open a wormhole inside the tube leading to an alternate dimension completely filled with Aim toothpaste, which will then squirt onto my toothbrush. Whenever that doesn’t happen (it never does), I just use my roommate’s. I do the same thing with shampoo. If my roommates figure this out, I’m in deep shit, so nobody tell them, okay?

However, the one place where I’m unwilling to mooch off my roommates is also perhaps the most necessary personal hygiene item of all: Deodorant. My roommates and I don’t have a strong enough relationship that we’re comfortable swabbing the same thing around under our armpits, but deodorant is also not the sort of thing you can get away with not using. I ride public transportation everywhere and will occasionally mouth the words I’m thinking; having an inoffensive odor is the only thing between me and the people who hang out at the transit mall all night.

It’s not that I’m even an especially foul smelling person – I pride myself on my ability to avoid all activities that could cause me to break a sweat. I wear deodorant out of a certain civic responsibility – it’s something we all do, as humans, whether we deem it necessary or not, if we want to be in society. Just like how immunization shots theoretically protect us by surrounding us with people who are unable to spread disease, the Deodorant Social Contract protects us by surrounding us with people who are unable to stink. And the people who refuse to wear deodorant are a lot like the people who refuse to let their children get immunized in that they’re insane douchewhales who nobody wants to be around.

So when I woke up this morning and found that I was out of deodorant, I grudgingly marched off to the store to refill my supply, worried the entire time that in spite of having just showered I might begin sweating profusely in the 15 minutes between leaving the house and obtaining the deodorant, creating a stink bad enough to permeate my shirt, my sweatshirt, and my jacket.*

*Like all other bizarre things about me, this obsession can be traced back to my parents. My mother, for her entire life, has been doing battle with a nefarious individual she calls ‘B.O. Man.’ He takes many different appearances but always winds up near my mother in a confined space, his suffocating Body Odor enveloping himself and the surrounding area like a celestial gas giant. He’s The Joker to Mom’s Batman, and throughout my childhood she made it known to me that people who smell bad are bad all the way to the core.

However, the only deodorant available at Market of Choice was the scented variety, whereas I am an ‘Unscented’ man, through and through. I wear deodorant because I want to not smell like anything – I find it highly unlikely that smelling like a pine forest will do much for your social or professional life beyond let everyone know that you’re wearing deodorant, a product which I appreciate for its subtlety in eliminating bad smells, not its ability to replace them with new, supposedly better ones.

And who are you trying to kid anyway, you with your ‘Ocean Breeze’ scented deodorant? You think we actually believe you’ve got the ocean in your armpits? Or maybe you want us to think that you just naturally smell like Lincoln City? You disgust me.

Alas, my options were limited – I had to go to work soon and I couldn’t go deodorant free under any circumstances. So I bit the bullet and bought the ‘Fresh’ variety of Speed Stick, figuring it was probably the least obtrusive out of all the available options.

And I’ve been sitting here in the checkout room smelling Fresh all afternoon – a foul, artificial odor that smells like wearing a wide brimmed baseball cap and riding a longboard. It’s really pretty awful. I’m considering doing a bunch of jumping jacks just so I can sweat some and balance it all out.

If this is what being fresh smells like, I’m going to have to seriously evaluate major parts of Will Smith’s acting career.

Truman Capps’ life got flip turned upside down…

A Trip To The Porn Shop

You may have noticed that yesterday, the Oregon Ducks won the Civil War and will be going to the 2011 BCS Championship. With all due respect to that, I find that this event, which took place shortly thereafter, is a far better read.

Oh, right, like I'm going to type 'pornography' into the Google Image Search window.

When I was a child, I was always intrigued by the dozens of adult shops in Salem. What kind of stuff for adults did they sell that you couldn’t get anywhere else? I figured it was probably calculators and bleach – things that were either too boring or too dangerous for children and, as such, had to be sequestered in special shops. I couldn’t understand why these places seemed to be so popular, given what they were selling, but I imagined that I’d figure it out when I became an adult and gained a true appreciation of calculators and bleach.*

*The Mystique Adult Arcade, located in a seedy repurposed house on Lancaster Boulevard adjacent to a used car lot, was a lot more enticing. I didn’t like arcades much because they were so noisy and full of hyperactive children; I figured that an arcade for adults would be more classy and demure, with a dress code and a velvet rope around the Time Crisis 3 machine.

