Surviving (annoying v. apocalypse)
Two fun things I’ve read lately are Survive the Tyrant! and the CIA’s guide for citizen sabotage of fascist regimes, which are spiritually related but quite different in practice. Remember the resistance in 2017, and how we did a very bad job of all that? Right. Anyway, we’re not here to talk about the resistance or how many Tesla tires you’ll be slashing, but instead we’ll talk about what to do.
Nobody knows what to do. I certainly don’t know what to do. But I also know that both sides of my family have been here before, and I have enough resources to do a little. So I did what should probably not be terribly useful in as climate-resistant of a place as Chicago, and I built a go bag and bought a backup battery with a solar panel. Why not! Felt like a fun project. You only really have to do it once, and then it’s there, just hanging out in case. Pretty much everything in a go bag is a durable object. I could fill it with granola bars, I guess? Some people do that. I don’t care enough. I’ll probably have enough advance notice to scrounge for food. Anyway.
Because I’m a normal person, I spent four months researching the duffel bag, and I settled on the thing the literal Finnish military uses, which is both shockingly cheap and so overbuilt that it will outlast multiple generations. Then I went to prepper reddit, filed everything in their lists into either “reasonable” or “unreasonable” buckets, and bought everything in the reasonable bucket. Was maybe a hundo? First aid kits are cheap, y’all.
Battery was harder. They’re all on deep discount and I have no idea why. (Applying a $500 discount code on a $900 product was a vibe.) They all look the same, reviews are scant. But batteries are probably about to get a lot more expensive, and so.
There is also the rack. I lift, and normally in order to do that I go to my friend’s garage, where he built a squat rack during the Bad Times® and gave me a door opener. These days, commuting is a risk both in terms of drivers trying to kill me and multiple ongoing pandemics trying to, uh, also kill me. So I have bit it and am starting to build a rack of my own. This will save commute times and likely end up with multiple workouts.
Finally, I went through my phone book, deleted 80% of my contacts, and turned off notifications for unknown numbers. So far this has been an issue precisely once, because I am boring and unpopular in a widespread, profound sense.
And that’s it. Those are all of the moves I did. A little disappointing that most of it involved buying stuff, but the rack was long overdue.
I never feel great buying anything even in the best of times, and I don’t feel great doing any of this. What if the battery never gets used? What if the go bag never gets used? You kind of hope that neither get used, but we all know roughly what’s coming to some degree, and so therefore the objects.
Take care of yourselves, take care of your community. Think about what’s in front of you, and what you can do to water the systems & structures that give us life. And then, in case things get real, at least you have a battery.