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I was a horrible person in 1995. My sense of responsibility was non-existent. I laughed at every bill that arrived in the mail. The fate of the envelope was one of two possibilities: opened and thrown away or unopened and placed in a growing pile. My financial situation was comparable to a Baghdad chandelier maker during Desert Storm. I felt like a truck driver who had jack-knifed his 18-wheeler and the ass end of the trailer was facing 45 degrees from the cabin—a point of no return. No matter what I tried to do to rectify my situation, it was pointless.

If potential success was measured in water, God let me fill up my bathtub and then pulled the plug in April 1994. I had dropped out of the Aerospace Engineering program at Texas A&M University, because of two reasons: I found out I was two inches too tall for the Space Shuttle, and I ran out of money. So I moved back to San Antonio for a few months, ultimately had to abandon everything and hopped on an Amtrak train bound for Daytona Beach, FL.

My life changed dramatically: Thursday Thermodynamics Pizza Night became Wet T-Shirt Contest at Razzles. Gone were the dreams of terraforming the surface of Mars into a hospitable ecosystem and replaced by large quantities of beer, shitty cover bands, lame raves in Orlando, and menial jobs.

I was employed at Aunt Catfish Restaurant on the Halifax River as a waiter. Tourist loved the overpriced fried crap, and waited up to three hours in the Florida sun for the experience of eating coconut shrimp and cornbread and the privilege of drinking super sweet tea out of Mason jars. To top off my misery, I had to introduce myself as Cousin Dan, because they wanted everyone to believe that we were all relatives of ole Aunt Catfish.

The only thing going for me was that I owned a baby blue 80’ Ford Mustang with cobra decals, spokes and a leather LeBra on the headlights and was making payments on a black 84’ Chevy Camaro. My credit was so horrible that I couldn’t even get a landline telephone in my name. I didn’t have any savings, so I was forced to get a $3,000 loan for the Camaro through a cutthroat used car dealer that required a payment of $75 in cash every Friday or he would repossess the vehicle. My bitchin’ Camaro would have been a lot cooler if it had a working stereo, an air conditioner, and I had a flux capacitor and an 18 gigawatt generator to transport me back to 1984 when a Camaro was “cool”.

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