One photo, three short stories. 1) This was taken the second to last time I ever fronted a band. That night because our drummer made me pay him out of my pocket so he could take an Uber home instead of getting on the train with his symbols. The guitarist and bassist had already left and I had to deal with the drummer's bullshit on my own and so I threw $40 at him and quit the band. The guitarist and bassist told me they would fire the drummer if I came back so I did and we played one more show and it was a complete disaster because we practiced exactly one time with the new drummer and we hadn't played in six months and I forgot half the words. 2) The guy in the photo is Badlands Booker aka Badlands Chugs, the vital competitive eater who chugs massive amounts of liquid on the internet. In like 2004 or 2005 someone gave me the Mp3s of his rap album which was all about competitive eating and I was obsessed and I think I still know an entire verse to one of his songs from back then. I ended up going to a bunch of Coney Island hot dog eating contests, booking a band I managed to be the opening act and then eventually covering it as a journalist. In the process I have become friendly with a bunch of competitive eaters including Badlands. 3) The woman in the photo is a friend of mine who years earlier I went on a date with. She interested in comedy and so I took her to my friend's weekly comedy night who often has some huge names show up to work on their sets and that night a pretty famous comedian came. We were all hanging out at the bar after the show and she was just hitting on him the whole time. She got kinda drunk and at one point she kicked me in the balls "as a joke" and then got really mad at me at the end of the night when I wouldn't go home with her. Somehow after all that we remained friends and a few years ago I did a "sexy" photo shoot for her for a comedy show flyer where she was in Agent Provocateur lingerie but wearing those glasses with the fake nose and mustache attached and holding a rubber chicken which if you made it this far I will post in the next cast. The end.

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Oh man I forgot about this until I hit send but before I lived in NYC I was managing a band and we played a show in the East Village and I met this girl who worked at the venue and got her number. I hit her up later but we never ended up meeting up. That night ended up being one of the biggest snowstorms in NYC history and we got stuck in NYC. The band and I had all split up to find couches to crash on and for some reason I couldn't stay with the person I crashed with the night before so I ended up hitting up the girl from the night before to ask her if I could stay with her. I think my friend Alex who was doing sound for us crashed on her couch and I ended up sleeping in her bed. I think it was my first proper one night stand and I did it 100% so that I didn't have to sleep on the floor. While we were hooking up I looked down and saw she had a lower back tattoo of some symbol but I didn't know what it was so after we were done I asked her what it was and she wouldn't tell me. We end up staying up until dawn and when the sunlight started pouring into her window I look up at a poster I hadn't seen the night before and it had the same logo. Oh my god she had a Hanson tramp stamp! Years later when I met Hanson I told them that story and they thought it was hilarious that my first one night stand was with a Hanson fan. Little bonus ending is that I have another friend who loved Hanson (they actually put on an amazing show) and I snuck her backstage to meet the band and she was there when I told that story. Apparently the Hanson base is small enough that she knew exactly who I was talking about just based on the tattoo. A few weeks later I get an email from the one night stand who I had not spoken with since that night because she found out I had told Hanson about her and thought that was amazing. Okay, the end of my pointless Hanson adjacent story.

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Mini story time: One time I was photographing a porn star I had met once before at her apartment and she was going through her clothes looking for an outfit to the shoot. She said something like "I have so many festival clothes but I don't go to enough festivals." I jokingly invited her to the Gathering of the Juggalos, since I was going the next weekend and she canceled some work and just came with me to the weirdest festival on earth in the middle of nowhere Indiana.

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It's been a while but I am about to drop a long thread on you with a lot of pictures. If you get anything out of this please share because I have a feeling it's going to take me a long time. A lot of times I think about defining moments of my career, big jobs, viral photos, successful art shows, media moments, book releases, etc. But as I slowly work on a new book that's more of a retrospective I have started thinking more about defining moments of my creative output. The beginning of course was when I picked up a camera for the first time... or at least shortly after. My first photo class in high school was fucking boring and I think everyone was surprised when I took Photo II but when I got to start shooting whatever I wanted my work got much better and I fell in love with it, documenting punk bands and my friends and I won some art awards and got recruited to art schools like I was an athlete or something.

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I tend to tell some crazy stories from time to time, so here's a super boring one. My fiance, Shannon, and I have very different sleep schedules. She goes to bed three hours before I do and she wakes up two hours before I do. It's actually great for both of us to have that little bit of alone time and we have different chores. Every night I make the coffee so all she has to do is press a button in the morning, and then when it's time for me to wake up she brings me some coffee. It works great... when she's in town. Shannon commutes to NYC for work twice a month for 3 or four days. Her flight is early in the morning so she wakes up at 4:30 am. Since I go to bed at 2am already, and I don't want to risk waking her up on a night where she's already not getting her 8 hours, I sleep on the couch for a bit and then crawl into bed when she gets up. Last night I couldn't get to bed until almost 3am and it took me a while to get back to sleep when she woke me up at 4:30. I am asleep for maybe 30 minutes when the fire alarm in my apartment building goes off and doesn't turn off for another half hour. I am now wide awake and it took me until nearly 7am to get back to sleep. At some point I cancel my 9am alarm and set one for 10am and when that thing goes off I am so deep in sleep that I am completely disoriented and I spend another thirty minutes just trying to be awake enough to get coffee. It's after 11am before I even get out of bed. So long, boring, story short, I am just now sitting down to the computer at 12:30pm, so gm.

