This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
After that, things went downhill fast. The dispatcher was still hung up on another officer. I told her I could be patient, but I wasn’t. I got toxic almost immediately, especially when she went out with him one night. That sent me spiraling. Drunk, I did something that left me more disgusted with myself than I had ever been.
I called my dad a few days later and told him how bad things had gotten. After that, he stepped in and tried to rescue me. I managed to stay sober for about two weeks. The dispatcher came back from a cruise, ready to take a trip with me. The other guy she’d been hung up on had moved away, so suddenly it was just the two of us. On paper, it looked perfect. You’d think everything would finally work out but I guess you wouldn’t be reading this if it had.
We took a trip together, and almost immediately I started drinking again. Once the alcohol was back in the picture, the drama followed right behind it. Not long after that, I went back to the strip club and crossed lines I had told myself I never would, and another thousand dollars felt “worth it,” which tells you exactly how far gone my thinking was. It didn’t matter. Everything I’d been doing—especially the dumb shit I did while drunk—eventually caught up with me at work. Some of it turned into formal complaints to the police department.
On September 9, 2009, they finally sat me down and strongly encouraged me to resign so they wouldn’t have to fire me. I remember thinking, fine, fuck you guys and saying something like a more polite version of that. Up until that moment, my thinking had been pure tunnel vision. I was law enforcement. That was all I was. That was all I did. I had vague thoughts about grad school or teaching, but they never felt like I had time for them. The second they told me about the six complaints they’d received because of my off-duty drinking and chaos, something snapped into place. Suddenly I could see another future. I could see myself doing something else entirely. I told myself I was going to move on, go to grad school, teach, and actually enjoy my life. Law enforcement didn’t have to be my whole identity anymore.
I called my parents and told them what had happened. They told me to come home immediately. I remember thinking, seriously? I’d just worked most of a twelve-hour shift which concluded with my best arrest just before that little talk in the conference room where I’d essentially been fired. I cried like a baby when I got home and now they wanted me to drive eight hours to Mississippi right away. I did it. I got there around 2:00 a.m., and they were just relieved to see me. I realized, driving that night, that if I had started drinking, things could have gone terribly wrong. It’s amazing how many close calls like this happen in life that most of us know nothing about.
Moving back in with my parents after I quit was an enormous relief. I hadn’t realized how much stress had piled up on me from being a correctional officer and then a police officer. The court cases alone were exhausting—showing up constantly, usually prosecuting misdemeanor cases by myself, always under pressure. And walking back into my parents’ house, exhausted and sober, I finally felt how much that life had been crushing me.
When I moved back in with my parents in Mississippi, I immediately latched onto a new plan. I started studying for the GRE almost right away. I didn’t spend much time reflecting or considering alternatives. A big life decision landed fully formed in my head: I would get a PhD in criminology and teach criminal justice. That was my job experience and therefore the easiest path I could see forward. I didn’t seriously think about other careers or possibilities. I just chose something and plowed forward.
I studied hard, took the GRE, and scored well enough that I knew I could land an assistantship somewhere. That part felt reassuring, like proof that I still had momentum. Not long after that, I took a trip to Las Vegas to see a girl I’d slept with earlier in the year. She was stone cold when she greeted me and did not warm up in the five days I spent there. She was still pissed that I had told my friends I’d slept with her—and she knew all of them. I never apologized or addressed it. I just let it sit there, unresolved. She let me sleep in her bed but didn’t want to have sex with me. She was clearly hurt, but also sad when I left. The whole thing was confusing and uncomfortable. While I was in Vegas, I gambled away all my remaining cash and then drove home. The drive took three days each way. Somehow, despite everything, it still felt like a fun trip and I was that much happier to just rest with my parents.
Back in Mississippi, gaming took over my life again, this time with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I used it like a drug. My days had a simple structure: I went to the gym near where my parents lived in Mississippi, had lunch and dinner with them, watched some TV with my mom, and then disappeared into the game. Everything else in my life revolved around Modern Warfare 2. I got good at it—really good. I dropped eight nukes in one night once. A nuke meant twenty-five kills without dying in a single match. One night I got three nukes in a row. There were nights when our whole team was getting destroyed, and I’d turn the game around singlehandedly by calling in a nuke and ending it instantly.
