dear dumb diary — page seventeen, possibly eighteen

dear dumb diary, page seventeen, possibly eighteen, written from a wobbly cafe table while the barista pretends not to read over my shoulder. the supermarket incident is page one through sixteen. the third yoga mat is footnoted. tipping is a hot take i refuse to back down from, even here.

that paragraph, for the record, is fiction. there is no wobbly cafe table. the wobbly cafe table is a literary device, like fog in a british novel or a cousin who shows up with a guitar. i am, in fact, at my desk on a tuesday at 10:38am, with carla deep in the q3 review on the third floor and approximately the rest of the morning before anyone notices. the diary is the bit. the diary is also, on the page, the topic. dear dumb diary is the salutation i chose, weeks ago, after trying and abandoning every other one.

i’d like to be clear about whose adjective the dumb is, because this is the entire post and several other posts depend on it. the dumb belongs to the diary. the diary is the dumb thing — a small, lined book, with a ribbon, that i talk to. the writer is, by my own admission, a perfectly average man with a fork problem. the format is what’s dumb here. that distinction matters. jim benton, who has been writing the children’s series since 2005, knew it. he put the adjective on the object. so will i. for the broader category — what dumb is, what it isn’t, why it’s gentler than its cousins — see my pillar on dumb at this same desk, which is the spine of the cluster this post hangs from.

writing this from the desk. carla is upstairs explaining the headcount slide for the third time. i have until she comes down for coffee.

dear dumb diary, the salutation i settled on

i tried other openings. i tried “to whom it may concern”, which felt like a complaint to a utility. i tried “dear self”, which felt like therapy i had not paid for. i tried no salutation at all — just bullet points — and found, after a week, that the entries had no temperature. the diary needed a name. names give a thing temperature. when i settled on dear dumb diary, the entries started, somehow, to behave. the dumb-ness gave the page permission to be small. you cannot be precious with a dumb diary. you can only be honest.

this is not, by the way, a clever finding. children figure this out at nine. jim benton’s series, the “dear dumb diary” 2013 tv movie based on it, the entire shelf of middle-grade books with that title — they all rest on the same small mechanism. the diary is dumb, so the writer can be normal. the diary takes the bullet. the writer goes on living.

i am, technically, an adult, and i am using a children’s mechanism on purpose. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, about how the formats we mock in children are the formats we secretly need at thirty-eight. i can’t find the study. i remember reading it. probably.

the supermarket entry, dated tuesday

here is the entry that fills pages one through sixteen of the dumb diary, condensed so you don’t have to read it. i went to the supermarket on a sunday for milk. i came back with a pineapple, three batteries of the wrong size, a magazine about boats, a bag of nutritional yeast i still don’t fully understand, and no milk. that’s the event. that’s, in diary form, sixteen pages, because the diary required margin notes about each item and a small, regrettable sketch of the boat.

the diary, on this entry, was useful in a way the bank app was not. the bank app told me what i spent. the diary told me why. the bank app said $43.18. the diary said: you skipped breakfast and went in hungry and you read the magazine in line and the trolley took you hostage. one of those is information. the other is, technically, also information, but the kind that helps. by the time i got home, the milk was, of course, the only thing on the list, and the only thing not in the bag. i wrote that down too. the diary forgave me. the bank app did not.

mom called that night and asked what i had eaten. i said pineapple. she paused. she said “you’re being dumb again, hon”. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated.

the barista who knows the order, mentioned in passing

i don’t write the diary at the cafe. i write it at this desk. but the barista — the one who knows the order, the one i have not, in three years, learned the name of — appears in the diary on page twelve, because she once handed me a coffee and said “you look like you’re writing a novel” and i, like a man who has been waiting his whole life to be asked, said “no, a diary”. she said “same thing, sometimes”. then she gave me an extra napkin. the napkin is in the diary. the napkin has nothing on it. that, i wrote, is the point of the napkin.

the barista is, in the cast of this universe, a structural figure. she does not have a name on the page, because i don’t have one for her in life. that is not, i don’t think, a failure of attention. that is the genre. there are people in your week who are characters without being acquaintances. the cafe has three of them. the supermarket has one. the elevator has, for me, currently zero, but i have hopes.

DEAR. DUMB. DIARY. THE ADJECTIVE. APPLIES. TO. THE BOOK.

the third yoga mat, on page nine, evergreen

the third yoga mat appears in the diary the way it appears in life, which is to say frequently and without justification. page nine is dedicated entirely to the question of whether the third yoga mat is, at this point, a piece of furniture. it lives under the sofa. it has lived there since 2023. the dust on it is, the diary suspects, also evolving — its own ecosystem, possibly with politics. the diary is patient with the third yoga mat in a way i, on most days, am not. the diary lets it stay there. the diary, in fact, considers it a recurring character.

this is the difference between a journal and a dumb diary, structurally. a journal would, by week three, demand action. get rid of the yoga mat. start using the yoga mat. donate the yoga mat to a person who will use the yoga mat. the dumb diary writes none of those sentences. the dumb diary writes the yoga mat is, again, here. that is the entire entry. it is enough. self-help books would not approve. self-help books would be wrong, here, as in many places. the airpods, by the way, also live in the diary on a recurring basis — the one charged, the one missing, the binaural luxury i no longer afford. the diary keeps a tally. the tally is sad and accurate and i do not look at it on monday.

the tipping take, briefly, on cafe ethics

page fourteen, written in different ink because the first pen ran out: i hold, with some heat, the position that tipping should be a flat 12%. i’d like that on the record because the diary, on this point, has my full support. the math is clean. the math doesn’t change with the bill. the math doesn’t punish you for ordering a sandwich at a place that also sells lobster. twelve percent is dignified. twelve percent is, for the cafe, fair. the barista, who hands me a coffee twice a week and lets me write in the corner, gets twelve percent. she gets twelve percent every single time, because the diary tracks it. the diary is, on this, more reliable than i am.

this is, technically, a hot take that walked from the kitchen into the cafe and stayed. some takes do that. they are versatile. the takes that travel are usually about money or food. the takes that stay home are usually about the dishwasher. there’s a longer post somewhere on this in the cluster, but i won’t link it. the diary also, briefly, fights with stefan-from-yoga about it — stefan, who tips with an app and feels good about it. stefan is wrong. the diary said so on page fifteen. stefan, in literal italics, in the diary, with a small angry asterisk. that’s the entry. the diary doesn’t argue back. that’s the genre.

carla just walked past the desk. i minimized this. she is heading for the kettle, which buys me, generously, four minutes.

verdict — the diary is dumb because i am the author

here is, in the end, the small honest answer. the diary is dumb because i am the author and i have decided that the format would, on the whole, be more useful to me if it had no expectations. naming a notebook dumb is a small act of mercy. mercy is, on most weeks, in short supply. you can give it to a notebook for free. the notebook will not refuse it.

jim benton was right. children were right. middle-grade fiction has been right, on this point, for longer than the literary novel has been alive. you give the notebook the adjective and you let yourself off the hook. the page becomes a small kind room. you write the pineapple down. you write the barista down. you write stefan down with an asterisk. you close the diary. you go back to work. the diary stays where it is, on the desk, dumb on purpose, ready for tomorrow’s tuesday. for related angles in the same cluster — see also the post about scooters being dumber than they need to be, which uses the same adjective on a different object, and is, on the question of dumber as a designed quality of the object, the closer cousin to this one.

the new microwave, the seventh, is coming thursday. the diary already has an entry waiting. page nineteen, blank, with a small drawing of a fork.

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