And so, because nobody wanted them, I took the magazines to the recycling center.
Two car-loads of them, saving out the boxes — at least the newer boxes — for our move.
Toward the end of March, when it became clear that we really would cause to be built a smaller, more energy efficient house out by the pond and the orchard and downwind of the chickens, it came time to begin this process.
Two truckloads of magazines came down from the attic and disappeared.
The rest were given a chance at survival on eBay, using a name I think nobody here would recognize because nobody here has known me long enough. Kyla knew I was doing this; I offered her whatever she wished if only she’d pay the shipping, but she has as many as she needs to sell here, more than she needs probably. And so she understood, I think, that simply throwing them out was difficult.
And so I tried to find homes for my old friends, each cover a story, a bit of design work I mostly wish I’d done better until, toward the end, I finally began to feel myself a designer. Each issue holding stories and words I’d written that I now doubt I could write, for it seems unlikely that I could summon the time and the focus to such a task, nor that the words would come so quickly as once they did. If at all.
So it goes.
On Christmas day I took the eBay listings down. Time to move. Time to shed.
I have kept ten copies of each issue, more than reason suggests necessary. My friend Tom was shocked, until I said that maybe in another decade I’d sell some off. A kind of planning foreign to musicians, I think! Ten copies of each issue for which I have ten copies, which is not all of them, but which is enough. Which is what it is. More boxes to be moved and housed, and I haven’t made all the pieces fit into my new lair — not in my head, not on my computer where I move them around by mouse instead of back and handtruck. But there they will go.
And so.
Seventy-five issues, plus three. A legacy, I suppose, but not a legacy of much consequence, in the end.
Such a joy go have made them, though, to have done the work.
Thanks for reading. For having read.
Buy some back-issues from Kyla, will ya? The site could use your support, and enough have been slain to the economics of indifference!
