EDIT: I'm bumping this up by request– sounds like more of us are thinking about becoming bus drivers!
Generally, bus drivers don’t talk about driving. They talk about people. You might think this job's greatest challenge is maneuvering those big lugs, but it's funny how easy the driving eventually becomes. It's our planet's fellow cohabitants that make this gig the challenge it is, and what justify its status as the all-singing, all-dancing customer service profession of all time. Nothing else comes close. It's possible to have a great time doing this job. I promise (days like this and this are what keep me comin' back!). Crusty senior colleagues will tell you it's only a matter of time till your enthusiasm cracks. They have the experience to back that up– their own. Their experiences are valid, but they don't have to be yours. Nod and smile politely, appreciate the good qualities and ideas they do have, but remember: you have control over your experience. I've been doing this for twelve years, and I've driven the "worst" routes, at the "worst" times, on the "worst" days, for years on end. I love this stuff. They're going to tell you you're going to become miserable, gain weight, become jaded, injured... but the evidence is that some of us are still here. Yes, you'll find your patience pushed on certain days to the absolute limit. But. You have control over your own experience. This job, like others but moreso, is a mirror; you'll get out of it just what you put in, in unexpected ways. Not everyone you greet will respond, and not everyone you're kind to will return the favor. That's okay. Things come back in a larger, subtler way. You say hello and help out, not to get kudos or acknowledgment (though you'll often get that), but to do your part. To feel the relaxed ease of being your good self, of having nothing to prove and nowhere to be in a hurry. You're getting paid; you need to be nice. They're not getting paid. They don't have to be anything. They're going through things you couldn't imagine. Just help and acknowledge, help and acknowledge. They may not love you today, but they may later. Others certainly will. Positive attitudes get noticed, and respect has massive currency on the street. You may have a few days where you go home stressed or unhappy. The important thing is, as they say in dieting, to not let it become a habit. Eat that wedding cake, but not every day. Identify patterns of negative thought or behavior early on and do something about them. Sure, you'll have a few days out of the year that go spectacularly poorly. It happens. Don't be discouraged; as the wise man said, we learn more from failing than succeeding. The trick is to just not do it too often! Think about how you'll deal with whatever it is next time, how to think about it next time– because there will be a next time, believe me. The fix might be as simple as a tone change of tone or perspective. Below are a few links I urge you to check out. Maybe you only have time to bookmark this page for later. I get that. But keep in mind these three bullet points as you start your next trip:
I don't have all the answers, but I do have a few: Two lists you might find useful:
A few stories on topics that might be stewing on the brain:
Let me know how you're doing. Seriously. We're here to help. Say hello if you see me!
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You have a name for the voice inside of you.
Why do we live at a speed that prevents us from hearing it? Why does it speak only at its own pace? O, pride. What arrogance for us to assume the turning wisdom of the earth will adjust to our rhythms. If the gods could speak, would not their syllables more likely sound out in years, rather than seconds? I watched him prepare to board. It was my last trip of the night, and only a few miles removed from the last stop; not many souls out here. He gathered his bags with urgent agility, the sure and capable grip of someone familiar with manual labor. There were scuffs and scratches on his skin I don't think he noticed. A tall man but young, short-haired lithe, slim and ragged: a quiet midwestern soul whose next word you could never anticipate. All epiphanies are whispers, Ernie Lawton once told me. Wisdom needs something to take root in. It doesn't come when you're rushing ahead, and like most great things, it often happens when you're not expecting it. He was talking. He remembered me from before, somewhere. People remember me to a degree I'm surprised by. Two nights ago a man walked past my darkened bus on the street side, scream-musing to the universe as he pushed a shopping cart. He saw me in the gloom and the words came bursting out: "DIS GUY GOOD. HE ALWAYS ON THE MIC, LETTIN' 'EM KNOW. YOU GOOD, BRO, GOOD TO TH' PEOPLE." Not what I was expecting! Back to tonight, as I listen: "I finally got off the street," he was explaining. He was off it, he was on again, an issue with a slumlord, trying to maintain... he paused before speaking again. "Those people I was hangin' around with, they know me the best of anyone else but they're not necessarily the best influence, you know what I mean?" Did I ever. I remember my high-school-aged self looking up at the moon as I walked with my friend group, wondering: Are there people out there who understand me better than this? Where will I find you? "That's hard," I said. "It's so easy to get pulled back in." Now it was my turn to reflect before speaking. "It's like that saying, somebody told me, we become most like the five people we hang out with the most often." "What?" I said it again. He grabbed one of his bags before it fell off the seat. "Oh, yeah. That's interesting. I haven't heard that before." "Yeah so I try to be mindful of who I put around me, you know?" "This is like the longest time I've spent not around other people." The pandemic blues. Isn't it strange for society to be melancholy, and not just you? "Totally. And it's especially hard these days..." "Yeah. Like I've just been watching, like, YouTube videos." "Dude I know the feeling." Young people don't often ask about others. He did. Was he older? "How's COVID affected you outside of