yo-yo #48: orange/blue siliconed zero

"So many want the juice that skating gives, the popularity and coolness, but are not ready for the pain that comes eternally. People who think skating owes them are wrong; they get wheelbite in the rain. People who owe skating will live for ever. You want to know how to be a skater? Taste the concrete!"

- Jake Phelps
i've been playing yo-yo since july 1985. that was [to the best that i can recollect/research] when my dad brought my a guilt-gift from one of his many doctor-trips in the form of an early yomega brain. he was at a conference in boston, and was staying at his home in fall river. at the apparent recommendation of his mother, he bought the yo-yo from a local toy store. the patent on the brain is, i think, from 1984, so mine must have been one of the earliest production models.

anyway, that means i've been yo-yoing (albeit touch n' go here and there) for 24 years.
and if you can believe it, i've been skateboarding for 25!

i'm old. really old. like easter island-deity old. at least i feel that way sometimes. in may of 1984, my family moved from 2101 kentucky ave. in "charm city" (baltimore, md - alternatively "the city that reads", as bus stop benches advertise) to that den of heat and sin and biting reptiles - new orleans, louisiana. my parents had bought their first house (which had to be 3 times as big as the one we'd left), a low, sprawling ranch nestled in a labyrinth of white-concrete suburban streets, alleys, and intertwining drainage canals. this would be the playground which, over the next 6 years, would provide me with endless delinquent adventure, and which would perpetually dare me to discover and redefine the true nature of "fun".

when we made the move, the old owners had left behind exactly three items: a set of "jarts", a useless basketball backboard, and a bright yellow, metal-wheeled banana-board. i had never seen a skateboard up close, although i knew vaguely what they were. i remember trying to stand on it with my dad looking on, unsure of whether he should intervene. upon the glass-smooth surface of the garage, the wheels slipped immediately. the board shot out from beneath me, and had settled under the workbench before my ass had fully connected with the floor. i remember it hurt; enough to put me off wanting to skate for a couple months.

in the intervening time, however, i met jason heinze and matthew patterson. matt i met at the local pool. i was playing with my brand new "gizmo" toy (the cute one from "gremlins", remember?), and we ended up tossing the thing across the length of the pool. by the end of an hour, we had built a lasting friendship and had penciled in a summers worth of playdates. (it is amazing and surreal to watch now, as my own daughter strikes instant swimming-pool-friendships in the same way.) later that week, i met jason while exploring the streets of the neighborhood on my bike. he laughed at my training wheels, in a moment providing me with the imptus to finally shed them, which i did a week later. almost immediately, i learned that jason and matt had a pre-existing friendship, and i was surprised to find that, rather than being ostracized by the pair with their history, we formed a sort of trio. usually three's a crowd, but with us, three was riches and power. three was always having someone to play with, always having someone get your back when psycho-timmy threw glass at you, and when you had to punch psycho-timmy, three was never (ok, rarely) getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of you when his big brother came home.

and when we all concurrently discovered skateboarding, three became a full-on pre-pubescant skate-gang.

jason had an old nash board with which he introduced matt and me to the virtues of skate. and whatever we learned, he probably always remained the best of us. within a few weeks of seeing his board and learning to push, matt and i had our own rides; matching variflex dragon boards (by coincidence, i kid you not). my first summer in new orleans was a blur of skinned and re-skinned knees, huge carves, and the made-up tricks that every eight-year-old swears are pure gold. somehow, the next 6 years (and to some extent the next 24) were composed of incrementally amplified versions of the same.

