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

by Griffin, Forrest

  To prevent you from dying a quick death in this type of sporting event, I am going to give you a few tips. Most important, join one of those geeky medieval knight clubs to learn how to wield ancient weapons of death. The only downside is that any friends you currently have will disown you, and you may become brainwashed into thinking that covering your body in tinfoil will provide adequate protection in armed combat. While wrapping yourself in tinfoil does wonders to prevent the government from reading your mind, it provides absolutely no protection when being struck with heavy, sharp objects. Being involved in a medieval club might also lead you to believe that it is a good idea to wear a giant steel cup and leave your legs completely exposed. While this is a great fashion ensemble,21 you might want to protect your femoral arteries. I know the Spartans like to keep their legs glistening in the sun for other men to gawk at, but you are not as fast and quick as a Spartan (and hopefully not as close to your comrades).

  At the very least, you want to cover your legs in heavy leather. If you chose to go bare legged and someone stabs your femoral artery, you will bleed out very quickly. And dying from a leg wound is a pussy way to check out, especially when fighting in the Thunderdome.

  WHEN YOU’RE ALL BUSTED UP

  While making your way across the rubble to your safe zone, you want to do everything in your power to avoid injury. The best way to accomplish this is simply not to panic. Granted, there will be some pretty freaky shit going on, such as people with half-burned-off faces staggering toward you, animals that are all freaked out and confused, and perhaps even groups of half-crazed individuals on the hunt for human flesh. You might even see that giant spider with its eight legs, huge fangs, and million fucking eyes (woo, scared myself there). No matter what stands before you, do not panic.If you lose your head, there is a good chance that you will injure yourself by stepping in a hole, tripping over shit, or even running into stuff. Just keep your head and be cool. If you have to run, then run. But look where you are fucking going. If you have to jump over a fence, look on the other side first. This is all very common knowledge, but common sense seems to fly out the window when people get scared.

  MY WORST INJURIES

  The worst injury I ever had was when I fought in South Africa. This was back in 2001 before MMA really took off, so the promoter offered me absolute shit. I basically fought for the trip. My opponent was a guy who had wrestled in the Olympics, and a few seconds into our fight, he picked me up and slammed me down on my shoulder. Being a Mickey Mouse event, we were in a boxing ring rather than a cage, and instead of a thick pad underneath the canvas, they had a tiny layer of foam on top of steel. The instant I landed, my shoulder popped out. I felt immediate pain, and when I glanced over at my shoulder, I saw what looked like the tit of a fourteen-year-old girl sitting on top of my deltoid. I would have quit right then, but my opponent began hitting me. I managed to get up, and we tussled for another few moments. As I was throwing punches and kicks, I kept looking over at my shoulder—as if staring at my injury would somehow make it go away.

  Anyhow, my opponent got tired, I kneed him in the face, we went back to the ground, and I ended up on his back with one hook in. In some pretty serious pain at this point, I wanted to end the fight as quickly as possible. Genius me, I wrap my bad arm around his throat, grab my wrist with my other hand, and pulled my limp arm up into his throat until he tapped in submission. The second the referee separated us, I began rolling around on the canvas, screaming in pain. Although this was in no shape or way funny, the commentary of the South African announcer was. In his weird accent, he goes, “And the American with an interesting celebration . . . I think he is pretending he is on fire. Maybe it is a stop, drop, and roll type thing . . . Wow,

  he is really getting into this . . . His face is all clinched up and everything.” Yeah, MMA has come a long way.

