UPDATE: The TV segment has been corrected, rendering all of the below moot. Click here to watch. I'll leave my thoughts below up awhile longer because I've received some good feedback and discussion on the ideas; but the important thing to highlight here is Diane and Tim's integrity in going out of their way to change the segment. They didn't have to, but they did. Thank you!!

In case you missed it (I did!), I was on The Seattle Channel last week, in one of their ongoing segments about local luminaries and goings-on. I'm not sure I qualify for recognition alongside the Workers Rights Committee and Wings for Autism, but I'll happily take a seat alongside their Pet of the Week segments, especially those cute lil' one-year old female ferrets.

I don't like watching myself onscreen (which is why I've still never seen this  2015 commercial),* but I enjoy making these projects and meeting the fine folks who create them, and I'm hugely grateful for being highlighted so. A warm thank you to Diane Duthweiler and Tim Pearson for being the loving maestros they are. 

However:

I made the mistake of recommending this to watch before actually watching it, and having now done so I feel duly compelled to address this program's opening lines: I do not assert, nor have I ever, that I am "the only happy bus driver." I understand the inclination for television to artificially amp things up, but am disappointed that took place here. Any quality I may have in that direction I've appropriated from others, especially other operators. For more, click here for details on what exactly I've learned from the hundreds of other happy bus drivers. 

Diane and I had a pleasant conversation revolving around these lines that didn't make the cut; I harbor no ill will against her or the pressures she's understandably up against to deliver a catchy and digestible piece of television. I'd simply like to contextualize for the record. She asked me reread this blog's opening post, and wondered whether I still stand behind its words. I found the exercise instructive. The opening lines read as follows:

I'm guessing this is where she got her opening lines from, but semantics play a role here: it should be apparent in the above that I'm referring to blogs, not bus drivers. Yes, this is the only blog by a bus driver centered around positive perspectives. No, I'm not the only operator with a good attitude. The ridiculous hubris and outrageous disrespect in such a statement makes me blanch, which is why I'm harping about it here.

In our conversation, I replied to Diane's thoughtful query by saying the only thing I'd change about the lines now is that I'd walk back on the implied judgment in the phrasing above. Six years later, I have a more clear understanding of how understandable it is to be frustrated, disappointed, jaded or otherwise dejected as a public service worker– whether regularly or from time to time. It's okay to be unhappy as a bus driver. It's okay to be unhappy walking down the street. I get it. I just try for the opposite.

Click here to watch the 5:31 Seattle Channel segment in any event.

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*Although for some reason I have no problem watching this piece on me by Brian Bell– maybe because the focus isn't on me but on the analogue medium. 

I used to save these. They're the bottom ends of transfer slips, leftover in the cutter after tearing them off for customers. I call them "transfer evidence," and they're exciting to me for what they represent. 

There's a sentimental streak in me that overvalues certain objects. We're always leaving people, or they're leaving us, and when we have the chance to say goodbye, we take it; transition looks too much like loss otherwise. We do what we can against the constant tide of reality becoming memory. 

This is where artifacts find their greatest value. They expand in their meaning, become more than themselves: the plain white saucer on my kitchen counter, Jewish, from World War II. The typewriter with the fading ink band; the patches on your jacket, darned by a family member, decades past on a cloudy Tuesday. The objects that didn't used to matter; how many memories do they now contain? 

I particularly like transfer evidence because of how much it reveals, collectively. Each torn sheet represents a story, someone's day, plans they had. Each paper is a person with a mission, infinitely different. 

Each diagonal tear position indicates a specific trip, and more positions indicate more trips. Some trips are busier than others, and that gets reflected here too, in the varying thicknesses of each diagonal:

The day represented by the left batch in the picture above had more trips, but less people per trip, whereas the chunk on the right looks like just 4 trips, with the last 3 being very busy.

My night shifts involve longer transfers and thus shorter evidence. The thickest strip is at the very bottom, of Owl transfers torn that night: 

This is a busy day. When I drove the 358 I'd use an entire book of 100 transfers in three hours: 

I no longer hang onto these like I used to, mainly for lack of space. As a hoarder I'm an utter failure, because I vastly prefer spacious and empty living areas. I can't keep everything!

