Traffic was crawling. Of course it was. From the moment the southbound express lanes close at 10:45 A.M. until the end of evening rush, I-5 south moves at a crawl. Michael Crichton once wrote that if aliens landed in Los Angeles, they'd think automobiles were the dominant life form; the cars here approach the city center slowly, as if a funerary procession, an act too reverential to speed up. We pay our respects to downtown, coming in from the outside with a sense of stately gravitas and wonder. 

Which means there's plenty of time to have a conversation. If driverless cars and predictable travel times ever really do take off, over-trafficked corridors like this one will become oddly attractive. You'll have that much more time to fix your makeup, Skype with the relatives, get a nap in….

For now, chatting with my fellow colleague will do. An energetic and strong-willed mother of two who radiates positivity, I benefit from listening to her.  

"I like your blog because you understand this," she was saying, referring to the impermanent nature of homelessness. Basically nobody's homeless their whole lives, after all. "Suffering as a phase."
"I like to share another angle of looking at these you know, 'tough subjects.' "
"Yeah," she replied. "Are they really tough subjects though?"
"True…"
" 'Cause if someone that people think is a drug addict, might just be going through a lot of pain,"
"And it's a short term solution,"
"Or, if they're in pain and they don't have food,"
"And they haven't slept, their mental ability…"
"Exactly. They're going to look like a drug–"
"Yeah. And in those conditions can we really expect them to be on their best behavior?"
"Totally. No way," she nodded, adding, "if they have that perfect storm of no food, no place to go, and no hope,"
"Oh I love how succinctly you phrase that. The perfect storm, those three."
"Yeah. Can we really expect them to…"
"Be nice?"
"Behave normally??"
"Of course not, gimme a break!"

I'm so grateful for reminders like this. I need them. Being positive in the realms of contemporary urban life is a decision I have to sign up for every single day. I've written about how compassion is disproportionately visible on the street, that respect has so much currency out here, that love reverberates and comes back in spades. All that is true, but it doesn't mean there's none of the opposite. The selfish apathy of survival can be galling, and the destruction– self-inflicted or otherwise– of what were once promising lives, the ugliness of despair manifest as hate, anger, fear… these are out here too, and sometimes I get disappointed by them. It's a duty to give love out to the world without expecting it back, but it can feel thankless. 

I need the reminder, that we generally see only what we're looking for. That the negative energy lobbed in our direction is never about us but instead a ripple of their own life problems; and that the positive energy shared, conversely, usually is about us, it being a reaction to something we've done. I need the reminder that we effect positive growth not sweepingly but one person at a time, through the incredible impact of a single, respectful exchange. You bring out the good in people when you make them feel human again, and loved. That's the importance of being nice to this face. And this one, and this one and this one….

In your mirror they remember their better angels.

Photo by Tim Willis.

In case you missed the NPR interview through KNKX, here it is! Just under ten minutes total:

Finding Humanity On A Public Bus, by Jennifer Wing. Interview by Gabriel Spitzer. Once again, an enormous thank you to both those fine luminaries for making this happen.

​And thank you for listening!

He was asking if I turn into the 7. I explained the details, and he listened with those crystal blue eyes of his. They shined through the grime and matted grease of his disheveled exterior like pearls; never mind the life-encrusted Raiders jacket or the jeans, starched and shredded, and not from fashion. "Thank you, sir," he said, politely. The contrast between appearance and voice was a surprise. I was further taken aback by his farewell: a mellow voice, the kind you had to strain to listen to. "You have a beautiful night."

Beautiful isn't a term you hear often in street parlance.

Such politeness. It wasn't the first time a street person has been polite to me (as readers of this blog know only too well*); respect has enormous currency out here, and it reciprocates easily. It wasn't the first time, but it was the right time. Did he know he was balancing out the universe for me, reminding me there is always a lighter half?

He couldn't have known that only an hour earlier I'd been berated by a man in a very different mental headspace. This fellow was also on the down and out spectrum, but he'd set the humanity I'm sure he has aside in favor of a different approach: he wanted to be in the U District, and was furious that we were in the U District. Somewhere in there it all made sense. He stomped off with the tantrum of a child's temper, the frustration we hide behind when we know it's our fault. I hope he figures out his story.

But here's this other guy now, still a twinkle in those silvered-out baby blues, like some sort of messenger from the universe, reminding me of the great bus driving balance of things, a balance one veteran operator long ago amusingly summed up to me as:

"There'll always be somebody who loves you, somebody who hates you, and somebody who wants to know how to get to Everett!"

---

*New to the blog? Welcome! Here's a quick "greatest hits" overview with links and highlights.

"Unshaven Nathan Smiles Demonically at Frog." Photo by Laura Loe. 

Yes, it's happening! Tune in this Saturday (Dec 2) morning at 10AM Pacific Time, to 88.5 KNKX NPR. Aim your antenna towards Issaquah!

