THE OPPOSITE OF MY ADDICTION Copyright ©2018 by RehabbingFishMedia This book is licensed under a Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) You are free: to share, to copy, distribute and transmit this work. You may not use this material for commercial purposes or distribute modified content. Distributed by RehabbingFishMedia www.rehabbingfish.com Introduction Chapter One: September, 2017 - Crash and Rebirth Chapter Two: October, 2017 - Hope Chapter Three: November, 2017 - Recalibrating Chapter Four: December, 2017 - Perseverance Chapter Five: January, 2018 - Survival Chapter Six: February, 2018 - Reflection Chapter Seven: March, 2018 - Rise Chapter Eight: April, 2018 - Relaunch Conclusion Seattle June - 2018 My mind races through my contact base of rappers, powerful models, famous poker players, local cannabis industry giants and journalists in multiple industries. The thoughts of startup CEOs, business owners, investors, my teams and many other intriguing individuals enter the picture. Unfortunately, I must also dwell on the horrific haters, trolls, and hackers who attack my websites, integrity, family and my work. How an Uber driver in gambling addiction recovery could associate with such a unique group of people is a solid question indeed. The following memoir is a documentation of the end of thirty-one years of gambling addiction and first eight months of my recovery. Intertwined throughout the story are facets of my unique journey navigating through multiple billion-dollar industries while trying to carve a piece of the startup world for myself, my associates, and my family. INTRODUCTION Chicago West Suburbs 1972 - 1996 I was destined to be an explorer from a young age. My father was the co-founder of an experiential learning program at a local community college in the suburbs of Chicago. During his career, he led groups of students into different environments all over the United States and the world. I tagged along on many of these trips and was given a childhood that many dream about. Summers were spent exploring Native American sites, canoeing rivers, visiting the islands and on many more adventures all over the Western Hemisphere. In addition to these exciting trips, my mother worked for a major airline doubling my travel benefits. Being told I was going to an exotic Caribbean country or to a beautiful Latin American destination was a common occurrence in my childhood. In a sense, my early years were perfect. Along with travel, I had tons of friends, was a decent athlete, a near average student and my future was bright. This dream was shattered when I turned fourteen when social anxiety, depression and addiction began to set-in. My love of gambling started at a young age. My family on my father’s side would hold huge poker games at family functions. The rule was you had to be fourteen to play, so I spent years watching. I was fascinated by the cards, chips and the banter. While I had to wait to play with my family, this rule did not pertain to my friends. We started to gamble as early as twelve. It would start out with spare change and by the time we got to high school, it would develop into pots of over twenty dollars. This was big time in the mid-80s. My grandfather on my mother’s side taught me how to play craps at a very early age. We would only play for pennies, but it grew my obsession with gambling. By the time I was sixteen, I was making weekly trips to the horse tracks in the Chicago-land area. Dropping a couple hundred on sports was common with a local bookie. I graduated high school in 1990, and six days later entered boot camp at Ft. Dix, New Jersey in the U.S. Army. I joined the Army Reserves as a legal specialist (military version of a paralegal). I later transferred to the Illinois National Guard and trained to be a military policeman. A few days after I graduated from boot camp, I entered as a freshman at Western Illinois University. Within a week, I started to play poker with my floormates in the common room in our dorm. Luckily, I did decent playing poker and money was never the problem. The gambling at this time just let me connect with an ever-growing addiction. I studied Law Enforcement Administration with a goal to become a police officer in the future. I was always fascinated by justice and wanted to become a person who helped others. I graduated university in 1993, one year ahead of my peers. During this time, I was already demonstrating abilities to hack systems for my benefit. My method in this case, was to use credits earned through the military, going to summer school and using credits I earned through classes I took at the local community college while I was in high school. My university years were the favorite time of my life. I had a lot of friends, partied, and met a lot of ladies the first two years away at school. My third year at university, I settled down with my first serious girlfriend. I graduated early because I wanted to go to graduate school under my Illinois National Guard scholarship. I ended up doing an internship with the San Diego Police Department. During the day, I would work the desk for missing juveniles and at night cross the border to Tijuana to gamble at the sportsbooks. After my internship, I returned to the Chicago area and took a succession of crappy jobs. A few months after returning home at the age of twenty-one my gambling addiction took a turn for the worse. A few guys I knew from high school and I started to visit the riverboat casinos in the area. One of the dudes was a successful blackjack card counter and pure insanity was about to take place. We pooled our money together. After months of daily visits, we ran a few thousand