As my wealth and arrogance grew, I took greater risks. One afternoon I was approached by a stout, shiny-headed man who wished to wager for my beloved “chariot.” Thinking that no mortal could defeat me, I agreed to a race. We flew like the wind down a stone path, our machines screaming with power, but alas, the man with the chromelike dome defeated me. Being a man of my honor, I bestowed upon him a pink contract for my beloved chariot, and retreated to the caves of Mordor to grieve. I cast aside all my earthly possessions, all my wealth, even my honor. All I brought with me was a single golden ring, my precious.
When I emerged many years later, it was to a strange and wondrous world. The gears of change had been busy in my absence, and there now existed boxes that could transport images and sounds across great distances. One day the leaders of every country appeared on these boxes, and their message was earnest: beings from another world were descending upon us. They traveled in ships the size of cities, and they had made their intentions clear: the moment they arrived, they would exterminate the entire human race.
I was earth’s only hope, but realizing that the Empire had betrayed me by casting me into the arena, they could not ask me to fight for them. Instead, they employed trickery and sent Colonel Sam Trautman, a dear old friend who I had served under in the great war on the planet Avatar. He assured me that I would be under his command, and if I went to battle, I would get what I truly desired, which was for my country to love me as much as I loved it!
Knowing we were outnumbered fifty thousand to one, Trautman and I commandeered an enemy craft, a metallic hawk that flew faster than lightning itself. We took to the sky, but we did not attempt to engage the enemy forces, as we were just one and they were many. Instead, we flew our stolen craft directly into their mother ship, pretending that we were one of their own. It was there that we learned that the bowels of their ships were actually flesh and blood. Instead of driving a stake down into the heart of that ship, which would do little because of its massive size, I released a virus that traveled not just throughout the mother ship, but also throughout all the enemy vessels. In a matter of minutes, I had saved the planet!
But alas, there was not enough time for me to fly my foreign bird away before the enemy ships exploded, so I was forced to travel into a strange device they called the Stargate, and it transported me to a different universe. I was set down on a small desert planet, and the primitive inhabitants mistook me for a god. They showered me with jewels and women, but after many years of basking in these luxuries, I left my tribe of Ewoks and searched the sky far and wide for a passageway back to my homeland. Alas, I found it, another Stargate in all that sky, in all that dark. I gripped destiny’s hand, and together we flew through the passageway, and in a matter of moments I once again recognized the stars around me.
But something was amiss. A massive mountain of pure rock was hurtling toward my homeland from the heavens. I knew that if this monolith impacted my world, it would surely destroy it with great floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and firestorms. The Great Danger lay just below my machine, and so I brought the craft down upon the chaotic surface. A team of my comrades had already arrived on the rock, led by a man named Bruce Willis. They had drilled a deep hole into the core of the object and were preparing to blow it to bits with an explosive device. When the timing device failed to operate, it became clear that one of us had to stay behind and manually detonate the weapon. Someone had to lay down his life for our home world. I told the others to go. Leave me behind and I would carry out this final task. I only asked them to tell my wives that I loved them all.
After my comrades had flown away into the darkness, I pressed the button that would reunite me with my ancestors of yore, including the great warriors Jackie Chan, Chuck Norris, and Dwayne Johnson. The subsequent explosion decimated the rock on which I had chosen to die, but alas, I did not perish. I was hurled into a cloud of rock and debris, and with my godlike strength, I clung to a small fragment of stone as it spun wildly outward. Once I was clear of the discharge, the ride smoothed and I realized I was heading toward my home planet. I rode that rock down as a returning conqueror, steering it to its destination. I managed to maneuver my horse of stone toward a vast blue ocean, took the deepest breath I’ve ever taken, and then hit the water. The force of the impact pushed me down hundreds of feet. My world faded to black.
I awoke to find that I had grown webbed feet and gills, and that I was breaking underwater. As my vision cleared, my eyes were met with the strangest sight. A small yellow square sponge and an enormously obese pink starfish were staring at me with wide eyes. Once they realized I was all right, they burst into hysterical laughter and ran away cackling at the top of their lungs.
I had no idea where I was. In fact, it came as quite a surprise when I wandered outside and realized I had been in a dwelling made from a giant, hollowed-out pineapple. At any rate, I seized the opportunity and swam desperately toward the surface hundreds of kilometers above.
I swam for a great many days, and when I finally stood on solid land, my entire country stood before me, and the president himself bestowed upon me the Medal of Valor, our highest honor. I settled in with my wives and my dog, Boba Fett. We’ve lived in harmony ever since, but I will stand prepared, as I always have, to once again defend my lands, my women, and you, my children of the corn.
Epilogue
Most kids don’t give death much thought, but around the age of ten or eleven, I became obsessed with it. With a single terrifying dream, I transformed from a happy-go-lucky runt into one terrified son of a bitch. Before you make a judgment call about my manliness, let me give you the details of this nightmare. I was at my biological father’s house down by the coast, and somehow I fell off the edge of a pier that stretched out over a sandy beach. Except instead of the pier being seven feet high, it was more than a thousand.
