I needed a sword.

I bet that isn’t something you hear everyday, and if you have heard it it was probably someone joking about the best way to deal with a problem.

That wasn’t me. I needed a sword, and it wasn’t a joke.  It wasn’t for nefarious purposes either.  I confess that I am often seen wearing a hood and carrying archaic weapons, but I am neither a thug nor a vigilante.

I’m a writer. Writes don’t have time to be vigilantes. We are too busy figuring out ways to take over the world, then how to save it before we destroy it.

In this case, I needed a sword for Karate.  I was learning a sword kata and the twenty plus year old bokken I was using was showing its age.

Now a normal person might have just ordered a new one from their Karate instructor.  Since I’m sort of normal, that was what I was going to do.

Then my wife said these wonderful words to me. “Why don’t we go to the martial art’s store and you can pick out the one you want.”

Imagine Tim, The Toolman, Talyor, being asked to go to the hardware store to pick up a screwdriver.  Yeah, I might have drooled a little.

A few days later we are driving to the Asian World of Martial Arts store in Philadelphia.  It’s basically the Home Depot of martial art store.

And I was going to get just one thing, a sword.

I picked up a sword. A 40″ wooden bokken with scabbard.

Next to it was a 24″ bokken. Hmm, that would be just about the right size for my minion. I picked it up too.  My bo and tonfas were as old as the bokken I was replacing. I picked them up too. I got a smaller bo for my minion.

I had been thinking about getting my own pair of sai for a while. The only ones I’ve used in the past were borrowed from a friend.  I grabbed them too.

Finally, I asked a salesperson to show me one of the katanas that I had been eyeballing on the AWMA website. Yep, that went onto the counter too.

Here’s what I walked out of the store with.

I am ready should modern technology suddenly fail in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.