dumb diary — a thing i have been keeping, technically

i have been keeping a notebook. it lives next to a half-built shelf and a cup of coffee that may have been hot in 2024. somebody on the internet called this kind of thing a dumb diary, dismissively. i took it as a compliment. honest writing is, by definition, a dumb diary.

10:14am, a monday. the desk. carla is in an all-hands on the third floor that the calendar swears will run forty-seven minutes. the calendar lies, but kindly. i have, optimistically, the rest of the morning.

the notebook is a real object. blue, A5, one of those ones with the elastic strap that has, over fourteen months, lost its will to elastic. i bought it at the corner shop on a sunday, walked home, opened it on the counter, and wrote the first sentence: “the milk is older than the receipt for the milk.” that was, technically, the launch issue. i have not stopped since. the entries are not improving. that is the design.

dumb diary: a notebook, app, or running document where a person writes down small, unflattering, mostly true observations about their own week. it is not a journal in the moleskine sense. it has no goals. it does not “track” anything. it is the written equivalent of leaving the porch light on for the version of you that comes home at 1am holding the wrong groceries. it is, in my view, the only honest format.

A SMART DIARY. WOULD BE. LYING.

that line goes in the ledger before we move on. people will tell you a journal should improve you, optimise you, make you a sharper instrument by sundown. those people sell pens. i am here to tell you that the only diary worth keeping is the one that admits, on a tuesday, that you ate cereal standing up over the sink because the spoon was already there. the spoon is a smaller bowl, fundamentally. i quoted that hot take elsewhere; this is, in spirit, the same point.

dumb diary, the short definition that i am sticking with

a dumb diary is, in my private taxonomy, a notebook that meets four conditions. one: it does not aspire. two: it does not lie about the day. three: it accepts that most weeks are not stories, they are inventories. four: it is held together, often, by an elastic strap that has given up. that is the format. that is the entire spec sheet. you can print it.

i did not invent the term. someone on the internet, in a forum i was not invited to, used “dumb diary” as an insult about a stranger’s blog. i found this by accident, while looking up something else, while pretending to look up something else, while in fact avoiding the bank app. the phrase struck me. i copied it down. i pasted it on the cover of the notebook in small lowercase letters. it now reads “dumb diary” in pencil and, underneath, in pen, the word volume one. there will be a volume two. there will not, probably, be a volume three.

the relevant point is that “dumb” in this phrase is doing the heavy lifting. it makes the format honest. for a longer treatment of what dumb actually means and why it is, frankly, gentler than people think, see the pillar i wrote on the topic from approximately this same chair. the present post inherits that argument and applies it to a notebook.

dumb diary, the format i landed on by accident

the format was not, originally, on purpose. i bought the notebook because i wanted to write down book ideas. it turned out i did not have book ideas. i had grocery regrets, a list of phone calls i was pretending i had not received, and a running tally of how many days in a row brenda the plant had been technically alive. the notebook, lacking better material, accepted what it was given.

after about a month i noticed the entries had a shape. they were short. they did not finish. they used the word almost a lot. there were dates at the top of some pages and not others, depending on whether i was, that morning, the kind of man who knew the date. the sentences had a tone. it was the tone of a man writing things down so that, later, he could pretend he had been paying attention.

i looked it up — the concept of dumb diary, i mean, not myself, although i could probably do with that too — and discovered that the most famous example in pop culture is an entire children’s film franchise about a girl named jamie kelly who keeps one. i learned this at 1:14am on a tuesday. i told nobody. i wrote it in the notebook. “a child has been doing this on purpose since at least 2004.” the notebook took the entry without comment.

so the format, as it stands, is roughly this: a date at the top if i remember. a short sentence about a thing that happened. a shorter sentence walking back the first one. an aside in parentheses that, on a good day, gets quoted later in a blog. and, at the bottom of some pages, a small drawing of a square. the square has been there since week three. i do not interrogate the square.

