the case of the missing knife

When I was going to Art Skool I got into the habit of carrying a knife around. The little equipment kits they sold us (at about 300% markup, likely) included an x-acto knife for cutting matboard and sharpening pencils. I found those inadequate to the matboard job, and quickly swapped it out for a nice solid box-cutter utility knife, which I kept in my pencil box. It's probably still there, wherever that box has run off to. With one thing spontaneously failing to lead to another, and me suddenly not doing school anymore, I found myself no longer toting a knife around, and then I found that I sort of missed that. They're useful tools, knives.

Then, a year or two later, I found one. The knife was stuck in a fence. In a construction site. And I was on a date at the time.

I know. It's so me, the love story of me and my knife. I grabbed it, put it in a pocket, cleaned it up later, and that was pretty much that. It made that date totally worth it. Boys come and go, but a good blade is forever.



I use the damn thing all the time. I've used it to open packages, done some light gardening, offered cooking assistance at friends' houses, pried things open, pinned things together, dealt with wayward threads, one time cut up some mall food for a friend with a novocain-numbed mouth, dismantled a large wooden bed frame, carved initials into things, poked at car engines, inadvertently startled a homeless guy, bent metal that needed bending, and used it in a pinch to cut cake at a hotel. Omnom. I've checked luggage on planes so I can bring it with me. Stupid terrorism. (And I clean it, frequently. There's no engine grease in the cake.)

So you'll understand that it was a bit of an upset when somebody tried to buy it and I wasn't there to stop them.

Y'see, what had happened was -- Bleu opened up a shop. A shop within a shop. Deep within that easygoing girl is a raging entrepreneur just waiting to get out and totally own Florida. Which is fine by me, because she'd do a better job of it than the people we've got. There's a sort of antique/craft place out in Brandon, which rented out little stalls inside their building to all manner of crafty and creative people. Tag your stuff with your stall number and they count it all up at the register for you. That kind of place. There were interesting things there: jewelry, sports memorabilia, taxidermied animal parts (the bone from a raccoon's penis is called a baculum), fantastic hand-carved wooden bowls, antiques or maybe just junk, craftsy stuff, etc.

My contribution to Bleu's addition was that she wanted to take some of my photos, blow them up, print them, frame them, and sell them. She thought this would go well. I wasn't sure about this because unless there's a famous name on a shot people want pictures they've taken themselves. But I went along with it, because when Bleu gets an idea into her head there's really no way to stop her. And it did sound like fun.

In one busy and brainless and tired day I processed some shots, we printed them up, then brought them to the shop and hung them for display and eventual sale. The knife came in handy there, too, because the frames Bleu had found had about a hundred little metal tabs each that had to be bent back before you could take out the back and put the photo into the matting. We put those up on the wall and waited for someone to buy them. Bleu added some more stuff, and waited for people to buy it. The people who ran the place told me I had a good eye, and I successfully didn't ask which one they thought the good one was. I helped trim up some odd bamboo-looking wallpaper for decoration - again, using the knife - and left it there by accident. We waited more for people to buy the stuff there.

Out of everything there, the only thing anybody tried to buy was my beat-up old pocket knife. When Bleu gave up and took everything down, she thought I'd been by to grab the knife. I thought she'd got it. So I detoured over to the shop and wound up running between the front desk and the office in back - "the case of the missing knife!" some old guy said - and finally got the damn thing back. Hands off my precious! Er - my other precious.

Not a one of my pictures sold, sadly. This is a clear sign that I should give up on photography entirely, instead finding knives in odd places, using them for years, and then leaving them temptingly in secondhand shops. But I'm bad at signs and portents, so I'll stick with the cameras, even if it's just for me. More swamps, more reptiles, and I'll keep trying new stuff, because that's always fun. I haven't been shooting people much. Or at all, you know, ever. Hopefully that'll change soon.