When Life Pisses in Your CHEERIOS — Get Yourself Some Water Goddammit!

Every survival article starts with water. You know why? Because you are dead without it, stupid. Three days. Seventy-two hours and your kidneys say "to hell with this" and your brain turns to soup. Deader than my marriage. Deader than Dale Earnhardt, rest his soul, greatest driver who ever lived, and I will throw hands with any sumbitch who says otherwise, bad knees and all.

Water beats everything. More important than food. More important than ammo, and brother I have a bumper sticker that makes my position on the Second Amendment very clear, so you know I don't say that lightly. And here's the one that should hit you in the gut: beats diesel fuel too. I have cried, real tears, at a Pilot Flying J watching diesel prices. God bless Pilot Flying J. If they ran the government this country would work. Instead we got dipshits in suits who couldn't find their own ass with both hands and a headlamp.

I know about dehydration because I nearly died from it in a truck stop bathroom outside Kearney, Nebraska on a Tuesday in August 2011. Not a dramatic situation. Not some wild act of God. A parking lot. A cook named Darryl. A six-dollar chicken fried steak I could smell from the parking lot and ordered anyway because I am a man with an optimistic relationship with his own stomach and poor judgment about independent diners.

I stopped at some pissant little diner off I-80, not a Pilot Flying J, and I need to be real clear that Pilot Flying J has never once done me wrong. This was some other place with a hand-lettered sign and a menu laminated so many times over the decades it was mostly laminate with faint menu-shaped ghosts underneath. The six-dollar special. Steak fried in what I believe was the same oil since the Clinton administration, gravy from a caulk gun, mashed potatoes that had given up on themselves, and a dinner roll you could've patched a drywall hole with. Fine. That's I-80 Nebraska. You shut your mouth and eat.

About ninety minutes back on the road, my insides filed formal paperwork. Not a complaint. A full goddamn mutiny. Every organ below my belt decided simultaneously that conditions were unacceptable and they were all walking off the job at once. I made it to a rest area. I stayed there for forty-eight hours. The sleeper cab bathroom is approximately the size of a coat closet someone welded to a diesel engine as a punishment. Under normal conditions it smells like synthetic regret and recycled air. These were not normal conditions. What happened in that bathroom over the next two days is between me, Darryl's legacy, and the Nebraska Department of Transportation, and I will take it to my grave.

I had two sixteen-ounce bottles of Aquafina. One I drank. The other I used for... logistics. The full details of how I repurposed that second bottle will never appear in print as long as I am breathing, and if Brenda is reading this, that means you specifically, especially you, almost entirely you, and we are never discussing it.

By hour thirty-six I was in genuine trouble. Mouth like the inside of a work boot left in a hot car. Head splitting in a way that went past headache into something structural, like my skull was reconsidering the whole arrangement. Heart doing fast, weird, unasked-for shit. I made deals with God: the rent situation with Brenda, stopping calling Gary a dipshit, the truck, all of it. God and I both understood those were negotiating positions and not real commitments and He bailed me out anyway. I hallucinated Dale Earnhardt standing at my front bumper with his arms crossed, looking at me like I was the stupidest living creature he'd ever seen. Dale didn't say anything helpful. He just shook his head and walked off, and that's when I understood the situation had gotten genuinely bad.

A trucker named Big Hoss from Tulsa knocked on my cab door because, and these are his exact words, I was making sounds like "a coon dog that ate a June bug and was real sorry about it." Big Hoss handed me a gallon jug and two orange Gatorades, warm as bathwater, and stood outside while I sat in that parking lot and ugly-cried for twenty minutes like a man who'd just been pulled back from something, which I genuinely had been. I owe Big Hoss forty dollars. He knows. I know. Some debts you just carry.

One gallon of water per person per day. That is THE number. Four people, two weeks, fifty-six gallons minimum. Write it on your hand. Tell your dog. Tattoo it on your ass for all I care. I don't give a single solitary damn how you remember it. Just remember it or die thirsty, your choice, I'm not your mother.

I got water stashed all over hell and half of Georgia at this point. Water in the Econoline. Water in the shed out back, right next to the tools I keep promising Brenda's daddy Jack I'm going to use. Jack hates me. Let me be clear about that. That man looks at me the way a dog looks at a bathtub. He knows I don't pay rent. He knows about the truck. The tools have been waiting since 2019. Jack, I'm getting to it.

There's water under Brenda's bed. Fourteen bottles. She don't know about those. If she's reading this: surprise, sweetheart. Don't be mad. It could save your life. She's definitely going to be mad. Worth it.

And there's water in the F-150. Thirty-two bottles in the cab. Twelve more in the bed underneath the volunteer trees. That truck everybody wants towed to the scrapyard? She is a supply depot. When the water supply goes to hell and you're all running around like wet cats, Bobby Pinkeye is going to be on the porch with enough water to last till spring. And I might share. MIGHT. Depends on whether you signed that petition.

