Dear Readers,
As all of you are about to know—assuming you possess the ability to read what I’m about to write—the world is on the brink of implosion. According to a group of scientists who I’ll instinctively trust because I assume they never scored a 17% on a 11th grade physics test like some other people who will forever remain nameless, the doomsday scenario we’ve all been dreading since watching Bill Pullman’s wife die in the original Independence Day has never been closer. What I’m trying to say is that our planet is on the edge man. The end looks to be near. And while some of us may have different strategies for surviving our race’s collective demise—rich people with their nuclear blast reinforced condos built on the interior of Teddy Roosevelt’s nostril, poorer people with their stockpile of Arby’s Roast Beef & Swiss sandies—we all know what the most important aspect to surviving the imminent apocalypse will be: a strong desire to not die.
As all of you are about to know—assuming you possess the ability to read what I’m about to write—the world is on the brink of implosion. According to a group of scientists who I’ll instinctively trust because I assume they never scored a 17% on a 11th grade physics test like some other people who will forever remain nameless, the doomsday scenario we’ve all been dreading since watching Bill Pullman’s wife die in the original Independence Day has never been closer. What I’m trying to say is that our planet is on the edge man. The end looks to be near. And while some of us may have different strategies for surviving our race’s collective demise—rich people with their nuclear blast reinforced condos built on the interior of Teddy Roosevelt’s nostril, poorer people with their stockpile of Arby’s Roast Beef & Swiss sandies—we all know what the most important aspect to surviving the imminent apocalypse will be: a strong desire to not die.
And I’m not talking about a strong desire not to die now, when things are more or less alright, and your local Starbucks only closes down because it got caught being racist and not because Dennis Rodman’s best friend dropped a nuke right on top of it. No. I’m talking about your will to continue on when the power grid has been totally taken out, and the zombies just won’t chill even though it’s a Sunday and Jesus’ dad himself told us all, flesh eaters included, to rest on the sabbath, and all the Crate and Barrel factory stores ever built have already been robbed and looted so completely that there isn’t a clean and untattered comforter available on the face of the Earth. I’m talking about your will to endure, when enduring seems way harder than it should be. Do you really want to keep living once that impending nuclear holocaust or alien landing or probable Chinese Hoax otherwise known as global warming causes shit to really hit the fan?
I'm not sure that I do. Once one or more of those aforementioned apocalyptic event hits, a lot of us are going to bite the big one, myself included. And I’m more or less alright with that. In fact the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to believe that I’d prefer it. Scrounging around, trying to survive once the luxuriousness embedded into modern existence is dead and buried forever, that’s just not the life for me. I’d rather go out without the struggle. What follows will be a much more detailed account why.
Reasons I Don’t Really Want To Stay Alive During The Apocalypse
1) I don’t like to run-After my most recent blog post, my views on running has never been more complicated. On one hand, running fucking sucks. On the other, people are willing to pay good money to charity in order to do something that ironically may one day cause them to commit suicide. Either way, my final conclusion is that the pain of running is not worth the pleasure of curing cancer. I also, in this blog post, concluded that this form of ritual torture is not even worth ensuring my own survival. Long story short, if I gotta run for more than 5 or 6 steps, then I am going to have to sit down and rest. If zombies are chasing me, then i guess they are gonna catch up. If you’re asking me if I’ll die for my principles, the answer is no. Unless the principle in question is remaining still for as long as I need to stop breathing hard. Because, in my mind at least, if I am forced to keep breathing hard, then I might as well already be dead.
2) I don’t want to catch and kill my own meat-Look, once Earth warms to the point where it is always too steamy to wear chinos, humans won’t be the only animals who start to die off in mass. By the time our species begins falling by the wayside, It’s likely that many of our planet’s cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and vensions will already be gone. Basically when the world starts to end, the current source of all the best kinda foods in the world could go dry as well. And what am I supposed to do then? Catch wild animals to eat myself? I can't do that man. I don't know how to sharpen a stick into a spear. Also, quite frankly, animals scare me. A few weeks ago I saw an o'possum under my back porch. I know feel the need to make sure I am wearing my stain resistant khakis whenever I am taking out the garbage. Yes, what I am trying to say is that seeing another o'possum might make me pee my pants. Meaning that if anything, once all the regular meat is gone, I won't be hunting the o'possums. The o'possums will be hunting me.
