yo-yo #76: 'tomoe'

the toy spins
licked by the fire of innocent skin
its whisper-whir breathes
with the hum of free dragonflies
its coils caress
the memory of all summers
intimacies of wood and twine-
young things twirl while
old things remember
drunk in the perfume-haze
of unlocking july
our boy assumes the stars
will turn for him, for ever

but years protrude
like brambles, bloodsharp
as by demons coaxed
from calloused earth
hard work to buy the ground
and hard tools to work it
so joy-like pus
oozes now from drycracked hands
cherished toys are hawked or locked
into dust-colored boxes
there was no then, it seems
and tomorrow is today plus
one more little death
space-dreams and useless loves
must go to seed

with the insignificance and fury
of sodacan explosions
boys die boys-
and fool-men pray on gravel-knees
toward wealthy gods
and candy whores
the wheels of want
turn too, but with an angry noise
all walls and teeth
the song of iron
makes real the sin and stutter of alive
the last electric ghost of childhood
is drowned beneath boot-rhythms
there is no twine which will not rot
there are no toys in hell

all fallendown his warm
blood now imbibed by foreign grass
no boys are left
to whom he might bequeath a box
the artifacts of a september breeze
a ticket stub, now leathersoft
a ribbon soaked with brown-hair smell
a photograph of smilelines and trees
a spinning top (which seemed to breathe
one afternoon
before the water stank with hate)
the world ago
all lost and scattered
waspwings crushed by winter

every thing waits
the air inhales-

-then nervous bird hands
black with pain, white with hunger
past an inch of worms and dreams
explore the soil of tragic lands
find now the so-neglected
toy all mangle-stained
with dirt and days etched deep
with writhing scars-
and tiny joys
all still caressed (they do not fade)
the tapestries of innocence
the shadows of a hopeful heart

mend now the broken world, our girl
please spin (again) the stars

yo-yo #'s 74 & 75: sleep machines

in 1992, when the sleep machine was first launched by tom kuhn's small san fransisco yo-yo workshop, i was still a kid. i was a huge fan of the sf giants (and specifically of will clark, having collected over 300 of his baseball cards). it was a time when you could get away with wearing wind-pants (or worse, Zubas©) to school, when you had to wait until saturday morning for 'good' cartoons, and when toys still felt like toys.

the 2nd production ball bearing yo-yo, the sleep machine (and its imperial-shaped counterpart, the roller woody) was an anomaly from its conception. it's fascinating to consider the yo-yo landscape of that era. the silver bullet and sb-2 were the only aluminum models. with the exception of the yomega brain (and fireball?), there were no plastic transaxles to be had. it was an era when every good yo-yo player out there still relied on a wooden, fixed axle models, not to be stoic, but because they were the best tools available. even the sb-2 was perceived by the elite as a bizarre novelty and mediocre player (on account of its inconsistent looping ability and slippy response).

tom kuhn created the sleep machine and roller woody in order to bring performance 'guts' into a more acceptable wooden 'package'. while it features the same axle and [brilliant] gap adjustment tool as the sb-2, its maple body is extremely delicate and prone to cracking when overtightened. the bearing is tiny by comparison with today's models (which would have seemed ridiculously gargantuan 18 years ago), but amazingly, a stock sleep machine can handle pretty much anything you want to throw at it. they featured linen 'turbo discs', which were the first friction stickers, as the bearing necessitated some means to compensate with the lack of response (the yo-yo actually comes complete with instructions for double looping the string... pad printed on its inner walls!)

yesterday, i read a question posed to the boards that i've considered many times: 'are ball bearings cheating?'

this question has been debated so hotly over the years of internet-yoyo-blathering that i find it remarkable whenever i read it, as if we should have reached some consensus and moved on. some of the first posts on the oldest yo-yo forum, yoyoing.com/news, are dedicated to the argument that the only 'real' yo-yoing is fixed axle yo-yoing.

i no longer believe that (i did once), and i doubt the original participants do either. i learned trapeze on an old fixed axle (again, not because i was hardcore, but because it was all i had), and i remember at the time feeling as though the idea of going 'beyond' the technicality of that trick would have amounted to a pipe-dream with extra grandeur. the first time i threw a raider (see below), i easily doubled my longest sleeper ever. a few throws later i tried my hardest trick, braintwister, and i think i did about 8 revolutions (having never done more than 1), laughing with my head thrown back as though riding a convertible on the autobahn.

after those initial tricks, i felt a little dirty. i felt like i was playing contra, having already punched in the konami code. i knew i didn't 'deserve' a minute-long sleeper or the ability to pause 10 seconds just to 'admire' trapeze. these new-found powers had been paid for by technological ideas not-my-own... but the question of 'just how far can i take this?' is a seductive temptress... and it should be.

besides, who am i cheating? 90% of the time, when i'm yo-yoing, it's just me and the yo-yo. am i cheating the yo-yo? i don't think it cares, or at least, it's never spoken up. am i cheating myself? even if i grind harder than ever to push the range of what i can do with a bearing? can a person who works at yo-yoing for 8 hours a day be cheating, regardless of the materials they use? there's no one else to cheat. i've never really been a competitive player, and even if i were, from as far back as 1995 on, transaxle players were prevented from playing in the same division as fixed axle players. in the aforementioned conversation, kyle weems said 'cheating implies that you have an unfair advantage'... so if there's no implied advantage?

the question is not really whether or not ball bearings are 'cheating', but rather whether or not they are 'destructive'. certainly they have catalyzed a dramatic mutation in the way we approach our play. if you took your yo-yo back in time 40 years, it would probably be only vaguely understood as yo-yoing at all. if those changes are understood to be 'bad', then ball bearings have pulled us in a negative direction (or rather, we have allowed them to).

ball bearings have allowed yo-yoers to go from zero to sixty in an instant (both literally and figuratively). i read another post the other day, asking for how long people had played. inevitably, the responses (most of which betrayed obvious youth) were along the lines of 'eight months - i'm on master.' don't get me wrong - i appreciate the importance of BELIEVING yourself to be approaching mastery, and the tendency to do so while growing up. investing in such a belief, however, which ball bearing yo-yo's allow for... could be seen as a means of cheating oneself, and the inevitable let-down once one sheds the delusion can be devastating.

i think everyone has known some incorrigable, hey-kid-get-off-the-lawn curmudgeon who wants to regale you with stories of walking eight miles to school in the snow (uphill, both ways). they've read 'the greatest generation' 6 times (12, counting the audiobook), and they remember wistfully when america felt self-sufficient and a force for good, rather than a gradually-devolving series of strip malls and strip joints. those are the kinds of guys whom you'd expect to tell you that playing your ball bearing yo-yo makes you less of a man; that its complacent, benevolent technology allows you to 'get away' with shenanigans for which you 'deserve' to be whacked about the knuckles.

i buy part of that. i do. in some respects, i've become the 'get-off-the-lawn' guy... but only ever to myself (i hope), and i think that's the way it should be. i think you should be your harshest critic... and also your most fervent supporter. i wouldn't pay any mind to some snot-nosed kid betting me i can't hit 'trick x' on my no jive... but do i pay mind when I say it? you bet. likewise, i don't go around criticizing people for the way they play, because i expect them to do that for themselves.

