Unelevated elevator

My MySpace friend Mary Ann Blinkhorn posted an orange bluebird poem today which mentioned a trapped elevator, and it made me flash to my own unelevated elevator event twenty years ago

In 1981 I went into my computer programming job at 4 in the morning to handle a deadline. Since it was pre-dawn and I’d be the only one in the office for hours, I got stoned before walking the 4 blocks to work from the downtown warehouse I was illegally living in.

Going up in the elevator, it made a weird noise and jerked to a stop mid-floor, totally dead. I called on the fone for help and was told it would take 3 hours for the elevator guy to get there, so I lay down on the carpeted floor and went to sleep. When I awoke, still stoned, my brain simply could not compute where I was or what I was seeing as I looked at the ceiling of a small oddly lit silent box. Half an hour later a part of the wall silently swung in and a guy in overalls helped me step across the dark shaft to the next elevator where he took me up to my floor.

It was a marvelous experience.

The building where this happened was on the northwest side of Public Square and was soon torn down for a new building which was never built, so it’s now the parking lot in front of which Occupy Cleveland has their white reception tent. In fact, their tent stands in front of where my office building’s front door used to be.

Who said irony’s dead? Long live the absurd.