The Greatest Living Writer

You know, I try not to expect too much out of life, but I do think that someday I’d like to be thought of as the world’s greatest living writer. Not that I have any pretension that my writing will be thought of as the “world’s greatest”, but maybe they’ll all think I was the writer who was the world’s best at living. Like maybe they’ll look at all the writers and decide that I ate pretty good and tried to exercise sort of often, that I was better at living than, say Jonathan Safran Foer, who in the future might start really letting himself go. Or maybe I’ll have this huge mansion with like a hundred rooms, tons of pinball machines, lots of marble surfaces, a really nice pool with hip-hop-video bitches (I’m normally loath to use this term, but in all honesty, it’s the most descriptive and appropriate for the sort of bitches I’m talking about (ya heard?)), and a modest but impressive topiary garden featuring renderings of the most beloved characters from my canon. And they’d all say, “Nathan Thornton knows how to live! He’s living better than Michael Chabon and Cormac McCarthy put together, and his house makes Sam Lipsyte’s beachfront villa look like a 1970s-era La Paz methadone clinic.” Or how about this – maybe in the future, there’s this crazy virus or something, a pandemic that only affects writers – they could call it “The Crichton Strain” or “The Book Worm”. Anyway, I’m the only one who’s strangely unaffected. Or even better – a serial killer who targets writers and I’m the last one or something. Wait, I’ve got it – zombies! All the world’s writers are mysteriously dying and then rising from their graves! So when the urban centers and shopping malls or the world are being terrorized by an undead brain-craving Joan Didion, and the flesh is dripping off Philip Roth’s fingers as he reaches under your front door to snatch your infant son from your quivering arms, maybe you’ll think something like, “Say what you will about him, but you can’t deny that Nathan Thornton is the world’s greatest living writer. His writing still sucks, though.”