Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down( A Survival Guide to the Apocalypse)

by Griffin, Forrest

  Sounds pretty terrible, doesn’t it? The good news is that smallpox was declared “eradicated” in 1979. The bad news is that the virus had become so rare, we widely discontinued the vaccine around 1970, making all the people born after that date extremely susceptible to the infection. This wasn’t considered a big deal because the nasty little fucker had been exterminated. I guess at the time no one thought that there could be a group so hateful they would pour resources into bringing it back from the dead. If the USSR’s former stash found its way into the hands of a group that hated Americans, and this group somehow found a way to release it into the population, it could wipe out a large portion of our country. Smallpox only kills around 30 percent of the people who get infected with it, but when you are talking about nearly 300 million people scampering around the land of the free, that is a lot of graves you will have to dig.

  What is disturbing is that there have been other strains of the “pox” virus discovered in the wild, as well as strains developed in the laboratory, that can infect both animals and humans (great thinking!). This includes cowpox, monkey pox, and . . . man, I feel ashamed to even say it . . . mouse pox. I mean, really? Mouse pox. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future some scientist will have to write an apology letter to the world explaining how sorry he is for introducing squirrel pox. This is how I imagine the letter would go:

  Dear World,

  I am very sorry for inventing squirrel pox. I was working on a project to enlarge male genitalia, got sidetracked, and ended up fucking around with the smallpox virus. One thing led to another; I ended up developing this terrible virus that could wipe out a large portion of the world’s population, and then decided to inject it into various squirrels to see what happened. But the last thing we want in this time of crisis is to be pointing fingers, am I right?

  If you for some reason come into contact with a squirrel and get the disease, it follows the usual progression of smallpox: fever, nausea, and the pustulelike bumps that turn to lesions. But after the lesions explode, you go through what I like to call a “turning” process. You get big puffy cheeks, grow a bushy tail, and patches of fur pop up in random places. For all intents and purposes, you turn into a giant squirrel. If you have a family member who happens to get infected with this virus, I strongly recommend strapping them down to a bed or tree to prevent them from sprinting across the road at the precise moment a car is coming. Anyway, sorry for this mishap. And good luck!

  Yours truly,

  Richard

  Personally, I feel this is the worst type of apocalypse. I would much rather get vaporized by a mushroom cloud or eat the hot dust of a super-volcano than slowly rot in my bed. To avoid dying a horrible death, take my advice below.

  1. Stay away from people. They are disgusting creatures. (I know what you are thinking: “So Forrest, you are telling us to avoid human contact with anyone but our most significant loved ones, but you roll around with sweaty men for a living?” Well, that’s only because I haven’t yet found a way to make a living without rolling around with sweaty men . . . Do as I say, not as I do.)

  2. Wear a body condom wherever you go. If you don’t have a body condom, just slip into one of those large plastic bags that dry cleaning comes in and fit a rubber 1970s swim cap on your head. Personally, I tried to go with the full-on contamination suit. Unfortunately, this was short-lived. In addition to my sponsors telling me I couldn’t do appearances in a plastic jumpsuit, Dana White informed me that the Nevada State Athletic Commission turned down my request to wear one in the cage. Despite these minor setbacks, I am hoping to get contamination suits into the new fall fashion line. Will you help me on this crusade?

  3. Become a homeless person and live in a trash can. Apparently, homeless people can survive pretty much anything.

  4. Kill every single person on the planet . . . and pigs. Those little fuckers are nasty germ carriers.

  THE HOT NEW THING TO BE AFRAID OF:

  SUPER-VOLCANO APOCALYPSE

  Seventy-five thousand years ago on the island of Sumatra, the human race was brought to the very edge of extinction by one of nature’s most powerful and devastating forces. I’m not talking about Cain Velasquez’s right cross, though that tends to be pretty powerful and devastating as well. I’m talking about the eruption of a super-volcano. It’s exactly what it sounds like—a really big volcano. Although these things are very rare, they fuck shit up beyond all recognition when they blow.

  Regular volcanoes like Mount St. Helens and Mount Vesuvius are usually shaped like nipples or penises (whichever you prefer), and as magma boils inside, pressure builds, until one day they erupt and spew molten rock out of their blowhole. Super-volcanoes, despite being exponentially larger, do not have the traditional cones. Instead, they are largely hidden beneath the surface of the earth. If the shape of regular volcanoes can be described as a nipple or penis, super-volcanoes should be described as a giant, yawning butt hole. The magma of super-volcanoes bubbles underneath the ground in gargantuan reservoirs, held at bay by a massive blockade of rock known as a caldera. Over hundreds of thousands of years, pressure builds in the depths. When the pressure reaches a critical threshold, the magma blows through the caldera, spewing shit into the atmosphere.

