And Now, The End Is Near . . .

. . . Or it certainly feels that way, every day, to more and more of us. DWIGHT GARNER confesses his APOCALYPTIC fugue state.

There’s a terrific scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove in which Major T. J. “King” Kong, played by Slim Pickens, announces the contents of his pilot’s postnuclear survival kits. There are guns and ammo and rations in there, he tells his men, and antibiotics. Then he gets to the good stuff: “Morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings.” He pauses and then comments, “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”

These days, a survival kit is called a bug-out bag, or a BOB. A good one is supposed to keep you alive, out on the road, like the grizzled father and son in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, for at least seventy-two hours. There’s a whole industry devoted to telling you what to put in yours: ham radios, fire starters, water filters, high-end slingshots. Nothing, certainly, that will help you have a good weekend in Vegas. If you’re not the DIY type, you can buy an excellent ready-made BOB on Amazon for as much as a thousand dollars. At those prices, I’d also want aromatic gin to be included, as well as a magnum of Armand de Brignac and a handful of cyanide capsules for, worst-case scenario, crunching between my molars.