bevedog

I’m sure you all remember when the grocery stores looked like this in March.

At that point I was already concerned about the civic unrest that I thought would be coming in November, not knowing that the police murder of George Floyd would spark protests and police riots all summer. But once it was possible to shop again, I started doing a bit of “prepping.”

I first just started preparing for another wave of COVID-19, much like what we appear to be experiencing now. I bought Costco-sized bundles of toilet paper, paper towels, and Kleenax. I made sure we had meat in the freezer, actually labeled with the month and year it went in the freezer to avoid the “do you even know what this is?” kind of conversation when pulling out something that appears to have been fresh back in the Bush administration.

I bought shelf-stable foods, first buying extras of stuff we already eat (rice, beans, crackers, peanut butter) then adding proteins we don’t normally eat like canned salmon (tried that & it’s good!) and canned chicken (still afraid to try that). Shanon says she’s unlikely to eat the Chef Boyardee ravioli because it tastes like “neglect.”

All that is probably wise and good, but I confess that I went a little further. I started reading guides for prepping like The Prepared website and this very bourgeois (but helpful) Wirecutter article. My Amazon wishlist became populated with multiple knives and outdoor equipment and books with titles like When the Grid Goes Down: Disaster Preparations and Survival Gear For Making Your Home Self-Reliant. This spooked my mom a little (“another knife?”).

Even so, most of what I have assembled is defensible (he said, defensively). A first aid kit for the house and one for the car is a good idea. The weather radio (with hand crank and solar recharging) may come in handy some day and is, if nothing else, a radio. If we can ever travel again the phone recharger and the bugout backpack I bought should be useful. I suppose we should be grateful if we never eat that freeze-dried food. The water filtration and purifying stuff was at least inexpensive?

While in the full heat of all this, I asked a person at my work if they’d done any prepping. I was surprised to immediately get tips on buying a generator and gas masks. Others I talked to at the very least were buying canned food or MREs.

One thing I haven’t bought is a gun. I’ve gone fifty years without ever holding a loaded weapon, so it seems a little late to start. Plus a household with two adults on anti-depressants and two teenage boys isn’t really the best place to stash a shotgun. But I did think about it. Robert Evans’ podcast It Could Happen Here (which I highly recommend) has me worried that the USA will be the next Syria and I’d like to be able to defend myself against fascists and Christian Identity insurgents.

I guess most “preppers” who fetishize weapons envision using them against fellow citizens who come to get their supplies. I haven’t thought that way both because I don’t think I’ll have enough supplies for any horde to come steal, and because I know that if the SHTF my family and I are unlikely to do well on our own. As I started prepping I also started trying to create a small mutual aid/affinity group with people I trust in Colorado Springs. So far we have mostly picked up stuff from Costco for each other, but I wanted us to get in the habit of asking for and giving help to each other in that way.

It’s also interesting to peek into the prepper culture a little bit. I haven’t gone seeking out the truly extreme groups, though I have enjoyed @NeolithicSheep’s Doomsday Preppers recaps recently. But mostly what I have seen is a much more common-sense approach to prepping for disasters based on understanding what you are preparing for and then tailoring what you do to a somewhat-likely reality. I particularly enjoyed in /r/preppers when someone asked about prepping a car to bust through post-election rioters and the top comments were, “If you have a place to go to, why not go there before the election so you won’t have to drive through riots?” and “What is more likely: your city has potentially the biggest riot of all time or someone sees you vehicle full of all of you valuables and decides to try and steal them?”

The biggest pitfall for me is prepping as consumerism/materialism. In one of those Doomsday Prepper threads, @NeolithicSheep says:

This prepping as retail therapy is certainly a pitfall for me. As is often the case “buying something” often feels like “doing something,” and it seldom actually is.

Watching

Akira (1988) animated film by Katsuhiro Otomo streaming in both subtitled and dubbed version on Hulu.

I first watched this in the 1990s and enjoyed it then, but I think I appreciated the animation and pacing more this time around. Most of Akira is a science fiction action film but the body horror parts are inventive, grotesque, and memorable.

The Queen’s Gambit (2020) miniseries on Netflix.

Ultimately this is a pretty conventional Hollywood escapist entertainment (Rocky but chess girl on drugs?) but (like Rocky) it’s so well done that’s it’s very much worth watching. Anya Taylor-Joy is not only incredibly beautiful but also a very talented actress (she’s also great in The Witch and Thoroughbreds). I found myself thinking about what I know of competitive Magic: The Gathering while watching the chess players travel to tournaments where they never leave the hotels; where the only people who understand their drive are their similarly-obsessed rivals; and where the difference between being one of the best and the absolute best involves huge sacrifices of one’s life in a pursuit that might not pay off. And then there’s the 1960s costumes and set dressing, which are like characters themselves.

Listening

Songs for Pierre Chuvin (2020) The Mountain Goats

My pick for the album of the pandemic, Songs for Pierre Chuvin is the album John Darnielle (dba The Mountain Goats) recorded on his trusty/legendary Panasonic boom box when the band’s tour fell apart in March. You can read his notes on how it came together but as far as I’m concerned, the sound of one guy singing and playing into an ancient tape recorder songs about the clash of pagan and early Christian civilizations is just what we need in 2020. “Hail the Panasonic! Hail the inscrutable engines of chance! Hail Cybele! “