I’d had falling dreams before, and like most people, I would always wake up just prior to impact. Not this time. My body slammed down into the unforgiving surface and I died. I could feel my body broken in fifty places, and assuming that this little accident had really happened, I figured that in a matter of seconds my brain would shut off and my spirit or whatever would head toward a bright light. That’s not what happened. I remained utterly lucid. I could feel hundreds of shattered oyster shells digging into my back. I could hear seagulls crying and waves breaking in the distance. I could smell the ocean air. I was just as coherent as I had been before making this great fall, but I was utterly paralyzed. I couldn’t move my body, blink, or communicate. For all intents and purposes, I was fucking dead.
I lay there for a great long while, and eventually people came and scooped up my broken body. They carried me away, brought me to a funeral home, and I was placed in a coffin. Next thing I know, I am in the ground, and I could hear dirt being shoveled onto my box, putting me into the ground for all eternity. I tried to scream, “I am still alive!” but no words came out of my mouth. All I could do was lie there and listen to the voices of my family grow more distant.
Despite my being placed underground, there was still light in the coffin. I should have realized that this meant I was dreaming, but I was too terrified by that point. Logic had been shut off and all I had left was my horror. I’m not sure how long I lay there, but pretty quickly there came noises around me. That noise was the maggots burrowing into my rotting flesh, consuming my body. Their numbers grew with each passing minute, and soon I was engulfed, my arms and legs and torso being removed bit by bit.
My life was not the same for a great long while when I awoke from that dream. For a week or more I walked around in a daze, and just when I began to feel that perhaps I could leave it in the past, I had another similar dream. My death was exactly the same—I fell off that skyscraper pier and crashed down into all those oyster shells, but this time, instead of putting me in a coffin and burying me, they loaded me onto the metal shoot of an incinerator. My head had been propped up on something, so I could see down the length o
f my body. As my feet entered the fire, searing pain shot through me. My entire family stood around me with grim faces, and I tried to scream at them to pull me out of the fire, but just as with the first dream, I couldn’t move or make a sound.
When I awoke from that one, I knew there would be no going back to my haphazard, blissful childhood. While other kids thought about the upcoming weekend and all the fun stuff they had planned, I thought about death. No matter where I was or what I was doing, anytime my mind drifted, I would think, “Forrest, you are going to die, and you know exactly what will happen. Nothing. You will be stuck in a body you can’t use, and maggots will eat you. You will see and feel every horrible thing to come.” I got paranoid about everything, especially getting onto the school bus. I would break out in sweat every time I had to climb those stairs because I was certain that the bus would crash and I would die. At night, instead of passing out the instant I hit the bed like normal, I would just lie there in a twilight sleep, reliving those terrible dreams over and over. And when I did fall asleep, I always woke up scared.
For seven or eight months, I lived in a constant state of fear. In my first book, Got Fight?, I told a story about that time in my life. I was in a locker room before basketball practice, and this jock who had made it his life’s purpose to fuck with me began making fun of my attire. I guess he thought my shirt was too tight and my shorts too short. He had been on my ass for a while, and realizing that his mother had recently died, I said, “Does it make you feel better, picking on me? Does it take your mind off the fact that the maggots are eating your mother right now?” I’m sure a lot of people thought I was the asshole of the century for saying something like that, but that’s where my mind was at this time in my life. I thought about maggots all day and all night, and about the fact that it was only a matter of time until I heard them eating my flesh.
The horror became so unbearable, I went searching for answers. I was in Catholic school at the time, so I talked to the priests. In fact, my desperation had reached such extreme levels, I thought about becoming a priest. I would do anything it took to avoid the terror I had experienced in my nightmares. The priests I tried gave me the heaven run-around as usual, but nothing they said was real or tangible. Those fucking nightmares were more real that heaven, and so I didn’t buy into anything they said. I was stuck with my misery.
There was a time there when I thought that ending up in a loony bin might be a very real possibility for me, but then one night while I was rehashing the nightmare over and over, it took a different turn. Just as all the other times, I was lying in a coffin and could hear the maggots eating my body, but strangely the terror had left. Instead of panicking at the thought of my decomposition, I focused on the maggots, and I could feel my energy or life force or whatnot inside of them. I felt my energy burrowing through the ground, and then a bird scooped that energy up. Before long, I could feel myself take the form of a muscle in a bird’s wing. I was soaring through the skies, and it felt wonderful. At the same time, I could feel another part of my (I want to say “chi,” but that is lame) energy being absorbed into the roots of a tree. In a matter of just a few hours, as I was lying there in bed, the terror left me. Just like in The Lion King, I came to terms with the great cycle of life. I didn’t see a bunch of dancing and singing wild animals, and Simba never made an appearance, but I was over-fucking-joyed, to say the least.
I don’t want to say that I accepted death, because I didn’t and still haven’t. I realize that one day my life will have run its course and I’ll die, and end up as the muscle in a bird’s wing. Although I have always liked muscles and want to experience the exhilaration of flight, I want to delay this day as long as possible. Deep down in my heart, I am still that eleven-year-old kid sitting in the darkness of his room, listening to Nine Inch Nails and burning himself with a lighter. I think about death more often than I should, but the results are much more positive than they once were. The idea of death makes me thankful that I am alive right now, allows me to enjoy each day, and makes me realize that I have to do whatever I can to hang on to life.