3) I need to be comfortable to sleep-There are many activities humans are evolutionary designed to perform outdoors—mainly consuming copious amounts of alcohol and/or running into each other with as much force as possible while wearing a helmet and shoulder pads—but sleeping is not one of them. That’s why our species invented physical structures. Basically our desire to not sleep outside and/or on the ground is the thing that spurred the human race to devise the entire concept of a “building.” And when those buildings are bombed out, and the comforters I mentioned in the introduction are completely hacked apart, all of us will be forced to sleep with little to no protection from the elements. That seems like an untenable situation to me. And I know what I’m talking about. I once slept in a Holiday Inn Express with a scratchy quilt and believe you me, by the end of the night I was begging for it all to end. Begging.
4) Hiding from stuff seems exhausting-Hiding is hard for me physically, given the fact that, in terms of both size and agility, I very closely resemble a baby blue whale who has been removed from the water and inexplicably discovered the ability to more or less walk upright. Hiding is also very hard for me intellectually. Ever since playing hide and seek as a child, I have had no concept of what a good hiding spot is. Under the bed? In the bathroom with the door locked and a healthy supply of Poo-Pourri to conceal my presence? In the crawl space in my parent’s attic I once filled with empty pizza boxes and natural light cans because I knew they’d get irrationally mad if I just threw them out the window and into the backyard like God intended? I don’t know. You tell me. But when the pressure is on, and I need to conceal my whereabouts in order to to have to make it, there is no chance I am figuring it all out then.
5) I have no skills-Things I cannot do that would be useful in an apocalyptic type scenario: start a fire. Use a non-electric can opener. Bend my knees. Make critical decisions in a timely manner. Shoot a bow and arrow. Sharpen a stick into a spear without stabbing myself. Pitch a tent. Siphon gas. Avoid getting sunburned. Remember to look behind me in case whatever monster(s) that just caused the world’s destruction is closing in on my position and I need to pick up my pace. Picking up my pace. The point is that there are a myriad of what would seem to be necessary survival skills that I lack, both in terms of my current proficiency and my ability to eventually pick them up. Oh yeah, here’s one more thing I am not very good at: learning new things.
6) I am too lazy to prepare-According to the Interwebs, legendary leader of men Vincent Lombardi once said: “the will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.” I think, in many ways, the same thing goes for surviving our impending global annihilation. And while, as I referenced above, some of us can cheat the process and buy their continued existence with their also aforementioned cryptocurrency fortunes, the rest of us schmo’s can only earn our survival through things like grit, hard work, and ingenuity. The rest of us have to prepare if we are going to make it. We all have the chance to keep going. All we have to do is steal a shovel from our parents and dig a secret bunker behind the trampoline in our neighbor’s backyard, due to the fact that your own “backyard” is nothing more than a piece of asphalt where your wife parks her Toyota Rav4, and therefore is really difficult and inconvenient to dig through.
I was at my parents house not that long ago, and spoiler alert: their shovel is still safe and sound in the garage. There is no hole in the ground behind my neighbor’s trampoline, both because, as I just said, i still don't have a shovel and because said trampoline has that net thing around it so I cannot fall off it and through the ground whenever I take a faulty bounce on the several occasions where I have snuck over his fence in order to jump on it. Long story short, I am doing nothing to ensure my own perseverance as a member of the human race, even though I know that I could if I really wanted to. I do not have the will to prepare. I do not have the will to survive. When the apocalypse hits, I am going to die. This will be a fitting conclusion to the story of my life. Whenever things go south, I have no one to blame but myself.
Now is not the time to change that. Now is the time to crack a beer and wait for it all to go down.
I'm not sure that I do. Once one or more of those aforementioned apocalyptic event hits, a lot of us are going to bite the big one, myself included. And I’m more or less alright with that. In fact the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to believe that I’d prefer it. Scrounging around, trying to survive once the luxuriousness embedded into modern existence is dead and buried forever, that’s just not the life for me. I’d rather go out without the struggle. What follows will be a much more detailed account why.
Reasons I Don’t Really Want To Stay Alive During The Apocalypse
1) I don’t like to run-After my most recent blog post, my views on running has never been more complicated. On one hand, running fucking sucks. On the other, people are willing to pay good money to charity in order to do something that ironically may one day cause them to commit suicide. Either way, my final conclusion is that the pain of running is not worth the pleasure of curing cancer. I also, in this blog post, concluded that this form of ritual torture is not even worth ensuring my own survival. Long story short, if I gotta run for more than 5 or 6 steps, then I am going to have to sit down and rest. If zombies are chasing me, then i guess they are gonna catch up. If you’re asking me if I’ll die for my principles, the answer is no. Unless the principle in question is remaining still for as long as I need to stop breathing hard. Because, in my mind at least, if I am forced to keep breathing hard, then I might as well already be dead.
