resolution

i've never been one for new years resolution. i guess i'm of the 'calvin & hobbes' mindset that the rest of the world should resolve to bend itself more to my own likeness. not really, but everyone is like that on some level (which is why it's a funny comic).

this year though, i have an obvious one, and it's caused me to be a bit more reflective and try to impose some more upon myself. so here we are. starting tomorrow, i resolve to:

• throw one wooden yo-yo for the entire year of 2012 (or until the world ends, whichever comes first). see previous entries for details.
• completely give up drinking soda pop. i've done this before, but always seem to squeak little exceptions by myself until i find myself holding an empty 64oz 'thirst-slayer' from 7-11.
• keep a journal by my bedside wherein i will write down all the foods i ate during the day. i don't really want to diet; i just want to be more aware of what i'm taking in.
• sit an hour of zazen per week. i have become lax in this practice.
• work on my iai kata at least twice a week, lest i forget how to tie on my hakama.

as for the 'one yo-yo' bit, which is clearly most pertinent to this blog, i last threw a bearing yo-yo on christmas eve. i thought about doing some sort of elaborate 'goodbye bearings' 11:59pm thing, but it would be superfluous. i'm sure the time will come this year when i sincerely miss throwing my other yo-yo's, but right now i'm still really excited to be narrowing everything down to the simplicity of the spyy 'eh'. i've been throwing it almost non-stop since i got it, and i'm as enamored of it as i could be any yo-yo.

it's going to be tough with all of the temptation i have in our 'yo-yo room' (see pics embedded throughout). i have no idea how many radical yo-yo's i have on display or in storage. a few hundred i guess. and though i feel like i should make some kind of elaborate gesture in bidding them adieu for the year, it just feels silly. i don't want to lock them up in a closet. i want the temptation (and to overcome it).

so i guess, 11:59 is going to come and go without much changing at all. i'll keep throwing the same yo-yo i have for the last week, perhaps a bit more excited to be 'officially' beginning on a journey, the end of which is unclear. i don't have any goal in mind for how i will play at the end of it, or for whether i'll want to go back to ball bearings (or other woodies) in 2013. this is about coming closer to who i feel i am as a yo-yo player, about determining what i need and where i want to go, and about stepping off of a path that i feel is adequately trodden without my footsteps.

first touch.

the eh arrived this morning around 11:02est. steve included the backup, along with a couple of other spyy treats (which i'll only get to enjoy for a few days before the journey officially begins) and a nifty jig for evenly sanding axles to desired length.

the entire parcel smelled like burned wood (steve lasered these just a day ago). the smell will gradually fade, and i'm sorry for that because it's wonderful. on a throw, the eh is incredibly smooth. it doesn't spin quite as long as my tmbr irving pro (which sports a wider profile & diameter and a walnut axle), but it's smoother and snappier.

as soon as i felt the spin, first trick i tried was spirit bomb, which is the string trick i use to evaluate pretty much any wood yo-yo. video here. it surpassed expectations. the oak is pretty slick and felt just a little loose on flyaway dismounts, so i've sanded a couple of the replaceable axles and am in the process of getting things dialed. pretty confident that i can hit whatever i want on it, though maybe that's the new-yoyo hubris talking.

it's a huge relief to have the thing in my hand and know that i can make it work how i want and make it last.

SPYY 'eh': completion

this guy is leaving his home in canada tomorrow and will arrive the 23rd (merry christmas, me)!

made of solid oak, take-apart design, and replaceable hemlock axles, this is it. this is the yo-yo i'm using for the entire year of 2012. i do have an identical backup if i should destroy one utterly, but both of my glued-axle oak spyys are still kicking after 6 months, so i should make this guy last.

these are not for sale. they are not being produced. making this kind of fixed axle yo-yo is time consuming and not cost-effective. i have a spare and steve has one of his own, but beyond that, there are no plans to revisit this on any kind of scale. my apologies if you were hoping they'd be on yoyoexpert for $19.99 or something.

there's a great chapter in the book 'the princess bride' by william goldman (the book is arguably better than the movie, which is a classic), in which background is given for the character, inigo. though it didn't make the film, it describes his life as the son of a master swordmaker living quietly in the hills above toledo. domingo montoya makes the greatest swords since excalibur, but, in the effort to avoid attention which might detract from his craft (he doesn't call himself an artist), he allows another maker to sell his swords as his own.