i don't believe that yo-yoing is dying some overbloated, decadent death, drowning in the warm milky bliss that bearings offer. i don't think we've been seduced by the 'dark side' that some of us assumed the technology would come to represent. i'm not sure how anyone could watch john ando or guy wright and claim that we're headed in the wrong direction. yo-yoing is ever on the move, and it really always has been. it hit us 'old folks' hard when bearings became ubiquitous, because it was a technological lightning bolt that revealed all of our assumptions (and many of our treasured skills) to be outmoded in its instantaneous flash. the field of play was warped, and suddenly creativity was rewarded ahead of effort and persistence. collectively, we're still working out how to cope with that upheaval.

you can look at essentially every technological development in our history. the printing press, the automobile... the sham-wow. if you want to experience the joy of a quill tracing across paper, then a movable-type printing press is not cheating... it's ineffective; superfluous. if you want to hike the appalachian trail, you will not feel 'slow' for not being in a car. if you crave the tone of a martin acoustic, a stratocaster just will not do. the only dissonance enters when you don't fully understand what you intend or mean.

i play wood axle yo-yo's an awful lot, and sometimes people ask me why i'm on spyy. i should think it's obvious. dynamic as it is, every attempt to grasp yo-yoing and pin it down is doomed to fail. because it is linked to our creative human spirit, there will always be a new direction in which to go; a new technology to employ and explore. sometimes, i want to experience cotton and wood sliding against each other (a sensation the like of which i have found no where else). sometimes, i want the yo-yo and string to 'get out of the way', allowing me to explore obscure and complex ideas. each perspective informs the other. neither is wrong. neither is destructive. neither is cheating.

i've said it before - yoyoing is an art. and try though you might, you really can't cheat at art, for which the subversion of our most cleverly-devised rules is an inherent proclivity. you might succeed in conning yourself occasionally, but that is pathetic rather than shameful or devious. by all means though, break those rules which you perceive. TRY to cheat... you might just inspire the next great mutation.

yo-yo #73: THP raider

... boom.

good lord, it's all i hear about lately. we're gonna wake up in a few weeks and yo-yo's are going to be everywhere, and we'll all be superstars, and sunshine and rainbows will cover the earth. and then what?

seriously, the community is all atwitter with news of an imminent 'yo-yo swell'. yyf and duncan are reporting serious sales increases. we've got the giganthomous hyper©®™ promotion going on in japan. you can suddenly buy yo-yo's (of a sort...) at walgreens for $4. guys like paul yath and paul han (pretty much the two best pauls i can imagine - oh hi, escolar!) are popping up in nice new marketing campaigns. and then there's this razor thing...

i don't want to get in a big tizzy over it. i already did that and got it out of my system. i like yo-yoing. i've done it for a fair while. most of the folks whom i'd call my best friends are yo-yoers. i want good things to happen to yo-yoing. but what does that mean.

the majority of people i hear talking about it seem to be under the impression that a boom is exactly what every yo-yoer has been waiting for. but let's examine that.

a boom is characterized by a sudden surge in popularity. people will want to yo-yo. retailers and manufacturers (some of whom are in the game now, and some of whom will jump on board as it happens) will respond to perceived demand by generating a much greater supply of yo-yo's and accessories, and putting those products within reach of the non-yoyoing public. people will buy said yo-yo's, which will generate awesome profits for the companies involved (if you have the startup to make and sell a million plastic yo-yo's, and the network to get them into retail stores, the profits can be immense). for awhile - maybe a few months, maybe a few years - there will be a metric ton of new yo-yo players, most of whom will obviously be total novices.

the issue with a boom is that (by its very nature) it must be followed by a bust. given a quick surge, there will come a time when yo-yo's are so ubiquitous that they are no longer in demand. if markets have not been prepared in a sustainable way (i.e. if kids lack the means to get good at yo-yoing and the desire to stick with it), then people will stop buying yo-yo's relatively quickly. if there are events, promotions, and learning tools in place to keep yo-yoing interesting, the boom may be prolonged. regardless, manufacturers and retailers will need to be extremely flexible and wary amidst the chaos, so as to position themselves properly for the inevitable bust. around y2k, when the last boom evaporated, seemingly overnight, HUGE amounts of product were left over. retailers found themselves selling it off cheaply, sometimes at a loss, and having misread the demand, a number of manufacturers were left choking on stockpiles of yo-yo's.

i bought this yo-yo in 1998. actually i bought a pair, a blue and a black. at some point much later, i foolishly tried the raider crush mod on one of them and destroyed it. at the time i bought it (for $30), you couldn't find them. they were sold out everywhere and i happened to be in zany brainy when the shipment arrived. THP of course, refers to Team High Performance, the teal-clad engine of yo-yo domination that burst onto the scene with their fancy transaxles. although boom-icon jennifer baybrook and such luminaries as paul han, ryan lai, and pat cuartero were members, i really didn't know much about them aside from their loud shirts and the card-full of difficult tricks you had to master to make the team. this yo-yo spun forever - for. ev. er. and once it broke in, it made tricks like split the atom or hydrogen bomb (which used to separate the men from the boys) positively easy.

by the end of the boom, a bazillion yo-yo's had been sold, but the number of people who kept with it afterwards was comparatively tiny. companies are businesses, and a number of them had to push the eject button, escaping from the market altogether with fistfulls of cash (or, if they were too slow, buried in debt). the community was shuffled up a bit, and yo-yoing went back to being a kind of 'niche' thing.

it's worth asking who stands to benefit from a boom? the companies who are well-positioned for one; namely those with the capacity to make large amounts of entry-level yo-yo's available to consumers. as of now, companies like duncan and yoyofactory have demonstrated this ability. both of those companies can put $10 throws in retail stores, sell them by the truck load, and make a killing. also, having invested a great deal in the yo-yo community during the intervening years, those are the companies with the most to gain in KEEPING yo-yoing popular. i think that, lacking some specifically bad experience with either, anyone who would call themselves a yo-yoer should want those two companies to do well. they sponsor contests. they push the standard of quality forward. they interact with the community, and frequently respond to its demands.

companies like peter fish or razor, who clearly have the ability to sell a lot of yo-yo's, but who have yet to demonstrate accountability to the community, are likely to make a bunch of money and then run away. nothing personal; just business. maybe they'll prove me wrong. it'll be on yo-yoers to watch these new companies and determine whether they're invested in yo-yoing, or whether they just mean to use it to bathe in duckets. it should be pretty obvious. so far, neither company has really 'given' anything to yo-yoing - no high-quality product, no sponsored events, no interaction with the community or the online stores. if they want to be perceived as caring about yo-yoing, those things will change. if not, they'll stay the same.

