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.
Memoirs of Madness 