Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down( A Survival Guide to the Apocalypse)

by Griffin, Forrest

  3. When in doubt, do what Ted Nugent would do. You can start this pre-apocalypse.

  How did this happen? Well, a lot of it had to do with the digital age. Due to all the technological advances, men have forgotten how to hunt women. Instead of chasing women in bars, they pick them up on the Internet, send text messages, and, when all their electronic attempts to get laid fail, they look at Internet porn. The day the great chase became skewed, the lion inside of men died. I know what you are thinking, “Forrest, I still hunt women, it is just a different kind of hunt.” No, you are wrong. Typing into a search engine is not hunting, and I don’t care if you spend two hours a day on the MILF Hunter website. We have been coddled by technology, and as a result, we have lost the manliness that our fathers earned at a young age.

  Men have gotten lazy—plain and simple. Blue-collar workers have always been a little lackadaisical, but now even construction workers have gone soft. Sure, they might be able to lay tile, but they don’t know how to lay brick. Sure, they might be able to construct a wall, but they don’t know how to fix a water heater. Back in the day, the men who worked with their hands knew how to do everything.

  If you fall into this sackless category, don’t beat yourself up too bad—you’re not alone. I do not work on my car or fix shit after I break it. I am not out there doing ultra-manly things, like vandalism. Just like you, I seek out help when something goes wrong. Most guys call their fathers when shit suddenly stops working, but not having one of them, I call my mother. Yes, my mother is manlier than me. Back when I was a kid, she did all the traditional guy stuff. She went out and worked all day, and then came home and repaired anything that had broken around the house during her absence.

  With that shit all taken care of, I assumed the traditional woman’s role. In other words, I cooked and cleaned. I probably would have learned how to do all the hard stuff when I struck out on my own, but there was no need to tinker in front of the water heater for nineteen hours, trying to figure out the gizmos inside. If my mom couldn’t give me step-by-step instructions over the phone, I could find the answers on the Internet. And if those answers were too complicated, I could use the Internet to find someone to interpret those instructions or simply come out and do the repairs himself.

  However, technology is not entirely to blame. There are two other factors contributing to our lack of manliness—the hormones in our meats and women. Yes, I said it, women are to blame for the downward spiral of man, but not for the reasons you might think. Becoming more independent, women have stopped wanting as many kids, and so a large percentage of our female population takes birth control pills, which are chock-full of estrogen. Well, that estrogen doesn’t just disappear. With every flush, it gets put back into our water supply, which in turn finds its way into every man on the planet. Did you know that when it rains, you are actually being doused with estrogen? I know this might seem like a cheap way out, but all that womanly DNA (I know estrogen is probably not DNA, but not having the slightest clue what estrogen actually is, that is what I have decided to call it) has got to be having some negative side effects, am I right?

  I know the lack of manliness in our society might not seem like that much of a problem now, but it is getting worse every year. We have to think about future generations. When all fathers are just as dumb as their kids, nothing will ever get accomplished. I mean, when fathers come home from an eight-hour workday and start playing video games and surfing on the computer instead of fixing the washing machine, the entire foundation our society is built upon will begin to crumble.

  If you are as worried as I am and want to attempt to fix the problem, do not run out and try to sleep with fifty women. Again, manliness is not about the number of women you can bed. If you truly want to become manly for the sake of the next generation, you should start by going out and getting a manly job. What is a manly job? Well, any type of work that endangers your health is a good place to start.

  The manliest job I ever had was working on a road crew. We would uncover these massive septic tanks, and being the new guy, I would have to go down in there to remove any of the debris that had fallen into it. So I would head down into the shit pit in a pair of boots and waders, shovel rocks and raw sewage into a metal bucket, and then someone up top would pull the bucket up. Of course, rocks and human feces would fall out of the bucket and rain on my head, which was the part that made the job manly. The first time I crawled out of the pit, a fellow worker named off thirty diseases I could contract from this type of work, the most permanent one being hepatitis. So, yeah, I kinda of have a hint of what it is like to be a real man.

  If you get a dangerous job and still feel somewhat unmanly, I have included a list of things you can do to make your balls drop further.

  1. Marry a destitute woman that has a lot of children you have to take care of.

  2. Do anything wilderness oriented—hunting, fishing, wildernessing. But I don’t want to see you out there looking at your phone or GPS system. Get a compass, camp, and learn how to navigate by the stars.

  3. Learn how to fix your vehicle. This is perhaps the most frustrating thing on earth, which in turn will add large amounts of manliness points. Personally, I learned how to fix a car in the most manly situation possible—on the side of an active freeway, with semis damn near killing me.

  4. Grow a beard. If you are like me and your Irish curse prevents you from growing a beard, get some wicked back hair.

  5. Wear boots . . . for a purpose. If you wear steel-toed boots, you better get a job where heavy shit frequently falls on your feet.

  6. Eat meat you cooked and caught yourself. Don’t be a pussy by shooting a deer and bringing it to a processing plant. Clean that shit yourself.