the boutique metal companies don't really have the means to interact with boom-consumers directly. no beginner will go online to buy a super-expensive first yo-yo when they can buy a speedle at TRU for $8, and few retail stores will sign up for the risk associated with carrying expensive throws. i remember when the last boom puked its last, and my local Hobby Lobby was desperately marking down SB-2's and cold fusions from $120+ to <$30. companies like clyw, spyy, and one drop can market their butts off, but on some level they'll have to hope that beginners latch on, see the pros throwing expensive metals, and decide follow suit. though that may happen to some extent, i doubt those companies will be raking in the kind of coin that those with entry-level plastics will see. if we could slow the boom down, and players who get into it have an opportunity to mature... the smaller high-end companies could stand to gain greatly, and the community would benefit from the new blood. i think it's also reasonable to ask oneself why a boom is desirable. some kids want yo-yoing to be popular so that they, themselves will be. i feel like that's kind of sad, although no more so than the kids who DON'T want yo-yoing to be popular so that they'll be perceived as unique and interesting. if you like yo-yoing (or love it), it makes sense to want to see it expand. but remember that there's a difference between expansion and unchecked, cancerous growth. after the latter, you might not recognize the landscape of yo-yoing at all. in my opinion, what we want to see is not this protracted cycle of boom/bust, but more managed and sustained development. i want to see yo-yoing grow in popularity, gain mainstream appeal, and see the companies that give a crap about it rewarded for their years of effort. i don't think that's what a boom really does, however. consider the landscape of the last boom. in 1996, yo-yoing was pretty dead. there weren't a lot of people doing it, and being good at it seemed impossibly hard. in 1999, it was inescapably everywhere, everyone and your mom was yo-yoing, and new technology made it seem like being good at it was possible. then by 2002, it was pretty dead; many of the new players had quit, and the standard of play had been reset, making it once again seem difficult and obscure. how much better would it be for a yyf, yyj, or duncan to experience 15 years of incrementally growing popularity, rather than 3 years of killing it (and potentially 1 being left with a warehouse of yo-yo's they can't sell)? if instead of the boom model, we could see yo-yo companies (and the community) enjoy that sort of gradual growth, i think it would be preferable. most of the yo-yoers i know would like yo-yoing to be a big deal again. they'd like it to be seen and appreciated as the hybrid sport/performance art that it is. they'd like every kid to have a yo-yo in his/her pocket. booms are pretty successful in GETTING those yo-yo's there, but to KEEP them in kids' pockets (or better yet - on their fingers) takes a different, more patient approach. i hope we find that our companies are up for that. i think that some of them will be, and some will miss out (thanks, cptn. obvious!). the scene isn't what it was 13 years ago. the culture isn't the same. some people feel that a boom of the same scope isn't even possible, because kids won't latch on in the same way. 'good yo-yoing' has become extremely technical, and while the technology allows a kid to throw a minute-long sleeper on a few minutes of practice... it still takes months to get 'ok'. are kids today up for that? i guess we'll find out.

if it does come to pass, i hope that we as yo-yoers are able to keep our wits about us. i hope that we're able to use our voice and experience to advocate for those companies which have worked to enrich our experience for years even without a boom. i hope that we're able to express to those just starting up that this is a pretty bitchin' deal we've got going here (if you'll pardon the vernacular); that it's well worth the effort.

i pick this yo-yo up and feel a little conflicted. on the one hand i remember how exciting it was when yo-yo's were suddenly everywhere - how it felt like a movement, the sole object of which was FUN. on the other, i remember how lame it felt for that movement to suddenly asphyxiate in the night. i want to see my friends rewarded for their skill and for their work. i want guys like steve brown and john higby to be able to tack a zero on to their average audience size (and their performance fee). i want guys like ben and hans to be able to retire to the polynesian island of their choosing. i want to see yo-yoing take its place on the pulse of pop consciousness once again... i just don't want to watch it explode into emptiness the way it did before.

yo-yo #72: 66

i really didn't intend for this to happen.

a couple months ago, i jotted down some yo-yo rules, which turned into some more, and which a few people read. now i've got a yo-yo and a comic with my likeness on it, illustrating the lot of em in a quirky cartoon-folk-art style. crazy.

collaborating with john higby has been a whirlwind dream. i feel as i imagine a young streetball player would if he were approached by magic johnson and asked to play one-on-one. awed, maybe a little confused... but 'OF COURSE!' in this case, magic plays yo-yo, and though known for his showmanship and art all over the world, he liked my idea and wanted to run with it in his way.

about 5 weeks and many e-mails later, i received a huge parcel with several examples of the finished product, along with some of the original artwork created by john. to call this stuff priceless to me would be an obvious understatement. it's cartoon-yo-yo-ME! mind you, it doesn't make me feel more important - more as a tugboat would if tied to the back of a luxury cruise-liner. 'we're going to the caribbean? ... mmmok!'

i like proflys. i like them a great deal. compared with pretty much every 'popular' yo-yo out there, they aren't easy to work with at all. before the axle breaks in, they can be downright snagalicious. and even after they do, the teeny gap is a harsh mistress, punishing hubristic hands which would try to control her. what john does to clear yo-yo's is positively insane. i have one clear '66', but i'm really only keeping it that way to provide a controlled counterpoint, standing out in relief next to the paint explosion pervading its peers. my favorite (the one in the foreground of the first pic) looks like it's teeming with multi-colored bacteria. during spin (or still), it seems to pulsate with a fecundity that no splash-ano on the planet could match. another example calls to mind swirling galaxies from the old charles & ray eames video 'powers of ten'. it makes me feel tiny (and huge).

playing them is a joy, and a lesson in humility. a mature person will not see the two as mutually exclusive.

i'm used to playing wood axles now. i prefer it, not because 'it's so zen' or because 'it makes me feel fancy'. i just prefer it; i prefer the tricks i do and the way that i approach them. i play my flying v's a ton, but i'm always looking for ways to make them feel more like wood, which i realize seems a little counter-intuitive to most people. a thin bearing caked with thick lube does the job, as does breaking open said thin bearing and using the inner race as a fixed axle (props to steve buffel for that idea).

this past week, matt carter reappeared on yoyonation. under the alias 'scarecrow', matt was a fixture on the old skill toys board, and recognized for his aesthetic talents (it was he who designed the graphics for both the quatle and celtic no jives - remember those?). talking to him reminded me of another yo-yoer from the past, one who (unfortunately), i have yet to meet: mr. bill alton.

mr. alton wrote a great newsletter in the early 90's called 'the noble disk', and even a book called 'the care and operation of the noble disk'. the book is particularly great, and takes a novice reader through the nuances of yo-yo play from 'beginner to advanced'. what's awesome about it is the fact that it was published in 1996, so all of the standards are going on 14 years old. alton boasts about his 12 second no jive sleeper (14 with a proyo), and describes a time when the differences between looping and string tricks were not yet so delineated. yo-yoing was a simpler (and perhaps more difficult) thing back then, and though i certainly don't 'rue the boom' or wish to turn back the clock, i do think that our present yo-yo culture could stand to relearn some of the lessons of the past.

it seems as though every time i check a yo-yo board, i'm confronted with some variation of the question 'i just did _________, is that good?'

exponentially-expanded technology has enabled yo-yoing to become so vast and complicated that it's no longer easily divided. completing x, y, or z alone won't make you a master, or expert or whatever. yo-yoing makes you a yo-yoer, and that's plenty. one of the defining hallmarks of adolescents is the 'desire to arrive' at something (yeah i used to be one too), so i can't expect them to fully 'get' that concept... but i do hope our next generation will find the patience to appreciate their own rate of development for what it is. imagine playing yo-yo for years, with a 12-second sleeper being the clearest result of efforts. imagine the time before youtube and regular contests, whence you might go YEARS between seeing yo-yoers of your own skill. it's only been one generation, but somehow the kind of patience and persistence it takes to accommodate those obstacles would seem ludicrous to much of our community now.

however, the point remains today. in a world where everyone knows kamikaze, the ability to do hydrogen bomb is not 'valuable' on its own. what's valuable is the WORK you apply to your craft. in the end, the work is the result; the journey is the end. the old guard understood this because they had to. otherwise, why on earth would they have persisted? i don't think you have to play a no jive or profly to understand (maybe i do, but that's my problem). i think all you have to do is recognize that there's NO end. you will never 'arrive'. unfortunately, that truth is really difficult for some people to swallow.

you want to be good at yo-yoing? really commit to it, and you will be. you want to be GREAT? commit to it for a lifetime... and you might be.

yo-yo #71: duncan o-boy

yeah, i know. it's been a long time. i don't owe any kind of explanation. i've always intended to update it when and if i have something to say.

