Nathan Vass
Nathan Vass is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and author by day, and a Metro bus driver by night, where his community-building work has been showcased on TED, NPR, The Seattle Times, KING 5 and landed him a spot on Seattle Magazine’s 2018 list of the 35 Most Influential People in Seattle. He has shown in over forty photography shows is also the director of nine films, six of which have shown at festivals, and one of which premiered at Henry Art Gallery. His book, The Lines That Make Us, is a Seattle bestseller and 2019 WA State Book Awards finalist.
This was before the pandemic, when getting on through the back was frowned upon. These two teens tumbled aboard through the middle doors anyway, a rough’n’ready young couple jumping in at Rainier and Othello.
The boyfriend was already stalking toward the back, casting about for his favorite seat. She was...
"We don't want RapidRide," Marcus told me one night. I'd been telling him stops would be eliminated, and how the 49 would be separated from the 7. "We never asked for it, and we don't want it!"
I said, "It's amazing how much they don't get that, huh?""No it ain't....
No, the conversation didn’t have the urgency or desperation of our first, nor the celebratory airs of the second. But I like to think that’s what made it special: in its relative mundanity it represented the completed nature of her hurdles. Now, finally, we could sit around chatting about...
What will we call each other sixty years from now? Sixty years ago we thought we knew. We didn't. Some of it won't be the same, and some of it will. The delirious human project will continue forth, and from time to time we'll look back on today. These...
This post is a thematic sister to this post.
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I will look back on these days with wonder. I will remember the texture of the everyday, the pleasing baseline of where we came from, what made a thing stand out.
What is called ordinary now, which our future selves will wish...
I'll leave it to those around me to conclude whether or not I'm the same person I was eight years ago, when I started my blog. I lack the requisite self-awareness to make such pronouncements.
What I can say is that some of my earlier posts carry a specificity of...
As in several of the posts in this series (see below), I’m sprawled out on a bus home after a long day working. I’m exhausted and happy, sitting near the front, chatting up the operator. Tonight we were talking about what drivers always talk about: schedules.
“This one actually...
We were in that special place following the conclusion of a night shift--and by place I mean both physical and psychological. Physical, because walking into the base in those wee hours is a different experience--a beacon of spacious brightness, unusual following everything you've just experienced, like a temple in...