  I received my second worst injury while working out with Bigger John in the gym. My shoulder was still fucked up from my fight in South Africa, and he had this notion that doing floor presses would somehow be better for me than doing bench presses. I hadn’t done bench presses in years, and I had never done a floor press, but not thinking clearly, I decided to take John’s advice. So, I laid on the floor, he hefted the bar up to me, and then spotted me on his knees (and yes, it was the gayest looking thing in the world). After about five repetitions, John leans forward to spot me, and I see a massive chunk of Copenhagen dip fly from his mouth in slow motion. I had two hundred pounds in my hands, and I did my best to squirm out of the way, but there was absolutely no avoiding it. That massive piece of saliva soaked dip landed right in my eye socket. Immediately my entire head started burning, and I begin shouting at John to take the weight. Instead of following my instructions, he began shouting back at me in his brutish voice.

  “Fuck that, son, you got another rep or two in you! You got two more reps easy, son!”

  I started screaming, trying to throw the weight off of me, but he held it in place. Without any options, I did my two reps, John took the weight, and I went running to the bathroom. After washing out my eyes, we finished our workout . . . And yes, I am still emotionally traumatized by that event.

  However, even if you are calm and collected at all times, there is still a chance that you will injure yourself somewhere along the way, so I have included some basic medical skills in this section. It is important to note that I am not a practicing physician, and there is a good chance that by following the procedures listed below, you will die a horrible death. With that said, let’s get started.

  Mending a Broken Leg

  If you injure your leg postapocalypse, chances are you will have to do your own diagnosis to discover if it is broken. To begin, examine your leg for any cuts, bruising, obvious deformities, or protruding bones. If all looks well, feel up and down your leg for any gaps or bumps in the bone; also move your leg as you normally would to check if it has full range of motion. If you discover that the bone is in fact broken, check the pulses around the bone to ensure that an artery hasn’t been severed or compressed from the swollen tissues or broken bone. If the pulses feel fine, you have a chance of surviving.

  Surgery is out of the question, so the only real option is to brace your leg. Although this will be tremendously painful, begin by aligning the broken bone to the best of your ability. This might require some elbow grease. Once you regain consciousness, place a rigid object underneath the leg, such as a rolled-up newspaper or a flat board. Next, wrap an Ace bandage or duct tape around your leg to secure the stabilizer in place.

  The next step is to attempt to survive with a broken leg. If you are already in your safe zone, you should have enough supplies to last you through the healing process. If you are in the middle of nowhere, you are going to have to fashion yourself a pair of crutches and attempt to make it to a location where there is food, water, and shelter. Good luck with that!

  Broken Ribs

  A broken rib hurts like a motherfucker, but unless it’s protruding into your lungs, the injury is not life-threatening. To help reduce the pain and aid the healing process, it can be beneficial to brace your chest by heavily taping the rib cage. However, the most important thing you can do is to breathe normally. It might be excruciatingly painful to do so, but constantly taking short, shallow breaths can eventually lead to pneumonia, which will be much more likely to kill you than a broken rib.

  Broken Fingers and Toes

  Broken fingers and toes are easily treated using the “buddy taping” method. This is where you place the broken finger or toe next to a healthy finger or toe, and tape them together so they are side by side. In case you didn’t get this, I am not talking about taping a finger to a toe or vice versa. If your finger is injured, tape it to the finger right next to it. For the best results, do not tape your fingers or toes completely straight. Make sure they have a slight bend.

  Major Broken Bones

  There are certain bones that will most likely lead to death when broken. For example, pelvic fr
actures are usually the result of serious trauma, like a high-speed car accident or when you get thrown off a twenty-foot cliff. For these types of injuries, you will want to perform surgery on the back of your head using a bullet. Either that or suffer an agonizing death.

  Your Teeth

  Your mouth can be a real motherfucker, especially when you fail to clean its contents for six months. That’s why I had you include toothpaste in your Go Bag. If you blew through that tube and forgot to pick another one up while pillaging homes, it is only a matter of time until your mouth turns against you. The shitty thing is that your mouth rarely gives you signs to let you know trouble is coming. One evening you go to bed feeling fine, and the next morning you are crying like a baby, unable to chew your eggs. If this happens to you, the first step is to locate the cause of the pain, as it could be the beginning of a cavity, an abscess, or even the dreadful scurvy that plagued British sailors.