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Let's drop a storytime on you guys cause I am in that kinda mood. It's gonna be a crazy one, the kind of story I used to tell (and post NSFW photos from) on AlfaFrens before that ended. Instead of crazy NSFW photos I will instead illustrate this X-Rated story with a very wholesome photo of my ex on her birthday. Anyway, back in my early 30s I was dating a fairly famous adult film star and I was on a photo shoot with a model and she mentioned she had a huge crush on my girlfriend so I arranged a photoshoot with both of them and we all hit it off, but the model had a boyfriend, and not only was he her boyfriend but they had been together her entire adult life and I believe they had lost their virginities to each other. Very wholesome. A few months later they ended up breaking up and my girlfriend suggested we take her on a date and she was all about it. The three of us got dinner together and went back to my girlfriend's place and had one of the craziest threesomes I have had in my life, and I have had an unfair amount and I took a lot of photos. She ended up staying over and the next day we all went to a pool party and ended up having sex in the pool in front of a bunch of people without them even knowing. It was a top tier 24 hours. My girlfriend lived in LA and I was in NYC and I left the next day but we kept in touch with the model. We had all these plans to hang out again next month, but less than a week later she got back with her dude and that was it. A year later she had a kid with him and I think they are married to this day. I have no idea if she ever told him about it, but could you imagine being in a relationship with your high school sweetheart and finding out during the one week you were broken up she had sex with only the second guy in her life and he was some creepy photographer, had her first gay experience, with a porn star, had her first threesome and all of it was on film? That is some shit I don't think you can come back from mentally. Anyway, I hope they are happy. The end.

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I met my friend Ginger at a party I shot for a tattoo magazine called Inked back in 2009. She wasn't actually a sex worker herself but she worked at a high end brothel in Manhattan and we talked about doing a photo documentary about the place, but unsurprisingly her bosses shut down the idea. But we did have dinner meeting about it. After the meeting we went to this club Happy Ending where a bunch of my friends threw two different parties, one on each floor. Downstairs there were all these areas that used to be massage rooms when it was a massage parlor. Ginger and I shot a bunch of sexy pictures of her back there. We had planned on just being there for a drink and a few dirty photos, but two girls who lived in my building showed up and they wanted to party. The three of them proceed to do exactly that and we all had a pretty fun time. I have been slowly going back through my archives and uploading photos to drivenbyboredom.com, the site I launched almost 25 years ago. All the photos from that night are up now, except for the NSFW ones that are on my pay site, dbb.im.

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Found out my friend Boddy died. I don't want to act like we were close or anything, I hadn't seen the guy since I moved to NYC in 2006, but he was a lunatic in the best way and his band, PCP Roadblock were so insane. I didn't even like their music but I would go see them any chance I could get because a) I loved all the guys in the band and b) they put on an insane show. The bloody photos in this post are from a show where Bobby tried to break a beer bottle over his head, or maybe it was a cinder block. I have the whole thing on an old mini DV tape somewhere. It was a small cut but there was so much blood. Just absolutely insane. But my favorite PCP Roadblock story I don't even have pictures from. We all lived in Richmond, VA at the time, the same town where Gwar is from, and Gwar asked them to open a show in DC at the famous 9:30 Club. That was the club I grew up in, it was all ages so I was going there starting when I was 14. I had to go with them. The crow turned on them almost immediately. They came to see Gwar, not this weird noise band, but what they didn't realize about PCP, is that when people hated them, they would intentionally play worse. Bobby shoved the mic all the way in his mouth and sang the rest of the show like that. All you could hear was grunts. He jumped around the stage like he was a gorilla. At one point the guitarist Andy got hit in the face with an audience member's cigarette and he casually picked it up, took a drag and then put it out on his tongue. They gave zero fucks. After the show someone set off the sprinkler system in their dressing room. Water poured out everywhere down on to the stage below, right above the mixing board, destroying a $50k piece of equipment. The staff called the owner of the club, himself a DC icon, and he told the staff to keep the band there until he got there. One of the bouncers cut the fuel line of their van so they couldn't leave. The owner of the club finally showed up and grabbed a hose and sprayed the band down, soaking them in the middle of winter and then just went back inside. My friend Barry was the person who told me that Bobby died. He wasn't in the band, but was traveling with them in the van that day and also got sprayed. He told me they banned them all from the 9:30 Club forever, but he told me he's been back a dozen times since and every time he wears his old PCP Roadblock shirt. RIP Dirty Bobby.