why a smart diary would be lying

a smart diary, in the sense that gets sold to you in december with a leather cover and a price tag of forty-eight dollars, is a document about who you would like to have been. it has prompts. it has gratitude sections. it has, in the modern editions, a small box labelled “intention for the day” that, if you fill it in honestly on most wednesdays, would simply read “avoid”.

the smart diary asks you to perform competence on the page that you did not perform in life. it is, structurally, a confession booth designed by someone who has never sinned. the dumb diary sells you nothing and offers no penance. you write the sentence. you turn the page. you go and find a sock.

examples from my own week, flagged for stupidity in retrospect

here are three real entries from the present volume, lightly cleaned up so the handwriting is legible to a third party. these are not for instruction. these are for evidence.

monday. “ate cereal at 9pm standing up over the sink. used a spoon. realised, halfway through, that the spoon is just a smaller bowl, and therefore redundant. finished cereal. did not get a bowl. did not get vindication. did get a small puddle on the counter that is, technically, still there.” that take has, since monday, hardened into a position. i hold it. i’ll defend it. on a monday.

tuesday. “watered brenda. brenda did not respond. brenda has, since approximately march, been a structure rather than a plant — leaves brown, stem present, soil dry in a way that suggests dignity. i continue to water her on the principle that someone has to. the watering is symbolic. the symbol is i did the right thing on a tuesday. brenda is not consulted.” brenda the plant is, in the canon of this notebook, a recurring character. she has more page time than dave. dave will hear about this.

monday. “dropped by the coffee shop on the way in. the barista said ‘the usual?’ which is, in itself, a kind of diagnosis. i said yes. i did not, strictly, want the usual. i wanted a different drink whose name i had forgotten by the time my mouth opened. the usual arrived. it was correct. the barista has known me longer than my dentist.” the entry stops there. the entry does not need more.

none of these entries are, on their own, important. that is the point. the dumb diary is not a place where important things happen. it is a place where small things are recorded with the same gravity an important thing would receive — and over time, this builds up, like sediment, into a record of a life. not the life i meant to have. the life i actually had. the difference is the whole thing.

how brenda the plant features in mine, prominently

brenda deserves her own section because she does the structural work in the notebook that, in a smart diary, would be done by a goal. brenda is a recurring entry. brenda’s status — alive, technically, browner than yesterday, has dropped a leaf, the leaf is on the carpet — anchors the week. when the rest of the entries are noise, brenda is the constant.

this is the unexpected gift of the format. when you stop demanding meaning from a diary, meaning sneaks in through a side door and sits down without asking. brenda was supposed to be a plant. brenda became a metric. i can flip back through the notebook and see, by the brenda updates alone, what kind of month i was having. months with daily brenda entries were months where i was holding. months where she went unmentioned for two weeks were the bad months. the diary became, accidentally, a mood tracker, and i have been, also accidentally, monitored.

stefan would call this emergent structure. stefan is the friend-of-a-friend who explains things at parties using both hands and a glass of red. stefan would tell me, with confidence, that the notebook had self-organised, that brenda had become a signal, that the dumb diary was, in some sense, smarter than its owner. stefan would also tell me that wine has notes of leather. stefan can be right about one thing per evening. on the brenda point, this evening, i’ll grant him.

the larger lesson — and i am, against my will, drifting into lesson territory, which is not the notebook’s natural mode — is that the format does not ask for meaning and therefore receives it. the format is the whole thing.

verdict — the diary is dumb because the days are

the all-hands has run over by eleven minutes. carla is, presumably, still upstairs. the notebook is, currently, in the top drawer of this desk, beneath a stapler i do not own and a paperclip from a document i did not file. i will close this in a moment. one more line.

brenda is, as of this morning, holding. the leaf count is stable. the notebook will record this at lunch. that is the entry. that is the system. that is, by definition, a dumb diary, and i would not trade the format for forty-eight dollars and a leather cover.

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