to up over fifty thousand dollars. My friend was an amazing controlled gambler and we were at the point where we could print money. Please keep in mind, this was in early 90’s money and 50k to a couple of young twenty-somethings was a ton of cash. The casino gave us comps that included hotel rooms, food, merchandise, limo use, and access to a private lounge. In time, our little blackjack group went from four to just two. The instructions were issued that I would not play and to let the card counter do all the work. I stuck to this while we were in the casino together, but I would go to the riverboats on my own time. I ended up losing a great deal of my new-found wealth and the reality set in that I was a losing gambler. My friend and I split ways over time, and I forgot about the riverboat casinos for a bit. My next stop was getting a job with Eagle Snacks as a route driver. This gig would help me develop skills that would come to great use later in life. Unfortunately, many of the other drivers would sports bet and I started to make large wagers through their bookies. After a year, I got myself into big debt with the bookies, but was able to dig myself out. I was twenty-three by this time and drifting aimlessly. In February of 1996, I took a vacation to Hawaii to visit a friend I knew since middle school. While on vacation I was reading the local paper and saw my company went out of business. I was stunned and called the company back home. They told me I would be receiving two weeks severance pay and a pat on the back for a job well done. I went back to the Chicago area to grab my car and say my goodbyes. It was time to move to Hawaii. Hawaii 1996 - 2000 For three months, I looked for a job while I went to the beach, played golf and enjoyed the island living. I finally caught a break and was hired on as a route salesman for Frito-Lay, the mothership of all snack foods companies. At Frito-Lay, I learned a lot about marketing, distribution and logistics. The staff at the company was huge and I picked up skills working with an aggressive company that had high standards. I really enjoyed my co-workers who were mostly Japanese, Hawaiian and other Asian nationalities. I lived in Hawaii for almost four years. It felt like I was living in a foreign country at times. It was a great building block experience for my future globetrotting. During my time in Hawaii, I met a woman while playing tennis and we got married. She was incredibly talented, highly intelligent and quite beautiful. In 2000, she was offered a professional opportunity in the Inland Empire of Southern California. It was a great deal and we ended up moving from my island paradise. It was incredibly rough moving from such an ideal place to an area that many consider completely desolate. Southern California 2000 - 2007 I was able to transfer jobs with Frito-Lay and started working in the sticks of the Inland Empire with a bad attitude. One morning I rolled my car and sustained injuries that made it hard to work off a route truck. I ended up quitting a job at a major company that I really enjoyed after four and a half years. My wife and I separated six months after I quit my job, and I was forced to find my own place. The collapse of our marriage was 100% my fault. I had very little money and was stuck in the Inland Empire. I got a job as a substitute teacher in a large district in the valley. I started to sub at one middle school a lot and the principal offered me a full-time teaching job. I started to teach 7th and 8th grade English and social studies. I was given three years to get my teaching credential. I started a program which included a credential and master's degree. During my first year of teaching, I also started to coach a junior varsity tennis team at a nearby high school. This decision to coach would change my life as it opened serious career opportunities all over the world. I spent three years teaching in this position and coached the varsity team my last year. At this time, I had periods of non-gambling, but in the end, I succumbed, and it caused serious problems. I was making enough money where I had a new townhouse and nice car, but lost it all due to a massive gambling binge. My life started to crumble around me and I started to develop serious depression issues. I was at the point where I was about to die. I was rescued by family support and the understanding of the mental health issues that developed. Gratefully, I was offered a tremendous opportunity in a special community. I was hired as a teacher and coach at a small school in the middle of nowhere in the California desert. I went from semi-desolation in the Inland Empire to complete Sticksville in a town of 3,000 people (7,000 in winter season). While I was still a mess, I was able to recover from my depression and be functional as a human being. The school was an interesting part of my life as I was very active with sports, school doings, and sad to say, a whole boatload drama at times. It was an incredible learning experience, and was probably the single most important part of my career development. I made amazing friends in the town and had great memories of working with athletes and students. I battled with many students and athletes over my three years at this school. I noticed the people I had the most conflict with usually ended up with us making amends and had a stronger relationship in the future. I call this “bonding with former enemies”, something that comes into play with my story. Tragedy struck our community in the form of a horrific car accident. One of our students died and several others were seriously injured. I was a coach or teacher of every student in