It all started somewhere northbound on Tenth Avenue East, as we drifted past Saint Mark's Cathedral. There's never any traffic here, but there was tonight. Whirling lights flashing up ahead, passersby on the sidewalk with cradled arms, hands on hips. We, in the bus, had just driven all the way up from Rainier Valley, and were in the home stretch, through residential north Capitol HIll on our way to the U District terminal.

This is normally the easy part. 

Police cruisers in the distance inched forward. What with the long line of cars and three other 49's in front of me, I couldn't make out what was happening. It took forever for me to realize it was a protest. Of course. But what were they doing out here in the 'burbs? People protest on Broadway, or downtown, not Tenth avenue. There's nothing out here but houses, and all the lights were turned out. These poor protesters were their own audience. 

Eventually, after six of us 49's– a staggering hour and a half's worth of bus service stacked up in the same place– got locked in a standstill amongst an endless line of cars, the protesters' plan began to emerge. By now we had spilled out of our parked vehicles and were standing in the street chatting. We were in the quiet realm, a good half-mile away from the action, living in the charged calm that lies on the peripheries of an event. Passengers fell asleep or else abandoned ship, choosing to walk. We began learning this was a Black Lives Matter protest on its way to the Mayor's home– hence the reason for masses of people blocking roadways in unconcerned sleepy residential neighborhoods. 

I've written before on the disconnect between protestors and the groups of people those protesters are supporting. The dichotomy is never more apparent than during Black Lives Matter protests. To explain:

For the lion's share of this protest's routing, it blocked and completely destroyed service on only one bus route– the single most essential conduit to the black neighborhoods in south Seattle, the 7/49. 

The irony of this couldn't be overstated. We laughed, unable to take the protest seriously despite its excellent and honorable intentions. They could've easily avoided this by protesting during the day, when the routes aren't linked. It's called a little bit of research, guys, we quipped to each other, giggling. Ruining bus service for black people in transit-dependent neighborhoods is proooooobably not what they were hoping to accomplish…. but buku brownie points for having their hearts in the right place!

After about 90 to 120 minutes of delays, depending on which of those six buses we're talking about, we all finally made it to the U District. The coordinator was slammed with a high-level accident in Ballard, and couldn't get back to us to direct us on how to return to schedule. Running all six buses in a row back to Rainier Beach would be pointless.

We decided to improvise. I like to think we did a bang-up job of using our initiative and spreading the service out. A couple of us worked on the 49 part of the route for the time being, while another drove the full ordinary routing of the 49/7 through downtown; myself and one other operator expressed ourselves to the south end to serve Rainier Valley as quickly as possible. He would fly all the way down to the bottom of the Valley and be the first northbound trip; I would be the first bus in nearly two hours to do a southbound trip from Vietnamtown to Rainier Beach. 

I recall thinking, whoever gets out there first on Rainier Avenue is going to get annihilated. Aside from a mass overload, what passenger on this green earth is going to be happy, waiting 90-120 minutes for a bus that normally comes every fifteen? Whoever that poor soul of a driver is who gets out there first…

Only later did I realize: I am going to be that operator. I didn't plan it that way; it just happened. I happened to get to Twelfth and Jackson before anyone else did, and saw the angry mob. Grab this bull by the horns, I told myself, and dive in. Anything else would be too easy. You were made for stuff like this. 

These folks were furious.

They didn't have the tech access to know why the bus was late, or what had been going on. They'd just been seething, for an hour plus. As a bus rider who's experienced egregious service disruptions, I could sympathize. You have to understand: the 7 is some of the best and most heavily used bus service in the county. It runs every ten minutes during the day and every fifteen at night til midnight, with twenty-four hour service after that. A gap this long in service that busy is a seismic event. 

Speak loudly, confidently, kindly: thank you for waiting, thanks for your patience, I appreciate your patience tonight; while also explaining as succinctly as possible: big protest tonight, blocked all of us for a hour and uh half, biiiig protest up on the Hill, black lives matter protest…

That got their attention. 

What could they do? What can you do, when the cause of the delay has been a fervent and much-needed call to action for your rights as a citizen? You couldn't be angry about it. That wouldn't make any sense. You could complain, but your complaints would fall away like so much chaff in the breeze. The wind would die down a little all over again, at each new stop. Sails slackened.

"OH MAH GOD," Devin said when he saw me finally at Walker Street. Devin's terrific. He works security at Walgreens. He and I like to talk about our workout routines. We're about the same age and body type. As the bus pulled up, we both threw our hands in the air upon recognizing each other. I always drive with the dome light on, but especially tonight– I wanted them to know it was me as early as possible. They know me out here. Anything to deflate those sails tonight.

