I’m unrobbable. Like I don’t think I can be robbed. Actually, I know I can’t be robbed. Or mugged. That’s the same thing, right? What if someone breaks into your apartment and steals your computer? That’s being robbed. OK I’m getting it now, just by explaining it to myself. And if you’re walking down the street, and someone pulls out a knife and takes your wallet, that’s getting mugged. But isn’t that also a robbery? Couldn’t you legitimately scream out, “Help! I’ve been robbed!” I guess it’s like squares and rectangles and parallelograms, like all muggings are robberies, but not vice versa.

So it would be slightly more accurate to say that I’m unmuggable. Because, whatever, I guess I have to leave the house eventually. And it’s not like I’m living at Fort Knox. So theoretically, yeah, I guess I could get robbed. But that’s not my point. My point is, I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to mug me. I’ve thought it out a million times in my mind.

Although I’ve never been mugged, my default scenario, the way I play it out in my head, it’s pretty ingenious. As soon as a mugger approaches me, or reaches in his pocket, or pulls out a knife or a gun or whatever type of weapon, he’ll start to say something, “This is a stick up, see?” Well, that would be a little old-fashioned. It would probably be more like, “Give me your wallet! Your phone!” But step one of my strategy would be immediately cutting them off, mid threat.

My whole defense would be to pretend like I’m an undercover cop. No mugger is going to want to get involved robbing a cop. It’s career suicide. It all depends on how it would go down. If the mugger is coming directly at me, and I can see him reaching for his weapon, I would bring my hands to my waist, pretending like I also have a weapon, and I’d say something confident, bold, like, “I’m not the guy you want to fuck with buddy.”

Chances are, if I play it confidently enough, that guy would take off running. But what if this mugger is a little smarter than your average degenerate? He might say to himself something like, wait a second, if that guy’s a cop, wouldn’t he be arresting me right now? And so I’d have to add another layer, like, “I’m not the guy to fuck with buddy. Now scram, this is a stakeout.” That would probably be enough to send him high-tailing it out of there.

I think pretending you’re a cop is the way to get out of ninety percent of life’s problems. And you don’t even have to tell anyone. Just tell yourself. Say it to yourself in your head. I’m an undercover police officer. And then act like it. You’ll be surprised how many people suddenly don’t want to be fucking with you anymore. Your whole persona, your body language, your real language, it’s screaming, begging for somebody to fuck with you. Just try it.

What if the mugger sneaks up behind you and catches you off guard? You might not get a chance to act as cool. In this case, just scream out, “I’m a cop you idiot!” Your mugger will at the very least be surprised, and that’ll give you the opportunity to reach for your waist and do the whole “I’m on a stakeout, scram!” routine that I talked about before.

But what if the there are more than just one mugger? What if it’s two, or three, or a whole crew? In this situation, your one imaginary gun might not be enough to ward off the very real threat of a whole posse. In this case, and I think I’ve written about this before somewhere, but all you have to do is fake a seizure. Collapse to the floor, start flailing wildly, pee your pants if you’re not too bladder shy. I’m pretty sure these hoodlums weren’t planning on actually having a dead body to deal with, just a scared victim to steal from. Once you make it look like you might die, they’re sure to make a run for it.

But there’s one imaginary stick-up that I’m afraid is too tough even for a fake police badge or a fake seizure. What if, you’re walking down the street at night, and some guy comes out of nowhere, not with a hidden gun, but a real gun, and he just comes up and puts it right to your head and he doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t need to say anything, you know exactly what to do, absolutely nothing, because either this guy’s going to go through your pockets, or he’s going to tell you to empty them for him. What are you supposed to do here?

I’ve thought about this, and it’s a little riskier than my other solutions, but I think it’s totally doable. Think about it, the guy has a gun to your head and he’s thinking to himself, I’ve got this guy. Nobody in their right mind would try something here. The mugger is overconfident, and it’s going to be his undoing. Because seriously, what is a gun? It’s just a stick. So imagine it being just a stick. Couldn’t you just reach up really, really fast, grab the guy’s stick, and push it straight up? He’d probably pull the trigger, but it would be way too late, the gun would be pointing up, and so it would be a shot straight up in the air. I’m figuring this guy would think to himself, shit, gunshots, the cops’ll be here any second. I better beat it. Or, if he decides to struggle, I’ll be in the dominant position, completely in control of his gun hand. It would be no simpler than wrestling a Nintendo controller out of the hands of one of my screaming younger brothers, something I’ve spent years mastering. And if he does stick around to wrestle it out with me, that bullet that he shot in the air has got to come back down eventually, and as it comes back down to the earth it’ll be just as fast as it was going up, and it’ll probably hit him right in the head. Right through his left eye. I’m absolutely unmuggable.

Remember when I said that I had never been mugged before? That was only partially true. One time I was in Ecuador with a few people in one of the country’s smaller cities. It was like two in the morning and everyone was drunk. We were walking maybe seven blocks back to where we were staying. After a block or two, all of the lights went out. It was a blackout. We kept walking. Another block or two later, this group of four or five guys comes up out of nowhere and surrounds us, but without stopping. We’re all walking, with this group walking around us, like a walking fence.

Things definitely didn’t look good, and I thought, how can I defuse this situation, fast? I was about to shout out, “Que tontos! Somos la policia!” but I noticed one of the guys had a cigarette behind his ear, and since they were all much, much shorter than I am, I simply grabbed it, put it to my mouth, and asked that guy for a light. Nobody said anything for a while. Finally, the leader of the group, I’m assuming he was the leader because he’s the only person who opened his mouth, he said, “You know, we were just about to rob you gringos.” Everybody kept walking. And I said, “That’s funny, because me and friends were just about to rob all of you.” More walking. Maybe a block or two later, the whole group broke apart and started at a brisk pace down a different street. High-fives all around.

I don’t consider that a mugging, more like a conversation. Nothing ever got past the hypothetical. But it’s all about how you carry yourself. I’m pretty sure that if they really did have any weapons or whatever, I could of gotten us out of that somehow. Please try it. Just try to mug me. I’ll act surprised. I’ll act scared. And then I’ll turn it around on you so fast you’ll have no idea what’s going on. If you don’t wind up seriously hurt, or worse, dead, you’ll definitely be behind bars. You can’t mug me. Nobody can. I’m unmuggable. A hundred percent.