the accident and my life, like many others, was completely changed. I decided to live my life to the fullest. It was time to move out of a small town in the middle of nowhere to a place where I truly wanted to live. I was a winning poker player during this time. I used to play local games and raked in a nice cash flow at low stakes and was making once a month trips to a casino with mixed results. I was not a bleeding gambler at this point. I quit blackjack as I was fascinated by the poker craze and thought I could be a winning big-time poker player in the future. We will learn soon learn what a bad idea this was. I found a job teaching in Honduras as a P.E. teacher and athletic director. I found the opportunity at an international teacher job fair that takes place every year in Iowa. It was an exciting time, I got a job at the school that was number one on my list at the fair. These job fairs are total crapshoots and many teachers just take what is offered. I was very lucky to hit my dream school and country. I was really interested in Honduras seeing the country is a natural paradise that for most parts has not been spoiled by over-tourism due to fears of crime and violence. There are areas of Honduras that can be considered semi-safe if you’re smart and not some sort of narcotrafficker. Mountains, beaches, islands, rivers, and much more, Honduras is a true natural paradise. I was very excited at the age of thirty-five to be going on a new adventure, but I had to wreck myself first. While backpacking in Idyllwild, a beautiful town in the mountains of Southern California, I had a little accident. I almost had my own little episode of that show I Shouldn’t Be Alive. I ended up tearing my ACL and meniscus high up in the mountains. I had a serious problem with my departure to another country in three months. Honduras 2007 - 2009 I had a rushed surgery and recovery. Sadly, I went to Honduras a hobbled man. Like an idiot, within three weeks I hurt my knee again. I had to fly home to have another surgery, but only on the meniscus and the recovery in the States was less than a week. Honduras was as amazing as I thought it would be. I bought a small motorcycle and rode all over the area around the city of La Ceiba. I visited islands and explored other parts of the country. My job at the school was intense and demanding, yet still rewarding in many ways. I was the school’s 1st - 12th grade physical education teacher, athletic director and coach of many sports. It was a wonderful experience I will never forget. The students and staff at the school were incredibly lively, nice and fun to be around. I have many lifetime local and foreign friends from this part of my life. Gambling was not an issue for me these two years. My issues were revolved around relationships, life in general and partying too much. I made a lot of mistakes during this time, but also learned more in two years than I had in a lifetime. I decided it was time to move on, wanting to see more of the world. I went back to the job fair in Iowa and found a job in Colombia that had interesting dynamics. The fact the school was on a coal mine in the middle of nowhere scared the shit out of me. I was kind of desperate, it was the only offer I received at the job fair. I also was completely intrigued by going to Colombia. The contract was only for one year, so I just decided to jump in. I could write a ten-page story on what a disaster that three-day job fair was all about. In the end, it all worked out, it led to massive changes that were needed in my life. While I was in Honduras, I visited many other countries in Central America. On one trip to Costa Rica I rented a big motorcycle and toured the country. It was complete insanity going through rivers, small villages and over mountains. I will never forget how fun this trip was. Colombia 2009 - 2011 I decided to buy a motorcycle on arrival in Colombia. I ended up buying a Kawasaki KLR 650, and rode around Colombia for a whole summer. It was an epic trip and will remember it being a highlight of my life. I had such freedom on the motorcycle and was in a spectacular country. Colombia has amazing people, culture, geography, and a way of life that can only be appreciated by visiting. After my two months of traveling over a great part of Colombia, I had to report to the coal mine. My time at the coal mine was rough. I felt isolated and in a strange position. I would leave almost every weekend for ten months on my motorcycle. I would go to a city called Valledupar, which is the New Orleans of Colombia. A vivacious city with a sizzling zest for life. I had a bad stretch of time when my bike would break down and I was completely horrified with having to stay on the coal mine for the weekend. I got to work with amazing students and co-workers during my time at the school and I’m glad I had the experience. During my stay in Colombia, I started to participate on a forum called, Poor But Happy. This was the first time I was active on these types of sites and really enjoyed the ability to exchange information so easily. The lame part about this site is it had massive trolling and harassment issues. It evidently shut down due to the problems. This was crazy as it was profitable and had massive traffic. It’s extremely rare for sites that make a profit to shut down in this manner, essentially abandoning a working gold mine. I was angry when this site went down, it provided critical information for navigating Colombia as a foreigner. I developed a great dislike for these trolls and haters. I didn’t realize at the time what an impact these dirt dwellers would play in my life in the future. I began to see these trolls everywhere