John protecting his perimeter in a bathrobe with a sword (RL7)
John's property has multiple buildings, an empty swimming pool, and an untended orchard. Although it is within the city limits, his neighbors are all of the ”Whatever you are doing over there: We don’t want to know!” quality. When John moved in there he had his hair down to the middle of his back and he was missing one of his front teeth, which established a certain tone with his neighbors. He was friendly and that was fine, so: "Let’s just wave to him and don’t go on his property and hopefully he will stay off of their property!" It has established a great dynamic! They say "Hi!" to each other at the mailbox, they actually talk over the fence, but all the teenage kids running around the neighborhood causing trouble go to the other side of the street when they walk past John’s house.
John frequently walks around his yard, thinking deep thoughts, while he is dressed in a bathrobe and carrying a sword, absentmindedly swinging the sword as he walks around. The kids in his neighborhoods have realized that there are better places to go and play than around this guy’s house. John has the tall-guy problem like Merlin got the smart-ass-guy problem: Everybody wants to take on the tall guy, and Merlin is wondering if carrying a sword on some level is also an invitation to bring that on and cross the fence.
John being capable of defending himself by instilling fear
All kinds of men are trying to put on Loco-eyes to get out of fights or out of trouble. It is supposed to communicate ”Don’t mess with me, I’m Loco!”, but the problem with Loco eyes is that all it takes is your bluff being called one time and Loco eyes turn to fear eyes very quickly if they don’t have anything behind them. There are actual Loco eyes and those people don’t care if you stick a pen in their eye because they are nuts.
John stopped a long time ago putting any kind of Loco eyes on his face. Whenever somebody in the streets gives him confrontational energy his face communicates exactly what he is capable of doing, which is writing an angry tweet about it later, and that is generally enough. John does not misrepresent the distance he is willing to go with someone in a fight on the street. That distance is not ”no distance”, which sounds really menacing when explained this way. "My dedication to fisticuffs with you has a non-zero value in the sense of not being defined. Do you even know the difference between Zero and Null? Because I will explain it to you, it is all the difference in the world”
At this point the person is probably confused and is feeling bad that they hadn’t taken more Math or learned Perl, which is the equivalence of one of those Wrestlers throwing sand in your eyes. Now they are on the wrong foot and they are wondering why this guy has a robe and a sword and: "What is Perl?"" It is like the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Paul Newman says: ”Let’s get to the rules!” and the older guy says: ”There are no rules in a knife fight!” and Butch kicks him in the balls (see here).
Other weapons and defense installations
Merlin is not against swords, and having a hidden arsenal of swords is not a bad idea, but when John walks around the perimeter of his property in a bathrobe, Merlin recommends him to also think about a crossbow, but not a small one like those jokey Thieves' guild things, but a fucking big-ass giant Novelty-sized trebuchet. Tray Bouchet was John’s Punk Rock name, which nobody ever figured out because it is not funny on so many levels, but John found it great. People would be called things like Peter Out. Merlin likes Amos B. Heaven.
John has a white picket fence about 4 feet (120 cm) tall with wooden pickets made out of old shipping pallets, not little pickets that you buy from some picket store, but reinforced pickets that could stop a car. They create a force field that makes John's house look like it isn’t actually there. There are not going to be a lot of Ray Charles records inside, it becomes a diorama, a shoe box simulator, and it fades into this Norman Rockwell two-dimensionality and nobody will think that there is actually a weird guy with an arsenal of crossbows.
There is nothing tricky about John's fence, the pickets are not dipped in poison or reinforced with rebar, but on either side of the fence front and back John has planted ornamental bushes with some prickly vines of death. Anybody trying to get through this hedge will get shredded, but you could also just go through the gate!
Merlin wonders if a large Bin Laden-style wall (see here) would be a problem for zoning and for ventilation, or if there is another reason why John does not have a big fucking Godfather-style compound. As the hedges grow, they will become an impenetrable wall of hedge that you won’t be able to see through. John wants his business card to say ”Scariest organic gardener in the world”, but Merlin thinks there is not a lot of fellatio at that convention. Those people have a lot of body hair because of the permaculture and they are not grooming themselves because they consider grooming an act of colonialism. What is more phallocentric than hoeing your own hair? It is a form of self-abuse that Gaia looks down upon.
Merlin is not telling John to go full-on John Wayne Gacy, dig out the basement, sprinkle Lye down there and put 29 Sheldon (?) in it, dress like a clown, and slowly turn a wire around his neck while he reads verses from The Bible. John has an arsenal of weaponry throughout the ages, which includes a rose bush and his untrimmed garden.
His child is still too young to have found his various caches of weapons, but there will come a time when she will say: ”Daddy, what is behind that steel-reinforced door?” and John is going to have to say: ”All your friends from school!”