I See You've Played Knifey – Spoony Before

That's from The Simpsons, in case you weren't aware

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People dug the story about The Axe on My Bookshelf, so here is another story about my dad’s place, more or less.

I saw Crocodile Dundee in the theatres because I was a teen in the 80s and everyone was talking about it. I didn’t get the appeal. It was less adventure movie (Raiders of the Lost Ark is still my favorite movie) and more just romcom. Transphobic romcom, although I wasn’t enlightened to that fact at the time.

The one funny part was “That’s not a knife.” The movie came out when I was 18 and that’s the drinking age in Alberta so of course all of a sudden Foster’s Lager was fucking everywhere and it sucked but I had no taste back then and yeah I drank some.

One thing you should know about me is that I quote from The Simpsons several times a day and I’m not even conscious of it. I’ll be setting the table for dinner and if there are both knives and spoons I’ll mutter “I see you’ve played knifey – spoony before” in a bad Australian accent and giggle to myself because I’m five.

I have a slight fondness for knives. I have some good quality kitchen knives, but I bought my first knife when I was 15. It was the Buck 110 model, seen here:

And yeah I put my books in the background of the pic as a not-so-gentle nudge that Christmas is coming buy a bunch of them. That’s not the original forty-year-old Buck knife though. I’ll get to that.

As I said, I was 15. My mom was a gambler, but she was good at it. As I’ve mentioned before, she made a small fortune as a stockbroker, but for a few years before she became a stockbroker she was really into blackjack. (My brain just added “and hookers” because I also quote from Futurama sometimes.) I may have mentioned that she finished high school at the age of 15, and was really good at math. She could count cards like a mofo.

And so, the summer that I was 15, we took a family vacation to Lake Tahoe, because in South Tahoe there are casinos. We were there for five weeks, renting a nice house on the beach. The entire vacation and then some was paid for by my mom’s adeptness at the blackjack tables.

We didn’t fly to Tahoe, we drove. It’s a bit of a trek from Calgary. I think it was about two-and-a-half days driving to get there. Somewhere along the way we stopped in some forgotten town and while I was in a mall, I saw a knife store. I thought fuck it I want a knife and bought the one that looks exactly like that blade you see in the photo. Not the big one in the feature photo. I’ll get to the story of that big ass knife in a bit.

Then I showed the Buck knife to my stepbrother saying check this out motherfucker. This was not the loser stepbrother who was three years older who I stole a girl from when I was 13 (that story here). It was the invisible stepbrother. The loser one wasn’t on this trip.