Smoke Test Shack

I kind of got out of the zombie preparedness thing for a fair bit. Bought a house, got a cat, got into some other hobbies. Discovered the value of streamlining my life and especially my possessions. This latter exposed a point of pain I have with a lot of preparedness concepts, namely the bit about having a lot of stuff around — since I don’t typically camp on its own merits, rather a lot a lot of stuff — that is pretty much never going to get used. I got tired of having to clean squashed and expired protein bars out of the bottoms of my bags. I dumped a lot of crap on Goodwill. I quit.

Then I got into larping, and fairly soon I realized that I was pretty much organically dealing with questions like “how do I go up in the mountains for the weekend and not realize halfway through that I forgot an important thing”, “how do I get home if someone smacks me in the face and breaks my glasses when I’m an hour and a half drive from home”, “what do I do when my car doesn’t start after said weekend in the mountains”, and “how do I continue to be a useful goblin when it’s ten degrees out and someone has drunk all my Diet Dr. Peppers”.

So the old survival stuff started to become directly connected to my having more fun and less pain, and my interest reawakened. I had a thought, too, of doing some writing on the various merits of larping as it relates to life in general and perchance the zombie life in particular. However, at this point I began to feel inadequate. For some reason, larpers are kind of a joke — more so than even tabletop roleplayers (which is actually my roots), for some reason, despite (and actually strangely because, it seems) that they’re actually going out and physically doing things.

In the face of folks who are commonly talking about how they have to be grey men to disguise their true nature, because people are going to look at them and know that they’re prepared — okay, well, people look at me and they know I’m going to the renfaire. Am I really going to talk about hanging out at a girl scout camp wearing elf ears is totes preparedness y’all because I keep a bag with extra pants and beef jerky next to the door now?

And then this thing happened.

The supply room for these folks, from earlier reports, has more or less what we stock in the portrayer cabin for roughly twenty people over two days — and those are meant to serve as actual snacks, in addition to the snacks that folks bring personally AND in addition to the meals we have hauled in and prepared by a professional chef. We have sleeping bags. We have french vanilla creamer (among other flavors). These are our preparations so that we don’t have to take our elf ears off and drive to Safeway, not so that we can make a final stand against tyranny (unless the cows get out).

So yeah. Apparently doing improv theatre in the woods every month actually does make a person at least a moderately decent survivalist. Honor the absurdity of life, I guess?