skate-sessions with matt and jason remain my most readily-fetched and most indelible childhood memories. i can still feel the asphalt under my ojii "team rider" wheels (which i still have and occasionally ride). matt became skilled at riding ramps (i won't say "vert" because all our ramps were mini's or launches). he was the only one of us that could launch into a 180 or land a solid backside air off our pal robbie's quarter pipe. jason always had lance mountain boards, but really only rode street. he could grind before it was called "grinding", and though our roads had no curbs, he ollied up the "gentle inclines" with easy grace. i kind of blended the pair of them. i was happy riding street; happy with transition. i had the best boneless in the neighborhood, and i'd snap them uselessly over hydrants to compensate for my mediocre ollies. though my skill was nothing much, and no sponsorships were seeking me out as they were some other kids in our neighborhood... i remember being happy to be included, to be swept up in something, to be a skater.

to be a skater in the 80's was an incredible thing. i remember, really remember thinking how cool it was to be a part of what felt like an artistic movement, no less epic than the harlem renaissance... or "the" Renaissance itself, for that matter. hanging out at the nearby shop, i'd watch powell and g&s decks flying off the shelves, bombarded by ubiquitous images of the bones brigade and day-glo thrasher stickers. every day at school was spent half-assing it, doodling imaginary signature-decks and impossible ramp-plans while waiting for 3pm (c'mon, at least i WENT). our little triumvirate took full possession of the evening, from when the bus breaks squealed at our stop to when our parents would literally peal us from the street for bed. although my house was on the way to our usual ramp corner, i made a habit of bringing my board to school so as to waste no time in collecting it (or maybe just so i could bring my board to school). the neighborhood, the whole world it seemed, was ALIVE with skate-passion, even if it was really just me.

and then, like most everything... one day it was all gone.

i blinked and my friends quit; they moved on to remote control cars and collecting hunting knives and stuff. the streets were all quiet, and no one was willing to break out the ramps. in 1989, skating in new orleans just died. not with a bang, but a whimper.

i was too busy to ruminate much on it. we were preparing to move to north carolina (it might as well have been nepal). the move was as much for me as it was for my dad's professional opportunities. the city had begun to simmer me into potentially criminal form (aside from skateboarding), and my parents wisely noted the precipice upon which i was perched. the move to winston-salem was for me, a move into nothingness, but it was undeniably safe. there were no skaters in my new neighborhood. if there had ever been a "movement" here, it had died of alzheimers. one kid at my new school had a skateboard (a nice hosoi hammerhead), but when i went to his house, it turned out to just be the deck, which he had salvaged from somewhere. noting my disappointment, he gave it to me, and yeah, i still skate that too.

the move to nc did teach me one positive thing though, a revelation that irrevocably altered my whole perception of skateboarding: hills are cool.

new orleans had no hills. well, technically it had ONE hill at a park by the zoo, and hundreds of kids would be on that grassy sucker daily, climbing up, rolling down, and just generally trying to comprehend it. nc was different. my kitchen window looked out on two huge, beautiful hills, tapering nicely with slight inclines before intersecting at a common stop sign. i vividly remember the first time i braved the steeper and shorter of the two. everything was perfect, amazing... until a third of the way down i developed a "wobble". speedwobbles turn a skateboard board into a shuddering, convulsing mess, especially if the trucks are too loose. having never experienced this speed for more than a second while on a ramp, this sensation was foreign to me and i panicked. i ended up rolling down the latter 2/3 and amassed an instant contusion-collection that had my mom mystified as to why we'd moved at all. within another week, trucks tightened, i was pointing my schmidtt stix down the nastiest hill in the neighborhood, and though i rode through the wobbles, i was unable to do so with the brick wall that punctuated the t-intersection at the bottom. more ow.

i mastered speedwobbles and powerslides eventually, and much more importantly, i mastered riding alone. on occasion, i'd be run off the road by seniors in their mustang or mocked by b-ball jocks as i pushed past their pick-up game. it's amazing to me that there was a time when being a skater was a real liability when it came to "being cool". but when i look back on it, pushing alone through those years was one of the richest, most meaningful times in my life. and every time i bomb a hill now, it's the same feeling, the same desperation, the same commitment that sweeps over me. it's somehow surprising to look back now and realize that i constructed a huge chunk of my character while on a skateboard.

