language is bananas.  nuts.  crazy in the coconut.  i write and read constantly to juggernaut verbs into being and to pound nouns into nothing.  my urge to deconstruct and reconstruct is constant and like a sand castle building obsession.  it makes me strong and happy.  i write too much in too many places and then sometimes sort the quarters out from pennies.

experiments with blogs and websites and facebook have been funny and stop startish.  process is king, but product shows progress and that is always on its way.  celebrations and incantations.  i slip into rhymes and lucid dreaming easier now that i am older and have embraced certain habits of mind.

its a job when i work for the mob but i love those guys and try as i might to fight the pull the full transgression or the obsessions and gravy, it saved me, enslaved me, the grave for me is after love, before love, glow of run, sun and whiskers, tricks and whispers.

“i am a feminist. this is an evolving transformational process. i have been reading bell hooks for a dozen years now and i agree with most of what she says. these are post-difficult times in the feminist movement and all of us who call ourselves feminists or even those who are but can’t call themselves that because of the vicious backlash on the word, should read bell hooks.”  i wrote this on my facebook status this morning.  yesterday, coming back from nyc i devoured half a thick book by bell hooks and had time to muse on the meaning of the word feminism and how it applies to me.  we are living in a patriarchal capitalist world with a rape culture.  it is up to us to resist it actively.  this can be done from our personal spaces, in our personal relationships, and in the way that we choose our battles in life.

i have chosen one battleground to be on the turf of the hula hoop.  a strange statement perhaps, when you first encounter it.  but those of you who know about bmore hoop revolution and who have read this blog know that it is not hard to make such connections once you view the hula hoop as a tool, a community tool at that, a maker of places to talk and be sexy yet protected in personal space.  within a violent sexist society it is critical to maintain a kind of safe space which does not deny in some puritan way actual sexuality, especially for women.  hula hoops can provide this space, if only temporarily.  but beyond the temporary physical manifestation of autonomy that the hooping provides, there is the dual work of metaphor and meditation, since prolonged time in the hoop means time to think, process, and even communicate with others around an action replete with gendered connotations.  there is a lot men can learn from and enjoy by understanding and practicing autonomous personal zone creation.  in a peaceful non-sexist world we all can live in the comfort that the hula hoop affords us.  so we can, for a moment of our day, meet theory with practice, in ways which are healthy, transformative, and provocative of better thinking.  hula hoops are, in this day and age, resistance culture.  don’t be afraid to hoop and call yourself a feminist.

yesterday’s rhyme:

atop our stop the hip hop hoop scoop is bangin, we slangin, flow freely like speed psychology, love spin kynestography, buy hoops or stop by and crop sandwiches of metaphors, slip record and tell em more, speak, spin, be free, bmore.\

and then early this morning:

the english language has done damage to the pantomime family-time, simple grind like shakespeare, grind like burning spear, grind off hemisphere, decapitated.  this shit has made us, degraded us, thrown us in trash cans, ash fans, assholes and beer brands, whip shakes and snakes with bricks, gypsies in ovens mean clean living for dozens even though it really happened you europeans are laughing in psychotic kitchens with grip iron extensions of racist sensations, dripping, ripping out your lungs, wishing you could say nigger, tell a story, let it simmer, put it into the bigger picture, say the word fuck to explain why it is not appropriate to say fuck.  but its these three trees that choose the frail the call of meaning, the reasoning comes from circles and doves, fuck your white gloves, the hopi shit on your stove, cook fake meat metaphor and i will take you to the store unclip the tape on the lobsters in the lobster tank, and dip your head in.

tumble block transgression, microsecond inflections, bite size rhymes and circular themes make trick bike metaphors time and vanacular light beams, break beats and telephones, stretch armstrong memories and tackle football that weather brings, spring jumps rivers of melt, givers of gelt fade steadily, what weighs heavily is the gift you give, sprig of lamb, jam on like a flock of two-toned love birds, sing the absurd, try apple pie or a finish, bring gyrating hips to lips like canteen, seen woods, fry eggs, begin again.

The hula hoop was just a toy in my mind, even as i have been obsessive in my artistic mind’s eye with circles (all of my life), the hula hoop never impressed me and i never could do it.

The transition of hula hoop to a concept that has taken a driver seat in my life has been documented in other blogs.  The thing that fascinates me most these dayz is the effect of hula hoops on individuals i come into contact with.  i sell the snake oil with my hula hoop schpeal, because some things if you believe in them, THAT is what makes them real.  And once something is real, well then it’s real, right?

See, kids are resilient to failure, and seem to keep trying new things or else have persistence enough to try something that is appealing to them, even if they are not naturals at first.  Adults are often very damaged, in many different ways, and so there is not the same kind of ability to unleash confidence or try new things.  The pop psych cliches are readily available for a reason.  Set in stone, we get.

