'zines.

I've long been a magazine subscriber.  I think it began when I was ... hmm.  Ten?  Something like that.  With a gift subscription to Sports Illustrated.  Then The Sporting News.  If I had a subscription to something for kids before that, it was something like National Geographic World.  I guess I did have that as a kid.  And there was a magazine devoted to wildlife, if I recall.  But I'm not talking about the kid magazines.  I mean regular, adult magazines.  And that began with the sports journals.  I was a Sports Illustrated subscriber for years, until I wasn't.  Same with The Sporting News.  Since then, I haven't subscribed to sports magazines.  Not because I'm not equally interested in sports.  I am.  But probably because of something called the Internet.  ESPN.com and sportsline.com and numerous other outlets give me all I can get in a magazine, and more.  Minus Rick Reilly.  But in the last ten years, I've subscribed to lots of publications.  Entertainment Weekly is the one I've stuck with longest.  I've been with them since their first year, I do believe.  And I've had Premiere, the movie magazine, until its recent fold.  Now they send me Us Weekly as a substitute, apparently ignoring the fact that Premiere was kind of a serious movie magazine, and Us is a small step above a tabloid.  Bleh.  I subscribed to something called Movieline one year, too.  It was just so-so.  I've had a free subscription to Blender and Outside.  Does anyone else get these free random subscriptions occasionally?  Somehow, I do get freebies now and then.  Full-year freebie subscriptions.  Blender was fairly useless to me.  Outside was pretty cool.  I could see myself re-subscribing to that one day.  They were, after all, responsible for alerting me to the awesomeness that is Camden, Maine, and they provided me with the necessary motivation to actually visit there as well (a very good idea indeed).  Anyway, the point is, I've always been a magazine guy.  More magazines than books, actually.  Even if I did write a (long, rambling, meandering, not-so-great) book myself.  So that brings me to my point, and I do kinda have one.

For the last few years, I've had a very off-and-on relationship with Esquire magazine.  I think it has its moments of brilliance, mixed with down spells, cluttered with way too many advertisements.  I subscribe.  Then I don't.  Then I do.  I let it go and bring it back.  A few months ago, I decided to quit it again.  And then came a bill in the mail telling me that I had indicated that I intended to renew.  Which, uh, I hadn't.  Apparently Esquire sent me some notice months before my subscription was due to run out, telling me that it was time to renew.  Now, I generally ignore such notices until I'm a month or so from the end.  In this case, I'm pretty sure I just shredded the thing after a quick glance.  But what I guess happened in THIS instance is, that notice had a box to check.  A box I was supposed to check and return to tell them that I DIDN'T want to be placed on their automatic renewal list.  I didn't see that.  So Esquire just signed me right up for auto renewal.  Now, this pissed me off.  Big time.  I was SO not happy.  I was gonna let the thing expire, and now they're sending me bills?  Not just bills, but vaguely insulting letters telling me that I made a commitment to them and now I wasn't honoring it?  Never mind that my subscription was still months from expiring.  Well, this went on for a while, I even sent one notice back telling them to take me off the auto-subscribe list or cancel my subscription, and I was not amused.  But gradually, I don't know.  They put out a few good issues, and I decided that maybe I WOULD renew after all.  So ... I did.  And you know what?  I finally received my July issue the other day, and I realized something.  In all my years of being a magazine guy, I've always kinda been a skimmer.  I read the articles that really interest me, but I don't read these magazines cover to cover.  But this Esquire issue?  I've sorta been reading it from cover to cover.  I've even started to read Stephen King's new short story, "The Gingerbread Girl" (GREAT title), published in the magazine, and yeah, I'm digging it.

So, I just think it's funny that this magazine, the one I sometimes hate for their fifty pages of clothing ads, the one I expected to be without now, seems to be the one that I'll want to keep long-term, the one that seems to be making me a better magazine reader.  Hmmm.

Now, what to do when Entertainment Weekly comes up for renewal.  Hmmmmm.