I’ve been teaching myself to use pen and ink, like dip pens and ink. I’m getting to a point where I’m comfortable. I grew up looking at a lot of etchings, and it’s a little dream to be able to draw some of those etchings, so that’s what I’m doing, trying to teach myself. But there’ll come a point where I’m like, “I’ve got to leave this alone or I’m just going to screw it up.” And it looks done or quite often I’ll ask my wife what she thinks. I’ll be like, “What do you think?” And she’s like, “Don’t do anything else to it.” I’m like, “But I really want to do this.” And sometimes I’ll listen and sometimes I won’t.

I had this sort of…vibe in my head that I wanted to get onto the page. It wasn’t even an image, not even that concrete. It was almost like a song that I couldn’t hear. The spirit of a book that wasn’t yet written, but wanted to be. I felt that way for Jell-O Girls, too. It was an energy I wanted to translate. I knew Aesthetica had come together when I saw and felt the vibe on the page. I don’t know if this makes sense, but I think now, after going through this process of channeling the vibe into a book twice, that there’s no way to force it. It’s a matter of time.

I don’t think you can finish a poem in the same way I don’t think you can finish a feeling, but I can find a tolerable place to pause. I am a very neurotic self-editor, and in this book in particular, because there’s so much personal vulnerability in it, I felt the need to shave the poems so I could account for almost every move or word or turn or line break. With the more formally experimental poems, I sometimes stumble when I read them, and I think that’s a good thing: I want that stumble; I wanted the poems to be rough and off-kilter. So I worked very hard to shape them into very tight, vibrating forms.

I don’t know if they ever really are. I mean, there are often works that you make for a particular moment and then maybe the next time you show them, you show them in a slightly different way so that they become more precise or more communicative. So they’re constantly evolving. Also, when you stick one work next to another work, suddenly it has a new resonance. You could almost argue that, in that new context, it’s a new work again. So I don’t know if you ever really finish anything.

The proudest achievement of my life at that time was that software. Wonderfully organized, extensible, and efficient: the culmination of everything I’d learned about programming in ten years. After a successful relaunch and Christmas rush, I was looking at my plan for 2008 and beyond. All my plans needed a huge effort for little reward, but were required for future growth. I had broken it into about 20 projects, each taking 2 to 12 weeks. But I wasn’t excited about any of them.

I do not want to be an expert in anything.

I’ve never been this close with anyone, or spent this much time with any other person in my life. We talk talk talk so openly about everything, and do everything together. He’s definitely the love of my life.

Keep you uncorked, keep you unstuck, keep it flowing, keep the ideas going, keep the feedback, keep you in communication with your potential future customers for the book. I think it's a great idea.

If you are a total atheist and believe in nothing, and you believe that when you die, there's no whatever spiritual realm that you just plop into the earth, well, then your personality is what lives on through recordings like this, through your writing and so that is your personality living after you have physically died. That is my favorite definition of the afterlife.

So for years I kept calling myself an entrepreneur until one day I realized like, wait a second, this is expired! Like somebody who is an athlete in high school can’t keep calling himself an athlete forever.