He wrote

I stumbled upon Friedrich Nietzsche when I was 17, following the usual trail of existential candies -- Camus, Sartre, Beckett -- that unsuspecting teenagers find in the woods. The effect was more like a drug than a philosophy. I was whirled upward -- or was it downward? -- into a one-man universe, a secret cult demanding that you put a gun to the head of your dearest habits and beliefs. That intoxicating whiff of half-conscious madness; that casually hair-raising evisceration of everything moral, responsible and parentally approved -- these waves overwhelmed my adolescent dinghy. And even more than by his ideas -- many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now -- I was seduced by his prose. At the end of his sentences you could hear an electric crack, like the whip of a steel blade being tested in the air. He might have been the Devil, but he had better lines than God.

What I read

I fell backwards into Friedrich Nietzche when I was still a backwards-ass man-child smoking pot and thinking I was better than everyone else because I had bought what my AP English teacher had hinted. The effect of Nietzche was more like a congratulatory and excluding factor than it was like the bleached walls of a typical city. I was pulled apart by seemingly infallible doctrine that cried, “It is better to die for some self-absorbed reason than to live in a comfortable home.” The distracting whiff of cerebral doubt; that casual self-awareness that reminds you of morality, responsibility, and duty—these things made me realize I was already a grown-ass man and I needed to stop chasing my tail with rhetoric. I didn’t understand all of it, but god dammit can that man make a reader feel important.