The reality is that adults need and CAN thrive on the idea that they are not calcified by their age.  It could be true what they say about language acquisition, that it is easy up until your brain is no longer malleable, or it could be a vicious twisting of the truth, a processing problem akin to being barked at over and over until you believe what they say about you on television.

Adults can learn amazing shit that makes them happy and proud of themselves, and this learning can translate into such great amounts of good karma for their kids and their communities that we could get some SHIT done.  Which is what needs to happen in a horrible beautiful place like where I am from.  How bout where you’re from?

I have my spot on 33rd.  the big median strip where i hoop every saturday morning has three brick pillars about 5 feet high at the intersection where Barclay and University and that other tiny street where the 7 - 11 is all meet.  i have been going there weekly, except for weeks when i have a debate tournament, since i coach debate at connexions high school in west baltimore.

yesterday the wind was whipping and it was january 2nd and my new year’s day had been pretty horrible and the temperature was in the 20’s.  hula hooping is a purge of evil for me, i thought, and i layered up and went out to market.

its always a bit strange to do what i do.  i am like installation art carnival hawk style, hey watch me, i am up on a post doing 30 seconds of tricks with a giant heavy hoop up on a pedistal for the passing MTA bus.

i flirt with women who roll down their window and say, “go ahead now,” or “you sell them?.”  i flirt with men in a deeper tone or often i just exchange hard smiles with people of all sexes colors sizes and car type.  walkers too, pass through in a regular slow trickle.  and in a little ebb and flow, people join me to try out hoops, find the one that is best for them, try out the outrageous huge hoop.  these saturdays are unpredictable even as they have their regular rhythms.

when i got up on the post yesterday, though, i felt drunk and out of synch with the hoop and the post, i felt a sick sensation like i was going to finally take a fatal saturday hoop spill onto the frozen ground below, crack my head open.  i had not had a drink since a touch of bailey’s on new years eve, so it was not actual drunkenness.  i thought at first a few days off from hooping and look what the fuck happens.  it took me a minute to realize that it was an exceptionally steady, cold-slow wind that was doing it.  it was like there was some sort of ice draft coming from a giant fan at the end of 33rd.  it was like hooping in gravy.  every now and then the steady wind would gather into a gust and i almost lifted off the post trying to stay steady.  i started doing tricks anyway.  the trash trucks pass on saturday morning and the drivers and crews of these regular trucks are big fans of me, as i am of them, and so i had to give them some of my newest shoulder rolls and above the head standards.  the old man with the cigar, from his regular post outside the 7-11, held up his smoke in toast when we caught eyes from way across the street.  i threw up my peace sign, we have become good friends, not even knowing each other’s names.  

the wind eventually died down, crept back up, continued to make the morning unpredictable and dangerous.  four hours i lasted, cold as could be, purging that evil.  

at the end of the day the smiles made it all worth it.  i get a lot of support from people in my city who see me do this nutty saturday thing.  they let me know in all kinds of ways that this city needs a hoop revolution and that small packages of joy can be found if we make them.

this past year saw many new things in my life, i got unmarried, began new careers, turned 42, went on a long losing streak, etc.

i also became someone known as the hula hoop man.  it started at wyman park at the charles village festival, where over the course of two days, on some maniacal whim stemming from divorce-energy and general CRAZINESS, i hula hooped for something like 12 hours cumulatively, and sold enough hula hoops of my own making to pay my rent, at a time when i was totally broke.

i started hooping in the median strip on 33rd on saturday mornings, across from the farmers market.  i sold maybe 500 hula hoops over the course of the year, which just ended last night.  i made a spectacle of myself.  i became famous in exactly the way one should want to be famous by spreading a joyful, harmlessly sexy, exercise mechanism, that is also a toy, to the ravaged streets of baltimore, my sick sick hometown.

we barely survive here.  shit gets crazy and people get desperate.  we get so angry at our life sometimes we want to lash out, or our whole psychology goes out of whack, we are poor, or if we are not poor we are scared of poor people and those of us who are poor prey on this fear.  wouldn’t you?

this is baltimore.  black and white.  fucked up royally.  police helicopters rattle all of our shutters day and night.  the schools…well the schools that i work in are like pipelines to prison.  the streets are dangerous, they suck you in because there is no where else to go, no way to get home except for to travel on them, and they are laced with a bitter history of white oppression and delusions of white supremacy and land deals and development laws that so blatantly paint the straight up racist face of the government, it would be up there with Hitler’s work if it weren’t tucked away in the silent tomes of history untold.

