Just what is with all the ists? Angry ists, stupid ists, happy ists, even wimpy ists: they are all of the same cloth and they, quite frankly, get on my nerves.

It would like to say I dislike the Marxists more than the capitalists, or despair of the pacifists more than the creationists, but really they all are a pain in the patootie. A bunch of otherwise supposedly thinking creatures wandering around espousing some cockamamie theory to the exclusion of every other thought or opinion. Hell, to the exclusion of the reality right in from of their furry little noses.

And it’s all based on belief. They believe! Really, at the end of the day, they are all a bunch of theists, believing in something greater than their acorn-sized noggins are capable of encompassing. Frankly, I’ve had more sophisticated conversations with a poplar sapling than I’ve had with some of the supposed “scholars” who hawk their istic twaddle in the guise of science or religion or humanity or {shudder} common sense. But they believe. They believe so fervently that if God himself were to show up at an agnostic convention, they’d sit him down and try to convince him to give it all up in favour of of sitting around with his thumbs up his ass, questioning his own existence.

And don’t get me started on the Marxists. Granted they were smart enough to name their ism after a real guy, which entitles them to the capital by default—everyone else had to work for it— but really, the fact that they can’t see that the maundering of some guy already dead for more than a hundred years shouldn’t be taken so seriously, given that he didn’t know what computer was, or that fascism hadn’t been invented, or that frankly instantaneous global communication has kinda changed the playing field ….Oh, no, never mind those and oh so many more interesting tidbits. What some lunatic exile wrote as a mental mastubatory exercise to impress his cronies must be taken as gospel.

Gospel. Huh, that’s ironic. Now that i think of it, Jesus and Marx have a lot in common: exiles, revolutionary thinkers, issues with women, and of course, the beards…

Man, I hate beards: they make my teeth hurt. And you’ve got to know that’s a world of pain…

—excerpt from The Beaver Monologues; published 2013