so what's it got to do with yo-yo's?

well... whatever. i never said it all had to tie up perfectly. i was holding this yo-yo today, an orange and blue siliconed fhz that i traded (or just stole) from my buddy samm scott, and it made me think about skating. it's an incredible zero, as some zeros just mysteriously seem to be. but as for what it's got to do with skating, i'm coming up empty... maybe it's the colorway. i had a rad driveway session yesterday, and i've got it on the brain. it's all just manipulating energy anyway.

but much has been made of how similar the two media are. for awhile in the late 90's, they were marketed in very similar (very eXtreme!!!) ways. both are all about tricks; the aesthetic of "the dance", and though both skating and yo-yoing pretend to be competitive sports sometimes, the best exponents of each recognize that they are ARTS first. they're different, too. some yo-yoers love to talk about yo-yoing as though it's some kind of iconoclastic sub-culture, but really it's playing with toys. it can be done in the safety of one's room, closeted if necessary, free from ridicule, and sans pain. all that notwithstanding... much of what i've learned from riding a skateboard has applied itself pretty naturally to playing yo-yo. truth is universal, and these could be "yo-yo truths" with only minor editing. let me hear it if you disagree.

• if you intend to hit a trick, commit... or you will probably eat it.
• learn the basics; no one wants to see you do a stationary tré flip if you can't rock a giant ollie at speed.
• your board's going to get trashed if you're using it right. don't sweat it.
• skateboarding does not happen on the internet.
• whether in a park, in the rain, or in 110 degrees, know how your gear is going to respond.
• knowing where skating comes from is just as meaningful as knowing where it's going.
• if you want to bomb massive hills, you're going to spend a lot of time walking back up.
• you're going to fall down, sometimes worse than others. get the hell up.
• getting sponsored will get you some gear and might make you cool among skaters, but if it satisfies your compulsion to skate, you should never have stepped on the board to begin with.
• although it's great to session with friends, skating is primarily a loner deal; you have to be comfortable with yourself.
• if you go fast, you get wobbles. put your weight forward and ride through them.
• sometimes skating won't be cool. people are going to make fun of you. get over it. if you're skating to be cool in the eyes of others, quit. now. please.
• the tricks are rad, but the ride will always matter more in the end.
• being able to do a handplant is pretty worthless. being a skater is pretty worthless. being a person who understands what a skater understands... is invaluable.

yo-yo #'s 31 & 32: extreme spin fhz's

once upon a time, i saw the yo-yo world as existing primarily within 3 big store-owned forums.

the biggest and most popular was certainly yoyoing.com/news, which had been active since 1997 and, despite a single-page format seemed to feature the liveliest debates from the brightest of yo-yoing's luminaries. next in size and scope came the skilltoys forum. run by david hall, and now a historical fact, this multifaceted jewel sported perks like a cool photo gallery, shoutbox, and multiple forums, but always seemed plagued by a plethora of aggro yo-yoers (which is about as natural as an oral bowel movement) who seemed to go out of their way to lower the average IQ of the board by 30 (it wasn't all that bad, and i kinda miss it).

the third was extreme spin.

now before you interject and remind me about theyo or yoyonation, this is about how I saw the yo-yo world... i went to theyo like twice when i was just sorting out the forums, and i just wasn't impressed. it didn't seem like anyone was saying anything interesting, so i ceased to check it. it did not exist in my world-view, and to this day i view the folks who came up exclusively within theyo as a kind of interdimensional anomoly... like bizzaro-superman or something. and yoyonation didn't even exist. it's always funny when the yyn guys get all misty, saying "i remember the good ol' days before all the acid-tounged noobs came with there negativity"... that was like a year ago! the yyn board has really only been fully (or at least mostly) toxic now for a matter of months! the turnover on that board is incredible.

