Thanks man. It has been a long ride for me. Meeting you has been therapeutic for me on a few levels. As has using the Rapscallion in the kitchen a lot this past year. PTS can get deep into the mind. When things have been extreme enough, it can take years for the mind to catch up to the new paradigm. Even then it likely won't catch up on its own. I've known this for years and it's one of the reasons most of my closest friends are combat veterans. Even though I didn't fight in a "war" per se, there were a lot of harsh battles. So for me it took several statements said by the right people, people I trust...which trust in and of itself is still a challenge for me, at the right time. You were among those people, in words and in physical examples. Hanging out with my oldest daughter a lot more this past year has been therapeutic as well. I was fussing at her one day a few months ago, about how much space she was letting her mom take up in her head, how it was high time she understood the days of abuse were long over. Being my daughter, and knowing how to make a point pretty succinctly, she just looked me in the eye and said, "I would think that you of all the people I know, would know how that could take a lot more time than people might think it should. Or have you always slept with a knife and gun in easy reach?" The light bulb finally clicked on. Yeah, keeping my gear close had started in childhood, but not out of a fear of needing it. Just because my father and I lived in a tiny trailer in south Florida. My bedroom was tiny and everything I owned was near at hand, but none of it lived under my pillow. That didn't happen till the years on the streets, after multiple times of being attacked in my sleep. After the night mom and I were attacked in our sleep by my stepfather, that left me orphaned and living on the streets. Before that night I had just been a simple boy who loved the woods, swamps, rivers, and bay. It was the Rapscallion, and using it a lot, that reminded me of the days when a television show called Grizzly Adams had influenced my knife of choice. Days when i would wander many miles with the 6 inch Old Hickory butcher knife being the largest and heaviest knife I owned. It would be the nights of urban survival that would change my opinion of what knife was best for me. All of the waking up from a dead sleep having to either run for my life or fight for it. All of the times of running through the winter nights needing to pry off lock hasps or smash them off. Or dig through the wood doors and windows of abandoned buildings to get off the streets. Like living my own odd version of Jumanji. The cops were hunting me because I was a kid and they wanted to save me by locking me up in a cage. The gangs were chasing me because i hated how they treated the people of the area and caused them problems, random other street predators had to be coped with as well.
There are reasons that by the time I was running a sort of mobile soup kitchen from ages 17 to 19 that my knife of choice was a jet pilot's knife I had picked up in a surplus store with money made from helping truckers offload their trucks. I still have one just like it close by at all times even today, and I have used it to shoot a lot of photos this past year as memory nudgers while I am writing my own autobiography.
I still have the first "Bushcraft" knife i ever bought. I picked it up from a friend on a British Bushcraft forum before I started hanging out on this forum much. Back when I first started trying to see the world from the different perspective I was reading about. Reading Mors' Bushcraft after having read Mr. Sears' Woodcraft. It has nearly the same dimensions and profile as Kev's KEB. So even though I disagree with his philosophies that innovation and new designs are pointless, and see innovation as a good thing. I'm definitely glad the copper, bronze, iron, and steel ages came along and I have more tools to cut with than the stone shards in the box on my desk lol. Especially now with all of the new materials coming out that are changing the paradigms. Lighter materials that are more durable, new alloys that are stronger in thinner stock and have more corrosion resistance etc., that justify putting the thought toward new designs and efforts into making them. I do agree with his thoughts that he stuck with tried and true shapes and geometries when he drew out the KEB, I already had the knife that filled that role for me a few years before I met Andy.
The Rapscallion is a horse of a completely different color. Innovation is in fact exactly what drew me to the Rapscallion. It is for me a butcher knife with innovations that suit my personality. We're both quite practical, but have a lot of attitude
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