Independence Day

The Fourth of July comes again—surprised? I thought you might be, what with the threat of Rapture, earthquakes, nuclear fallout, Michelle Bachmann, economic disaster, world anarchy and Florida. So that booming sound you heard tonight from your underground shelter with a three years supply of food, water and pornography was only the sound of proud Americans celebrating the 4^th of July. Perhaps you came to the surface, just to see for yourself—the violent mobs tearing themselves apart fighting over the last can of refried beans from the gas station down the road. Only to find that the sounds of crying children, explosives and smells of burning flesh wafting through the thick summer air was only your town’s fireworks display.

To be fair you already had the porn

Now that you’ve wiped the tears of joy from your eyes the heavy feeling in your stomach reminds you that you now need to rejoin society—somehow. I want to be the first one to tell you, it’s ok. Don’t worry about it! Hey things were looking bad you couldn’t turn on the news for more than a minute before you had a sudden desire to stockpile food and water for the harsh post-apocalyptic hell scape awaiting the survivors of the radioactive-earth quake-communist-Islamic-whatever Glen Beck was talking about-world.

You will be sorely missed

Your fear turns to rage as you remember all those nights secretly digging in your back yard, carefully disguising your homemade apocalypse shelter by erecting a greenhouse over it. The hours melted away as you painstakingly removed the dirt and clay for the foundations—the arthritis you acquired while tending to your lilies in the dark of night…Who is to blame?

The news, politicians, religious fanatics, religious politicians, and political news—you trusted them. Amateur mistake. To reintegrate with society you’re going to needs an excuse, a damn good one. There are lots of reasons why someone would go missing for a month! Coma, last minute Caribbean cruise, heroin, alien abduction, or time travel—personally I believe time travel is the winner. Heroin requires pricking yourself until your track marks show, the cruise requires a tan, you’ve already used the alien abduction excuse before and everyone knows that a coma would cause your muscles to atrophy. TIME TRAVEL—that’s the ticket, always go forward in time.

Thanks to chaos theory, and parallel universes you can’t possibly be expected to predict to your friends and family what will happen accurately. Your very existence in the present with knowledge of the future changes that very future. That being said you should still be unnecessarily specific with the details of your adventure—while remaining vague on the how. Keep Doc Brown or any mention of DeLoreans and flux capacitors out of the conversation. You saw a light and poof! You fell into a gap in space-time and something impossible to duplicate.

For instance "phone booth"

Now for the details—you want to be specific but also don’t try to actually predict what will actually happen. The more impossible sounding the better. As Hitler said “The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.” You need to make the future sound like Dr. Seuss’ acid trip. Naturally your friends and family will assume that you yourself have been eating shrooms for breakfast.

This or you tell them what you've been doing all by yourself (see figure 1)

That’s when you give them the whopper, the bow on top that ties it all together. On top of all the other trippy shit you’ve been saying you need to confirm all their fears, your fears and everything you ever heard on AM radio at 2 in the morning while digging your bunker.

They’ll believe you. They’ll believe you because like you they’ve been bombarded by pessimism on every channel and like you are really only a Jersey Shore marathon away from building their own bunkers. Tell them your truth, tell them that you’ve been stuck in an apocalyptic future, don’t leave out the refried beans the cannibalism, or Florida. Don’t be surprised when your friends start night gardening themselves.

Apocalypse NOW