The End, Like Sand (post-apocalyptic fiction)

or: How I Joined the Muppet Babies in the War Against the Cannibal Nazis From the Suburbs

I’ve been struggling to write down some of my ideas about preparedness through non-fiction, lately, because non-fiction has never been how I get my grand ideas about what we can do and how we can improve the world. I’ve gotten those ideas from friends telling stories and I’ve gotten those ideas from reading narrative, like memoir and fiction.

So I think I’m going to write a series of vignettes about collapse. I don’t know if I’m going to weave this into some post-apocalyptic novel, or turn them into zines, or run this as some kind of serial here in my newsletter, but we’ll see.

I’ve always been interested in writing didactic fiction. It’s out of vogue to just say “this story is supposed to teach you something,” but some of my favorite fiction has been pretty transparent in its aims to do just that. I grew up reading a lot of Heinlein and Le Guin, two masters of didactic fiction, though they go about it in essentially opposite ways and have more or less opposite political positions (I won’t defend Heinlein’s politics, but I will admit I read a lot of his books as a kid). In Starship Troopers, Heinlein just straight up has entire chapters that are philosophy lessons in the essentially fascistic military academy the protagonist attends. Le Guin builds novel-length, transparent metaphors, books with ideas like “what if gender was fluid” and “what if anarchy but on the moon.”

Cory Doctorow, another favorite author of mine, sometimes in his books he just has long asides that say “and this is how you use encryption” or “this is how capitalism works.”

Some of my books are more didactic than others, but I suspect this “how to survive the apocalypse” series will be among my most transparently didactic work. Hope you forgive me, hope you enjoy it. Hope you never have to strap dolls onto your armor and raise a pastel flag and go to war against cannibal Nazis in a disintegrating Rust Belt city.

I’ll be reading an audio version of this on Sunday on Cool Zone Media Book Club.

The End, Like Sand; or: How I Joined the Muppet Babies in the War Against the Cannibal Nazis From the Suburbs

This piece was written by our beloved friend and comrade Christiano “Mud” Alves who was martyred during the assault on the Butcher Shop by shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade. That day’s battle was lost, but the Muppet Babies prevailed against that location eight days later, saving uncountable lives. May Mud live eternal in our hearts.

The collapse was slow until it was fast. Of course it was. We’ve all read Parable of the Sower (by Butler, not the one in the bible. I think most people who say they’ve read the bible are lying). We all knew it was going to be a slow collapse. We’ve all read that tweet, that famous one. Even if you came of age after Twitter became X and so you never had Twitter, you’ve read the tweet by @perthshiremags. The one that goes: “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”

Well it turns out, to no one’s surprise, that this is true about pretty much every type of collapse, not just climate collapse. One more quote for you, this one intentionally rewritten. William Gibson once wrote “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” My corollary is that for years, we’ve known that “the apocalypse is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Which means I can’t tell you the specific day that “society collapsed” because it depends on where you’re looking. Syria? Iran? India? Or do we mean suburban America? I feel like we always mean suburban America when we’re talking about the collapse, even though I was born and bred well inside the limits of my Rust Belt city and the only thing I’ve ever gone into the suburbs for was cheap food at Trader Joe’s (RIP) or more recently in sorties against the cannibal Nazis.

When the apocalypse came to America, it came in fits and starts and it’s hard to say what kicked it off. Did it start with the 2024 election? That’s where most people put the beginning of the end. But we’d been ignoring climate change for decades or a century or some shit at that point.

Hell, the first apocalypse that happened where I live happened hundreds of years ago, to the Erie people, and I’ll tell you that some of the first dominoes that led us to today were tipped over when the Haudenosaunee were conquered by a bunch of Protestants from England. And you know what? The Haudenosaunee people are still around. The English bastards (including a couple of the less savory among my ancestors, to be real) didn’t manage to kill them all.

There’s that other quote, this one from someone who survived the collapse of the USSR, that I hope will apply to us: “most people survive the end of their way of life.” If most of us survive the current collapse though, it’s going to be by a generous reading of the word “most.” I made it through the first thirty-six years of my life having only seen three dead bodies that weren’t already in coffins, and in the past year I’ve seen a few hundred and made two of my own.

