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February 8th, 2012 
IW 
So it’s 2012. Wow. This year seemed so far away for so much of my life, now it’s here. It’s the year that the Mayan Calendar ends. And it’s also the year that a whole lot of smart asses expect to laugh one last time at the concerned folks they’ve branded Doomsday Preppers. They’re all ready to call it “the year that nothing happened” and the odds say they’re right.
I have to admit that a zombie apocalypse at the end of this year would be all too satisfying even if it meant a series of painful losses and a grizzly death for myself. As such I expect it won’t happen as well. Logic tells me that, and a long history of being right when I expect disappointment also tells me that. But something in my gut tells me we’re going to get hit out of left field with something we aren’t expecting. That, after all, is the meaning of apocalypse. Apocalypse means revealing. And that, to me, means high odds of a surprise. Nothing happening would not be a surprise to most, so my money is on the long shot.
A solar flare + CME big enough to take down the grid seems the most likely candidate for something astrological and cyclical that the Mayans might have been able to point to, but even that is sketchy, why pin it to an exact date? One answer is that the 21st of December is the date of highest probability but the actual event could come weeks or months in advance or post the event. That’s sloppy to me. The Mayan calendar has been legendary for its accurate prediction of eclipses for hundreds and hundreds of years. In my opinion a calendar of that precision wouldn’t F around with probabilities.
Beyond the solar flare / CME hypothesis I just don’t see anything that we mere Earth humans already know about, at least that we know about and accept in scientific circles that the Mayans could have been pointing to. However it doesn’t rule out something that modern science doesn’t know about or something that modern science has rejected for lack of explanations or measurability.
There are those among new world tribes (namely the Hopi) that claim that “the world” has been destroyed several times before, this even has precedent in the Western myths, an example being Atlantis / Thule and Noah’s flood in the Old Testament. How is the destruction of the world a cyclical and predictable phenomenon? For this I can conceive of two prominent possibilities. One is that physics itself changes the rules on us. We here on Earth are really just a baby step away from being stick swinging apes in the grand scheme of development as a sentient race. We only just learned to fly about a hundred years ago. Really we haven’t the foggiest idea of how the universe works. The “rules of physics” may be a hell of a lot less static than we’ve wagered. Perhaps there is a periodic changing of the rules that upsets everything we’ve built dependence upon. Imagine the possibilities, what if petroleum no longer was combustible? What if the viscosity of air changed? What if gravity became unstable and fluctuated? The point is that a LOT of things could happen that we have no way to predict or prepare for, and given all that we DON’T know about the universe, they’re just as possible as anything else. Likewise, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that perhaps the Mayans found a way to measure a cyclical changing of the rules that our modern science hasn’t yet identified. But don’t worry; I won’t go getting all metaphysical on you. We’ll leave it there for your own ponderings.
However, there is still the second conceivable possibility for a cyclical, predictable destruction of “the world”, whatever that means. This is the possibility that someone told the Mayans that they or someone or some thing else was coming back to Earth to shake the pillars again. As much as I hate risking any sort of association with that guy on the Ancient Aliens show with the crazy hair, to me, logic dictates that this is the most likely impetus for the destruction of the world on December 21 2012. The most likely way the Mayans could have known is that they were told.
Scientists, by the nature of probability and the shear immenseness of the universe, accept that there are many other civilizations out there and that many are likely far, far more advanced than we are. It’s even not all that unlikely that Earth has been visited before, and that possibility is seeming more and more probable every day as the hadron collider shatters the limits Einstein’s theories placed on our concept of what is possible in the universe, particularly concerning the limits of speed of travel.
Anyway, one could rant for hours about this, but there it is, the logic has spoken. If the Mayan long count has anything to do with a cyclical destruction of the world, logic dictates that the most likely way they knew was that they were told. This could mean an Alien race or it could mean humans that rose to prominence tens of thousands of years in the past, humans with biodegradable cities under the ocean that haven’t left a trace that our primitive scientists can yet detect, humans that left earth to our ancestors who couldn’t afford the boarding pass to the stars. Or something else. The possibilities are endless.
