The title refers to a state of mind I used to have before I figured out that, for instance, going north takes a person downtown, while going south takes you to Fitchburg. Not knowing exactly where Hoyt park is is sort of my way of hanging on to this sense of geocraphical mystery just a bit longer.

The End of Infinity is about just this feeling, I think.

I like to talk about dreams I have that are like this - where I'm at or near home, and then I walk for a bit and I'm somewhere I've never been before, or where there's a big park with a river that you can only get to from one side, or a shortcut in someone's back yard, or something of that sort. But I realize now that things were the same way when I was very young. I was vaguely familiar with our immediate neighborhood - I knew how to get to the railroad tracks, Toys R Us, or Neil's house, and maybe how to get to ORE (though I remember scenes from a time when I didn't even know that - getting walked home by a babysitter and not knowing where the heck we were), but when it came to anything more than a mile away, I was lost. I remember everytime I rode along to take Elspeth home, we'd go down Whitney Way and when we crossed what I now know to be Mineral Point, going north, we crossed into an area that I recognised, but recognised as an area that I didn't know how to get to. I can even remember riding in the car while my dad was going to get Beer, and we'd cross the railroad tracks down by University Avenue, and I'd look at the place where Whitney Way crossed the tracks thinking "I recognise this place. I don't know where it is or how to get to it, but this is the place we always pass on the way back from the liquor store."

I'm pretty sure this 'mystery of place' is what made me love walking down the railroad tracks so much. I didn't know that going down the railroad tracks, under verona road, and out into the country would take you to Seminole highway, bridge 127, and Belleville. I didn't even know that it went south. For all I knew we'd go under another bridge and come back in the far side of Madison, or maybe there would be giant mandelbrot sets growing around the next corner.

Those were the days of railroad tracks and Mandlbrot sets in my mind. I'd daydream about railroad bridges over valleys full of fractals while playing with blocks or watching sesame street. For a while I was convinced that there were 2 parallel streets on Sesame street...

          Apartments            |
     +---------+                |
     |         +----------------+       China
     |              oscar
     |                      bus stop
     |         +----------------+
     |         |
     +--+   +--+    some trees
 Fix-it |   |      and maybe a benck
  shop  |   |       and a mailbox
        |   |
--------+   +-------------------+ another corner?

<-- oscar moved over there once
       to Illinois or something

This sense is also linked to video games. When I first started playing NES games, before I had a more developed sense of how video games work, I would think of the backgrounds and places off the edges of levels as being just as real as the parts that the designers let you explore. If I could only find a secret door, or a gap in a fence, or jump high enough, I could get access to that much larger expanse, and who knows what I'll find?

This has been a recurring theme forever. When I would design Doom levels, I always wanted to build an additional 'outside' (or maybe an inside) that one could get to if they explored hard enough. In the 'Boy and His Blob dream' that I had in 2023, I was intent on escaping the bounds of the world even while being aware that video game worlds (unless they incorporate some procedural world generation, which is usually not very interesting) are necessarily finite.