anyway, extreme spin was an actual store when i joined the board (in may 05?), run by rich rains in the chicago area. the forum was positively miniscule in comparison with the others, but with its small size came a pleasant side-effect. it was like a family. a lot of the guys knew each other through the extreme spin team (on of the few teams you could "apply for") or from the store's illinois environs. as a random nc yo-yo player, i kind of felt as though i had wandered into a biker bar where i didn't belong... except since the bikers were all actually yo-yo nerds, big deal.

people were friendly. the posts seemed meaningful. tommy gun, the admin (rich virtually never posted), ran a tight ship with cool mods, but the general population didn't seem to need a lot of censorship. it was just a pleasant place to discuss yo-yoing, and i was always amazed by the degree to which it was overlooked. it had its share of idiots for sure, but most of said idiots ended up leaving because they were policed by the board's more sensible population, as opposed to being banned.

around this time, rich commissioned two subsequent "extreme spin edition" duncan freehand zeros. the zero was (and arguably still is) one of the coolest, most popular yo-yo's on the planet. the es zeros were nifty because they sported a "bionic" silver body. i'm not an expert (and correct me if i'm wrong), but i'm pretty sure these were the only bionic zeros (es i know there were bionic fh1's).

anyway, i hated them. so although i kept the cool black-on-silver caps, i traded the stock silver body for a recessed black one at va states 06, and i was happy... till i tried to put said caps on a red zero and i blasted the axle straight through one. it was too bad, too, because although one of the caps said "extreme spin", the other one just had a silver "duncan" logo, which was unique... and that of course was the one i busted. i may have actually broken the other one in rage.

anyway, a few years passed, and yyn came on the scene in a HUGE way. everyone who was anyone was taking their conversations there, and pat really made it feel like something special was happening; like a revolution without the inconvenience of an actual revolution. rich and the es store took a giant hit (as did skilltoys and i assume, yoyoguy). rich ended up closing the store indefinitely, without any explanation to the board (or from what i understand, the team). i assumed that es was dead and buried right there, but tommy decided to keep the board open on his own. it had become tight-knit; a dedicated core of friends surrounded by a small envelope of the standard evolving come-and-go crowd that typifies any yo-yo board.

the es board is cool, in part because it sports a few features most yo-yo boards don't possess. for one, there's a highly evolved "rep" system that allows you to congratulate members on insightful or constructive posts and chastise them for dumbassery. you're not supposed to sign your rep (it's supposed to be anonymous), but a lot of people do.

additionally, es features "categories" that members can be filed into. when steve brown posts there (hasn't in like a ear i'm sure), he does so as an "industry pro" with a cute little orange banner under his name. guys like seth peterson or nate weddle get a little "company rep" banner. it's neat because it offers one more way for new folks to get a sense for who they're talking to. the first time i ever saw the green "trusted" banner, it was takeshi. everyone loves takeshi, and why shouldn't they? there are plenty of national yo-yo masters now, but takeshi's the one dude i think could get elected "national yo-yo saint". the first time i saw him post on es, it was to give away a recessed mosquito to the 1st person to correctly guess his hair length in inches (36'). sometime in 07, the mods decided to give a ton of the old posters the "trusted" banner. it was meaningless really, but it was kinda cool, too. and i liked the color green.

at some point, i was approached about being a "supermod". although i didn't really have a sense for what this entailed, i kind of rejected it out of hand. one of my aikido sensei's used to tell me that his highest ambition in aikido was to reach blue belt (a low-middle rank you get after a few years). when i asked him why, he said "you know enough to have fun, but not so much that anyone really expects anything out of you. you can still surprise people with your skill). he's a good instructor, so i'm glad that didn't work out for him (he's a 4th degree black belt now). i sort of felt like that about being a mod. i liked being trusted, because it seemed to give people the sense that i wasn't a total waste, but i had no pesky responsibility. so i refused.

and they made me one anyway, which was strange.


