Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss
March 13th, 2009I haven’t read Emergency yet, but HOLY COW, the entertainment value on this one should be worth the purchase price alone.
A previous Neil Strauss book, The Game, was about how to pick up women. So, while I doubt that John ‘lofty’ Wiseman has anything to worry about, Strauss seems pretty determined to learn about and understand baffling topics!
I read a few pages of Emergency online and Strauss is a guy that many of us can probably relate to (whether or not you need to read books about how to find someone to share your bed with you is a different matter). I was raised on a solid diet of bullshit. I was encouraged to spend many years learning things and getting degrees that were supposed to help me find jobs doing work in one cubicle or another. (My parents meant well.)
And now things aren’t looking so hot in cubicle land, or a lot of other places.
What to do?
Learn new skills that apply to the situation on the ground.
From Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life by Neil Strauss:
I can’t tell you the exact date along the way I lost faith in the system, because for me there were five of them, each chronicled in the section that follows. And over the course of this gradual awakening—which perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, covered the span of the Bush administration—I decided to equip myself with the tools necessary to survive whatever politics and history threw at me next.
By the time the Obama administration stepped in with a message of hope and change, it was too late to undo the damage. Because I now know that, even in America, anything can happen.
Preparing myself for hard times has been an incredibly challenging task, because some people were born tough. I wasn’t. My parents live on the forty-second floor of a seventy-two-story building in Chicago. They didn’t camp, hunt, farm, cook, or even fix things themselves.
As for learning skills after leaving home, I spent most of my adult life as a music writer for the New York Times, so I could tell you anything you wanted to know about rock and hip-hop, but nothing about growing food or building fires or defending yourself. In fact, I’d never even been in a fight in my life, though I had been mugged twice.
In short, if the system ever did break down, the only useful skill I really had was the ability to write about it. Perhaps, at best, I could talk someone with practical knowledge into helping me out. Or maybe they’d just mug me.
But that wouldn’t happen anymore. Today I can draw a holstered pistol in 1.5 seconds, aim at a target seven yards away, and shoot it twice in the heart. I can start a fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together. I can identify seven hundred types of foot prints when tracking animals and humans. I can survive in the wild with nothing but a knife and the clothes on my back. I can find water in the desert, extract drinkable fluids from the ocean, deliver a baby, fly a plane, pick locks, hot-wire cars, build homes, set traps, evade bounty hunters, suture a bullet wound, kill a man with my bare hands, and escape across the border with documents identifying me as the citizen of a small island republic.
When the shit hits the fan, you’re going to want to find me. And you’ll want to be doing whatever I’m doing. Because I’ve learned from the best.
You can call me crazy if you want.
Or you can listen to the story of the eight years it took to open my eyes, realize my country can’t protect me, and do something about it.
It just may save your life.
Reading The Game, there´s a fair bit about social engineering and mind control in there, though in a different context that what you´re used to. I´ll have to read the new one when it becomes available to me.
Well, if a pollyanna guy picks up the right doomer woman, *she* may be the most likely means of his saving his ass.
HA pookie, good point.