A chase in muliple directions. 
Chasing one's own tail is obviously a recognized and accepted phrase. It shows up over a hundred times on an AltaVista search, sometimes as a report on the tricks someone's pet is capable of (even Abraham Lincoln's dog, Fido, is reported to have been adept at this) and sometimes as a metaphor, which was of course my intention.

I thought that I was taking it from one of my favorite sources, Winnie the Pooh, but another of my countless reads through the Pooh books didn't find me the source. I thought that it was Tigger who, in the bouncy style associated with him, went around and around in circles trying to catch his tail, but all I found was his attempt to defend himself from a tablecloth. Eeyore, of course, lost his, but that's a totally different story.
 

Additional associations, perhaps springing originally from thoughts of Tigger, came to mind. Hila, for instance, was a panther for Purim, and held on to her costume until well after Pesach. Stretching her hands out in front of her and yelling "waahh!!" was perhaps her favorite activity in that costume, but catching her tail was pretty popular as well.

She claims that next year she wants to be a panther that dresses up as a little girl. We'll see.

But when trying to think of one thing, serendipity has it that you fall upon another, and I remembered that Pooh and Piglet set out to catch a Woozle, and encountered a whole slew of Woozles since, of course, they were going around and around the same tree and finding their own tracks:

So they went on, feeling just a little anxious now, in case the three animals in front of them were of Hostile Intent. And Piglet wished very much that his Grandfather T. W. were there, instead of elsewhere, and Pooh thought how nice it would be if they met Christopher Robin suddenly but quite accidentally, and only because he liked Christopher Robin so much. And then, all of a sudden, Winnie-the-Pooh stopped again, and licked the tip of his nose in a cooling manner, for he was feeling more hot and anxious than ever in his life before. There were four animals in front of them!
 
"Do you see, Piglet? Look at their tracks! Three, as it were, Woozles, and one, as it was, Wizzle. Another Woozle has joined them!" 

And so it seemed to be. There were the tracks; crossing over each other here, getting muddled up with each other there; but, quite plainly every now and then, the tracks of four sets of paws. 

"I think," said Piglet, when he had licked the tip of his nose too, and found that it brought very little comfort, "I think that I have just remembered something. I have just remembered something that I forgot to do yesterday and sha'n't be able to do to-morrow. So I suppose I really ought to go back and do it now."

And maybe that's a better metaphor than trying to catch my own tail. Perhaps what I've done on my quest for some insights into all this hypertext stuff is continue to belabor a point, and perhaps the new tracks that I continue to find are nothing more than my own glosses on half-baked ideas over which I've already trampled numerous times. In a way, the thought is every bit as scary as that of encountering a herd of Woozles.

Go to: Something much