i know a lot of people probably felt like i shouldn't have been made a mod; that there were better choices, and i don't really disagree. on the other side of it though, i kind of dig it, and not for the expected "power-tripping" reasons. since i've had some responsibility for the es community thrust upon me (albeit unwanted), i actually feel more invested in it than ever. i don't want it to go away. over the past few weeks, i actually sought out and acquired a pair of es zeros (well one es zero and one set of caps). due to nostalgia, i don't find the bionic all that atrocious anymore. and it plays pretty well stock, which is how i think i'll keep it. from my pal mike, i also scored one of the worlds 07 transitional zeros (dual sticker-recessed). i was super-amped because it's one of the "sword of destiny" ones that sports a fiery "blade" at one of the injection sites in the plastic. i snapped my spare es caps in there and have been rocking it daily.

i think i've probably only used my newfound supermod powers a handful of times at this point, but it's pretty irrelevant (and indicative of how well-balanced the group is anyway). it's made me appreciate how kind, bizarre, and fascinating the core group at that forum has always been. because it's so small and friendly, it's easy to forget that pretty much none of these people have anything much in common... but for the little "retro-winding double-knob toy" that we all seem to love...

and that's quite enough.

yo-yo #'s 23 & 24 (and #1 again): the ones i'm taking to disney world

WALT DISNEY WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

as steve martin said (in reference to anaheim, ca's disneyLAND), "disneyland was my versailles."

well, i'm not going to california. i'm going to orlando (i always go to orlando; maybe one day i'll try "the other one"). i've been a lot of times... i think this trip will make 17 (really), and i've never lived less than 700 miles from it. this will be the 6th disney vacation for my 6-year-old daughter (REALLY). and yet, my wife's worse. not only has she gone more than i have, she's a total disney world addict. she visits disney touring websites and forums daily. she's up on all the new openings, closings, remodelings, and menu-changes. 99 days before any given trip, we have to do the "double-digit dance". she puts WAY more time into planning the trip than the trip ever actually takes up. but she likes it that way, and i won't lie; she's a pro. we never wait in line. she has a positively superhuman ability to organize a trip based on crowd patterns and havy/light days at each park, and though we do it all, the longest we've waited in line in the past 7 years has been about 20 minutes.

among my most indelible memories are these:
• being cathartically soaked by a torrential downpour after the illuminations laser/fireworks show at epcot when i was 14.
• getting totally barftastically sick when i was 12, and staying in the hotel most of the week. ugh.
• the first time i took my daughter (then age 3) to the princess breakfast in the castle. (certainly among my most joyful days ever).
• breaking the peter pan ride with my wife when we were 18 and still in high school by pulling too hard on the exposed conveyor belt attached to the ride's drive mechanism.
• almost getting thrown out of epcot for faking a series of fistfights with my brother on the imagination ride at the moment it snaps and projects the picture of the car.
• taking the picture below during the pirates & princesses party fireworks in 06.


since i see so much of life through the lovel prism of yoyoing, i tend to remember trips based on what yo-yo i bring with me. on recent disney trips, i've brought a luke vader zero, a milk (more on that one someday soon), and a pair of fh2's. this is my first trip in 18 months (18 WHOLE MONTHS!!!), and i've been seriously deliberating on which yo-yo's should make the trip. i've decided on 3:

• my "number 1" no jive 3-in-1 yo-yo (see the blog for "yo-yo #1"): this was a no brainer. it goes virtually everywhere with me. obvious.



