About Brett Colby

Bitcoin, Drugs, Festivals and the rotting filthy trash bag that is my life

I grew up humble and happy, I was an energetic, athletic, genuinely happy kid.

By the time I was 8, everything changed, there were events in my young life of great trauma, by the end of elementary school, my childhood collapsed.

I spent all my time reading online stories and immersing myself within the internet, growing more and more reclusive, but that didn’t last long…

I was exposed to drugs my entire life, but I had a great core group of friends.

Lawrence Massachusetts is a small city with immeasurable disparity, corruption, violence and poverty.

My hard substance abuse began with LSD when I was 13 years old, Psychedelics quickly broke my ego down to nothing and rebuilt it to something I never expected. My High School years were like something out of a Harmony Korine movie, I ended up having a large incredible group of friends that partied, traveled and did incredible shit all the time.

I began living within the EDM and Jam band tour scene in 2008 working concerts and festivals, embedding within drug culture. In early 2010 one of my best friends started majoring in computer science at Northeastern. I used to crash in his dorm in Boston even though I was still a Junior in High School. He showed me bitcoin, we began to mine it and trade peer to peer on the forums. By March 2010 I was putting my high school job checks from a flower shop into Bitcoin and writing my college prep thesis paper on an alternative to debt based finance and I posed replacing the financial system with Bitcoin.

For three years I bought and mined Bitcoin, first through Bitcoin 0.2, which was the update that allowed you to run it on TOR, then I purchased from the various new exchanges that started being shared on BitcoinTalk and used my own cold wallets.

Part of why I went all in on Bitcoin was from reading Neal Stephenson’s 1999 novel “Cryptonomicon” my freshman year of high school. For those who don’t know the second part of the novel is about an online cryptography based currency that is used to help fund oppressed citizens in corrupt countries.

Even though my interest in Bitcoin remained, my drug and alcohol habits got worse and worse. By my senior year of high school I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I would write all about the absurd shit I was getting up to, I was using Cocaine, Dilaudid and Percocet everyday.

I still managed to get into a bunch of colleges but I chose to go to a school in Vermont, based on my habits and got kicked out of college within two months into my first semester. The initial idea for my first book out of high school was to write a drug razed memoir of my modern hijinks, I called it “The Rotting Filthy Trash Bag That is my Life”

I had a book deal and everything.

I expected it to be done a couple years out of high school, however I’m still writing it over a decade later.

By the time I was 19 I had traveled the entire country, trashed my own lake house in Vermont, lived from hotel to hotel from NYC to Miami. I had found a system that worked for me, was living a life that I thoroughly enjoyed however the entire time I was abrasive, irrational, and had a god complex like no other. I was able to puddle myself with LSD and still function, I would scare people with the amounts of different drugs I’d ingest on an hourly basis. I was self destructive, confident and absurd, burning and building bridges beyond belief.

The altering of my perceptions and the way everything worked out for me in the beginning truly led me to contemplate whether or not I was a god.

By 2012 at only 18 years old I delved into heroin and by 2013 I was living back in Lawrence, amassing an IV habit that would last for years.

It wasn’t until the fall of 2014 that I checked back in on Bitcoin, I put myself into a rehab for a bit and at the time Bitcoin was rising to $1,000. I was worried that I might’ve lost most of the coins I got in the early years, but luckily I had the same computers. I continued to hold and updated my accounts to ensure that I would be able to access them. I remember people thinking it was insane that I wasn’t going to sell. But I probably should of because multiple years of worse chaos ensued and I essentially lost my ability to retrieve them.

By 2015 half my friends were dead, and that was just the beginning. I was arrested two days after turning 22 in a large heroin sweep in Lawrence, my case would last 2 years until I was acquitted. I continued to use heavily until, almost exactly one year from the date of my arrest, my best friend and Brother died.

From 2016-2018 I didn’t listen to music, I didn’t acknowledge he was gone, I just blocked it out. But it all came out eventually.

Then in October 2018, the police showed up asking about my other best friend Austin. He and I were incredibly close friends since high school, however that last year was incredibly rough. Even though I took him in rent free, he was constantly stealing from me, I gave him chance after chance until eventually I had to kick him out. We’d been through so much together, I really hoped that things would change and we could one day go back to normal, but that day never came. The police had come because he had my address on his ID. I had forced him to get an the ID from when I took him in, the cops told me that he was found dead in a field in Florida and where trying to reach his family.

In 2016 I became incredibly close again with a friend that I had done wrong back in my chaotic years 2012, Garrett had forgiven me, and we spent so much of our time together. We had the type of friendship where you find yourself in one long constant conversation, through texts, calls, social media, meeting up weekly for food and drinks. We both were doing good for so long, but on April 1st of 2021, Garrett sent me a text goodbye and took his own life.

Today, while I’ve lost all my friends, I have a very stable life with an incredible girlfriend that I’ve been with since 2018 and known since 2013. She’s known me at my worst and seen me now through all of this. We have an incredible Yorkipoo named Nori, so I’ll probably give some updates on that and all.

The reason why I call my writing project A Broken God is because it aligns with my view of everything I’ve been through, incredible highs, followed by debilitating lows.

Thank you to anyone that’s taken the time to read this, and especially to anyone who decides to subscribe to my free posts here.

On this Substack I will tell some of my story, and the stories of those who only exist through me and my words, as well as publish my fiction pieces and poetry.

This piece is dedicated to these three incredibly important people of my life, may they Rest in Peace.