i received this yo-yo for xmas. it was in my stocking along with a few other nifty trinkets (an old 'whirl king', several packs of ancient cheerio string, one of those silver gorham yo-yo's, and an autographed trading card of my very good friend, mr. john higby - with whom i am presently collaborting). in our family, my mom does a lot of the big-box shopping, and wraps them in thick, fine paper with a crisp brilliance that i will never be able to emulate. but the stockings are my dad's exclusive province. he loves it, and though my brother and i are all grown up now, our stockings are still replete, year after year, with small but shockingly relevant gifts. the o-boy stood out, however, as a yo-yo that i've always coveted.

one of the earliest models released by duncan following its buyout of the flores company, the first o-boys were essentially identical to the elliptically-profiled flores models of the day (we're talking about the 30's - old). those first models featured extra thick dowels for axles, and i can't imagine that they spun for very long at all. the model now in my collection materialized considerably later (don't have a date). the profile is a little wider and the axle is (thankfully) considerably thinner, so it actually spins pretty well. i can hit kwyjibo on a 50+ year-old yo-yo, which is kinda cool. shortly thereafter, it falls apart because the axle is not glued.

my dad scored all of this stuff on ebay. he's become a total ebay-junky, scouring the site for auctions of old original ansel adams yosemite photographs, 1st edition copies of john muir books and ancient medical tomes. he and my mom are collector-types. they keep everything, and each corner of their home sports some manner of miscellanea. while the untrained eye may waltz in and not understand the crumbling detritus, i see it as the substance of my youth.

i'm the third edward haponik (out of four). my father has always gone out of his way to embrace pretty much whatever i do (aside from my proclivity for sneaking out to 'roll' houses growing up). with the exception of playing baseball though, i'm not sure any of my obsessions has ever really resonated with him: skateboarding, jazz, martial arts, yo-yo (though he gave me my first - an original run yomega brain). one might expect a parent to react to their offspring's varied and apparently disconnected pursuits with a kind of benign neglect, but not my dad. he's always been secure enough to appreciate the things that he never pursued himself and to look diligently for their connective tissue. i guess i played chess, to which he could relate. i even beat him - once. (i suppose there is also the matter of our mutual appreciation for the early film work of steven seagal.)

dad's a successful doctor, and in some respects, i feel as though i may have let him down. elementary school teacher, stay-at-home-dad, yo-yo player... not the kind of stuff that typically garners one great accolades. and yet i know he's proud of me. i truly wouldn't feel 'worth it' had i not spent my entire childhood (and now adulthood) being SHOWN that i am by both he and my mom.

my most persistent memory of my childhood is probably playing catch with my dad. i have no sense for how many hours we spent in our various backyards (or at campsites, or at the grand canyon, or at the 'field of dreams' in dyersville, ia) tossing a baseball back and forth. it seems as though our relationship was built up gradually, one throw at a time. i first recognized the end of my childhood following one such catch around age 15. i was a strong (though wild) pitcher, and i turned the fingers of his left hand into swollen sausages and covered his palm with a pulpy bruise. i've always had a problem with accuracy (i once hit three consecutive batsmen, and then gave up a grandslam - no joke), but when i threw the ball across three lawns he never complained, beyond mocking his own inability to leap the 8 feet needed to catch them or else pick them out of the dirt. he never laughed or discouraged me. he did, however, make me run after them, which i did not fully appreciate at the time.

there are a number of things that i just could never imagine him doing. virtually all of them are dishonorable. he compulsively deflects praise to those around him, especially to my mother, which is appropriate considering the yeoman's effort she brought to our family. my dad isn't some kind of saint, as i'm surely making it sound... he just tries really hard to be a good man, and he's done it for so long i don't think he even recognizes it as 'trying' anymore. it's taken me a lifetime to fully understand it, but if he weren't my dad; if he were some random guy that i met at a dinner party and learned a bit about... he would still absolutely be my hero.

it's too easy to see my parents as an inseparable unit, ignoring their individual outlooks and efforts. they're as head-over-heels in love today as i imagine they were 35 years ago, a fact i found nauseating as a teenager, but which i find endearing now. while i've always seen my dad as a calm, consistent force, my mom is just pure, unyielding energy. the second of six sisters, the rhode island home where she grew up still shudders with laughter whenever the family is together (probably even when it's empty, at this point). she will kick your ass in whatever board game, whether you're 6 or 60 (though her ferocity has dimmed slightly through playing against her granddaughter), and although my dad loves the outdoors, i've always seen it as my mom's affinity for growing things that has sent the pair of them hiking through essentially all of our national parks. it was not until i became a [comparatively inept] homemaker and cook that i came to appreciate the full spectrum of what she did for us. she plays with my kids for hours. not 'watches them play'; plays with them, and usually harder than they do. my daughter loves when she comes over, not just because she's willing to play pretend... but because no one else has ever dared her to be so imaginative.

it was my dad who serendiptously picked out the o-boy, and this post was meant to be about him... but to try and yammer on about him and NOT my mom would be tantamount to pulling a portuguese man-o-war from the ocean so as to point out its features - it would immediately disintegrate. my mom loves my dad like the sea loves living things, and vice versa. each is now composed of the other.

i know an awful lot of people who have had really difficult, awkward relationships with their parents. in some respects it makes me feel guilty for having so many warm memories of my own. i didn't do anything to deserve an amazing family - no one does, just as sure as no one deserves a dull or abusive one. the worst of it is the knowledge that there is absolutely no way to repay them. ever. my dad didn't 'sweep in' and save the day valiantly one time. he saved EVERY day. my mom maintained a kind of glue that not only kept our family together; it electrified it. they're not dead, and i don't mean to preemptively eulogize them. but my whole life, now both steady and exciting in its own right, has been built around the scaffolding they provided. the closest approximation to karmic recompense that i can imagine is to be that kind of father - that kind of person - for my own son and daughter.

alex is up from his nap... guess i should get off the damn computer. ;)

yo-yo #70: "throw today. throw forever."

i carved this yo-yo last week. it's just an ordinary no jive that i cut up with a benchmade model 42s. i'm just getting to know it. i like it. a lot. that's all i got for this yo-yo... however, here's something else. some of them, i'm still working on, and will be until i die.


66 rules for yo-yo players.

1. learn to loop. with two hands.

2. when you play yo-yo in public, look up. be aware of your surroundings. say hi to the people who look at you in wonder. say hi to those who look at you with disdain.

3. be generous with your time, and with your toys. if you have the means, at every event you attend, give something away to someone (who does not ask).

4. understand the differences between yo-yoing for yourself in your room, yo-yoing for judges at a contest, and yo-yoing for a small child at the park.

5. try to find and play yo-yo's that come from every decade of the past century. appreciate their differences (and similarities).

6. when performing for an audience, always look better than they do.

7. be proud you're a yo-yo player. have pity for those who think you shouldn't be.

8. never act like yo-yoing is a big inconvenience. no one's making you do it.

9. be prepared to walk the dog on command. always.

10. never blame the judges. maintain the attitude that, if you had REALLY won, it wouldn't have been up to them at all.

11. hit a true laceration on a stock renegade. fly-away dismount.

12. don't talk about how 'so-and-so' is a lousy player (or human being) if you're unwilling to bring it to them personally.

13. don't confront someone about being a lousy player (or human being) unless you're right. and be sure you understand the consequences.

14. when you're getting paid to yo-yo, be on time and do your job with a smile.

15. don't yo-yo with the goal of being admired. don't worry over whether you're 'somebody in the yo-yo community'. be 'somebody in real life' and then be the same person in the yo-yo community.

