Constructive, Really

            (Two days late. Conspiracy? Blackmail? Lazy author? Two of those three.)

            I’ve never really been concerned with the world at large. In fact, any monitoring that I’ve done of my community lately has only served to remain on the alert in case the authorities catch on to the makeshift barrier that I’ve erected across a nearby roadway for what I swear are constructive purposes (They’ve taken it down three times, and they’re surprised when it goes back up? Who’s the insane one here?). Like many aspects of my personality, such as my inexplicable compulsion to violently maim any person that I see wearing a porkpie hat, I’ve always written this off as a harmless quirk of my personality that only affected people who I wasn’t going to enjoy meeting anyway.

            Of course, I’ve come to the realization that willful ignorance is no way to spend one’s life. The only rational means of existence is forceful ignorance. You see, self-imposed isolation is only half of the solution; you also have to make sure nobody else knows anything about the world either. Forceful ignorance (patent pending) is a 3-step program that I’ve developed so you can achieve this sort of success in your neighborhood- you can’t depend on the government for this sort of thing anymore.

            1. Step number one is to make sure that no mail gets to any of your neighbors. “Mail” is a word that means “pieces of paper placed in metal boxes”, and was what people used to communicate before the internet was invented and mankind was doomed. This is a fairly simple step: just spend an hour every day following your mailman around your neighborhood with your flamethrower. Whenever he places something in a mailbox, incinerate it. Of course, the more efficient solution here is to simply incinerate the mailman, but there might be a law against that, depending if mailmen are considered human where you live.

            2. After proceeding with step one until you either run out of flamethrower fuel or realize that you don’t own a flamethrower, move onto step two. Step two is to cut off traffic into your neighborhood. The most obvious means of doing this is to simply build a wall around your neighborhood, but that’s hard to do quickly unless you’ve befriended a colony of beavers or ancient China. An easier means of doing this is to have a friend (or hostage, if you’re so inclined) in the government simply remove all record of your neighborhood from local maps. As the incidental traffic dissipates, take the opportunity to discourage any casual passerby from entering your neighborhood by making it appear as if your neighborhood has been annihilated by a large explosion (Note: Do not actually annihilate your neighborhood in a large explosion. You might think that this would be a hard mistake to make, but you’d be wrong).

            3. If you’ve followed all of the steps before this one, either your neighborhood is successfully shut off from the rest of the world, or you’re sealed in a maximum security prison plotting your slow revenge against the one you only know as “Hal”. Both of these work for me. Your next step is quite simple. Strange as the thought might seem, the people who live around you might still make an attempt to communicate with the outside world. These people must be sealed inside their places of residence, preferably with brick and mortar, though other acceptable materials include steel, burlap, and Tupperware, to lock in freshness.

            I’m not quite sure how to end this one.