You don’t need us to tell you society is coming apart. What you do need us for is a little help in figuring out your pre-apocalyptic to-do list.
1) Oh, what the hell: Vote.
2) The five words you’ve been waiting a lifetime to hear: Eat. Your. Weight. In. Sushi. (Your weight in sake is also recommended.)
3) Do the Bond thing at a casino. You know. Tuxedo. High-limits room. Beautiful women. No fanny packs or T-shirts or 12x zoom cameras. Maybe you pay some goon—and if the world is about to end they shouldn’t be too hard to find—to beat you up if you lose, because this is no time to skimp on the attention to detail.
4)
See Fellini’s La Dolce Vita October 21 in the Clark County Library’s main theater. Because this film about a superficial, pleasure-seeking journalist—hey, that could be us!—questioning the meaning and morality of his life as he “encounters prostitutes, buxom actresses, religious fervor and personal tragedy”—hey, that is us!—is great art. And great art has a soothing, curative effect during hard times.
5) Consider this while standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon: It took more than 900 million years for this canyon to develop. The geologist speaking to a bunch of gray-headed tourists behind you, surely spending up their retirement money before it evaporates, says that from this vantage point, looking at the strata, he can see solid evidence of at least 12 times that the ocean covered this spot and, 10 or 20 million years later, receded. That’s right. The ocean came in, stayed for 10 or 20 million years and left. Puts the end of our civilization, our tiny speck of dust in the universe’s timeline, in perspective! So stop worrying!
6) Bumblingly fail to grasp the depth of America’s economic despair during a nationally televised debate.
7) Get away from it all. We were thinking maybe Antarctica, until we remembered it won’t be there much longer.
8) Create art. Preferably a situation/installation thing, or perhaps guerrilla performance art on the Strip. Bonus points if it involves either a gorilla suit or a gorilla.
9) This is the year to spend an inordinately long time pondering what to wear for Halloween.
Are you kidding me? I'm going to reprise snow white and the 7 (as i do have 7 this year) dwarfs for the 10th year in a row!10) Oh, what the hell: Help someone.
Help a dog, their more appreciative, unless its a friend, then go ahead and help them.11) Cancel your health insurance, jump out of a plane over China, heli-ski in Switzerland, scuba in the Pacific, ride the wild tiger in the Serengeti, hook up at 4 a.m. in Body English. If not now, when?
Ok so if I cancel my health insurance, I won't have the nerve to do this, ya know, without the pills.12) Help someone else.
Adopt a pig13) Margaritas for everyone at La Salsa, big spender.
or splurge and have a neiborhood party with boxed wine, really big spender14) Streak!
did that yesterday, thanks to the wind. Hope you guys driving on St. Rose enjoyed it15)
Spend “an evening with Neil Gaiman” on November 6 at the Clark County Library. Fantasy novelist and comic-book writer Gaiman has written about enough secret civilizations and alternate worlds that he probably has a pretty good idea of what to do in the event of global collapse. Hear his keynote address to open this year’s Vegas Valley Book Festival, and then ask him afterward how to escape to Faerie when the stock market implodes.
16) Recite Walt Whitman aloud in a meeting, from tabletop, without irony, before renouncing capitalism and skipping out the door.
17) Tap on the glass at the shark exhibit.
18) Refer to your boss as “that one.”
19)
On November 4: Rise Against (at House of Blues), yes;
Danzig (at the Joint), no. What makes a better election afterparty as the markets tremble, your home value slides and education remains poorly funded—the anti-Bush punk of Rise Against or the gloom-metal of Danzig? That question answers itself.
20) Adopt all of the animals in some run-down shelter and provide them with a good home, perhaps in a casino, or at Michael Jackson’s house.
21) Adopt all of Michael Jackson’s children and provide them with a good home, perhaps in a casino, or an animal shelter.
22) On November 7:
George Lopez at the Hilton, yes; on November 8:
Madonna at the MGM Grand Garden, no. This is a time of hard choices, after all.
23) Go an entire week with no media intake. Think of it as practice for whatever primitive society awaits us on the other side of this economic crisis, a post-oil, water-scarce, globally warmed world in which your Blackberry will be useful primarily as a projectile.
Does this mean a week off of work? Really?24) That copy of Infinite Jest you’ve been promising yourself you’d get to eventually, because it’s the best exploration of the dissolution of the self in our postmodern infoverse? You can be honest with yourself now.
25) Bet your 401(k) on black. Hey, a year ago this would have been the most ridiculous idea ever proposed, but we’re willing to bet there’s more than a few Americans who just looked at their retirement-account statement who right now would be willing to take that bet. Bailout or no bailout, does the market really offer better odds? So let it ride!
