My name is Jeremy Frank and I'm almost one week clean. It's been roughly seven days since I've felt those heady highs, lost hours of the day, alienated my friends and loved ones and neglected my personal hygiene. I've gotten myself a one-way ticket back to the real world. I have kicked Farmville.
I was level 43. I was the King of Farmville. I was the Muhammad Ali of Farmville, except without the mannish daughter. I planted and harvested like nobody's business! Float like a farmer, sting like a farmer, and also farm. But the many hours I played started to get to me. I started seeing the world ... differently.
Thankfully being a Farmville addict doesn't make you a filthy hippie pansy like dependency on some other drugs. There was no peace, free love or sharing with me. As far as I was concerned, this land wasn't "ours," it was mine and I was going to plant some damned pumpkins on it even if I had to compost your still-warm carcass for fertilizer.
But that's all behind me. One day, and I say day because it was 4:18 in the morning and I had to get up to harvest my 4-hour blueberries, I realized I hit rock bottom. I already had the million-coin villa and had upwards of a million more in my reserves. I only kept playing until I got all the blue ribbons, I told myself, but they kept adding more. I couldn't sell my old stuff because there might be a ribbon for it down the road. It was at that moment I realized I had become a sort of crazed hermit, collecting scraps and hoarding them in my den like some sort of animal. I didn't want to go out like my Uncle Marty, who died alone in his house full of old newspapers. When I die in a raging paper-fueled house fire, I want to take people with me!
I truly am one of the lucky ones to be able to combat my addiction in such a supportive place as Geneseo. I think this will be a good environment for me. Maybe, just maybe, I can take this empty void in my life and fill it with something wholesome and collegiate like sex and alcohol. You know, get me back on the straight and narrow, or as it will likely turn out, the staggering and two inches wide.