Weekend's Words to Write By: Heinlein

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.” - Robert Heinlein

Monday's Desire = Thursday's Bone

"Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still." - Thoreau

Sometimes that gnawing pays off. On Monday I was blue and hoped someone would toss me a bone for my efforts. Yesterday I got a nice meaty piece of news. Onward.

Wednesday's Pelecanos Brief

So, yesterday I was reading What It Was by George Pelecanos and (as usual) I grew hungry. No great revelation here but Pelecanos talks about food in his novels more than any other writer save for Jim Harrison. Because of my recent years in DC and my weird gravitational pull toward most things culinary (the former chef in me dies hard) I always relish the dining and food nooks and crannies the lean Greek genius seasons into his crime novels. I'm not done with What It Was yet, but I wonder if he'll mention one of my favorite places (now defunct and vanished from the homogenized landscape)--Scholl's. Doubt you'd catch most of his upper NE, NW, and SE District characters in Scholl's on K Street but you never know. The cafeteria was an oasis that my old pal Jerry Lenoir (a DC native) introduced me to, and I often tucked into its inexpensive fare. Now it's a gym I think, which is beyond tragic and just so goddamn typical of the vanity associated with downtown Washington, DC in general. You could find all types of sorts in Scholl's. Non-profit managers. Lawyers. The homeless. Old warhorse secretaries. Nurses from GW Hospital. MPD cops from the second district cage in Foggy Bottom. Coffee was .75 cents and the liver and onions? Fortifying. In its heyday there were a bunch of Scholl's in DC, but the last known location was the one I frequented down on 21st Street. A place to be missed for sure. Onward.