• Published on

    For New Bus Drivers: Thoughts, Tips, and Stories

    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:

    • Do not concern yourself over schedule or fare. You can't control those. Disregard them. You only need to do two things: be nice, and don't hit anything. You can control those.
    • Take care of your body. It's easier than you think, and more than worth it. if your hurting physically, everything else is that much harder.
    • Pretend to be happy. The funniest thing will happen: that pretending will start turning into actual happiness. It's bizarre, and I don't how it works, but by God, am I glad it does.

    I don't have all the answers, but I do have a few:

    Two lists you might find useful:
    1. A Love Letter for My Colleagues: Exercises and Stretches for Operators (mostly physical stuff)
    2. What I've Learned From Other Bus Drivers (mostly customer stuff. If you click on only one link here, let it be this one)

    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!
  • Published on

    Second Beach Wave Break

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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.
  • Published on

    Nationwide

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    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.
  • Published on

    Nathan at Redmond Library: The Complete Videos

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    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 (currently offline) 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 (currently offline) where everyone from teens to 90-year olds chimes in as one big happy family!

    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!
  • Published on

    Bus Driver Appreciation Day: 2021

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    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.