On EDC
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At the end of January, kvothe wrote a phlog entry about his EDC[1], or "every
day carry", the stuff he carries with him every day. Jandal wrote a
response[2], and possibly a third person did too, but in a disturbing frequent
turn of events I've forgotten who. Email me if it was you. This topic is
somewhat dear to my heart, as like kvothe I used to frequent the /r/edc
subreddit. I stopped when I realised doing so was only going to cause me,
directly or indirectly, to buy more stuff - it's funny how we do this (I'm not
singling out /r/edc here, this is true of just about all online communities for
enthusiasts of any kind of physical thing). Get interested in something
sufficiently obscure or niche that there are no megacorporations bombarding you
with marketing crap to trick you into buying stuff you don't need, and you'll
often find yourself spontaneously joining a little community where everybody is
always (usually not even intentionally) one-upping everybody else, and suddenly
you start to think of the <item> which has perfectly met your needs everyday for
years, which you love so much that you joined a <item> fanclub, "maybe this is
not quite as perfect for me as <item2> would be...". Humans are peverse.
Anyway, I'm rambling off topic already in the first paragraph, good show.
So, I like to think about EDC. What exactly do I mean by that? I think the
term has been genericised/softened a little bit in recent years to include
literally everything you carry with you every day, including boring stuff like
keys which every single person carries, but the term has its origin in the
concealed carry firearms community, and because the kind of people who carry
guns with them everywhere for their own protection tend to also carry a bunch
of other stuff to help them out of various other potential jams, to me the
phrase "EDC" has always meant something like "tools people who are more prepard
than average carry every day to help themselves out of various tricky
situations which could crop up anytime". This is not limited to self-defence,
there are also very large emergency/disaster preparedness themes here (one
could call EDC as I'm defining it here "pocket prepping") as well as just
general inconvenience avoidance. One could also call this "stuff I carry
around to make me just a little bit more like MacGuyver". Keys, phones,
wallets, etc. need not apply.
Whereas kvothe carries a lot of stuff around in a backpack, my EDC is pretty
pocket focussed (but not entirely, and I'll get to that). Exactly what I carry
has changed over the years, but regardless of shifting fashions, for a very long
time I have always, always, always had a knife and a torch (aka "flashlight") on
my person.
I am very firmly of the opinion that anybody who is baffled as to why somebody
would bother to always have a knife and a torch on them is suffering from a
critical lack of imagination and/or problem solving skills, caused as a direct
consequence of living the kind of life where you *don't* always have a knife and
a torch on you. Once you simply expect these tools to be available within
seconds of needing them, you will learn to recognise the situations where they
can help within seconds of them occurring, and it will be very rare to go a
whole week without using one or the other.
Something I have tried to always carry more recently is a small notebook and a
pen. I still carry a small notebook with me everywhere, in one of my back
pockets. While I have somehow managed to carry exactly the same pocket knife in
my front left pocket everyday for probably close to ten years now without losing
it, I have had pretty poor success with pocket pen retention. I have tried tiny
telescoping pens which fit into your coin pocket/watch pocket and clip to it,
and I have tried pens with screw on caps which you just stick in a regular side
pocket. Neither kind have yet made it through a whole year, so for now I've
given up and I have a pen with me when I am carrying my bag but not otherwise.
Another more recent addition is some kind of rectangular piece of fabric - a
handkerchief or a bandana or a tenugui. I have all of these but mentally
classify them as the same kind of object, so on any given day I am carrying
whichever one I happened to find first the last time I changed them out for
washing. This is never, save the gravest emergencies, used to blow my nose,
because I have always found the idea of blowing my nose into something
non-disposable and then putting that in my pocket disgusting, but they are just
generally very useful things to have. I often find myself using them to quickly
mop up random small spills, or to wipe small quantities of water off benches at
parks or bus stops after light rain, things like that.
Now, bags. When I lived in NZ, I used to carry a laptop back and forth between
work and home everyday, so I had a backpack with me a lot of the time, and I
used that extra space to expand my EDC game just a little. In the front pocket
of my bag I always had a roll of duct tape (which, I kid you not, is
colloquially known as "Jesus tape" in Finland, which I love), and a small first
aid kit. I made the first aid to take hiking/camping, but it was small and
light enough that it was no big trouble to carry it with me. Some of the stuff
in there was to handle very small daily medical stuff (band-aids/plasters, pain
killers, antihistamines, antidiarrhoeals - as Jandal says, "Not things I need
every day, but things it sucks to not have when I do need them"), but there was
also some heavier duty stuff (saline solution, betadine, gauze and bandages).
Here, though, I don't have to do the daily laptop shuffle, at least not often,
so for the most part I carry a small shoulder bag to and from work because I
don't have to move much more than a notebook (the paper kind). The bag is a
surplus Finnish army gas mask bag. I generally own and use a lot of military
surplus stuff, because it tends to be dirt cheap, extremely sturdy, not at all
flashy looking, having been designed for function over form, and totally devoid
of branding. It's extremely hard to hit all of those criteria buying any other
kind of stuff. The downside is that if you wear/use too much surplus stuff at
once you can start to give off a kind "delusional violent sociopath" vibe. I
generally like to avoid this vibe, so I recently dyed the bag jet black, which
turned out very nicely indeed. Just last week I also waxed it for
waterproofness, so I'm now really happy with this unique and highly functional
bag which cost me 5 euros.
Anyway, being a bag designed for carrying gasmaks, it has quite the array of
small little internal pockets of different shapes and sizes for carrying, I
don't know, spare gasmask parts and/or tools you need to clean or maintain a
gaskmask. I really have no idea what is supposed to go in them, but obviously
they are perfect for carrying nifty little EDC bits and pieces, so I'm quite
excited to find small and light but genuinely useful gizmos to put in those
pockets. I have already put together a much reduced first aid kit, and a small
sewing kit, too. I am very open to suggestions. I definitely need to adopt
Jandal's habit of carrying a small carry bag in my bag, because I sometimes stop
by the convenience store for random groceries on my way home, and sometimes what
I buy doesn't fit comfortably in the shoulder bag.
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/kvothe/phlog/2018/01/30-of-faults-and-edc
[2]
gopher://grex.org:70/0/~jandal/phlog/personal-baggage