• a red schmooved/silicone-recessed freehand zero with cut-to-flush throw down weight rings (that was a mouthful): originally, when i intended to bring a bearing yo-yo in case i feel like playing with a bearing (unlikely, but possible), i assumed i'd bring one of my throw down ronin prototypes (more on those someday soon). however, much like its cousin the luchador, the ronin is bare aluminum and looks like it could (and would like to) kill someone. it's one of a very few yo-yo's i'm honestly not sure i could talk past airport security. the uninitiated would give it a glance and, if they previously did NOT believe the myth about yo-yo's originating as weapons (they did NOT), they would upon meeting the ronin.
since i didn't feel like mailing it home in one of those airport baggy-mailers they give you (which they did me on the time that i waltzed into security wearing a butterfly knife - dumbass), i picked another yo-yo. i settled on one of my eric wolff wooden yo-yo's (see the blog for yo-yo #'s 2 & 3). i was going to bring the small bearing one and have a lovely all-wooden time of it, but talking to my pal brandon, i was advised NOT to do so. although i have 2 (and another on the way), eric wolff yo-yo's are rare, valuable, and not to be blithely paraded down main street, u.s.a., as anything could happen to it, and i would be most sad. he suggested i take a zero instead (big surprise there).
so i am. the zero i'm taking i got from a guy i don't know well at all, but it plays like the absolute dickens, and i'm reasonably sure that it looks "yo-yo" enough to not be mistaken for any kind of obect of destruction (like, for example, gel insoles or a bottle of water). i know that, in the event that i choose to rock a bearing, i'm covered.

• a "clean machine" no jive 3-in-1 yo-yo that i received from 1997 world champion jason tracy: this is the yo-yo that i've been playing more than any other in recent weeks. although my #1 is still my "#1", this one has made it into my pocket more and more on account of its dazzling play. i received this yo-yo from jason (out of the goodness of his heart) in late 2007.
i had never played a clean machine (an uncoated no jive), and i was shocked at how well it performed. at that time i was even more of a purist and wouldn't have dreamed of flipping it butterfly, but nowadays, that's how i rock it. it was on this yo-yo that i discovered i was able to hit kamikaze and pure 143 a few weeks ago (2 tricks i thought i'd never land on a no jive), and it's occupied a more special place in my heart since. this is also the yo-yo that my young friend (and another world champion) tyler severence dinged the ever-loving crap out of when he snapped a string and sent it caroming off of his house's outer wall at last year's east coast classic.
although i have no idea what gives it such incredible qualities, it is a truly special player, and seems to take into consideration the desires of the person throwing it more than any yo-yo i've played.
the nice thing about playing uncoated wood, too, is the response. this clean machine can go from dead unresponsive, requiring a bind to finger-smashing, loop-happy tug-response solely by adjusting string tension. it's actually really annoying until you get the hang of it, but once you do, it's incredibly cool to have a yo-yo that can handle kamikaze (albeit barely) and then vertical punches on the next throw. this is the yo-yo that i plan on playing most on this trip, and the one that i imagine i'll come to associate with it when i reflect on it afterwards.

apologies for the awful photo booth pictures. my camera is packed away, and i'm out the door!!!

yo-yo #'s 16 and 17: "fake" Mg's

at worlds '05, during his 5a freestyle, my pal jack ringca tossed a dull silver yo-yo out into the crowd. when it was examined after being fought for by the masses, it was discovered to be one of the rare and highly-prized silver mg's... and when it was further examined, it was discovered to ACTUALLY be a well-doctored freehand zero with mg caps. when i heard this story, i thought it was absolutely hilarious. the visual image of people clambering over each other to get to what they believed was a $400 yo-yo, only to discover it to be a facsimilie is at once super-funny AND pretty telling with regard to "the human condition".

at the risk of offending dear friends, yo-yoing is chock-full of teenage boy-types (some are actual boys and others just pretend to be). many (though not all) of these yo-yo boy-types have ingested that most western (and most human) of philosophies; that more is better. more yo-yo's, more expensive, more rare (my favorite). if a magnesium yo-yo sold for $38, no one would assume it to be any sort of "holy grail", no matter how it played. they might trample each other to get to it, on account of it being tossed by jack, but not with the same fervor as they would thinking it was actually "worth" something. things that are "worth something" are so popular on the boards, but they're really only attractive if your spirit is "worth less". i'm guilty too. i have a lot of yo-yo's, some of which i've "wanted". i'm working on that.

