On EDC

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 which has perfectly met your needs everyday for

years, which you love so much that you joined a fanclub, "maybe this is

not quite as perfect for me as 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