Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 11/12/21
Christmas Resistance Edition
It’s been a busy week here at the Apocalypse Bunker as the inevitable crush of holiday preparations is upon us, and everyone in the front office is scrambling to get events scheduled, excursions mapped, and provisions acquired in a timely manner. We have put a general call for assistance to the other departments, and Bunker Operations has kindly agreed to assist us with these tasks.
This now puts us in the awkward position of having to secure a “thank you” gift, in addition to the usual Interdepartmental Christmas Nut Log we send out, and to that end, we are vacillating between a new gas mask and a gallon jug of our world-famous homemade gin (back in production now that we have purchased a new 50-gallon hazardous waste drum to replace the old one that was partially dissolved by the last batch). Also, we are taking orders for any affiliate bunkers in the Texas-Oklahoma territories that would like a little extra Christmas cheer this year.
New Branding Update
The Design and Fabrication Division is pleased to report that the logos and department badges are shaping up nicely. We have been encouraged by the comments we received on the new logo and are moving the design into all levels of the Bunker’s bureaucracy structure, including but not limited to the Departments themselves, any Bureaus, Divisions and Agencies under each department, as well as all section badges from Field Assignments and Special Projects.
All inhabitants and staff in the N.T.A.B. will be assigned a corresponding badge to designate their department or bureau. Special project and field assignment badges will be handed out upon completion of tasks or missions. It’s important to display your proper credentials whenever you are inside the bunker to avoid confusion. Badges and patches may, of course, be displayed outside of the bunker, but we would urge all staffers to please refrain from revealing the location or even the existence of the bunker until after the holidays.
Below is a handy example of the upcoming changes to command structure. Your handbooks will be updated accordingly.
Update from the Bureau of Statistics
Also, in the category of “Minor Triumphs” we can add the following number from the boys in statistics: you may recall that I have a directive in place to do 5 things per day that fit under the large umbrella of “self-care.” If I do all 5 things, I get to cover my tracker with a sticker. At the beginning of the year, I took note of how many “good” days I had. Not sure why; it seemed important at the time. In any case, as of last week, I have had a half-year’s worth of good days. Roughly every other day since January first, if we are averaging it out.
YOGA NEWS
Having done yoga for all of four weeks, now, this makes me something of an expert and so, if you will allow me the indulgence, I’d like to make a few observations: Yoga is pretty easy. It’s also real damn hard. I remain fascinated with the idea something as simple as turning my foot 30 degrees to the right would suddenly cause all of the muscles in my inner thigh to scream in agony as they have apparently become atrophied to the point of ossification and this is the first real activity they have experienced in years. Then I remember that Steven Segal based his entire movie career around the concept of making small adjustments in the position of a stuntman’s elbow that would cause them to flip end over end and fly across the room in a graceful arc, so maybe I’m not too far off the mark, at that.
Yoga is evidentially all about hip flexibility. I’ve done more hip stretching in the last three weeks than I ever have before in my entire life. I wish this was an exaggeration. About half of what I am doing now is either stretching a thigh or moving something deep within the hip. Sure, it feels pretty good, but the side effect of all that pelvic expansion is that I have been farting in the midst of every session. A lot. And it’s all broccoli farts, too. I made the dog leave the room the other day, I’m not kidding. She looked at me with tears in her eyes as she sidled out of the room. Did you know dogs can hold their breath? I heard her exhale with a gasp as she stepped out into the hallway. I cannot imagine being in a class of full of 12 or more earnest, bright-eyed people doing this in my airspace.
Rhetorical question: Is there any place on Earth more farty than a yoga studio after a cobb salad lunch? It’s not the cows punching holes in the ozone; there’s a tear in the fabric of space and time over every yoga dojo in Portland Oregon, I am certain of it. That’s not steam coming out of the Hot Yoga Yurts. It’s chemical warfare.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Agency of Media Review
Finch (Apple TV)
Finch may be one of the last people on earth. He’s been methodically going through town, sector by sector, looking for stuff, and it appears his well has run dry. But he’s got a plan, working on a sophisticated robot to help him make the perilous journey cross country ahead of a violent storm.
If there is another app that delivers consistently with top tier talent and interesting content for the money it charges, I don’t know what it is. This movie wrecked me, baby. It broke me in two. Hanks is at his Tom Hanksiest, playing the thoughtful, likeable, quirky guy that he does so well. His dog is charming, and so is his robot buddy, and the reveals in the story are hardly surprising, but the emotional investment in the characters makes them seem fresh enough.
This is a Pinocchio story, right? That’s not a knock. It’s just that, well, there are a ton of parallels that are screamingly obvious even if you didn’t have AP English with Mrs. Forbis in high school (oh, the symbolism of it all!). The sci-fi aspects of the movie are refreshingly upbeat and prescient; I don’t know if this would have gone over as well without the proliferation of articles about Predictive A.I. and all those video of the creepy walking robots and dogbots that will obviously one day rise up and murder us all. This movie also features the best usage of Don McLean’s “American Pie” as a needle drop to date (better than the one in Black Widow), reclaiming it from both Weird Al and the cast of The Office, who reduced one of the greatest rock songs of the 20th century to a punchline. Finch is melancholy in the best of ways, generating sadness and hope in equal quantities.
Dopesick (Hulu)
This mini-series makes it very clear that it’s “inspired” by “the true story of how America got hooked on a lie.” If you haven’t heard about this show yet, it’s the story of the Sackler family and their introduction of Oxycontin into the modern world. In order to make the complicated, years long battle on multiple fronts easier to follow, characters are amalgamations of several people and events are compressed together to represent single incidents, when they are really widespread occurrences. You may not know someone who has been impacted by “the Opioid Crisis,” but you know what: I bet you do.
Hulu may be positioning itself as the go-to source for star-studded medical dramas and there is certainly no shortage of horror stories to make into mini-series. But Dopesick is a little more important than just another doctor performing unnecessary surgery and being protected by his insider’s club privilege. This is about how a family, from behind an army of attorneys and bolstered by a firewall of cash, made billions of dollars while intentionally selling a narcotic they knew to be extremely dangerous, and moreover, engineered it to be so.
Everyone in this show is a veteran actor, and there are no bad performances. Look at the poster; you probably see someone you know and like. No one phones it in, least of all, Rosario Dawson, who is one of our main POV characters and the one who most frequently speaks with the audiences’ voice. The show is about Oxy, and the way it was presented, and how the truth was obfuscated, and who did it, but make no mistake: this movie is about the rise of the corporation to be the dominant political power in this country. I would not be surprised if somewhere in the last episode or in the closing credits we are treated to the Mitt Romney soundbyte of him asserting that “Corporations are people,” a statement I find abhorrent for any number of reasons, starting with, you know, the way that Purdue Pharmaceutical instigated the Opioid Crisis in America and then took no responsibility for it. That’s monstrous. Soulless. Indolently evil. That’s not what people do.
Dopesick is good, if maddening, and I advise watching it if you can handle the frank portrayal of addiction that leads to character death, divorce, denial, and many other words that begin with the letter “D” such as depressing. The last episode is nigh, which means now is the perfect time to catch up.
I like the new logos! Since doing pilates I've been discovering what hip flexors are, and wow. My hips are now a lot more flexible, but I've had grandma knees since my early twenties and they continue to stiffly resist all entreaties.