i am basically a loser, because who isn’t a loser in baltimore?  and yet i struggle with a love for her that somehow still bares its teeth, even after getting slapped so hard it draws blood.  and this slap is a repeating slap.  it is brutalizing to be here, trying to live, trying to love.  

i needed to do something to stop the pain.  hula hooping.  i needed to do something to make some change.  hula hooping.  i needed to make a fool of myself because the absurdity of the decade and living through the bush years teaching and raising kids in baltimore, MADE ME CRAZY.  hula hooping.  i need to self-actualize.  hula hooping.  it even helps with loneliness if you can find someone to do it with.  hula hooping.

so it is, i became the hula hoop man to save my life.  this year i plan on selling a thousand hoops in baltimore.  all of which is about me, but the thing that is not about me is the revolution part.  that is happening at a dizzying pace.  i keep getting new reports, seeing new people, finding more ways that hula hooping has infiltrated the city’s damaged veins.  i got hope for 2010, i guess, but either way, this year when you see me hooping, you will know why.

The almighty story,

runs beneath everything

yet men of power have conceived of a world of knowledge which 

disenfranchises the worthiness of little people stories.  The hula hoop 

gives this back

holds small personal spaces intact.

Tells a story to the the observer, the spectacle of rotation.

it can be put on parade or done alone, the former

a barrage of small stories intertwined in human complexity and backstory

the later just a wispy reminder of the passing of time, the laws of physics.

Extreme hula hooping is something I am working on bringing to the Baltimore area.  Over the past 6 months the first phase of this effort has begun and is progressing steadily.  The process is a long one, since it involves a change in the culture of our city, though I believe that some of the most unbelievable extreme hooping has lain dormant in our city for years, and so it is not so much a question of creating the culture as unleashing a beast within it.

The first phase is to make hula hoops that get into the hands of as many citizens as possible.  To that end I have unloaded perhaps 200 handmade hoops of an unbelievable variety of sizes and weights.  Hoopers ranging in age from 3 to 70, male and female, all different backgrounds, have begun the first phase of hula hoop consciousness.  From me this phase gets a decidedly underground effort.  I believe that there will be a moment when this person to person recruiting will get a blast of official propaganda, some magazine article or television spot that will begin to peg the whole phenomenon as a fad and then it will seem to be one, attracting more hoopers and giving the artform more validity and exposure. But my job is to secure the organic street credibility of hula hoop.  I go into black and white communities of Baltimore, poor and rich people buy my hoops, the buzz is created by the buzz.  People recognize me in the streets, “you are the hula hoop man, right.”

Extreme hooping involves more than just the waist, and it involves innovation and hard work, so it is not just the “fun” first phase of hula hooping that sees the hula hoop as a super great toy that any age kid can have fun with and get some exercise.

For my own part, I have been working hard to get tricks smoother, trying new things, honing and stretching and building a repertoire of hard to do arrangements with the hula hoop.  Never have I seen or heard of tricks being done with the huge hoops I make, and this becomes another point at which the art goes to another level.  But since the precedent for this kind of hoop work is primarily found in cultures that do not exist in the mainstream of Baltimore life (the hoop trickery stuff is more like a circus skill than say, championship step teams or a king of the microphone, or for that matter, women’s hair in Hampden) some effort must be made to open up space for the battles to begin. 

Thus, in the future, Baltimore will see hula hoop competitions that will challenge the human limitations of what can be done with a circular tube and the body.  I can see this day, and that is my work for the future, to make this happen.  In the meantime it is Monday and my body is sore and the daily grind continues.  There is much to look forward to.

On Friday I got scant playing time in the student teacher basketball game.  I can hustle and I am an athlete, don’t get me wrong, and I able to compete in many sports, but hoops have never been my strength.  I did not mind sittin on tha bench, though, since a lot was at stake.  The game was a sight to see, since our team had some poetic players, whose movement together and individually was a symphony of power.  But the middle school team and especially the high school team fought back bravely, and Connexions staff and basketball teams, boys and girls, middle and high, put on quite a show.  The program is growing, the talent is clear.

Hoops.  Then on Saturday night I am at a soup contest, and an old friend who had just gotten on facebook told me about how he had thought that Hoop Revolution was my new basketball obsession, until another friend of ours informed him, no, stupid, he is into hula hoops.  What’s that about he asked and I told him.  But somewhere outside of the conversation something in my head clicked.

Thus, I believe, the synopsis of this three paragraph essay is a call to the basketball community in Baltimore to join forces with the hula hoop community in Baltimore.  I am learning more and more lately about how girls and boys, men and women can be great hoopers, whether it be bball or hula wise.  We engage in revolution whenever we are hooping.  Now we just need to organize.