"OH MAH GOD," he said again. "THEY SENT THE RIGHT BUS DRIVER OUT FO' THIS RUN. 'Cause I was 'bout to cuss the shit outta this muhfuggah so bad…"
"Devin, thanks, man!"
"Oh, my God,"
"I'm glad it was you standin' right here!"
"This th' ONLY driver they coulda sent," he told the bus. He just had to get his pent-up energy out. I love how it tumbled out as something positive. "Aw, shit! I been waitin' so long, I was so ready to cuss out WHOEVER it was. But ah couldn't! 'Cause it was him! This the best bus driver in all Seattle right here! I cain't cuss him out!"
"Devin, man," I said. "Love you, dude."
"Ah love you too, man!"
"Iss good to see you. It's been crazy tonight. They marched from downtown all the way to the Mayor's house…."

With this and other similar interactions, we turned the night around. Grab the bull by the horns, and make it happen. It was exhilarating. Over the microphone, I continued to periodically explain and thank, explain and thank. I refused to accept to fare. How could I charge these overtaxed souls in such a circumstance? A young man raised his eyebrows in grateful surprise. "Good lookin' out," he said. The acknowledgment on both sides of that small exchange, making waves in each person's heart.

In eavesdropping on the conversations around me I was reminded, potently, of the weight of the issue. Dwayne, an educated man who knows Shakespeare, working swing shift at a hardware store. Yolanda has a law degree but works four entry-level service jobs. It's near midnight, and she'll miss valuable sleep– she gets up at five a.m. tomorrow. Someone saying they shop for groceries every month using the same $54 amount they've been allotted for years. A boy revealing to his friend there's not enough water in the house for him to shower that night.
His friend said, "just wear your other drawers, bro! I know you got three drawers!"
The first boy laughed shyly, and the second tried to make him comfortable, revealing that his family uses toilet water to wash their socks and underwear. 

Black lives do matter. Last Tuesday they mattered in North Seattle, and took place in South Seattle.

When it's the middle of the night and there's no one else on the bus– or on the road– you can really get to talking.

"It's seriously like the biggest thing now. It just started."
I don't know about these things. The big article hadn't come out yet. I said, "what's it called again? Pokemon what?"
"Pokemon Go."
"Pokemon Go."
"Yeah, its a GPS-based version of Pokemon."
"Oh wow. Where you go around in the real world."
"Yeah, you actually go around,"
"Oh my gosh!" I exclaimed, in mock terror. "It's become real!"
"Yeah, you go into different places and,"
"Catch 'em all?"
"And fucking catch 'em all, yeah!" 

I don't know why, but we both sounded like a couple of stoners. Either that or there's a little California surfer in all of us. I was saying "dude" way more than usual. Different people draw out my different sides. He was the definition of laid-back, medium-length hair after midnight, about my age, just this side of drawling out the words. You got the sense he knew how to take it easy. 

"Oh gosh," I said.
"It's so big now. Seriously like on my walk up here, I usually pass by like fifteen or so fraternity dudes and sorority girls. Except tonight they were all playing Pokemon Go."
"Holy cow! I never thought I would ever think about frat boys and sorority girls and Pokemon Go in the same sentence!"
"I know, right? Maybe that's good. Now kids are starting to go outside." 
"Well, if this is what it takes to get kids to play outside again,"
"Yeah it takes them everywhere. In fact, there was these two kids recently on the news, they were playing so hard they ended up way out in the woods and they found a dead body!"
That is playing pretty hard! I said, "what?" 
"Which they never woulda found if they weren't playing it." 
"Wow. That's hilarious. Sort of." 
"Kinda makes you think about all the dead bodies that never woulda been found if people weren't playing Pokemon Go."
"I never even heard of Pokemon Go! Clearly I'm falling behind the times!"
"Dude, no," he said. "Fuck the times!"
I quipped, "the times can fall behind us!"
"Yeah, man! Seriously though, most people who have it really together that I wanna emulate, you know, don't really spend a whole lotta time keepin' up on shitty news stuff."
"You know that's true," I replied. "You know how people say great things happen when you're least expecting them? I agree with that, but I think what they're really saying is, great things happen when you're really present. Because then, you're not expecting it–"
"You're not thinking about it. You're here."
"Exactly. Dude."
"There's just so much bullshit coming at us, it's like our little human brains can't handle all of it."
"I agree. I think much of modern life is the act of editing. Figuring out what stuff to cut out."
"Oh. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very negative, a subtracting thing."

We bemoaned the act of plugging in, celebrated the act of being present. You've heard me go on about that enough; I won't repeat it again here. He made an astute comment about how the obsession with secondary or tertiary experience is more than just a fascination with the unreal, and often seems like a fear of confronting the banal, the everyday, the immediate reality. Anything but the act of simply being here, sans stimuli!

