Bookshelf Battle

When the zombies come for you, they’re not going to care if you aren’t ready for them. This isn’t the prom and these flesh chomping dirt bags aren’t going to park their butts on your sofa and make small talk with your mom while you put the finishing touches on your make-up in the bathroom.

They want your brains and they want them now.

Thus, in the event that it starts looking like your home is about to be overrun with more zombies than you can handle, then you need to be prepared to make a dash in a flash.

Or to put it more succinctly, you need to be ready to “bug out” of your pad and that’s where a bug-out bag comes in.

Only Pack the Essentials

Your baseball card collection. That trophy you got for coming in seventy-seventh place in a foot race with seventy six of your classmates. Your collection of potato chips that bear a striking resemblance to Phyllis Diller.

Be ready to leave all that and more behind, because if you aren’t ready to eat those Diller chips for sustenance, then they’re just bogging you down.

(Phyllis Diller, millenials? No? Crap. Who’s a crusty old funny broad today? I got it. Do you have a collection of potato chips that look like Lisa Lampanelli?  No? Too early 2000’s?  Ok.  Check it out. Do you have a collection of potato chips that look like Chelsea Handler? Yes. The millennials are nodding their heads. I can get out of this terrible joke and move on.)

The zombies are not going to give you a break because you need to grab a few things before you go. And they aren’t going to run slower to compensate for you carrying a bunch of crap that you don’t need.

Zombies are dumb animals who don’t understand concepts like fairness…or kindness…or hygiene.

So if you’re slowly struggling under the weight of bags filled with all the notebooks you used to write love letters to Harry Styles from One Direction, then I guarantee your brains are going to end up with zombie teethmarks in them.
Thus, you must fill your bag with a) life sustaining essentials and b) the sum total weight of which you can carry while you are running away from damn dirty zombies.
The great thing about diversity is that we all are, at the risk of sounding redundant, different. An item that can sustain my life may be of little to no use to you.

So only you know what you can or can’t get along with during the z-poc, but here are some suggestions:

Food and Water

We covered storing food and water a bit in the section on zombie proofing your home. Now we’re talking about packing it. You’ll definitely want a few store bought water bottles in your bag. Prepackaged foods will also be ideal. Granola bars. Some of that nutritional shake mix (something along the lines of Carnation Instant Breakfast, for example) might be good. Of course you’ll have to mix it with water. You won’t have any milk to mix in it unless you manage to kidnap a cow amidst the apocalyptic fallout, which if you do, go you. I applaud your resourcefulness.

Canned food will last awhile, not due to its nutritious value but because it is pumped full of more preservatives than the face of your favorite aging celebrity. Just remember too many cans and you’ll be weighed down. The slower your roll the more likely you’ll end up zombie poop (because a damn zombie will eat and digest you and yes, they do poop.)

Medicine

You’ll definitely want to bring your prescription drugs, though I can’t really recommend just leaving them in a random bag in your house. Drugs can be dangerous so you want to keep all that shit locked up in a safe location, far away from dumb little kids who explore the world by putting as much of it in their mouths as possible. (You parents who are constantly prying random, tiny pieces of floor junk out of your kids’ pie holes know what I’m talking about.)

Plus you want to keep your drugs out of the hands of untrustworthy adults, like your coke head brother-in-law, or your self-medicating hypochondriac buddy who jumps onto various health websites and diagnoses himself with a strange new tropical disease every time he sneezes.

In other words, your pharmaceuticals are for you, period. A medical doctor prescribed them to you based on his assessment of your condition and his judgment based on years of medical training.

So no, don’t leave drugs lying around your house in an unsecured bag. Keep drugs somewhere safe, secure, away from others but remember where you left them in case you need to grab them in a hurry when the zombies come.

As for over the counter stuff, these drugs can also be dangerous if you leave them just lying around in a bag.

Instead, maybe keep a mental list of what you’ll want to grab quickly when the zombies come a calling.

Do you want to bring your Nyquil in case you get a stuffy nose and/or a sore throat that keeps you from sleeping? Be my guest. However, keep in mind that the sleep you get from it will leave you less alert and more likely to become zombie chow.

Money

It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to leave a little bit of cash in your bug-out bag. During the first few weeks of the zombie apocalypse, people will retain their faith in the government’s ability to restore order. Thus, they’ll be willing to trade goods and services for cash, completely unaware that the president has already left us all for dead and is partying hearty in his underground bunker with a champaign flute in one hand and a buxom supermodel’s honkers in the other.

(Not gonna lie, world leaders will really be the only ones who totally make out like bandits during the zombie apocalypse, which is totally unfair, for as we will discuss later, if anyone is going to cause a zompoc, it’s going to be those asshats.)

How much money? The short answer is whatever you can afford to lose, because you’ll be keeping it in a random bag in your house and you just know that when the end times come and you need a hundred bucks to bribe a guard to let you through a gate that leads to safety, you’re going to reach into your bag and discover that one of your sticky fingered relatives already found it, swiped it and spent it on something stupid (candy, comic books, ticket to a Justin Bieber concert, take your pick.)
Lighter and/or Matches

From time to time, you’ll need to start a fire when you’re living in the wilderness. Maybe you’ll need to cook a squirrel you caught and never would have even eaten before but after months without fast food that furry little bastard is looking mighty good to you (and ironically, it will probably taste much like your favorite fast food chain’s burger.)

Some experts might tell you it is possible to make a fire using a flint stone, rubbing two sticks together, or by harnessing the power of the sun through a magnifying glass, but I’m not an expert on anything. I’m just a jackass with a magic bookshelf pulling random thoughts out of my butt.

At any rate, it probably isn’t very safe to leave flammable materials lying around in a bag in your house either, so…ok. Scratch this idea too.

