This weekend, or more to the point, this Sunday and Monday, I traveled to a work retreat in the Washington, D.C., area. When I travel, I like to pack my personal item with magazines that I can read and discard on the way, which means my bag gets lighter as I go.
As I might have mentioned, my magazine subscriptions wax and wane over the years, and I have accumulated a bunch of old magazines in a drawer in the parlor that I’ve been meaning to read (including a number that came out of the trunk 17 years ago).
I have to consider what to pack carefully. My beautiful wife wants to browse some of them after I am finished, so I cannot discard Forbes or 417 on the road, so I might as well not pack them. I don’t want to pack magazines with guns on them as I don’t want to have the TSA give me the side eye or give some fellow plane traveler the vapors, so Garden and Gun, Ducks Unlimited, America’s First Freedom, and various other items are right out.
Which leads me to an eclectic collection in my bag, to be sure.
So in rapid succession, someone sitting on a plane next to me is likely to see me go through years-old issues of:
- Chronicles, kind of like a Midwestern National Review;
- St. Louis, the slick from St. Louis, natch;
- National Review, kind of like a hipster coastal elite Chronicles;
- First Things, a magazine of Catholic theology;
- Birds and Blooms, a lightweight photography magazine about flowers and birds;
- Metal Hammer, a British magazine about heavy metal music focused on European bands.
As you know, gentle reader, I am a man of eclectic and diverse interests.
But, Brian J., won’t your beautiful wife want to read Metal Hammer? Well, yes, which is why I have brought it home.
And why I have looked up Follow the Cipher on YouTube:
Watch for that album on a future Musical Balance post.
