I launched Sketches of Time in 2019 as an outlet to share my thoughts on movies, music, books, and games when I realized that my incessant attempts at engaging my wife in lengthy discussions about Roger Corman and Robert Heinlein were much more pleasant for me than for her. It’s not that she doesn’t care about these things, it’s just that they exist on her priority list somewhere between the brand of socks her mother wears and how long the local grocer keeps the “fresh” donuts labeled as such. That is to say, almost not at all, but she’ll put up with my ramblings for a while because I have other positive qualities. For instance, she really likes my recipe for honey-glazed popcorn (which I only make if she watches a movie with me).
In any case, the friends with whom I share my hobbies live hours and hours away. The ones that live close, whose company I greatly enjoy, would not want to share company for long if I regularly started talking about pop culture esoterica every time there was a lull in the conversation. Oddly, although I’m usually fairly introverted, I’ve found that I have very little apprehension about typing my thoughts up and sending them off to the digital ether of the Internet where literally anyone with a computer can read them. Of course, no one does, but that’s beside the point.
As Plato said, opinions have a tendency of fleeing the mind unless they are tethered down by thinking through the reasons you hold them. “Once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable.” And so it is more or less through selfish motives that I’ve begun putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), so that I can document my thoughts for future perusal and come to better know myself and my proclivities. I initially had grand ambitions about becoming a buccaneer film scholar or something along those lines, and that day might yet come, but I have found that I enjoy dabbling far too much to commit to any narrow subject without an external motivating factor.
And so I mostly follow my whimseys, however erratic; one day digging into pulp horror or European arthouse or Classical Hollywood, the next day watching a twelve hour Youtube series about videogame development or a docu-series on a newfound pagan cult, the next listening to a podcast on economics or child-rearing, and the next honing my fingerpicking skills or playing a board game.
Much of what pops into my head floats out shortly thereafter, some of it sticks around long enough to become a note bound for obscurity in a google doc, and then a smaller portion still ends up here. I try to write at least a cursory review for the movies I watch, the books I read, and the videogames I play, but my music listening habits make it nigh impossible to write about everything I listen to. I also enjoy writing essays on topics broader than a single work of art, but have typically struggled to establish boundaries at the outset, leading to many bloated and aborted drafts.