Day Four Thousand One Hundred and Fifty . . . Going Up?

10:24 AM
May 8, 2020


I woke up this morning thinking about elevators.

Humans have a very peculiar relationship with elevators. We give up a lot of our power to a semi-automated box with numbers, buttons and lights on a regular basis. Depending on location and purpose they may even be designed with a window or two. Or it may be completely clear and on the outside of a building adding to its cool/elegance factor.

I'm sure there are people who chose not to use them. I shy away from them when I can just for exercise sake. But this internal agreement has its limits. I'd say five (maybe six) floors is all I'd really want to climb for health's sake. And of course this all is dependent on if and what I'm carrying. I'm lazy at heart. It doesn't take much to sway my resolve.

The four floor apartment complex I live in here in Kyoto is a new building. And as such it's got a cute little elevator that's big enough for maybe four people. It's got windows on its doors to see each floor as it goes by. There aren't that many tenants here and so I rarely see anyone waiting for it--I think it's happened once that I had to ride with somebody else. Sometimes I use it, but mainly I take the stairs. Regardless of whether or not I can see the floors going by I've still managed to get off on the wrong one on occasion.


But the elevators I woke up thinking about today are not the kind with windows.

No, I'm talking about your standard issue, big, boxy elevator that you walk into and the doors close and if it wasn't for the light above you it would be black as night.

We make so many casual, unspoken agreements on a day-to-day basis. So many things we do where we put our trust in something or someone else to work like it should--an ATM, revolving door, subway, traffic signal, etc. I'm not a statistician but I'd say it's safe to assume that those agreements more often than not end up all shaking out about even, or at least winning more than losing. I'd like to hope so. Either way I'm not going to look it up.

But your average, department store elevator comes designed with a feature that we all rely on in exchange for putting our trust in it. This goes beyond just safety and the assumption that it will stay powered, maintained and safe.

I'm talking about the numbers we all watch as it moves.

They may be digital or they may be (in the case of an old-timey version) an arrow that follows an arc with numerals on it as it goes up and down. Every elevator has to have them because we rely on these numbers to know where we are in relation to where we want to go.

If those numbers weren't there it would make using an elevator a challenge to say the least.

Can you imagine getting into an elevator in an unfamiliar skyscraper needing to go to the 50th floor, pushing the button marked "50" and not knowing absolutely for sure when you've arrived? Of course this is a ridiculous question. Nobody would ever design a system like this. It's counter-intuitive and just bad business sense. The whole point of an elevator is to get you where you need to go quicker than you could using your own limbs under your own power.

The numbers on the inside tell us what to expect so we can prepare and make our move. Sometimes I picture myself being announced to the audience of a late night program. The doors open, the band kicks in and God help anyone standing in my way. We got a show to do, people!

Can you tell I'm an only child? Can you?




I'm writing this while I sit on our bed, just after breakfast on May 8th.

At midnight I will be 50 years old.

Holy shit.

How did this happen?

I mean, the easiest explanation was that I was born on May 9, 1970 and I haven't died yet.

But seriously . . . this is how it feels.

This is what it's like to have a half of a century of life under one's belt.

This feeling of the closing of a book "Alex Johnson: 40-49 In Words And Pictures" is a very strange and surreal one.

It's exciting, nerve-racking and a little bit worrisome.

I know, I know, I shouldn't make a big deal out of it. It's just a number.

But god damnit it's my number. And to me it's a big one.

And when I say that, it's not that I feel like I'm old, per se. More so I feel like I'm incredibly lucky to have made it this far. Hell, I had some good friends who didn't make it this far. They had some of the same lifestyle issues as I did and came up in the same era and under a similar set of circumstances as me. But they didn't make it through this crazy maze of choices.

Who knows, maybe they made it as far as they ever were going to and I'm just a nut who thinks we should all have the opportunity to live out the full average lifespan of a human.

If that were to be my case I'd have a good 26 years left to do stupid shit.

But it's an average because . . . well, not everyone's lucky enough to make it that far. And my friends who died in their 40s play into the math. It's just the sad side of the percentage.



But sitting here staring at my empty yogurt and fruit bowl looking back on my last decade I have to sit and smile for the joy and new experiences it has brought me.

When I think about what it felt like to be in the last year or so of my thirties and to have just lost my ballast--my mom and aunt--to have gotten sober, bought my first home and . . . and to have met my future wife.

It's all almost too much for me to really take in.