16. recognize that you don't really know very many tricks at all. this should make you feel inspired rather than pathetic.

17. find a mentor. or twelve. no need to be explicit about it, but they should know who they are and what they mean to you.

18. stay up all night playing yo-yo.

19. compete. ladder, freestyles, best trick, or whatever. register, pay, and support the contest.

20. carry a paperclip in your wallet.

21. don't accept sponsorship from a company you don't absolutely love.

22. carve a palm tree on a yo-yo using a pocketknife.

23. understand how your yo-yo's work. be able to maintain them.

24. never begrudge your dings. not in yo-yo. not in life.

25. respect the venue.

26. meet the masters (national or otherwise). shake their hands and thank them for making yo-yoing something more. make that YOUR goal.

27. take care of your hands, wrists, body, and mind. when those things fail, so will your yo-yoing.

28. don't go out of your way to vilify this or that company. support the ones that you feel benefit the community and yo-yoing in general. that's enough.

29. travel to a contest alone.

30. travel to a contest in an overfull car.

31. respect your elders.

32. don't fiddle obsessively with your bearings. they'll do their job if you let them.

33. it's one thing to be awed, but don't be intimidated by yo-yo players, regardless of their skill.

34. learn to snap-start.

35. find a yo-yo that you can't play well at all. play it exclusively for a month.

36. go to worlds.

37. be able to do enough of each style to wow the uninitiated.

38. do something else. take up an instrument. knit. do card tricks. shoot skeet. something.

39. make yourself useful at contests. help set up. help clean up.

40. don't be careless with other peoples' yo-yo's. don't be overprotective of yours.

41. own an old wood yo-yo.

42. if you bring a bunch of yo-yo's somewhere, it will be understood that you want people to see them and be impressed. don't be surprised when they aren't.

43. pass out on a yo-yoer's floor in delighted exhaustion.

44. learn all you can about every major player from every era of yo-yoing's history. this art is FULL of fascinating characters.

45. be neither proud nor ashamed of your collection.

46. don't seek to be someone else's favorite player. seek to be your own favorite player. and in that regard, NEVER succeed.

47. don't leave home without it.

48. learn to twist your own string.

49. play responsive, but don't act like it's a big deal.

50. practice more. post less.

51. develop yourself such that someday, if you should find yourself in a room surrounded by your heroes, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that you belong.

52. invent a trick. hell, invent so many tricks that finding a way to record them becomes a necessity.

53. don't hide behind the mantle of an 'online persona'. that has zero to do with being a yo-yoer.

54. run a contest or event. make it a benefit to the companies that are willing to sponsor it. make it a benefit to the players who come and spend their day.

55. don't use the word 'sexy' to describe a yo-yo. or 'sexay'. or 'secksay'. or 'pure sex'. or 'smexy'. to do so makes you sound as if you have no real context for the word 'sexy'.

56. make a video. before you publish or hype it, make certain that it's something that you would want to watch all the way through, even if the yo-yoer were some random guy you've never met.

57. yo-yo transcends gender, and yet the vast majority of yo-yoers are male. respect and appreciate the few girls and women brave enough to wade through all the smelly aggro testosterone to do their thing.

58. find a globe. locate 'the other side of the world'. befriend a yo-yo player from there (or as close as you can manage).

59. at one point, you were just starting out. whether it was last week or 50 years ago, remember that time. treat those who are learning the basics with care. answer their questions, help them with string tension, and don't act like they need to get in line to kiss your boot.

60. acquire a yo-yo from shinobu, eric wolff, or john higby.

61. always have a spare string on you.

62. have more than one gear. go fast when it's time to go fast. go slow when it's time to go slow. understand when it's appropriate to play simply and when it's best to be strange and complicated.

63. don't set too much store by contest results. at their MOST valid, they give an idea of who played the best for three minutes, on one given day. respect everyone who can get up there with poise and intent.

64. disregard these rules. make your own rules. and make allowances for those who won't play or live by them.

65. treat every throw as if it's your last. (throw today.)

66. treat every throw as if it's your first. (throw forever.) the two are not actually contradictory.

yo-yo #'s 68 & 69: pearl/blue hummingbird genuines

i was kinda conflicted about which blog to put this in... i guess such is the dilemma for one who maintains two separate 'yo-yo metaphysics' blogs.

i recieved a truly enormous package of old wood yo-yo's the other day. it's almost an anticlimax, because as soon as you open something like that, you think "well, i guess i have enough yo-yo's for forever now." funny the way we fool ourselves into believing stuff like that for a minute or two. the box was mostly full of old hummingbirds, which was the company run by brad countryman BEFORE he ran bc yo-yo's (which of course, was the company he ran BEFORE switching to run tom kuhn yo-yo's). when my friend kevin asked what kind of yo-yo's i'd like, i said "matched sets", since i've been enjoying a lot of [really] simple wood 2-handed lately. he went "batshit-crazy" and put more absolutely gorgeous sets of tricksters, bc's, and old genuines in the box than i know how to shake a stick at, and i'll be working my way through them for a LONG time.

i started with this set, because... well, look at em. they're BEAUTIFUL.

the hummingbird genuine was not a regular production release. it was pretty limited even in its heyday (the 80's), and since the liquidation of the arcade, ny hummingbird factory, is downright tough to find. this pearlescent white with blue stripe version just has a gorgeous, classic appeal. and they play wonderfully, even for someone with mediocre looping ability like myself. playing older yo-yo's makes me want to do older tricks. i don't know a lot of older tricks, really. i wish i did. i tend to do the same ones that i love over and over.

i had a brief "conversation" with one of my "friends". i use the quotes to emphasize that said dialog did NOT actually take place in person, NOR have i ever actually met the other participant. i'd like to though. we were talking about yo-yo tricks; how they're learned and how they're taught. it really got me thinking ("a dangerous pastime - i KNOW"... beauty & the beast fans? no? ok.). basically, someone was asking for an in-depth tutorial for a trick called "chinese cradle", a weird little decades-old picture trick, and the question was... should they get it?

this particular trick came out of the duncan demonstrator crew of the 1950's. dale oliver tells me that it predates him, and that originally, it was called "chinese puzzle". the cradle part was added on later. ironically, i first saw it done by dale on a tiny, scratchy internet video. since the trick is pretty small and complicated, it was completely impossible to discern what he was doing in the vid, or even what the finished product should look like. maybe that contributed to its intrigue and mystique.

years later, i asked steve brown to teach it to me in virginia, and once he had dug the thing out of the attic of his memory, he obliged. he said something about it having been a "special" trick which, in years past, wasn't taught casually to just anyone. i think i was almost more fascinated by this fact than by the trick itself. this was the first time i had ever heard of a trick that had been "exclusive" in any respect besides its own inherent difficulty to perform. evidently, in the years of the traveling demonstrators, certain tricks were identified as "calling cards". as such, they were more preciously guarded, much like a magician guards his secrets. it kind of makes sense in the context of the giant fad-eras of the 50's and 60's. it just wouldn't do for a demonstrator to pull up at toy store "x" and throw a bunch of tricks that everybody already knew. a degree of exclusivity would have been essential.

nowadays, there are more tricks; more directions from which to amaze an audience. the technology has rendered much of the past's yo-yoing 'antiquated', but the sheer volume of a modern demonstrator's repertoire should be more than enough to flabbergast any audience. 50 years ago, the number of individual 'tricks' out there was comparatively limited. there are infinite ways to loop, infinite ways to stylistically alter 'rock the baby'... but any yo-yo performer of the modern era or the golden age would agree that you HAVE to have the ability to show em something truly crazy - something they've never seen.