when offshoot Colombia-based forums started to pop up. All the talk about starting businesses on the forum got me obsessed with the idea that I could start my own business in Colombia. While I enjoyed teaching, I was getting sick of the politics that always went with working at a school. I wanted to be my own boss and I also wanted a piece of the Internet pie. I started to search for ideas and thought I hit gold with one around the tourism industry and started to make business plans. I made a five-year game plan that I would execute from savings from teaching. The problem with my plan is that I hate to wait, and I caved in on the sensible plan. I ended up coming up with a new idea that entailed me getting into an incredibly difficult industry. In the summer of 2010, I launched my own print/digital travel guide company. This was probably the worst plan I ever had in my life, but it was quite the experience and I assimilated tremendous skills from this endeavor. Before it was all done, I went totally broke, got a knife put to my face, got scammed, extorted and more fun happenings through a series of mishaps. I also produced a travel guide that had a small distribution inside Colombia. I printed a crapload of books and while the book was not perfect, it had received positive reviews from within the industry. I had a digital version created that sold on Amazon Kindle and can still be found on my site gotocolombia.com. In addition to a version of the book, the site contains old blog posts you can check out in both English and Spanish. After I went broke, I had to go home back to the States. This was a fate worse than death. I had nowhere to go and had to stay with my parents. I spent most of my time playing online poker on a poker information site. I learned about Bitcoin off this site and made many contacts that I still have eight years later. After a few months of this, I found a job off the Internet and packed my bags for Asia. Taiwan 2011 - 2013 I was offered a teaching job at an American school in Taiwan that I could not pass up. The pay was decent, the school had a good rep and the country was known as a paradise for expats. My first vision of Taiwan was that of an industrial wasteland, but I found the complete opposite. Mountains, beaches and many other natural settings are easily found. I lived in Kaoshiung, the second biggest city on the island. The city was quite lively and had plenty to do. I liked Kaoshiung from the beginning and so did many of my expat friends in the city. It was a time for a new start, but I wasn’t ready, gambling would soon hit me with a full head of steam. Taiwan is one part of the world where gambling is nearly impossible to come across. Leave it to me to find not just one, but multiple underground poker games. Within a month, I was buying in for a couple hundred bucks, which led to thousands, and started a two-year period of massive poker degeneracy. My job at the school kept me busy, but I spent way too much time playing poker when I should have been focusing on relationships, personal growth, traveling around Asia, and my bank account. The first year I was a middle/high school English literature teacher. I also coached basketball and volleyball. The second year, I became the schools athletic and activities director. During my time in Taiwan, I took trips to Cambodia and Laos. I spent a lot of time in Cambodia playing poker, smoking weed, partying my ass off and exploring the country off a motorcycle. I started to have a great liking to both the country and the people. A freak conversation led my thoughts back to my project in Colombia. I could not get over my failures on my publishing company and dreamed of another shot. I took a Christmas vacation to both Cambodia and Laos. While in Laos, I had multiple ideas that came to me that had an incredibly strong appeal. Back in Taiwan, I was having career success, but all was not completely in place. I was happy to be back in education, but I wasn’t focused on what was in front of me. I was building empires in my head, when I should have been attentive elsewhere. I decided I would continue as a teacher/coach/athletic director. I would work on my project on my own time, and push it off for a few years until I had a sizable chunk of cash for a second attempt down in Colombia. I did notice when I committed to being on the project, I totally quit gambling for a decent period of time, allowing me to have the ability to save and focus on the project. In March of 2013, I launched gotocolombia.com from Taiwan. The project had a positive reaction with many people in the Colombian tourism industry and from others on the Internet. I started to market on Facebook and had a huge reaction from inside Colombia. While my target market was expats and travelers going to Colombia, I hit the jackpot with Colombians who started to follow my project. I lined up a few former students and paid them as interns and they did translations for the project. Within a few months, I owned a large Facebook page with 38,000 followers. I had something that had value and still own to this day. My blog was getting over 1,500 unique visitors a day after thirty days post launch. This is sizable traffic and is considered to have commercial value. I had several problems with the traffic as it was mostly social media driven and once budgets were pulled, the numbers would plummet. Sites like this need at least one to five years with constant content updating to be considered solid. I was scheduled to stay in Taiwan another year, but a conversation with an administrator at the school led me to question where I really wanted to be. I ended up thinking it through for a