Rock-A-Hoola: End of a Dream

"Quitting a business is fundamentally different then stopping or closing. The latter happens frequently as one owner gives up, and then another comes along to renew the dream of success. But Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again; it means the dream has been irrevocably abandoned.

Business abandonment is not unique to America but we seem to do more of it then most countries: car plants close, shoe and textile factories go still and their work sent to some jungle shop, downtown merchants abandon character rich locations for a suburban box, and talented people quit their talent thinking there is no destination for their work.

There may be some kind of cowboy wisdom that drives our penchant for abandonment, something that says if your horse is dead, well then− you might as well get off and ride another. But I think abandonment occurs when we fail to balance our imagination with realistic calculation. Turn too far in one direction and your head fills with wooly fantasies. Lean off on another course and you spend your life color coding your day planner. In either case the dream fails because expectations never arrived and it is then that the owner quits. What is left behind is the industrial undercarriage of what was and perhaps what might have been. This proclivity to abandon dreams and leave things behind has long fascinated me as a visual thematic."