  Cavities are pretty easy to spot, at least when they have progressed to the point where they are causing you pain. Just grab a mirror and look for the tooth that has started to turn black. Unfortunately, you won’t have a dentist around to shoot you full of Novocain and give you a filling, so you will have to cowboy the fuck up and be a man. Yep, I’m talking about yanking that rotten tooth out of your head. Here is how you do it:

  STEP 1: Locate the rotten tooth.

  STEP 2: Apply some type of pliers around the tooth; a Leatherman tool works great for this.

  STEP 3: Depending upon the location of the rotten tooth, you want to pull either straight up or straight down. You may need to employ a slight rocking motion to loosen it.

  STEP 4: Once the tooth pulls free, pack the hole with a piece of alcohol-soaked cloth.

  STEP 5: Place the tooth on a necklace, and then brag to anyone who will listen about how you yanked that very tooth from your skull. Skip the part where you cried like a big fucking pussy and wet yourself.

  If you search all of your teeth and none of them appear to be rotten, you may have a disgusting abscess hiding in your mouth. The warning signs are fever, swollen red tissue, pain when chewing, and a permanent bad taste in your mouth. Abscesses are much like zits in that they are enclosed pockets of pus. However, if you ignore the abscess hoping it will go away like an annoying pimple, it will most likely continue to grow, destroy surrounding tissue, and possibly even kill you. To avoid such an outcome, you must drain the abscess by sterilizing some sort of cutting instrument, either with alcohol or over an open flame, and then lance that bad boy so the pus and blood can drain. Once the opening is empty, pack it with some type of clean material, such as pieces of a boiled sheet. To prevent infection, you want to put fresh material into your mouth every day, as well as rinse the abscess with anything cleansing you may be able to scrounge: hydrogen peroxide, mouthwash, alcohol, urine, or drip some of that boiling water right into the hole.

  Scurvy is also relatively easy to spot: look for spots on your skin, spongy gums, and random bleeding. Ignore these warning signs too long, and your teeth will begin falling out like a meth addict’s. Luckily, scurvy is not hard to cure. It is caused by a lack of vitamin C in your diet, so all you have to do it is eat more fruits and vegetables such as oranges, lemons, tomatoes, potatoes, and green peppers.

  Excuses for Leaving Others Who Are Injured

  If you ignored my advice to travel alone, you are going to need to come up with excuses to leave your traveling mates should they get injured. Although this might seem like it would be very easy, it can be difficult to be quick-witted when someone is clinging to your shirt collar and begging you to save their life and not abandon them. To spare you the added brainpower, I have come up with some canned excuses that I will allow you to use.

  1. “Shhhhh, buddy. You’re all right. You’re gonna be just fine. No, I ain’t never gonna leave you. I will be right here by your side, guarding your back. However, I am going to go fetch you some water from that creek we saw a few miles back.”

  2. “Dude, do you have my wallet? . . . I think I dropped my fucking wallet. Hold on, I’m going to look for that shit really quick.”

  3. “You hear that! . . . Holy shit, we’re saved. That is the Red Cross out there. I hear them shouting for survivors. Hold on, buddy, this is your lucky day. I’m going to round them up real quick. I’ll be back in a minute with a stretcher.”

  4. “I’ve got to go take a shit.”

  HOW TO SPOON FOR WARMTH

  Assuming you don’t abandon your injured buddies while you’re traveling on the long road to nowhere, spooning is an excellent way to conserve body heat and stay warm. If it is just you and one other person, you will want to rotate every hour so that both of you get a chance to warm your chest and back. If there are more members of your group, you can either spoon in a circle so that everyone is pressed tightly together, or spoon in a straight line, in which case you will want to treat it as a game of musical chairs where the people on the ends rotate into the line every hour. Below I have illustrated the proper way to spoon, as well as the improper way to spoon.

