It's in my back pocket right now.
It has been in my back pocket, or very close to it, for years. I reach for it without thinking — to open a package, cut a tag, split an apple, slice a rope on a dock. It appears and disappears. That is the point. The best tool is the one that stops being a tool and becomes just the way things happen.
The knife was designed by a man called Molletta. This is his nickname — it means clothes peg in Italian, which tells you something about him, though I'm not sure what. His actual name is Michele Pensato. He spent years as an archaeologist and an excursion obsessive before he ever designed a knife, which means he spent years needing a knife in actual places, which is maybe the only honest qualification for designing one. He made it in Maniago, in the northeast of Italy, where knives have been made since at least the fourteenth century and where LionSteel has been making them since 1969.
The body is CNC-milled from a single billet of aluminum. The blade is two pieces of steel, fitted together with the kind of precision that has no margin — either it's right or it's wrong, and you feel the difference in every open and every close.
There's a small rotating button on the spine called the RotoBlock. When you turn it, something changes. The framelock — the mechanism that keeps the blade open in a folding knife — becomes locked in place. The knife converts from a folder into something functionally identical to a fixed blade. One small turn. The object becomes something else. I find this beautiful in a way I can't fully explain: the idea that with a single gesture of the thumb, you can change what a thing is.
I got it at a knife shop in Portland, Maine. The kind of small, serious shop that exists for people who have thought carefully about these things. I held it for a long time before I paid for it.
What I paid for wasn't a tool. It was the end of a certain low-grade anxiety — the background hum of what if I need something and don't have it. The knife, in my pocket, is the answer to that hum. Not because I use it constantly for heroic purposes. I use it for cardboard boxes and loose threads and stubborn clamshell packaging. But it's there. When I need a thing, I have the thing.
There's a window breaker built into the tip. For emergencies. For the moment — which I hope never comes — when you need to get out of somewhere fast. I ride motorcycles. The window breaker is there for the ditch. That it exists makes me calmer, which makes me ride better, which makes the ditch less likely. This is how preparation works: the thing you never use is exactly what enables you to act well.
Rolex owners talk about a daily pleasure in the object itself — the weight, the movement, the small satisfaction of a thing done right. I understand this now. Not from a watch. From a knife in my pocket, from Maniago, made by an archaeologist with a funny nickname, that turns into something else when you need it to.
It will probably outlast me. I think about that sometimes.