few days and decided that I would be leaving at the end of the school year with both parties agreeing and my contract nullified. It was time to go back to Colombia. Bogotá, Colombia July - 2013 Before coming to Colombia, I took a month break in Cambodia. I had a project idea I wanted to work on that I would cross-over with what I was doing in Colombia. I enjoyed Cambodia more with every visit. The people were so friendly and wanted massive change. The sights were amazing and the prices of everything back in 2013 were like 1985 America. After a month in Cambodia, I came back to Bogotá and hit project resistance like I never thought possible. I launched a bunch of initiatives around my blog, but could not get the proper traction. I was able to get into a few local media outlets including a local expat podcast. I had a tight agenda and I knew I would go broke fast. My plan was not very strong, and I still had a hard time fighting obstacles. My second week back in Colombia, I was walking back from a major tourist attraction and I was robbed by a team of two thieves that at one point consisted of me on my knees with a knife to my face. After living in Latin America for four years, I was never robbed or had a serious problem. It took one incident to shake my confidence to its core. I felt like my security was taken away, and for many months after the incident, I felt very uncomfortable doing things I once did without caution. I was having depression issues and made a series of bad decisions. I went broke again. The writing was on the wall that my second attempt at my Colombia project was destined to fail, and it was time to face the facts. I went home to Chicago for a few weeks, and decided I needed a job. I found a job teaching English in China. After only a short few months, I found myself very close to where I just departed. Wuxi, China September - 2013 I was a little disappointed with my recent fall of grace for so many reasons. I went from a posh apartment with nice salary in Taiwan to dumpy housing in China. I went from clearing $3400 a month to $800. I downgraded from a world class international school to a school with very little resources. It was a true reversal of fortunes. I worked at a technical college that was basically a two-year school for lower level placed students. My students were either engineering or tourism majors. The tourism majors were crazy excited with life, and the engineers were extremely calm. I had zero resources and it was rough, but enjoyable since it was such a unique experience. I hung out with other teachers in the city and played poker. It was supposed to be for small amounts, but the pots got crazy. I did okay, but it really put the gambling bug into me. I started to go to Shanghai for the weekends to escape and played in organized card rooms. I even played in a private expat teacher tournament, and got my clock cleaned. It started to get cold, and I decided I was moving on after one semester. I'll never forget the experience working with my former Chinese students, they were incredibly entertaining. I’d love to go back and visit Wuxi, the school and former students. There was not much to do in Wuxi leading to spending a lot my free time reading poker information sites. I couldn’t play online as it was illegal, so I just immersed myself about stories of poker players around the world on a site called Two Plus Two. I decided I would become a professional poker player, develop into an industry media personality and future poker information site owner. I had a starting budget of around $3000, luckily this money came my way courtesy of Bitcoin. I already was involved in Bitcoin since 2011 and I had a friend who made a killing when it first went to $1000. He had a debt with me and shipped me cash from his Bitcoin profits which I used to start my poker industry penetration. Thailand/Cambodia/Taiwan February - 2014 I moved to Bangkok and found a nice apartment for $300 a month. Thailand was the place to be in the online poker world. There were estimates of thousands of players, grinding out a living while living abroad in paradise. My first task was to establish an Internet handle called Rehabbing Fish. I picked this name as I knew I was fish (means very bad poker player) and I was rehabbing both my game and life. This name is now attached to me due to the permanency of the Internet and my place in poker culture history. Rehabbing Fish has become infamous in a sense, picking up many dirtbag troll enemies, while developing incredibly strong allies. I can say there is a lot “Fake News” about Rehabbing Fish all over the Internet. I’m looking forward to getting to set the story straight and expose those who wish to behave like complete animals. I stayed in Thailand for three months grinding online poker. I pretty much sucked at it and I knew the project was in deep shit from the beginning. I didn’t lose much but I had weak focus and mostly wanted to work on the media end. I was very active in the Two Plus Two Cambodia section and started to document a trip to the country. I made friends with two UK poker world legends who go by the name of the Broke Brothers. I also had a nice blackjack bink (big win) of $4,000. That was a huge sum to me than at that time, and I felt a big surge. I went back to Thailand and got my stuff and decided to relocate to Cambodia. Setting up in a familiar spot where I already knew quite a few expats and local people made the quick jump easier. I first spent time in Phnom Penh, a very exciting city. I started to ride a motorcycle all over Cambodia. I ended up in Sihanoukville and hung out with the Broke Brothers once again. After partying two months in Cambodia