My next column for the local paper is lit. LIT, I SAY.
It will quickly go viral, lead to a fierce public debate, and result in a multimillion-dollar book deal for yours truly.
I will use the money nobly at first but quickly fall into profligacy. Cars I can't afford. A drug habit. A posse of hangers-on and ne'er-do-wells.
My family will abandon me. My friends, too. But my posse, they understand a genius can't abide society's rules. And they urge me onto a new book deal. My thoughts must be shared with a waiting world!
After a flurry of initial sales, my first book appears on the remainder shelves. My agent stops returning my calls. Publishers avoid me. My bank account is drained and the posse evanesces like smoke from my glass pipe.
I'm broken by an indifferent world and my terrible choices. A lost lamb, rejected.
Bereft of fame, money, and ego, I collapse upon the doors of a monastery. I'm hungry and greedily accept their meager bowl of pottage.
I study. I learn. I serve.
Unworthily, I am tonsured a novice. Later, a monk. Denying the world, and even the monastic community, I become a hermit accepting a life of solitude and prayer.
Years of abject poverty, decades of shamefaced repentence, yadda, yadda, yadda, I'm canonized St. Jon of the Greater Phoenix Area and do all sorts of cool miracles.
Long thread short, if you want to see a world transformed through divine intervention, you should read my next op-ed. I'll tweet the link when it's out.