I tell you, nothing positively destroys your innocence like learning that people have a fundamental desire to watch other people bone, and a robust and successful industry exists to satisfy that need. It kind of cripples whatever childish ideas you had about the superiority of our race when you find out that a guy with a video camera and a few open minded, flexible friends can make more money than your dad.

In spite of the appreciation for pornography that I cultivated throughout my teenage years, I had never gone into an adult shop before. You have to keep in mind, I’m a fairly self conscious person; I felt embarrassed eating a deep fried pizza in public, so understand that I never wanted to visit a store where everyone can assess one another’s sexual preferences from a quick glance in the shopping cart.

Last night, though, was the night of a Christmas party that included a secret Santa gift exchange with a 15-dollar limit. I had drawn my friend Adam and neglected to buy a gift until an hour before the party, so my roommate Eli, who also needed to buy a gift, suggested that we go out to Castle, an adult shop in Springfield. His reasoning, which seemed pure at the time, was that when you’re looking for cheap gifts for a quick laugh at a party full of your morally questionable friends, you can’t go wrong with porn.

Ten minutes later, when I walked into my first ever adult shop, I was admittedly a little disappointed. I had expected long, well-stocked aisles, floor displays, maybe free samples of edible panties – basically like a really smutty Albertson’s. Instead what I got was a large, bare, harshly lit and sparsely furnished room full of sex toys and dirty movies. In retrospect, I guess they removed a lot of the clutter so as to eliminate any dark corners wherein patrons could test out the merchandise.

Eli and I walked through the aisles, looking for some pornography that was just dirty enough to be funny but not so dirty as to be awkward in a group setting. Unfortunately, while we saw DVD covers adorned with penises being inserted into orifices that I didn’t even know existed and women covered in a wide range of bodily fluids, none of it really jumped off the shelf and shouted ‘Adam!’ at us.

I made the assumption that an adult shop operates along the same principles as Barnes and Noble or JC Penny and went to the front desk to see if somebody could make a recommendation for me.

“Hi,” I said, approaching a well kempt woman in her mid 30s standing behind the counter. “I’m trying to buy some holiday porn for my friend. He’s Jewish, married, and he loves World of Warcraft. Have you got anything that fits with that?”

The woman furrowed her brow in thought for a few seconds before uttering arguably the most wonderful sentence in the history of language:

“Well, we’ve got some circus porn. Do you think he’s into that?”

I’ll never know how Judaism, matrimony, and the world’s most popular online game combine to form a bunch of clowns fucking, but I’ll be damned if that wasn’t exactly what the blurb on the back of the DVD promised. In all seriousness, though, I would’ve bought the movie for him if it hadn’t cost $35.

Hoping to find a more cost effective gift, I meandered on over to the dildo section, but the prices there got even higher. They were charging $150 for an apparatus that, thanks to its intimidating size and several curious protrusions, looked like it would do more harm than good.

I would’ve lingered more and given some real thought to my selections, but an adult shop in Springfield Oregon is not the sort of place where you want to spend a great deal of time. Most of the other patrons were overweight middle aged couples, the sorts of people who look like they’re bus drivers or middle school cafeteria workers, only they were locking eyes with me over by the gallon jug of discount body chocolate.

I realized that in these circumstances, Eli and I – a beefy former high school football player with a beard and an effeminate Conan O’ Brien knockoff, respectively – looked like basically the cutest gay couple in the world. Almost without thinking I grabbed the first novelty beer stein I could find and made a beeline for the counter.

In the long run I imagine it doesn’t matter what the patrons of Castle think about me, because if I bump into any of them again in my social life it will mean that something has gone very wrong. But I left the store all the same, because I found it personally offensive.

$35 is totally overcharging for circus porn.

Truman Capps wants to convey his sincerest and most heartfelt apologies to Mrs. Walsh, his third grade teacher who reads his blog, and assures her that he turned out this way due to his parents and not her teaching.

Running Behind

Magazine finals suck. Blog will be up in threeish hours.

Working For A Living, Tokyo Drift

Only because I couldn't find a picture of Huey Lewis in a lowrider.

I’ve always had a lot of friends who worked for the University. When I was a freshman, I knew an awful lot of people who worked in food service in the dorms, which always created something of an awkward dynamic for me. If I were in a friend’s dorm room and I asked him to get me a bag of chips, it was pretty likely that he’d flip me off and tell me to do it myself. However, as soon as his shift at work started, I could go to the cafeteria and he would be my slave, making me a turkey sandwich to my exact specifications.

