Finding Boster the Nose

In childhood, one of my brothers wrote a series of stories set in a country in which a great many people are named Boster. Most people don't have surnames, but to avoid confusion each person named Boster is given a "Boster title" and is known as "Boster the" plus some random common noun -- Boster the Food, Boster the Cow, Boster the Toe, and so on. The main character in most of the stories is just Boster, the only person of that name not to have a Boster title, which in the first story, Boster vs. Boster the Pig, leads to a case of mistaken identity.

The last story in the series is not about Boster but is the origin story of Johnny Apple Changer, a legendary figure mentioned in passing in some of the Boster stories. Johnny begins his career as a distinguished lexicographer -- "Johnny was so famous that anything he wrote would become a bestselling dictionary, no matter what it was" -- but his work is misunderstood by the reading public, leading the disillusioned Johnny to seek a new career. He falls in with an eccentric called Timer who is pursuing the hopeless project of discovering how to produce magic from apple juice, and it is then that Johnny makes the life-changing realization that what he needs to do is learn how to change apples, modifying regular apple trees so they will grow taller and produce more apples for Timer.

Unsure of how to proceed, Johnny goes to the library and finds a book called How to Find Out How to Do What You Want to Do If It Seems Rather Impossible at This Time, by Boster the Basket. It turns out to be an extremely short book:

If you want to do something that you don't know how to do, there are two main methods of learning how to do it. First, if it is something that other people do know how to do, you go to those other people and have them teach you how to do it. The other method is used when there isn't anyone else who knows how to do this thing that you want to be able to do. That is the situation this book attempts to address.

Simply put, here is how you find out how to do something that you want to do but don't know how to do and no one else knows how to do it either. Go to a certain great wizard named Boster the Nose and ask him. This great wizard can find out -- through his great wizardry -- how to do just about everything. Everything I have asked him about anyway, so he will probably be able to find out how to do whatever it is that you want to do but don't know how to do.

THE END.

On the next, and last, page is this map:

Johnny rejoiced. He felt a little sad that Boster the Basket had made the map with ASCII as that made it a little hard to understand, but he felt very happy about it all. Then he read a small warning at the bottom of the page: "This map may not be accurate if you do not live to the west of Boster the Nose. If you live north, east, west, or south of Boster the Nose, adjust the map accordingly."

Johnny felt that this might be a little difficult. Especially since the warning gave no guidance whatsoever as to what to do if you live northeast or northwest or southeast of Boster the Nose. And he worried that maybe they did.

So he went off to Timer to find out if he could help. After all, he had lived here for a long time, and he might know where they were in relation to Boster the Nose.

"Hmm... Boster the Nose?" Timer said, looking up from the apple juice box he was working with at the moment. "Never heard of him. But I'd bet we're to the west of him. Just start going that direction. If you don't find him, you can always turn around and try something else."

Johnny couldn't dispute the logic of that, so off he went to try and find Boster the Nose. He took the book with him so that he could check and make sure he was on course as he walked.

Less than an hour later, Johnny has indeed found Boster the Nose by following Timer's sage advice.

I reread this story a week or so ago and could definitely empathize with Johnny's situation.

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Update: a couple of hours after publishing this, I checked my blogroll and saw that there was a new Duckstack up, called "Reflect Eject." It includes almost exactly the same advice Timer gave Johnny:

You can spend a lot of time trying to untangle these philosophical problems if you're inclined to, but unless you invent some very clever sophistry they're essentially unsolvable. . . . If something paralyzes you to the point of inaction and missed opportunities, you're better off just picking a path at random and sprinting down it. If its wrong you can always sprint back.

That Duckstack was actually published a few hours before this Boster the Nose post. The Life and Changes of Johnny Apple Changer was written decades ago, I possess the one and only copy, and I announced my intention to post about it on May 25, so there's no way either of us could have influenced the other by any normal means.

An additional sync is that ducks play an important role in the Johnny story. He writes a dictionary in verse "just for ducks," but it becomes unexpectedly popular with humans, who grossly misunderstand the definitions due to their unfamiliarity with duck culture. It is this that moves Johnny to give up lexicography and apprentice himself out to Timer.

Further note added: That Duckstack even includes a long line made of ASCII characters, connecting two parts of the post.