By Dana Jerman

“The end of the world is on people’s minds. We have the power to destroy or save ourselves, but the question is what do you DO with that responsibility.” —Nicolas Cage

For the life of me, I cannot get the go-bag together. You know, the emergency kit.

From time to time, you’ve seen those lists of what to pack on random flyers/pamphlets. Closest thing I’ve got going is a really solid air-travel toiletry kit.

And the emergency plan— Oh Christ, the plan. That’s another matter entirely. Perhaps you, too, have thought about this, and maybe even done something about it.

This shouldn’t be so hard. So why does it feel that way? Indecision, natch.

Perhaps it’s the untrustworthiness and inadequacy of any inventory I would take. That I would dip into the bag for something I might need, and then never replace it. Or the notion that it would take up space in my apartment no matter where I decide to keep it, and there’s no guarantee that in a true emergency I would be able to get to it.

Carrying something, anything heavy out of a burning building, say, that isn’t my husband, or my neighbor, or their girlfriend, or both, or some yet-undetermined highly sentimental artifact or heirloom, has minimal appeal. You’re laughing right now and so am I.

Really? if I’m honest with myself—an heirloom? For fuck’s sake, I would only look at the thing later on, whatever it may be—all singed around the edges, probs—and be reminded of catastrophe. Just a thing in a past life that ties me down to feelings of loss.

Surely also, how heavy can a first aid kit be? Should I not be able to have such a simple thing on my person at all times?

Already I schlep about, day to day, so many everyday objects in a messenger bag out of mindful but mostly manufactured necessity. So again, natch, nearly every day I think about what happens when/if I’m forced to live out of that bag exclusively.

When considering this, the true usefulness of cash as an object also becomes anti-food for introspective thoughts.

Okay, here’s the gear I’ll give myself the chance to amass instead: items with an interactive creative existence in mind. Tools for the voyage by choice, not via outside fear-driven circumstance.

There will be no basement or manhole-covered shelter overfilled with canned soup and bottled drinking water. No macaroni-shaped lightbulb cache and heavy steel petrol heater that doubles as stove.

Altho’ there probably will be a well-sharpened machete and a hand crank solar-powered radio! And as many pens as I can possibly find, along with a lot of scavenged paper.

In the vein of doomsday prepping, there seems to be a negative connotation within the act of hoarding resources for the sake of survival. Basic survival only. Survival’s simple gesture of power and potential is not to be underestimated, but screw all that!

I want cultivation. A chance to thrive, exhilarated! And a place to do so- bunker-less and wild and hyperactive with horizonless possibility!

I’ll make sure I have a healthy lavender garden somewhere, or a window box teeming with things that help abate radiation sickness. Nearby will be the labyrinth piled round with magic stones. I’ll build a bo…

Holy hot shit. I know. I figured it out. I’ll be an Odyssey Prepper.

Check it out—an Odyssey Prepper will repurpose random objects into new tools. Improvisation will be the rule. Perhaps it’s a bit of a steam-punk fantasy, but the Odyssey Prepper will be spending lots of time near water or in it- swimming as a mode of transportation.

You know: “You take your car to work, i’ll take my board…” Right?

There has to be enough room in the boat for my friends, new and old, who have survived some epic end-of-times ordeal. “Friends” are anyone who can/wants to work…

But so help me in the accident that betides a general misfortune will I not be able to say: get thee behind me, procrastination? It’s now! Now more than ever before it’s time for sit-ups and push-ups and getting off of my flat ass for kung-fu and self-defense class because, as an Odyssey Prepper, one must be in shape to heave the rope ladder from the tree-house. To hoist the sail for the mast of the ship. And we’ll all have to figure out how to be doctors, scientists, carpenters and navigators while soaking wet.

Ah… but the weak, self-involved flesh dances and delights only in these wistful imaginings from its comfortable spot. Healthy and whole, it pauses to close the eyes, in the middle of a good book. At rest and seated in the sunbeam at the window. Gravid with anti-will and idealism.

How easily even the driven-to-dream Odyssey Prepper becomes paralyzed by the myriad comprehensive depths of MacGyver-esque preparedness choices. The Platonic mind frozen in delicious deliberation of future liberation.

It’s not hopeless. I could re-think all of this.

I could do something, nothing, anything. Do, and do not.

Come to think of it- the end-of-the-world is also pretty lazy getting around to itself.

Time, as we know it, really is on our side.

Which turns out to be a good thing.

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.” —Richard Bach