For a long time I’ve wanted to write about some of the incredible people I have met throughout my misadventures. I finally bit the bullet and told a story about my friend Igor a couple of posts back. It was a lot of fun to write, and I learned that if there’s nothing to write about, I know I will always have a wealth of stories to tell about the unique people I have met…and there have been many, trust me. I am having a ball with these, so you can expect to see more in the future. For now, here’s some background…

When I moved to Colorado from Virginia, I did so with one carload of my possessions. I left VA for a variety of reasons; the biggest one being that I couldn’t find a job. After my clothing store closed I was pretty destitute and I had a lot of trouble finding a job. I came across a roadblock like this from time to time.  This one found me living out of my car on the streets of Virginia Beach, not even able to get a part-time job at 7-11. I knew it was time to pick-up and move on.

The first office job I ever got happened about a month after I moved back into Denver. It was a domain name registrar in a small brick loft upstairs from Paris on the Platte, on 15th. The company was called DomainSite and we also ran a younger registrar called name.com out of that office. Soon after I was hired we moved into a much fancier office in Lowry, where I spent the next four years.

The owner of these companies is a man named Bill Mushkin. Bill had lived a life much, much different than mine. It was hard for me to relate to him at times, at least partly because of those differences. I’m sure I took him by surprise from time to time too. Bill’s kindness, shrewd business sense and marked individuality is pretty amazing. I saw my boss weather strife both in business and personally. In good times, as well as in bad, I got to see Bill use his skill and authority to carve his business out of intentions as good as the values that they were born from.Throughout my tenure at this job I learned a lot more than the domain name racket.

Bill’s uniqueness shines through everything he does. Anyone who knows him can bear testimony. He took me in and made me a part of his company, almost literally off of the street. Four years later I had knowledge of what I wanted to do and I was headed in the right direction.

Here are a couple of things that I learned during that time.

1. Beware of overspecializing
   It’s hard to find your way by a single path. If you have the ability to create something large, you should already know how to manage the little things. It is also true that that in order to reach vast depths, you have to start in the shallows. Bill has been, among other things, a Wall Street trader, college professor  and also founded a few wildly successful (and some starkly different) companies.
2. Learn to adapt
   When water comes out of the faucet it takes the shape of the container it falls into, filling each angle and curve. It can be a tiny drop, or a gigantic ocean; vapor, fluid & ice. Striving to be a successful, real-live, human company that serves an international customer base while maintaining a small staff with high morale… you have to adapt. If you can separate certainty from your path, when you overcome one obstacle easily, you will have already overcome every obstacle you will encounter.
3. Do not compromise your identity
   Specifically I mean matters of business and making your living. Businesses can be large or small, and industry continues to evolve with a life of its own. A freelancer who serves a handful of clients is not entirely different from an established company in a global marketplace. The difference comes in that the larger a company gets, the slower and less maneuverable it becomes.  Individuals are able to move more quickly and are less predictable.  Knowing one’s self, and one’s own strengths and limitations come only with practice. Every moment is a decisive one and a slack mind can equal certain defeat.
4. Own your style
   Style is relative. There are old styles, new styles and different styles in every way of thought. The most efficient method of developing your own style is to clearly understand the styles of others. Morals, ideas and reasonable people will always conflict, no matter how you choose to act. Some will try to actively understand style, but still fall far from the mark. It is natural to misunderstand people, and small misunderstandings become large ones. If you are  cognizant of your ethics, and you pay close attention to the intentions of others, you will avoid dangerous faux pas.
5. Appreciate nature
   No, I don’t mean go hiking. Nature is circumstances and it is chaos. It is incalculable; it has no beginning and no end. Nature is complete and unhindered freedom within the bounds of Natural Law. Only by knowing the nature of circumstance will you have the ability to develop strategy. There is rhythm in every situation. Once you have found this rhythm you will come to solutions without effort.

I’m hearing a lot more buzz about name.com around town lately, and I think it’s great. Name.com is sponsoring local nerd events and is keeping up an incredibly fun and friendly social media presence. I like seeing new people getting excited about my old company and I thought it was important to also know about the CEO, social leader and loving father who was responsible.

Thanks Bill.

Image above © name.com 2010

                          

Nate (Igor) was the first blogger I ever met and I always kept up with what he was doing. I was a few years out of any kind of party scene and he was in New York photographing these amazing parties. We kept in touch and I have been helping him out with his web projects on and off for years. I didn’t realize his reach until last summer, when I was in visiting my mom in Falling Waters West Virginia. She was asking me about the projects I had done and I brought up Igor. I was shocked, and a little mortified when she told me that she knew about his blog and reads it all the time. Well fuck what you heard because my mom reads Driven By Boredom.

Photo by Igor VA 200?

Richmond Virginia was an awesome town to live in. It was truly the definition of punk rock, as in it wasn’t uncommon to be walking down the street in The Fan and pass a couch that somebody set on fire, in the middle of the night. If you’re into Missy Elliott, Avail, Municipal Waste, Steve Earle, Pig Destroyer, Neko Case, Mae, GWAR, Lamb of God, Day By Day, Strike Anywhere, The Neptunes or (dare I)…Bruce Hornsby, then you might already know that Virginia is a party all the time. Our upstairs neighbor hung out with Igor and we all kicked it together from time to time. Igor had a web site, and I thought that was pretty cool.

Igor never drinks, except for once a year on his birthday. I’d love to tell you about that time, but I was out well before he was. One of my favorite Igor party tricks was hot dog swallowing. At one of my house parties he got into a hot dog swallowing contest with my friend Kimmy. Kimmy was a 7 foot tall, bleach blond bombshell. Daisy dukes, horn-rim glasses and covered head-to-toe with tattoos of cars and weapons. This girl was in it to win it, like she had something to prove. Igor smoked her by gutting 6 whole hot dogs in a row. It was truly Epic.

The Gaskets

Not long before I left Igor started managing a goofy little pop duo called The Gaskets. He started shopping them around at Richmond open mic shows, and before too long they were getting booked… to open for motherfucking “Weird Al” Yankovic. They released a couple of albums, and played a bunch of shows. One of the two, Teddy Blanks, went off on his own and recorded a really cool  cover of Headache by Frank Black. You can still hear it on Teddy’s MySpace page.

Erotica LA 2009

You’re either made to live in Richmond, or you were bound to visit. Not to long after I left town, Igor set off for New York City to make The Gaskets stars, I think. What happened was a bit different. We didn’t stay in touch too much, however he’s a big Miami Dolphins fan so there was always a lot of shit talk at football season. The Gaskets broke up and Igor started focusing a lot of attention going to these sweet parties and taking tons of pictures. After years of plugging along he ended up developing a pretty solid following. His work became more and more popular, and he started getting contracts at music conferences, film festivals and Andrew W. K. shows.

Off Broadway Awards After Party

Kuato

This is the part where I just spent over an hour looking through Igor’s pictures, trying to decide which ones to talk about. I’ve went way over my time budget for this blog, so I’m just going to list my top 5 favorite Driven By Boredom photos in no particular order.

• Robert Redford checks out Andie MacDowell’s boobs
• The porn star with the freckles (NSFW)
• Lou Reed
• Cortney Love
• Re-Re-Penetrator zombies (NSFW)

So now you know Igor. If nothing else, subscribe to Driven By Boredom in your reader for a while. If you have a weak constitution, a closed mind, freaked out by extreme sleaze or anything like that…don’t sign up for his Christmas card list. Who knows though, my mom’s into it. Wussy.