  To help you better understand this phenomenon, let me use another third-grade fecal analogy. Say there is a morbidly obese man who gets a bad case of diarrhea, but that diarrhea can’t squeeze itself out of his swelling anus because he lost an anal bead in his rectum. As the obese man continues to gorge himself, the diarrhea burbles in his great bowels, creating an insane amount of pressure. Then one fateful afternoon while he is loading up his shopping carts at Food 4 Less, the pressure becomes too great, the anal bead becomes dislodged, and gallons upon gallons of explosive shit hurtle into the atmosphere of his tremendous trousers. This is exactly what happens with a super-volcano. The only difference is that there are no feces of any kind involved—but there is a ton of hot magma and ash.

  When the butt hole in Sumatra blew seventy-five thousand years ago, it shot so much ash into the atmosphere that the sun was actually blotted out. The ash came down like snow, covering the ground a foot deep more than twenty-five hundred miles from the eruption. The catastrophic event wiped out the majority of the human race living at the time, leaving only a few thousand survivors to struggle through a seemingly never-ending winter. Although there is no evidence of any kind to support this theory, I believe the survivors were forced to turn to incest and cannibalism.

  The next blast will most likely come from Yellowstone National Park, which is home to a caldera more than eighty-five kilometers wide and forty-five kilometers tall. Scientists have discovered that this super-volcano erupts every six hundred thousand years, and with the last blast having occurred 640,000 years ago, we are overdue. This baby has got to come out, and Mother Earth is pushing like a son of a bitch. Since 1923, the earth over the caldera itself has swollen and risen more than two feet. It is not a matter of if this thing will blow, but rather a matter of when. If it should erupt in our lifetime, let me give you a little preview of what could happen.

  THINGS FORREST HATES

  • People who smoke.

  • People who drive.

  • People who breathe.

  • People who have been brainwashed by a certain diet and talk badly about the things you eat.

  • People who used to be addicted to alcohol and now think that everyone who occasionally uses alcohol is somehow an addict who needs their help.

  • People who bash everything that is fun, such as eating bad food or drinking alcohol.

  • Fat people who order a cheeseburger and a Diet Coke. (In fact, so many fat people drink Diet Coke, Forrest used to think that diet soda made you fat. Turns out it is just a strange coincidence.)

  • Close talkers. Even worse still, close talkers who follow you around as you try to walk away from them.

  • Anyone who talks about themselves in the third person. Forrest Griffin hat
es that.

  • Salespeople who refuse to give you refunds.

  • People who wear spandex shirts out to the bar.

  • People who use too much gel. Unless, of course, the gel is Rogaine.

  • People who are balding. Completely bald is totally cool, just not those who are currently going through the balding process.

  First, a series of earthquakes will rock the area around Yellowstone, shattering the seal on the caldera and allowing all that magma to eject. It is estimated that falling ash and lava will extinguish all life within a six-hundred-mile radius, and do so with approximately one thousand cubic kilometers of lava. Ash will get ejected into the atmosphere, and when it comes down it will cover lands as far away as the Gulf of Mexico. In a very short period of time, all the farmlands of the Midwest will be covered in ash and destroyed, which will be a major blow to the national and global food supply.

  Tens of thousands of people will die pretty much within the first few minutes from hot ash and molten rock. How terrible would this type of death be? Think back to those occasions when you nuked a microwavable burrito too long, and when you went to pick it up, you got that napalmlike cheese-and-bean goo all over your fingers. Now imagine the cheese and beans from a really big burrito dripping on your entire body. Now times that pain by fifty thousandish, let’s say. That is pretty much what you are looking at. Luckily, you will be seared into oblivion almost instantaneously, so pain really won’t be a factor.

  If you manage to avoid hot shit falling on your body and killing you, all is still not a bushel of canned peaches. The ash and debris flung into the atmosphere will very likely block out all the sunlight and drive the world into a state of nuclear winter. When the super-volcano in Sumatra blew its load into the sky, the overall temperature of the earth dropped by just over twenty degrees. Just as with all the ash covering the ground, this will dramatically reduce the world’s food supply, which in turn could lead to starvation, extreme bitchiness, and eventually nuclear war.

  Hints for surviving the hot blast of a super-volcano:

  1. Build an island in the middle of the ocean, kinda like they did in Waterworld. Do not leave your island or let Kevin Costner star in any movie made on your island.

  2. Get on the boat with Bilbo and Frodo and sail to Valinor.

  3. Volunteer on a Russian space station.

  4. Kill yourself.

  THE END OF THE WORLD ISN’T JUST FOR PAGANS:

  A SINNER’S GUIDE TO REVELATION

  The Christian Bible has its own version of the apocalypse. A lot of people refer to this as “Armageddon,” but this is the incorrect word. In fact, Armageddon is the name of the actual place in Israel where the final conflict between Good and Evil will supposedly take place. The end-of-the-world prophecy in the Bible is referred to as Revelation or, according to Apostle John, the Book of Revelation. How did Apostle John know what he was talking about? Well, he saw a bunch of crazy shit go down in these two “visions” he had. Anyone who is named John and has regular visions is undoubtedly Irish, so I have a tendency to believe him. After all, we all know that God favors the Irish and gives them holy visions regularly. I could get deeper into it, but I would be saying too much.