anyway, the question i was left with was "SHOULD there be a quality online tutorial for a trick like 'chinese cradle'?" and the answer i've gravitated to is "no."

i don't think that tricks should be withheld by anyone on the basis of who is "worthy", but i DO think there should be some tricks that AREN'T accessible via the internet. we live in an era of instant gratification. if you want something, and you've got internet and paypal - BLAM! "bad credit? no credit? NO PROBLEM! CONGRATS! YOU'RE PRE-APPROVED!!!" as a society, we've started to feel entitled to things like food and shelter. and while, i agree, it's good to have these things available to people... we need to recognize that NONE of them are things that "just happen" to us. i think that we should work for things, or at least viscerally recognize the work that goes into them, regardless of whether it's our own. if you want to eat a cheeseburger, i think you should be willing to slaughter a cow yourself. period. i don't think it's necessary to kill one every time you order a #12 from McD's (ew), but knowing what it means to kill something, prepare it, and eat it - how messy it is, how wasteful, all the emotions involved - it helps you to truly value what you take from the world. it helps you to be thankful. if you want to live in a house, i think you should be willing to help build one - to learn about the different skills and efforts that have to come together to enable your "dream kitchen". it goes without saying that we can't DO all this stuff. the functions of our society are so refined and technical that no lay-person will be capable of coming to understand all of the arts. still, it's the attitude - the work ethic - that matters. lunch, indoor plumbing, quality health care... whether you should be entitled to these things or not, they don't just happen to you. they're born of effort - always. what are you working for? and where does your work go?

if you want to learn a yo-yo trick, i think you should learn it. and if it isn't on youtube or kwos or sector_y or yoyoexpert... you should get out of your house and seek it out. maybe that means harassing someone at your local club or maybe it means traveling around the world. maybe it will involve some waiting, during which you get to experience "not knowing" it. in the end, when you do learn it... it'll be worth EXACTLY what it took to obtain it. lately, i think some things should be harder to obtain.

i allude to the martial arts all the time. in budo, we have something called kuden, which are, in effect, glorified secrets - secrets of training or secret applications of technique that have developed within different schools over millennia. the defining characteristic of these secrets is that they're only ever taught to people who are worth a damn - who have proven their loyalty to the school and the system. just like demonstrators withholding this or that trick from potential competitors, if you teach the wrong sword technique to the wrong person... it could be employed against you. it's not all paranoia either. having a technique that belongs to someone only if they make a legitimate contribution might inspire that person to contribute... whereas making said trick available on the internet primarily inspires acquisition (which leads to the compulsive need for MORE acquisition). it might seem like a trivial distinction, but you'll remember from my last post - ain't nothing trivial to me. there's something valuable in learning a trick from a human being, with no intermediary 1's and 0's.

should every trick be common knowledge (or at least commonly and easily accessible)? should one's ability be the only factor that mitigates the dissemination of information. i don't believe in withholding things arbitrarily. i don't think it's valuable to say "nah. i'm not teaching you THIS trick cause you're not in The Cool Guy Club." that's not it. at the same time, "chinese cradle" is an old trick, and it belongs to way more than just me. steve taught it to me, and he learned it from dale. if either of those guys would prefer that i carefully consider those the manner by which i share such a trick... i'd be inclined to respect that (and honestly, even if they don't give a crap... maybe i should). dale told me that he, for one, doesn't really believe in "trick exclusivity"; that if someone asks him, his response is "i learned this trick from a champion, and it's my responsibility to teach someone else." i agree, but at the same time, i'd rather teach someone who DOES ask, as opposed to someone who just happens upon it whilst searching for "darth vader". fortunately, it's a self-governing principle, seeing as the number of people who really want to learn "chinese cradle" (or really any old trick i can imagine) would probably number around a dozen or so, at most. i'm certainly not going to be met with throngs of kids asking for help with it, nor would i look sideways at someone who asked, in effort to size them up or gauge their commitment to our "sacred art". pretending at exclusivity in such a teeny niche community is pretty stupid. seeking knowledge out is enough all the accreditation you should require ... but if you want it, be willing to really seek it. there's not enough seeking in yo-yoing; not enough patience. maybe that's true of modern humanity in general.

the trick itself is perfectly irrelevant. this is not about "chinese cradle" at all, so much as it's about learning to feel less entitled. in our world, which every day, seems to become more digital, there's some real value in learning a trick from a master; in seeking one out, in looking into his eyes, and in valuing the lifetime of work that's gone into the trick he teaches you. i've learned a lot from online tutorials, and i'm certainly not trying to diminish the efforts of guys like gabe, whose sector_y (as i've previously stated) represent one of the main reasons i'm any kind of yo-yoer at all. that said, i care about yo-yoing. though i've been exploring it for what feels like a long time now, i kind of want it to withhold some secrets. rather than just picking what i want from a silver cyber-platter, i want to have to work to uncover some of its gems. rather than be told the secrets that i've yet to understand, i want (in time) to deserve to know.

yo-yo #'s 66 & 67: save deth freehands

there's no such thing as a 'save deth freehand', strictly speaking. for awhile, the proprietors of that most 'now' of yo-yo lifestyle companies (big pond, there), seth peterson and dave poyzer, were selling little vinyl decals with their logo. although the circular decals could be used for any number of purposes, they were made to fit perfectly upon the caps of the ever-popular duncan freehand. ironically, the decals were printed and cut by none other than brandon jackson, then-graphic-design-guru and NOW, the head of marketing for duncan toys.

i first saw the decals at ecc in 2008, where dave gave me a pair of the purple ones. that contest also marked the first time i saw an enyo freehand, which had just been released as a collaboration between duncan and yoyonation. i'd heard people begging for a freehand made from the super-hard and super-sparkly enyo plastic for years, and was psyched to finally score one at the contest. when i got home, i dot-3'd the caps (brake fluid is the best way to remove the printed logos from fh caps, if you were wondering) and applied the decals. one of them went on perfectly, the next i stuck on just a bit off-center. the issue with 'a bit off-center' with spinning objects is that they end up looking 'really off-center'. perfectionist (psycho) that i am, i ripped the errantly-placed decal off angrily, replacing it with a tiny green triangle project sticker, which also looked egregiously dumb.

i liked it ok at the time though, and i sent the zero off to my pal chris hicks, who was modding everything not nailed-down. chris had done some very consistent (if simple) work for me in the past, but he had grown into his lathe pretty well and i was just asking for a silicone job. when i got the zero back, i was in utter shock. it was (and remains) the single best-playing freehand zero i've ever used. chris ended up doing a silicone-schmoove job, cutting the schmoove rings super-shallow compared to the inner silicone-ring. though simple, it was just a flawless job; pristine. and when, a few months later, seth sent me a set of green decals with a shirt i'd ordered (and i actually stuck em both on RIGHT)... i was in freehand zero heaven.

it's a funny thing about freehands; some seem to play better than any yo-yo out there... and some are total lemons. i'm not sure if it has to do with the tolerance of the plastic or the axle or the spacer set-up or what. a few months ago, i received a white 'duncan boy' zero in a trade (no idea for what). it looks totally ordinary (or it did), and yet, as some zeros just seem wont to do... it outplays almost anything. it's just a fricking MACHINE, and it doesn't even seem to care what bearing i toss in. like it's aforementioned brother, it was the beneficiary of the least complicated mod imaginable. and yet it was just perfectly executed, enabling this little hunk of plastic to manifest its highest level of play. you know, it might piss me off that there's such inconsistency from one duncan yo-yo to another... if i didn't have a few that are just completely perfect.

