Must-Haves

I'll be honest: Hurricane Katrina frightened me. Part of it was that I realized that under no circumstances did I ever want to live in the Superdome. The other part was that I realized I didn't have any of the necessities for living through a natural disaster. Now that I've had a few days to consider, I present my list of must-haves for living through a catastrophe (ranked in order of priority).

1. Guns. Notice that's not singular, as you must have many, many guns. I say this for three reasons. First, what are you supposed to eat when you grow tired of Nutrigrain bars and pretzels? With a bunch of guns, your diet could include rat, raccoon, swamp rat, prarie dog, musk rat, and dump rat; tell me that wouldn't make a nice little buffet. Second, living through this ordeal would frustrate you; if you had guns, you could shoot up pumpkins and such to relieve the stress. Third, and most importantly, how else are you supposed to signal the rescuers without a bunch of very loud guns?

(If possible, your house should be like one of those old timey mansions where you pull on a candlestick and a wall spins around to show a safe. Except in this case, it'd be an enormous armory that's shown instead of a safe. Also, there'd be a ton of these secret candlesticks, as many as ten per room. (Make sure your kids don't know about these candlesticks.))

2. Water, obviously.

3. First aid kit. Nothing would be worse than going than a catastrophe than doing so with a sprained ankle or a head cold. Also, if you run out of food, eat the neosporin.

4. Mad libs. I don't care what you think, electricity will not be an option. With all of that time to kill, what will you do? Mad libs are not only fun, but they will keep your verbal skills sharp while awaiting your rescuers.

5. A blowtorch, obviously.

Are there any more? Probably so, but I wouldn't consider them necessities. No, only those five are the necessities; I stake my reputation as a survivalist on that.

Posted by Cody at September 13, 2005 6:32 PM