Tools: Part 1 | Bob Shepherd

My daughter says that my apartment looks like a hoarder’s. It is, emphatically, not as bad as that. There are no piles of garbage. LOL. But there is a lot of stuff in a relatively small space. I think of it as my tiny home. Available space is maximized, and everything is in its proper place.

This is a secret I learned long ago. If you put your keys down in the same place every time you enter your house, then they will never be lost.

It’s shocking, really, how much stuff I have managed to arrange neatly, comfortably, and accessibly in a small space. My female companion at any given time throughout my life would look at the trunk of the car that she was helping pack for a weekend trip and say, “No more will go in.” And I would rearrange things, and a lot more would go in. I was always good at this.

So, why so much stuff in my place? Well, I moved from a full-scale house to an apartment, and I took a lot of stuff with me. And for good reason. First, many of the things I have are precious to me—the artwork and books I have collected over the years, for example, and personal and family mementos. Second, I keep things that I use. My books, for reference and study. My tools, for crafting things.

Young people today often don’t have a lot of kitchen gadgets and other tools because they don’t make things from scratch. They don’t make guitars and doll houses for the grandchildren, so they don’t have a micrometer and a Japanese saw and a dead blow hammer. They don’t make sauerkraut from scratch, so they don’t have fermentation jars and a muddler. This is a great pity. Some things that are important are almost lost because of people’s tendency, now, to go store-boughten instead of DIY. Quality, for example, and a lot of personal satisfaction at having done a job well. Almost lost, I said, but only almost. I am pleased to say that whatever your crafts (if you don’t some, get them), there are thriving communities devoted to them online, and some of those communards are young. May all the gods bless them and their endeavors.

I continually bug my younger friends about this. “Don’t freaking spend eight dollars for a quart of mediocre yogurt,” I say. “For that price, make a gallon and a half of far more delicious yogurt yourself. ALL IT TAKES IS TO BOTHER LEARNING, and once you do, that learning IS YOURS TO KEEP FOREVER.” This is an important life lesson—one of the most important I know. And these days, there’s no excuse. You want to learn how to make phyllo dough for spanakopita? How to make pâte à choux and turn this into eclairs? There is some Greek or French grandmother or grandfather on YouTube who will show you exactly how it’s done. How it was traditionally done. Sometimes, traditions are best, having been honed for centuries. My spanakopita and eclairs are to die for, and here’s why: they are made fresh by me from good ingredients and using the right tools: a Danish dough whisk, parchment paper, a piping bag.

So, I have a lot of tools and gadgets that I have collected over the years, and my daughter is wrong about my having “too much” stuff. These are not the things of a hoarder. These are the tools of an artist and artisan. Let me share an example from recent days. I recently prepared tomato and pepper seeds for germination and then planting in containers on my porch. Both like hot weather, and I live in Southern Florida. So, what did I use to do this job?

Well, first I set out some disposable cups. I used an awl to poke holes in the bottoms of half of them. Then I put decorative marbles I happened to have around in the bottom of the other half of the cups and placed the cups with the holes inside those cups. This arrangement would provide proper drainage and allow me to keep the seedlings watered but not water-logged. Then, I filled a bucket with warm water and placed a brick of coco coir into it. The coco coir was soon loose and hydrated and would provide my seed-starting medium. Then, I used a canning funnel and a canning ladle to fill the cups with the coco coir, and I tamped this down lightly with a wooden muddler. Next, I emptied my seed packets one at a time onto a dilute hydrogen peroxide solution to kill any contaminants on them, such as funguses or molds, and to soften the hulls to make germination easier; drained them using a small strainer; and dumped the seeds into spring water to wash off the peroxide. Then, I used a different strainer to strain off the water and used wooden tea tweezers to place the seeds onto a bamboo tea shovel, which was the perfect tool for holding and moving the tiny seeds. Next, using a chopstick, I poked two holes about an eighth of an inch deep in the top of the soil in each pair of cups and used the tweezers again to move two seeds to the holes. Finally, I filled the holes with my fingers and covered them with a thin layer of growing medium and watered them with a little gooseneck watering vessel I have.

So, disposable cups, an awl, marbles, a bucket, a canning funnel, a canning ladle, a wooden muddler, two strainers, wooden tea tweezers, a bamboo tea shovel, a chopstick, and a gooseneck watering vessel. And all these tools I had, and here’s the thing: each was perfect for its job. The awl made perfect little round holes in the bottoms of the cups without cutting huge fissures. The tea tweezers allowed me to move the seeds without harming them as metal tweezers might. The bamboo tea shovel made it easy to move them without losing any. The chopstick made the perfect-sized hole for the seeds. The gooseneck watering vessel allowed me to control precisely the amount of watering.