anyway, a considerable chunk of the commentary on the boards relates to "yo-yo appraisal". a good-playing (or looking) yo-yo begets hype, which begets cash value, which begets the widespread belief that it's a good-playing yo-yo... which begets more hype. in our present climate, a good player can do almost anything with a stock $20 yo-yo. a great player could win worlds and shift paradigms with less, and yet our fixation on market value remains, as if it represents anything more than an illusion.

the evolution of my own take on this has been interesting. when i first heard about the mg, my response was "am i really going to have $398 more fun with that than with a profly?" i thought the mg was frivolous and decadent. lately, however, when anyone brings up the popular view (almost invariably expressed by the embittered and resentful) that "an mg plays just like a zero", i feel compelled to step in and contradict them. my inclination to defend the mg was probably born right around the time i first played one, whereupon i realized something like, "whoa...this isn't bullshit, at all." in truth, it's not that i care a great deal about its monetary value, but the real mg IS a great player, and, whatever your preferences, it feels DIFFERENT from a zero. but don't be fooled: people who claim to own or desire an mg because it's BETTER than a zero are just as full of crap as the people who say it plays just the same. i'll come back to that point in a bit.

i put these two "fake mg's" (just freehand zeros) together out of happenstance, really. i got both the red (recessed kentaro) and the black (recessed silicone) in a casual trade. i always detested the "new mg" caps, so when i received an mg with them firmly fixed onto it, i drilled through them and pulled them off immediately. (as the aforementioned jack ringca showed me, strategic drilling into the side of a cap makes for a nice whistler.) i stuck em on the black zero, and when i got tired of the whistling eventually, i plugged up the hole. more recently, john higby sent me a pair of "o.g. mg" caps along with his lovely dinosaur art feautred earlier. i had the red fhz sitting around, so i figured why not make a matched set of "frauds".

although the real red mg is much darker than a red fhz, the fact that it's a blatant rip-off makes it, i think, all the more charming. i satined the black one though, and it's actually a passable facsimile in texture. the initiated would immediately notice the difference: (a real mg is delightfully cold every time you pick it up).

i realized later that the best part about them is neither their striking looks nor the "statement" i guess i'm trying to make about yo-yo's and value. what i love about these yo-yo's is that they play incredibly well. not "like" my real mg, but certainly just as "well". these aren't "fake yo-yo's". they're really, really good yo-yo's. i can do all the same stuff with them as i can with my mg, and my tricks and my spirit are "worth" the same no matter what i'm playing.

it occurs to me that when a yo-yo is spinning; when it's in play, no one really cares or even easily identifies its make, model, or value. it's only when we gaze at yo-yo's that are sitting still on a shelf, in a case, or on a web page that we start to salivate about value. when they're in play, the value is in their utility: i can use this to make art, engage others, experience life, win, or whatever.

i think often of the following quote, usually associated with chinese buddhist monks. "tattered, threadbare robes are nothing to be ashamed of; neither are they anything to be proud of."

i think it's important to keep in mind that yo-yoing is only ever yo-yoing, no matter what you're throwing. if all you have in the world is a beat up zero, the value of your yo-yoing is not decreased. and if you're sitting on caseloads of mg's, catch 22's, painted peaks, and bvm's, your yo-yoing is not worth any more. you can't forever hide from yourself behind a lot of toys. i have many yo-yo's (my wife would say "too many"), and some of them are downright fancy. however, the having of them, itself, is less than nothing. i'm blogging about them, but at the same time, i'm not very attached to them. sometimes it's harder than others, because i might connect with the people and experiences that the toys signify to me. but the stuff is just stuff; wood and plastic and a little magnesium. sometimes i catch myself glorying in my collection, but there's no glory to be had there. ever. likewise, no one's any better for subsisting with just one beater of a yo-yo. pride derived from having nothing is no better than pride derived from having a great deal. it's only by walking that middle way, without any attachment, that you can ignore the illusory value of an object and recognize the value of your self.