When I was growing up, and vehicles were still in use, my parents used to take us on road trips instead of flights because it saved our family money.

We used to joke as a society about how dads were intent on stopping as little as possible, despite trips over multiple days. My brothers and I learned to piss in plastic bottles, which was easy having the pieces we had… but dad wasn’t safe when we needed to go #2.

My mom always made us uncomfortable by referring to it as “prairie dogging” - your business is about to burst right out of your pants, and it’s peeking in and out. I always thought that phrase was disgusting, but now it’s one of the remaining funny memories I have of her.

And yet, here I am on a daily basis, performing prairie dog duty. My official title is “Meteorologist/Entertainer”, but all I am doing is popping my head to the surface, seeing if it’s even possible to roam above ground, and telling the town of my findings.

I’m one of the oldest people down here, I never thought I’d live long enough to be the old man that everyone considers wise, and yet, it feels like the entire town comes to hear my stories.

I sat around and watched tv and played video games my entire life up until the sun got too hot, and now that I’m the only remaining person in my age group, no one knows that my stories are really just retellings, humorous Cliff Notes of my favorite movies and tv shows growing up.

So just to recap, by morning I go outside, slither down to 3rd floor in those annoying fucking crawl spaces near the cafeteria, say “shits hot yo, probably just dig farther west towards Colorado for the day”, and by night I spill the details of my latest novel, Breaking Bad after a nice long jerking and nap session.

These idiots really don’t know how the weather works. The clouds could be fully covering the sky, it’s only 95 degrees outside, and they still say it’s too hot.

It hasn’t been that cold in a while up there. The days have been so hot that the others as well-off as me have regretted their land purchases directly underground, just under the surface. Places that we haven’t secured with foundation are collapsing every time that the boiling rain comes.

A lot of people are too lazy to actually install concrete steps or anything of the sort, so we’ve all just sort of become used to sliding down floors in mud. I can’t remember the last time I showed up to one of my performances in clean attire. Carrying a backpack doesn’t make it much easier, in fact it makes it so much harder to slide.

Once you’re on the floor you need to be on, the floors are mostly flat! We have a whole crew that collects solar-powered scooters by night, and charges them all by morning… but for some reason we can’t figure out how to build a fucking set of stairs.

And I guess I can just feel myself collapsing as easily as our underground system can. 75 years old and nothing much left to live for. We’re going to continue to dig to Denver in hopes to scavenge something, anything. We’ve been through various small towns, but this is the first full city that we have dug towards.

Maybe we’ll meet some other moles - a crew coming from a different direction. Maybe tomorrow we’ll reach a DVD store, or those new moles will have heard of one of my most famous works, like the one I called Pulp Fiction.

There’s part of me that hopes I’m found out as a fraud. No individual should live this long as an imposter… the charade will eventually stop. Maybe someone will kill me for my lies.

Maybe Heaven will have escalators.