“No, damn it, only toasted on the meat side! Do I look like the kind of two-bit country asshole who wants his lettuce to wilt? So help me God, I will beat you to death with a sack full of doorknobs! But yeah, we’re still on for Call of Duty tonight, right?”

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would one day be collecting paychecks from the same University that I had funneled so much of my family’s hard earned money into, mainly because in my more temperamental moments I like to say that the University of Oregon overcharges students for a product that is frequently sub par. What I’ve discovered, though, is that it’s far more profitable to collect paychecks and be a part of that sub-par product than it is to be the douchebag rallying against it.

I work as a Technology Monitor in the Chambers Electronic Media Center in the School of Journalism. More specifically, I sit in an almost comically tiny room full of very expensive camera equipment and check it out to journalism majors, some of them friendly, who have reserved it in our tattered and greasy logbooks.

When first applying for the job, I was worried that I was ill-qualified, because until now most of my work experience is either in food service or sitting up all night reviewing footage of Midwestern ghost hunts. What I’ve found out over the past couple weeks of work, however, is that this job is almost eerily similar to food service – the only difference being that the camera equipment I’m giving people is probably less harmful when consumed than some of the bacony, cheesy, cholesteroly foods I delivered to patrons at Mike’s Drive In.

What I’m learning is that when people want something – whether it’s a cheeseburger or an 85mm lens – their personalities are rooted in three core traits:

Friendly
“Hi there, I’ve got a reservation for PD-170 #8. Oh, it’s not in? No, it’s fine, let me see if another is open. Hey, it looks like #9 isn’t reserved! I’ll take that instead. Thanks!”

Stupid
“Hey… I’m, uh… I’m looking for a camera.”
“Okay. This entire room is filled with cameras, so could you be more specific?”
“It’s, like… It’s a small one. And I think there’s a number in its name.”
“Okay. That still describes most of the cameras in here. Do you have a reservation?”
“Um… No. Should I do that?”

Angry
“Hey, I’m here for PD-170 #8.”
“Okay… It looks like somebody else has that checked ou-”
“I put my name in the book and everything.”
“I’m sure you did. Somebody else probably just came in here and checked it out without looking in the b-”
“God DAMN IT this fucking happens to me all the TIME!”
“I’m really sorry – maybe check the book for another camer-”
“Look and see who checked #8 out! Get his phone number so I can call him!”
“Uh, it looks like we didn’t get this guy’s phone num-”
“You don’t take peoples’ phone numbers? How can you not take their phone numbers!? You should start taking peoples’ phone numbers!”

The friendly ones tend to be upper division journalism majors – wizened old sorts who realize that the best way to get what they want is to play nice with the people in charge of giving it to them, a position that’s favorable to me because it vastly inflates the amount of imaginary power I have in my role as a glorified librarian.

The stupid ones are generally freshmen, unfamiliar with checkout procedures, in the newly created Gateway courses. Gateway is strong in the creating electronic media department but weak in the writing a 100-page research paper department. As a result, these students are technically gifted but, having never experienced Info Hell, fundamentally weak down to their cores. They do not know true fear, and I will never fully respect them.

The angry ones are journalism majors of any given age who are having a bad day and have decided to take out their misfortunes on the Technology Monitor, which is tough to forgive seeing as all the Technology Monitors are either friendly, somewhat dorky guys or cute cheerful girls. Yelling at us because somebody else took your camera is like yelling at Mrs. Butterworth because your pancakes are undercooked.*

*This metaphor isn’t perfect, because I’m almost certain that none of the Technology Monitors dispense syrup when squeezed, but seriously – what kind of stone cold asshole would yell at Mrs. Butterworth? She seems so nice on the commercials.

Dealing with the public aside, this remains one of the better jobs I’ve had. I get to act knowledgeable in front of freshmen when explaining how to use camera equipment, which makes me feel like I’ve learned something over the past few years, I get to surf Wikipedia during downtime, which means I basically get paid to do what I do all the time for free, and my supervisor hasn’t publicly humiliated me.

Of course, I’ve only been working here for three weeks. There’s a whole lot of school year left.

Truman Capps does miss the risk and adventure of being a lactose intolerant person making milkshakes.