This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
Here’s how that happened. One night, I started drinking around 7:00 p.m., watching Fight Club, playing poker, and bouncing between video games like usual. If you’ve seen Fight Club, there’s that scene where they just let go of the steering wheel, floor it, and drive the car off the road. I’d watched that movie too many times and had been drinking for about ten hours straight, mostly vodka with Dr. Thunder as usual. At around 5:00 a.m., I decided to drive to Waffle House because I was starving. I came up on a turn I knew well. Sober, you shouldn’t take it faster than about 20 miles per hour. Even at 20, you risk sliding. That night, I floored it. The speedometer shot past 40 miles per hour. My reaction time was completely shot from the alcohol, and by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. I was already going over the curb.
I hit that curb at about 40 miles an hour. The impact deployed the airbags and knocked one of the wheels completely out of alignment on the axle. Somehow, the car still drove. I slid off into the grass, fishtailing around at maybe 30 miles an hour, thankfully with nothing to crash into. Instead of stopping, I floored it, jumped the curb again, and got back onto the road. At that point, I was already committed to being an absolute idiot. There was a concrete median up ahead, and rather than drive down to make a proper U-turn, I drove straight over that too. I remember thinking, I already went over one curb, why not a median while I’m at it? I needed to get home immediately. This was a DUI waiting to happen.
It was early morning and the sun hadn’t come up yet. The roads were mostly empty except for cops and a few people heading to work. I pulled up next to a guy on a motorcycle at a light. He looked over at me, raised his eyebrows like, what the fuck happened to you? My windshield was cracked, the wheel was visibly fucked up, and the car was wobbling but still moving. Somehow, I made it back to the apartment complex, parked it, and dealt with getting it towed the next day. Then I called my parents around noon. I was a disaster.
Later that day, I made the mistake of calling one of the hot girls I’d been close to hooking up with that first night out partying—the one I’d carried back to the dorm when she got drunk—but this time I called her crying after the car wreck. That was the end of that. She wanted nothing to do with me after that. From her perspective, I probably sounded like a whiny bitch, and honestly, there was truth to that. I told my parents about the wreck. They were distraught. For the first time ever, I tried to quit drinking. I made it one week.
That week felt unbearable. All my friends were still drinking. I felt incredibly sorry for myself. I tried distracting myself with video games, but the thought kept coming back: I can’t miss senior year being sober. I was convinced I’d be a complete loser if I didn’t drink. So I started again, telling myself I’d just control it this time.
Right after that week trying to stay sober and relapsing, I went to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I’d just wrecked my car and was on probation at my job as an RA, so things weren’t exactly going well. The meeting was small—eight people total. My boss was there, along with six others. We sat around a table with everyone but me drinking coffee. I was sober and had no idea what to expect. One by one, the others shared. One person talked about being so drunk while cleaning a house that the whole place flooded. Another talked about sneaking around to buy beer, hoping nobody who knew him would see. Listening to them, my internal reaction was brutal. I thought they were pathetic. Old losers who couldn’t drink right. People who had failed at life. I told myself I was nothing like them.
My boss shared next. He didn’t say he was an alcoholic. He just spoke with real understanding about how drinking can touch people’s lives. That empathy probably saved my job. Then it was my turn. I said my name. I didn’t identify as an alcoholic. I mostly talked about my dad’s drinking because I couldn’t be fully honest with my boss sitting there. When the meeting ended, people asked if I wanted a sponsor. I said no. They asked if I wanted a white chip. I said no. My boss drove me home. As soon as I walked in, I poured two liquor drinks with two shots each. I was now drinking every single day. I wasn’t as active anymore. I used to play racquetball and basketball with friends regularly. I used to lift weights. ROTC physical training had been brutal but effective—two or three times a week, hour-long sessions of intense exercise. Push-ups in parking lots, uphill runs for miles in formation, collapsing at the end, completely spent, all starting at 5:30 in the morning. Once that was gone and drinking took over, the physical structure disappeared too. And with it went another layer of protection I didn’t realize I’d needed.
That period left me completely unmoored. I’d also discovered that Zia Juice sold these Oreo elation smoothies that had about a thousand fucking calories each, and I started downing them almost every day on campus. Between the drinking and those smoothies, I went over 200 pounds for the first time in my life. I felt totally out of control physically and mentally, even as I tried to convince myself I was still managing things. One thing that temporarily stabilized me was finding a girlfriend on Facebook. She lived in one of the women’s dorms. I friended her randomly, pretending we were in the same psychology class. Those intro classes had hundreds of people, so it wasn’t exactly a stretch. We ended up meeting in person, started dating, and she became my girlfriend. She liked drinking with me. We had sex. I told her I loved her and all the usual things. Being with her gave me some sense of balance, but it was a shallow kind. Even while she helped steady me, I was already resenting her because she interfered with what I really wanted, which was drinking with the guys.