somehow it gets out to a rich swordmaster that domingo is the real deal, and count rugen shows up requesting a sword which would match his 'peculiarities'. domingo denies having any great skill and tries to persuade rugen to visit yeste in madrid, until rugen shows his 6-fingered right hand. then it's on. not only does domingo admit to being the 'genius of the hills', he accepts the job for nothing (allowing a single gold-piece as a deposit, at rugens urging), and tells the count to 'come back in a year'.

then, for the next year, inigo watches as his father essentially beats himself into ruin in making the sword. he took the job due to the implicit challenge of making a perfect sword for a 6-fingered hand. for an amateur, any long-handled cleaver would be fine. but for a master to reach his potential, the entire sword would have to be reimagined from the ground up. all of the measurements would have to balance each other seamlessly. in the end, after peaks of elation and valleys of terrible frustration, inigo wakes in the night to find his father staring, becalmed, at his creation. 'finally, inigo,' he says, 'i am an artist.'

i'm not a master. i don't have 6 fingers. i'm also not going to kill steve like rugen did domingo and provoke the eternal revenge of his sons who would eventually do me in (god, i love that movie).

in terms of how this whole affair pertains to steve's craft, though... i feel like there's some balance. i went to him with what i thought was a simple request; to basically punch out a few more wood halves from his drill press. he did like a hundred for his wedding. we cranked out 12 or so in an hour at canada nats. he could have settled.

instead, he hit it with trial and error for a month, working late into the night and giving up his lunch breaks to make, essentially, the best all-wood yo-yo he could. everybody has something they really care about (or everybody should). i think in some aspect of our lives, we all need to adopt that stance of 'no-compromise' to arrive at our potential (as craftsman, as artists, as yo-yoers, or just as people). compromise is not a bad thing, but in terms of our approach to ourselves; our self-improvement and sense of self-worth, it's a tantalizing poison.

i guess this whole project germinated from the idea of no-compromise (of a different sort), and i'm thrilled that the same spirit was present through the birth of this yo-yo.

365

did i mention that i have a problem with year-long commitments?

... not in breaking them, mind you... in MAKING them.

in addition to the whole "one wood yo-yo for a year" thing, i'm also joining the crew of 365yoyotricks.com. besides me, some of my best friends in the world will be sharing a trick every week. Nate Sutter, Drew Tetz, David Ung, and Sebastian Brock have all signed on (Steve Brown will be contributing 2 tricks/week). besides the companies those guys represent, yoyoexpert.com will also be sponsoring. frickin' wicked.

part of me is a bit nervous about getting 52 [good] tricks on video using just a simple wood yo-yo, but the other (bigger) part of me knows that the floodgates will open, and is thrilled to all hell about being part of a crew this radical. i look up to all those guys like crazy, and trying to keep pace with their creativity will be the most wonderful kind of "daunting" imaginable.

getting back to the yo-yo, it's coming along nicely. ironing out things like the shape of the corners, the axle material, the wood density, etc. it kind of feels like i'm a 60's north shore surfer whose shaper is hard at work finalizing the details of their big-wave gun... getting the pintail just so, setting the rocker so it won't pearl on big walls... until i remember i'm a yo-yo player.

actually, even after i remember i'm a yo-yo player, it's still a lot like that.

newborn

first time i see the yo-yo i'll play for the next year. steve's sending me live updates as he cuts it. yesterday he sent me an email which was so obscurely technical that i only vaguely understood what he was talking about. this i understand.

i love everything about this little iphone shot, from the smoothness of the raw wood to the "eye"-like pattern of the grain to the dirt and chips on his hands. i look at this and i'm thinking of a hundred-thousand throws and catches.

more to come as it takes shape.

steeling myself (so to speak)

haven't played a bearing yo-yo in over a week. been awhile since i could say that (not that... it's anything significant to say).

still really excited and gung-ho about this idea. obviously, throughout the next year, i'll go through peaks and valleys, some more substantial than others. right now it's easy, because to get ready, i'm kind of cycling through my favorite wood yo-yo's (to which i ALSO won't have access in the new year). mainly been throwing my favorite clean machines, tmbrs, yyf legends, and my old #1 no jive. once i'm down to one, the real fun begins.

as for said one, steve and i have been e-mailing back and forth on specifics. true to his own tendencies, he's being more ambitious about building a better wooden yo-yo than i would have even hoped for, but i'm all the more stoked by the ideas coming out. this is not an attempt to sell yo-yo's, and currently, no plans exist to make this yo-yo available.

part of what i'm looking forward to (or at least what's immediately apparent) is the way i'll have to address the idea of playing 'for' other people. a lot of folks know i always have a yo-yo and will ask with no prompting whatsoever to see a trick (or for a whole show). kids are especially uninhibited about this, but grown-ups do it too. the 'pro' in me wants me to ask them to evaluate my stock portfolio or check my blood pressure or do whatever they 'do' on the spot for free... but that guy's kind of a dick. i mostly just smile and put on a rad little show.

doing a rad little show is both easier and harder with a fancy metal/bearing yo-yo. it's easier because you do longer tricks with more hits and weird formations. those things impress the uninitiated, even when you mess up. i'll miss shattering the illusions of people who have never seen progressive yo-yoing by doing a mindless, minute-long combo on my ronin without trying at all. it's fun to drop jaws sans effort. but it's also harder with bearings because i find that the more you rely on your equipment (or tricks enabled by your equipment) to run the show, the less you 'connect'. it's easier to shock people by yo-yoing in a way that, to them, looks nothing like any yo-yoing they've seen... but it's also fun (and in some ways, more rewarding) to enthrall them with play that looks exactly like yo-yoing to them... but somehow 'unquantifiably awesomer'.

it's a different kind of challenge, which is precisely what's fueling this whole endeavor.

2012

for the calendar year of 2012, i've decided to challenge myself to simplify and refocus my approach to yo-yoing.

for awhile now, i feel like all of my best yo-yo tricks have gotten shorter and shorter, and that my longer 1a combos have stagnated or else deteriorated into self-indulgent pointlessness. not that there's anything WRONG with that, but i feel like i need to do something to refresh my perspective and go back to what i love. considering the team spyy has built (and CONTINUES to build), my ability to rep the brand with relevant, progressive 1a tricks is spiraling down to a pinpoint. my value to the team has really only ever been in playing 'against the grain' (so to speak). i don't mean that to sound self-deprecating - i like thin yo-yo's that whack your knuckles.

and so, spyy has agreed to make me a[nother] new yo-yo (similar, but not identical to the one pictured above). i doubt this one will see any kind of widespread production, as that's not its aim.

starting 1/1/12, my goal is to play one all-wood yo-yo for a year.

a year is a long time, and wood is fragile. in the event that i burn through the axle completely or somehow irreparably damage the yo-yo, i'll have a couple of identical backups... but that's it. no bearings for a year, no metal for a year, no unresponsive for a year. to me, it's the equivalent of joining a yo-yo monastery, which when i think about it, is something i should have done awhile ago. in some ways, it's meant to be a kind of 'yo-yo death', but rest assured, while i'm walking away from the aspects of yo-yoing that don't appeal to me at all, i'm walking TOWARD the parts that do... which is unbelievably exciting.

since other yo-yo's will kind of cease to hold a lot of appeal for me during this process (seeing as i won't be playing them), i'll be using this space to document my progress (or regress, as the case may be). i'd like to note that i really appreciate spyy's acceptance of this. when i brought this to steve, he could have given me a hard time for having made me the flying v, having made me the ronin, and having sent me a truckload of awesome spyy's... just to have me give up on all but one wood yo-yo. instead he embraced it, said 'it's where your passion lies', and offered to make it for me.

i don't expect anybody to care about this. i know a few people read this blog, which always surprises me. i don't mean to act like it's a big deal. it really is just where i need to go with my yo-yoing. i really believe that by imposing limits upon your approach to an art, you can come to understand your own unlimited nature.

here's to finding out.

yo-yo #94: gold ronin

on my vimeo page today, a guy asked me a pretty tough question. he wanted to know how i'm sponsored if i don't really compete.

it's a great question when i think on it (which i don't often), because virtually every sponsored player out there is either expected to compete by the masses/company or else is naturally driven to do so. there are really just a handful of anomalies like me who either stink at competing or else have no desire to do so, yet remain sponsored by legitimate companies.

i do try to count my lucky stars. i absolutely recognize that i get a lot of perks and free yo-yo's and stuff for doing essentially what i would do anyway. that was kind of driven home yesterday when i caught myself looking for a 'perfect' bearing to replace a screechy one in my purple ronin. i was doing flick-tests when it occurred to me that i probably have about 50 extra bearings sitting around in various jars. some thin, some thick, some gold, some grooved. my mind flew back to several years back to when i had exactly one really consistent bearing and i would trade it out from one yoyojam to another. you don't mean to take it for granted, but somehow you don't fail to either.

i'm not altogether sure how it happened, or how it maintained itself. i'm fairly certain that i never did anything to deserve an amazing yo-yo covered in gold. (but hey, i'll take it!) spyy isn't really a 'competition team'... sometimes i wonder if we're not more like a 'band'. we all play different roles, and i'm sure we've all had very different conversations with steve about what we bring to the equation. i'm an anomaly in a team of anomalies, and there's no way i could adequately thank steve for seeing the value in a team like that.

i hear a lot of kids clamor about the idea of sponsorship like it's thor's hammer; seemingly unliftable, but 'man if i had it i'd be unstoppable'. the truth is obvious: if you're not unstoppable without it, having it doesn't mean a thing. there's no way a 15 year-old takes that kind of thing to heart, but it's true. a lot of guys seem to fade into oblivion right after aligning with this or that company. if you're expected to compete, the pressure can be extreme, and if you're not, your contribution always feels ambiguous at best. it's a bit like the advice i dread having to give my daughter in a few years - if you're not enough without some guy who wants to dangle you on his arm like a patek philippe, then you won't be enough with him either.

if you're prepared for all that (meaning you're ignoring it), and you still want to be sponsored, you have to do something to stand out. maybe you make neat videos with old dixieland jazz soundtracks. maybe you have 9 fingers on your left hand. maybe you dress in the loudest conflicting plaid imaginable. i've seen guys sponsored for lesser traits than any of those, but if you don't actively share your playing (or who you are) with the greater community, no 'pro scout' is going to show up at your high school looking for you... and if they should, do not - DO NOT - get into their van!

if, beyond that, you want sincere advice, here you are:

• look like you enjoy yo-yoing. better yet... ACTUALLY enjoy yo-yoing (it is enjoyable). would you hire someone to manipulate your toy and make it look like it steals your girlfriend and leaves shrapnel in your palms?
• don't talk about wanting sponsorships. if that's all you really want out of yo-yoing, you're pre-destined to fail as mentioned above, but the more you blather on about it, the more unlikely it is to even happen. it makes you look cheap.
• do something that no one else can do (or that no one else could give a crap about doing). this could be 'winning' or it could be something else, but chances are, whatever it is, you're going to have to work really, really hard to get close to it.
• be a nice person. i love how this one gets overlooked. i'm no math teacher (i am a math teacher), but by my count there are around 10 yo-yo companies out there that can offer a legitimate sponsorship, and since yo-yoing is still such a niche thing, virtually all of the players and owners are buddy-buddy. if you conduct yourself poorly on the regular, you'll be blacklisted like the hollywood ten.

above all, you have to serve your own interests. this spinny-toy thing that we do is an art, and though it be swathed in company logos and the occasional giant-check, you can't really make it something other than that. do not risk your own artistic freedom or fulfillment by misrepresenting yourself to get sponsored. it's just not worth it.



... unless they offer you a yo-yo like this, in which case yes, you should sell out right now.

yo-yo #'s 92 & 93: spyy garagecraft woodies

when i look at my life honestly, all of the most memorable and significant periods - the times when i truly grew and changed as an individual - were when i had it comparatively rough. understand, i never 'actually' had anything rough. i've never been abe lincoln carving out an austere, frontier existence while self-edumacatin' in a cabin. my home has never been torn apart by war or famine or disease (knock on wood).

regardless of one's background though, we all 'have it rough' sometimes. within the context of one's life, you can only compare against your own experiences, and it seems only natural that the times in which we are most hard-pressed are often the ones from which we take the most valuable lessons. there's obviously a tipping-point: if one's challenges are so great or so many that you can't progress at all, it's a different matter. in general though, we need a bit of newton's 3rd law in our lives, lest we spin our wheels (so to speak) in stagnant, boring complacency.

this summer, i took a welcome retreat from nc's 3-digit early july, touching down in calgary, ab to judge the canadian national contest. though the experience was filled to bursting with memorable anecdotes, i might have taken the most joy from the hour or so spent carving and sanding these yo-yo's out of strips of oak in steve's garage. when steve (the proprietor of spyy) married his wife, suzanne, he was already into yo-yo's. as such, crafty dude that he is, it seemed fitting that he should put together some nice DIY yo-yo's as gifts for the guests. i had the pleasure of throwing one of these ink-stamped beauties, too. i'm not sure what kind of wood it was (pine maybe?), but it weighed in around 40g. it was like playing a yo-yo made from gaseous helium.

steve, gary longoria, and i just kind of fell into a pattern with his press and power tools, and at the end of an hour or so, had somehow etched a quintet of slick-looking wood butterflies from his oaken stock. (i love that, depending upon how gary operated the press, they each have distinct scorch-marks along their profiles.)

we were able to cajole the yo-yo's into playing well enough. the narrower of these two has a fairly deep gouge which gives it a bit of a rattle. we later shot lasers at them, etching subtle logos and messages into the wood, and inducing a wonderful scent which i'm sure still pervades steve's basement. the wider butterfly (etched 'supersonic' on one side) ended up perfectly smooth - rare in a wide[ish] gapped butterfly woody. i spent at least 20 minutes hand-sanding it, and the unfinished oak feels softer than teflon.

it wasn't until much later that it occurred to me that it's actually TOO soft.

since these are glued together, we basically had to set the gap using a popsicle stick tool and then pray we got it right. the gap isn't too wide, but the profile of the yo-yo and the smoothness of the inner wall are such that virtually no string will hold a decent bind (much less a tug), and unless the tension is positive to the point of kinking, i can pull the string right through the gap from a full wind - not what i look for in a wooden yo-yo. it's still fun, but i get pissy if i can't set a wooden yo-yo up to do decent moons, and this guy is just too slick & loose.

a few weeks ago, i tried an experimental surgery that had never occurred to me. dead duncan stickers can work wonders in a no jive if the gap's too large, so i surgically cut a line down the radius of one and used tweezers to set it [ever so carefully] around the yo-yo's gap. alas, i was not born to be a surgeon, and the slightest movement of my hand established a 1mm gap in the sticker, causing, in turn, an irregular whir.

beyond that tolerable side-effect? perfection. tight binds, crisp loops, late fly-aways into smooth string-stalls. it's incredible what a little friction can do.

the metaphor holds true for our lives as well. when we're just coasting along, everything going our way, life rarely feels as meaningful as when we're pushing against it to a degree. we need that push-back; it gives us context for our lives - a frame of reference. everybody's different, but i think we all share this universal need; not for hardship so much as something to lean on - something to feel sliding against us as we spin. having that metaphorical traction is what enables us to move.

in yo-yoing, we call it 'response', but i rarely consider how apt the term is. my kids at school want massive gaps so they can get away with any kind of sloppy throw or flailing laceration. they're honest at that age, too. they'll tell you they don't want response because it makes whips hurt. but in our lives, if we're out of control, we SHOULD get that response. we SHOULD get a knuckle-whack, or a speeding ticket, or a dear john letter. when we screw up, our lives should snap back and make us untangle and wind back up before trying again. that cause and effect helps clean us up and give us a handle on where we went wrong.

we live in an era of minimal response. we want it to be easy, but we aren't always wired for easy to seem meaningful. we can design yo-yo's to make tricks more blissful and forgiving, but applying a perfect takeshi recess mod to your life can be a bit trickier. in a world where, more and more, people seek to distance themselves from negative consequences, the idea of inserting some augmented response - of holding oneself to a higher or tougher standard - can feel almost heretical. but it's not always a matter of being hard-headed or artificially going against the grain.

sometimes you just need that extra friction to feel right.

yo-yo #91: luke hildebrand 1-piece looper

luke hildebrand is a good friend from eastern virginia. he goes by 'the wood dwarf' on the boards, and i've been fortunate to have known him for years. like a lot of our community (or at least the most interesting cross-section thereof), yo-yoing isn't the alpha and omega of his life; it's just one more interesting thing that he does. a talented visual artist and sculptor, his art always seems to exude a kind of 'rough-hewn' texture with bold 'woodblock-print' contrast. so i found it kind of amusing when i unwrapped this yo-yo, which he sent me this summer.

it is tiny - among the smallest yo-yo's i own. luke carved it from a single piece of cocobolo, the density of which is ample to provide it comparative heft, but it still feels delicate and fine.

i've just got the one, so despite the fact that it's obviously designed in the style of an archaic looper, after a few minutes of 0a, i tend to gravitate to some of my standard fixed axle string tricks. i've spent a lot of time trying modern 1a on old-timey yo-yo's. sometimes it feels like an appropriate challenge, and other times it just feels obscene. maybe it's the fact that this yo-yo is about as thick as my middle finger, or that the gap is about 2 string-widths, max, but trying to force technical string tricks on this guy feels decidedly silly. it IS fun to work on basics with it - trapeze, eli hops, boingy. the gap is so hilariously unforgiving that flying away out of a clean combo feels decidedly satisfying; as though you've somehow 'attained something'.

it occurs to me that, on some level, this is always our approach, in virtually every pursuit. sometimes we feel it after hacking our way through a particularly dense 1a jungle or after having finally mastered a concept that's eluded us for years. invariably though, after we 'level up', the experience feels less significant to us than we expected. we break through a creative ceiling only to discover that the skill-set that kept us up at night is really nothing so special at all. it just becomes a part of 'where we are'. before we can do it, it's something intimidating and awesome - afterward, it's been pulled into the gravity of our personal sphere, like a possession we couldn't previously afford.

in some cases, our response is innocuous enough. just a pleasant exhalation or a fist-pump in an empty room. to work hard and then delight in the result of our efforts is the natural rhythm of how we progress through most every endeavor. however, to begin to EXPECT reward or recognition outside ourselves - to crave it to the point of belittling others or perpetually self-aggrandizing - is to mutate the natural into a sort of compulsive illness.

i find it disconcertingly funny when members of our community put on airs as though what they're doing is so phenomenally hard or so incredibly inventive. i have nothing against personal challenges. i don't even take issue with the ephemeral glory that follows overcoming them. there's a lot of insecure self-obsession in our little community though, which i think is counter-productive and best rooted out. (it's worth noting that if you have to ask whether you have an ego/insecurity problem, you probably do... and if you're sure you don't, you almost certainly do.)

i don't think you should ever develop a big head about your yo-yoing. is there anything more ridiculous than some child (adult or otherwise) blathering on about how they're going to dominate in 2012 or set the yo-yo world on its ear with their new video? that's about like setting the 'cake-baking world' on it's ear (actually that would be substantially more lucrative). pretty much all the yo-yoer's i know treat their art as a deeply personal pursuit. you might have outward goals (especially if you're competitive), but you don't work hard to attain something without so much as within. so, who can you dominate, really? what do you think you deserve? whose attention do you crave?

make-believe swagger is not strength, and momentary self-deprecation is not true humility (especially when its actual objective is to elicit the predictable reaction of 'no no, you ARE amazing!' from one's 'yo-yo fans' - please).

i think we need to escape this cycle within ourselves. it's hard, because how do you push yourself if you're NOT actively trying to attain something of value ('mastery' of a trick, ca$h-money, slaps on the back from collectible internet-friends)? is the yo-yoing itself EVER powerful enough to be its own reward, or is there always something ulterior attached to it? i reiterate a question i asked much earlier: would you continue to yo-yo if you couldn't get online?

i wish we could play yo-yo without the implied carrot of the golden loving cup or recognition-as-vindication. i feel as though these two [generalized] archetypes of playing for extrinsic 'attainment' attach to essentially all of the darkest and dumbest behaviors in our community. you're playing with a yo-yo. you're not curing disease, comforting sudanese refugees, or even wiping down someone's lunch table. if anyone, ever, happens to see your playing, take something positive from it, and relate it to you, that one instance should surpass your expectations for recognition (and you should let it fly off of you the moment it touches your ears).

there are a thousand brilliant, wonderful reasons to throw down, and virtually all of them happen within you.

thanks again, luke.