Prepping for my EDC Post

The question I’ve been getting most in my email the past year or so is in regards to my EDC (Every-Day Carry).

To get inspired to answer this question, I decided to visit the EDC Magic page on facebook. It took me some time to visit there because I don’t have a facebook account.

(I don’t mean that to sound like, “I’m so much better than you… I don’t even have a facebook account.” The reason I don’t have social media is that I find it so easy to spend hours on it at a time, and yet it’s not something that brings me any fulfillment. So, because I lack the discipline to spend just a short amount of time a day on social media, I just cut myself off from it completely. If you’re in a similar situation, I can’t recommend enough just ditching it altogether. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. Yes, to be fair, sometimes I find out things much later than other people in my social circle. “Oh… that guy died? I hadn’t heard. Two years ago? Really?” But for me, that’s been a small price to pay. Of course, if you have a healthier relationship with social media than I do, there’s no need to make that sacrifice.)

So I waited until a friend was visiting—a friend who is on facebook and a member of that page—and went scrolling through.

At first I was very confused.

One of the first posts I came across was this person’s picture of his EDC.

Really? Multiple wallets? Rope? Brass cups? Old coins? A lemon? ANOTHER LEMON???

You carry this stuff every day??

As I continued to scroll, I saw many more photos with ten or fifteen items pictured in people’s EDC.

What kind of pants are these people wearing to hold all this stuff? I wondered.

I soon realized where the disconnect was.

I was assuming people were using the term Every-Day Carry in the usual sense of the word. “This is the stuff I carry with me every day.”

But it turns out a lot of the people were posting pics of what they carried with them to gigs.

While that’s kind of interesting, that’s not quite the idea behind EDC. Some would say it’s the opposite of EDC, which wikipedia defines as, “a collection of useful items that are consistently carried on person every day.” Generally, to fall into the category EDC, you’ll want something that’s relatively small and multifunctional and that you can see yourself using in a myriad of situations. One lemon wouldn’t really fall into that designation, much less two.

Of course, a facebook group is going to become what the members decide it is. So if people are posting what they bring with themselves to gigs, then it might be because that’s what people are more interested in posting/talking about.

Ultimately it’s just another example of the vast difference between performing professionally and performing socially. That picture above represents a perfectly reasonable set of props for a professional. But if an amateur was carrying that stuff around with them, they should be institutionalized.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss my “EDC philosophy” specifically for casual/social performers. It’s not a list of tricks, but rather a way of thinking about the type of things I want to have on me that has served me very well the past 5-10 years.