ABOUT MY AMBITIO-METER

“A man’s worth is no greater than his ambition.” Marcus Aurelius said that. Marcus Aurelius, of course, was a dick. That is, he was a pretty smart dick, but he was emperor of Rome, and none of those guys were all that great. Being emperor means you say a thing and bingo! it’s the truth. What about us poor sods who have no ambition?

No ambition that an emperor would call ambition, anyway. My main ambition today is to wake up tomorrow still alive. I’ll have the same ambition tomorrow, unless I die tonight, which I probably won’t. When the oncologists started me on round four of chemo, they assured me I’d probably keep living for at least another month to six weeks--anyway they hoped so. Although, I don’t actually know if oncologists are any greater than emperors. Mine are both very sweet ladies, but not emperor material.

On the other hand, maybe they are. Even if they did lack ambition to become emperor of America, becoming an oncologist takes quite a lot of ambition. A person really has to hit the books, as well as be able to stand watching a lot of their patients die. That must suck. Mine will cry if/when I die.

But I was starting to talk about ambition. Which I did have at one time, by the way, in case you think I’m just some mewling slug-a-bed. I had huge, hellahuge ambitions two years ago. My worth as a man (or as a potential man, seeing as two years ago I was only sixteen) must have been very high on the Aurelian scale of worthiness. Not only did I aspire to take Taylor Swift away from that football-playing goofball, which would require some major skills, but I actually was thinking about getting a Nobel prize for my writing. My teachers generally agreed that I had an unusual gift of gab, and I’d always hoped to parlay that into money, fame, and hot dates. That’s what ambitious men do. Or women, I guess.

Now, though, that’s all melted away like ice in an unplugged refrigerator. I have a whole new set of desires which don’t right out front qualify as ambitions. I want to be able to eat a whole dish of mac n’ cheese without hacking it up. I aspire to a state where I don’t want to snap the head off anyone who makes a comment, about anything whatsoever, in my presence. I have an overwhelming ambition to be left alone. If I could cough in a normal way without people immediately asking if they should call 911, that would be great. I look forward to maybe being able to sit up long enough to untangle my bedding from my legs. A person won’t get to be a Roman emperor through these accomplishments, but then, even at my healthiest I never wanted to be a Roman emperor.

Let me give the guy (Marcus) his due, though. I have actually read his whole book—assuming there was just one. He said a lot of things. Like Tolstoy said, “I say a lot of things.” That was in a movie. I always liked the phrase, because I say a lot of things too. On good days, which I’m not having now but used to, I have “wit.” That’s just the second half of nitwit, and believe me, no one lets me forget that. Still, I have it. Every time I say something, I laugh. You might think it’s a nervous habit, but I prefer to believe I have an outstanding sense of humor. Just think, with a little more ambition I could be a lie-down comedian. Hahaha.

This is getting very expletively tiring. I sit up long enough to type a paragraph, then I have to lie back and sleep, or try to. I have a great ambition to sleep a long time, like all night. I haven’t accomplished that feat this year. The year isn’t over yet, though. But you know how it is, when a man has an ambition to do something, the man pretty much expects to do it, especially if it’s something with a low bar. All this man’s current ambitions have an extremely low bar. That’s okay, but if the worth of this man is no greater than his ambitions, I come off being worth about two hatfuls of Confederate money.

Let’s get back to Mr. Aurelius, though, while I still have the strength or the interest. He did say some cool things—like “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” That is sure as fuck true, and explains a lot about me. What else? "You could leave life right now; let that determine what you do and say and think," said the man who had no intention of leaving life until he had accomplished his ambition to be emperor of Rome—though I shouldn’t put thoughts in his head. Still, you know, I’m a man, or anyway a boy, who might actually leave life right now, or in six weeks, and I find I have woefully little control over my thoughts these days. I try to think about arranging my blanket so it exactly covers my ear without touching my face.

Last year, after running through their first bunch of treatments, they finally gave me a stem-cell transplant. This means I’m not entirely myself, because someone else’s substance is mixed with mine, or replacing mine, I never understood which. Anyway, I don’t have my old immune system, which used to protect me against bad thoughts and the pity-pot. Som apparently I can get deathly ill at the drop of a tear. When it was time for me to come home, the house got emptied of our three cats, our dog, and all vegetation, meaning fifty-nine pots of my botanist dad’s experiments and also my sister’s marijuana plants, after which my mother Cloroxed every rug, dish, lamp shade, fork, keyboard, electric cord…you get the idea. I came home to a world so completely sterile that the very air was afraid to come in. And here I sat. Lay. After awhile I was informed that the transplant hadn’t worked and that it’s not possible to try again. Meaning that was my last shot. I think at this point some people do develop a strong ambition: to be dead. I haven’t reached that point of ambition.

My Aunt Gladys peeped in to see if I needed anything. ‘Peeped in’ is what she called it. My Aunt Gladys is a kind, considerate person who I love, or used to love. I wanted to kill her. Same with my grandma, who is knitting me a striped cap. The sound of her knitting needles in the living room sets my teeth on edge, and the living room is on a whole nother floor. Once in a while—though not nearly as often as they did at first—someone from school will send me a card: “Doin’ ok?” or “Hang in, dude!” They should have sent them when I was alive. But wait, I am alive.

What am I trying to say here? I do seriously have ambition, and it’s large. My ambition is to do this well, if I have to do it. When you consider, ‘this’ may be my only chance to realize any ambition. Ambitions vary a lot, from being emperor of Rome to entering the Olympics, being a college professor, making a giant bundle of bucks, becoming an astronaut (I had that one at six), or inventing an automatic dog-walker. A lot of people call this kind of thing ‘fire in the belly,’ which by the way I have frequently these days and it doesn’t get me onto any higher rung. And some people have ambition for someone else; my parents had the ambition of sending a kid to college. Yep, me—that kid.

Okay, so, I do have an ambition. I just don’t take it out and look at it all the time. I aspire to find some courage, some humor, some path to acceptance, because I am a man, or at least proto-man, and while I haven’t had all that much time to get some worth, I sure hope whatever worth I’m measured by will look like something to somebody. I’d like someone, maybe some kid, or Aunt Gladys, or someone else who’s in my position, to say, “Wow, he really did that well!” So, yeah, I guess I do believe that will be my worth. And if so, then Marcus Aurelius was not, at least for saying that one thing, a total dick.