Hello my Muleteers, and welcome to Donkey Thoughts. Today’s topic was too sexy for a Thursday publication, which is precisely the only reason that I have saved it for Friday. Thank God. Because of how hot it is, only, and not because of me being overworked or exhausted. Only sexy.
Grant Wagner from Northbrook, Illinois, asks,
“You seem like a person who takes quite a bit of pride in being prepared for whatever may come. Would you mind sharing your everyday carry? Maybe what you keep in your car or go-bag if you have such a thing. Maybe your favorite multitool?”
Then, in reference to a photo from my recent post “Toad in the Hole”, Michael Korak of the internet asks,
“Is the Victorinox Swiss Army knife with the mountain scene on it yours? If so, where did you obtain it. Very classy!”
and Devin Bradley, currently from San Francisco, asks,
“I am interested to know if there are any good stories about that pocket knife.”
The answers to all of your questions are related, but Grant, I’ll start with you.
For those of you unfamiliar, a niche interest group has developed in recent years that is passionately concerned with all of the “pocket” and/or “belt”items one wields upon one’s person on a given day. They call it “Everyday Carry”. The list of implements usually includes things like knives and other cutting gadgets, multi-tools, lighters, wristwatches, spectacles, pens, keys, wallets, flashlights, and other tactical gear. To most of the world this might seem a bit dorky, but as a practical person and regular user of tools, I totally get it.
When I used to work full-time as a scenery carpenter and/or woodworker, my everyday carry, or “EDC”, was more versatile, because I’m rather a pragmatist, and I needed more tools of a greater variety at those jobs. That justified the wearing of a Leatherman or Gerber multi-tool, and I regularly relied upon a larger folding knife with a 3-to-4 inch blade to perform many tasks around the shop or stage. As a stagehand I also wore a small flashlight in a holster on my belt, and also for many years a small pair of vise-grip pliers in a leather holster that my Uncle Don had gotten as a promotional item from a seed corn company. These tools were found daily on my person for their practical use, and would probably be considered a bit lame compared to the arsenals many modern-day EDC enthusiasts lay out in the photographic displays preferred in the chat group, or on Instagram.
As my yearly work has leaned more into the field of entertainment, I would feel a bit silly wearing belt-holstered tools to operate in the soft-shoe realms of television and film, so I switched to a medium-sized Swiss Army Knife, on which I mainly utilize the two knife blades, the small scissors, the screwdriver heads (2 standard, 1 Phillips), the bottle opener, and the tweezers and toothpick housed cleverly in the knife sides. Thanks to the rough-and-tumble terrain of my 52-year-old teeth, I used to whittle down the plastic toothpick to reach even more remote crannies, but now I also carry a second RotaPoint toothpick that gets into even skinnier crevasses.
I keep these items close to me because I make regular use of them. They are also called to serve quite often when other people need to pop open a beer, cut the tape on a package, skin a small mammal, or snip the tags out of a new sweater. People are generally delighted when a small problem can be neatly solved because one of us has a wee tool kit in his pocket. That’s why I carry them every day. I’m not personally interested in taking pictures of my dope array of gadgets and getting online to compare and contrast them with the EDC fare of others, but I don’t mean to disparage those who do so. I mean, if the shit goes down, I’m glad a fair number of you have a shitload of knives and flashlights.
In my vehicles I always carry the necessary means to change a flat tire, a set of jumper cables, and usually at least a few wrenches, a socket set and a multi-tip screwdriver, among other miscellany.
In our go-bags, there is nothing particularly clever outside of the usual water, foil blankets, water purification tablets & straws, gold ingots, and several squares of the elf-bread Lembas that I traded off of Hugo Weaving at the Vanity Fair Oscar dinner in exchange for a Bic lighter with a picture of Hasselhoff on it. I thought I’d gotten the better end of that barter, but on second glance, these look an awful lot like melba toast. Shit. Goddamn Tolkien and his anagrams.
Because of the value I place on amazing modern multi-tools, like my knife, I decided to have some of them custom-made for all the contributors to my third book, Good Clean Fun, which is a really joyous woodworking textbook, and sort of memoir of my woodshop. I chose the killer vista of Yosemite National Park, and added the word PITH.
The word pith refers to a couple of things. First of all, the central core of a vascular plant like a tree, is called the pith. Even though we don’t necessarily value this part in conventional, rectilinear woodworking, the heart of a tree is symbolically relatable to other heroic iterations of the word, such as “having substantial quality”. We want our deciduous trees, our family members, and our neighbors all to boast substance and solidity within their characters. Exhibit hearts of oak, if you will. To speak with pith, or to be pithy, means you get to the point. Thus, since I had a very limited number of characters from which to choose on the knife side, PITH seemed appropriate for a few reasons. U KICK ASS would also likely have fit, but I also like PITH better as a part of my ongoing campaign to strengthen our vocabularies.
Grant, Michael and Devin, thank you very kindly for your interest, and I wish everyone a safe weekend. Hug before Punch.
Love,
Leave me questions in the comments, and let me know where you’re from. Weekdays are generally free, but some weekend fare is for paying subscribers only. This keeps me fat.
Leather Men