Get off my lawn...

A little over a year ago, I bought my very first house.  It was brand-new, and as such lacked certain amenities.  I had no blinds, for example, so I put up some temporary (paper) blinds from the Home Depot.  I had no garage door opener, so I parked in the driveway.  I had no landscaping in the back yard, so I learned to enjoy looking at dirt...  You get the idea.  At the time, I didn't give it a second thought.  I rather liked my temporary blinds (Imagine a giant, accordion-folded Post-It note.  Totally badass, right?) and I thought that they looked rather stylish.  Heck, you could barely even tell the difference from outside...  Or so I thought.

WRONG. 

As it turned out, I was putting out the wrong kind of vibes.  Vibes that made certain people think that I wanted certain things...  Even if I wasn't consciously aware of it.  They'd roll by slowly, creeping along and looking my house up and down.  Look at this guy, they'd think to themselves.  The car parked in the open, the dust-bowl out back, the phony blinds in the windows...  We know that he wants it.  Hell, he's ASKING for it.

Naturally, I didn't notice any of this nefarious activity.  I just went blindly about, minding my own business and doing my own thing.  As such, I managed to spend three whole days in my new home before I realized that I was being stalked.  It was early Saturday morning, around 8 or 9 AM.  All was quiet.  I was sleeping, my girlfriend was sleeping, the dog was sleeping, and my cat, Hercules, was silently plotting our deaths...  Suddenly, I was jolted awake by a hideous burst of noise.

Ding-DONG.

Ok, so it was just my doorbell...  But I had never actually heard it ring before, and that thing is ROBUST.

So I lay in my bed for a moment, attempting to get my bearings and apply a bit of logical analysis to the situation.  Everyone who knows me knows that I'm not a morning person.  In fact, that's probably one of the greatest understatements that I've ever types.  I wake up with all the charm and grace of Godzilla with a hangover and full-blown PMS...  And I usually smell like a <content deleted so as not to make readers nauseous and destroy my sex life>.

Charming, eh?

So I'm laying there, wondering who might be at the door, and I find myself giving a crap less and less as I gradually slip back into the wondrous bliss of weekend slumber when all of a sudden...

Ding-DONG.

Oh HELL no.  With the unique determination that one only acquires when they're both barely conscious and ass-kicking furious, I leapt from the bed, stomped into a pair of (dirty) boxers, (from the floor) slung on a (dirty) wife-beater, (also from the floor) stomped to the front door and threw it open.

In front of me stood one suddenly bug-eyed moron, clutching a small pile of pamphlets.  As the door flew open, a small snowstorm of other pamphlets (jammed into the crack of my door by previous morons who had not succeeded in waking me) flew across my porch.  As I stared the man down, my brain began to take in information.  The over-abundance of hair gel.  The beady, shifty little eyes.  The tell-tale reek of polyester and cheap cologne...

SALESMEN.  Good God almighty, I'm under siege by SALESMEN!!!

If looks could kill, mine would have already slain this pernicious little skunk and probably retroactively obliterated his entire line of relatives from the space-time continuum.  Nonetheless, he opened his mouth and began to make his pitch.

"Um...  Good morning, sir," he began, holding out a pamphlet from his pile, I couldn't help but notice that you're in need of-"

"WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!" I queried gently, "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT F&^KING TIME IT IS?!  GET LOST!!!"  And with those friendly words I bid him adieu by torquing my entire body about and slamming the door in his face.

Don't get me wrong here; I'm an ardent capitalist and I love money as much as the next guy.  I'd never fault someone for trying to make a buck.  However, I'm also extremely territorial and don't appreciate being pestered, so if your method of making a dollar involves invading my domain and annoying me, things are going to get unpleasant.  To this day I still come home to find that people have stuffed crap into the crack of my door, and one of these evenings I swear that my molars are going to explode from grinding my teeth together so hard.

Bottom line: If I want your crap, I'll seek out your crap.  If you have to try to convince me to buy your crap, I'm never going to buy your crap, even if I discover a need for said crap in the future.  And, with God as my witness, if you come to my house and try to force your crap upon me, I'm going to make like Yosimite Sam confronting a varmint.

Or, as Clint put it...