Magazine Rack

Who buys magazines at the grocery store?

To class my life up recently I've started reading the New Yorker. I had previously dismissed such magazines as nonsense for aloof pseudo-intellectuals who insist on being boorish to prove to the world how sophisticated they are. This is a view I held at the same time I watched the WWE frequently and, well, people change over time. I no longer watch wrestling, and in fact my life and viewpoints have been trending in the opposite direction: away from crude, juvenile entertainment; away from fast food; away from heavy drinking. I think it's called growing up, or something like that. I drink tea now. Yeah, that's right, I occasionally start my morning with a cup of Earl Grey and as I write this I have a cup of Vanilla Chai next to my computer. Some mornings I even turn on NPR. Yeah, these are shocking revelations. The new soft, effeminate Furious M needed to switch his reading habits accordingly, so instead of perusing the day's listing for Spike TV I picked up a New Yorker and that was the real revelation.

Did you know that the people who write for the New Yorker are professional writers? This startlingly simple insight instantly explained to me the appeal of such magazines. To be honest and cut the jokes for a sentence or two, the majority of my reading in the last year or so has been the university newspaper, the Spokane newspaper, and sundry online news articles courtesy of Google News. To go from that to professionally written articles in a popular, literate magazine was a shock to my system; every paragraph I read I kept thinking, damn, these people can write.

I've enjoyed reading The New Yorker so much lately I've been considering taking the next step up and supplementing that with The Atlantic, so last time I was at the grocery store I moseyed on over to the magazine section. Holy horseshit, I was not ready for that experience. Apparently normal people don't buy magazines at the grocery store; I was unable to find any sort of general interest or literate person section. The bulk of the magazines were either the most masculine of the masculine or the most feminine of the feminine. One side was all about guns, bodybuilding, and extreme sports, and the other side on how to keep an immaculate house and sex up your man. There was very little in between. I mean, I would have been satisfied with a Popular Science or a Discover to thumb through, but the truth was that I would have been embarrassed to be seen with 90% of the magazines there. I would definitely feel weird holding a muscle magazine with a borderline homo-erotic cover featuring an impossibly well muscled, oiled, and tan man. I would also feel weird holding a magazine promising tips on “how to make your man crazy in bed.” And I would just feel like a loser buying soft core pornography.

There actually was a decent hiking and camping section which accounted for the entire 10% of magazines I would not feel embarrassed holding. Other than that, though, the grocery store magazine section was not a place that I am going back to anytime soon.