TFP Communique: Red Rooster

Hi TFP.
Update- I sold my Ranchero yesterday afternoon. YES, I DID. I actually didn't make a profit, but it did sell blindingly fast considering that just the other week it was rolling backwards down a hill with a dead battery and bad fuel pump...

Yes, friends, time to start looking into that 5D.

I've been staying with my friend and coworker Amanda in DC this week, brewing coffee, talking politics, and dragging her home from the bar (that was on Monday night). I've also been meeting back up and spending time with some of the students I used to work with, hearing that it helps them just for me to listen and tell them that everything's going to be ok. JUST THAT. Nothing but that.
What would it have been like to have had someone tell me, back then, "You don't have to answer to your parents; you just have to answer to yourself and what you love"?
These last couple of nights I hung out at Busboys & Poets and Tryst, two cafes/restaurants/bookstores that are the (bigger) incarnations of what I'd like to open someday... with your help, of course. The only thing that neither of those places have is what 826 Valencia has going on- a little alcove behind a curtain where you can just sit in total silence and watch fish swimming around in a tank. (Well, that and pirate eye patches.)

It's funny that I always think that I hate DC. I think I hate the cutthroat politics, and the shitty rain-hail, and the fact that every single person owns a knee-length black peacoat, and everything else about this place. But then I always end up loving EVERY MINUTE THAT I'M HERE. In this place, the first thing Amanda does when she gets up in the morning is put on Talking Points Memo and listen to the previous day's progressive tv news clips; and at 2pm on Sunday afternoons, Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle is packed with young and old people just READING while they wait for a table. Yes.

Bus to NYC tonight.