How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself Read Free Page A

good knife to be sharp. Nobody can put a good edge on a poor knife. A good one will cost more than a cheap one, but it’s worth it. It’ll take a good edge, it will hold it, and it will last practically forever. When I was a kid, we all thought the only good knife was a Case knife. They still make them, they’re still good knives; there are lots of other good knives, but I know about Case. You should learn how to sharpen a knife. For that you need an oilstone. We used to sharpen knives by taking a flat stone, spitting on it, and then sharpening it, but it isn’t as good as an oilstone. There are lots of books that will tell you how to sharpen all kinds of tools. They’ll be in your library, but the best way is to get someone who knows how to show you. In any case, the reason I mentioned the Case knife is that ever since I’ve known about it, the factory has guaranteed that if you will send the knife back to them at any time, they’ll sharpen it and send it back to you. And they do a swell job.
    Okay, that’s it about knives. Now, let’s say you have the knife and you know how to use it, and you have a pencil.
    One of the things we did was to cut a thin strip at the top of the pencil. Then we took a pen and wrote our names or initials on it, very small, like this. I know that you can get pencils with your names stamped on them, but we didn’t have them then, and somehow it’s different when you do it yourself.
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    Another thing we did was to decorate our pencils by cutting. Take one of the hexagonal pencils (hexagonal means six-sided, as a square is four-sided). These are usually painted yellow. Now, cut a very thin sliver, like this, so you’ve lifted off a little square of paint. Now on the side of the pencil right next to the side you’ve cut, cut another little square of paint that you can sliver off. Now the next side, and so on all around the pencil, making a checkerboard effect.
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    Working the same way, sort of, you can make a spiral all down the pencil. Or maybe you have some ideas of your own.
    By the way, in the spring and summer when you can find a green branch of some kind, you can do all these things and many more with the branch. You cut very lightly, just enough to cut through the dark bark, and when you peel that off, you see just about the whitest white you’ll ever see. We used to make walking sticks out of these branches, but we never really used them for walking. It was just to make designs in the bark.
    If you can find a willow tree in the spring, you can make a whistle out of a willow branch, but you’ll have to get a book from the library telling you how, because I never could make one.
    One of the things I found out when I was writing this book was that an artist can’t draw a picture of something without seeing it. I talked my wife into doing the drawings, and I’ve spent about a month now in making all the things in the book so that she could draw them. Fortunately for me, I was doing this in the fall, and I could tell her that the reason I couldn’t make a willow whistle was because the only time to make willow whistles was in the spring. If you want the real truth, I never even knew a kid
who could make a willow whistle. But there were books in the library that told how to make a willow whistle, and I used to try. The only reason I’m even mentioning it is that people I’ve talked to claimed they knew a kid when they were kids who was able to make willow whistles. Maybe I’m just a dope about willow whistles and you’ll be very good at making them. But everything else in the book I’ve made. I made them when I was a kid, and I made them again as a grownup, and they work. This is a guarantee.
    If you don’t know what a willow tree looks like, go to the public library and get out a book about trees. You’ll notice that all through this book, I advise you to go to