Past & Future Word Search: Jimmy Can’t Get Past “Some”

It’s the Word “Some” Jimmy Can’t Get Past

Jimmy keeps coming back to the Past & Future word search.
Mostly because it refuses to explain itself.
There really are not any instructions before it telling Jimmy what to look for or how to begin. It just looks like a basic word search.
So maybe that is exactly how Jimmy is supposed to start.
Just find words.
Not clues. Not locations. Not hidden meanings.
Just words.

Black-and-white Lost Cabin Mine comic showing Jimmy, his search partner, and the raccoon studying a word search and a theory involving five clues and proper nouns. — Jimmy’s latest word-search theory starts with one small word he cannot get past: “some.”

Once enough words are found, another message starts to appear in the letters that are left.
“There are five clues in this word search.”
That is the part Jimmy keeps coming back to.
Because now Jimmy has two things in front of him.
A message saying there are five clues.
And a list of words he already found.
So what comes next?
Then there is this instruction:
“You may ignore all 3 letter words and some proper nouns.”
And that is where Jimmy gets stuck.
Not on proper nouns.
On one word.
Some.
It does not say Jimmy can ignore all proper nouns.
It says some proper nouns.
That does not mean the remaining proper nouns are automatically the answer. The instruction only tells Jimmy what he may ignore.
Still, it makes Jimmy wonder why proper nouns are called out at all if they are not important somewhere in the process.
So Jimmy keeps going back to the beginning.
What if he first does nothing more complicated than finish the word search?
Find every word he reasonably can.
The hidden message appears.
Now he knows there are five clues somewhere in that word search.
Then he gets the next instruction.
Ignore the three-letter words.
Ignore some proper nouns.
And then look at what is left.
What if there are five proper nouns that Jimmy should not ignore?
Could those be the five clues?
That is the part Jimmy cannot quite shake.
Some of Jon Collins-Black’s comments during the Q&A at Seeking Treasure Con in Las Vegas are part of the reason Jimmy keeps thinking about it.
When Jon was asked about other ciphers in the word search, he described it pretty simply. He made a word search, so you search for words. He made a cryptogram, so you decode it.
He also said the word search was “pretty important.”
And when he was asked about the five clues, Jon said:
“I think either you have all five of them solved or none of them.”
That does not prove Jimmy’s idea.
But it does make him wonder if the five clues are something that show up together once the word search is handled the right way.
And if that is true, Jimmy keeps coming right back to the same place.
Some proper nouns.
Maybe the words Jimmy finds are not the clues yet.
Maybe they are just the first step.
Maybe the hidden message tells Jimmy what he is looking for next.
Five clues.
Then the instruction narrows down what deserves another look.
Three-letter words can go.
Some proper nouns can go.
So which proper nouns cannot?
If Jimmy ended up with five that still looked important, that would get his attention in a hurry.
And maybe, just maybe, the cryptogram would start making a little more sense from there.
Jimmy is probably completely off.
There is no shortage of evidence that treasure hunting is very good at making simple things look complicated and complicated things look obvious right before they turn out not to be.
But this is just Jimmy’s opinion.
If one piece of the thought helps another searcher see something Jimmy missed, or even helps rule out one more dead end, then it was still worth putting out there.
For now, Jimmy is back where he started.
With one little word that refuses to leave him alone.
Some.
The raccoon remains undecided. He found the word FIVE and has considered the investigation complete ever since.
Jimmy is a fictional treasure-hunting persona. The raccoon insists he is real.