About Me

When faced with filling in a text-box titled "About Me" I usually default to, "I'm a nate, urinate." But I always guessed that wasn't entirely true. So this afternoon I free-wrote an answer:

By trade, I am a man of numbers and figures. By choice, I am a storyteller with an insatiable appetite for human experience. Without this balance, I will spiral down into a life of responsibility and dreamlessness.

In my dreams I own a cafe where the guests can purchase my wares with an essay, poem, song, or film. They don't even have to be well-written. In my cafe, there are many tables for four, and six, and eight, but still adequate tables for one. I've placed it in the most ideal latitude where the nights are breezy and warm but you can still see the northern lights. It is on a cliff overlooking a beach (with a convenient path down), and I live in a small cottage closeby. The body of water resembles both Lake Michigan and the Arabian Sea. My cafe is open 24 hours. My cafe has free wi-fi, but I have instructed management to block any business-related use.

There are two main rooms in my cafe. The first one, closest to the entrance, is well-lit and sociable. Friends meet, artists paint, poets write, and some people just sit and watch everybody else with their white earbuds in. The walls in this front room are covered in photos of guests, mostly from polaroid instant film. There are photos on top of photos, leaving no room for flyers or handbills. Each photo contains a salutation and signature of its subject, so each time it is viewed it feels like a personal letter to the onlooker. With Love, Jacob. Beating Heart, Leah. Under The Stars, Dahlia.

The tables in the back room are aligned towards a performance space against the cliff-facing wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, which during the day are usually opened vertically with a top-hinge and hooked to the ceiling. At night, however, sheer black curtains are drawn and the lighting is dim. During the early evenings, my guests can listen to a lecture taught by any volunteer, no Ph. D. required. Later in the evening the stage is reserved for performance art: musicians, beat poets, dancers and dramatists flock to fill the always-full but never booked-too-far-in-advance schedule. Every once in a while, I like to stand on the cliff with the water to my back and stare at the faint glow of the stage emitting through the curtains.

Birthdays of guests both new and old are celebrated by strangers and friends alike. On these occasions, the guest of honor is honored by superlatives and affirmations of only the most sincere form. There is no birthday song or clapping or free cake unless requested.

When regular guests announce that it will be their last visit due to an impending move or extended international travel, they are instructed to remove photos from the front-room wall of friends and memories they wish to cherish, in exchange for one last photo of themselves. It never seems to be a final goodbye, for so many that have left will make their way through again while visiting the region for a wedding, vacation, or pilgrimage of self-rediscovery.

When asked if I will ever leave, I cannot give a certain answer. For here in my cafe I have human experience at its fullest and emptiest, for unlike my guests I cannot call it my Shangri-La. And I'm not sure anyone can live in Shangri-La forever.