it was so good that i wanted it to match the aesthetic of my other super-zero... so when i snagged yet another pair of decals from seth at indy this year (pink ones - the last he had), i knew right where they needed to go. i always kinda found those duncan boy caps (and the duncan boy mascot in general, now that i think on it) to be pretty friggin' lame - a poor successor to either the original circle-headed duncan or the weird little cartoon bell-hop, both of which have a simplistic, classic feel. anyway, i stuck the decals on some sparkle blue caps with the kind of accuracy that experience alone can yield, held my breath when i clicked them in (cause wonky caps can upset an otherwise-perfect freehand)... and yet again, i had a zero that qualified as 'functional art'.

every time i pick these yo-yo's up, i'm reminded of a virtue that has seemed to apply every meaningful endeavor i've encountered: do a small thing well.

i'll relate one of my favorite stories surrounding the swordman, musashi miyamoto, a hero of mine (inasmuch as legends CAN be heroes). musashi was bathing and relaxing in the fief of the renowned swordsman, yagyu munetoshi, who had secluded himself in the mountains and taken to delighting in the simple pleasures of gardening and the tea ceremony. like musashi, a group of burly samurai from kyoto had come to the fief to test their skills in fighting the old master. politely declining to meet with these challengers, munetoshi sent a single white peony from his garden, along with a message intimating that he no longer had any interest in teaching or in fighting. the samurai scoffed at the peony and left in a huff. out of kindness, munetoshi's courier then delivered the peony to musashi's room, who, upon seeing it drew out his short sword and cut the stem in two. picking up the fallen piece while the terrified courier collected herself, musashi compared the two cuts at either end of the stem. from the angle and smoothness of the original cut, he deduced that the peony could only have been sliced by a sword, and that his own stroke was decidedly inferior. upon learning that the peony was cut by lord munetoshi, himself, musashi arrived at the conclusion that he was not yet ready to challenge such a master.

of his performing career, steve martin said "being great is easy. every performer can count on nights when the stars align and everything goes to plan. nights like that are statistical, but being good - every night - is difficult." similarly, when i was growing up, i confided to the poet maya angelou, a family friend, that i wanted to grow up to be a great man. her response was that "the world is too full of great men as it is. be a good man, which is rare." while throughout my youth, i was awed by every sort of flamboyant virtuosity... in my adult life, i have come to respect consistency, simplicity, and and sincerity above all else. it might seem like hyperbole, but a carefully-siliconed freehand reflects these principles as well as anything. nothing you do - not the way you cut a peony, the way you perform on stage, or the way you silicone a freehand - is ever trivial.

i play these guys more than any other zeros, probably; even more than my mg's. partly on account of their anomalously wonderful play; partly due to the fact that i think save deth remains one of the coolest entities in yo-yoing. sure, they're sparkly, but their real value lies beneath the caps. like expert flower-arrangers, their respective modders found the way to bring out the best in these yo-yo's, either by diligent practice or serendipity. playing them reminds me to try to 'do a simple thing well' in the context of my own life...

every simple thing.

yo-yo # 65: tulipwood eric wolff masterpiece

awhile back, for no good reason at all, i put together an incomplete list of tricks i'd learned. it was fairly substantial, and mostly composed of ridiculously simple stuff culled from now-outmoded (if not defunct) sites.

for years, the only site i learned from was 'ken's world on a string'. hallmarked by simple text and illustrations, kwos is one of the few instructional tools left over from its era, and i still find myself going back to it to check this or that, or to remember old, beloved tricks that i once treasured.

years after i stopped visiting kwos, i stumbled upon the mark hayward/harper reed collaboration, 'howtoyoyo.com'. this may have been the first organized video catalog that i encountered, full of treasures filmed at contests in the early 2000's. i still remember some great, 8-second 5a trick-tutorials by steve filmed in a dark parking lot and performed with laser-cut precision. trying to learn them, i'd have to watch the clip over and over dozens of times. the real cache, though, for me, was the list of picture tricks. performed by dale oliver, bill deboisblanc, dale myrberg, cappy, john bot, and others... it's a trove. and i don't throw that word around (although... who does?). the videos are ridiculously hard to see, but bits can be deciphered.

going through the list i had composed, i ran into a trick from said collection that i had TOTALLY forgotten. buried in the list is a phenomenal trick by bill deblah entiteled 'flower'. upon seeing it in type, i flashed immediately back to a day in 2005, when i sat in my empty classroom until dusk trying to get it wired. i never really did, and abandoned it in frustration. however, when i looked the trick up yesterday, i understood it immediately. i picked up this yo-yo, a gorgeous eric wolff-turned tulipwood butterfly, which i scored last year at nc states, and had it first try. funny how the mind changes. with yo-yoing, it's not like you develop crazy abs or cauliflower ears, or any outward sign that you're 'developing'. but the more you yo-yo, the easier it is to make connections. you really feel how you've grown when you re-approach a concept that seemed difficult or impossible years ago.

anyway, i think it's a cool trick; it feels 'cutesy' and old-fashioned. it got me thinking about the way we create and retain tricks. obviously, they aren't something that you can hold. they aren't objects that can be manipulated whenever, or stored away. and yet, we tend to treat them as possessions; as if we 'pay' for them through the process of learning them, and after we can do them, they become 'acquisitions'. i wasn't thinking about it in such explicit terms when i composed that list years ago, but that's the attitude from which it surely sprang. these here are the tricks that 'belong to me'.

the sticky point is that when you acquire something, it becomes your responsibility; such is the nature of acquisition. if you buy an old pick-up trick, it's yours - you CAN do what you want with it. but if you let it sit stagnant in your front lawn while weeds and shrubs grow through it until it becomes a rusty, dilapidated eyesore, then your negligence has expanded to affect the landscape and community. everything you own, everything you have is, implicitly a BURDEN upon you. some burdens are heavier than others, and the more you've got, the more you're responsible for. we can try to get around it with slippery ideologies and/or ignorance, but it's pretty straight-forward. you've committed to bringing certain things into the fold of your life; into the realm of your 'control'. whether that's a car, a bonsai tree, or a work of art like this yo-yo - or even something intangible, like knowledge or a certain trick, then doing so makes you responsible. whether you mean to or not, the things you HAVE are things to which you tie a piece of yourself. as such, none of the things we acquire should be perceived as trivial.

if, whether tacitly or explicitly you decide, 'i know this yo-yo trick - it's mine,' then caring for it becomes a kind of duty (like changing your cat's litter box, only less gross). how do you care for a yo-yo trick? the same way you care for any artistic element: by doing it right. if you've learned kamikaze, then you should do it correctly, using the elements paul uncovered. if you mean to do something different with it, then you're changing the trick. that's ok, but don't do so casually, just because you have trouble with 'magic drop' or something. when you teach it, teach it right. you're passing it on. you're proliferating a piece of yo-yoing's living tapestry. don't muck it up.

awhile back, jon rob made a good analogy, comparing yo-yo tricks to undiscovered land. the tricks are all there, waiting to be found. you may uncover them, present them, or learn them... but they don't really belong to you, alone. no one can really steal 'your' tricks, and the tricks you learn aren't really 'yours' either (that said, there's nothing cool or interesting about doing a derivative freestyle that people will have seen before). you may have exposed the thing, but once it's out in the open, it kind of belongs to everyone, and everyone who learns it must share the duty.

