I have proof that the square sticker exists.

I own several thousand of them.

This has not made it appreciably easier to buy a one-inch square sticker.

More specifically, I want a one-inch square sticker, with actual square corners, printed on a roll. The stickers are tiny Jester Compasses, intended to masquerade as postage stamps on postcards from SpillianQuest. As you can see, I already have thousands of them with actual pointy corners, but they came individually cut, which means someone would have to peel the backing off each tiny sticker one at a time.

I thought a roll would be easier.

And so began the Quest.

Square, I have learned, can mean square-ish. Square can mean square with rounded corners. Square can apparently mean, “We understand that you are attached to an antiquated Euclidean conception of the square, but have you considered letting that go?”

I have not. A postage stamp has corners. I want corners.

This has now involved multiple printers, samples, emails, quotes, accidental orders, and the acquisition of a vocabulary I did not previously possess. Yesterday I learned the words butt cut.

A butt-cut sticker, for those fortunate enough not to have needed this information until now, is cut straight against the next sticker without the little gutter around it. It is apparently one of the ways I may someday achieve the elusive combination of roll + square + corners.

I have spent years studying mythology, imagination, psyche, ritual, and the transformative possibilities of the imaginal. Butt cut may bring me to my knees.

Meanwhile, because quests have a tendency to produce consequences nobody anticipated at the outset, I appear to be accumulating Jester Compass stickers in alarming numbers. Some have pointed corners. Some have rounded corners. Some may yet achieve the promised land of butt-cut geometric orthodoxy.

At some point yesterday, while contemplating the possibility that I may soon own approximately 20,000 tiny Compasses because I wanted perhaps 1,000 postage stamps, I realized that this was getting ridiculous.

And then I realized that, of course, it was. This is what questing does.

You set out in pursuit of one seemingly straightforward thing. The road forks. There is an unexpected obstacle. You become obsessed with a detail that no reasonable person would consider important. You learn an entirely unnecessary skill, acquire peculiar objects, meet people who know arcane things, and spend considerably longer than anticipated in a territory you did not know existed.

And somewhere along the way, the thing you thought was the point becomes only one of the things you found.

So now we have Wandering Compasses, stickers for parcels and field notes and correspondence and places where unexplained Compasses might usefully appear. We have potential raw material for collage and bricolage and maps and strange little artifacts not yet imagined.

It has not escaped me, by the way, that the object I have spent all this time attempting to make conform to an exact shape, precise dimensions, and an orderly roll is the Jester Compass.

The compass whose entire reason for being is that it refuses to point where it is supposed to.

Apparently it has little interest in conforming to the boundaries of the square, either.

And so we also have the beginnings of what future scholars may recognize as the Great Rounded Proliferation of Early SpillianQuest Material Culture, a period characterized by the mysterious abundance of Compass iconography that researchers initially attributed to intense ritual significance.

Current scholarship suggests that the Founding Fomenter simply could not successfully procure a square sticker on a roll.

I still want the blasted corners.