But it actually happened. Ten years ago Jodi and I celebrated my 40th birthday and began our journey from the farthest edge of the east coast to the middle of Japan where we are writing our latest adventure tale.



But these elevators I woke up thinking about today. They have numbers so you can see where you are on your brief journey between floors. We rely on them for the short time we are in their care. I've never been purposely led astray by an elevator. I may have missed my floor because I was looking at my phone or just not paying attention (which is almost always because I'm looking at my phone). And we trust them to work and not snap off in mid-ride like in the movies. We expect them to work and at least in my case they always have.

But this whole life thing.

To me it feels like an elevator with no numbers.

I mean, I can feel it's pretty far up.

I can see in my reflection of the shiny door that my face tells the story of almost five decades.

I guess as long as I'm alive that this elevator I'm in is going up. But I have no choice but to believe it is from the way it feels deep down inside. I have to know that what I'm doing has been building on what's come before it--that it's been growing, expanding, learning and evolving.

I can feel in my heart and soul that I've lived several distinct lifetimes: precocious child, mama's boy, inquisitive adolescent, unabashed hellion, wanderer, rocky rocker rock star, insolent party boy, substance abuser, deathwish enthusiast, seeker of redemption, lovestruck fool, clear-headed creator and assumed expatriate.

And with most of these lifetimes comes a place in time, a way to put my life into some sort of order. Because as haphazard as my time on earth has seemed at times there's definitely been an arc to it all, not that an elevator travels in an arc. No, that would be a bridge. But I'm not going to digress again.

Tonight before I go to sleep I'm going to push the button on the inside of my elevator and when I wake up it's going to be the 50th floor. But I won't have any way to prove it means anything because I won't really be able to see the outside to tell how far up I am. I just have to trust that I am where my birth certificate says I am in life and believe in my capacity for trusting and loving whatever I find outside when I walk through the doors.

Not like I have a choice.

It's trust and love or nothing as far as I'm concerned.

Trust and love is all I have and all I have ever wanted.

Trust and love is all I get from the most important person in my world.

Trust and love guide me through my day.

Trust and love will let me sleep deeply and soundly into the night.

Trust and love will be what I hope to leave as memories of me when my time is done.

50th floor: trust and love.

Life is unpredictable. Nobody knows for sure what's around the corner.

I want to be alive for a long time from now. I've got things to eat, stuff to do, shows to watch and dumb jokes to hear and tell.

But, you know, nobody ever gets into an elevator thinking they won't be eventually coming out.

Maybe I'll take the stairs for a while.


Thanks for reading,

~FAJ

Day Three Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty Six . . . Birds Of Prey

Something happened yesterday that affected me more deeply than I thought.

A couple of years ago my wife and I installed a birdhouse in our back yard. We got it specifically for the bluebirds who spend time here seemingly all throughout the year. They are so sublime in their coloring and they seem to just enjoy sitting, eating, and sleeping. They aren't too big and they aren't tiny. They are round and fluffy and they almost seem to smile from time to time. When I see them I can't help singing "Mr Bluebird's on my shoulder . . . "

In short, they make us happy.

We were told that the best place for the birdhouse is on a tall pole in the middle of the most wide open area in the yard. It seems that the bluebirds enjoy not only the inside of the house but also sitting on top and being able to survey what's going on around them. So we bought a pole that screws into the ground--it's about 6' tall--and it has a podium to screw the birdhouse onto.

We have a couple of pairs of binoculars which we use to watch all manner of wildlife that enjoy what we call our backyard to go about their lives. We call it ours but it's really just an area that abuts a sizable parcel of conservation land. So really it's for any non-human who cares to walk, hop, crawl of fly into its boundaries. My mom and aunt would love it.

So these bluebirds--there seem to be three or four of them--enjoy this birdhouse very much. Every time either Jodi or I see one we get so happy. My eyesight isn't as great as it used to be but I can still spot the bright blue tufts on the birds head and back. I say out loud "blue-bird" to her and we both get the binoculars and check them out for a minute or so.

I had to clean the birdhouse out last year. It was incredible how thick, neat and well made their nest was. I rather hated to remove it. But we were instructed that this is something that needs to be done every year so that the following spring the bluebirds can start afresh and build a new nest, lay their eggs and raise their family.

We have a good friend who is well versed in birds, plants and gardening. She is somewhat of an oracle. She had warned us recently that if we saw sparrows going in and out of the birdhouse then that is a sign of trouble, as sparrows typically end up invading the birdhouse, killing the inhabitants and taking over. They eventually mark their territory by adding onto the well-made and meticulous bluebird-made nest with their own haphazard and indiscriminate scraps. They pile it on top and use what was there as a foundation.