Some advice: over time, spend the money to purchase the right tools for the jobs you do (and for those you have not yet anticipated). You will end up with quite a nice little collection, and these will make you happy. Again, I learned this lesson long ago: It was Christmastime, and I had bought a big, red toy fire engine for my son at his request. The thing made sounds and had flashing lights and needed batteries. The battery compartment was closed with four Phillips-head screws. I didn’t have a Phillips-head screwdriver handy, so I stood there trying to turn those little screws with a butter knife from the kitchen. Dumb.

Over the years I have accumulated a lot of “the right tools” for a lot of jobs, and that stuff makes doing tasks a breeze. One can save a lot of time and effort and produce higher-quality work if one has the right tools. If you want to make your own sauerkraut or kimchee, I highly recommend getting some Mason jars, a wooden muddler, a kitchen scale (for measuring water and salt for a brine), and some pickle pipe fermentation lids. Having these proper tools will save you a LOT of grief. I rarely kayak anymore, and my daughter tried to get me to throw out my paddles. But I have been doing a lot of container gardening on my porch, and I fill a large trashcan with tap water, mix in a small amount of Vitamin C powder, and this removes the chloramine from the water, which might harm my plants. And the kayak paddle is the perfect tool for mixing the powder into the water.

Why do the proper tools work so well? Well, they have the right affordances. In other words, their design is perfect to effect the desired result. I learned the term from the late, great expert on human interface design Donald Norman. Norman—head of the computer science department at MIT—hated, hated, hated bad design in everyday life—the blue page of doom on DOS, then Windows computers; doors that scream by their design “push me” when they have to be pulled or vice versa. Engineers tend to like very neat, very orderly designs—everything all lined up in a row. Perhaps it’s a mild autism spectrum thing that one finds in engineers. In his superb book The Design of Everyday Things, Norman gives the example of a bunch of identical levers on a control panel in a nuclear power facility. This one means raise the fuel rods. This one means lower them. They look precisely identical, but misreading the tiny labels in an emergency and choosing the wrong lever could mean a freaking nuclear meltdown. The workers at the nuke plant had solved this issue by procuring some beer taps and placing them over the levers. Grolsch means lower the rods. Bud means raise them. LOL.

Recently, I ordered a teapot from a fancy modern design company called Kinto, and in their fanciness, these folks had designed away the knob traditionally at the top of the pot in Asian designs. Such arrogance is typically its own punishment. In this case, the lack of the knob makes it impossible to add a braided lid keeper, which makes keeping the lid on when pouring multiple infusions difficult. When pouring, you have to place a finger on the hot top of the teapot. Ouch. If, in the crucible of the ages, a design has emerged unscathed, THERE IS TYPICALLY A REASON. The design serves a function. (For more on stuff for tea and its uses, see this: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2024/01/23/how-to-drink-tea-a-brief-guide-bob-shepherd/. For instructions on making a beautiful traditional braided lid keeper for a teapot, see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81yA_zvbq-4).

When a tool has the right affordances, then it will work smoothly. Consider, for example, a hammer. Novices hold a hammer tightly and force it down against the nail, aiming for the nail’s head. But that’s not how the hammer is supposed to work. A skilled user of a hammer holds it loosely and creates an arc that allows the weight of the hammer head to fall on its own accord. Let me repeat that: on its own accord. That’s what having the right affordances means. The design accomplishes the task almost by itself, with hardly any conscious effort. People have to learn this same truth when chopping wood. Don’t shove the axe down. Arc the thing and allow the head to fall naturally and do the job for you. And don’t try to hit the surface of the wood. Don’t make the top of the wood what you are aiming at. Allow the hammer or axe head to fall as though it were going to strike THROUGH the nail or the wood. Let the proper tool do its job.

When you let the tool do the job, after a short while, the conscious use of the tool completely disappears. You don’t think about what you are doing. You simply let the tool work.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger called tools like this “the ready to hand.” They are there for the hand to take up and then let the tool work with almost no conscious thought at all. To a skilled user, the tool becomes an object of consciousness ONLY WHEN IT STOPS WORKING, WHEN IT IS BROKEN—if, for example, the head of the hammer or the axe has become loose at the end of the handle.

All that is prelude to Part 2 of this essay, in which I will take up three astonishing topics:

types of consciousness,

the coming internalization on the part of the few of common tools, and

the vastly different creatures, for good and ill, we shall be when that happens.