UNBOXED: Unpacking Life's big problems to expose the smaller more manageable issues inside

By Antone Ade

UNBOXED shares a story that illustrates how seemingly trivial actions can have consequences that reverberate through generations. With every action, with every day we live, we create the future. Of course, forces beyond human control also have influence, but it is how one’s choices relate to these external events that determine the outcome

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imperio Underground LLC
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733808316

Book preview

UnBoxed

Unpacking Life’s big problems to expose the smaller more manageable issues

By Antone Ade

You will never truly grow as a person until you outgrow the limits of your box

By Antone Ade

A child looks at a box with wonder and awe, seeing it as a doorway to a fantasy world. That box could be a secret dungeon, or even a fire truck. In fact, it can be anything they wanted to believe it to be. It’s amazing that something as simple as a box can be likened to a great escape or a lifetime of solitary confinement.

Table of Contents

Prologue

The Box

Box tops

Positivity Pays Off

Choice or Chance?

Understanding the Dark

Comfort Zone

I’m Good

Limits are like walls

Can’t Get Right

The Boxed

Epilogue

FYI

Prologue

You can either survive this maze of institutional racism, crime, drugs, and poverty, or go bust; for teens living in the hood, its success, jail, or death…that’s it.

~ Tariq Toure Activist/ Writer ~

One rainy April afternoon, floating down dirt-soaked streets in my pearl black CTS Coupe, I contemplated. The limitations unknowingly erected in my life, had me on pause. I wasn’t alone, but the car was as quiet as a library. I don’t like his music, and he ignores my oration. We mutually agreed on silence. My windows kept fogging up, so Marcus and I stopped at Mickey D’s to escape the misery of our environment. We ordered and sat down; speechless, in our own worlds. We were there as a mentor and mentee, in the latest local, Save the kids idea. Marcus was a fourteen-year-old man-boy, mandated to my charge after being labeled a delinquent by his misguided school system. He just eats and burps, then gives you that you done fussin yet look. And if I start talking about anything of substance, he puts in his earbuds…

As diners piled into the booth next to us, I snapped out of my haze. I noticed a puddle from cold sweat running down my cup. The tears of my aggravation, I mumbled. I looked over, and as usual, he’d inhaled most his food and drink before we even reached the table. His tray was just a discarded pile of wrappers and cold fries. I always wondered if he had enough to eat at home, but feared I’d embarrass him by asking. Marcus was a good kid, save his situation. His story is all too familiar, hell it its almost my own. A mother who’s about fourteen years older than he is. She behaves more like his friend, and he conducts himself as the adult. His over-animated, always intoxicated, mother sells dope. She does it because ain’t nothing else to do, and she thinks she’s good at it. Despite her growing clientele, she’s always broke. Seems she’s forgotten the number one rule: Don’t get high on your own supply!

They stay with her mother—his grandmother, in a two-bedroom communal dump. When Marcus was born, his grandmother was thirty-six, and turning tricks, every now and again to pay the rent. Now, she does what she can, but she is hindered by her limited intellect; possessing only a 6th grade education. Much like the whole public housing area they call home, their place is constantly on edge. Everyone pretends to tolerate each other’s shortcomings as they halfheartedly exist in judgmental bliss.

Marcus doesn’t go to school much because nobody in the house is ever up in time to get him ready, or up to make him breakfast, or even up to buying him the proper clothing. The kids at school make fun of him so much that he would rather just stay home and watch Maury. He turned to gang banging as soon as he could walk, since to him, bangers were the only ones paid. In his whole life, anybody he’s ever seen getting it, got it…in the streets. He’s black and poor; either of which can be considered bad, but the combination, as of late, is a death wish. His world is the mysteriously misunderstood and often over-exaggerated ghetto. A place everyone claims to be from, but nobody ever wants to move back. A segregated apparition of hate and power, or more specifically, a misconstruction of cultural self-hate, and a mythical quest for imagined power.

As Marcus and I finished, we watched some of his peers amble by. I smiled. Through the big picture window, it looked like an ugly stereotype caught in a frame. I