When I came to New York City for college in the fall of 2002, it was a post-9/11 New York. Columbia University was post-modern, post-structuralist, post-ironic, post-gender, extremely postcolonial, not yet entirely post-racial, it was post, very, very post. I was introduced to the ironically named magazine The Believer by my friend Phil and worshipped it until I was reading an issue one day on the train, and it happened to be an antiwar article, which was rare for this magazine that affected not to believe in anything, and I was feeling very nauseous, and I couldn’t separate my feeling of nausea from the article, and I wanted to scream at the magazine, DO YOU BELIEVE IN ANYTHING OR NOT. Afterwards, just like if you vomited up a Nutella sandwich and had hazelnuts forever ruined for you, I could not go near this magazine.

Phil was at that time suffering from the worst case of aggravated Raskolnikov syndrome I had ever seen. The syndrome works like this: A young man, say, a man of twenty, reads Nietzsche and becomes convinced that he is the Ubermench. Then the young man reads Crime and Punishment. Does it act as a tonic? Does he see in Raskolnikov’s character a cautionary tale about the dangers of being a young man hopped up on the fumes of half digested Nietzsche? No. Now the young man believes he is the Ubermench and Raskolnikov. Often the syndrome at this stage is accompanied by a solipsism so profound that the sufferer will say, TO YOUR FACE, things like, “I just don’t know how I can tell if other people actually exist.” This exact remark is quite common.

I remember wandering around downtown Manhattan with Phil one night not far from the site of the fallen towers, when he was in the throes of his syndrome. He was drinking out of his own personal quart bottle of brandy and he kept on running into signposts. 

I myself was not in very good shape at the time. I had become convinced, really convinced, that I had to create a theoretical justification for the fact that my butt was so large.