When I am pushing against the boulder which separates me from my goals, and it's having a good laugh by sitting there weighing several immovable tons, I turn to random influence. Chaos and I are old friends and frequent collaborators.

Here's the pair of tools for divine generation I use most often.

An old-school favorite of creative unstuckers, Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt is with me in three forms: a hand-made set of cards from the mists of yesteryear, a version I patched up as part of my Max/MSP/Jitter control panel, and the nicely implemented software from CurvedSpace which lives in my dock.

It's not only used for song-writing decisions, either. Bare minutes ago it solved a particularly vexing decision over how to structure my life to realize some larger creative goals:

The above says it all for my trouble of the moment.

I'm in the midst of several projects, so my copy of Tiger is still in the shrink. If someone doesn't create an Oblique Strategies widget by the time I'm ready to upgrade, I might have to make it myself. Oblique Strategies, if followed either literally or metaphorically, always yield good results.

The other half of my kick-start pair is Roger von Oech's Creative Whack Pack. I've been using von Oech's masterpiece since the early 90s and it has brought me no end of delight and inspiration. Similar in design to the Strategies, this set of cards gives you an instructional missive such as Slay A Dragon, Exaggerate or Focus On The Real Truth, then follows up with a small story to provide a contextual guide for you to work on your own problem.

Somewhere in my ToDo database is the conversion of these cards to software, but for now Roger von Oech's website CreativeThink will give you a random card from the Whack Pack. Just refresh the page for another one.

Some people call it cheating, I call it working with the universe as another aspect of my own mind. As without, so within, which then leaves home to stand on its own as the new without... and the cycle repeats. Like Tarot and I Ching, utilizing random processes with these tools to aid in making creative decisions is just another way of holding a conversation with oneself.