I haven't heard the interview, so this will be nearly as much a surprise to me as it will be to you. All I know is Gabriel, Jennifer and I talked a lot, both on the bus and in the studio, and I'm so happy to share some of those conversations with you all. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Jennifer Wing and Mr. Spitzer for inviting me on the show. Sound Effect is a weekly program inspired by the place we live, hosted by Gabriel Spitzer and focusing on a different theme each week. This week's theme is "traffic." You may have heard of the stuff.... 

I'm the first interview after the opening. 

If you're not in the Pacific Northwest, tune in online or locate better radio frequencies here. KNKX is on iTunes.

The ridiculousness of this will only make sense in conjunction with the previous post. 

We were talking about the addiction of rabbit holes.

I then proceeded to pull my hair out over how to house the Pocket Camera (whoops, I meant Bmpcc) in preparation for shooting. You have to house these things. They're too fragile to use on a shoot without a protective outer covering, called a cage. Here's what a cage looks like. 

Which cage to get? 

I feel like this should be one of the simpler steps of the filmmaking process. We're taking about a hunk of metal here, and one with no moving parts at that. Why then are there a few dozen options, and why do most of them cost hundreds of dollars?

It's like learning a language. The more you learn, the more you realize how much more there is to learn. It's positively bottomless, the options here. No Bmpcc cage ideally addresses all the issues you'd like it to address, and things remain convoluted even if your budget is bottomless. 

Here's how they've figured out how to make protecting a camera complicated. I'd oscillate from brand to brand, review to review, squinting at spec sheets, price breakdowns, forum discussions and reviews debating the following:

Does the cage cover the camera completely. Should it cover the camera completely? Seems like a good idea to me. But here's the highly reputed Wooden Camera, with its highly reputed Bmpcc cage, and it covers the only left half the Bmpcc camera. Hm. I was thinking about grad school, family, and the meaning of life, and now I'm thinking about how one hunk of metal can protect another hunk of metal from hypothetical drop impacts that may never happen. Not sure how I feel about this….

It's easy to make an argument that a camera cage should cover the whole camera. But what about lightweight versatility? And, really, how many times have you dropped your expensive camera on its left bottom side? Probably none. I sat there, chomping on raw lettuce at 1 A.M., calculating the odds. Trying to remember how many times I've dropped the left corner on something. How many times I've seen someone bang the left half of their camera. Does that happen? Do people do that? Or has Wooden Camera secretly discovered that people only damage the right halves of their cameras? Where are these guys coming from?

Then there's the importance of an HDMI cable clamp. I know you love hearing about cable clamps. The Bmpcc's main video cable port is famously weak, and it stands to reason that strengthening that cable connection with a protective clamp would make sense. I sure thought so. But was I willing to pay thirty percent of the entire cage's retail price for a clamp??

There I go again, munching on stale toast at 2 A.M. (somehow this rabbit hole isn't complete without terribly timed and, even better– nutritionally questionable– food), trying to calculate the odds of ruining my HDMI port without a clamp. The different companies have proprietary clamp attachments. Of course they do. We wouldn't want this to actually be straightforward, let alone easy. 

And what to make of clamping the fragile 12-volt power cable as well? Sounds like a good idea to me, but when was the last time you paid $35 plus shipping and handling for a piece of metal smaller than a nickel? Some of these cages don't even have clamps. How necessary are they? Then your brain gears really start whirring. Couldn't one of my welder friends throw something like this together in a few hours?

Gradually, a pattern starts to appear. You'll recognize it, whether you've shopped for lamps, clamps, cars or refrigerators. It's all the same. Capitalism, a terrific idea, is nearing the end of its useful life, and the seams grin at us with a warped sense of humor:

Each competing item available is missing one crucial component. The Smallrig 1665 is ridiculously affordable but has no cable clamps. Great. The Wooden Camera has a power clamp but its HDMI clamp is no longer available, and the replacement they offer for it doesn't make up for the fact that the Wooden is only half a cage. Terrific. The SmallRig 1476 half-cage surpasses the Wooden Cage because- voila- it has both cable clamps, but wouldn't you know it, it's made of three parts, one of which is prohibitively hard to find online and no longer supported by the company. The Tilta ES-T13 has clamps, but so does the MovCam Body Cage and it's $150 less… but why? Why do the Varavon Armor Pocket and CamTree Hunt Mod Cage look exactly the same? Which one's the Indian knockoff that costs a fraction of the price of the other, and is it worth the risk?

You start second guessing yourself.

We haven't even started talking about how the cage you eventually choose is then mounted on a rig.

Rigs are made of several components that add up to an enlarged camera base, upon which other items can be attached– follow focus dials, microphones, loupes, monitors and more. Here we go again. Do you buy a cage that comes prepackaged with all the rig elements, spending a fortune while absolving you of the need to buy each item separately? Or do you search high and low for the best materials, the best price, the right fit.... 

Or do you simply sigh philosophically, remembering that life is tolerable only with a sense of humor, and rewatch this video of my favorite CWG so far as he rips into the "CamTree Hunt Mod Cage Rig" (someone on their product naming committee was definitely hungover), as his New Zealand accent softly, gently decimates what has to be one of the worst knockoffs in tech history, and chuckle at how passionately– dare I say lovingly– he hates everything about the product?

Sometimes, this is what filmmaking looks like.