Pocket Litter

My two "always" tools.

Nightcafe is still a pack of ungrateful honyocks.

As I was desperately pondering blog fodder that isn’t quite as polarizing as the last couple of essays,¹ I dropped something I was fidgeting with, it rolled under the desk; and I looked at the flashlight I pulled out of my pocket, realizing there are a lot of articles written about the weapons one carries day-to-day, but not much about tools other than weapons.

The most important tool I carry on a day-to-day basis is a good quality lock-back folding knife. If I am wearing pants, there’s a pocketknife in my right hand pants pocket.

A knife — to invoke Sir Terry Pratchett — marks the spot where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Despite what the granola-munchers will yelp, a portable sharp thing was the first tool that proto-humans made — and are what makes humans … human. And I refuse to be less capable than the average Australopithecus.

As the Gentle Reader might suspect I Have Views regarding pocketknives. The first of which is that I consider them as tools, and not weapons. Why, you ask? Because I cannot reliably access, nor deploy, a folding knife in the middle of a fight.

Before you “Buh, buh, buh!” at me: I am sure that you can, and I am sure that there are weekend classes in Apache Knife Fighting Secrets that you recommend, but I have stress-tested — multiple times, over years — trying to get to my pocketknife against full-speed resisting opponents, and I simply can’t access or deploy a folding knife from a pocket under stress with any reliability.

Tool, not weapon.

I prefer a blade length of 3-ish inches, or shorter,² and I prefer a crossbar-style locking system like the Benchmade Axis, CRKT Crossbar, Kershaw DuraLock, or any number of mechanisms that use a steel bar to prevent the blade from closing, and don’t require me to put a digit in the path of the closing blade to unlock it.

My daily carry for years has been a Benchmade Mini-Griptilian — I started carrying one when the thumbhole was still oval, and I carried that one up until I lost it to TSA a couple of years back. It’s narrow enough that it doesn’t take up a lot of space in the pocket, but is thick enough not to roll in my hand when I’m using it.

I like the pocket-clip to position the knife in a tip-up orientation while it’s in my pocket, and to draw it I slide my right thumb along the body of the knife until my thumb reaches the stud or hole so that deploying the blade means I don’t have to reposition the knife once it’s out of my pocket.

When I label my pocketknife “The most important tool I carry on a day-to-day basis” that’s what it is. I use my knife daily to make my life — and other people’s lives — easier, and I can’t for the life of me understand the thinking of a male of the species who doesn’t carry one.

In the last couple of weeks I have opened innumerable cartons and packages, scraped the expired registration sticker off of my windshield, pried a stone out of the tread of my shoe, cut plastic wrap, cut strapping, prised a splinter from my finger, trimmed 550 cord, and notched a pair of chopsticks to hold a rubber band and a paper pivot so that a sproglet could use the same eating utensil his grandma was using. Amongst many, many other things.

How do males who don’t carry pocket knives do these sort of things? Do they beg a competent person for help? Use their teeth, like savages?³

Get a decent pocket knife. Keep it maintained, keep it sharp, and it’ll make your life easier — just like they’ve done for hundreds of thousands of years. And if the laws — if your self-proclaimed “betters”⁴ in government — forbid you the use and carry of mankind’s oldest and most useful tool — why are you still living there?

The second tool I carry daily is a good pocket flashlight, and if I’m going to be honest, it gets more use than my knife does. I can count on the number of fingers the times that Rita has asked me for my knife over the last decade or so, but weekly I hear, “Do you have your light?”

Not only do my 59-year-old eyes need a little extra help these days, but Africa taught me to always look where I’m putting my hands — especially if where I’m reaching is in shadow — and, let’s face it: Rita and I are crepuscular. A little extra light is always handy.

Much like my knife, if I’m wearing pants there’s a AAA flashlight in my left pants pocket.

My absolute favourite pocket torch is the Streamlight MicroStream AAA version.

I do realize that a rechargeable flashlight would put out more lumens,⁵ however the AAA version is more compact, and when the battery dies, I bin the battery, pull another out of the battery box — or any convenience store — and my light is back up and running in the time it takes to make the swap. When a rechargeable dies, it’s got to be, well … recharged … before you’re up and running again.

That being said, a friend who is a switched-on individual enthusiastically recommends the Streamlight Wedge XT as far as rechargeable lights go, so I’m going to give it a try later on.

My current MicroStream is the red version because it turns out that when I need to get it out, it’s usually dark — and a black flashlight that you drop in the dark is a pain-in-the-tuckuss to find⁶; the red barrel one is easier to see in the shadows.

There are other tools (again, not weapons) that I carry fairly regularly — a Fischer Space Pen, a lighter, a shim, that sort of thing — but these are the two I carry habitually.

Anyhoo, blogfodder for a Monday morning.

Ian

1. Remind me to never, ever invoke PizzaGate or QAnon ever again.

2. I’m carrying a knife, not carrying at knife AT someone.

3. Although, to be honest, savages generally have knives.

4. Spit.

5. I will note for the record here that using Energizer Ultimate Lithium AAA cells not only gives me more lumens than the factory specs call for, but also a longer running time.

6. Yes, I’ve needed a flashlight to find my flashlight. Don’t judge me.