Just... what? While a million typewriting monkeys could very well eventually write Shakespeare, I question whether any amount of monkeys, using whatever writing implements they desire, with an infinite supply of LSD could not come up with this title, this cover, or even this book. You've got a UFC Fighter, as famous for his clever silliness as he is for his exciting brain-punching fights, writing a book that has pushed his tongue so far into the cheek that it has broken through the skin, resulting in a tongue-out-of-cheek experience.
As unsure as we are exactly what this book is, Forrest Griffin (and co-author Erich Krauss who gets substantially more in-text credit than he did during their previous collaboration with Got Fight: The 50 Zen Principles of Hand-to-Face Combat) is all that much more confused. Sometimes he is just talking nonsense, being extremely candid about his self-conscious insistence that no one in their right mind should be reading anything he says. Other times, he is so earnest in his suggestions for how to survive the Apocalypse, that you wonder whether you too should be planning an escape route to a secret, remote cabin and/or bomb shelter, stashing ammo and non-perishable food items along the way. And later, toward the end, he even lets things get personal, talking about childhood events and a rediscovery of faith that have shaped the person and the narrator behind this messy mash-up of a survival guide.
Got Fight worked as a memoir because it was a humourous recounting of Griffin's life, as well as a pseudo-how-to guide for manliness. There were also some legitimate self-defense and fighting tips. Even in these instructive sections, he would still go for toilet humour punchlines as soon as they presented themselves. In Be Ready When The Sh*t Goes Down, however, things are never quite so well-grounded. In one chapter, you're learning about how to best suit up your vehicle for a post-Apocalyptic environment, and before you know it, you're reading about fellating a giant wolf during Ragnarok. The book goes to some pretty weird places, and even Forrest and Erich seem unsure as to just how much of it you should be taking seriously.
More than laughing out loud at how funny the book is, you're laughing uncomfortably because you're wondering what's wrong (or possibly what's so incredibly right) with Forrest Griffin. As the quote on the back, attributed to Forrest's Mom states, "This book is an unholy abomination. It will make you dumber for having read it. Judging by the content you would think he grew up eating paint chips. I swear that wasn't the case." It wouldn't even occur to me to consider which animals could be milked should the cows run out once the world ends, but Forrest did, and we've got three or four pages of cost-benefit analysis of the different lactic offerings of various members of the animal kingdom. Going balls out like that, all the time, you're sometimes going to stumble upon some gems (like suggesting that the appropriate way to milk a giraffe is to ride a motorcycle underneath one, suckling at every opportunity) but you're also going to say some iffy stuff, like the general tone of borderline-homophobia, or the questionable, if not distasteful David Carradine jokes. More often than not, though, Griffin and Krauss are able to keep on the side of batshit ridiculous, rather than offensive.
Even after writing about it for the last hour, I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. It's strange, but funny, but twisted, but helpful. All I do know for sure is that once the bombs start falling, it'll be the first thing I grab.
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