Planning for the Apocalypse

Every other week, my partner and I have what I call an “away game” date. As opposed to a “home game” when he comes over and spends the night, an “away game” is when we head out for a few hours after work (usually to a restaurant or bar) and …you know, have a date.

There’s a lot more talking that happens during an away game, since Tuesday nights aren’t particularly popular nights for dungeons to throw parties where we could do anything other than sip on a cocktail and talk in full dress.

With those precious few hours, we usually end up talking about a lot of things. Sometimes we’ll get into really in-depth conversations about the role of each of the people at the helm on the Enterprise or how shit works in a post-capitalistic world. Sometimes we talk about what the ideal kink scene might look like and how we’d organize it if we were in charge.

But lately, we’ve spent quite a number of our away games talking about preparing for and surviving the apocalypse.

I want to define what we mean by the “apocalypse.” It’s not a zombie apocalypse. As I told him last night, if we’re dealing with Zombies, just kill me. I really don’t want to exist in a world where the dead come back to eat your brains.

No, we’re talking about the likelihood that at some point, systems and governments will collapse and humanity goes into a free-for-all.

Maybe folks from our generation had too many post apocalyptic influences in our media entertainment, but it feels like a very real possibility that at some point in our lifetimes, the luxury of having services that deliver food to your door via mobile phone app connected to your paypal account, and corporations that produce two-ply toilet hypo-allergenic paper that you can pick up at the local grocery store with your rewards card are going to the things that future children will treat like fairy tales.

So we spend a lot of time half-joking and half-not joking about where we’re going to go, what supplies and skills we need to start collecting, and how we’re going to survive.

I think we’ve narrowed it down to a couple of different locations within the continental United States where the cost of living is currently affordable to the point where we can invest now and set up for the apocalypse to come. We even talk about what kind of work we can do in the pre-apocalypse economy to make sure we can continue paying the mortgage and taxes while there are still entities in place to collect them.

My google search history now also includes checking out what the kink scene looks like in these two smallish towns, ’cause we’re not quite willing to give up pre- OR post-apocalypse.

All of this is to say that while it’s still far away to be something to laugh at, internally I’m having a lot of anxiety about the future. Not like, tomorrow (that exists, but not to this degree) – but five years from now. Obviously we don’t know when shit will fall apart, we just really, really believe it eventually will.

After I got home last night and got in bed, this anxiety manifested in increased heart rate, fear of death, and hyperventilation. Coincidentally, these are the same things I feel after I’ve just finished cardio exercise, so while I had enough awareness to know that I wasn’t going to actually die, it was bringing up a lot of fear and discomfort and hindering me from falling asleep well past the time I knew it needed to happen.

I did what I do: I had Alexa play the Star Trek Engine Noise and practiced some mindful meditation to put it out of my head so I could calm myself down and get to sleep.

I remembered telling myself to “let it go” and it’s bringing up a lot of questions about the line between anxiety being a thing that holds me back from functioning or being the thing that drives me to be prepared for any crisis.

Anxiety isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s a thing that reminds me that “winging it” isn’t always an option.

It’s so annoying sometimes that the answer to everything is “balance.”