  7. Get a gun. However, if you get a gun and don’t learn how to use it, you lose manliness points.

  8. Wear slippers around the house and possibly even a smoking jacket. I know, doesn’t seem too manly, but it is.

  9. Wake up early. I’m talking before 5 a.m.

  10. Milk things. If that “thing” is your girlfriend or wife, you get extra points.

  11. Sports are relatively manly. I mean, the little bit of manliness I have, I learned from football coaches.

  Now, I know a lot of you are probably pretty disturbed right now and want to correct your lack of manliness. Some of you will take my advice above, but others will undoubtedly think that taking directions is the unmanliest thing of all, and attempt to strike out on this mission alone. To prevent you from steering in the completely wrong direction, I have included a list of things that you might feel are manly but are actually very unmanly. I only do this because I care.

  1. Beating your woman is not manly. When angry with your old lady, the manliest thing you can do is step out for a pack of smokes and then never show back up. That is what my dad did.

  2. As I already stated, getting tattoos is not manly. Unless, of course, you are a sailor or legit biker.

  3. Muscles are not manly. Don’t be a pony show, as my old boss used to say.

  4. Do not wear jewelry. I know pirates used to wear earrings, but they did that for a reason. They had no home, no family, and lived on a ship with a bunch of thieves. Their two gold earrings were to pay for their burial when they died in battle. Whoever stumbled upon their battle-torn corpse would use one gold earring to pay for their burial, and then keep the other for themselves. Unless you plan on dying in battle, do not wear earrings.

  FORTUNE COOKIE WISDOM

  Manliness isn’t like on the show Mad Men—that is a re-creation of what we think it would have been like. The manliest thing we have going today are Old Spice commercials, which I actually think might hold the key to regaining our manliness. That’s right, commercials are the best shot we have at regaining our manliness. Yeah, we’re fucked.

  I know all of this might seem like a lot of work, but for the sake of those who will follow us, please make your best effort to become a real man. And don’t set aside time for it like you do for the
gym—you have to make manly things a way of life. Start a local petition in your area to outlaw estrogen pills. Of course, a large part of the estrogen we ingest could be eliminated by eating organic, but altering yourself in such a manner isn’t very manly, so stick with the petition and contacting your congressman. I feel if all of us men band together, we might have a chance of getting estrogen eradicated from our water supply. Unfortunately, that will probably mean a lot more kids running around, but taking care of kids is pretty fucking manly . . . So long as you actually take care of them.

  BOB’S USED CAR LOT OF THE APOCALYPSE

  You don’t need to read this section if you followed my instructions and built a Vehicle of Death, but I realize that shit happens. If you’re a woman, you most likely stood in front of the car that you planned to convert for a long time, confused by all the parts under the hood. Eventually you started crying, kicked the bumper in anger, and then cried even harder because you hurt your foot. A few minutes later, you went inside and ate a box of bon bons16, never again to visit your little pet project. If you are a man, you most likely used the project as an excuse to get away from the missus. Although you spent approximately nineteen hours a day in the garage, you never actually worked on the damn thing because you were too busy drinking beer, looking at porn, and telling your buddies who came over how cool your Vehicle of Death would be when it was finished.

  In either case, you don’t have a monster of a ride to plow through all the mayhem that’s choking the streets. All you have is your family sedan, and under the current conditions, that won’t get you out of your neighborhood. Of course, I told you to have a backup escape route, one you could negotiate on foot, but if you were too lazy or teary-eyed to work on the Vehicle of Death, you probably never got around to doing this either. So you are in a bit of a pickle, but luckily Uncle Forrest is here to bail you out . . . Again.

  Below, I offer instructions on how to hot-wire a car, but since we’re not at the apocalypse yet, keep in mind that hotwiring cars is still illegal. I’m not suggesting that you go out and do this now. But once the shit hits, all bets are off and you’ll do what you need to. Before I get into the actual act of hot-wiring, though, I feel it is important to talk a little bit about the type of vehicle you want to commandeer. The most important thing to remember is that shortly after the apocalypse happens, survivors are going to go gas crazy. Gun battles will break out at every gas station in America, and the winners will most likely suck the pumps dry. So whatever car you commandeer, it is important that it has enough gas in the tank to get you where you are going. If you chose a safe zone several hundred miles away, you will want to stick with vehicles that run off diesel. With the majority of cars running off regular gasoline, diesel will be a lot more available, especially when all the truckers fall asleep due to the lack of meth. And if you can’t find any diesel at gas stations or the pumps have stopped working, you can always siphon from the generators in machine shops.

  VEHICLES YOU SHOULD COMMANDEER

  1. SEMIS: Whether or not to commandeer (notice how we said “commandeer” and not “steal”) a semi requires careful consideration. If you know exactly where you are going and want to haul a ton of shit needed to survive for the long term, it’s obviously a good choice. Once you have the semi, all you have to do is back up to the loading ramp at Costco and begin stocking up on the Cheetos and diapers. Just make sure that you steal a cool big rig, like the one with the clown face from Maximum Overdrive. (Seriously, I better not see you driving around a basic, piece of shit International.)

