Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

Orig­i­nal fic­tion, essays,and poetry com­ing tomor­row or the next day; it's been a bit of a wreck around here last week and this. Had to make a quick trip back to my par­ents to visit my 95-year-old grandma, who is sadly liv­ing her last days in this world. Fif­teen hours in the car in 48 hours. Not fun, but had to be done. This woman made me sugar cook­ies spe­cial every Christ­mas for years and years, until her hands couldn't do it. Any­way. Don't get me started. I'll blubber.

It was nice to see my fam­ily, if only for a day, really. Break­fast with my sister's fam­ily, bon­fire at my niece's, light­ning bugs and coy­ote howls and s'mores, and best of all, a long trip down dirt roads late at night, deer in the head­lights and pos­sums in the road. It wasn't all bad.

Now for the topic at hand. I have been a sur­vival­ist of sorts in mind since about 1980. I never leave home with­out a knife and a means of mak­ing fire even now. My first aborted novel was a post-apocalyptic kind of thing. If I could build a bunker here in Revere to save my fam­ily from the end of civ­i­liza­tion, I would. I'm as prepped as I can be. I have the skills to sur­vive it. If it comes. So I laugh a lit­tle bit at the sur­bur­ban folks pan­ick­ing now. Like, have you paid atten­tion for the last forty years?

Thank god the red­necks will all prob­a­bly sur­vive.

SAN DIEGO — Six months ago, Jim Wise­man didn't even have a spare nutri­tion bar in his kitchen cabinet.

Now, the 54-year-old busi­ness­man and father of five has a backup gen­er­a­tor, a water fil­ter, a grain mill and a 4-foot-tall pile of emer­gency food tucked in his home in the expen­sive San Diego sub­urb of La Jolla.

Wise­man isn't alone. Emer­gency sup­ply retail­ers and mil­i­tary sur­plus stores nation­wide have seen busi­ness boom in the past few months as an increas­ing num­ber of Amer­i­cans spooked by the econ­omy rush to stock up on gear that was once the domain of hard­core survivalists.

These peo­ple snap­ping up every­thing from water purifi­ca­tion tablets to ther­mal blan­kets shat­ter the sur­vival­ist stereo­type: they are mostly urban pro­fes­sion­als with mort­gages, SUVs, solid jobs and a twinge of embar­rass­ment about their new­found hobby.

More here.

Or you can see lots of hor­ri­fy­ingly unnec­es­sary sur­vival crap all over the inter­nets. Here's a sample:

Bat­ten your hatches and watch Red Dawn and the Post­man again, peo­ple. Or read one of my favorite books, Wolf & Iron, by Gor­don Dick­son. It may come to this, folks. The good thing is, if it does, I'm likely to stop obsess­ing over edit­ing this fuck­ing novel.