I was born in the usual manner in Jersey City, New Jersey, a bucolic little village across the harbor from Manhattan. I found it unremarkable that I could look out my living room and see up past the Ming The Merciless spires of midtown Manhattan all the way to the distant smudge of the George Washington bridge. I found it of no interest that I could look out my bedroom window any morning and see the ominous Kronos rectangles of the Twin Towers being constructed. As a native New Yorker, I was utterly blasé about growing up in the most exciting city in the world in the most exciting era in American history. How lucky for me that I eventually outgrew such melodramatic ennui. At least, I think I did. Maybe not. At the age of 14 I sat in the cavernous dark of the Stanley Theatre in Journal Square, waiting for a movie to begin. I liked sci-fi movies, so I figured this movie with the odd title would be a mindless way to waste an afternoon. Slowly I became aware of a strange, deep bass rumble coming from the enormous Dolby speakers on the walls. The floor itself seemed to be vibrating. On the screen the camera was panning up over the dark side of the moon. Three brass notes were sounded, rising; the music suggested infinite distance and enormous possibility. On the screen, Earth broke over the top of the moon and an enormous orchestral outburst slammed me back into my seat. As the opening fanfare continued, something happened that I've never experienced before or since: the hairs on my arms and on the back of my neck stood up. I had to know what this music was, and what it meant. The subject was not open for discussion. It was an obsession, you understand. My investigations took me to the King Kullen record store in one of the seedier parts of midtown Manhattan, where I bought the soundtrack album for 2001: A Space Odyssey. I played it until the LP became unplayable, the uneven grooves reamed smooth by the needle. I read the liner notes, and discovered that the piece that obsessed me had an odd title, in some language that I didn't recognize. "Also Sprach Zarathustra." The liner notes were kind enough to inform me that the piece was composed as an homage to a book with the same incomprehensible title, written by some man with an equally incomprehensible name. How the heck did you pronounce that name? Nye-Chy? Nitch-key? Nysh? (I didn't find out the correct pronunciation until years later, in college). Another odyssey (so to speak) to Manhattan secured me a copy of "The Portable Nietzsche," which contained "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and several other works. And so I started reading. I am absolutely convince that had it not been for Nietzsche, I would have wound up just another dead junkie in the low, dangerous neighborhood where I grew up. I damn near wound up that way anyway, which is a whole other story. Miraculously, I managed to escape to a little Jesuit college in Jersey City, where I majored in Philosophy and went head-to-head with the priests, aflame with the sort of humorless sincerity that only a Philosophy undergrad can muster. Nietzsche led me and my college peers to Camus and to Sartre, and we all fancied ourselves as engaged, indignant Existentialists, determined to change the world or at least to change a few livesYou were either a Camusien or a Sartrean, and your life wasn't worth a plugged nickel if you got caught after dark in the Camus side of town with a copy of "Being and Nothingness" on your person. We all wrote boatloads of philosophy, but in the spirit of our French heroes, we also wrote novels, stage plays, and short stories. It was all completely awful, of course, full of political bathos and poseur bravado. What the hell; we put our hearts and souls into it, we meant it, and we had fun. Speaking of fun, I always made sure to balance the intellectual high-life with great enormous helpings of the sort of (very) low-life that only Manhattan in the 1970s could offer. Upside: lots of cheap sex.Downside: lots of cheap drugs. After college, life did what it so often does: it got in the way. It's a funny thing: blink and ten years have gone by, blink twice and 25 years are gone, used up, no way to get them back. Somehow I found my way to a good place with a good woman. And one day, for reasons I still do not understand, something happened, some sort of psychological slippage, some inner dam broke … and ideas started pouring out through the breach. Combined with this was an exhilarating compulsion to get as many of these ideas down on paper as I could, to write them out, to realize them. The flood has not slowed to this day . To the contrary -- the more ideas I capture on paper, the stronger the flood becomes. I imagine the sound of all those ideas will drive me quite mad one day, but in the meantime, I get them on paper, slap them on the ass, and send them off to find their way in the world as best they can. There's no time to hug them and squeeze them and make them my friends, because so many of their siblings are shouldering their way through my brain and out into the world every single minute of every single day.