Learning Day: Walt Builds a Family Fallout Shelter (Patreon)

So you’re thinking of dying in an impending nuclear holocaust—Not so fast! When you die of radiation, you leave America two hands weaker to HALT THE RUSSKIES. That’s why I took it upon myself to review Civil Defense Department films on avoiding fallout, which I will sum up for you now as: nightmarish.

In “Walt Builds a Family Fallout Shelter,” we meet Walt through his neighbors, who have come over solely to view a 10’ x 10’ doom room in a basement. “This shelter is a real good idea!” Walt tells Helen and her unnamed husband, “My wife Ruth is still alive around here somewhere,” but the lie rings hollow.

Through subtle suggestion, he gently guides the younger folks into preparing to die in what will by then be relative comfort. The couple is impressed! Husband says building a shelter of his own is appealing, since he needs a darkroom for an unspecified personal photography project.

Yes, the fallout shelter has many other uses if you don’t mind tripping over the last meals you will ever eat. Here are all of them:

Helen suggests that when guests visit, Walt put them in the extra-dark, airless corner of his basement made especially for the death of all that is. In view of that, explaining what the 5-gallon bucket in the corner is for will be a spark of levity. Weekends at Walt’s aren’t grim so much as the lighter shade of gray despair that lies beyond acceptance.

Walt plans to board his grandchildren here once they’re born [if his children aren’t first sterilized by fallout]. Kids just love whispering ghost stories to each other of how one day Gam-gam and Pop-Pop will die in this very bunkbed. You know the old nursery song: “Here, and here, and here, shalt our elders clutch in fear, two bodies becoming one, a puddle of electromagnetically toxic goo, what fun, sing hey-nonny-ripplet-fa-DOOM!” Good times for the kiddies. Good times.

Walt figures he spent a few evenings and a couple weekends building his tabernacle of hopelessness. Two weekends! This is a lot of work. I get three hours’ notice when the birds are in the air, I’m just going to drive to my local concrete & block producer, and squat down in the warehouse. Easy!

Plus it’s easy to befriend a concrete warehouse guy to let you prep a shelter in advance. You just ask him to hide all your beef jerky on a pallet, and pay him in as much jerky as he wants to eat. You’ll get it all back when it’s still not safe to go out three months later, and you slay him for his meat.

Or a pool! You could spend two weekends building a pool and just have a sweet conceptual glass bachelor pad at the bottom. Water’s a great insulator against radiation, plus it lets the sun in. You’ll never look at the sun the same again. In fact, you can’t! Not through the holes fucked into the ozone layer by a 20-mile-high mushroom cloud, anyway.

Most of the video is just Walt providing sensible and informative advice on how to build a small shed that you will die cursing God in. Like he says to be generous with your mortar; he slaps it on so thickly it oozes out of his cinder wall like muscle softly slipping from tibia and fibula to pile wetly in the stretched skin of your ankles.

(Don’t get offended by these jokes. As a future victim of nuclear holocaust I’m allowed to make them without punching down.)

But after some straight talk about using dense materials that block radiation, the dopey old guy adds air vents to his design! Wait, what now? Is there a minimum height requirement on electromagnetic waves?

Obviously not, because Walt doesn’t use mortar in the ceiling blocks. In his world, a photon acts like a particle and a wave and a respectable house guest who enters through the front door to knock the electrons right out of you for sleeping with its wife Helen.

Frankly, I’m way less interested in what Walt builds than all the stuff he left out. Everything you’d expect to find in a nuclear shelter is absent here:

Without these items, Walt and Ruth are at risk for a number of threats that aren’t radiation poisoning. Fear and madness, starvation, marauders, and the prevalent STDs running through our nation’s bunker-orgy community menace Walt and his definitely-alive wife. You can mix all the Valhalla 8-balls you want (that’s a pill parade of meth, Viagra, and cyanide), but they’re no fun if the mutants already stole off with your bunker buddies.

If they can survive these existential threats for the two weeks it takes fallout to blow off, a paradise awaits them! Walt will have free use of his neighbor’s lawnmower if the grass ever grows again. Best of all, he may finally have a shot with the widow Helen if it’s necessary to restart the human race and she ever stops crying. As their mournful gyrations beat a cruelly hollow affirmation of life in a world without hope, odds are fairly low that their skin will slough off just yet.

And if for some weird reason the fallout lingers, a lifetime supply supply of Hormel (three months) awaits the hero resolute enough to bludgeon his family for it.

Will whoever’s whistling please st—

Wake up, Dweller in the Darkroom. You have been committing thoughtcrime again by dreaming of The Pre-Shelter Age. Deleting scratch file from your personal information processor.

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Loading retraining module.

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Congratulations! You have survived The Shelter Age and have been chosen to join The Knights of the Transistor! As preparation for your sojourn into Meatworld, here is a recap of our recent history, and if we have time, some recipes for locust stew.

As the plenty of the 20th century petered out in the 21st, war became inevitable, and even desirable as for the good of the economy. A decentralized network of shelters was established to house our nation’s suspicious widowers and hobbyist photographers and their living wives.

Alas, these shelters quickly became boredom-fear fuckpods as the bombs began to fall like lover’s kisses on the naked Earth:

Unfortunately, their shelves were drastically understocked with birth control, because it is a sin. Women soon bore the fruits of their lusty couplings with men who wouldn’t normally do this but were led into temptation by the existence of breasts and thighs, how dare you?

This, in turn, led to rapid shortages of everything except canned prunes and barbecue sauce. The starving babies began the most obnoxious wailing in response.

Fortunately, both problems had a single solution.

After population had been restored to acceptable levels of the right people, a strong breed of man emerged to lead us back to the order we enjoyed in the golden age.

The new rulers commissioned the Knights of the Transistor to return to Meatworld for short supply runs and scan the burning metals of our world for useful supplies.

As a Knight of the Transistor, you will be granted monthly privileges for your labors:

You will be given the thickest rubber in the bunker to repel radiation.

You will scour the earth for its greatest treasures: munitions to win the forthcoming final battle against our ancient enemies!

No, not other nations. The one foe who always drags us into battle…

War. War never changes. It starts with the bastard who will profit from it telling pleasing lies to the people who will pay for it. It was you, Dweller! You started this war when you listened to him, instead of throwing him into the sea!

But this time you can end war forever. Stop fighting the foe beyond and turn your weapon on the one within. Kill your leaders, and together we will grow a new garden of Eden from the growlights in our shelter. What do you say, Dweller? You can borrow my lawnmower for both purposes.

Thanks to Renardo for the Vault Boy generator.

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Speaking of making bad decisions, Brendan’s tweeting again.

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