But sometimes I'll still pause after the end of a long day, reflecting on that bushel of paper before tossing it in the blue bin, considering all they represent. Flipping through those little sheets. The jostled stress, the happy eyes, the students and mothers and lovers and sons, crowded together for only this hour, and probably never again. That was a lot of life out there that I just saw, I'll think to myself.

Isn't that kind of glorious?

[This story is now available in my new book!]

Photos by Eleanor Moseley. Part 1 here.

There are different levels of thanklessness in filmmaking. 

You're watching the latest Oscar winner, or the latest direct-to-video Netflix production, and you're sitting there afterwards watching the end credits, as I like to do, taking a moment to decompress and process what you've just seen. Some people don't watch credits, but I find it hard to instantly transition from the trenches of World War I to making a cheese scramble. Plus there's all those names in the credits. Look at all that. Most people don't know what a best boy is, or a gaffer, or a second AC. We blink and move on.

There's a level of thanklessness in that dynamic, but to a degree it can't be helped, and it's not the sort I want to dwell on.

On a set, everyone knows what a best boy does and who the gaffer is. They're not invisible. It's the Production Assistants. Who are these friendly and harried people, running about the set on their own time? Bringing another carrier of coffee. Filling everybody's parking meters again. Carrying the ladders. Ordering the lunches. Taking out mounds of garbage. Fighting traffic as they rush run errands. Cleaning the location afterwards. All this and a thousand tasks more, as a volunteer: no matter the size of the production, PAs generally don't get paid. They're taking days off work to do this. Often you don't even know their names. 

You can understand how the smaller the production is, the more is asked of each crew member. My recent shoot was a tiny one, but the effort put into it was massive. Each PA did the work of what should really fall to several people. My script supervisor monitored continuity and confirmed shots and was a director's assistant and deputized to delegate the other PAs and and managed the extras and transported and relocated items from room to room and car to room and truck to car and blocking pedestrians and showed up on set as asked, just in case she was needed– on one day only to find the shoot cut short by rain. 

My craft services person selected all the food in careful anticipation of everyone's needs and supervised setup and takedown and wrangled the extras and cleaned the locations and ordered the crew lunches and packed the cars and blocked traffic during takes and enforced seventy extras to a quiet set. Did anyone on my film perform only one role?

It's all so spectacularly thankless... and yet so absolutely critical to a film's existence. This thanklessness isn't exclusive to the PA role; it's just the most obvious there. They bear the brunt of representing it the most potently. 

A PA, scrambling to get a stack of pizzas for a crowd of hangry extras. The extras, waiting two hours in a cramped room while lighting is set. The gaffer and grip, working as quickly as they can with dangerous equipment, solving a thousand mini-problems the extras will never know about. The location owner bending over backwards to bring in security and technicians on their off days. The DP and focus puller, working out a complicated move the audience will only notice if it's done badly. The actors, spending hours working out a psychology and backstory only the most careful viewer will consider.

You have to do this stuff because you like it. Because you like the people you're working with, the idea behind the project. The craft of it. Filmmaking is tied heavily to celebrity in the public eye, but you can't do it for recognition. It's invisible work.

Directing is one of the last truly dictatorial roles out there. Realizing the authorial singularity of one person's vision by collaborating creatively with dozens of others demands the approach; a hierarchy is needed. Everyone who works a film set has at one time been a PA, and we all understand what that bottom rung feels like, but there usually isn't time to express it. You just hope they know, as I hope my crew knows, that I'm forever indebted to them for putting in the backbreaking effort necessary to make a film together.

"I feel awful," I told a friend after one of the shoot days. Things had gone spectacularly well, but the euphoria was wearing off.
"What? Why?" 
"Because I have no way of communicating to all these people how thankful I am. Like I'm trapped. The language doesn't allow for an expression of gratitude that big."

I'm guessing everyone on my production, to varying degrees, felt ignored and undervalued at various points of the shoot. It's the nature of the beast. I asked for the world from each of you, and was too busy to say thank you. Friends, know that I knew you then, in each of those moments, as I dashed from issue to issue, trying to keep the ship going. 

It's because of you that it all stayed afloat.