New York is a tough place to feel important. It’s a bit like Twitter—it’s a place where people come to be heard, where not many people are listening, and everyone is trying to make a statement. If you’re lucky, you rub and you rub and you rub and you spark some sort of local fire, in the Village perhaps, or maybe Brooklyn. The aim is to make enough smoke so that the media machine will take notice, package you up, and ship you to cornfields and suburbs where people have a bit more time and longer attention spans. But like I said, it’s tough. Because everybody here is trying to start fires and everybody here is trying to get noticed.

So it helps–and I mean really helps– if you are delusional. The nuttier the better. As long as you can still function and create, it helps to be completely batshit. It takes an inhuman amount of effort to make it to the top, and this sort of effort is best sustained by some form of megalomania. You really, really have to think that you’re great. You have to scream into a crowd of people who aren’t listening, and keep screaming, keep your voice loud and constant, until you convince the crowd that you were sane all along, and everyone else was delusional.

Of course, there is one more option. You can skip being good altogether, and just be delusional. And I’m going to quit being jokey here because I think this is poetic, and human, and a bit sad. It’s really not all that funny. Because we all need to feel important. Not New York important, necessarily, but important. We all need to know that there’s a place in this world that only we can fill. Some people need bigger places than others, but everyone needs a place—a hole in the universe that only they can fill. This need is so deep and food-like and so human that we will do anything to fill it. We’ll go crazy to feel important. A protective, evolutionary sort of crazy. When the body has no food, it will break down muscle to feed itself. When the ego has no food, it will break down the mind to feed itself. If we have no place in this world, we’ll withdraw from this world, and inhabit one where we have a place.