And one more — this one mine.
In December 2020, in an industrial neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia, my wife and I and a friend opened a restaurant. We had been dreaming about it since 2017 — using the capital left over from a house sale, negotiating a private purchase with no bank involved, DIYing the conversion on a shoestring while I spent eight months convincing the city to let us change the zoning. COVID hit when we were pulling our final permits. I cashed out $100,000 from a Microsoft 401k to float us through the shutdown. We opened anyway.
You have the name for this now. What we were trying to build was a commons — a place where people could just be, that gave them space to choose what they wanted to become, not what institutions had on offer. Where they could express their soul, their love, their joy, and be welcomed. Southern hospitality has a real reputation and a real asterisk: you will be welcomed if you are the right kind of person, and you will always know if you aren't. What we offered was: you can be one of us instead.
We offered a $15 tipped minimum in 2021 and never backed down. We always paid our people well and on time. We ran nature education tableside — when someone asked about the wine, I told them about the plants, the birds, the soil, how it was all made. The queers kept us in business. The neighborhood never quite came. We ran the best menu we ever ran in our final year, just the two of us. We closed in December 2025. Sold the property in March 2026.
It cost me my idealism and my faith in humanity.
I say this as transformation, not as defeat. Idealism that has been tested by five years of fifteen-dollar minimums and hot dog cartons in the bushes and COVID and two prior burnouts is not gone. Mondragón has lost cooperatives. Cooperation Jackson lost the mayor in eight months. The Zapatistas dissolved their own structure because the structure could not survive what was coming. The commons does not always survive in the form it first took. The people we paid, the people who felt welcome, the conversations about birds and wine — those happened. The idealism has been converted into something that knows what it is up against.
The commons wasn't the room. It was the stable distribution of responsibility — across staff and regulars and growers, across years — both for creating and upholding the uniqueness of that space. The trust between regulars and staff built over years. The knowledge of what people needed before they asked. The wine described in terms of the soil and the watershed and the farmer who had decided to make it honestly, planting a different relationship to the living world in whoever was willing to receive it. A place where people could just be, and that would give them space to become.
That is what we lost when we closed.
I was trying to offer a commons to someone who had been produced for an enclosure. The connection was missing before the scaffold went up. I didn't see it until I was deep in the attempt.
He was waiting for the clipboard. I had refused to lift it. The spell he had been raised inside has names.
The restaurant was organized, in principle, around distributed self-governance. Everyone in the room, decisions made by the people doing the work. In practice, only we had skin in the game — financial risk, personal liability, the consequences of failure landing on specific bodies. Everyone else had a labor contract. About halfway through, I understood why early syndicalists viewed labor contracts with such suspicion: a contract is an enclosure. It specifies what is owed and what is not owed, and everything outside the specification — the initiative, the investment, the genuine ownership of the project — falls outside it. The contract is a boundary that produces exactly the relationship it describes. You want distributed intelligence; you create the conditions for transactional compliance. You want people who treat the institution as theirs; you hire people who have every reason to treat it as yours.
We were not selling food. We were not selling service. We were selling theatre — an immersive performance in which guests had a role, the staff had roles, the room had a role, the menu had a role, and the food was a prop. The prop mattered to us. We sourced it carefully, priced it fairly, told people about the farmers and the winemakers and the soil. But that's not what people were paying for. They were paying for the show. And the show we were writing — the show where the food is real and the price is fair and the staff are paid fifteen dollars an hour with tips in 2021 and nobody pretends that hospitality is natural hierarchy — was not the show the people with money wanted to see. They wanted the simulation they knew. We were offering something else, and the people who came to us loved us for it, and there weren't enough of them.
I spent the first three years of running the restaurant arguing with banks. I had started with seller financing — the previous owner holding the note, the way small transactions happen when conventional lenders won't. Post-COVID, the only commercial loans going out were to REITs. Not to a restaurant in Chelsea trying to refinance a seller note. I eventually negotiated a loan with my father. The entire process was humiliating in the specific way that asking family for money is humiliating — the relationship that should be outside the market, pulled into it, repriced, restructured as a financial instrument. I got the loan. The relationship survived. But I had been inside the exact mechanism Graeber describes: the commons of mutual obligation subjected to the logic of extraction because no institution existed that was governed by people like me, for purposes like mine.
The restaurant ran for five years. Five years is an average lifespan for a restaurant. Not being able to continue and failing are different things. We could have continued indefinitely, financially, if we had been willing to accept the terms others accept: long hours for little pay, never being able to leave, procedural autonomy in exchange for the real compensation, which is status. Social capital. The sense of being someone in a room. We weren't willing to accept those terms, and so we stopped. That's a different story than failure.
The doors had been locked behind the last guest. The lights had been turned down to the after-hours level — bright enough to count, dim enough to talk. A few regulars were at the bar, the way regulars stay after hours when the room belongs to them as much as to anyone. The staff who were still around were clocked out, shift drinks in hand, sitting in among the regulars — which is the commons before any of us would have called it that. I was behind the bar, polishing glasses. There was a conversation going.
The restaurant was the other version. The hard one. The hard version feels like pitching a tent in a downpour. It has to be done and you know you can do it, but you will take any help you can get, you will make compromises you would not have to make under better conditions, and you will have to deal with the consequences when it is all over. The frame is not established. The aura is not free. The container has to be raised in weather that is actively trying to flatten it. Everything you build has to be built also as cover from what is coming down on top of you.
The architecture is different in a hostile environment. You do not get to choose the ideal site; you choose what cover you can raise on the site you are on, and the architecture starts as that cover. The restaurant was a canopy. We managed the downpour instead of holding out for a better day. And once you are running a canopy, certain things you would have built on a dry site you do not get to build. We ended up not opening a tea room for the sober-curious socialites. We ended up not opening a nature school. Those things would have wanted their own canopies in their own weather, and the weather was already taking everything we had. The structures you do not build are part of the architecture too. They are the shape of what the canopy was costing.
The downpour is still happening. We packed up and moved on. That is not a metaphor — the restaurant closed, the canopy came down, and the work the canopy had been sheltering had to be carried in some other form into some other weather. Which is also what happens at the end of any psychic-architecture project that actually got built. The structure does its work for as long as it can hold up under what is hitting it, and then you take what was built inside it with you, and you go on. The work is not the canopy. The work is the people who learned to do the work under the canopy and who are now somewhere else, doing some version of it, in their own weather.
The third was a restaurant. The chip was above the bar the whole time, witness in advance. I tried to feed people honest food at fair prices in a system designed to make that impossible. It failed in the predictable ways and succeeded in some unpredictable ones: a meal that lit a table on a Tuesday in February, a cook who learned a knife skill and took it elsewhere, a vendor who is still selling to better restaurants because we showed up consistently for a year. The wreckage is the system. The seeds are the meals that worked and the people they passed through.