It's here. It's everywhere, at any local bookstore and counting, because you supported me. Because you commented on the blog when it was young. You shared it with your friends, read and reread, talked about it and reflected. Because you liked my photography.

You came to my art shows and talks, first by the handful and then by the hundreds. Literally.  Do you know what that means to me? The book is launching nationwide because you made it a Seattle success.

Debut books by unestablished authors without money aren't supposed to do this well. They don't sell at #5 at Elliott Bay, Seattle's biggest independent bookstore and most significant cultural bookselling stronghold. They aren't the #5 book there, just ahead of Michelle Obama's memoir. They don't end up as a top ten bestseller for two years at the store, or the #1 holiday title down at Third Place Books Seward Park, near where many of the stories take place. They don't get additional stock ordered at libraries to meet demand, nor get continued press at numerous television, radio, print, podcast and online outlets. They definitely don't become textbooks taught in the English departments of prestigious universities, or finalists for state-level book awards.

Believe me, I know how fortunate I am, and I know whom I have to thank for all of this: you, the supportive reader. The reader and citizen who responds to kindness, inclusiveness, true stories, and unheralded lives. The small moments. I am far from perfect and know it, and have much to learn from these everyday souls who were kind to me when they didn't have to be. I do my best to emulate the love and respect I so look up to, and (this is hard in Seattle) to generate it. The book is my attempt to observe, document and celebrate.

Art is a way of speaking that lasts longer in time. It holds a little more firmly against the cacophonous, clock-winding, second-stripping rush of modern life. We buy the book for the stories and the texture and the mood, sure, but that's not the underlying draw.

We buy it because it means something.

As an object it lives on our shelves representing a certain kind of possibility. It gives heft to an ethos we haven't found the words for yet. We wish to treasure the reality of goodness, not mine but yours, the goodness that lives because you choose to see a certain way. The book is concrete. The moments within it are real. They remind us that on the day-to-day, person-to-person microcosmic level of existence we humans as individuals live on:

There is a lot to appreciate.

---

Ask for my book, The Lines That Make Us, at any local bookstore. Or, if you must, here it is on Amazon.

More about the book and buying locations here.

I feel a little sheepish sharing with you 15 videos totalling over five hours of my mug blabbing away... but here I am doing exactly that. Being the single title for Redmond's 2020 Summer Reading Program was a big deal to me, because I spent much of my childhood there, and worked at the Redmond Library putting books away for years. Now there's a Library Page somewhere shelving my book... thanks for doing that, whoever you are. 

This video playlist, brought to you by the Redmond Library, has all the videos, interviews, talks and more that we made together over there. Included are

• an intro video wherein I describe what I think the book is and why I wrote it,
  
• breakdowns by me on individual chapters in the book,
  
• a streamlined 2021 version of my MOHAI lecture on youngsters and communication problems (direct link to that here),
  
• a 2-hour "Meet the Author" session where we get nice and personal (link), and
  
• a 95-minute community discussion where everyone from teens to 90-year olds chimes in as one big happy family!
  

Full playlist here.

Enjoy!

I love that they have an actual day for this. There's something endearingly old-school about it, and yet who can argue the value of its intent? With COVID upon us, there's ever more reason to be thankful. Let's hope the powers that be are working at creating Grocer Appreciation Day, Wait Staff Appreciation Day, Laundromat, Flight Attendant, Security, Janitor, Dishwasher, Garbage Collector, HVAC, Nanny Appreciation and countless more. These are the true stewards of modern life, these caretakers who keep animated our rumbling metropolis, feeding the sleeping giant at odd and swinging hours, ever moving, without expecting much in return.

We do this job with our sleeves rolled up.

Speaking for myself, I do it with pleasure. The question is put to me often: Why don't you go supervision? Apply for chief? Rise up in the ranks?

I'd rather people who actually wanted those positions took them. My passion is here. Could you imagine that I have found something that gives me equal fulfillment to the heady thrill of directing a film? Printing in the darkroom, staging a shoot? Regularly it surpasses those thrills, if you can believe it, because as I age I find myself asking the question more intently: Where can I do the most good? What can I do for others?

Everyone's got a different answer, suited to their proclivities. Sometimes it is being in administration. Or philanthropy, research, art. All great. But for me, the answer to those queries isn't found in an office, or even on a set or darkroom. It's found in the eyes of the lost souls I gently steer toward a smile. It's in the camaraderie of talking to the person next to you, trundling together up Jackson Street. Doing the midnight 7, gently.

Nothing beats the vortex.