I threw parties, drank, played video games, and often told her she couldn’t come over. There were nights when my friend and I stayed up until noon the next day. We wouldn’t even start hanging out until after midnight. We’d play Rise of Nations for hours, see who could absolutely wreck the AI, get completely wasted, then stumble across campus to Taco Bell for lunch at noon, drunk as shit in broad daylight. Then we’d go to bed. At the time, that felt like a perfect day. That was my idea of happiness: getting fucked up and playing Rise of Nations until the sun was high in the sky.
By then, I was spiraling hard. I was over 200 pounds, drinking constantly, and even though I felt like I couldn’t stop if I wanted to, I wasn’t ready to admit that. More and more fucked-up things kept happening. One night, I had a few hundred dollars on PokerStars and worked my way into a $500 heads-up match. It was one-on-one poker: you put up about $525, they rake twenty-five bucks, and the winner takes $1,000. I’d already won a $100 heads-up and a $250 heads-up to get there. I was right on the edge of another big win—and then I lost. I completely lost my shit.
I trashed my dorm room. I smashed keys off my keyboard, knocked things over, punched the walls, and eventually passed out on my bed with the lights still on. When I woke up the next morning, the room looked like a war zone. It honestly looked like Afghanistan or Iraq—shit everywhere, total chaos. There was blood smeared on the walls because at some point I’d cut my hand open. I looked around and felt almost nothing. I tried to go back to sleep, telling myself I’d deal with it later. I snapped the keys back onto the keyboard so I could play video games again and took a day off drinking. Some days I skipped afternoon classes because I’d drank so much the night before. This was the heaviest drinking period of my life. There were plenty of weeks where I drank every single day, no breaks, no recovery, just a continuous blur of alcohol, games, poker, and avoidance, with my life slowly collapsing around it.
By spring break that year, my life had shrunk to something depressing and small. Everyone else was out of town except one friend I’d lived with the year before, and the highlight of my spring break was getting drunk and playing World of Warcraft with him. The day before that, I’d had an even worse idea. I got on a Greyhound bus planning to go to Daytona Beach by myself, already drunk at 7:00 a.m. after drinking all night. I brought alcohol on the bus even though you’re not supposed to. About an hour into the ride, reality finally broke through. I started feeling sick, dizzy, and exhausted. I realized how unbelievably stupid this was. I was looking at ten hours on a bus to Daytona Beach in that condition, and there was no chance it was going to end well. I got off, switched my ticket to go home, and made it back home by noon. I was sober enough by then to feel deeply ashamed and relieved at the same time. Thank God I turned around. Stuff like that just kept happening—impulsive plans followed by humiliating retreats.
It’s honestly amazing that I even graduated. The only reason I did was because the classes were easy and I was smart enough to do the bare minimum. I coasted. In some classes, I even resorted to cheating. A lot of the coursework was just memorizing pointless information, and I decided I wasn’t going to waste my energy on it. I made tiny cheat sheets—little scraps of paper with abbreviations and letter codes that would look meaningless to anyone else. To me, they mapped authors to plays, concepts to names, whatever the class demanded. In theater class especially, it was all rote memorization, and I justified cheating by telling myself the professors were being lazy and stupid. Today, with phones, cheating is even easier, which says something about the system. Somehow, despite all of this, I graduated.
My career planning was a disaster just like my college applications. I finished college with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and nothing lined up except a summer internship. No real job. No real direction. I was about to move in with a roommate I barely knew. I went to graduation hung over from drinking the night before. My parents were there, proud and relieved. I had no car. And when I really stopped to look at it, the contrast was brutal. Four years earlier, I’d gone to college with my health intact and my life pointed upward. Four years later, my insides—my physical health, my emotional stability—were completely wrecked.
From there, things didn’t magically improve. The deterioration continued. That’s why I generally don’t recommend college to people. For me, college was one of the worst things I ever did to myself. It caused damage that took an enormous amount of effort to undo, as you’ll see. Did I have fun? Yes. There was laughter. There were moments I genuinely enjoyed, and I try to honor that honestly. But the cost was enormous—and the story doesn’t even get better yet. After college, it gets crazier. And it gets darker.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.