Black Oak's Daughter

I’m about to throw out an entire stack of unread magazines.

My mother would consider this a sinful waste if she were still around. She’s not, but she’s still in my head.  Dammit. At least I know where my magazine neuroses comes from.  Mom was a depression child. When she died, my stepdad took twentysome carloads of unread newspapers and magazines to the recycling center. She was going to get to reading them “someday”.  I live under no such delusion. If I cared about reading them, I’d have done that when they came in the mail.

I have five magazine subscriptions, I regularly read none of them. They are about eight months of them in a stack on the desk in my office, and I need that desk back, so it’s time to fill the recycle bin with them.

I have a love hate relationship with magazines.  If I don’t have subscriptions, I buy the ones that look interesting at the checkout stand in the store. When I buy one or two of them a month like that I read them, but they cost three times more than a subscription. I feel bad about that, so I subscribe, and then they collect in a pile on my desk until I can’t handle the clutter and toss them. The subscriptions run out, so I buy them again, etc.

It’s a vicious magazine cycle.

I’m realizing two things about it that makes it easy to give up the habit.  The first is that the national magazines are all on line now. If a headline intrigues me, I don’t need to pay to read the article.

The other thing, is that when it gets down to it, it’s just something else that clutters up my existance.  Not particularly useful stuff is being weeded out of my life one piece at a time.  It’s a step in the right direction.

That’s what matters.

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