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.