it's the same with any art. it's not really a question of whether or not i CAN copy picasso's bull sketches... it's more a question of 'what would be the point?' artistically, the moment those pictures have made the journey from picasso's hand to the page, they no longer belong to him. 'intellectual property' lawsuits notwithstanding, the moment an idea or emotion is expressed, it's no longer really within our jurisdiction or control. picasso discovered some incredible ways of drawing a bull. now everyone can do it. but... why would they? spencer berry discovered the movements that compose 'breath'. now everyone can do it (i mean, kind of). but... why would they?

cause it's nice to make pretty pictures? cause 'breath' is a fun yo-yo trick?

why DO we do any tricks that have already been discovered? obviously, in the beginning we have no choice. we perceive yo-yoing to simply be a collection of tricks that we have to learn. by now, i really shouldn't be so perplexed when i happen upon the question 'do you guys make up your own tricks?'... i mean... after a few years, what else is there to do? realistically though, what we'd call 'new' aren't even our own tricks; when viewed close up, the 1a tricks we do are composed of the same underpasses, pops, and landings that have been popular for the past decade. a 'new trick' may be composed of less than 1% innovative material. and when viewed from afar, the tricks we do melt into the landscape of the freestyle or session. a doctor cannot understand the human body without understanding cells. a yo-yoer cannot understand the nature of yo-yoing without a sense for 'tricks'... and yet, just as with the body... it's the WHOLE that really matters.

and that whole must always belong to everyone. no one (not yuuki or shinji or the eternal spirit of pedro flores) is big enough to throw the whole thing.

each of our string hits represents a brushstroke in the painting of our trick, each trick a brush stroke in the painting of our combo, each combo a brushstroke in the painting of our session, and each session a brushstroke in the painting of our life. however we wish to divide it, however we try to stake it off and claim it, yo-yoing is really just one trick, and that's what we have to take care of. though we may reveal this or that fraction thereof... no particle will ever be the exclusive province of any one of us. all of it belongs to all of us, and as such, taking care of it becomes our collective responsibility. nobody gets into yo-yoing for the responsibility. some people see it as a 'bad word', and would certainly rather not associate things like that with yo-yoing. but that's what caring about something boils down to... and if you want to take anything from yo-yoing (or give anything to it)... there's really no escaping the burden.

do it right. have pride. represent.

yo-yo #64: laminated rd-1

my family and i were at target last week (or tar-jay, because we're high-fashion french-types). we were meandering through the toy section, idly discussing the bike that everyone knew we were planning to buy caitie for her 7th birthday. we had straight-up SOLD her bike at our yard sale the week before to an adorable 4 year-old, and cait had watched it go with a degree of nostalgic sadness. she could barely fit on the thing though; it was time for an upgrade.

i asked cait what she wanted besides the bicycle, and was surprised by her response: "a yo-yo... a nice one like yours". my daughter has never really paid any attention to my yo-yoing. sometimes she jokes that it's an embarrassment at the bus stop or imitates her mom in rolling her eyes when i play in the department store. lately though, she's asked to play quite a lot. she has several yo-yo's, most of them cheap party favors that she prizes not for their play, but for their depiction of favorite cartoon characters. i gave her a mosquito awhile back when she asked to learn the basics, and chris allen kindly sent her a yellow proyo awhile back, cause he's nice.

now, however, she was intimating that she wanted a "nice one". part of me fell into the mode of thinking that i experienced as a teacher whenever a kid asked me about buying an expensive yo-yo. "you don't need one. play what you've got, learn to love it and ask me again in a few years." the father in me though, was busy thinking "she's interested in what i'm interested in? seriously? where's my credit card??"

somewhere in between, it occurred to me that i really do have a lot of yo-yo's... probably an unhealthy amount. and lately, i only really play my no jives, my flying v's, and a few others with any regularity. it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to buy a 7 year-old a brand new fancy yo-yo. i don't want her to feel tied to it; she's 7! at that age, one's hobbies should be as fluid as water. you feel like yo-yoing today? play your yo-yo. tomorrow you want to bury your yo-yo in the sandbox? knock yourself out. i'm not one of those parents that expects my kids to take their pastimes very seriously, but neither am i one to deny a birthday wish.

i decided to channel mr. miyagi, and asked her to choose. my wife suggested that i give her 3 options that i wouldn't mind losing, but i had other ideas. i don't like to be too attached to things, and when i get attached, i sometimes need to find a way to let go of the object(s) in question. i don't want to be the kind of person who would hesitate for an INSTANT if my kid asks me for something i can easily give them on their birthday. when my wife suggested i put limitations on what my daughter can have, my immediate reaction was "oh yeah, good idea". however, THAT VERY REACTION indicated a problem. that was really only my reaction because i'd be AFRAID that she'd pick one of my most prized toys. and THAT... is inherently lame; no getting around it.

to my daughter, all of the yo-yo's on the wall of the 'yo-yo room' are toys. as such, she has a much more accurate and unclouded understanding of them than i do. i equate them with 'value'; either monetary value or sentimental value. this is a problem, because my attachment to them obstructs my ability to see them for what they fundamentally are: playthings.

i gave my daughter an unlimited choice. from the 100's of yo-yo's in the room, which cost anywhere between $1 and around $450 (and several of which i would truly call 'priceless'), i said "pick any one you want". i did this for ME; not for her. i did this because the moment i said it, i was giving EVERY yo-yo in there to her. i was offering EVERY one up, and in so doing, i was severing the connections i had with each of them.

what if she picked the mg??? PICK the mg! TAKE IT. i'll set it up so it's tug-responsive and i'll smile when you do 'creeper' on the driveway. what if she picked an eric wolff??? PICK an eric wolff! i've enjoyed them all. and while i view them as high art, they play AWESOME... and i firmly believe that no yo-yo - NO yo-yo can 'do better' for itself than by being played and adored by a child. if it could talk, the yo-yo that shinya used to win worlds this year might say it's pretty happy... but i'd wager its joy would be NOTHING next to the one that any 4th grader uses to make his first loop-the-loop. and what if she picked "no jive #1"??? how could i give away my favorite yo-yo of all time? PICK #1!!! i'm always saying that playing that yo-yo taught me humility. i say it taught me that i don't need anything fancy to amaze myself, and that 'it's not the yo-yo that matters'... if i'm not prepared to give it to my kid, then i'm full of shit. and playing it hasn't taught me anything at all.

i think you need to be hard on yourself sometimes. i often make little challenges to myself and hold myself to them really strictly. some of them are relatively silly and easy like this, and others are harder. i don't want to be the kind of man who says one thing and does another. i'm truly more afraid of finding myself to be a hypocrite than anything else. some days i wonder if there's anything else to really be afraid of. guns and monsters and root canals... you can find the strength to face any kind of terror in this life. but looking at yourself honestly and recognizing your own hypocrisy? that's a whole different kind of scary.

caitie walked around the room a little bit, and then picked this yo-yo. a 2003 tom kuhn rd-1. made of purple, green, and blue laminated wood. it plays just fine. nice and smooth, not too heavy, and it responds well. this will be a good yo-yo for her to learn with, at whatever speed she wants. she's not really ready for a big gap, and i'm glad that she didn't choose one... but i'm glad for HER, and not for myself. i'm happy she picked the rd-1, because it was the one she liked, but i'm also happy because i passed the test i gave myself. it occurs to me that i'm relieved that i WASN'T relieved; that i could have handed any of those damn yo-yo's over to her with a smile. for a minute there, i was worried that it would be tough to do so, but i know better now.

happy birthday caitlyn. how time flies.