Been to a few gun shops and have so far lacked the cojones to step up and
start the process. Just don't want to relate at all with the characters behind
the counter. Also think having a pistol around the house might be
difficult - there'd always be this perverse temptation to put it to my
head. Need a rifle anyway to hit whatever before it get close enough to be
threatening, so I think I'll stop looking at handguns.
Yesterday I extracted my two from the toy box and re-learned how to
cast a top. The "peg top" is hard to spin, initially - it takes
awhile to re-learn the skill - how to wind the string, and the just-so
arm movement. A good spin-time is 60 seconds, 70 is great but the few
long ones I get are 80 seconds - the 1.5 minute barrier being so far
unbroken. It's such a dumb sport compared to the yo-yo - there it spins
while you stare at it, slack-jawed, for a whole minute - what can you
do for tricks, kick it around? I have one of the few tops Duncan
<1> made, one of
only a few models - the Imperial was the best - another was a whistling
unit just like the yo-yo, with the little peripheral holes. I have four
Duncan yo-yos, three wooden (a red, a mint-condition orange and a blue)
and an Imperial my older brother H could make a serious though futile
claim upon - it's a gray-marbleized wonder with a metal shaft. You can
barely discern the fleur-de-lis Imperial logo on both the yo-yo and on
my Imperial top, which is hollow, the two halves being the transparent
blue lower, and the opaque white upper. Alas its two parts dislike
staying together at operational torques now, plus its point (made of
some special substance, a clear plastic) has become dull. But at Zany
Brainy I once found the exact same classic shape in polished wood - that's
the one I've been throwing - I stash the new string in the old Imperial.
In elementary school I recall we had brief, distinct seasons of both top
and yo-yo fashion, when those who could congregated in groups,
manipulating & wielding their toys. We never did marbles, though. That
was too old-fashioned.
Feet much better today.