Mexico City, Mexico

When I lived in Austin, I used to get my knives and razor sharpened at a little knife shop on Burnet Road called “The Sharpist.” Kind of a crappy little shop, but with really nice people, the tired little building with its second-hand shelves held knifes of every size and shape, from the practical to the … ummm… Middle Earth.

I’ll always remember waiting in the long line one day to pick up my Dovo behind a gruff guy in his late 20’s who – I gleaned from his conversation – was just back from Afghanistan. His large hunting knife – the type with a blade that measured almost a foot long with a saw on the back side – still had blood stains on it.

He smiled solemnly to the woman behind him – a fellow conservative who seemed impressed at his  his war stories,

“Well, better to kill ’em there than kill ’em here.”

In Mexico City, I don’t have as good a command of the language for such rich experiences, but knife sharpening continues to have it’s ingenuousness flair.

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In my neighborhood, I came across a man with a specially made bicycle that has a grinder welded to the top of it. When he gets to a location – a restaurant, for instance, which appears to be his main client base (I’ve seen him and others like him a few times now) he switches his bike to sharpening mode and uses pedal power to sharpen the knives.

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The day he allowed me to take his photograph, he was working on a machete for a local gardener.

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Snippets