  When John goes into one of his more intense visionary states, he hears voices beckoning him up to heaven to meet God. During one such vision, John finds twenty-four old dudes kicking it with some animals, one of which happens to be a lamb. John of course attempts to kick the lamb because he never managed to catch the one that ate his rose bushes down on earth, but the old men quickly stop him. They tell John that the lamb symbolizes Jesus. Now, I don’t know if John thought this was a little weird, but I certainly do. If you are the Son of God, you can choose whatever form you want. I would have picked something cooler, like a lion, a giant eagle, a marmoset, or a Tyrannosaurus. Obviously, Jesus never won the “If you were an animal, what would you be?” game.

  Anyway, this all-powerful lamb is the one picked by God to learn and divulge the true sequence of the end of the world. The lamb does this through the cracking of the Seven Seals; potentially more evidence of John’s heritage, as Seals could be interpreted as those on bottles of whiskey, tapped kegs, or ancient clay jugs of wine. With the cracking of each Seal came a vision of how the world will end. How did John see these visions? Apparently, he saw them through the lamb’s eyes. I know, sounds a little Ragnarökish, but I am not going to be the one to talk smack. I mean, what if, right?

  Forrest Factoids

  Forrest Griffin is only to be referred to in the third person omniscient . . . he will also accept Grand Master G.

  Forrest has an elevator in his single-story trailer for obvious reasons.

  Forrest Griffin only drives barefoot.

  Attaining a bachelor’s degree takes seven years in Forrest Griffin time.

  Forrest Griffin doesn’t get knocked out—he just chooses to take naps at odd times.

  Forrest Griffin reuses condoms.

  Forrest Griffin wears a parachute at all times, just in case.

  Forrest Griffin doesn’t know his pets’ names—he simply refers to them as pets 1 through 4.

  Forrest does calisthenics before sex.

  Forrest uses car keys instead of Q-Tips. In an unrelated matter, Forrest gets a lot of ear infections.

  Forrest Griffin can communicate with trees simply because of his first name. (However, trees have nothing to say. They just bitch a lot about not being able to walk.)

  Babies hate Forrest because they know . . . cats love Forrest because they know . . .

  The vision for the First Seal is that of a king riding a white horse. I thought it was odd that this dude would ride on a white horse and not a white pony. Does this mean that he will prefer heroin to cocaine? I don’t know, but this king is also quite the conqueror, so probably not. If he were truly riding the white horse, he’d just doze off in the middle of his sentences and most likely wouldn’t do much tooling around. But his drug of choice means little because it is believed that he represents the Antichrist or false prophet. The one who says he is God. Few people will believe him at first, but he will actually be able to work miracles, like making Eddie Murphy funny again. I don’t know about you, but if someone pulled that out of their hat of tricks, I would be a believer. This guy ends up fooling a ton of people into following him, and for a moment he becomes more popular than Oprah.

  The cracking of the next Seal leads to the vision of a rider on a red horse. This too is quite strange because I have never actually seen a “red” horse. I have seen brownish-red horses, but not actually one that is fire-engine red. I suppose in a supernatural dream it is important to suspend disbelief at some points. Well, this rider is almost as bad as the first one because he brings massive wars and conflict. A lot of people who are really into this story feel that the rider on the red horse is currently among us. If you think about it, it makes sense. In the past hundred years, we’ve seen World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the cold war, Desert Storm, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dancing with the Stars, Halo, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and countless other raging battles. The signs are all there, so what comes next in Apostle John’s visions should interest us all.

  When the Third Seal is broken, John sees a rider on a black horse. This horseman brings with him Famine—which reminds me, I’m starving right now! I’ll be right back . . .

  . . . Okay, back. When I wrote the word “famine” I knew I needed to go out and get some Quiznos. That shit rules when you are hungry. I don’t think they’ll have Quiznos around when all this biblical shit goes down, so I recommend getting the good grinds while you can. Anyway, the world experiences a bunch of famine, which is a pretty realistic scenario. Other than the “seeing through the lamb’s eyes” part, I’m still on board.

  With the breaking of the Fourth Seal, the rider on the pale horse emerges. For some reason, the pale horse is different from the white horse. I don’t know about you, but I have always con
sidered white a pretty pale color. Perhaps the pale horse is translucent like one of those weird shrimp that Japanese people eat while the little fellas are still alive (when I said “little fellas,” I was referring to the shrimp, not the Japanese). Perhaps this means that the fourth and final horseman is actually riding an invisible, giant shrimp or sea horse. Now that I think about it, all this horseman stuff is kinda strange. If John is actually seeing into the future, why is he still seeing people riding horses? Shouldn’t he be seeing people driving cars or hovercrafts or light cycles or something? Anyway, the rider of the pale horse brings Pestilence. After looking up that word, I discovered that it means plaguelike sickness or infectious diseases. We’ve covered how this concept could be a real-deal apocalyptic scenario, so things are starting to look rather grave.