Pond water, creek water, your neighbor's above-ground pool that's been growing something with real ambitions since the Obama administration. You cannot drink it straight. You will get things living inside you that will do to your insides exactly what Darryl's chicken fried steak did to mine, and I promise you will not handle it with the quiet dignity and creative improvisation I brought to that Nebraska rest area.

Boil it. Rolling boil, sixty seconds. Everything that had plans to kill you is dead. Above six thousand feet, go three minutes because altitude does some nerdy shit to the boiling point I don't fully understand. I trust the nerds completely. God bless every last nerd on this earth.

Bleach. Plain unscented Clorox. Eight drops per gallon if the water's clear. Sixteen drops if it's cloudy or you fished a dead something out before you scooped it, which has happened to me, and I don't want to say more about it. Stir it, wait thirty minutes, drink it. Tastes like a YMCA locker room. You're alive. Shut up and drink. I once drank radiator runoff in a Walmart parking lot in Tulsa because that was my option at that particular moment. Bleach water is a goddamn vacation by comparison. Do not drink radiator runoff. That is the one piece of free advice I give without conditions.

Get a real filter. Not a Brita. A Brita is a toy. I'm talking a Sawyer Squeeze, a LifeStraw, a Berkey that looks like R2-D2 let himself go after a bad breakup. Something that actually kills what's in there. The one thing no filter can touch is the expression on Brenda's daddy Jack's face when I come downstairs and eat his eggs every morning without asking. That requires either extensive therapy or a complete and total shamelessness. I chose option two approximately four years ago. Zero regrets.

Most people are dumber than a bag of wet hair. I say that with love. The point is: your hot water heater is sitting there right now with forty to eighty gallons of drinkable water in it and you didn't even know it. Turn the power or gas off first. Dying in an explosion is embarrassing, stupid, and permanent. Open the drain valve at the bottom. Boom. Up to four weeks of drinking water you already paid for.

If you blow yourself up because you forgot to turn off the power, that's Darwinism doing its job. I'll feel a little bad. Mostly I'll be annoyed you didn't listen.

Some states have laws against collecting rainwater off your own roof into your own bucket on your own property. The sky. THE SKY. God's water. Free water from clouds that aren't owned by anybody. And some jackass in a government cubicle who probably couldn't change a tire decided that is illegal. That is the single dumbest thing the government has ever done and they have done some genuinely spectacular stupid things.

In Ohio you CAN collect rain, thank the sweet baby Jesus, because if you couldn't I woulda snapped a long time ago. Set up your gutters, run 'em into barrels, filter what you collect. God made it fall for free. Any government that has opinions otherwise can go directly to hell.

Now I gotta address the 1985 Ford F-150 sitting in Brenda's driveway. Seventh generation, straight six, two-tone brown and tan. Has not run since 2005. I do not want to hear one goddamn word about it. She'll run again. I'm getting to it.

Thirty-seven people signed a petition. In a town of fourteen hundred. "Eyesore," they called it, in a town where the hardware store has had a Reagan campaign poster in the window since 1984 and not one soul has said a word. But Bobby Pinkeye's truck is the great civic emergency of our time. You know what those thirty-seven people can do with their opinion? You're smart enough to figure it out from context. Gary, you are not.

Gary is the mayor. I call him Mayor Dipshit in open company. Fourteen official government letters. Fourteen. On municipal letterhead. "Mr. Butts, the town council has received complaints." Gary, when I was sixteen years old I built my high school's football stadium with a John Deere tractor and a disc plow because nobody else had the guts to do it. Coach Dempsey watched me grade that whole field and said, "Bobby, you're the only kid I got who ain't completely useless." That is CHARACTER, Gary. You write me a fifteenth letter and I will read it out loud at the diner and use it as a napkin.

You know what's in that "eyesore" right now? Thirty-two bottles of water in the cab. Twelve more in the bed, under the volunteer trees growing up through the cargo floor, which I consider nature personally co-signing my lifestyle. When this town's water main gives out, and it WILL, that infrastructure is older than I am and held together with corrosion and wishful thinking. Every one of those thirty-seven petition-signing turkeys is going to come shuffling up Brenda's driveway with their hats in their hands. I might share my water. MIGHT. Depends entirely on the sincerity of the apology. I've memorized every name on that list. Ask Gary.

Some of you from around town are reading this going, "Bobby, ain't you the one who hit fifty grand on a scratch-off?" I do not know what you are talking about. I buy scratch-offs at the gas station like a normal American. Most of them don't hit. Whatever the IRS may or may not be sniffing around is a private matter and I will not be elaborating. Whatever Brenda thinks she knows, she doesn't. My face is red right now but it's because I'm angry. Just anger. Plain regular anger. We are done with this topic forever.

The Data Dive Bar boys tell me I'm writing more of these. Food, shelter, security, first aid. It's gonna be a hell of a ride.

Until next time, don't let nobody piss in your Cheerios.