Act 3

(Husband gets up from chair and walks around the stage)

Husband: "What a beautiful sunny day! Saturday is here and my wife is three thousand miles away. It took me awhile to wake up this morning but I slept like a baby and feel recharged. Being a bachelor is pretty fantastic!

I mean, after thirty years of marriage, what can I say but I've been domesticated. I actually know how to clean a kitchen before going to bed at night and how to do my own laundry. I even know how to change my sheets and wash them.

I'll get into the nitty-gritty of my wife's and my irreconcilable differences in the next act, but right now, it's too beautiful a day for that. Time to get outside and enjoy this glorious day.

It's time to take a break from prepping and just be.

My wife won't let me be, tries to prevent me from stocking up on provisions for two main reasons. Reason #1 she thinks the world can never change. Reason #2 is the more tricky. It's a reason that I didn't understand until I decided to put my foot down
regarding prepping. When I was still in wimpy prep mode, buying a few extra cartons of organic rice or almond milk seemed like a big step. And it was. And the five extra packs of garbage bags and two six packs of toilet paper, that I caught hell for, seemed like a really big steps. And the year of toothbrushes for the whole family that I ordered on Amazon was a pretty swift move. I found a brand that has three replacement bristles with every toothbrush. I got those past my wife's radar without too much trouble. But the paper bowls that I bought for our kitty cat, they are bright white, almost like white neon and they stick out like a sore thumb. That's when I had to ask myself, 'Are you a man or a mouse? Hiding paper bowls in the house!' What would tough guys in the hood think about that?!

Ah, and then there are the seeds. The nitrogen-packed seeds in big plastic tubes. That's when TSHTF. I mean I'll take a little BS. But that's the whole point of this melodrama. Sometimes you have to please yourself. Yes, the synopsis of this play is simple: take a little BS, but there comes a time when you have to draw a line in the sand. When the smoke is drifting over your town and starting to drop ashes in your yard, you can't just stand there and do nothing and pretend that nothing is happening. You have an opportunity to be a man. What a blessing. Dare to take it!

Weaklings can't prep. And prepping cannot be done by a penny pincher. My wife,
God bless her, is like a Japanese housewife, she's an amazing bookkeeper. And this is why I am moving out. Buying an extra case of cat food, a few bags of rice just don't cut it. I didn't know it a month ago, but as soon as I got serious about prepping, I quickly learned that it takes a substantial amount of capital. Now tell me, just how am I going to get it past my 'Japanese accountant'? 'Oh, honey, I bought $3,000 or guns yesterday and another $1,000 of seeds.' Right. I mean, I would rather you just tie me to a post and give me twenty lashes. I can take that kind of abuse. But torture me verbally, morning, noon and night for buying twenty pounds of rice, and I am fighting back. I am going to click my heels together and feel the power. The power that I always had but never trusted.