26) If your 401(k) is now empty, take out a huge marker from the casino of your choice and bet that all on black. Or on the Arizona Cardinals, whichever seems like the riskier long shot.
27) Watch every season of 24, in real time, consecutively.
28) Swim in a lake in Banff.
29) Beat the hell out of the bully.
30) Live a month like Thoreau on Walden. (Tip: Best not attempted at Lake Mead.)
31) Reflect on your home purchase, and appreciate the absurdity of the moment you decided that paying that amount with those loan conditions was a good idea. Funny stuff! Mencken said it best: Stay delicately and unceasingly amused.
32) Get hypnotized by a Strip hypnotist.
If you can’t suddenly peck the ground like a chicken every time someone inadvertently says the trigger word now that everything is falling apart, when can you?
33) Oh, what the hell: Take the fire exit. The one over the wing.
34) Latch onto the bright sides available to you: Not only is the NFL carrying on in times of national woe, thank God, but the Cardinals also beat the britches off of the 4-0 Bills. And CityCenter is still forging ahead. And we will (likely) elect the first African-American president. And we’re discovering wind energy through a new device called a windmill and have a hunch that the big fiery ball in the sky could give off power. And no matter how bad UNLV tanks the rest of the season, they beat ASU, remember that. And Roy celebrated another birthday! And fall has brought another gorgeous day. And chocolate still tastes great.
35) Oh, what the hell: Start smoking.
36) Actually do
what your horoscope prescribes. Do something for yourself? Don’t be afraid to spend money? Woo-hoo! Wait, what? There’s no money left to spend? Shit! Why don’t we ever get the horoscope that tells us to take a day off work and make up some excuse?
37) Hunt the mighty caribou. We’ve never been one to own a gun (you know, the accidental shootiness of the whole thing), and the thought of slaughtering an animal for sport strikes us as what we will now forever refer to as Palinesque. But since it seems good enough to get you selected as a running mate, what the hell? We now want to know what it’s like to wage that great battle of man vs. beast. Actually, more like man with large gun shooting from the safety of airborne vehicle vs. beast. Just as Darwin intended!
38). With what’s left of your retirement account, reserve a spot at Robert Bigelow’s space hotel. A patio suite with a hot tub and interstellar view. The future awaits!
39) Stage a protest at your local university. It’s on the list of all those wild and crazy things you didn’t do when you were wild and crazy. Lock yourself in the president’s office. Demand free speech. Civil rights. Divestiture from Sudan. More snack-bar options.
40) Start driving a cab. As civilization breaks down, cab drivers are sure to be in demand—racing people suddenly deprived of their cars from one end of town to the other. The ideal front-row seat for the Final Days.
41) Hang upside down from David Blaine.
42) Oh, what the hell: Rappel down the side of Hoover Dam. If not now, when? If not you, who?
) See Bodies: The Exhibit at Luxor. That skinned body? That’ll be you, if this recession gets much deeper.
44) Rent all end-of-the-world movies … to see which ones are truest to life. Mad Max? Or Waterworld?
45) Get drunk with Oscar Goodman. Maybe not a one-on-one affair—maybe a citywide Day of Imbibing at Cashman, with Oscar leading the way.
46) Love that your mayor is featured in Heeb magazine as the best potential for the first Jewish president; Lieberman be damned. Roll on, Sin City. Mazel Tov!
47) Consider Canada.
48) Vote again if you can. (If you aren’t registered, you have until October 14, although you’ll have to go to the election department in person to do it. See
accessclarkcounty.com for details.)
49) Persevere. Hey, your grandparents, or great-grandparents, or distant ancestors made it through the Depression, only to see decades of ebullient growth ahead. They stuck it out in the Dust Bowl, sheltering their hovels and dry eyeballs from sandstorms with sheets over the windows. They stood in line for soup and bread and took it home uphill in the snow to their starving babies. They hopscotched from town to town on freight trains looking for work—any work. What makes us think we can give up because our McMansion might be foreclosed or we can’t afford gas for the SUV?
50) Wander the Strip with a sign proclaiming “The world is ending.” Because, finally, it might be true.
I gathered my ingredients and set to work ... determined to beat the odds and bake a damn good red velvet cupcake, one that would make Paula cry, Martha fall to her knees and best of all my daddy praise the Lord ... (I come by my red velvet lovin' honestly y'all)!
The result: The happiest damn African you'll ever see, speaking the sweetest words I've ever heard, "It's better than The Cupcakery!"