I was sitting in Occidental Park recently in between shifts. A man was playing guitar up at the little bandstand. Nobody was listening to him, but he would offer little anecdotes between each of his songs. At one point he mentioned he'd hadn't watched the news in three months. He went out, interacted with people daily, but wasn't up to snuff on the list of tragedies across the globe. "I feel better about the world these days," he said.

His words revived a memory from long ago: my aunt and I riding in her car, when we lived in Hollywood. I was asking her what she found different about life between now and her adolescence. She thought for a moment before speaking. We were going north on Vine, approaching the 101 entrance. She said, your idea of the world was different. It felt safer.

The world wasn't actually safer,* but saturation crime reporting and the twenty-four hour news cycle didn't exist yet. In the days before the internet, your youth was your neighborhood, your job and your friends. Do you remember those days, when reality was right here?

I suppose it's arguable there's a benefit to living in a culture of fear. But it's got nothing on the benefit of not living in one. 

--

*Hopefully by now we all know crime has been declining for decades, while reportage of incidents has skyrocketed. For the curious reader: best of all is Lomborg's staggeringly comprehensive 2001 text, the landmark The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, which explores crime and reportage on a global scale, among many other topics. If you don't have time to read that, check out these links, presented in order from most readable to most dense!

"Despite Grim Media Reports, Crime Rates Are Actually Down In The U.S." (NPR)
"We’ve Had a Massive Decline in Gun Violence in the United States. Here’s Why." (The Washington Post)
"What Caused the Great Crime Decline in the U.S.?" (The Atlantic)
"America's Faulty Perception of Crime Rates" (The Brennan Center for Justice)

Here are two figures running for my bus now, tumbling out of the American darkness. They are a man and a woman of proximate age running together, held down by their gear, a motley assortment of blankets and bags. Right now they're in between stops, and I have a moment of hesitation; perhaps I should leave them, as the 7 is still running frequently at this time of night. There will be another one before too long.

But then I looked again at the man, who'd been waving to me, signaling his desire for the bus while trying to retain everything he was carrying. His T-shirt was white, and his arm was dark brown– black in this light– and he put his hand over his heart in a gesture of entreaty, appealing to my better angels. The contrast of his arm and shirt made for a clear visual, cutting through the evening haze.

I smiled and pulled over. They could see my smile, as I drive with my dome light on (people are nicer to you when they can see you). Catching their breath, stepping up the stairs, making sure they have everything, thanking me profusely all the while. 

After they were seated I turned and said, "it was the hand on the heart that did it for me."
"Right on," he grinned. "Nice," she breathed, still winding down. 
"It was no way I could turn that down!"

We chatted a little further, but the glow of his gesture and our initial exchange were what held. I was reminded of an old memory at Rainier and Henderson. I'd been standing by the farebox reading, with the doors wide open, when a middle-aged man came up asking for two transfers. 

I was irritated by his entitled attitude (this was long before I'd arrived at the thoughts in the two posts preceding this one and the recent writeup on homeless laziness). I knew better than to refuse him while standing alone in the 'hood, knowing I'd be in the exact same place again tomorrow and the next day, and the day after. But as I tore two transfers to hand to him, I blurted out against my better judgment: "what do you got for me, man? I'm helpin' you out, happy to do so, but what d'you got for me?"

Without missing a beat he replied, "I got love for you, brother! I got nothin' but love!"
I paused and smiled. The quote, humbly glancing through my brain: Every man is my superior, in that I may learn from him. I said, "you know, that's beautiful! I like that, thank you!"
"Nothin' but peace and love, my brotha!"

What else is there, really, at the end of the day? What more could you possibly ask for? 

Nothing, that's what. 

The night was silent. We ambled forward together, a mobile living room, lightly populated with benevolent strangers. Nothing but the gentle hum of the bus's electric current. People sitting alone, nursing their own thoughts.

Then out of the silence, like cymbals crashing after a mellow adagio, I hear an ear-splitting stentorian roar:

[This story is now in my new book!]

To my fellow humans the terrorists,

Before you pull your next trigger, I would ask for a pause, not for my sake but yours: take in a full breath, and think of the smile on your mother's face. Think of the early times, when your parents were young, when sunsets lasted longer, when the biggest problem was schoolwork, acceptance from friends, or the hesitant expression on a pretty girl's face.

Think of the taste of bread.

Consider your goals now, and reflect on how they're all ultimately to do with loneliness, the search for belonging and respect and when we really get down to it, love.

Know that I was all of those things too. My goals and memories are like yours, and as children we would've played together. The weight between your shoulders is one I can feel, different but familiar, a lack of love to be solved not with hate, but with love. We are all bitter over something. Let us not fight rigid ideologies with other rigid ideologies, or address violence and mayhem with the tools of violence and mayhem. In the business of fighting ideas, there is only one successful method: other ideas.

