Peak Magazine Subscription

At bookstores everywhere in the Moorestown Mall named B. Dalton.

I just started a couple magazine subscriptions in the past few months, so naturally the expiration notices are already arriving en masse.  The last one actually struck fear in my heart.  Newsweek sent me a brown, craft-paper envelope - no indication of sender - with big, bold letters stating "LAST NOTICE - YOUR EXPIRATION IS APPROACHING!"  Now if that's not an explicit death threat, I don't know what is.  Either that or existentialism via postal carrier. 

"My passport!" we'll pretend the middle guy exclaimed.

Why have I chosen to let my periodic mailbox friends lapse?  Ugh.  This stupid environmental...thing.  It's as though I did something ecologically disastrous in a past life or something.  Maybe I was in charge of throwing those Manhattan post-war confetti parties or something, and in the days leading up to the parade I'd bounce around the supply room incessantly barking "more confetti!!"  God I loved confetti...

And now here we are, on the brink of man-made cataclysm, and I have to read my Good Housekeeping online, like a chump.

How deleterious is the magazine publishing industry?  Let's find out.  Do you know how many are sold every single day?  I went to the only source that counts - Yahoo! Answers - and learned I wasn't the first to inquire:

Quat a lot indeed!  I'm definitely going to dig a little deeper and talk to the store staff/manager to find out.  Naturally I'll specify WHAT magazine - are we talking about you?  Wheels?  So many variables.

[Fourth-wall break: that was the "Best Answer"?  This world is f@%&ed.]

Of course, this doesn't account for the vast number of mags produced and not sold.  Sure they're recycled.  But the embodied energy in the quat-a-lot of never-even-once-perused issues of BOP and Tiger Beat is so staggering as to induce apoplexy.  (Do they even make those magazines anymore?  Yes.)

So like it or not, no more confetti parades for me.  Thank god we didn't just wrap up a seven-year foreign war, or I might suffer a relapse.