The Heart of the House of Skills

by Crazy Ivan


Kid and I stayed up late last night chatting about the brief history of the House of Skills.  For many Myachi Masters, that represents the beginning of their involvement with Myachi, but for Kid and I, it only represents the most recent chapter.  Monk had been with us for over a year when we moved to Forest Hills and Mav had already been on board for quite some time as well.  Animal had been a part of things on and off for a while, but he started full-time Myachi employment only a few months before we signed the lease on the House of Skills.

So Kid and I were contrasting it, as we often do, with life in the Myachi Mobile before it.  Obviously life it a bit more comfortable now.  The House of Skills is about 12 times the size of the Myachi Mobile and it had fully functioning plumbing so there's that.  There's also the fact that the House of Skills is big enough to hold all our stuff and still have room to play.  There's also the foosball table, the ping pong table, the slack line out back and the presence of a real kitchen.

The Myachi Mobiles (there were two of them, after all), saw a few variations in residency as time went on.  The very first tour in the very first Myachi Mobile consisted of Myachi Man and his buddy Goldie and that was it.  Eventually Goldie left and Kid Myach and I joined in (along with some temporary stints by Big Dog, Butter and Animal).  Throughout those years we never stayed in one place for more than a couple of months at a time.  The Myachi Mobile was our home, but motel rooms, friend's couches and cabins occasionally augmented it.

At that time, to be a Myachi Master was to be in motion.  It was a nomadic lifestyle that demanded the ability to live with very few possessions and with few constant friends.  Of course, it's easy to make friends when you have Myachi to lubricate all your social encounters, so the lifestyle was as rewarding as it was demanding.

And then things started to change and NYC became an inferno of a hot-spot for us.  Before long we had all but retired the Myachi Mobile and all gotten apartments in and around the five boroughs.  Now, I think it's safe to say that even if you've never been to New York City, you probably know that it's one of the most expensive places to live in the world.  It had the highest living cost of any city in the US by a pretty wide margin (San Fransisco is a distant second).  So the House of Skills was born of necessity when it became too expensive for all of us to find places to live.

But the House was also a dream we'd talked about for years.  Even when things were small, we foresaw a day when we could expand and hire a bunch of Myachi Masters.  There was talk about eventually renting a "House of Skills" even before I joined the company.  The concept of giving a bunch of Myachi Masters so much time in close proximity promised to revolutionize the game by creating an engine of unending challenges.

To that extent, the House of Skills has more than lived up to it's intended purpose.  Whenever one of us comes up with a new trick, variations on it show up in a matter of minutes.  New prop-adds and games show up on a regular basis and every record in the game is under constant challenge as the Myachi team relentlessly pushes the envelope of possibility.  Two, three and four man tricks and games can be tested out as soon as they're conceived and there's never a lack of test-subjects when we examine new products and new series.

But the true heart of the House of Skills is in the variety of people who occupy it.  A few people have come and gone, but even the past residence of the House left an echo of their skills.  The unique blend of talents that each resident brings forever alters the overall make-up of the house.

Kid Myach was an athlete all through high-school and college and that has really defined him as a person.  It also colors the way that he looks at the world and, more importantly, the world of Myachi.  Competition is key and accuracy is his strong point (he's a basketball player and a golfer, after all).  He brings a competitive nature to the House of Skills and often sees things in terms of team possibilities that the rest of us miss.

I bring something else to the table entirely.  I never really played team sports and was always more focused on individual accomplishments.  As a juggler, I spent countless hours perfecting odd nuances of skill with a myriad of props.  My focus always was (and still remains) finding new variations in existing tricks.  In the past that meant applying diabolo tricks to cigar boxes or contact juggling moves to poi, but now that I focus that lens on Myachi, it helps to keep the repertoire of known Myachi tricks ever-expanding.

Monk was a renaissance athlete in school as well.  He had a sport for every season growing up and played volleyball at the collegiate level.  He's also the most competitive person I've ever met in my life.  But unlike Kid Myach, he also focused for a long time on an individual skill; flair bar-tending.  Like juggling, this requires hours and hours of solitary refinement so Monk adds a strange synthesis of minute skill and athletic dedication.  Where my focus is forever on expanding my tricks, his is ever on perfecting.

Maverick comes to us from a background in footbag.  Like Kid and Monk, he was an athlete and focused on lacrosse, though he dabbled in a number of athletic endeavors.  The one that eventually caught his eye was, of course, footbag.  He proceeded to take this talent to a level that very few ever do.  Combined with an astounding level of confidence, his skills quite-literally know no bounds.  The tricks that scare off the rest of us are ready challenges to Mav and he almost always gets the best of them in the end.

Lucky comes from a background of performance.  Theater, song and dance and are his primary loves and this adds a new flair to the game.  While he's still catching up when it comes to Myachi-specific skills, two unschooled observers would never know that.  What he lacks in technical know-how, he makes up for in the theatricality he adds to his every move.

While still only a part-time resident, Bones adds a strange blend of skills to the mix as well.  Unlike the rest of us, Myachi is truly his first skill-based obsession.  His introduction to juggling, advanced footbag, balance props and skill-toys in general is all seen through the lens of a Myachi Maniac foremost.  This provides a strange "bottom-up" approach to new skills that none of the rest of us can match.

Even though they've moved on, Animal and Kore still left an indelible mark on the heart of the house as well.  Animal's focus on yo-yo and string based skills (as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of pop-culture) can be seen in Myachi tricks and Myachi trick names, but his greatest influence was to the art of STWAKOJ, which he all but revolutionized with his larger-than-life persona.  Kore's extreme-sport history and devil-may-care attitude helped to establish the very spirit of the House of Skills and it lives on every time a new longboard finds its way to our foyer.

The heart of the House of Skills is the people within it and as new people add their skills, personalities and aspirations to the game that heart grows ever larger.  I suppose it makes for a pretty good microcosm of the Myachi Movement itself.