Okay one more quote for you. I must miss the old internet, because I still think in memes and screenshots. This one I can’t find you the source for, but it basically boils down to “if it’s the apocalypse, why do I still have to go to work and pay rent?”

And this quote is particularly important, because if you want to know when the apocalypse started, well, it started for most people when they were laid off and evicted. The apocalypse looks more like grains of sand dropping through an hourglass (we’re the grains of sand, in case my metaphor was too subtle). People dropped one by one, ten by ten, through the cracks of society.

When did my apocalypse start?

I wasn’t the first grain of sand to drop and I wasn’t the last. I guess my apocalypse started last spring when some private security showed up to evict our whole apartment building. Our faceless corporate landlord, the bank, was clinging desperately to some semblance of normalcy and thought words like “rent” and “lease” and “litigation” still held power, and they had convinced some mercenaries with rifles to try to enforce those dead words.

Which means that around eight months ago, some guys tried to rip me and my cats and our neighbors out of our building even though society was pretty solidly collapsing and almost none of us had work. The cell phones still had service back then, most of the time, but half the apps were either dead or location-locked for the gated communities, and I hadn’t been on Instagram for almost a year already. Maybe a more interesting metric by which to measure the apocalypse isn’t “do I have to work and pay rent” but “am I still addicted to social media or has that been yanked out from under me?”

When the mercenaries came, almost none of us knew what to do, because we didn’t really know one another too well in that building. We were mostly Millennial and Gen-Z, and our communities were online or were built out of friends scattered across the city who shared our niche subcultural interests. I mostly hung out with other bartenders from my job (back when I had it) plus a few of the people I went birding with. I didn’t know most of my actual, direct neighbors.

I didn’t want to be evicted. I’ve got three cats and all of them used to be alley cats, and frankly I used to be an alley cat too for a little while as a teenager, and none of the four of us were looking forward to sleeping outside again, and food was getting spare enough that people weren’t throwing much out, so I wouldn’t be able to live off of dumpstered bagels again even if I wanted to. I figured this eviction might be the end of me.

Until about thirty Muppet Babies marched up the street. That’s what they called themselves. Bunch of weirdos with AR-15s and armor and half of them were in pastels and half of them wore all black and they had a bunch of flags. Too many flags. Just an altogether inappropriate flag-to-marcher ratio. You should have like one flag per ten people, tops. Half these motherfuckers were carrying flags. There was a pride flag and some other kind of pride flag and a Palestinian flag and a pirate flag and an anarcho-syndicalist flag, but most of the flags were those cringey boomer yard flags. You know those ones that you can buy at Walmart (or loot from Walmart, these days) that just say like “Springtime” or “Snow Day” or have an illustration of a pumpkin or whatever? Most of the flags were those kind of flags.

And probably the smallest person in the crowd, a short king (who I have learned since does not like being called a king because he’d cut his teeth in those No Kings protests that started getting spicy once it was clear fair elections were a thing of the past, so “no kings” was practically his identity, but also he was a short king)... that guy was right in front with a megaphone and he shouted out “you want us to clear out this rabble?” but he was talking to us, not the mercenaries the bank had hired. And my neighbor Yousef, like the only person in the building whose name I knew because we used to date but that was years ago and by that point we were “friends” but in quotes because we didn’t actually hang out, we just said hi awkwardly in the hall, he was out on his tiny balcony and he cupped his hands over his mouth and said “yes please!”

The mercenaries, well, they were probably just a bunch of guys who didn’t want to fall like sand through that same hourglass everyone else was falling through, so they’d taken jobs with one of the only institutions that still believed in business as usual and paid enough money to support yourself. But they weren’t dumb. They’d shown up ready to push other people, like sand, down through the hourglass. They hadn’t shown up ready to deal with a couple dozen queers and anarchists and pirates who’d named themselves after an ancient children’s cartoon and armed themselves with rifles, so they fucked off without a fight.

