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

the library when you want to find out something. I think just plain going to the library and getting out a book is a swell thing to do. It’s something to do, when you’ve got nothing to do, all by yourself. It’s a thing I still do when I’ve got nothing special to do. I just wander around until I find a book that looks interesting; let’s say, a book about ship-building, or rockets, or a story by some author I’ve never heard of before. Now, chances are I’ll never build a ship, or ride in a rocket, and maybe I won’t like the way the author I never heard of writes. But it’s interesting to know how someone else builds a ship, or plans to fly in a rocket, or how the author feels about things.

    Now, as long as we’re talking about knives, let’s talk about mumbly-peg. This is a game you can play any time of the year it’s not too cold or too wet to sit on the ground—which means it’s really okay for any time except when there’s two feet of snow or a flood.
    This is the game you play with a Boy Scout knife. There’s a long thin blade in it with a ridge along one side.
    HTDN_32

    The blade is called an awl, and it’s made for punching holes in leather and things, but when I was a kid, that blade was a mumbly-peg blade. Your father may have called it something else—I kind of remember some kids who came from another town calling it munjigo-peg, but it’s the same game. I’m sure, just the way it was called a different name in different places, it’s probably played a little differently in different places—but here’s the way we played.
    Sit down on the ground. Open up that awl blade; hold the knife flat in your palm. The idea is to flip the knife up, so it goes and sticks in the ground.

    That’s the first thing in mumbly-peg. Learn to do this one first, and you’ll get an idea of how the knife balances and how high to throw it, and how to get your hand and knee out of the way. It’s supposed to stick in the ground, not in you. Incidentally, that’s another reason for using that particular blade. You notice that the tip is rounded and it doesn’t have a cutting edge on it. Also, playing mumbly-peg is not the best thing in the world for a knife blade, what with hitting pebbles and dirt, and this blade is not sharp to begin with, so it can’t be dulled, and that ridge along the edge strengthens it, so it won’t break the way a regular knife blade might.
    HTDN_33

    Now, if you’re playing with another guy, you choose up to start. One of you flips the knife from the palm of the hand. If it sticks up right in the ground, that guy goes on to the second thing. If the knife doesn’t stick, the other guy
gets a chance to flip it from his palm. If it sticks, he goes on to the second thing. If it doesn’t, it goes back to you and you try and so on. This is the way it goes on all through the game, except for one thing which I’ll tell you about in a minute.
    The second thing in mumbly-peg is flipping the knife, same way, only from the back of the hand, like this:
    HTDN_34

    Now here’s the thing I said I’d tell you in a minute. Suppose you have flipped it, and it stuck, from the palm. You go on to the second thing, the back of the hand. Suppose it doesn’t stick when you flip it from the back. Then you have a choice. You can take a second chance doing it from the back. If it sticks, you go on. If it doesn’t, the knife goes to the other guy, and when it comes back to you, you have to start at the beginning. This may not seem like much of
a gamble to you now, but wait until you’ve done ten things, and you have to make the choice between trying it again, or going all the way back ten things to the beginning.
    I’ve been talking to people about mumbly-peg and some of them say that when they played you had to reach at least the high dive (that comes later) before you got a chance