1pg essays: Beyblades—let it rip
Where do I start with beyblades? In this new series of essays entirely funded by twitch-chat and fueled by a fear of encroaching mental decay, I hope to explore the topics presented to me earnestly and with intent. I seek to take back what damage years of off-loading my mental faculties to google and quora and facebook and twitter has done to me. That said: where do I start with beyblades? I believe the most succinct answer to the ethos behind this change is best said in the first season's opening theme:
Picking up speed
Running out of time
Going head to head
It's the way of life
You gotta fall down
Eat ground
And get back up again
Let's Beyblade!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19qpqjebafg)
Even after all these years the lyrics have not failed to carve themselves into my heart. Eat ground, get back up again. When faced with a world that beats you down, over and over, you choices are to eat ground, and either stay down, or get back into the fray. Life is acceleration. Effort. It's coaxing and stoking the flames within us to achieve whatever sets our hearts ablaze. Too many of us have become numb to the world, too many of us have been beaten by the banality of an everyday life, too many of us chase after safety—avoiding the terrifying possibilities that conflict can inflict upon us. We've let the beyblades in our hearts rev at a low speed, forgetting the speeds we once yearned for before academia told us that risk and adversity was bad.
But nothing goes forward without turning: a wheel turns by revolving and a drill pierces by spinning. Sure, the wheel might one day break, and the drill only stays pristine if it is never used, but how sad of an existence would that be? Shining. Sparkling from disuse.
Beyblade teaches us that no matter how many times the spinning tops stop, it can always be revved up again. The plastic might break. The paint might chip. But the only way for a beyblade to live is by spinning, going head to head, clashing metal against metal and letting the sparks of passion fly between them.
When I was a child this fucking asshole at school bought one of those chinese bootleg gold defense rings; you know, the kind that I'm pretty sure were made of recycled sawblades that tore up any stadium it was a part of? It destroyed our beys left and right. Kids tried to use techniques from the tv show like rotating your arm during a launch, or launching right on top of that monster in hopes of dislodging it. No matter what we did he always won. He was cheating to the top of the school. This is where I learned the first thing about tackling powerful, imposing figures in life: you learn how to play the players.
So we stole his beyblade and threw the gold ring into the sewer grate. He cried, of course. But the rest of us looked between each other and our torn up beyblades in our hands, how this guy didn't care how many allowances he destroyed in his quest for glory, and how it was only through our collective answer to his bullshit that actually stopped him, that I as a 9-year-old child finally understood the purpose of government and revolution.
Beyblades taught me many lessons in life. But the most important lesson of all? To fight for what you believe in even if you get your teeth kicked in over and over again.
You eat ground.
And get back up again.
Let it rip.