But to turn those escapades into a career, you have to be Joe Peacock, an Internet author in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson, George Plimpton and other scribes who were at their best when they injected themselves into outrageous situations.
If you want to know what it feels like to have your nipple rings ripped out while sparring with a judo instructor, Peacock is your man -- and you can be his editor.
Since 2002, Peacock has been chronicling his misadventures and letting several thousand readers "socially edit" his work. If you want more detail on how he vomited during his first sexual encounter, you let him know it. If you want to correct his spelling and grammar, just dive in.
The result has been two books, both called "Mentally Incontinent." The first was self-published and was largely sold off the back of his truck as he drove town to town, barnstormer-style.
Now, Peacock has hooked up with Gotham Books, part of Penguin Group, and suddenly, he's much more than an eccentric, heavily tattooed Internet author.
"When you write like this, you're accountable to the audience at all times," he says. "Your readers are letting you know when it's crap."
Though the second book has the same title, it's a new collection of stories, revised and edited by his readers. Each of the 11 chapters was voted in from an archive of more than 50 -- and each has been picked apart on his Web site.
"Does that improve the quality? I can't say, because it's the only way I've ever done it," he says. "Of course, I think so."
The book gets off to a roaring start, with an account of how a scorned college girlfriend drove to his home after the breakup and convinced his mother that he was gay. That led mom to sit him down for a series of frustrating "I love you no matter what" conversations.
Peacock, now 32, is married, and calls his wife, Andrea, his best friend and uncredited co-author.
The wedding did help quell his mother's suspicions about his sexual orientation, but the nipple rings didn't help matters.
'I Thought About Whoring My Body'
"Andrea understands that anything I do can be put into one of my stories," he says. "It's up to me to use my discretion. But there are no limits."
Joe, however, isn't famous for his discretion. In one story he talks about letting a stalker sleep in his home. In another, he ends up on a blind date with a 15-year-old.
His one year in college resulted in perhaps his most famous story, about his job working overnight for Walmart.
"I was desperate for a late-night solution to my funds-to-tuition ratio. I had to do something for money," he writes.
"I thought about whoring my body out to dirty old men or selling hash made from yard grass and pencil shavings to high school kids, but I felt that as a future writer, I needed, for once in my life, to indulge in something truly dark and evil. Something from which immeasurable pain and embarrassment would come, so that I could have an experience to draw upon for inspiration in the future. Naturally, working at Walmart was the first thing that came to mind."
When co-workers -- not exactly "the conversational elite," as he says -- conspire to get him fired, he hits rock bottom.
"I would say only a retard could get fired from Walmart, but this isn't true: Even the door greeter with Down syndrome who once bit a female customer and refused to let go was still employed. I was completely mortified."
And that's when he rigged the store for a post-Thanksgiving Day sale that ended with several customers getting computers at drastically reduced prices, along with a lesson in anatomy that they'll never forget.
Why wasn't he arrested? That's a question you could ask after almost every Joe Peacock story.
"For one thing, I wrote this story several years after the incident," he says.
For another thing, "My stories are not 100 percent true. Jesus, what do you think this is, the Wall Street Journal?"
Peacock lasted just a year at Georgia State University. He dropped out in 1996, became a computer programmer, and started e-mailing his stories to friends. In 2002, long before the blogger boom, he established his Web site and began building readership.
The big boom came a few years later, when Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, linked to one of his stories. Suddenly, millions of people had read his work. He and Curtis struck up a friendship, and he ended up working on the site's redesign, as well as the short-lived Fark TV.
"Some people are just magnets for weirdness," Curtis writes in the book's foreword. "Joe Peacock is one of them."
"Getting two nipple piercings ripped out, for example, was probably not hilarious at the time. I suspect the resulting nipple reconstruction surgery wasn't laugh out loud either. Nor was seeing Joe in nipple casts for six weeks. Actually, that was kinda funny."
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