A wise band once said "It is better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven't done." I have always believed that is pretty good advice, unless of course you are speaking of something that caused you to contract herpes or brought about a particularly painful, slow death without any glory. But, for the most part, it's good to do things.
When my friend Rett first approached us about this bunker he was building, my first response was to simply laugh it off. "You know how Rett is," I told myself, "always doing things." But the odd thing about this one was that the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense. What if the world was actually perched on the brink of the Apocalypse? Maybe there really was something to the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Superstorm Sandy (seriously....Super Storms? What the hell?) hammers the Northeast. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Mass shootings. Terrorist attacks. The economy was deep in the crapper. The Middle East, of course, was in constant turmoil - it seemed like only matter of time before the lid would completely blow off that one. Hell, one of the biggest news stories of 2012 was about the cover-up of a completely unrepentant child molester at Penn State who didn't even have the decency to just kill himself once he got caught. Damn, Humanity, you've GOT to do better than that. And to top it all off, as comedian Duncan Trussell pointed out so eloquently, our choices in the 2012 election were a man who kills innocent people with remote controlled airplanes and a man who believes in the power of magic underwear.
So you can see why TJ and I started to believe what Rett was saying. Also, he is quite handsome (at least to most of his male friends), and that tends to go a long way when one is trying to make a logical point. And so, after a lot of planning, digging, building, securing, and hoarding, in December of 2012, we decided that we would enter the bunker and seal it shut.
Sadly, Rett's powers of persuasion did not seem to have an effect on any female that he spoke to. No matter - we would press on without them and hope that some females would make it through to the other side of the end of the world. We would force no one to enter The Bunker, because we all agreed that that would have been a REALLY awkward conversation to have with a lady if the end had turned out to not actually be nigh. We felt that a kidnapping rap might be pretty hard to beat, and Rett was not willing to press his luck with the legal system again.
Food, water, booze, weaponry, books, computers, A/V equipment, pornography - all was stockpiled in The Bunker. All went according to Rett's plan. Some of his plans seemed quite odd, and questions were often asked: Do you think that this is enough alcohol? Do we really need that much mayonnaise? Why does Rett always get the final word on the porn? Because I am REALLY not into most of that stuff he brought. I'm not even sure what some of it means... We stocked up on music, podcasts, and documentary films to occupy our time. We made sure we had enough gas to run the generators for at least a year.
And so, on December 20, 2012, after one last attempt to convince them, we bid farewell to our less-prepared loved ones, we gathered up the last of our belongings, and we went underground...