The downside is that when you focus on trying to stay alive, it causes you to take a much harder look around you and you see the possible dangers. And when I look around me these days, what I see looks bleak. Personally, I see a giant neon sign blaring in the sky, and its message is very simple: people have gone too far. Just like every person’s life runs its course, so does every society. When a forest gets old, it develops a massive amount of undergrowth that threatens all the life within it. To keep the forest from withering and dying, Mother Nature sends in our happy friend fire, which wipes out the excess brush and undergrowth, puts nutrients back into the soil, and allows the forest to start the life process over again. But when you stop Mother Nature from doing her job and beat back all the flames, then, when another fire eventually comes, it is catastrophic. It wipes out not only the underbrush, but also the entire forest, leaving nothing but a charred moonscape.
I don’t know how close our society is to having run its course, but to me it looks like there is a lot of fucking underbrush choking the life out of us. Eventually there will be a correction; a massive reset button will be pushed. It’s just a matter of time. When you get to the point where there are too many people using too much of our resources, it puts a burden on the earth, and good old Mother Nature is going to implement a correction. We can beat back the flames all we want, but eventually that fire is going to find its way through our meager blockades and cleanse the surface of the earth. With my mind focusing so heavily on death, it makes me think about that fateful day, and I personally want to be one of the ones who survive, which is the reason I wrote this book. I want to feel what it is like to be the muscle in the wing of a bird, but not just yet. I want to be a part of a tree rustling in the wind . . . just not yet.
Appendix
Believe it or not, I actually read quite a few books, and one of my favorites is Stephen King’s On Writing, which teaches you how to write books good . . . or is it write books well? In either case, with only two books under my belt, I am not so ostentatious to think that I could teach you how to write a book. I can, however, give you an idea of how to sell a book concept. To illustrate this, I have included the proposal we sent to HarperCollins to get this book picked up. If you’re not a quazi-celebrity and your goal is to get a publisher to give you actual money (personally, I requested them to deliver the cash in actual sacks with dollar signs printed on the front of them), I suggest you select your words more carefully, make the proposal make sense, and pretend you actually know something about the subject you are writing on, but hopefully this will give you a good idea of where to start.
P.S. You should watch Where the Buffalo Roam—it made me want to be a writer of words.
FORREST GRIFFIN’S SURVIVAL GUIDE TO THE APOCALYPSE
Forrest Griffin and Erich Krauss
Authors of the New York Times Bestselling Got Fight?
(currently No. 5 on Advice, How-to, and Misc.)
“ . . . and that’s one of the nights when I learned that if you’re going to pay a stripper to punch you in the face, you’d better make sure that she’s not wearing any large, gaudy rings.”
—FORREST GRIFFIN
“Everyone should carry a gun, especially if you have a small penis like me. The second amendment was not designed to protect yourself. It was written—and I read this in my NRA magazine, so you know it’s not biased—to protect us from the Government. They are crazy and oppressive and will one day lead us into the apocalypse.”
—FORREST GRIFFIN
Why is Forrest Griffin, the former Light Heavyweight Champion of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and New York Times bestselling author of Got Fight? The 50 Zen Principles of Hand-to-Face Combat, writing a book on how to survive the apocalypse? Seriously, why the hell not? Most children dream about a sparkly world filled with unicorns and stardust where everyone is kind and friendly to each other. Some of those children e
ven grow up to write terrible books about magic and wizards and little boys named Henry (or is it Harry? Fuck, I always forget that shit . . . I know I just jumped from third person to first person, but I figured that you, as an editor, would put two and two together. If you didn’t, put down my proposal now and back away from it slowly. You are mentally challenged, and under no condition will you be allowed to publish my book.)
Fortunately, Forrest did not fantasize about little boys named Henry. While getting his face rearranged by bullies in school, he dreamed about the near-extinction of mankind and all of the fantastic repercussions that come with it. Think about it: with grooming and personal hygiene no longer a prerequisite to social acceptance, you can let your mutton-chops grow and live out your secret sexually twisted fantasy of becoming Wolverine, which in turn would allow you to dry hump a broad assortment of four-legged creatures with impunity. You could kill squirrels with your bare hands, practice throwing knives all day, and never have to say “excuse me” after farting.
But most important, you could drive down the freeway without worrying that a 125-pound douche bag will somehow grow balls of steel and cut you off. And if one of the four remaining 125-pound douche bags should cut you off, there would be no one stopping you from pulling out one of the six forty-five caliber handguns protruding from your home-made utility belt and dispensing some vigilante justice. Once the douche bag is good and dead, you could strip naked, paint yourself in his blood, and go sprinting down the road singing any one of Madonna’s top hits. Most important, you wouldn’t be judged or arrested for any of these actions, which is what currently tends to happen. (Note to Editor: My agent said that the intro had to be dramatic, a real ball-grabber. How am I doing?)
Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down( A Survival Guide to the Apocalypse) Page 26
