I am a serial monogamist of sorts, and have been with my girlfriend for almost four years. In imagining my brain back to worlds where I might be around someone other sexed in that way and not know them that well, speaking out loud almost seems like requiring of demon language, or money spurting.

It is important not to show too many inches at once.

I'm really close to my mom, but things with my dad have been different. He has dementia and watching him change, I've actually started to think that it's a purer state for people. Because he operates as if he's a child and everything is new, which seems more honest.

When I was a kid my primary goal in life was to find a book that was alive. Not alive in the human sense, but like a thing that would send me to a place not otherwise accessible on Earth. This book should have hidden words encrypted beneath the printed ones, so that if I worked hard enough and discovered the code I would somehow end up inside the book, or the book would take on a body and consume me, revealing a secret set of rooms behind the wall in my bedroom, for instance, inside which anything could be.

So many doors forever. There were never enough. Each door had several locks. One lock was combination. Another required keys. Another was a simple side latch. Another was strictly ornamental. Another you could open by whispering the right thing to it at the right time, which is the type of lock most humans have.

I think language is a system that we have devised to negotiate a series of more amorphous entities. It's a layer you can use to see where those things exist, but if you don't have anyone speaking anymore, those things are still there. The things that language stands for do not require humans, and in fact are often trampled down by humans.

I'm not an escapist, but the value of language is that it can create places that did not exist before. And so language for me doesn't reflect the world, it extends the world, so that it becomes larger and more fantastic and less mired in this school shooting bullshit. It actually builds a future - that's how evolution occurs.