  Proper Way to Spoon

  Improper Way to Spoon

  Chapter 5

  No, You Can’t Invite Your Friends—They Will Trash Our Utopia

  Congratulations! If you are reading this portion of the book, you made it to your safe zone and spent the last six months chilling out while the world burned around you. You survived when billions of others did not, and you owe your success entirely to me. Please, take a moment to think about this and thank me in your own way. If you can think of nothing original, let me give you some hints on what might be appropriate reciprocation:

  1. Build a large Forrest Griffin shrine, but do not decorate it with lame shit like flowers and wreaths and such. If you feel it absolutely must be decorated, use skulls and animal bones and patches of fur.

  2. Name one of the wild animals you have adopted over the past six months after me. However, do not name it Griff or Griffmeister or the Griffinator. You must name him either Forrest or Griffin. I will also accept Forrest Griffin. However, it cannot be one of the animals you are currently husbanding.

  3. Search me out in the postapocalyptic world and become a blind follower of my cult. I would promise to make you my right-hand man, but I will most likely already have held a six-day gladiatorial event in which the best men in the land fought for this honor. However, I can guarantee that I will make you a jester or minstrel. At the very least, you can get a job as my castle janitor.

  4. Sacrifice your life in my honor. This can be done by slitting your wrists, beheading yourself with an ax, or simply jumping off a cliff or out of a very high tree. However, if you attempt to sacrifice your life in my honor and fail, you will have disgraced me. (P.S. Please fax or e-mail me a map of your food stash before you take the plunge so things don’t go to waste . . . I promise I won’t make a beeline for it once I receive your e-mail, and I further promise I won’t use a large hunting knife to dispatch you should you change your mind about offing yourself in my honor.)

  5. Use my name to describe something really cool. For example, when telling people about the time you surfed a tsunami or battled a supernatural wolf, say, “It was so utterly Forrest.” I will also accept, “I Griffined the shit out of that wave and wolf.”

  Up to this point, your primary goal has just been to survive. But you have been there and done that, right? If you’re thinking it’s time to get to the good stuff, you are absolutely correct. Currently, you are standing at a crossroads and have a very important decision to make. Do you want to live a life of solidarity and continue to eat nuts and berries to survive, or do you want to be a part of something greater?22 If you decide you want to strike it out alone like Captain Apollo did in the last episode of Battlestar Galactica (sorry if I ruined the ending), or just perch on top of a mountain for the rest of your days and reminisce about all you have lost, that is fine by me. You will get bored as shit and most likely get eaten by a bear. But if you feel that it is your destiny,
so be it. However, if you want to be a part of something greater, then you must create your own utopia, which will require some work. Again, Uncle Forrest is here to tell you how to get it done.

  Things are going to get pretty complicated pretty quickly, especially when you begin adding people to your circle, but it is important to take things in steps, with the first one being finding a place to build your new utopia. Your safe zone might be good for you, but chances are it’s not enough to support life on a large scale. If you have trouble envisioning what this new utopia should look like, just picture the Thunderdome. Of course you will want to remove the midget and his pigs, add a whole bunch of hot chicks, some personal servants, and a church whose fellowship worships your awesomeness. You will probably also want to remove Tina Turner from the picture, as she will undoubtedly challenge your power, and seeing what she put up with from Ike, you don’t want to be messing with that bitch. In any case, you get the picture.

  THAT CASTLE AIN’T GONNA BUILD ITSELF

  Once you find the location of your new utopia, the next step is to get yourself a kick-ass castle. You’ve worked hard all of your life, am I right? You broke your back doing manual labor for years while chasing the American Dream. But after all that anguish and toil, everything got ripped right out from underneath you, putting you back to square one. The good news is that there is no more American Dream, and you can do things completely different this time. You can start the (insert name of your country here) Dream. You do not have to play by the rules because there are no more rules. The apocalypse came and wiped them all out.