Smiling to myself at the construction guy standing in the back, bouncing slightly as he dances to a quiet boombox with his friend. Losing it laughing over jokes I don't remember. A young Latina mother's eyes smiling, realizing she is valued. Respected, here on this bus by me, maybe more than other parts of her life. Her goodbye smile needs no words; it's almost a shared secret. Do you know what it is to build that with someone? You never see her again, but maybe that's the point. Because here's the next face already. What greater, more richly romantic, elemental and vital act can I perform than driving up the block?

I'm not always able to give out light as the colleagues I most look up to do, but I try. Because it's worth trying, out here on the gravel-stricken bottom-feeding world, the street-level restless night where nothing makes sense but you're kind anyway. This is where small gestures accomplish multitudes.

Recently I was handed a card and box of chocolates by a pedestrian who popped into my bus at a zone near her home. I didn't recognize her. The card was thoughtful and erudite. I was grateful. I still have another card a youngster thrust in my hand on the 358 one afternoon nearly a decade ago. But even if there were no cards, I'd carry on just the same. Because I'm not doing this for accolades.

I'm doing it because it feels good to give.

---

Thank you, fellow operators, for being the inspiration you are.

• A laundry list of things I've gained (erm, stolen!) from them: What I've Learned From Other Bus Drivers
  
• Inspiration I got from them when the pandemic first hit: Bus Driver Appreciation Day: Coronavirus Style
• More on why I love "these foo's":The Swagger I Love: Thoughts on My Fellow Operators
• The best I've got to give for my fellow drivers (plus anyone who's got a sitting job!): A Love Letter for My Colleagues: Exercises and Stretches for Operators
• I'm not the only good bus driver! Obviously! Commend your driver here!

This was in the Before, as I call it now, when we thought nothing of hugging, handshaking, bumping and all the rest. I was part of PLU's Visiting Writers Series and gave a day-long series of lectures, talks and class visits last Spring. It was magical, particularly in hindsight: a crowded, joyous public event involved infinities and excitements about the future which would very soon cease to exist as such. Wendy Call, the professor who facilitated the event, would later tell me it felt like that last significant memory at the University before the world shut down. On February 27, 2020, the bubble hadn't popped yet, and everything was still real in the ways we were taught to expect.

But let's keep in mind– we thought the world had gone crazy even then. People always have, and we will continue to do so. Who looks best, in the hindsight of history's long gaze? What ages most creditably? Not despair, since things look better when you have some perspective; not cynicism, for that requires pretending you know everything, and pretense always ages poorly; not pessimism that masquerades as realism; not capitulating to the mores of the times when your heart knows better; and– interestingly– not even believing things have gotten worse, because the long view reveals there's always been suffering, often of greater magnitude. No, none of these.

What ages best is tolerance. Acceptance. Of the people around you, of the hard yet easy freedom that is being kind, of the passion in goodness and helping others. That will always read well. For some of us that means fighting the good fight. For others it means having a twinkle in your eye that lets those around you know they're loved. I don't see a value difference between these ends of the spectrum. You have been wronged, yes. You have things you're bitter about. But you still give out joy? Bring light, and share it around as best you can? Think about the person next to you? That will age well, I promise you.

We used to live in between history. Now we live in it. Our actions count doubly these days, even the indifferent everyday nothings which shape the character of our souls. Especially those. I don't remember the names of the students pictured above, or much of what we talked about, but I remember very distinctly their kindness. The feel of sharing their space; their generosity in coming to my event, staying after to talk, in together building joy and belief. The small moments matter.

The story of how I came to be the last Visiting Writer person at PLU before the whole thing collapsed is itself a small avalanche of such small moments. I detail that story here.

Click here for a nice chunky interview with yours truly, covering some of the above and a lot more, as conducted by the student editors of Saxifrage, PLU's literary journal.

Above photo by Wendy Call.

My book will be launching nationally on April 6, which is why there's a preorder link on Amazon here.

But for us Seattlelites (and anyone else with access to the internet! Ha!), the book is currently still selling out at Elliott Bay, Third Place, Phinney Books, and others; if you're having trouble getting copies at Elliott Bay or Third Place (where we continue to run out of stock– thanks you guys for continuing to buy this puppy!), you can now consistently find it direct from the publisher, downtown at our very own Pike Place Market.

Chin Music Press now distributes the book, and you can pick up a (SIGNED) copy of the latest printing there anytime you wish! I recently signed all their stock, as well as Elliott Bay's. The Chin music showroom is at 1501 Pike Place #329, which is the lower lower level inside Pike Place.

If you need the book, whether singly or in bulk, reach out to Bruce at Chin Music Press using this email.

