The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - February 2nd, 2008
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11:46 am
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The Sadness Of Being Me
A few months ago, we stockpiled a survival kit at La Casa McJuddmetz - stashed in our closet are two large, plastic tubs filled with a handful of canned foods, flashlights, dust masks, can openers, wrenches, a cheapie radio, and two large containers of water. It's not that I think that Cleveland is destined for terrorist attack, but rather that if the shit hits the fan I want to have something around. It's insurance, and a mild investment of $200 could pay off in a big way later.
Unfortunately, my wife is a bankruptcy lawyer, which means that she's in a growth industry. And there are periodic headlines in the New York Times about how Cleveland's housing market is collapsing faster than anywhere else in the nation.
 And so, after looking through an estate sale the other day, I am now looking at serious food. Like, a month's supply of dried food.
For example, take this kit containing a two-month supply for one person. (Or, in my case, a month for my wife and myself.) It weighs 110 pounds, but comes with all sorts of extras you wouldn't expect, like dried Chicken Fricassee, Taco Bits, Banana Pudding, and White Cream Sauce.
Then again, we have the thirty-day survival package, which is much less ambitious - there's a lot of cereal and pancakes in here, as well as no-fuckup-foods like Chicken Bouillon and Egg Powder. Ironically, I trust it more because it's less ambitious. Plus, it comes with a bottle of Aerobic Oxygen to treat the water you'll so desperately need, and some Saf-Instant yeast.
Or, if you have three thousand dollars to spare, you can get the Cadillac of food supplies - the Mountain House ULTIMATE Year Supply of foods, storable for up to thirty years (only $83.26 a year, or a measly $6.94 a month!). Look at that list! It'd be like you were living at the Overlook Hotel!
Still, none of those are complete solutions. You'll need a huge bottle of vitamins (which, fortunately, are already in our kit).
 Then I could go the military route, and get the one week supply of military MREs. Now, the U.S. Army doesn't fuck around, and the MRE has been well-tested, so I know that this works. Unlike the big cans of powdered/granulated food, I wouldn't have the nagging worry that maybe this would turn out to be completely unusable when the fan starts chopping feces. But at the same time, it's $135 for a week of supplies, which is getting pretty spendy compared to the $250 for a month's supplies that Big Cans o'Doom route gives.
Thing is, I know my paranoia is working overtime, but I can't get the idea of "complete government collapse" out of my mind. We're spending too much and doing stupid things to fix it, our whole economy is becoming reliant on producing services and not goods, and I worry that we're on the brink. But there's a part of me that's going, "If this was the 1950s, you'd be building a bomb shelter in your back yard, you putz." And it's true; if the government collapses and nobody's around to restock the Giant Eagle, having a month's supply of powdered food isn't really going to solve the problem.
Then a part of me goes, "But what if you had a year's supply?" And that's just getting crazy.
Plus, there's the other part of me that loved the freeze-dried ice cream I'd get at the NASA Visitors Center. It tasted like moldy, crystallized yogurt, but that wasn't the point - this foil-wrapped food stuff was invulnerable! You could stick it in a drawer for twenty years and still eat it! You could bring it into space! That was food technology, right up there with Tang, and we had created a food that defied the very elements. I'm reasonably sure that I might ask for the "case full o'forever food" as a birthday present, since it's something my wife could afford but I would never buy on my own.
There's still that child within me that wants to have a basement full of the invulnerable food. I want to see what the MRE-version of chicken tastes like, try the granulated Beef Stroganoff, sample the craptacular egg stuff. And keep the rest around for when the nuclear winter arrives, at which point I will be king.
Well, for a month. Then I'll be starving with the rest of you. And probably not even that, because we don't own a rifle. But hey, a man can dream.
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01:32 pm
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A Question For You: Rock, Paper, Cheating
I was engaging in a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors with my wife to see who would get to use the exercise equipment first. She had a long upswing. As she began her downswing, I waited a split-second to see if her hand would change shape. It began to spread out, and so I immediately used Scissors. Of course, it cut paper and I won.
Poll #1131935 Rock, Paper, Cheating
Open to: All, results viewable to: AllThis was...
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284 (61.1%)