LITTLE SHAVER
The greatest problem confronting humanity is the shaving dilemma. To shave or not to shave? I hear the rusted sound of razors scraping against skin. I am transformed, repelled, terrified. I sense inevitable nicks and cuts, awful puckering stuff to be applied to these cursed shaving wounds that makes them sting, these stigmata, the scream when you douse your proud flesh with after shave, or you slash your armpits, the water and shaving creme sprayed haphazard around your bathroom, your mirror fogged, stained with bloody fingerprints. Envision all the blades, single and multiple, the wet and dry electric shavers, the cologne, after shave, the healing compote. This is not your choice, but social conformity makes it so. Either Nair or hair, or the highway. The right choice, the only choice if you want to be a decent, upstanding human being is to endure the ritual of shaving despite your pain, despite your humiliation, despite your subjection to societal norms.
This social enforcement starts early. Uncle Morris, his breath smelling of tictacs and Old Milwaukee, his red and blue checkered double breasted suit looming , hovering, menacing, leaning in close to your face, his grin full of yellow teeth, he grabs your five-year-old cheeks and pinches hard while growling, “How’s the little shaver?” Then he pinches hard again to redden your cheeks, so they look blushed up healthy. You want to take a straight razor and filet Uncle Morris. Occam’s Razor, perhaps that says the simplest solution for a problem is the right answer.
Uncle Morris was never aware that the original Little Shaver was a pencil sharpener developed in the early 1900’s. He never knew that there were Little Shaver rag dolls in 1919, or fishing lures today called Little Shavers. Despite these facts of which Uncle Morris was ignorant, and whether little or big, shavers, and by extension shaving, is the most simple explanation for all the bad stuff we go through as humans, the simplest reason for the world’s problems, and so therefore the most likely root cause for the ultimate human catastrophe.
Think of all the suffering, the calamities occurring right now, the starvation, the loneliness, the disasters, the floods, the pestilence, the lies, the corruption, the complexity of world political disorder, the savage and twisted issues that vex even the most aware problem solvers, all because good people do bad things. They yearn to conform through shaving, and that’s the plain old reason for all the world’s intractable ills, easy peazy. According Occam’s damn razor, I have peeled away the onion-like layers of complexity that guard the truth. Shaving is the cause of it all.