Cops were still a thing at that point, they hadn’t just given up and admitted they were just another gang, but they’d retreated to the downtown core and the wealthier suburbs. They weren’t coming. If the cops had been available to run tenets out of buildings, the bank would’ve sent them first. Mercenaries are expensive. Capital will always trying to leverage the state for free services before they rely on hiring someone themselves. Just like how the state always relied on nonprofits to fill in the gaps for social services that should have been provided for by tax money. I used to work for nonprofits and I’m still a little bit bitter.

Since the cops weren’t coming, we knew we were safe, at least for awhile, and that’s when my apocalypse started, and I got to keep living in that apartment till it caught a mortar round over the summer. All my cats were okay. Wish I could say the same about all my neighbors.

But on the day that my apocalypse started, not a single shot was fired, not a single person was killed. My apartment was saved by the Muppet Babies, and now I’m a Muppet Baby too, and I don’t know if we’re a gang or not. We call ourselves a “MASS,” a Mutual Aid and Solidarity Society. We’re honestly sort of one of those “warlord groups” all those apocalypse movies warned us about, though we don’t do a lot of roving. And we make our decisions democratically and anyone can leave at any time, which is a detail I haven’t seen included in any of those movies. If we’re a gang, we’re a nice gang. Or a mostly nice gang. I’ve been in too many gunfights now to think I can claim a pure moral high ground.

Actually, two of those guys who’d shown up to evict us, two brothers named Hammer and Henry, they’re with us now too. We don’t pay anyone anything, but we also don’t charge anything. We just take care of each other. Like a family. Like a community. Like a cult. Or a solidarity society.

We’ve taken to strapping dolls to our armor when we go into battle, though, which is honestly kind of culty, or warlord-gang-ish. But we don’t have a warlord, and we don’t have a charismatic leader, and look yeah most of the people under the age of 40 among us are polyamorous, but we’re not a cult.

I feel like a lot of people’s accusations of us being a cult are already answered by the “we’re not a cult” flag that Tracy hung up outside our warehouse recently. I appreciate my generation’s commitment to internet humor even though we don’t have the internet anymore.

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Most of the founders of the Muppet Babies are dead now, despite the group being only a year old. Only Sasha is left, and if I’m being honest, Sasha had a pretty major break with consensus reality about half a year ago and they spend most of their time converting the second floor of the Muppet Theater (the warehouse most of us live in) into a dollhouse village with an elaborate public transit system built out of model trains that we’ve scavenged from garages and basements across the city. The trains always run on time in Makhnovia, the village Sasha is building, and there’s a whiteboard with the train schedule right by the stairs. If you try to make a joke about Mussolini and the trains running on time, Sasha will lecture you for about thirty minutes about the anarcho-syndicalist unions in pre-fascist Italy who got the trains running on time, a punctuality inherited by the fascist dictator. I don’t know if that’s true or not, because the answer isn’t on our Wikipedia backup.

Sasha is kind of a seer, now. That’s what they call themself. They’re at every meeting but they never directly express any particular opinion. They just offer us stories out of history or out of their imagination, and those stories are occasionally disruptive to the meeting process and are occasionally remarkably insightful. Organizing with disparate people means accommodating the disparate ways that people are going to participate. And I love Sasha’s stories.

Sasha used to be an organizer. They’ve done it all: political campaigns, non-profit work, direct action environmentalism. They helped stop a bunch of data centers through good old-fashioned aboveboard, legal grassroots organizing, and they were a person of interest in the federal government’s investigation into that string of data center fires that picked up once the feds stepped in to overrule local prohibitions on their construction. You might not remember that particular string of arsons, because once-in-a-lifetime events were happening every week during the last ten years or so before collapse, but those warehouse fires happened around the same time as that National Guard mutiny that wound up splintering everything into State Guards, which you probably do remember.

Sasha used to be an organizer and they were good at it, and they helped start the Muppet Babies, though they’d argued against the name. They’d wanted to call it the Rust Belt Mutual Aid and Solidarity Society, which they wanted to shorten to RB-MASS because organizers are obsessed with acronyms, and Sasha figured every region could set up its own MASS built on the same model.

