*This is the kind of crazy island my mind vacations on when its avoiding thinking about homework.
A/N: And because listing is awesome.
With 2012 drawing closer to its final four months, it's dawned on me that in the case we are all to burn to a crisp or spontaneously combust or just left here to die when God comes to take everyone worthy to the land of eternal orgies and buffets--as the Mayans so helpfully predicted--, that I would not be prepared if and when I am left without shelter or all of my earthly belongings. While I've already resigned myself to sacrificing myself to the nearest hippopotamus in case the world comes to it's grisly end, I do have several concerns if I am taken off guard and happen to be one of those unlucky living assholes left standing in the middle of a wasteland like a douche, speechless with no items to my name, and the 'new world' is more of a living-off-the-land type thing where we have no choice but to live like our forefathers; the cave people once did.
Most of your minds would initially jump to the basic three survival needs: food, water, and shelter - how are we gonna provide for ourselves and live sustainably without Xanax, McDonald's, and Dental? While my primary concern is less for my safety, and more for certain vanities and necessities that would probably be the catalysts for my early demise in this post-apocalyptic world.
1. I wear contacts, and am self-diagnostically (now a word) on the cusp of blindness. In movies, yes, you gotta put one sucker with spectacles to keep it all realistic, but do you know what happens to the people who have poor vision and the unfortunate coincidence of being born half-bat? THEY DIE SOONER. Contacts would be obsolete! And your glasses are useless because you can't keep your glasses from falling off if you're hanging by a tree to avoid getting your face bitten off by a mountain lion (and that shit actually happens in this century), and if you lose them, then you become the liability that's walking around with your hands outstretched shouting because you can't see anything. I would become bait for the tigers unless I could put myself out of my misery. On the plus side, it would give everybody something to chew on for the next two weeks.
2. Hair. So I've often thought about what would become of my hair when the water supply is reduced to creaks and streams and my showers dwindle to once every so often because I'm a loin-cloth, fur-bra wearing Amazonian and we're too busy hunting for grub to bathe. And then I realized to avoid bugs turning my hair into their new habitat and having to use sticks to comb it and it getting dirty and matted, I would have cut it off in sort of a fro-do. Which of course, would not look stupid but rather bad ass in a 'I can handle my shit, watch me kill this tiger', kind of way. And also, on a more unpleasant note, body hair. Our western civilization is programmed to run on a clean-shaven, hairless denial that we do not grow hair on our bodies apart from what is on our heads, eyelashes, and eyebrows. In reality, shit's gonna get ugly. I'm talking arm bush, mustaches, unibrows, the works. It will probably take another century and a half for men to get used to this shock of hair growth and accept our gorilla-drag appearance as a natural state and not some Stephen King-National Geographic program from hell. As for me, I would probably have to be persuaded not to strangle myself with my own beard. I would make a new life among animals who have a higher percentage of body hair than me, and luxuriate in a non-judgmental environment, perhaps becoming their sacrificial lamb on Thanksgiving.
3. Sex. I've often wondered if living in a post-apocalyptic world (my mind creating a outrageous picture of a desecrated, arid, Planet of the Apes-esque landscape with blood-red skies and endless, rolling hills*) would mean we would throw our egos and propriety to the wind and just copulate left right and centre like the animals we are - abstinence be damned, we'd make up for lost time and just be the civilization of epic sluttery.
Or would living in such a perilous environment where we would be breaking our backs for our resources make us less likely to want to have sex? Who has time to shag? Shoot that buffalo! And there's that whole lack-of-privacy business. Who'd want to fuck behind the bush with your tribe snarfing down fish and berries within hearing distance? Not me.
*Somehow the remnants of our city have been covered by mass vegetation, just work with it
4. Best put down your sandwich for this one, but I've always been curious about what women in the ol' hunter/gatherer society did when they got their monthlies. For thousands of years, women had no Always or Tampax to hide the effects of their period in a cleanly and civilized manner - for Christ's sake, they didn't have garbage bins. Or underwear. Don't tell me that once a month, they'd be walking around in a blood-drenched loincloth because I may just toss my cookies. How did they disguise and dispose of...y'know, the mess? They should put that shit in the history books. Maybe women just spent a whole week submerged in water so that there would be no evidence of it. But in a society where ye Olde Tampax factory has been blown to smithereens, one of my primary concerns would be to figure out how to deal with my period. Something tells me that I'll be constructing a vag-barrier of leaves but then what does it sit on? There's no such thing as underwear, or even respectable clothing (assuming that the 'apocalypse' has destroyed all of our previous belongings, all of our factories, plants, and most disheartening, all Walmarts) so we'd obviously all be walking around either mostly or entirely naked. Unless we manage to procure furs for winter although I'm planning on hauling ass to the California tribe because I will not go through a Canadian winter without hot chocolate, space heaters, or winter apparel.
5. The most critical of modern amenities - not having this item will undoubtedly cause the demise of me and a good chunk of the rest of humanity so my concerns are perfectly legitimate, thank you. Without cell phones, I fear that most of our existences will be rendered entirely worthless and there will be a giant mass self-extermination from text withdrawal. The inability to contact each other through the press of a button will certainly cause major confusion. People having always relied on one's contact list will be confuzzled when faced with the difficult task of actually communicating with someone - people would be forgetting names, stumbling over half hearted attempts at small talk, and hermit-ing themselves in their wooden huts. Without any occupation for those quick fingers, people will construct huge towers of sticks and entertain themselves with Jenga: Jungle Style. Meanwhile, people will be walking around yammering into empty coconuts and over time, their brains will turn to mush due to lack of stimulation and we'll be a futuristic, post-apocalyptic humanity of jelly-brain zombies who enjoy ravenously tearing off pieces of raw buffalo with our teeth, throwing our living family members in blazing pyres in fucked-up mating rituals, and brawling amongst each other over the size of our huts, who gets to find the berries, and which women will be forced to 'service' the tribe leaders.
We'll be a bunch of blind, hairy, bloody, rage-filled, nimble barbarians. The wheel of evolution turning 180, people will regress to the maturity and intelligence of our animal ancestors. Yes, we'd be handling our shit, APE-STYLE.
Note: I'd like to be taken out in the hurricane/blast of energy/alien probe/sun explosion/mass evisceration that wipes out most of the planet. Just off me mid-text, please.
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