Convergant Divergent Definite

As a kid I was probably unhealthily enamored with those "choose your own adventure" books. After taking a couple of precursory goes through one of those books, I'd map out a tree figuring out which steps lead to which results so that I could take the best and most adventurous trip through the book. The really interesting endings though as far as I was concerned weren't the good ones that could be accomplished through various routes, I was mainly interested in the novel endings, the endings that were only navicable by way of a discrete set of decisions. When I was about sixteen I had a class that we built an off-line web page in, instead of writing a page about cows or trucks (give my class-mates a break, we grew up in central WI, there really wasn't much more than cows and trucks) I wrote my own choose your own adventure story and embedded links in the illustrations as a navigation tool. First of all, I wish I had that computer disk today. Second, the process of mapping first and then writing instead of reading and mapping was a revelation to me. Additionally, in high school I got involved in this field biology thing were we, for the dnr, sampled the macroinvertabrates in the eau plain flowage as a method of determining organic polution in the river system. What you do is you take a mesh net and collect the water dwelling invertibrates, put them in a jar with some formaldehyde and then figure out which order, genera and species they are by using what's called a dichotomous key. The point is that the key and the books are really much the same thing, you follow a set of directions which converge and diverge based on a set of decisions. A contemporary definition of insanity is repeating the same steps expecting different results. What then I counter is taking different paths to the same results. Furthermore, what does it mean then to define those paths.

"standing at the bottom of the step/if I tilt my head a little I can look up her dress/I'd be willing to bet that she'd move if she knew/so I'm going to tap her on the shoulder and give her a clue" - Slug


-Erasmus