Thanks for reading!

There's something formidable about the place. It surpasses the American understandings of boundaries and size, sidesteps our notions of fealty and social constructs. Remember the childhood feeling, overwhelmed with the realization that the world is more than you know? Travel often does that for adults, and China does that for those who travel a lot.

Shenzhen, where these (film!) images were made, is a port city connecting the mainland to Hong Kong. In 2012, when I was there, it had the indefinable adventurous grit port cities have, the fractal conflations that slip and slide against each other in a concentrated space without borders. The city was burping upwards in fits and starts, a somber sort of puberty evinced by skyscrapers and levelled villages; no corner of communist China reeks more heavily of late-stage capitalist strife than Shenzhen. But that isn't what grabbed me. What grabbed me was the mystery of a stillness no amount of speed, sound and fury could overtake.

Photos and more here.

So this piece first appeared on Seattle and LA shelves in Hart Boyd and Daphne Hsu's wonderful 2018 Zine, Workin' On It. As Boyd explains on his site and in this Medium.com interview, the zine "explores creative development through relationships between an individual’s childhood expressive efforts and their current practices/productions... through work samples from both past and present and a short piece of writing detailing their connections."

My piece (with new thoughts) is below, and concerns these two photos I took: one as a preteen youngster, and the other deep into my art career. You can probably tell which is which:

Here we have the text which accompanied these images:

At least twenty years separate the images, possibly more; but what of substance has truly changed? Yes, the first is a childhood snapshot, at first blush more a document than a creation. The second, still using the same 35mm format and still avoiding all digital manipulation, as is my wont, represents a progression of technique. The colors are richer because of the decision to process the now-extinct Kodak E100vs slide film in a chemical bath designed for negative film, thus deepening contrast and blowing out the color spectrum. There is an awareness of the rule of thirds, of the painting practice my photography is now rooted in, of a need to use photography not to record, but to create.

But isn't all that just window dressing? We are left, finally, with two images of the same emotion: the plaintive and deep-seated wonder at the manyness of things, a mixture of confusion and admiration adding up to a quiet wonder. In all societies light has been a metaphor for truth, and we look upward when we want to know more. There was something about those floating trees, objects seen against the sky, and that silent swirling being overhead. I was feeling lonely in Redmond, Washington; two decades later I would call it pensive, alone overlooking San Fernando Valley.

"Only the most naïve questions are truly serious," Milan Kundera wrote. "They are the questions with no answers." There is no difference between the questions I ask now from those I asked then; I know only that as a child, it was easier to be happy.

---

As I post this today, I realize I would write the final sentence differently. What is happiness? Is it peace? Excitement? Or deeper down, is it synergy between expectations and outcome? You're thinking it has something to do with freedom, and satisfaction of needs. Makes sense. But Tolstoy writes in War and Peace that "a superfluity of the comforts of life destroys all joy in satisfying one's needs" (emphasis mine); that "all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity." Basically, if you have everything, you fall into a stasis. I'm reminded of coming across the graphs of income versus happiness; people get happier the more money they make, until the two lines peak together somewhere between $60-75,000 a year– after which things level off, with happiness decreasing after $105,000. Mo' money, mo' problems, indeed.

We humans are searchers. We need to be incomplete, on our way somewhere. Clawing our way up walls of challenge, as Tennessee Williams famously wrote in his 1947 essay The Catastrophe of Success (about how he found himself mysteriously miserable and uncreative after becoming rich). In her landmark 1971 essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists," Nochlin notes that artists almost never come from aristocratic backgrounds. There's a clarity of sight that comes from a certain amount of struggle, alongside the loneliness we humans feel simply from existing as individuals. My own struggles as a working-class artist have been less financial than emotional, psychological, existential. Was I happier as a child? I'm actually not sure, on further reflection. People forget how frustrating growing up can be.

What I do know is I've honed the muscle of choosing happiness, of deciding what to see, to a level I definitely never had as a youngster. No job is better suited for it than mine: a neutral deluge of the best and worst of humanity, dumped in your lap by the Universe, as if it's saying: "Here's a riddle for you."

The trick is not trying to answer it. The trick is looking for the light. By looking for goodness, you manifest it in yourself and by extension in others.

I wouldn't trade that skill for anything.

Further reading:
Linda Nochlin: a primer on her essay, and the essay itself.
Nature: Human Behavior. "Happiness, income satiation and turning points around the world."
Moneyish. "The dark reasons so many rich people are miserable human beings."
CNBC. "From the ‘perfect’ salary to keeping up with the Joneses, here’s how money really affects your happiness."