Okay, this is just weird stupidity. But somewhere in the day today the thought popped into the head that using a stylus would change my life. This thought came about because I’ve been getting extremely angry and frustrated at the misery of my life lately and perhaps not using my clumsy fingers to do all the work on my device might help. I’ve thought of using a stylus many times but for some reason it just never got in to my brain that I should spend the money on something I would probably lose in a moment of stupidity. Today, I found one in a moment of cleverness.

I decided to look up DIY stylus on the internet to see what the story was. I ended up learning that there’s a difference between an active stylus and a passive one except that the explanation for the active one had the word “features” in it and I knew I didn’t want that. I then even checked how much one of these things cost manufactured and found them for as low as a dollar or so. What had happened? How had this instrument completely invaded my consciousness for so long?

I watched two or three videos where everyone made things more complicated than they needed to. The basic premise is that you’re conducting electricity from your hand through some metal and universally, there is some cotton at the tip. I eventually chose an old half pencil that doesn’t get much service life and snipped the tip off to make it slightly more blunt. I rolled up some cotton gauze four or five or six times to make a cap and then tightly rolled some aluminum foil around the top to hold it in place and tightly around the pencil. Did it work? I am using it right now to hand write these words.

I don’t really have any epic thoughts here. One time my dad told me that he liked the clarity of a pic when I played the guitar more than he liked the tone I got from my fingers. He was right in his way. The pic made things clearer, louder and had greater possibilities for tones. A stylus is basically the same thing. And I now have the first stylus of my life and I made it out of a blunt pencil, some bandages, some leftover foil. I also learned that if it becomes inaccurate for some reason, literally you lick the tip like you would with any other pen and it starts working well again. Madness.