When foreclosure threatens your cave

We at the Puke have been well on top of capitalism's death spiral. We've advised you all to fortify your homes, purchase heavy arms and stockpile munitions and non-perishable foodstuffs for the inevitable mobs that will be running amok throughout the land as civilization crumbles under the weight of sub-prime loans and endless billion-dollar ponzi schemes. You don't have to prepare all at once. Little strokes, as they say. For example, every time the unemployment rate rises half a percentage point, buy a shotgun, dig another ten feet of trench, unwind another length of barbed wire or pile another truckful of sandbags around the perimeter. By the time the barbarians arrive, you'll have a veritable fortress. If you haven't been able to build a sufficient stronghold, you may want to read The Road for clues on how to get along as a traveling survivor in the aftermath of the coming calamity.

So, you might be thinking, what if I live in a cave? Well, caves happen to be ideal living quarters for post-civilizational homo sapiens. They're easy to defend, require little or no fortification, they're warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and the roving bands of mutants will have serious trouble sniffing you out with their newly evolved sense of smell, fine-tuned for the hunt.

Good, you say to yourself, I'll stay in my cave. But have you thought about the cost of maintaining your cave in the interim period when most of us are seriously conflicted over whether we should even bother paying our bills? After all, only dried meat, canned beans, and bullets will have value in the future. I would say don't pay your bills if you can avoid the authorities in the coming months, but this is harder done than I imagine.

Take Curt Sleeper and his family. Eerily appropriate, you might say, that a group of Sleepers dwell in a cave. But they are foolishly giving up their cave to avoid foreclosure, worrying about such meaningless things as 'home equity.' Ask the mutants what they think of your home equity. They'll just flap their gills with laughter and then strangle you with their bungee-like tongues. The only thing Curt should be worrying about is the thickness of his walls (which, in this case, at 50 ft, is ample), but he instead decided to put the cave up on eBay. The Sleeper Family had seemed perfectly positioned for disaster, and then Curt goes and makes a boneheaded move like this just before the jaunt of civilization comes to an abrupt end.

Well, don't follow in Curt Sleeper's folly. You keep your cave and shoot anybody who even comes close to the entrance, foreclosure be damned. Just don't give up that cave.