TIL our book club's meeting spot is gone, replaced by a vape shop

Honestly, I drove by the old library annex on 3rd street last week and it's a vape shop now. Our club met there every other Thursday for like 7 years, since 2016, and we argued about everything from plot holes to whether the author's ending was fair. I walked in just to see, and the back room where we jammed 12 chairs around that folding table is now storage for boxes of flavored e-liquid. It hit me that we don't even have a new spot yet, we've been doing Zoom since 2022. Has anyone else lost their usual meeting place and struggled to find a good replacement that doesn't feel weird?

2 comments

2 Comments

claire_butler125d ago

We hit the same wall when the diner we always used for our group got bought out. Tried a couple of coffee shops and a bar, but the noise and the vibe just killed the conversation. What finally worked was rotating houses, and honestly the first few felt weird, but people got used to it. We kept the Zoom for months too, but seeing everyone in a living room with actual snacks made a huge difference. Maybe ask around your crew if someone's willing to host, even if it's just a few months at a time. A folding table in a garage still beats a vape shop storage room.

jamiekim24d ago

Did you guys try changing the day you meet? We had the same problem when our usual spot closed down, and for us it was less about the place and more about the routine being off. We ended up doing Thursday nights at a buddy's unfinished basement for a couple months, and the first two times felt stiff, like we were all pretending to be somewhere we weren't. But once we brought our own cheap coffee and stopped trying to make it fancy, it just became the new normal. The garage thing you mentioned is real, nobody cares about the walls once the talking gets going. Maybe someone in your group has a porch or even a shared laundry room that nobody uses, it just needs to be dry and not too loud.