Brains are fascinating things. For something that looks like a bloated raisin, it holds more storing capacity and processing power than any computer developed by man. It is perhaps the ugliest and most bizarre part of the human body, but it is by far one of the most important. Without brains, we’d be history.

It’s a mystery how it works. How can chemicals and chains of neurons hold memories of images, impressions of scents, whole passages of music? How can something material contain something immaterial? The human brain is truly a mystery of God’s creation, capable of a thousand things that science and human discovery has yet to realize.

The irony here is that this powerful supercomputer settled between my ears can’t seem to remember anything of importance for longer than a few minutes.

Or, in the words of Darryl Duncan, father of Jeremy Duncan from the comic strip Zits, “How come I can remember an advertising jingle from the 70’s, but I can’t remember what I walked into this room to do?”

Sometimes I wonder if my brain is prematurely senile. I can remember details and quotes from my favorite movies, as well as the lyrics from songs I sang as a child, but I can’t remember what my work schedule is for the week, or even what I was doing five minutes before changing activities.

Much to my mother’s consternation, I’ve taken to writing things on my hand. I have planners, memo pads, sticky notes, and scraps of paper coming out of my ears, but it seems that I never have one handy when I need to write something down. And even when I do, half the time I can’t remember where I wrote it down. So I write things on my hand.

The original Palm Pilot.

Trouble is, once I wash my hands a few times, the memo is gone. But somehow, by writing that thing on my hand, I can remember exactly what I was supposed to do – like today for instance, I remember writing a note that I was to find  a nice genuine leather wallet for The Boss – maybe an Armani. I also had a doodle of a heart and some random squiggles at the base of my thumb. Don’t ask me why.

Maybe my brain is just tired of trying to remember, so it simply expels the things that happened soonest in favor of things that are more long-term. Who knows. The human mind is, and always will be, a mystery.

Needless to say, Thank you, ancient Egyptians, for inventing the pen. My brain would be lost without one.