So we watched Back to the future as a family last night. Everyone having seen it many times before.

It was exciting, I was excited. Inside my mind, while watching back to the future, there is a kind of fireworks party island of thoughts and memories and associations and theories and sheer bliss.

My good wife noticed that I was a bit too effervescent —

And she suggested that if I felt I had any comments to make during the movie,

• Whether it be some weird new speculative fiction grand unifying theory (This Explains Everything!)
• Or comments about plot, or characters, or the mechanics of time travel

...it might avoid my sudden violent death if instead of saying these wise nuggets out loud - I was to quietly write them down.

So I did.

I took out a notebook and a fountain pen, and bit by bit, as the movie progressed, I wrote and wrote. I wrote a lot. I wrote a hell of a lot.

And even though I wrote a lot I see now it’s just the barest sketch of what I want to write about that movie. There are at least five different ways I want to write about it.

I think I’ve found my calling. It’s like when St Paul was knocked off his donkey by the lord himself — or when the light shone through the church and Jake Joliet blues declared he had seen the light. Or when Doc Brown fell while hanging a picture in his toilet and awoke to draw the flux capacitor - and he had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity.

It’s like Archimedes who - on discovering the principle of displacement he ran naked down the street shouting “you beauty?” Or “ripper!” perhaps? What was it? “EUREKA”

This is what I want to spend the rest of my short life on this earth analysing.

Before transcribing these notes, I will first need to perform further research and run a series of experiments etc. I could be some time.

See also

• Time Travel Models
• Coward, Bully, Hero
• Story Layers — The Search for the Grand Unified Theory of Story Telling
• This Explains Everything — The hyper rapid expansion phase of the explanatory power of any emerging theory