For ages, The Idiot labored under the fell weight of reality. How many years? None can say, because counting them would be boring. It might have been one, or a hundred, or eleventy billion. All his life, the cruel yoke of knowing stuff hung from the idiot’s neck, holding him back from greatness.
He ran a register, which sucked because it was almost math. The machine did some of it, but he still had to press the right buttons or his boss would be on him about whatever. And if he tried telling customers who really ran the government, they’d get weird. He’d probably never make manager, unless two managers got bored and left at the same time. Which could happen, but he wanted to be manager now. He had ideas.
Only the light of Margarita Mondays kept his soul from despair. As he clawed at the dirt, which Staples insisted wasn’t his job, the idiot dreamed of a better world. It mostly looked like the world on television, but with him in charge. He dreamed of it nonetheless, placing himself in the hallowed shoes of Vin Diesel, or his costar that died, or a tropical bird on The Masked Singer.
Then, the change.
One night, after his third or eighth margarita, The Idiot told a stranger that he’d be president if he was black. The stranger changed seats, so The Idiot switched to his cell phone. His roommate had told him to try Twitter, and The Idiot could accept advice after softening his liver a bit. He entered the name TruckNuts69, found it taken, and became TruckNuts68.
On the blue bird, The Idiot repeated his insight: with black privilege, he would already run the world’s largest superpower. This time, he found cheers. Retweets offered the unconditional love he’d missed since moving back in with dad. He prepared a second tweet, and a third, and all the boring numbers after three.
He also read. Reading used to suck, but Twitter made it natural. It hewed back all the metaphors and big words and paragraphs, and left a language anyone could speak. And if anyone was any one part of anyone, he was the one. The Idiot received a graduate-level education in the location, scale, and methodology of pedophile cabals. He even picked up the words “cabal” and “methodology” from reading, meaning his old teachers were right. He sent one a thank you note, along with a short guide to finding local pedophiles.
Life took on a new tint (another reading word). He still ran the register, and the boss still freaked out every time he cost Staples a couple hundred dollars. But now The Idiot had an audience. An audience that understood that he understood that they both understood things better than people that went to understanding school. The Idiot always had something to say, and they always had time to listen.
The world was a big body, and The Idiot used to be a small cell. Now he’d learned to divide super quickly into others, who divided quickly in turn. They’d become a big mass of awesome cells in a better, kickass body, where cells could divide all they wanted without worrying about PC lymph node bullshit. And it was good. Together, they could save the world.