I hope it was sex, drugs and rock-n-roll that had you so detached from your classes. I'm finding it difficult to reconcile your claim of being rather sharp and then having such a foggy notion of what your classes were about.

Couple of questions: How do you learn best? Reading, tinkering and learning, being shown how to? What are you passionate about? - I mean outside of programming, perhaps connected to the opening comment. Have you become self-motivated? or still need a mentor to guide you?

I think if answer the above questions you might discover a path forwards. If you share the answers with us on HN, then people might be able to chip in with suggestions.