But Vivian and Hatchet and Oak and the rest of the founders were insistent that there shouldn’t be buzzwords and there shouldn’t be acronyms and instead they should pick something so ridiculous that no one would ever accuse them of taking themselves too seriously, and Sasha went along with it and about ten of them started the Muppet Babies. And it was, you know, a Mutual Aid and Solidarity Society. Because buzzwords or no, that was what the group was designed to be. Occasionally, travelers come through town and tell us about other MASS groups, most of which also eschew the acronym and have absurd names for themselves, and hopefully sometime soon we’ll get a much larger federation put together with all the MASSes around North America so we can really start getting shit done. And knowing us, we’ll wind up called like, Rugrat Nation or something. God forbid we just become the Federated Mutual Aid and Solidarity Societies.

Anyway, the Muppet Babies, the founders knew that society was collapsing, and fast. They were a mix of organizers and preppers and community defense practitioners, and they figured their skills were going to be in demand soon, and they’d been preaching community-focused preparedness for awhile.

I’ve actually got their old meeting notes, which I’m supposed to use to cobble together a “how to build a MASS” pamphlet now that we’ve gotten some old letterpresses running off of a waterwheel in the river. I used to write grants for nonprofits, so somehow that qualifies me to write a “how to build the new world in the shell of the old” instruction manual. It seemed like an overwhelming task, but Sasha suggested that when work is too serious, too insurmountable, just treat it like playtime instead of work, and maybe I could write the whole thing out in some kind of narrative form first.

Maybe that’s why he’s building a village out of dollhouses. When the work is insurmountable, turn to play.

If you’re reading this version of the story, though, then something has gone terribly wrong and someone has decided to publish my narrative instead of my finished, polished, nonfiction essay that will magically teach everyone how to build a new and better world. Maybe I never finished that essay. Maybe I didn’t live to see that better world. Maybe this is my main written contribution to that effort. Thoughts of death will never be far from my mind in times like these.

The basic idea that the first Muppet Babies came up with was a return to an older era of mutual aid organizations. Anarchist workers in Europe used to build mutual aid societies that you actually have to be a member of to take advantage of fully. Some of the first Muppet Babies, they were preppers with deep stashes of all the classic stuff: dried and freeze-dried food, guns and ammo, gas masks, medical supplies, armor, seeds, radios, solar panels. Oak straight up had a bunker under her house in the sticks, though we lost contact with her months ago now and she’s presumed dead—which is why bunkers were never the best plan for most apocalyptic scenarios. Not to victim-blame. I hope we’ll clear out the Proudest Boys who’ve been organizing in her area and find her safe and sound in her damn bunker.

But yeah, the founders, they had all this stuff, and they’d been organizing together for a few years, putting on preparedness workshops and distributing supplies and trying to build connections between various groups of people. When they sat down at one of their meetings and realized that the end was nigh, they were like “alright, what’s our plan when shit hits the fan? Do we just set up on the street and give away our stuff? Do we hole up and defend what’s ours? What do we do?”

What they decided was that most of what they had, they would keep within their group, but the group itself would be joinable by anyone and democratically controlled by all members. If someone was hungry, they could become a Muppet Baby and eat as well or as badly as everyone else and be part of the decisionmaking. But they had to commit to participation in the collective wellbeing in whatever capacity they had.

And that’s a MASS. How am I supposed to write a whole pamphlet about an idea that I can get across in three sentences?

To make sure that rapid expansion wouldn’t fundamentally change the nature of the group, they agreed to what they called the Accord, which were immutable agreements at the core of the group’s bylaws. Bylaws can be amended or removed or added to, but the Accord is eternal. If the group ever wants to change the Accord, they would simply have to disband the group and become a different group.

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The Accord is simple:

One: Our group operates under democratic procedures in which all members have an equal say, regardless of seniority, popularity, or productive capacity.

Two: Our group will not exclude members on the basis of ethnicity, race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, national origin, documentation status, prior incarceration, level of ability or disability, or productive capacity. This list is non-exhaustive and is to be understood in the spirit of inclusion rather than exclusion.

Three: Our group provides to its members according to their needs and each member will endeavor to provide for the group according to their ability. Members still have a right to maintain personal property such as (but not limited to) a residence, weapons, media, and small-scale supply stashes.

Four: Membership in the group is voluntary.

Five: Our group prefers to build more bridges than it burns; our group prefers to seek reconciliation whenever possible; our group does not perceive people as disposable; nor is our group a pacifist organization.