Yesterday she was over and we decided to have a look.

We turned the lock on the back door of the bird house and lifted it open. To our shock we were greeted with a bright blue feather sticking out from the middle of the cross section of nest. But this feather was connected. It was connected to the rest of a once-beautiful bluebird. The poor thing had been killed sitting on its own nest, and it seemed that the sparrow that did it had begun piling onto it a mess of twigs and grass.

Our friend immediately pulled the nest out and angrily threw it on the ground.

"This is just horrible!", she said. "Those sparrows are so brutal."

I proceeded to dust out what I could from the bottom of the house and we decided to put it back up in case the bluebirds who were left needed a home. I had said if I saw any sparrows in it I'd take it down and we'd put it away for a while.

Today I saw exactly that and went to check the house. Sure enough there was a mess of straw and grass and twigs inside it--the start of a sparrow house--so I shook it out and brought it inside.

We will have to see if the bluebirds return and, if so, whether it is safe to put the house back up. I don't really want to feel responsible for any more preventable bird deaths. Once again, I have too much of my mom and aunt inside me to let this happen.


But this all was very much unsettling.

We are living in increasingly unstable times, and many mornings I wake up in a bit of a panic. This feeling subsides as I my consciousness settles in and my day gets rolling. But some days it's enough to make me just want to just stay in bed until it gets dark again.

I know I'm not alone in this.

I feel like the world is so fractious and unpredictable that sometimes when I make it through to the end of the day and I'm brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed I get so excited that I get to sleep and turn off for seven hours.

It used to be that I hated to go to sleep because there was so much to do--so much to live for in the waking world.

I'd call this a byproduct of getting older (today is my 48th birthday) but I think it's a combination of many things.

I think the reason seeing the bluebird's lifeless body trapped between two disparate nests affected me so deeply is that it is a significant analogy to the way my life used to be. And I see how every day I am faced with uncertain dangers from most directions.

I try and keep my life orderly and organized. And while I'm far from perfect I'm happy to say that the streams of responsibility--bills, meetings, rehearsals, gigs, life events, etc--they all seem to flow pretty smoothly into the ocean that is existence in my world today.

I like to keep an eye on what's going on around me--not in a paranoid sense, but more so just to try and stay aware in case I need to make a sudden decision.

But I like to also be able to crawl inside my box and peer out from within, while sitting atop the nest that I created--my everyday version of sticks, grass, stone and mud. But, of course, this perspective only allows for so much in ones view. They say "don't look back" but reflection is important, and awareness is even more essential.

And I admittedly show off a little bit--fluffing my plumage here and there (I am a performer after all)--but I try to keep things in check and realize that life isn't all about attention. This is extremely difficult for me to remember being the only child of an overly doting mother.

I enjoy making the bed every morning and smoothing out the wrinkles in the sheets and preparing for the coming sleep in a matter of thirteen hours of conscious living. It's my way of sweeping out the nest for the next cycle of slumber.

But the sparrows are everywhere. Some are very much real and some are self-made. They exist in every city in every state in every country all around the world. And they are not content to live life on life's terms. They exist to take what they want and smother anyone who gets in their way. They see a doorway to a sanctuary and decide that this is what they want and they come in and take it without warning.

I don't struggle with temptation often, but it happens from time to time. And when it does I feel like a sparrow is staring at me square in the face waiting for just the right moment to pounce. I see people all around me who are dealing with their demons (or, rather, not dealing with) and I wish I could help. I have reached out to many but it is often not easy to accept help until help is the only option.

And all that said, I will try to live like the bluebird today.

I will enjoy my surroundings and the neat little nest I have built--a personal ecosystem created with rational, healthy, and conscious decisions.

I will attempt to live in the moment and not look too far ahead or too far behind.

I will fluff my feathers just the tiniest little bit at how far I've come, while at the same time remaining humble and grateful for what I have.

And I will accept love from those who care to show it to me.

I was raised by a family of bluebirds. They are gone now but the joy they brought to this world remains unchanged and unparalleled.

I may be the last of my kind but my time here is hopefully far from done. And I have many smiles to bring out.

Like the bluebird, I will try to make others happy, even if it is from far, far away.

The animal kingdom extends farther than the eye can see.

We are all capable of great and beautiful things before we fly away.

Thanks for reading,

~FAJ