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Installment from "The Bowling Ball in the Freezer and Other Secrets of a Highly Efficient You." Copyright 2008, all rights reserved.

Home bunkering options are now more affordable and less delusional than ever. Today’s American sociopaths can avail themselves of a wide range of underground shelters – we no longer have to settle for used gas tanks and roughly hewn caves. If you haven’t gotten your family into its fully stocked, heavily armored bunker with at least five thousand rounds of ammunition, why the hell not? It’s coming, people! Time to hunker in the bunker. When zombies start crashing through your windows is NOT the time to start flipping through Bunker Beautiful in search of fortress layout ideas!

Bunker living is a great lifestyle choice – who wouldn’t look forward to kicking back, respirators on, waiting for ragnarok to start? You’re going to want to throttle the living shit out of your dearest family members minutes after sealing the hatch, but you and yours will be safe from everything from ebola to the second coming of Christ. You’ll pray from death from above in the form of 500 pound bunker buster ordnance as the kerosene lamped days and nights become months and years. Until you finally go insane in the membrane and burst from the ground into what must surely be a post nuclear apocalyptic wasteland populated by runny faced man-things, only to find blue sky and sun shining on your foreclosed home where yuppies are sipping lemonade on your porch.

Bunker design and construction is going high-tech and upscale. Dank concrete tubes are going the way of the cold war. What’s in: hardwood floors, designer gun racks, Elfa storage shelves, tanning beds. And with the advent of CO2 sensors and air handling technology, surprisingly few people are asphyxiating underground these days. Cave-ins are a thing of the past.

The friendly folks at Bob’s Bunkers and its high-end design center Le Chateau Survie make bunkering affordable, and installation becomes a DIY project. And so what if the neighbors laugh – fuck ‘em! When the shit hits the fan and society disintegrates, you’ll hear them knocking – but they can’t come in.

Yes, in days past, scrambling into a big underground box buried in your back yard in dead of night drills was enough to get you listed as a person of interest by the neighborhood watch group. Yet while Archie Bunkerers used to be thought of as wacked out redneck gun nut survivalist freaks, that image is changing: now when 40-somethings Marge and Otis R. take a break from rotating their MRE stock, you’re just as likely to find them playing Mah Jongg with the Millers as throwing knives at a cardboard cutout of the President. Marge recently hosted a Tupperware party in the shelter, and half the neighborhood came (well, actually only those who could squeeze in, and it’s true they mainly came to see if the sex dungeon rumors were true) –a good time was had by all!

Oh, and that reminds me – they’re great for storing kidnapped schoolgirls with whom you can father a clan of supermen freedom fighters, right under the noses of neighbors, mailmen, your lawn service and her frantic parents.

Having a panic room and lots of tripwired shotguns rigged throughout your home is all well and good, but if you want to outlast a mankind-ending siege of famine and pestilence, a big-assed bunker is the only thing that’s going to keep you from cannibalizing or being cannibalized.

So if a man’s house is his castle, make yours an impregnable fortress of airtight 24-7-365 home security against the forces of anarchy, communism, liberal hippy do-goodery, the Census Bureau, and the reanimated flesh-eating dead.

Brought to you by your friends at Bob’s Bunkers™ – a fully owned subsidiary of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc.