The devil and the yo-yo, a term to describe the uncanny ability for the devil to grant any mortal any physical or worldly power. And why a yo-yo? Well, its what I feel is gifted to me. Maybe, not by the devils hand, but still I've yet to encounter another enthusiast in my life with as much prowess.
I've been yoing for a long time, since I was in second grade I believe. It was then when I thieved a yo-yo (Yomega X-Brain) for the first time, and never had one before that day. I was a kid and packages to toys were always the shit, and the yo-yo was a nice deep blue color, so I wasn't about to pay 15$ for such a device. Needless to say I flawlessly obtained the yo-yo, and my career began.
I brought it everywhere I could. It was so extremely fascinating to me I absolutely had to master it. The yo-yo came with a trick booklet, where they explained the different techniques and parts to my yo-yo, so I was not taking shots in the dark with this. I brought it to church, brought it to school, and brought it on car trips. There was sometimes downtime when we took rest stop breaks.
However, as most things in my life, good things must come to a close eventually and it began with the string breaking. The package came with replacement strings, but those of course had seen their days of looping and was now down to just my device and.... well, ingenuity. I had to figure out the next best thing to yo-yo string with my available materials. Eventually, I found that yarn was a decent placeholder, until more coaster string could be obtained. Nothing else was durable enough or sturdy enough to have decent longevity and yarn was always readily available while living with my grandmother.
So, as you can tell, I played and played, and played with it more, until the inevitable occurred: the yo-yo was broken. On the bearing of the x-brain there was a tiny little rubber band, a brake for the "brain" portion of the device to latch on to was lost after cleaning my yo-yo. This caused eventual disinterest after I had to do a lot more work with my yo-yo. A brain/automatic yo-yo is a nice amnesty for beginners, but I had not expanded my trick list due to lack of exposure to the internet. It was not until middle school that the internet was deemed valuable to me.
After I lost interest in the x-brain, I had many life changing events occur (other blogs lol) and that, I believe, caused me to put the yo down for good. Well, almost for good...
It wasn't until my 16th birthday that I had felt I ran out of good birthday gifts, so I reached into the confines of my mind and thought "yo-yo". I recieved about 5 that year. One was a yo-yo ball, complete jokes. But the others were special ordered and I picked them out myself. Two were Yomega Fireballs, both with black front caps, but one was clear plastic and the other red plastic. One was a yomega saber-raider, which was a red/black scheme, and the last was a yomega hyperwarp wing. The warp wing was the first one to get lost, which is probably in relation to the value of each yo-yo obtained.
By the time I put these yo-yo's down, it was a year later. I had stopped bringing yo-yo's everywhere when I stopped having them. I would lose them or they would get stolen, and that was that. They were not very cheap, either.
The yo-yo has a long and often murky history. Some believe it originated in "x country" or "y country", but the truth is there were many, many different variations to the yo-yo in its most primitive form. However, it was not until the digital age, rise of mass marketing, and the development of lighter weight yo-yo's (remember, plastic hasn't been around very long) that made the yo-yo into a fad and sport. While watching a video or demonstration of a professional yo-ist, they will always make every maneuver look easy. But it is not until you pick the string and device up that you realize you could be in over your head!