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There are all sorts of bylaws, and they change month to month, because we meet about them all the time to discuss what is working and what isn’t working, and because the three things that revolutions are built on are meetings, shit work, and terrifying action, in descending order of time commitment. The bylaws discuss things like:

How to become a member (currently there’s a one-month provisional membership).

How to remove members (currently a three-quarters majority vote, but we’re discussing making it harder to remove members as we expand and become a larger portion of society).

How decisions are made (currently by simple majority for low-impact matters, three-quarters majority for high-impact matters, and the empowerment of temporary, recallable, accountable positions of authority for immediate crises and military situations).

How we are structured (we are currently organized into three wings: administrative, productive, and strategic, with individual working groups inside those wings).

How we interact with other groups (full cooperation with all groups that are democratic, respect diversity, and respect political pluralism; limited cooperation with groups that respect diversity and political pluralism; situational cooperation against common enemies with any group that is not tyrannical or otherwise monstrous [look, it’s the apocalypse, and there are people out there doing some pretty wild shit]).

Meeting structure (I’m really not going to bore you with this. Think Occupy-era meeting culture but with more emphasis on autonomy for both individuals and for working groups).

How we distribute food (equally) and how we distribute weapons (selectively, through a war council, although individuals often possess and maintain their own weapons).

Conflict resolution (our most contentious bylaws, which we will probably never truly perfect).

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We’ve grown a lot since the Muppet Babies marched on my apartment building and saved me from becoming another grain of sand. But we’ve lost a lot of people too. Our “let’s take care of each other and treat each other as equals and make decisions together” thing wasn’t too popular with some of the other factions in the city, especially the cannibal Nazis from the suburbs.

Those Nazis call themselves the Survivors, and they’re a sort of fascistic oligarchy with pretensions of meritocracy. Most of their leaders are former cops (to be fair, there are three ex-cops in our ranks as well, which was a contentious decision, but none of our ex-cops are active Nazis). The Survivors call their teachings “the harsh truth” and believe the new world will be built of the true survivors, the strongest of the strong. The fascism came first, the cannibalism came later.

Sasha likes to say “we would have added ‘no eating people’ to the Accord if we knew then what we know now, but that’s the kind of thing you’d like to imagine goes unspoken.”

The Survivors rule through fear. We co-rule ourselves through love and respect. We’re winning. All it takes to defeat evil in this world are love, respect, and plenty of 5.56x45mm ammunition.

I don’t like to call them the Survivors, because they aren’t going to survive, not if we have anything to say on the matter. I like to call them the Cannibal Nazis From the Suburbs, because it’s more accurate, and because when I call them that I get to feel like I’m living in a bad 80s movie.

Despite that war, or maybe because of it, since it spurs us to build bridges with other communities in our region, we’re growing. Fast. I think soon enough we’re going to break apart, but intentionally, into local councils.

Sasha keeps calling the proposed councils the “Soviets,” but I think he’s joking, because I read a book about Makhnovia, which he named his dollhouse town after, and that was a country of anarchists who fought tooth and nail against the Bolsheviks and the founding of the USSR. Though “soviet” just means “council,” basically, it turns out. We’re going to set up councils and we’re not going to call them soviets. The councils will be formed by individual apartment buildings and by city blocks and by working groups and by schools and by workplaces (we’ve taken over a few factories already) and those councils are going to make their own local decisions, then come together in a bottom-up federation to discuss the bigger topics like defense and like food distribution.

Which means we probably won’t be called the Muppet Babies much longer. Most of the new members don’t like that name anyway. I think a core of us are going to hold onto the moniker, but for a unit in the territorial defense. We need that territorial defense. It’s the apocalypse. People are dying. We’re trying to build this wild, desperate utopia, but at the current rate of disease and famine and disaster and conflict, most of us won’t live to be old.

And I go into battle these days, something I never would have thought I would do, but it feels oddly good to strap dolls to my plate carrier and fly a pastel flag with the Easter Bunny on it and sing “Muppet Babies, we’ll make our dreams come true / Muppet Babies, we’ll do the same for you” as I go to war against the cannibal Nazis who are pouring in from the suburbs.