Old magazines....

A week or so ago, after Christmas and just before the start of the new year, I found myself in a cleaning frenzy of sorts, sifting through a lot of my old stuff for items that would be better tossed into the trash. Some of this stuff even met their end in a blaze of glory, literally (see previous post here).

Among the stuff that I threw out were several kilos worth of old magazines, some dating back 20 years. If I had my way, I probably wouldn't be getting rid of them, but considering that most of them had been contaminated by the excrement of mice and various insects, I decided to play it safe (watching all those programs about various disease-causing pathogens on the Discovery Channel can really make you paranoid) and commit them to the trash heap.

While I was sorting through these old magazines, I just realized that even as a kid in my early teens, I already had a voracious appetite for reading. Remember, these were during the days before cable TV and internet access were commonplace.

Among the pile of 20 year-old magazines were issues of:

• Newsweek;

• inCider (an Apple II enthusiast magazine);

• A+ (another Apple II enthusiast magazine);

• Nibble (yet another Apple II enthusiast magazine);

• Call A.P.P.L.E. (yet still another Apple II Magazine);

• MacAzine (a Macintosh enthusiast magazine);

• Mac A.P.P.L.E. (yet another Macintosh enthusiast magazine);

• Personal Computing (a PC enthusiast magazine);

• PSICOM (a locally published PC enthusiast magazine);

• The Plain Truth (a religious magazine I subscribed to for free after watching Herbert W. Armstrong's The World Tomorrow);

• Life Today (yet another religious magazine I subscribed to in high school);

• Discover Magazine (a science magazine);

• Popular Mechanics (another science magazine);

• MAD Magazine (a humor magazine);

• CRACKED Magazine (another humor magazine);

• various other computer, science, religion and humor publications.

I stored all these magazines, thinking that it would be nice to read them again someday in the future. Unfortunately, paper isn't really that durable, especially when it's accessible to various forms of animal life.

It makes me wonder what will happen to the various issues of FHM, T3, Gadgets Magazine, PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, Electronic Gaming Monthly, TopGear, C!, Automotion, AUTOCAR ASEAN, Motor Trend, Car and Driver, Road & Track, Time, and various other magazines I have stored in my den a couple of decades down the line.

Not only am I an avid reader, but apparently storing all these old and new magazines betray the fact I can be quite obsessive-compulsive about hoarding reading material. Oh well. Maybe in another twenty years I can repeat the cycle. Or maybe I should just lay off the magazines. Think of all the money I could have saved. :-)