A Book In 30 Days — Day 2
Chapter 1 Part 1: Ambition…What is it? Why I DREAM.
In 3rd grade, there was a morning journal assignment to write about… how I wanted to go get to school in the morning or something. I don’t recall.
All I remember is spending so much time thinking about it… fantasizing about my favorite movies of the time: Fifth Element and Back to the Future II. I wrote a short paragraph; three or so simple complex sentences… I even drew a picture; used my new techni-colored ink pens…
My idea was of a flying bus. A schoolbus that hovered on air. It would fly over the city and get kids excited to come to school, not to mention really wake them up! It was like the Magic School Bus, with flashy colors and funny sounds… wonder in every trip.
I got an F.
I’ve been obsessed with hovercars ever since.
To me, ambition has been my bestest friend: loyal, cool, strong, smart, and always sticking up for me. When I felt down, I always could count on Ambition to pick me up. When I felt lost and alone in the dark, I knew Ambition would light the way. When I felt that the world was sht and I was a hopeless pile of bones, Ambition made me stick it out. Ambition told me that I would change the world one day… and I believed.
I suppose that really means ‘belief’ or ‘hope’ or ‘optimism’ is actually what strengthened me. But I don’t see it that way.
By the time I was in 3rd grade, I had already moved at least 5 times, mostly in the same county. Only a few dozen miles apart, but it was enough to completely divorce me from any friends I had made. It was the early 2000s, we didn’t have a computer or a phone, so there was no real way to keep in contact even if you moved just one city over.
By this time I had become well acquainted with loneliness. I had 2 other siblings, but my (step)sister was not into what I was into, and my little brother was a demon incarnate who loved throwing around my painstakingly color-coded Lego piles.
Thus my imagination was my friend. No, not an imaginary friend… my mom would never have that, could be voodoo demons trying to get into our little heads. I don’t know about demons, but I certainly wasn’t going to talk to no fake ghost thing. It wasn’t real. Not like my imagination.
I didn’t have to imagine some invisible friend, because I could just imagine a whole adventure I’d have all by myself, with my Legos. I’d challenge myself to build a spaceship that looked fragile, but was strong enough to survive a drop from ‘space’ i.e. me standing on the bed. Or a spaceship that looked compact, but had enough space for my lego man to ‘walk around’. I didn’t have any fancy Star Wars sets or anything tailored for that; just a regular box of assorted color bricks augmented by my first Harry Potter set (after I convinced my folks that reading it wouldnt subject me to witchcraft curses of course).
I came up with all manner of building designs and other structures. I thought I might want to design really cool buildings for actual people to use one day. My uncle said I’d probably be an architect. I always translated it as Art-kitect… but it sounded cool either way.
I had a lot of fun with my Legos. But not so much that I couldn’t see that something wasn’t quite right with my parents, or around our living arrangements… our money…
It wasn’t having to move from Buckhead to Riverdale in the middle of the school year… it wasn’t that weird change in seeing mostly white kids to mostly black kids… and it wasn’t that dude that got shot dead that one time a few doors down in the new apartment with the freaky ghost toilet and creaking floors at night and funny smell.
There was a certain feeling of… I dont know… quickness I think the feeling was; a sense that not everything was as good as it seemed. Maybe it was some of those mailbox adventures or different fancy cars every weekend or my dad talking about how the Masons rule the world… I have no clear clue really.
All I remember is feeling that something was off.
Even with these nascent levels of perception…
It wasn’t until years later that I realized our sixth move, the summer after my crazy second grade half-year, was not a fun adventure just hotel hopping… that was us being homeless with nowhere to go…
To be continued…
I’m mad I don’t remember the prompt right now, I actually still have my 3rd grade school journal full of elementary ideas and stories about sci-fi superheros with magic powers.
But it’s in storage, I’ll have to find it and include some pages in the full book.
Which you can pre-order right now, for whatever price you want. 😀😉
https://gum.co/ElijahsAmbition
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for part 3 tomorrow!!
