Give Me a Hand!

Eons ago, or at least while I was attending grade school, I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. Didn't own them all--that was way too expensive for my allowance (plus pay for mowing lawns), but I did have a pretty good number. Between one of my other friends and I we were able to cover most of them.

It was always nice, the idea that you could go back and try again if you made a mistake. Or that you could re-live the same choices over and over again if you really liked finding the buried treasure on page 54. There was surprisingly little actual adventure, given the title, but the stories were generally fun, and didn't take too long to read through a single try.

Of course, to read the entire book, I often ran out of fingers.

I'd keep track of the choices I'd made in the last pass through the book, holding a finger in each of the choices made along the path. I'd get to the end, die a horrible, gruesome death (almost invariably, the first time through), and then back up to the most convenient finger, and keep going. Keeping track of where I was in the book was the most I ever had to make use of short-term memory, holding a half-dozen or ten different plot-points in my mind at once.

But armed with a fistful of fingers and an often-flaky memory, I was able to live through one life, over and over. Making choices, for good or bad, until I saw what all the possible outcomes were. Alas, while life tends to come with at least a fistful of fingers and the often-flaky memory, once a choice has been made, a finger can't be used to give us somewhere to return.

Which I suppose is probably a good thing. Given the difficult choices I'm faced with, I'd run out of fingers sometime by the middle of breakfast.

And I don't eat breakfast!