I am not good to go. My sins and my shortcomings are too grievous a burden to carry.

Good job.

Where did you find the picture of the go bag? I think I'd like to buy one.

Is that a Strider knife if go bag dudes pocket? Nice choice!

"What does one wear to a truly stunning natural disaster?"

A Rifle.

...And shoes.

Keep your shoes on if you have any inkling of what's coming, and reach for them first if disaster catches you by surprise.

One thing that often gets missed is cigarettes.

Even if you don't smoke, they would come in handy as currency when the SHTF.

If you're not going to be smoking them yourself, buy the cheapest stuff you can find.

That bag is an S.O.Tech Go Bag.

GVL likely googled "go bag".

But that pic is from a website called Mil spec monkey.

Any bug-out gear I take will have food, water, shelter in quantities easy to pack and carry, might have to walk some miles. First aid, ammunition and a couple weapons. Long gun if possible and for sure a pistol concealed. It all depends on how much time I'm allowed to get ready and how I'm traveling. A number of survival sites have lists and recommendations but I see it as levels of emergency. Out the back door in the middle of the night with only what I can grab, say fire or earthquake or assault is one thing. Given time due to warning I can take more and have transportation.

Google up "Katrina survival" to hear from people that have been there, done that.

The Knights Templar Mexican drug cartel took down the whole electrical grid in the Mexican state of Michoacan down in the last year, IIRC.

You need food, water, batteries, and guns & ammo. Get some. Just spend $5 more at the grocery store each week for supplies until you have 3 days worth for each person in the house, and then keep going until you have 30 days. Guns and ammo are almost back to pre-hysteria prices and availability, except for 22LR ammo. Don't tell anyone outside of your house you have any of this stuff.

Don't forget in a natural disaster, if the cell phone system is working at all TEXT messages will get through. Phone calls can and will overload the cell towers, but TEXT messages cannot overwhelm the system. High-capacity USB batteries are cheap and your car battery can recharge your phone several times. You can even get a hand-crank USB charger, but don't rely on just one. I have USB batteries, several hand-crank radios and chargers and a Rayovac 7 Hour Recharge than can use alkaline batteries to recharge phones.

The Art of Manliness recently published an article demonstrating how an Amazon Kindle, or other e-book reader, can be used very well in your Go-Bag. I heartily concur. They have fabulous battery life, my Kindle 2 will go weeks without a re-charge. If you create an account with Instapaper.com you can create a "book" with as many web article as you desire.

************ VERY IMPORTANT ************
Store a couple of recent utility bills and copy of your Driver's License. These are often required to let people back into a neighborhood.

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/06/17/build-a-bug-out-kindle-a-digital-survival-library-at-your-fingertips/

or

http://tinyurl.com/nhljxzg

The whole west coast is both spectacular and problematic because of its geological instability. Whatever. Enjoy it while you can. Your choice.

Instead of a go-bag, move out into the boonies. Your whole house is your go-bag. Be sure to make friends with your neighbors.

You really don't need that career in finance or high tech.

@Scott — good advice. This subject is not a laughing matter. What looked like "preppers" and others foretelling of a collapse of the system and the romantic notions that we could all get out of town and live in the woods, well, it has real serious consequences.
Whether due to infrastructure failure, or storms and fires, or hostile groups, perhaps military or para-military, we need to be able, get out of the danger zone.

Friends, there are a lot of survival web sites that can show you a list of what to have on hand.
The basics will be the same: food & water, first aid, shelter and fire, knife/machete, firearm(s).

I am prepared at several levels so I can respond to conditions requiring bug-out: immediate and first 24 hrs; two or three days; long-term, like you ain't going back.

Here are some links; I don't have any vested interest or preference and you can find other sites with any search engine:

http://www.theplacewithnoname.com/blogs/klessons/index.html

http://www.urbanevasion.com/

http://www.shtfplan.com/emergency-preparedness/considerations-for-shtf-living-locations_05032011

http://survivalblog.com/

This is a very useful blog about lessons learned from Katrina:

http://www.theplacewithnoname.com/blogs/klessons/index.html
He mentions missing out on work, after relocating, because he didn't have all the documentation that he needed. I do not currently have a go bag. I am working on stocking up on food first (21 cent increase in milk prices in 10 days!). Go bag is next. It is the way that folks used to live and it is a good idea to do these things now. I know people that had to get ready to evacuate from fires this month. It would have been less stressful to plan for the possibility first.

And just to match the contents of your Go Bag, mine will have a slim book. I asked my husband to fill the book for my birthday one year. He wrote of his memories of our long marriage. He died a few years later. I have scanned some of the pages to Dropbox, but it's one of the things I don't want to lose. I really should scan all of it and my pictures to a thumb drive for safekeeping.

@Teri — yes, thank you for reminding me. We need some emotional supplies as well. Your idea of pictures and poems on a thumb drive is a good one.
On a more pragmatic level, having the last couple month's utilities bills, perhaps proof of a pension or Social Security benefits, birth certificate, vehicle registration, so forth scanned and put on a memory stick. There are ways to encode it so without a password the info stays hidden.

I reckon if I had to "leave in my socks" as they say, you know, in a real hurry, I could get along with a knife and a cigarette lighter and a 22 pistol in my back pocket, maybe a hunnert rounds ammo. I could pick up whatever else I needed along the way.