The progression was addictive as hell. Seven kills got you the Harrier. I’d rack those up using noob tubes on players who often couldn’t see me. The Harrier would carry me to eleven kills, then I’d bring in the AC-130 or the chopper gunner and just wipe people out. Hit twenty-five, press the button, game over. It was the most satisfying experience I’d had in a video game since World War II Online.
I wasn’t playing World War II Online anymore because I’d gotten banned back in 2006 when I was part of the high command structure. As colonel on the Axis side, I’d run coordinated blitzkrieg-style attacks, pulling everyone online into a single town and steamrolling Allied positions one after another. On the last night, we wiped out five or six towns in a row that way. Then a higher-ranking guy logged on and started ordering everyone to spread out to defend our gains. I told him he was a fucking moron and refused to cooperate. He pulled rank and told me I had to follow his orders. In an epic one up, I moved all Axis units back into the training area, effectively shutting down the entire side of the game. The Allies began winning every single battle since the Axis side now could now spawn within a hundred miles of the front. The admins had to log in in the middle of the night to undo it, and they immediately banned me.
The longer I lived at home, the deeper into Call of Duty and Xbox games I went. I had a solid group of friends I played with regularly, and eventually I met some of them in person. Night after night, I’d log on around 8:00, 9:00, or 10:00 p.m., and we’d play until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, seven days a week. That was my social life. A lot of the guys had kids, so they came online after their kids went to bed. Others were teenagers living on the West Coast and logged on right after dinner. The game wasn’t just entertainment—it was where my people were.
Around Thanksgiving, my mom brought a girl over to the house—a student she knew. This felt almost laughably easy. She was beautiful and had never had a serious relationship. I remember thinking, damn, Mom, I’m about to clean this shit up. I walked her out to her car in my parents’ driveway, asked for her phone number—even though my mom already had it—and not long after that, we were sleeping together. We became boyfriend and girlfriend pretty quickly.
The problem was her expectations and my maturity. Every night, she wanted me to come to her place for dinner, sex, and then to go to bed around 9 or 10:00 p.m. To me, that felt impossible. My real life didn’t even start until that time when my friends logged on. If I went to bed with her, I felt like I was missing my entire social world. In my mind, the solution was obvious: she should sleep with me, and then I should go home and play Modern Warfare 2 while she slept alone. She told me that made her feel lonely and that it wasn’t going to work.
A couple days after New Years, she refused to have sex because I wouldn’t stay over given my friends had all confirmed they would be online that night and we’d have a full party to slay out in hardcore search and destroy. I got angry and stayed that way. Two days later, I came early and stayed over, but I refused to say anything consolatory that might loosen her up. Meanwhile, she still refused because she was mad too. I lay there awake all night, resentful and stubborn. In the morning, when she still wasn’t being nice to me, I stormed out of her place, slammed the door, and never saw her again.
After that, there were a few more short, messy situations with girls I met on Plenty of Fish. Nothing meaningful. Just more of the same pattern. In March, I got accepted into the University of South Florida in Tampa. What stands out most looking back is my attitude. They called and offered me a two-year graduate assistantship where I could get my master’s degree without paying an tuition and receive $9,000 a year in pay. Instead of feeling grateful, I told them to let me know when they had something better because I already had the same offer at Cincinnati which generally was considered a better school.
The day of that phone call, I flew to Las Vegas with friends. This time, we went completely off the rails. I drank for close to twenty-four hours straight on the day we got there and got a tattoo at Starlight—the only tattoo I still have to this day. I went hard. I drank every single day of our five day trip, from the moment I woke up until I passed out at night. Somehow, I managed to stretch my budget, right up until I couldn’t.
The worst part of that trip came right at the end, when I was completely out of money and felt how empty the whole thing was—I had spent everything chasing a good time in a city built to take it all, and I had nothing to show for it but shame. I was furious at myself. The hangover on the way back was just as brutal. I didn’t usually drink that hard for that many days in a row, but that trip destroyed me. I remember eating at California Pizza Kitchen, convinced I was going to die. I nearly threw up when the plane landed in Salt Lake City. Eventually, I dragged myself back to my parents’ house in Mississippi, feeling hollow, ashamed, and only slightly better physically—mentally still completely lost.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.