At this point all I can tell you is that it isn’t going to be a comet falling from the sky, it’s not going to be an earthquake and it’s not going to be a super volcano, though it might be something bigger than we can conceive that causes some or all of these to happen. What I know and what I feel most certainly is that IF something happens, you’re probably not going to be prepared for it even if you try because logic says it’s going to be WILD.
So put away some food and start an exercise regimen but give your existential muscles a pre-apocalypse work-out too, because if something does happen I argue that it will not only be harrowing but mind blowing as well.
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So you’ve stashed hundreds of pounds of rice and beans in preparation for this apocalypse, now you’ve got to eat it. 
Get a small casserole dish with a lid (8 or 9″ dish). If you don’t have a lid you can cover it tightly with foil once you’ve loaded the ingredients.
No matter what form the Apocalypse ends up taking, be it Mad Max zombie-rampage or slow tedious economic decline, one thing is for certain; trash will be everywhere.
So let’s try an exercise. Go outside look around, and every object you see, be it a rock, a piece of broken glass, a junked car, an old sofa or a dead animal, try to think of at least three different ways you could recycle that item. For example, a broken toaster could be fixed. It could be made into a mirror. The heating element could be removed and positioned between a high-temperature resistant insulator(maybe a flat stone or a piece of ceramic) and a conductor (maybe the metal wall of the toaster) to make a hot-plate. The possibilities are endless, especially if you are willing to make a small investment in equipment to form your own micro-recycling business.
Flash forward a few years. The Zombie Apocalypse has come and gone. And you are still alive. Surrounded by billions of rotting corpses, the barrel of your rifle still smoking.
Personally, I’m just going to say no to this task. No way in HELL am I going to chop up dead zombie corpses mix them with sawdust and woodchips (Which I’m going to have to haul in from somewhere, another problem), and worse STIR the bastards periodically!!!! No WAY!
Pop a hatchet into the spine of your dearly deceased flesh eating family to break the rigor mortis that has set in. This will allow you to fold them in half and drop them ass first into your barrel. 
setting the stove pipe on top of this hole to create a draught. That is a chimney affect that will increase the speed and intensity of combustion.
Now you simply mix the material into the soil. 10% by mass is generally considered to be the optimal level of biochar to soil. That’s a little tricky to figure out since the charcoal is so light, but if you go by volume, i.e. bucketful or so. A mixture of 1/3 biochar. 1/3 regular compost and 1/3 native soil will likely make for some rich gardening dirt.
So now that the end is here and it is just a matter of time before we have to start REALLY taking care of ourselves nutritionally it is high time that we take a look at the old world problem that plagued the isolated during seiges and long ship voyages. Scurvy! Yep, that debilitating condition caused by a lack of vitamin C.
Yup, cabbage is a bearer of vitamin C, but the problem, of course, is preservation. How are we going to keep cabbage from rotting through a long northern winter? Sure we could try some elaborate root cellaring procedures, but for people of modest means this is a bit of a messy option, the learning curve is too steep. We could can it, but then the vitamin C would be largely destroyed by the heat and what good would that do us? There is of course another way, and millions of people have been using it for thousands of years. Similar to the Limes and the Limeys this also gave birth to another nickname.
There are few things in this world more satisfying than endevoring to make something yourself and succeeding. This is one of those things that is immensely rewarding and hard to screw up. A good skill to learn now so you have something to contribute to the post zombie apocalypse world and perhaps a gateway drug to the world of local or even self sufficiency.
More often than not when we need to survive out in the woods we’re already in a bind. It’s getting dark, we’re injured, cold, scared, tired and there is never enough time. Bushcraft skills can save your life, but most people who practice them do so under ideal conditions, good dry warm summer weather with plenty of daylight to burn. Rarely do we test ourselves with realistic scenarios. Hell, rarely do we test ourselves with any sort of handicap at all. So a few weeks ago I decided to do something about this.
food, water and shelter basics of course. Have you ever had major dentistry work done or known somebody who has? Holy CRAP! Can you imagine going through that kind of pain without access to Novocaine? Better be proactive and not get the tooth decay in the first place. Flossing is arguably more important than brushing, but flossing right before you brush is, I believe, the best practice so that the tooth toughening flouride can get into the crevices where the food bits like to hide and start the decay.
