This lil' thing just keeps chugging– thanks to you. We've printed a third run of books, in conjunction with my recent TED talk (which will be online shortly; stay tuned!). If you've already bought a copy, Thank You!! Tell your friends, your bookstores, book reviewers and others! It'll be a while yet before this little endeavor is actually sustainable– even when considering how phenomenally it's been doing.

That's not just because books are a terrible way to get rich. It's because I'm Nathan and I can't help myself, in that the focus from day one has never been profit. When you leave the artists in charge of everything, it's never about the money, for better or worse... This was always about making the best possible item we could for you, the reader.

This book is about that level of quality but also about something else, something deeper. I used to scoff at material objects– especially the buying of material objects– in a way that I've cooled down on in recent years. 

Because objects outlast loved ones.

They live longer than people, and carry with them the bodied memories of a thousand ordinary days, the days when that person still wandered about the house, called you, whisper-chuckled in your ears. Objects stick around, long after your friend, grandparent, whomever– has drifted out of your life, whether by death or something smaller, heartbreak maybe, or just moving away. 

A friend once mailed me a letter (yes, young people still do that!) that included a handwritten copy of Pablo Neruda's poem, "Things." It's a celebration of physical objects, and at the time I thusly disregarded it. Who needs objects when you've got people, human souls to connect with?

Well.

I've been learning what my older friends already know. Humans don't always stick around, even when they desperately want to. We feel the unsolvable gnawing questions of God and Death and Time, and we, all of us, act accordingly.

Some will tell you the organizing principle behind everything humans do is sex. Or love. Or loneliness. But all of those sit broadly at the root of something larger.

Death, Don Delillo wrote, is the motivating factor for all human action. Meaning the act of life, and specifically the recognition of its fragile preciousness. The urgency of it, of our being here.

Why did I begin creating with such urgency in the last five years? The blooming of the blog, the mad rush of photography, the large-scale darkroom printing, the book and everything it entailed, my upcoming film and everything that involved, the various radio, print and television placements, the awards at work and at large...

What else would you do, friend, if you were in a terrorist attack, and then survived?

"Tell us about Paris," a friend in the audience asked during my Elliot Bay author Q&A. I'll be giving incomplete answers to the fallout of that event for the rest of my life. I'll post the video of that talk soon as well, and you'll notice how uncertain I am as I fumble about for an answer, something succinct.

This is how I might answer now:

Life has urgency for me now, and I fight its fragility by creating. This fight will always be a losing fight, Sisyphean in a way, pathetic from a certain angle; but I welcome that futility, and all the growth that comes with it. It means I will never tire of making art, trying to be good, kind, loving– the ultimate art act of existence is how we live life. In the face of death, I create. I infuse my art with everything I've got, everything I've learned and gathered, such that I might be able to throw a beam of light into the void, for a flicker of a moment.

As I say above, this book was never about the money. Debut authors don't always find it strangely necessary to have their books printed on photo-quality paper, with offset-printed covers, blurbs from major local luminaries, or come graphic-designed to within an inch of their lives, until you have what is basically a non-fiction coffee-table conversation art piece masquerading in the shape of a novel... But our book is all of these things, because we pulled out all the stops for you. The generosity of spirit that's come my way via the blog all these years demands it.

But more deeply, more profoundly even than that, is the Urgency. To pour my absolute best, every single solitary thing I've got, into something I can gift to you, something that will live on your shelf or someone else's, in your mind, maybe your heart, for longer than I will be able to live on this earth.

Objects. They carry secrets like I never knew.

---

​Buy the book here.
​More on the book here.
Nathan on the Elliott Bay author event: Parts I, II, and III.

​He had one of those 'normal' names. Mono– or duo-syllabic, from the Western tradition: Christian, Jewish, something. Paul. Eric. You know. The kind I can never remember... and also the kind that humanizes a downtrodden face. All names do that, but it's the ones we grew up with that double up in our mind, sandwiching in between the déjà vu of older memory.

I knew a lot of Erics as a child, grew up around Michaels and Matthews and Carlos's, but never one with a face this scruffy, shaggy, stubbly, brow-beaten, aged, hollow, and slight. None of the Erics I sat next to in school dragged around a garbage bag large and lugubrious enough for me to fit inside of– or at least, not yet. 

