T. GAMBLE: Preparation for hurricanes starts with toilet paper

By the time you read this, I guess the hurricane will have landed in Florida and be headed to somewhere in Georgia. Jim Cantore will be stationed somewhere as well. I’d rather have Charles Manson as a houseguest than Jim the day before a hurricane is set to land. Imagine you’ve been living off the grid for a year or so and don’t know the hurricane is soon arriving.

“Jim, so good to see you on such short notice. Thanks for coming by.”

“Well, thank you, T., only gonna be here a day or so.”

“Aw, Jim, why are you staying only a day or so?”

“Oh, no, T., I’m staying a few days. I meant your home is only gonna be staying here for another day or so. “

Folks are boarding up windows and buying everything in sight in preparation for the impending storm. Maybe the best preparation would be to move somewhere not right next to an ocean, where hurricanes hit about twice a year. I don’t live on the edge of a volcano because I don’t particularly like molten lava running through my living room. Well, and also because I have no idea where an active volcano actually is located. But if I did, I would not live next to it. But, you know, that’s just me.

We build houses right up next to the Mississippi River and then scream about the tragedy when the river rises and floods the house. We go camping in a wilderness loaded with polar bears and then write a movie about the unexpected death of the guy who pitched his tent 20 feet from the bears’ mating site. If the government would allow it, somebody would build a hunting camp right beside Old Faithful at Yellowstone, I imagine.

People are rightfully terrified of these hurricanes, as am I. But I’m not worried about being blown away in a storm or my car being crushed by a tree. If it happens, it happens. No, I’m worried about more important things like running out of toilet paper, if things get really bad. I truly do not know how people survived prior to the invention of toilet paper. The guy that invented toilet paper should have a national park named after him as far as I am concerned. We have schools named after the man who invented peanut butter, and to my knowledge not one single thing is named for the toilet paper inventor. The shame of it all.

Instead, I doubt anybody even knows who he is. I can tell you right now, if we have an apocalypse other people will be off hoarding food. I’ll go straight to Walmart and loot every single roll of toilet paper, and I’ll fight like Davey Crockett at the Alamo to keep it.

I’m also worried that I will go down in my tornado shelter, the home will collapse and nobody will know I am trapped in the hole under it. Yes, I have a tornado shelter in my home. It came when I bought the place. The former owner probably watched too much “Wizard of Oz” and there you go, a tornado shelter under the hall closet. Folks will say, “I haven’t seen old man T. Gamble since the Hurricane hit a week ago. Sure is a shame about his house. His wife just had the rubble bulldozed in a pile right there and left town. You know she was out of town when the thing hit.”

Truth be told, I’d rather brave the storm than go down in the tornado shelter, which is really just a deep hole in the ground. It’s got spiders and bugs and God knows what else. I’ll brave this one above ground like I did the last one. But if this keeps happening, I’m moving further inland to maybe Utah. And I’m bringing my own toilet paper.