Blake Butler, editor of HTMLGIANT, asks, why do anything:

I tend to often want to beat myself up for whatever gives me pleasure, especially when it is a solitary pursuit. I think that comes from always wanting more from myself, to feel that I am up against a puzzle that keeps shifting underneath me, and only in certain moments fits into a set up that seems clear, like coming out of a forest into a clearing all of a sudden, but then to go anywhere else you have to go back into the forest, and often it feels like you’ll never find another clearing, and so a lot of people tend to go back to the previous clearing to feel that again. Great metaphor, dickface. Anyway, to answer your question: I guess because there’s nothing else to do? And for me going in search of the clearing and finding those modes where the search makes time no longer exist because I am so caught up in the mechanics of negotiating the dark makes the moments of emergence more emergent, personally, and the moments of utter darkness that much more volatile. It’s the only world I have.

Blake is the author, most recently, of Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia and There Is No Year: A Novel and wrote one of the kindest things about me anyone could think to write.

(via @5cense)