The great battles of the twenty-first century will be intellectual battles. War is simplistic, and blinds with tragedy; it traffics more than perhaps anything else in nostalgia, and is outmoded and archaic as a problem-solving format. You are so much better than this, my friend. I am disappointed in you. You knew the face of goodness, once. 

​I do not think you have completely forgotten how to see. 

-Nathan Vass

​As you know, I was present during last year's attacks in Paris. It hasn't felt right to share these photographs until now. Now it feels wrong not to share them. 

Click here for the galleries. 

I'd never seen her at Fifth and Jackson before. Rose's squat profile was instantly recognizable, her silver hair backlit by the storefronts opposite. 

"Hey, Rose," I said, looking down through the gloom at her stroller.
"Hey, Nate," she replied, hobbling a step forward. Quickly, knowing I've turned her away before (read here and here for the backstory on this), she said, "I got a new stroller but it has broke wheels too."
She may not have been able to see my face in the darkness from out there, but I smiled with my voice. "That's okay, thanks for getting a new one. That's what counts."
"It still has a problem."
"That's okay."

Rose stepped in keeping pace with the glaciers of old, cursing the nerve pain which shot through her swollen legs at each step. Glaciers with nerve pain would move slowly. She still demanded the front seats be lifted in a particular fashion I can never remember. I really ought to write it down. Tonight a young male passenger– don't say the youth never help their elders!– helped her out for me.

I couldn't see her as we carried on our way, but could hear her just behind me. Snatches of another life drifted within earshot; I strained for the details. She was ready to go home, she sighed. "I got up at 4am… 'cause when people are in pain they make a lot of noise. He's been in a lot of pain." She kept saying "he," and I never got an answer on who he was; only that he was a vet, and someone special. I said that's a hard life, being a vet, and she didn't disagree. He was going in for surgery, she said, he went in for surgery, but he's okay now.
"I'm glad he's okay."
"I'm gonna take care of him," she remarked. "He's not gonna do anything to me." 
"That's good."

The silences, the barest sentences, and the lifetimes behind them.

"You can sit down! It's safer to sit down!" she hollered at an Asian man, trying to be nice. Genuine negativity is contagious, but so too is genuine positivity. I caught a glimpse of her craggy face in the mirror, her grey-blue eyes still blazing in late age. I'm sure she fit most people's definition of pretty at some point in her life. Does she reflect on her past, as I do, when the pain is not as strong? Sleepless in the wee morning hours, lying in repose, a reverie between the ceiling and ourselves. I hope there are good memories. It's a solitary act, and something we all share. 

"Getting operated on…" she was saying something about medical procedures. Then a thought on housing, how they're gonna tear her house down, putting up condos instead; I can understand that frustration. "They need to be more kind to me." Her grumbles mingled with the gentle hum of the electric bus. Then I heard her, and I heard her again. She said it more than once: "everybody just needs to be loved." 

We Americans are a vocal sort. We wear our emotions, our opinions, fear, anger, ignorance– loudly, on our sleeves. But there are things even we don't bray out to the world. 

I believe loneliness is the premier element of the human condition. No other state of being is experienced as pervasively. It doesn't matter how popular you are. We are individuals, and we process things away from others, deep within our own minds, and that is always and ever a singular act; how many millions of thoughts will you never share with anyone, because they were too esoteric, inconsequential, hard to contextualize, or private? We brush our teeth, tie our shoes, and hang up our clothes alone. We crave acceptance and love, or at least acknowledgment, from others in an effort to combat it. It's not quite up there with the fact of death, as the motivating engine for all human action, but it's close.

But we don't ever talk about it. 

We wax and whirl about the subject, and because the condition is universal, we understand each other anyway. We talk about relationships, goals, psychology, and desire, but we never discuss it bluntly in relation to ourselves. "Everybody needs to be loved" is a valid statement on its own, but it's also code for something else, something deeper and more personal. I heard it in her plaintive voice. I know that feeling too.

As she left: "Nate, I'm glad I got to see you tonight." She apologized she couldn't ride further, and explained that she really did need to go home. She took forever. That's fine, I said. Then she hollered into the wind, her cry reaching through the closing the doors, me turning the wheel out to pull back into traffic. She was yelling more nice things. So nice, perhaps it's good I didn't hear them.

Some days later she was at the Andover Street bus stop. She was surrounded amongst her things in the bus shelter, camped out for an afternoon siesta of sorts. She didn't want the bus, but waved her hands upon recognizing me. She called out, repeatedly, until she knew I heard her: "thank you Nathan, thank you! Thank you, Nathan!"