In 2007, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection dropped. Without realizing it, so did the first brick in the next version of my life.
To understand that moment, you have to go back a decade, to a high school hallway in Los Angeles. A friend and I came up with “Data Cross” the way teenagers do, casually, without ceremony. We were just kids playing with words. The name went into the air and we kept moving.
I was drifting.
The Architect of Absence
I “graduated” high school in June 2001. Sort of. My senior year wasn’t spent in a classroom. It was spent at UCLA, crashing with the same friend who helped name Data Cross. I ditched most of that year and lived in his world instead of mine. When graduation arrived, I was buried under makeup classes.
I got my diploma in August, alone. Everyone else had already walked.
The truth is, I had never really graduated from anything. My mother died on May 8, 1994, five days before my elementary school graduation. After that, I checked out. Middle school was a blur I didn’t participate in. By high school, the ceremony didn’t mean anything to me. I had never stood on a stage.
In September, I enrolled at Marymount College. That’s where I met my daughter’s mother, and that’s where I complicated my life. I was already involved with another woman in Boston. Instead of choosing, I tried to live in both worlds. School, relationships, responsibility blurred until reality arrived in December.
I was going to be a father.
Around that same time, I got caught messing around with credit cards. Nothing sophisticated, just dumb, adolescent decisions. Ordering pizzas and shoes like consequences didn’t apply to me. They did. I confessed. I got kicked out.
That period didn’t break me. It exposed me.
A friend landed me a small IT job at a nonprofit called BreakAway Technologies. It wasn’t a career. It was proximity. Most of my friends were computer guys, nerds who understood systems in a way I didn’t yet. They kept me around, giving me just enough opportunity to stay in the room but not enough to be taken seriously.
I was the joke.
When my daughter arrived, I didn’t run. I leaned in the ways I knew how, even if I didn’t fully understand what being a father required. I cared about her. I cared about the life we had created. But love by itself wasn’t enough to hold a foundation together.
Her mother was sixteen.
I was barely holding onto my own identity.
I enlisted in the United States Navy on February 13, 2003, thinking I was building something. To her mother, it didn’t look like growth. It looked like distance. It looked like abandonment. That’s where we broke, not all at once, just a slow unraveling.
I entered the Delayed Entry Program and waited. On July 22, four days before my daughter’s first birthday, I shipped out. It didn’t last. The pattern held. I got kicked out of the military too.
The Decision in the Dark
I moved to Boston, back into a life I had never properly closed.
And then everything stopped.
I ended up in a cell at Billerica House of Corrections.
Jail doesn’t just take your freedom. It takes your motion. All that drifting and bouncing ends, and when it does, you’re left with yourself. I had spent years being the extra in my own life, the guy in the room people laughed with, and sometimes at.
In that cell, staring at the ceiling, I decided I was done being the joke.
When I get out, I’m doing IT consulting. And I’m calling it Data Cross.
Bill Gates had a concept about the digital divide, the gap between those with access to technology and those without. I understood that lane instinctively. In that cell, I took what had been two teenage boys playing with words and made it into a mission statement. Nobody knew I did that. Not even my friend who helped name it.
On February 6, 2006, four months after my release, I walked into the L.A. County Registrar’s office on La Cienega, paid the fee, and made the name real.
Data Cross existed somewhere other than inside me.
The Enterprise of Access
The first year was blue screens. Corrupt hard drives. Routers that needed coaxing. Clients in apartments with too many extension cords. I showed up. I fixed things. I got paid in cash and occasionally in food. I did not refuse.
It was barely enough.
Then 2007 came.
The shift happened in a low-lit living room in Northridge that smelled of Newport 100s and overtaxed hardware.
“Hey… can you get CS3 Master Collection?”
My answer was immediate.
Yes.
I didn’t have the discs in my bag. I had a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection and a membership to a private torrent tracker that felt like the keys to a digital kingdom.
Getting it was a ritual. The low hum of fans in the middle of the night. Progress bars crawling across my DIY rig while the rest of the world slept. The thrill of the keygen. That lo-fi chiptune music blasting through the speakers while I generated serial codes that unlocked thousands of dollars of proprietary software for the cost of a blank DVD-R.
I knew exactly what I was doing.
Adobe was selling a product. I was selling speed. I was the bridge between the high-end creative tools people craved and the barriers they couldn’t clear. The digital divide, just redrawn.
I learned early: never commit a crime while committing a crime. If it didn’t work, I fixed it. If they called, I answered. That wasn’t marketing. That was loyalty.
By 2011, I was moving ninety software titles and setting up POS systems for restaurants across Los Angeles, many of them running on pirated QuickBooks. I had built an enterprise and a lifestyle.
In 2010, I tracked my money for the first time.
On restaurants alone, I had spent $89,000.
In a single year, I had eaten someone’s salary.
That wasn’t ambition.
That was a lifestyle with no floor.
The Collapse
On December 22, 2011, it came apart.
A sale of thirty copies of Microsoft Office was pending, the largest transaction I had ever done. I ran to Fry’s Electronics for more discs.
When I returned, the door was kicked in.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was waiting.
Shotguns drawn.
It was over.
I was arrested just before Christmas. I didn’t appear in court until January 4, 2012.
My final exam was on January 5.
That timing became the only leverage I had. I stood in front of the judge and told the truth: I had been in school since 2009, I was a straight-A student, and I was one day away from finishing something real. Because of my daughter, I had gone back. Because of school, I had something legitimate to stand on.
I walked out of the room.
But I didn’t finish. I didn’t take the final. I didn’t graduate.
I meant everything I said in that courtroom.
I just didn’t have the mindset to follow through.
For the next fifteen months, I didn’t build anything. I sat in the collapse, the loss, the silence after everything stopped moving.
The First Post
Then July 2013 came.
On the Fourth, I met a sonographer from San Diego. We spent the holiday together. No speech. No revelation. Just movement. And somewhere in that movement, something shifted.
I started writing.
On my daughter’s birthday, I registered a domain:
cuethecritic.com
The first thing I wrote wasn’t a review. It wasn’t even about me. It was the history of a drink — the origin of the Bloody Mary. The hair of the dog. The morning-after remedy.
I didn’t plan it that way.
But looking back, it fits.
The Morning After
After 2012, I didn’t return to that life. No relapse, no second act. But stability didn’t arrive all at once either.
I was still moving through Los Angeles — not homeless in the way people imagine, but displaced. The utilities weren’t in my name. The address wasn’t mine.
I always had somewhere to land, but nowhere that was actually mine.
At the same time, my life was becoming more public. Writing. YouTube. Television. From the outside, it looked like momentum. Behind it, I was still figuring out where I was going to sleep.
Eventually things started to anchor. The duplex came first. Then First Brands Group. Then DriveAway — another way to move, this time within the lines.
There are a hundred stories in between all of that. They don’t all belong here.
What matters is this:
I have a home now.
The utilities are in my name.
The address is mine.
I’m behind the wheel of someone else’s RV most days, moving it from one city to another. I write when I stop. I eat, and I document it. I build in the margins of motion.
In 2007, I didn’t recognize the moment when the first brick dropped.
I do now.
The bricks are there.
This time, I see them.