2) I don’t want to catch and kill my own meat-Look, once Earth warms to the point where it is always too steamy to wear chinos, humans won’t be the only animals who start to die off in mass. By the time our species begins falling by the wayside, It’s likely that many of our planet’s cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys and vensions will already be gone. Basically when the world starts to end, the current source of all the best kinda foods in the world could go dry as well. And what am I supposed to do then? Catch wild animals to eat myself? I can't do that man. I don't know how to sharpen a stick into a spear. Also, quite frankly, animals scare me. A few weeks ago I saw an o'possum under my back porch. I know feel the need to make sure I am wearing my stain resistant khakis whenever I am taking out the garbage. Yes, what I am trying to say is that seeing another o'possum might make me pee my pants. Meaning that if anything, once all the regular meat is gone, I won't be hunting the o'possums. The o'possums will be hunting me.
3) I need to be comfortable to sleep-There are many activities humans are evolutionary designed to perform outdoors—mainly consuming copious amounts of alcohol and/or running into each other with as much force as possible while wearing a helmet and shoulder pads—but sleeping is not one of them. That’s why our species invented physical structures. Basically our desire to not sleep outside and/or on the ground is the thing that spurred the human race to devise the entire concept of a “building.” And when those buildings are bombed out, and the comforters I mentioned in the introduction are completely hacked apart, all of us will be forced to sleep with little to no protection from the elements. That seems like an untenable situation to me. And I know what I’m talking about. I once slept in a Holiday Inn Express with a scratchy quilt and believe you me, by the end of the night I was begging for it all to end. Begging.
4) Hiding from stuff seems exhausting-Hiding is hard for me physically, given the fact that, in terms of both size and agility, I very closely resemble a baby blue whale who has been removed from the water and inexplicably discovered the ability to more or less walk upright. Hiding is also very hard for me intellectually. Ever since playing hide and seek as a child, I have had no concept of what a good hiding spot is. Under the bed? In the bathroom with the door locked and a healthy supply of Poo-Pourri to conceal my presence? In the crawl space in my parent’s attic I once filled with empty pizza boxes and natural light cans because I knew they’d get irrationally mad if I just threw them out the window and into the backyard like God intended? I don’t know. You tell me. But when the pressure is on, and I need to conceal my whereabouts in order to to have to make it, there is no chance I am figuring it all out then.
5) I have no skills-Things I cannot do that would be useful in an apocalyptic type scenario: start a fire. Use a non-electric can opener. Bend my knees. Make critical decisions in a timely manner. Shoot a bow and arrow. Sharpen a stick into a spear without stabbing myself. Pitch a tent. Siphon gas. Avoid getting sunburned. Remember to look behind me in case whatever monster(s) that just caused the world’s destruction is closing in on my position and I need to pick up my pace. Picking up my pace. The point is that there are a myriad of what would seem to be necessary survival skills that I lack, both in terms of my current proficiency and my ability to eventually pick them up. Oh yeah, here’s one more thing I am not very good at: learning new things.
6) I am too lazy to prepare-According to the Interwebs, legendary leader of men Vincent Lombardi once said: “the will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.” I think, in many ways, the same thing goes for surviving our impending global annihilation. And while, as I referenced above, some of us can cheat the process and buy their continued existence with their also aforementioned cryptocurrency fortunes, the rest of us schmo’s can only earn our survival through things like grit, hard work, and ingenuity. The rest of us have to prepare if we are going to make it. We all have the chance to keep going. All we have to do is steal a shovel from our parents and dig a secret bunker behind the trampoline in our neighbor’s backyard, due to the fact that your own “backyard” is nothing more than a piece of asphalt where your wife parks her Toyota Rav4, and therefore is really difficult and inconvenient to dig through.
I was at my parents house not that long ago, and spoiler alert: their shovel is still safe and sound in the garage. There is no hole in the ground behind my neighbor’s trampoline, both because, as I just said, i still don't have a shovel and because said trampoline has that net thing around it so I cannot fall off it and through the ground whenever I take a faulty bounce on the several occasions where I have snuck over his fence in order to jump on it. Long story short, I am doing nothing to ensure my own perseverance as a member of the human race, even though I know that I could if I really wanted to. I do not have the will to prepare. I do not have the will to survive. When the apocalypse hits, I am going to die. This will be a fitting conclusion to the story of my life. Whenever things go south, I have no one to blame but myself.
Now is not the time to change that. Now is the time to crack a beer and wait for it all to go down.
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