Throughout the years, the trucking industry has classically attracted an independent type of personality. I’m not sure if it’s an independent personality finding a job that is suitable, or a job creating an independent personality. Whatever the cause, we’ve met a lot of people who have the same goals for the future we do, and they don’t include getting rich owning a truck.
(I nearly choked on my Cheerios writing that, snort and honk. As if.)
Anyway, we never set out to get rich, we set out to make enough money to be able to have some land and a cabin or trailer, or whatever is comfortable and safe to live in, and enough room to disappear. Or at least withdraw a little. When I say, “One day, Ima walk off into the woods, and y’all ain’t gonna see me no more,” I don’t mean I plan on doing an Ol’ Yeller on myself, it means we’ve got a hidey-hole and we’re hitting it.
George has always been kind of a prepper, but the first rule of prepping is never discuss prepping, so we don’t talk about it. He sends me cryptic messages every now and again, but I can neither confirm nor deny their content. Mostly because I don’t have a decoder ring. I may be behind on intel.
So good, you’ll wish it was Soylent Green!I do have an interest and a willingness to help us get ready to survive the apocalypse, although each episode of “The Walking Dead” I watch makes me wonder just why in the hell I’d want to. I mean, seriously, I chafe after not having a shower for 24 hours, I’m pretty sure my skin would suffer if I got as dirty as some of those non-zombies look.
I digress.
In my willingness to prepare us, I became fixated on a recipe for pemmican. Pemmican is basically dried meat dust, mashed together with fat and dried fruit. It kind of resembles what the ground-up shavings from a very colon healthy hamster’s cage would look like if you put enough bacon fat in it to make it stick together good. Yummy. It has a shelf life of 50 years because nothing will actually eat it more than once. I kid. It apparently kept a lot of people alive back in the old days, before McDonald’s.
Anyway, I made pemmican and I discovered I probably have less of a will to live than I originally thought. I’m also not sure George will survive if he has to rely on my pemmican, and that’s not a metaphor for anything. It’s the truth.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s pemmican. Super food of the Native Americans. Lasts forever and an ounce a day will keep you alive indefinitely. It’s what we’re going to live on when we disappear into the woods.”
“Babe, we’re not leaving the planet. We’ll still go to Kroger to stock up once in a while.”
“Eat some.”
“I’m not hungry enough to eat that.”
“I’m going to eat some.”
“You ate dog food once.”
“That was an accident.”
“You said it was good.”
“I said it tasted like Play-Dough. That’s not good.”
“It’s not bad.”
Instead of arguing with him about the properties and palate of Play-Dough, I took a big, healthy, life sustaining bite of pemmican, and immediately discovered that I’m not ready for the apocalypse. I gagged down the soggy, greasy meat paste, and decided that I would make other plans for the future that didn’t include pemmican. As a matter of fact, if pemmican is the future, I’d rather walk towards the light, thankyouverymuch.
