Originally Posted by
RevolverRob
When I was about 8 years old, my dad found a butterfly knife at a Flea Market and bought it and gave it to me. I credit that knife, and butterfly knives in general, with setting off my love of bladed weapons. He gave it to me, because I absolutely loved the Ninja Turtles and he thought I would appreciate a knife that said, "Golden Dragon" on the side. I still have it, it's in my valet case at home, in its sheath. I take it out about once a year and play with it for fun. Today is clearly that day of the year.
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About that knife, knives in general, and butterfly knives overall...
I read Greg Walker's Springblade books as a kid of about 13, they involved knives and I fucking loved knives. In the first book the main character uses a 'balisong knife' to stab a would-be D.C. mugger in the ass (hey it was the '80s). I didn't know what a 'balisong knife' was, so using our primitive dialup connection went online and looked it up.
I figured out that butterfly knives and balisongs were the same thing and that they were from the Philippines. Then I found Balisong.com and different ways of flipping the things open, that was cool as hell. So, I started trying to figure all that out and found a place called BladeForums.
At BladeForums I started chatting with some guy called Michael Burch, who was still working as a writer then, but was making cool knives, he said, "Hey check out this place...since you like balisongs.". He sent me over to the Usual Suspect Network. Through USN, I met Ram Maramba, Larry Davidson, Allen Elishiweitz, Charles Marlowe, a whole host of folks. From there, I bought my first custom knife, then my second, to...I don't even know how many these days.
On USN I kept seeing these other cool 'Filipino' knives called 'pikals' - some dude with a blurry face and the screen name, 'Southnarc' had created some knife called a 'Clinch Pick'. I didn't quite get it, but it seemed cool, the edge was backwards, but fuck it, I liked balisongs and those you can use with the edge inverted. I tried it, it made some sense, so I eventually started to pick up what that blurry faced guy as part of his company, "Shivworks" was putting down.
That led me to a little van down by the river called Total Protection Interactive. Over there I ran into some guy called TLG and that's how I made my way over to his forum, Pistol-Forum.
Along the way, I started focusing on learning, training, and thinking deeply about martial aspects of life. And also about non-martial aspects, like not dressing like a slob, putting in a lot of professionalism, etc. It was all quite useful for a boy who came from a blue collar background but was trying to make his way in a white collar world. I didn't really know what the fuck I was doing (I don't know now, either), but I learned an absolute metric fuck ton of stuff along the way and made some really, really, good friends in the process.
And all of that because of a butterfly knife.
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I guess you can say this journey I have been on for pretty much my entire adult life is all due to, the butterfly knife effect.
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