I’ve carried a pocketknife nearly every day of my life since I was eight years old.

Never got into any trouble about it at school. Where and when I grew up is gone now, though; a different world.

If I could, I’d rather carry a Bowie knife like one of these on my belt, as I did nearly every summer for years when I was younger, when it was still possible.

I don’t have any desire to carry a gun, but knives are so very useful, unlike a gun which is only really good for one thing. And it’s so much harder to kill someone or yourself accidentally with a knife than with a gun. To kill someone with a knife, you have to mean it.

Knives are generally useful tools, unlike guns. Here are some things I did with my Bowie knife that I carried nearly continuously from age 10-15:

1) Cleaned fish.

2) Cleaned deer and birds.

3) Pried rocks up to look for bait (not the best use of a knife, but it was a cheap knife).

4) Trimmed fishing line.

6) Made my own fishing poles.

7) Shucked mussels.

8) Defense against feral dogs in my area.

9) Trimmed limbs for uses such as water rise measuring stakes (one place I lived was prone to flooding).

I am sure that I am forgetting many more. I miss my big Bowie knife. Wish it were acceptable to carry one of those beautiful ones around these days.

The book that most exceeded my expectations: The Emperor’s New Mind, by Roger Penrose.

Even though its conclusions are almost certainly dead wrong, it’s interesting and mind-expanding throughout. This book caused more deep thinking in me than any other.

The most disappointing book: Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter.

An overlong, boring hodgepodge of ideas that I either learned and/or occurred to me independently by the time I was twelve. My reaction on finishing this book amounted to, “That was all? That was fucking all? 700 pages that seemed like 7,000 for that?”