Retiring a Myachi

by Crazy Ivan

When someone says that a Myachi has been "retired", there are two things they might mean by that.

If they're referring to a type of Myachi (and they usually are), they're referring to the fact that Myachi doesn't make that particular sack any more.  For example, "I want to get a Blue Beard, but unfortunately it's retired".  All Myachis retire after a certain amount of time, which is why they become collectible.

But there is another and less often used meaning for the term.  If someone is talking about a specific Myachi and they say it's retired, they're referring to the fact that they just don't use that Myachi anymore.  For example, "I have a sumpoy Eco-Kids Green, but it's retired."  This essentially means that they still own that Myachi, but they don't jam with it any more.

This is different than just owning a sack you never jam with.  If you picked up a Yellow Wetsuit Paper-Tag, odds are you wouldn't spend a lot of time jamming with it.  You might do a few tricks with it just to see how it feels, but the Wetsuit would be way to valuable to be your every day jammer.  This one would probably sit in a tube on top of your collection and would never really be a jammer.

In that instance, you wouldn't say that your Yellow Wetsuit was retired.  It was valuable when you got it.  Saying that your Myachi is "retired" implies that you used to jam with it all the time but no longer do.

There are several reasons a Myachi player might retire a sack.  Most often, a Myachi is retired when it starts showing distressing signs of wear.  If the stitching on one corner, for example, seems to be stretching out, you might realize that this sack is getting close to a blow out.  You could probably get another few weeks or even months of jamming out of it and most often you would, but if you really liked that particular Myachi, you might just retire it so it never has to lose sauce.

But a Myachi doesn't have to be on its last leg to be retired.  Sometimes it's pure sentimentality that convinces someone to retire their Myachi.  Imagine that you have this Diggity and it's a great jammer and you've had it forever and it's your go-to Myachi.  But you find that you like that Myachi so much that whenever you take it out, you're terrified that it'll get lost in a grating or slip into an elevator shaft.  You love to jam with it, but you're on the edge of a heart-attack whenever you do.

That's another good time to retire a sack.  Let's face it; if you jam with a Myachi a lot, eventually it will likely get lost or land in a place from which it can't be retrieved.  At a certain point a Myachi is so personally valuable that you don't want to take that risk any more.

But there are a few retired sacks in my collection that were instantly retired.  Sometimes a Myachi just has a story to it and that's enough to keep you from ever jamming with it again.  When I met Jackie Chan, he pulled a Cold Fusion with the Red Line I had that day.  The instant he handed it back to me, it was retired.  Now it sits atop my shelf with sacks 100 times rarer so that when somebody asks "what's the deal with this one?" I can launch into my Jackie Chan story.

I got to thinking about this today when I was on the forum.  Champ had a Coreyster that went south on him the other day.  This is a Myachi he sought in trades, the first one he ever got in a mail-trade and it was his primary jammer for a long while.  Yesterday it started to longboard early and by the end of the day it was beyond saving (not that he didn't put in some effort to keep it going).  In the end, this one kind of retired itself.

Perhaps I should do the same thing.  Perhaps instead of retiring my sacks when they get close I should just jam them out.  But I just can't stand the part where you have to have the heartfelt goodbye.  After all, is there really any point in having a Myachi that you never jam with anymore?

When I glance at the top shelf of my collection, it's obvious that in my opinion, the answer is a resounding "yes".