Lately, I have come to the conclusion that very little interests me anymore. I do not look forward to being with my key people, nor going places or even acquiring new things. I guess I get my fill of that by owning a retail store. But still, everything is making me tired. Life has become blase, not that interesting to me. Maybe life and this world is simply tired of me too!
The latest "rain on my parade" has come today from a local news weekly called AltDaily printed and distributed here in good old Hampton roads with it's primary distribution in Norfolk, Virginia. I had written a pissy email to the editor a few months back about an article titled "The Guide to Olde Towne Portsmouth," or something close to that. Anyway, they wrote as usual about the museums, local entertainment and eateries, but left out the shopping aspect of our beloved Olde towne. So, my question to them was: "how can this be the guide to Olde towne if you have only covered certain parts of it?" They suggested writing a follow-up article that would include our unique boutiques and Olde Towne shoppes.
Last night I received a Facebook notification from an author that stated that they just published a feature story in AltDaily titled "50 Reasons I Love Portsmouth and You Should Too." So I read the article, a wonderful review about our fair city, it's people, places to go and things to do etc., and there we were listed in full glory below an image of a James Buttersworth painting, an inclusion in the article but once again with the name of our business spelled incorrectly!
 |
| Arrgh! |
Now again, I'm really tired and confronted with another sleepless night from this damn article churning once again through my mind. You know, sometimes after all is said and done, we find that the effort is simply not worth it. Maybe we should just turn our store into another "I don't gives a shit" junk shop, or better yet just close down the old brick and mortar part of our business once and for all and go 'web only' like so many of my competitors have done. That way there would be no store for anyone to maybe visit or maybe write about and of course no chance in misspelling our business name!
We recently had that choice dangling in front of us like a bone in front of a rabid dog. Our previous riverfront location building was sold last year and we became faced with an overwhelming choice of either relocating our business or just going web only. We looked at new locations up and down the eastern seaboard from Massachusetts to Florida and almost packed up and moved to Savannah, GA., but someone had just beaten us by a few weeks to a perfect riverfront warehouse store location, so after all of our 6 months of hunting, we decided to stay put here in Olde Towne and relocate our store to another building on High Street (and that's a whole different story). This is our fourth (and final) location since our meager beginnings that started years ago in Virginia Beach. So here we are, now located directly across the street from our original Olde Towne location, destroyed by the city of Portsmouth after a church fire that happened in December of 2007. Now I get a picturesque view of our empty downtown lot that today only displays a few weeds that pop-up in-between the stress cracks around the empty concrete flooring, an ongoing reminder of the total loss from both our business and our residence that presided above the store with all of our precious invaluable belongings destroyed!
 |
| What remained of our store and residence, collateral damage from the Zion Baptist Church fire. |
The sky is falling chicken little is my new blog- only one previous blog was written prior to this one, but I now plan to write here more often as my "Bitch blog" of all things unbearable and tiresome! Hope your day is going better than mine, and yes they did fix our misspelled business name problem- they removed us from the article. Have a nice day!
Joe Elder
