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I think that we’re explorers by nature. We see something, anything, and we can’t help but be curious about it. One final holdover from the age when we were babies and every single thing was something miraculous to us.

As we get older, the unknown world (as we perceive it) gets smaller and smaller. And then, when it happens, it’s easy to lose a sense of wonder altogether.

It’s important to venture into the unknown from time to time. Let the miraculous open your mind to possibility. It seems that all of life’s wonders exist just beyond that which we know and are comfortable with.

AMC’s recent rollout of tiered pricing was, to put it mildly, flawed. Arguments in favor of it claimed similarity to concerts or sporting events. But concerts or sporting events are one-time things.

Live productions, or any ticketed activity that is limited to a once-only experience, are much different than seeing films. Because while the film stays the same, the experience of attending a live event can never be duplicated.

The risk, of course, is that cinema attendance, while somewhat on the rise following the pandemic, could suffer from such pricing initiatives.

I used this term recently to describe the evaporation of time – or, more literally, the passing of time. The fact that it’s already the end of February when it felt like last week it was still 2022, is just mind-boggling to me.

When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see exactly what we look like at that moment. But in our minds, it feels like we’re much younger. What we see is the remains of what we think we are – that’s what I meant by the remains of the mist.

There are roughly eight billion people on this planet. Today, then, is experienced in eight billion ways. And those are the ways that we could possibly understand – not the trillions of ways various animals, insects, etc. may see today.

For some. today is their first day. Others, their last. For most of us, it’s just another day in a line of days.

But each day is different. Each day can be special. And when we think of the number of ways that today could be perceived, the fact that today is seen through our eyes makes it something that we should cherish.

A lot of my preliminary thoughts for blog posts go into a “scratchpad”. Currently, it’s pretty much a Google Doc that just has page after page of scribblings. One line here, two lines there.

When I do finish something and post it, I highlight the entire thing, leaving a “PUBLISHED on …” note so that I don’t accidentally repost scrolling through them later.

I used to write quite frequently in notebooks – I enjoy the act of writing, using pen on paper – but it’s not something that I was doing with any consistency for a while. At least until last year’s trip to Hawaii.

So I’ve been thinking of the history of the word scratchpad. Looking it up, it’s just the combination of scratch + pad, meaning a pad of scratch paper. A place for preliminary notes.

The thing is, I don’t recall where I first heard it. I’ve been using the term for a while now, at least a couple of years. Perhaps it was referenced in something I read, or heard on the radio. But, the specific escapes me.

The nice thing about a scratchpad is that it just collects and collects and collects. The longer you scratch, the more you build up, and the more fuel you have to throw onto your intellectual fire.

The process is important. How you go about doing things, getting things done. It matters.

But maybe not as much as the fact that it does get done.

Something about writing every day, and keeping notebooks and, honestly, a lot of paper of all sorts, I get to look back and see where I was in time. And for a moment, I can remember.

I think that’s what photos are, in a way, too. Little moments, frozen in time. And looking at them, you can remember words said, feelings shared, or any number of sensations that may have been occurring. And when all we have left of those moments are the time capsules, it’s nice to revisit them sometimes.

Used to be, a movie was rarely over two hours. This was from a lot of factors: shooting on 35mm, for one, was expensive. It was time-consuming to edit. Another, selling tickets at the cinema was very important. If you could keep every movie roughly the same length, then you’d be able to plug and play into most of the screens nationwide.

Now, most of our movie consumption is at home. Nearly all film and television production is digital. The turnaround from filming to distribution is shortened to mere months.

And thus, three-hour or longer movies are much more commonplace. Are they fun to see in the cinema? Well, sometimes. Though it’s much harder to hold off going to the restroom. And you almost certainly have as good a screen at home to watch it later. When it’s streaming.

There’s a point in showing up to the page. Sometimes it’s more than just writing down thoughts. It can be cathartic to, as Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith had similarly stated, “bleed on the page”.

We all write for different reasons. Sometimes we write for more than just one reason. But for people who like writing, we can’t seem to really do without it.

“Every man has his daydream, every man has his goal.”

We all have dreams, of the things we want, and the lives we want to lead. Most of us don’t fully those dreams. I think a lot of it is the relative safety of the familiar vs. the possible risk of the unknown. If anything, we are generally taught to be risk averse.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t think before you leap, or live life dangerously just because you can. But I think it is important to keep your sights set on what you actually want, and to make progress towards it – whether small steps or giant leaps.