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I haven't told any long stories on Farcaster lately because they kinda stopped popping off and they take forever, but I was just reminded of one today that's pretty short. I don't have any good photos to illustrate it, but here it goes. I am on the Subway in NYC heading home to Brooklyn. I was on the L train and I lived by the Lorimer stop which is the second stop in Brooklyn after Bedford. As we pull into 1st Ave, the last stop in Manhattan, the train starts to fill up and an extremely pregnant woman is standing in front of me. I try to give her my seat, but she told me she was headed to Bedford and she didn't want to sit down only to have to stand back up one stop later. The train is packed so I have no real choice but to stare at her belly. I don't think smart phones weren't at thing at the time, and if they were you didn't get any reception under the East River anyway. Suddenly she starts kinda swaying and I look up at her just in time to see her eyes roll back in her head. I jump forward and catch her mid air and pull her on to my lap. I sit her down in my seat, but we are at her stop so I help her up and start to get off the train with her but someone else offers to help her since this is his stop. I watch out the window as her takes her over to a bench, and just leaves her there without so much as asking her if she's okay. He just goes about his business as she's slumped over in her seat as the train leaves the station and I can't do anything about it. Everytime I remember that story I get so upset that I didn't get off the train with her. I am sure she was fine, but maybe if I walked her home she would have named her kid after me. The end.

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Okay I got a good story for you guys today. I am gonna tell you about the first and last time I ever took LSD... 🧵

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Okay here's another story about me doing drugs, but this one isn't really a drug it's just weed, but it is maybe the highest I have ever been. I am pretty sure I told the story on here about how I accidentally got so high at Abella Danger's place that I almost split my head open and I realized that my body would be found, in my underwear, in the kitchen of a 20 year old porn star which I guess seems appropriate but not really the way I wanted to die. But the highest I have ever been happened in the same city (LA) almost exactly two years earlier... (Keep reading below...)

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Been slacking on crazy stories and stuff cause my life has taken a (positive/busy) turn but I promise I got some good stuff for you. Let me hit you with a quick one... *editor's note: It was not a quick one and I went on a very R-Rated tangent in the middle of the story so trigger warning or something. My friend Stevie came to visit NYC for a few days and stayed with me, but then she just never left. She didn't stay with me that whole time she was staying in a hotel between crashing with friends and she was just drinking a ton and one night we went out and she went into this sex shop and bought a whip cream canister and a bunch of N2O cartridges to do whip its. I hadn't done them in years but I did a couple with her and it was kinda fun and I didn't really think about it after that. A few weeks later she decided her drinking was too much and she just got on a flight and went to rehab. She didn't even take her stuff with her. For some insane reason she left her stuff with a girl that neither of us knew that well. I had gone on a single Tinder date with her and somehow I introduced them. Anyway, that girl was like "Stevie wants me to mail her all her shit, but I am not dealing with that". Of course I took care of it because I am way too nice of a person and I felt like I owed Stevie for one of the most insane experiences of my life: She got a Times Square hotel on New Years Eve that was a block from the ball drop. I had lived in NYC over a decade at that point and had never done any of that touristy shit but I wanted to hang out with her. Our plan was to watch it from the street, but the hotel windows opened so we could just see it drop from the window. You could just look out and see all the people down there waiting in the cold. I had an idea. She bent over stuck her torso out the window and I closed it on her and we had sex while she was just looking out at the crowd and watching it turn midnight. I was hiding behind the blinds so no one knew what was happening from below, but yeah it was insane. Sorry back to the story.... She called me from rehab and we went through her bag to take out stuff so it would be cheaper to mail. We pulled out her stripper heels and some warm clothes she wasn't gonna need in Florida and her whip cream canister. I didn't know what to do with it so I just put it in my kitchen. Fast forward three years and the pandemic happens. I am quaranting with a girl who I liked but all of a sudden we were spending so much time together and it was maybe too much. We were so bored and one day when we were ordering our groceries we saw the local bodega sold N2O canisters so for some reason we bought a box and did them, and then a few days later did it again and all of a sudden I am doing whipits like a high school student or something and that's when I knew I had to maybe stop seeing this girl. Ultimately I ended stuff with her and threw away that canister when I moved. That girl is now a tattoo artist and seems to be doing okay. Stevie actually got sober, and also religious and blew me off last time we made plans so we stopped talking, but hoping she's doing okay too. The end of this story that suddenly got way too long.

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If you guys like my stories you'll enjoy this post about how I became friends with a bunch of competitive eaters and how I got incredible access to photograph Joey Chestnut's first hot dog eating win. https://www.drivenbyboredom.com/2025/07/04/hot-dog-eating-contest-2007/

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Since I am headed to LA today I figured I could drop an LA storytime. This one might be a long one but people are always asking how I got into photographing the adult industry so you might like this one. You are gonna wonder where it's going but it gets there in the end... It starts in 2009 in line for a party -- a party I should not have been in line for. I was freelancing for VICE Magazine at the time and they had tried to hire me to shoot a party they were throwing in NYC, but I couldn't make it because I was in LA. I didn't know it at the time but that exact same party was happening in LA and my friend Jessie (on the right in the photo) wanted to go. She was sleeping with this well known drummer who happened to be DJing the party. We assumed he would get us in, but by the time we got there he was on stage and couldn't text us so I am texting my editor at Vice while we wait in a VERY long line. While we are waiting we start talking the people in front of us in line...

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Holy shit

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