Stupid Magazines

(At the moment I'm getting right into a site called Byte Stories that's all about true stories. It's changing my thinking about what's worth writing and what isn't. Here's the latest).

    

I don't know why I chucked a rock through the newsagency window but I guess I can think of a few possibilities. It was late, so no one was around and by some miracle a rock was right there in the street. Why was a rock just lying around in the paved street of a suburban shopping strip? A strip so ordinary that the milk bar with three steps was called the Three Steps Milk Bar? God put that rock there, surely.

I didn't have time to admire my ability to make holes in things because a loud alarm convinced my body to sprint away into the night. The whole event lasted ten seconds tops.

The weird thing about that newsagency was that the lady co-owner maintained an awful 1960's beehive hairdo right up until 1980. Here she was selling magazines that constantly update a women's ideas about to how to behave, what to wear, but she wasn't buying and updating the bullshit she was selling

Those same magazines had given my mum an eating disorder. The eating disorder consisted of crazed dieting advice in those fucked pages and those diets had a big effect on our household. Mum stopped buying food because on some chemical level she became blind to it, so us boys became both malnourished and undernourished. Thanks Cosmo. Thanks Cleo. Thanks New Idea. Thanks Womans Day.

I would sneak around at school fishing other kids' uneaten lunches out of the bin, with all sorts of marks and sores all over my body from being starved. Yes, good guess, that's possibly the saddest thing I've ever written.

I wonder why women don't smash newsagency windows in protest at those magazines. I felt bad about breaking that window but that was because I didn't know why I was doing it. I wouldn't do it again, however, because my protest against women's magazines is too convoluted. It wouldn't fit on the cover of a stupid magazine.