Case study.(the nonlinear editor)

In the last chapter of The World According to Garp, John Irving describes a novelist as "a doctor who sees only terminal cases." That's his peculiarly rigid brand of New England fatalism at work; no character can avoid his destiny, and every destiny is, in a sense, an ending--termination, as it were. For every introduction there's a conclusion, and for every rise a fall, unavoidable and inevitable.

Equipped with an Irvingesque sense of inescapable fate as I ply my trade in the event video world, it occurs to me that there are two looming inevitabilities in this busines