Sure, I like other people. I mean, nobody likes to be alone all the time. But I also like to be able to shut out the world when it gets too full of itself.

The thing is, a large portion of society is incapable of grasping the weird physics of the human system. Look at it this way: people scoff or frown censoriously when I say the world revolves around me. But that’s not because they think I am being selfish or arrogant. No, it’s because it means the world can’t therefore be revolving around them.

And that’s where they are wrong: it can. Just because we grew up with some weird life-metaphor based on Galilean physics as the basis for our love-your-fellow-man drivel, that doesn’t mean it’s actually right. That’s how metaphors work, right? They stand in as a representation of an idea you are having difficulty grasping in some sort of attempt to get you to think outside of the box you call a braincase. And all too often the metaphor gets away from you and suddenly it’s leading you and a hundred other lemmings off a cliff.

So stay with me. The galactic metaphor has bodies orbiting around other bodies, right? And since some guy, born 40 years before the invention of the telescope, gets his hands on one and declares the celestial truth for ever and ever, then that’s that right? Really? Try selling that to your 10-year-old and he will tell you to take a flying leap.

Anyway, we’ve got bodies orbiting around a central point, but there is no way, given the additional 400 years of science, we can still believe there is only one central point. Hell, the astronomers have us talking about the entire universe pulsing in and out, and we all know galaxies are sure as shit are revolving around something. So it stands to reason there are whole heck of a lot of revolutions still unaccounted for.

Back to me. I never said the whole world revolves around me. It doesn’t. The whole anything doesn’t do anything; as far as I am concerned, there is no whole, just a ton of pieces. And my piece, well it revolves around me and mine.

But like I said, no man is an island. And sometimes I get lonely like any other guy.

—excerpt from The Beaver Monologues; published 2013