First Aid Kit

This is a must have. Some bandages. Some gauze. Maybe educate yourself on how to treat a wound. I have no idea how to do that shit either so let me know if you do.

Weaponry

Ah, finally. The gun control debate that’s tearing our country apart finds its way into a Bookshelf Q. Battler book.

Folks, here in America, we have the right to bear arms. This right has been written into our constitution due to a rather abusive relationship we had with our pre-democracy ruler, the King of England.

I’m sorry but someone has to say it. King George was an epic douche. Always bossing us around and telling us what to do. Forcing us to house his damn redcoats. Taxing the shit out of our tea.

We don’t drink as much tea as we used to and today we have  taxed ourselves at rates that would make the Founding Fathers spin in their graves, but still. It’s the principal of the thing.

If we’re going to be required to take a portion of our hard earned moolah and feed it to the bureaucratic beast known as government, then we at least want a say in choosing via elections which public officials will fleece us and which song and dance routines we want to see as these officials promise they’ll do one thing with our money and then once elected, do something completely different with it. Pick the song and dance routine that complies with whichever preconceived notions you have about the world that will never occur because political types just do what they want in the end anyway.

Like an empowered woman who has escaped an abusive relationship but remains fearful her nasty ex might break down the door at any time, we Americans still sleep with one eye open, frightened that the King of England will either come back for us, or a new, scary form of government will rear its ugly head and make us yearn for the good old days with the King.

Thus, Americans are understandably hanging onto this right. And aside from concerns about hypothetical tyranny, there’s always people who are rightfully afraid of crime, street gangs, terrorists, and assorted perverts.

Personally, I don’t own a gun. I could tell you that it is because I am trained in a variety of martial arts, from Kung-Fu and Krav Maga to Nerd-Fu and Obla Dee Ma Da.

But frankly, the real reason I don’t own a gun is because I did a mental calculation of the pros and cons of gun ownership versus potential risks posed to me and determined that due to my general incompetence and stupidity, the likelihood of me accidentally shooting myself or someone I care about was high whereas the likelihood of me needing to protect myself or someone I care about from a mob of violent weirdoes was low.

I’m in a weird place on gun control. I don’t want a gun. I don’t want to blow a deer’s brains out or anything. But I don’t necessarily want to see the right to own a firearm go away. After all, every time we surrender a right, the government grows that much stronger, and though the government we have today seems reasonable, who knows what it might morph into tomorrow.

On the other hand, we do have a problem with mass shootings and other gun related crimes. I don’t have the statistics but generally speaking, I don’t recall there ever being as many instances of mass shootings when I was a young lad in the 1990’s as there are today.

We were better at handling our depression in the 1990s. We’d pop on some alternative rock. A moody as hell bearded dude dressed up like a lumberjack in his best flannel would sing a depressing song. All of us young folk would sort of half-dance by swaying a few inches to the left then a few inches to the right with our heads down. We essentially handled our depression by going out of our way to let everyone know that we were depressed all the time.

Today’s kids are different. Parents and teachers and shrinks and everyone pumps kids full of so much happy good time, sparkly sunshine, special snowflake, get a participation ribbon just for showing up bullshit that when they become adults and meet up with someone telling them no for the first time, they grab a heater and go berserk.

And yes, I do realize its not only the millenials losing their shit. Old people have engaged in mass shootings. Middle-aged people have as well.

So I do understand why many people today are throwing their hands up, declaring society as a whole can’t be trusted with individual gun ownership, and demanding that the right to bear arms be thrown in the trash.

I’ll have to paraphrase the late great Ronald Reagan here. He once said that “the closest thing to eternal life on Earth is a government program.”

I’d go a step further and say that the closest thing to eternal life is a right. Once the government says you can do something, it becomes difficult and practically impossible for that right to be taken away.

I don’t know what the answer to the gun debate is. A long held government right vs. too many people getting blown away by wackos. I’m just a mild mannered humorist so I can’t tell you how to resolve this debate, but I hope the various and sundry folks at the helm of our national ship figure out a way.

Did I have a point with all this? Oh right. So honestly, I am not going to tell you to go out and get a gun or a knife or some other kind of weapon to prepare for an apocalypse of any kind, be it a zombie apocalypse or an apocalypse generated by some other type of disaster.

The odds that you’ll shoot or stab yourself, or someone else, maybe even someone you love are high whereas the likelihood of you needing a gun or a knife or another weapon to fight zombies are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. Shit, that’s a lot of zeroes, but that’s also how unlikely zombies will ever become anything more than make-believe.

Should you feel dumb for buying this book then? Probably, but it’s too late. I have already spent the money you shelled out for it on a delicious wings and skins sampler.

Burp. Excuse me.

If you are already a gun and/or knife or other type of weapon owner, I hope you’re exercising your right to bear arms cautiously. If you are, then surely you know it is a dumb idea to keep guns, knives and other weapons lying around in a bag in your house. You must, must, must keep all weapons locked up in a safe, secure location, and there is plenty of information out there on how to do that.

Bottomline

Hmmm. So I have determined it is a bad idea to leave weapons, fire starting implements, and medicine in a bag that’s just lying around your house. Perhaps this section was a waste of time.

Or maybe it wasn’t. You can still pack a bag filled with bottles of water, nonperishable packaged food, and as much cash as you can afford to lose. In the unlikely event that the zombies come, you can at least grab your food/water/money bag and run like hell.

During the first few weeks of post-apocalyptic survival, you’ll be able to survive off of the food and water you bring, and you perhaps could even trade some of your food and water with other survivors for goods and services.

Your money won’t be there because you always knew your buddy Doug was a dirty, dirty thief.

Up your nose with a rubber hose, Doug. You know you spent my zombie apocalypse money on hookers and blow. #WorstBuddyEver