I went into exhaustion. I gambled a lot, and had a very bad run at it. I did have a few binks that keep things going for a bit, but in the end, I burned myself out and I was going broke. Before it was time to go back to the States, I would stop in Taiwan for a month to get some possessions I left the year before. I would also make a few last desperate attempts to avoid having to face reality. I couldn’t get anything going in Taiwan and said my goodbyes. I came back permanently to the United States for the first time in seven years. San Diego 2015 The rest of 2014 was not the favorite time of my life and will visit in other writings down the road. I ended up in San Diego for a full year. Returning to the U.S. was extremely difficult and I had a serious case of reverse culture shock. It took me a good year to feel normal. I was now going on two years on my poker project. I was mostly using my time developing a site and marketing channels. I started to do crappy jobs to survive. I started to slide into massive debt the longer I went. I began to drive for Uber as I saw how easy it was to make extra cash when I went on my first ride as a passenger on a trip in Denver. I started to enjoy the freedom of being able to work whenever I wanted. Driving for Uber in San Diego was chill and was an easy way to start a cash flow. I was working on my poker project and using Two Plus Two as my main marketing base. I started to experience serious trolling and attacking by many other community members, but one horrific racist famous poker industry troll took it to the next level. This lunatic attacked me on six different platforms. He also got into my Facebook and started to attack my family and friends. I was meeting several top poker personalities all over the United States. I met many higher regarded players, including a top industry journalist and many of the top media type players in the world. During this time, a site currently owned by Amazon called Twitch became very popular with the poker scene. I decided to launch a Twitch channel. I didn’t want to go on the air alone, so I decided to bring 420 models to join me. I did two different broadcasts with three different models. It was a great success, and our numbers were extremely positive. The trolling was getting extremely negative, and was creating a massive effect on my psychology and ability to do business inside the poker industry. I ended up folding the project as the volitivity and the negativity was something I could not overcome at the time. I didn’t think I could succeed in an environment that was laced with such poison. Seattle 2016 The lease of my apartment was up, and I was having a hard time finding an apartment in the tough San Diego rental market. I needed a new place to go and all signs pointed to Seattle. I loaded up my car and pointed north to a city that was a complete mystery. I once spent two months up in Eugene, Oregon and loved the area and thought Seattle sounded like a great place. High job availability, booming tech industry, culture, nature, opportunity, and most importantly, the future. My VW Tiguan made the trip like a champ and I stayed at the Marco Polo on North Aurora Avenue, a hotel that is famous for being one of the last places where Kurt Cobain was seen alive. I had a couple friends I knew from So Cal, and I hung out at their pad and neighborhood to get the lay of the land. I ended up getting my first apartment in an area called the U-District in a total hellhole. I lasted three months in this area. I really enjoyed living near the University of Washington, one of our countries top institutions. The area has a long main street with all sorts of craziness and places to eat and drink. It’s an area of great extremes, going from being very exciting and electric, to potentially dangerous and appalling at the same time. After leaving the U-District, I ended up in Northgate, a commercial shopping area that gets very quiet after 9:00 p.m. I enjoyed living in this area, but my apartment had noise issues with the neighbors above and I wanted to be central to the city. I lasted ten months in Northgate before moving to Eastlake for my second year. Eastlake is smack dab in the middle of Seattle and an excellent area for an Uber driver to call home base. I found a killer place through an interesting Uber ride. When I first moved to Seattle I started a new project called Beat The Seattle Freeze.com. “The Seattle Freeze” is a theory that when people first move to Seattle they face massive resistance in making new friends and forming social circles. It could point to the area's geography, Nordic connections, tech awkwardness, weather, and economic hardships. I was in way over my head with Beat The Seattle Freeze.com. The only way I could make it work is if I had a much bigger budget and a team. Around this time, I launched a website focused on the Washington’s booming cannabis industry. I also restarted my poker-related project. This project consisted of a blog and a social network that had a Bitcoin fueled poker room attached. Suddenly, I was knee deep in projects and took on an investment to get me over the hump. I was able to run the poker site for many months, but I was having many issues. I couldn’t grow it the way I wanted due to restrictions from working in Washington. Maintaining the poker room on a daily basis was extremely difficult. I was also playing live poker myself and taking decent size losses. I was starting to crumble to pressure. I decided that I would fold the poker site and focus on my cannabis related project. In February of 2017, I made my first entry into the cannabis industry as the founder of Blazing Seattle.com at