“I was drinking jasmine tea,
When the goon squad came for me.
It was all my drunken friends.
They kicked down my front door again.”

Twice I’ve packed and unpacked my bug-out bag.

“Let’s see here,” Jeff says through the phone. He embraces transcendentalist David Wilcox’s outlook and has yet to assemble his bag, though he says he intends to do so soon. “They’ve got poison in the water (fluoride). They’re spraying us (chemtrails). It’s in our food (aspartame, sodium benzoate, formaldehyde, hormones, insecticide).”

“They provide the toxins by which we voluntarily pollute our bodies,” I say. “And with the mass deception propaganda matrix enabled by modern communications technology, they provide the information by which we voluntarily pollute our minds and souls.”

“I think I’m with Wilcox,” Jeff, 911 Truth Movement activist and UFOlogist, says. He says the gig may not be to strive to survive, but to strive to ascend.

“If Wilcox is right,” I say, “the turbulence ahead may be more severe than it would be were he wrong.”

In my bug-out bag the New Testament rides atop a box containing 200 bullets. How paranoid are we?

Judging by the fact that we waited until this late in the game to prepare and the half-hearted rate at which we do it, I would say not as paranoid as the gubbermint, who has wasted no time or opportunity in turning this once quasi-free republic into a high tech corporate police state dystopia, complete with underground bunkers, space-aged surveillance, psychotronic radio wave MindWar and torture chambers. Why are they so afraid of us?