Notes from a Feeble-Minded Insomniac

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Daily writing prompt
What’s the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?
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What’s the oldest thing I own that I still use daily?
The last time I answered this question, I mentioned my old pickup sitting in the driveway. It’s beat to hell, leaks a little oil, and rattles like a shopping cart on gravel — but somehow, it still runs. That felt like a solid answer. It felt true.
Except it wasn’t. Not really.

The honest answer hit me while I was sitting at my desk, trying to draft some notes for another post. I was overthinking the structure, second-guessing the tone, basically chasing my own tail. After a while, I leaned back, shook my head, and muttered, “I’ve been using my brain too much.”

And just like that — Eureka.

I’ve been the feeble mind of an insomniac since birth.
Okay — maybe not technically insomniac at the start. Back then, I stayed up past my bedtime mostly out of spite. Perhaps a little orneriness, too. Hard to say. But I do remember using that word — ornery — and now that I think about it, a fair number of women have used it to describe me over the years. So, maybe they were onto something.

I’m a constant learner. Always have been. I believe if you go a day without learning something, you’ve wasted it.

Most people think learning has to mean reading, working, studying, building — something active. But I’ve learned more just by paying attention. Not scrolling, not zoning out — observing.

I don’t Google “brain-boosting activities.” I just rely on my favorite tool: active listening. That might sound simple, but it’s one of the sharpest tools we’ve got.

The thing is, most people don’t actually listen — they wait to respond. You can see it happen: someone’s still mid-thought, and the other person’s already loading up their reply. If we’d just let people finish, then respond or ask a decent question, most of our conversations would be ten times better.

Now, I’m not pointing fingers here — I’ve cut people off after 30 seconds of dumbshit like it’s a reflex. I’ve been trying to stretch my tolerance up to 90 seconds, but somehow it always snaps back to 30. Still, I’m working on it.

A lot of my friends and family talk about how they can’t remember shit anymore. I get it. I’m right there with them. I might’ve single-handedly made the Post-it Note company profitable.

But I’ve got a few tricks. For one, I carry a journal with me everywhere and write things down. Yeah, I know you can make notes or record memos on your phone, but here’s the thing — when you physically write something, you remember it better. Science backs that up. Not that I need some egghead in a lab coat to tell me what works for me.

Like yesterday, I was talking about chasing the start of a story, sitting at my laptop… but I skipped a step. First, I write a few notes in my journal. Random lines, loose thoughts, things that feel like they matter. I also keep a microrecorder on hand for fast ideas when I’m out — then I transcribe those into a binder.

I’ll sometimes spend weeks researching a topic before I write a single sentence for a story. Somewhere in one of the dozen journals scattered around my house, there’s a note — a clue — waiting to tie it all together.

“Today was a good day. I wrote a sentence.”
— James Joyce

I keep that quote close. It’s a reminder that one good sentence is worth more than a thousand shitty ones.
No fluff allowed. Ever.

Another way I keep the engine running is by going back and reading my old notes.

Earlier this week, I was flipping through a binder from ten years ago and found a scribble about a quirky love story set on Friday the 13th. Sound familiar? It should — I think I finally wrote that story last year.

Looking back shows you two things: growth and delusion. You see yourself in these raw, unfiltered snapshots — how sharp you were, or how far off base. Sometimes I shake my head at my younger self and think, Jackass.

But that’s part of the deal. This brain — stubborn, scattered, always working something out in the background — it’s the oldest thing I own, and the most used. And like that old pickup, it’s still running. Somehow.

Sometimes I look back and wonder how my late wife ever put up with my scattered, feeble-minded antics. The half-finished thoughts, the notebooks everywhere, the midnight mutterings about plot twists or people-watching revelations.

Then it hits me — maybe she just had a predilection for the company of psychos.

God knows, I gave her plenty of material. But she stuck around, laughed at the chaos, and made room for it. That counts for everything.

11 thoughts on “Notes from a Feeble-Minded Insomniac”

  2. Here’s a thoughtful comment for this post:

    This hit me right in the gut—in the best possible way.
    Your revelation about the brain being your oldest daily-use tool is brilliant, and honestly, I’m a little annoyed I didn’t think of it first. We’re all walking around with these incredibly sophisticated machines that we’ve been operating since birth, yet we rarely give them credit as the tools they are.
    The bit about active listening really resonates. You’re absolutely right—most people are just waiting for their turn to talk, loading up their response while the other person is mid-sentence. I catch myself doing this constantly, and like you, I’m trying to stretch that tolerance. Though I have to admit, 90 seconds of someone’s stream-of-consciousness rambling can feel like an eternity when you’re fighting every instinct to jump in.
    Your journal system sounds like organized chaos in the best way. I love that you’ve got a decade-old note about a Friday the 13th love story that finally became something real last year. There’s something almost mystical about how our brains work in the background, connecting dots across years and years of scattered thoughts. It’s like having a personal search engine that runs on intuition instead of algorithms.
    The James Joyce quote is perfect—”Today was a good day. I wrote a sentence.” That’s the kind of realistic ambition that actually gets things done. No fluff, no overthinking, just one good sentence at a time.
    But what really got me was your reflection on your late wife. The way you described her tolerance for your “scattered, feeble-minded antics”—the notebooks everywhere, the midnight mutterings about plot twists. That line about her having “a predilection for the company of psychos” made me laugh out loud, but it also speaks to something deeper about love and acceptance. The best relationships aren’t built on trying to fix each other’s quirks, but on making room for them.
    Your brain might be beat up like that old pickup—leaking a little, rattling around—but it’s still running, still creating, still connecting those random dots into something meaningful. And honestly, that’s probably the most valuable thing any of us own.
    Thanks for the reminder to appreciate the tool we all take for granted. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go write something down in an actual notebook before I forget it.

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  3. I so agree about writing things down as it does help remember! Mind you, a shopping list is useless if left on the kitchen counter. Hubby and I both carry small diaries where we record dates for appointments, not birthdays or such (he leaves that to me) but with both of us having health issues now and appointments that are all over the place, literally in different directions, it’s the only way we can keep up. We do not put anything on our phones as reminders (not that kind of phone anyway), leaving that to the medical people who text us.
    I learn by observation. No good me reading about how to do something, I need to see it done and follow it through the process.
    I am sorry for your loss, but it sounds that you were blessed to have her.

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    1. I hear you about the shopping list, I got like four laying around. I learn both ways it depends on what I’m doing. She was damn pain in the ass. as she would say, “Honey, you give me the sweet ass.” Blessed isn’t a strong word I don’t think, but I sure in hell can’t think of a better one. Thanks, Di

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  4. Joyce also said, “I’ve been working all day, and I’ve written seven great words.”
    “Well, that’s not too bad.”
    “It wouldn’t be if I knew what order to put them in.”

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