CannaCon. This convention is one of the industry’s largest events. I was able to make several contacts including those in the media side of the industry. During the early stages of Blazing Seattle.com, I also started to cover two Tacoma based rappers that I first met while I was covering the 2016 Seattle Hemp Fest for Beat The Seattle Freeze.com. Covering rappers went well together with a cannabis site that primarily was focusing on culture. It was clear to me these two rappers were on an upward spiral. I thought it would take them a few years to get to a certain point where they could quit their jobs and go full-time. I also thought it would be a great story to include in a future book I was pondering writing about my embedment in the Washington cannabis industry. I wasn’t surprised they stepped it up a notch and by the end of 2017, they were touring with Grammy award-winning big-name artists. Along with music connections, I made friends with several business owners and directors of well-known cannabis-related ventures. Things were going great until I hit a roadblock I could not clear. I was pushing too hard what I was doing, and I made multiple mistakes that led me to pull the project. It was the first time in my career as an independent producer that I killed a project with a nice sum of money in the bank. Blazing Seattle was pulled in early May of 2017, only five months after it launched. Many of the articles were getting over a thousand views, I made dozens of high-quality contacts, and was about to receive major local industry press. I couldn’t imagine what would have happened if I stuck with it and had the original site still in place. I feel into a major depression like I’ve never seen before. I had money, but I was so depressed I didn’t even want to gamble or smoke weed. This was new for me, in the past, I’d just go gamble or party to make myself feel better and alive. I slept for a month straight. I knew I was in trouble and I sought out help from my doctor. I also started to get help at the local psychology center. It was not helping, all I wanted was a project and purpose for life. I would stare at the Internet searching for something to do. In June, I decided it was time for me to get back to Ubering. I also had a gambling loss that made me upset, I knew I wanted to quit, but couldn’t find the strength. I started to go to a 12-step program for gambling addiction. I went for a few weeks until my worst nightmare came upon me. My VW Tiguan had a series of breakdowns that lasted for a full month. Four different issues that were all unrelated. Bills were: $1,200, $1,000, $1,400, $800. I now went further into debt with the repair money, but also couldn’t work. I felt I was going insane walking back and forth between the U-District and Eastlake after I dropped off the car at the shop. I stopped going to the 12-step program, stopped Ubering and resumed the fetal position for two more months. I was completely losing my mind. My family and a few close friends were aware of the situation. We were hoping time would work it out for me. Three months turned into four and I felt like I was going to die. My weight went from 212 to 250 in this short period of time. All I would do is lay in my bed, eat, and stare at the Internet. In August, I started to gamble again. This time I was playing a new game called Spanish Blackjack. This is the crack of the blackjack world. Players get sucked in by carnival type game bets and get hooked very easily. I had a few big wins at this game and wanted to keep the feeling. The problem was that I started a terrible losing streak. I was at the complete verge of insanity. I would go Ubering for a day and then lose it at the table. Sometimes, I’d Uber for eight hours and lose the money within five minutes. I was a wreck, I needed serious help and it came in the form of my family. I decided to go spend some time with my parents. My parents were very patient with me and they helped me break the cycle. They are taskmasters and they would not let me waste away. They took me to a movie, a ball game, and made me do other active things for a period of four days. I went for a short trip as I wanted to get back to work to start to pay down a debt and to stack some savings. I left the trip still depressed, but it lit a delayed spark under me. When I got back to Seattle it was like I never left. I was still totally depressed but ready to get out of the box that I had put myself in. I started to work right away and went back to the 12-step program. A major catalyst for my change was a video I stumbled upon while wasting away surfing the Internet. The video was titled, The Opposite of Addiction. It was a Ted Talk that spoke to me clearly. The only way I would break my addiction is surrendering to getting better. I decided I must do the opposite of which I usually do. My go-to behavior is to detach and isolate. I would do the opposite and go to where there was life. I would make connections with those who have the same struggles as me. I felt by making true connections with others, I could make serious life changes that could even lead to some sort of exciting future. The following eight months is the documentation of the beginning of my gambling recovery and my struggles in Seattle. The rest of this memoir will be written in article style. The work will go along a timeline that incorporates multiple subjects and themes. I did not keep notes for the first thirty days of my recovery. On the thirty-first day, I realized I would be writing this book and I started to document my daily affairs in a notebook. My deadline for content is the last day of April 2018. Chapter One: September – Crash and Rebirth