This Eric did, though, and I was sorry to have forgotten his name, because he remembered mine. I'll have to build up the nerve to ask him again– again– someday. His voice was raspier than a Leonard Cohen buzzsaw, and his name, ordinary as it was, served as a reminder that he was as we are, regular folks trying to make something of ourselves, for a month or for an hour.

"Hey. I went to Georgetown today," he said. It sounded incongruous, such an innocuous statement declared so hoarsely, from such a scarred, battered, nigh war-torn visage. His was the face you'd have from leaning into a hard wind for six decades. But beneath that gravel-shredding guttural croak: hear the friendliness in his tone!

"That's cool," I said. 
"I'm going to apply for a job down there. I got a paper application." 
"That's right!" I replied, my memory jogging to life. "You got all kinds a stuff going on. Last time we talked I remember you were takin' class somewhere."
"Yeah I am."
"Sweet. What classes are you takin' again?"
"Accounting, I'm doing accounting, gardening-"
"Gardening that's right–"
"And woodworking. I don't wanna spend the rest of my life wearing a coat downtown, collecting cans."
"Gets kinda old after a while."
"Yeah. Plus you only make $67 a day. I'm gonna do building maintenance. Sweeping the floors, fixing up the bathrooms, changing light bulbs and stuff."
"I like that kind a work," I said, without irony. "Working with your hands. Feels good, like you're really doing something." 
"Yeah. It'll be good," he said. "I was a janitor before."
"Oh you'll get it then, you got prior experience."
"Hope so. Anyways. I'll let you drive. I thought I would tell you that though. I'm going up to Wenatchee next week."
"What's in Wenatchee?"
"It's my hometown."
"Oh cool. How's the weather up there these days?"

He wasn't a homeless person. He was a homeless person with an interest in gardening, who'd been a janitor, was enrolled in classes... who spent nights planning, musing on the future. 

Who thought about his hometown.

How many others coming upon his streetraggled form tonight will know of his secrets? What will they miss? Or will they have their kind eyes on, the eyes to see all this man is, was, and might ever be?

"Go get 'em," I said, as he left. 
He grinned.

What can I say but thank you: to the lovelies who organized the whole thing, who invited me not just to take part but to be the closing speaker;

To the giants pictured above and elsewhere, for letting me crash their party and speak alongside (more on each of them here)!

To my friends who've TED talked before, who coached my speech into something actually worthwhile. Bill Bernat's talk about "how to talk to your depressed friends" crossed 1 million views a long time ago, and his comprehensive site (how can you resist a URL like stayawesome.com?) only scratches the surface of all his presence has to offer. Paul Currington has MC'd TED events, coached numerous TED speakers, and produces Fresh Ground Stories, the best event of its kind for many reasons. Both of these friends regularly give talks that have the power to change lives. Let's be honest here. Without Paul and Bill and their expert ideas and finesse, so generously given, I wouldn't be where I am.

To the people close to me, who kindly listened as I practiced it with them, innumerable times– at different volumes, paces, in different rooms, with music playing, while driving, while facing different directions... We did everything. I wrote the speech down by hand from memory. I recited it while turning around. While whispering. Shouting. With radio and television going. While groggy and sleep-deprived. While hungry. While needing to use the restroom. The better to simulate the circumstances: you may not know that a scheduling snafu on my end resulted in my giving the TED talk just hours after landing from a red-eye flight from Houston!

And not merely after a night of no sleep, but two nights of no sleep– I was only down there for twenty hours, and red-eyed it both ways. Why, Nathan? Why do you do stuff like that?

For the love of art and life, and everything in between.

I'm grateful for every person on the TED team who worked to make things easier, let alone possible, for me to participate in spite of my ridiculous schedule. Gosh, I love these guys (meet the team here). What an honor to be on the receiving end of such care and enthusiasm. How could I not give them my all? Practicing the speech while showering, doing crunches, cooking noodles, parallel parking...

My speech is about being kind to strangers. The strangers running the UW TED were so kind to me they stopped being strangers almost immediately, and it's thanks to their good graces that any of this happened at all.

And of course, the final thanks must go to you, who took an interest, came and listened, or watched online. We exist because of you. You take the ideas of these wonderful speakers and germinate them out into the world, sculpting them with your own experience. We'd be talking to ourselves in empty rooms were it not for you. Thank you.

The speech will be online shortly. I'll keep you posted.

Also, my book lives!! A third printing has just been completed!! More on that in a moment. I'm off to pick up the boxes now...