work?" "Well, it's kinda like you're saying, I've noticed just a lotta people telling me about they're feeling isolated. It's such an interior time, isolated, even for folks that's outside." "Yeah man. I was gonna, before the virus hit, I was all lined up to go the Redwood School of Botany." Young people will not always share with you their passions. They may be too scared, embarrassed, vulnerable. Reward it. Reward that risk, so they know there are people who won't laugh. "Oh, sweet!" "It's the largest botanical horticultural school in the United States." "Oh awesome. And that's such a beautiful area, the redwoods." "Yeah totally. It's crazy now though. They had these fires down there, you know California, and a bunch of redwoods burned down, and get this, they were the oldest ones. Two thousand years old." The light was red. I turned around. "Whaaat? That's devastating!!" "That was my reaction," he said. "Some people I told about it to were like oh that sucks, but I was like–" "Oh. Totally. It's devastating." "Yeah it is. I mean, 2000 years." "Two thousand years!" The light turned green. We trundled. This was the time for trundling, unhurried conversation in the neighborhood night. He said, "So I was staying with these hippie guys out there–" "That's cool–" "Yeah. This that the other... I got stuck outside for two nights, and there was this redwood, super tall, and it'd been hit by lightning and the inside had died but the outside was still growing." "Oh wow." He used his hands to help explain. "So the inside part was gone, was hollow but the outside was still a growing tree, and it was wide enough for me to lie down in the empty space inside." Let them know there are people who care. "Wow! That's amazing! That's really beautiful. How many people can say–" "Yeah. And it was just... I know this might sound like, kinda–" "Oh no, I get it. I remember standing under those redwoods, and you just feel it." "I always feel hesitant to say stuff like this to people out loud–" "Dude no, I hear ya." We were cresting the wave. He finished with, "but just saying the word redwood, I feel calmer." I breathed in. I exhaled the ocean of stress my personal life has been, the clutter of nonstop Doing. He hardly needed my help, my emotional supports. I needed his. He illuminated what I too often fail to keep in sight, surrounded as I am in the chaos-happy urban vortex. Even here you can slow down, build your peace. No need to live life in fifth gear. "Man, thank you," I said. "I needed that reminder." He had no idea. "Oh totally." "It is calming. Just thinking about them, out there. Man, I'm so glad you got on this bus, seriously." He smiled. The grin was a mixture, equal parts Not a Big Deal, and Thank You For Hearing Me. My soul breathed through me, suffused as it was with the image of sleeping inside a redwood as I trundled through rain-lit neon. When you feel like you belong amongst your friends, that's special. You need that, sure. But when you feel kinship with strangers, doesn't matter who it is the person next to you, the smile that travels down your spine means something else. It calls you awake, deeply, and you know everything's all right. You belong amongst the World. 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
Full playlist here (UPDATE: this list is currently offline. However, you can still access the intro video and Meet the Author videos via the links above). 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.
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." Christmas Eve.
I was parked at my layover, inside the bus. What was I reading? I don't remember. Probably Middlemarch. I turned the page and looked up, out at our neon-hued urban night, a rain-slicked reflective darkness scattered with the detritus of nature and decay. A movement caught my eye. Something irregular in the periphery. Yes, that was it: a man had ridden past on his bicycle, on the sidewalk to my right, before stopping suddenly. Interesting, but only so much. I returned to Ms. Eliot's prose. Books distract me from the loneliness of having to work a holiday, and deepen my appreciation of existence. I was straddling worlds, taking comfort in what only books can offer– no waiting for the screen to load or app to start up, no pause while you anticipate a text; just the gentle rhythms of imagination, and the turning of pages which will never freeze or go dark on you. That was when he knocked loudly on my driver's side window. I was standing by my driver's seat, using it as a table of sorts to lean on while reading; I never sit on my breaks. What bus driver would? I looked up. The guy on the bike had come over to my window, and was in the roadway trying to get my attention. "Hey," I said, by way of greeting and reply to his presence. He spoke loudly now, loudly enough to be heard through the glass: "Hey! Be sure to have a Merry Christmas!!" Wow, I thought. I had just barely enough time to respond with heartfelt surprise before he rode away. "You too!" I exclaimed with gratitude, my hands joined in a clasp of thanks. Would that we could decide which moments we'll hang onto. Which will linger as memories, representing all those in-between exchanges our lives are made of? Sure, you remember the epochal milestones, the documented highlights people will always bring up, but what about the daily substance of it all? Was this any less illuminating of how people can be? Let me store it away with words. Let me repeat the truth of it: a person out there in the world paused, turned back and came over to me. They thought about it. That bus driver's working on the holiday. I should say something. It was important to him, enough to alter the rhythm of his day and direction. I'll never see him again, and he got nothing out of it. But: the gesture. The surging goodwill afterwards. Is there anything, anything at all, after being kind? Isn't that the final estimation of what it means to be human? To coexist? Let me not merely admire goodness, but follow it. Let me not only receive or imagine, but do. It's 2021. We know some things we didn't before. Let's live. |
Nathan
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