  However, a semi is not something you want to be cruising around in, looking for a place to set up shop. They are not very fast, so outrunning marauders is usually out of the question unless the truck that you pick happens to be Optimus Prime, in which case you have to worry about having Shia LaBeouf around and that will pretty much suck.

  Despite what they show in the movies, semis really aren’t that great at smashing through blockades, either. Big rigs have their cooling systems in the front of the truck, so if you ram something with it, don’t be surprised to break down on the side of the road a few minutes later. I know what you are thinking, “But what about Mad Max, he rammed all sorts of shit.” Yes he did, but if it were real life instead of fiction, a few minutes later, the pursuing gang of gay motorcyclists would pull him from his ride and ram him in a ditch in the desert.

  Another weakness of big rigs is their tires. Although they have a lot of them, they are large and easy to shoot by people in pursuing vehicles. If you’ve ever watched an episode of COPS, you know that most vehicles can drive just fine with one of their tires blown out. Not the same can be said for semis, due to their length. Lose a couple of back tires and you’ll go careening all over the road, lose control, crash into a ditch, and then . . . well, you know what happens then. To top all of this off, semis are a fucking bitch to drive because they have 20,000 gears.

  2. SCHOOL BUSES: School buses are better than either semis or RVs if you are traveling with a group of people because they have a ton of windows to shoot out of. If you don’t have guns or are running low on ammunition, you can simply throw things out the window, including the more annoying members of your crew. I mean, that would get pretty much anyone to stop chasing you, am I right? Just picture it. You are chasing a yellow school bus packed with helpless survivors, eager to claim your spoils. Suddenly they begin chucking old people and whiny teenagers out of the bus windows. Would you still chase them? I sure as hell wouldn’t. (I bet you’re starting to see why I landed this book deal. I have all sorts of useful wisdom to impart.) In addition to having more windows, school buses are also a lot easier to modify than either a semi or an RV. You can deck it out with barbed wire, skulls, and all sorts of other menacing-looking ornaments. And with a bright orange bus, you will never have any difficulty spotting your ride in a crowded parking lot. The downside is that school buses suck gas big-time and tend to have governors installed to prevent angry bus drivers from doing a hundred and ten on the freeway and producing one of those gruesome scenes from the driver’s ed video, Red Asphalt. If you chose to commandeer one, I suggest loading the back with multiple barrels of petrol and removing the governor from the engine.

  3. TRUCKS: If you do not have people or a ton of shit to haul, a truck is an excellent choice. They get decent gas mileage, do well off-road, and if you install a snowplow or steel grille on the front, they are decent for ramming shit. However, there are a couple of things you must do to make a pickup a safe traveling vehicle. First, store several guns and some ammunition in the cab. Second, knock out the back window and store backup ammunition at the front of the bed. Remember, if you have ammunition, you never want it to be too far away from it. Third, properly tie shit down in the back. Although it is the apocalypse, you’re still in America. If you want to pack a mountain of shit in the back of your truck and then tie it down with dental floss, move to a third-world country. Lastly, always bring a pet monkey so that he can drive the car while you shoot out the window at pursuers. It is also possible for you to drive and the monkey to shoot, but I have discovered that monkeys have lousy aim. Quite possibly the monkey will shoot you.

  4. HUMMERS: Despite all the negative shit I said about these gaudy, overpriced vehicles and their owners in my last book, a Hummer is actually a good vehicle to commandeer during the apocalypse for obvious reasons. They are roomy, rugged, have massive gas tanks, and do exceptionally well off-road. However, if you steal a Hummer with the three-piece rims that Snoop Dog talks about when he raps, you have made a huge mistake.

  VEHICLES NOT TO COMMANDEER

  1. TRACTORS: Although tractors are super cool because they allow you to destroy all kinds of things such as scoreboards, barns, and other vehicles, they are not very practical. They burn a shit load of gas and top out at just a few miles an hour. Unless you are looking to dig a pit of death for people to fall into, avoid hot-wiring heavy machinery.

  2. SPORTS CARS: While it might seem like a good ide
a to commandeer a sports car because they can go super fast, you don’t have to be Einstein to figure out why they are a terrible postapocalyptic vehicle. First off, it is difficult to fit two big bodies into one of these sleek pieces of machinery, let alone all the extra shit you would want if you go through the effort of obtaining a vehicle. There is no room for an extra gas tank, your various weapons, or a stockpile of ammunition. In addition to this, having the ability to maneuver through various types of rugged terrain will be much more important than speed. With abandoned vehicles and bodies littering the streets, as well as all the damage to the pavement caused by the thousands of accidents that occurred as people attempted to flee, having a low-clearance vehicle is just about the stupidest thing you could choose. I know why a sports car jumped into your mind in the first place: you want to look cool. Well, a sports car will not make you look cool.17 If you were a douche bag before you climbed into a sports car, you will still be a douche bag once you’re behind the wheel. However, if you absolutely insist on commandeering a sports car, stick with American-made vehicles. They have more clearance, more torque, larger tanks, bigger trunks, and handle much better off-road. (Just remember, you’re still a douche bag.)

  3. ELECTRIC CARS: Do I really need to explain this one?

  BE FAST, BE FURIOUS