I have to confess that sometimes I feel like hot shit. All things considered, things are going pretty well for me on the Spirit Path of the East Village Writer/Hipster. I publish this e-zine, which gets a fair number of readers, and my first book is coming out sometime from Feral House. Bits and pieces of my other writing get published here and there, on McSweeneys.net or in this week's New York Press, and I'm going back to grad school in the fall, which will hopefully afford me the time for full-time navel-gazing.

From time to time, though, things happen that make you put everything in perspective. For instance, last Thursday, I had dinner with some friends and friends of friends at one of those incredibly hip restaurants I would have never been able to afford if one of those aforesaid amigos wasn't also comfortably well-off and incredibly generous. In our party were the owner of one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web, a writer for another one of the largest sites, and a book agent for one of the most important literary agencies in the city.

Now, I think that Corporate Mofo does pretty well, but both of the Web sites were in the Alexa top 1000, and both get a fair amount of press and attention. Compared to the book agent, though, all of us dotcommies were small potatoes. Nobody really pays attention to the Internet, and there's no money in it anyway. You don't see a New York Times Web Site Review, and the days when you'd get $100,000 to write for a site are long gone (if they ever existed). This guy has no reason to even consider representing a book unless he thinks it's going to be a commercial success on the order of tens of thousands of copies sold and thousands and thousands of dollars in royalties—which is the equivalent, in the publishing world, of making it all the way from Little League to major league baseball, except there are probably less authors receiving thousand-dollar royalty checks (let alone hundred-thousand-dollar royalty advances) than there are multimillion-dollar athletes. The reason, I'm sure, isn't snobbishness or elitism on his part; it's just that, at that level, representing anything less doesn't pay the bills. It would be like asking George Soros to run a subway token booth, or Johnny Cochran to get you out of a speeding ticket.

Just as we were getting ready to go, we noticed the table next to us was filling up with surreally beautiful women—I mean women who, in the genetic lottery, were the equivalent of Kentucky-Derby-winning horses or Olympic athletes. All were dressed like they had just stepped off the set of "Sex and the City" and had that carnivorously friendly attitude that marks the woman whose job is to be professionally beautiful. They were either models, or really, really expensive call girls.

Their presence was explained, however, when Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson walked into the restaurant. I would like to say that I immediately recognized them, but the fact is that I kind of exist in a non-pop-culture-consuming kind of parallel universe and so I had to be told who they were. (Though I did see Zoolander on an airplane once, and actually thought it was pretty funny.) Even in my philistinism, however, it was immediately apparent that these were Special People by the combination of social deference shown to them and the privilege everyone seemed to feel in being able to bask in their presence.

Their divine manifestation led me to another kind of epiphany: No matter how much Starsky and Hutch might suck, more people were going to see it than would ever read my words, and it would earn more money on its opening day than I would in my entire life. Compared to the adulation heaped upon movie stars, Web celebrity and even being a successful writer are absolutely nothing. About the only consolation I can feel is that, even if pixels are ephemeral, paper will remain when flesh and bones are dust.

Is there a moral to the story? Is ambition pointless? Are we all just links on a chain of small fry, big fish, and bigger fish that stretches endlessly in both directions? Do fleas have fleas that torment them? And why wouldn't my friends let me throw flatware at Wilson and Stiller?

Obviously, I haven't given up writing. Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, I've always thought you have to do your own thing, regardless of whether or not the mewling masses "get it"—because if you don't, there's no purpose to life at all. And if a small cult readership is all I have—well, I'm damn proud to have every one of you.

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