so i looked over at the still-unwrapped chocolate bar on my bookshelf, and along the spine of it, next to “extra creamy milk chocolate” in gold print, were the instructions “open here”.

ok, mr chocolate bar.

my bookshelf is now much closer to my desk — which explains why i managed to read the tiny type on the side of a chocolate bar despite near-legal blindness — since i moved it over from the opposite side of of the room, to make space for the crib and change table for the new person who will soon be upon us, holy fucken crap.

aside from moving furniture around, the mammoth magazine cull continues… the last couple of days i finally made it to my pile of “juice” magazines. if you read the previous post about cutting down the swathe of “spin”s and detected a faint poignancy about the exercise, this new challenge has been a few notches more melancholy. because these, i actually worked on.

i have issue one, and two, and three (you get the idea), from when i had to buy them at the newsagent… through to a couple from around issue ten when i did a spell of work experience there in third year uni, and then a bunch more, and then every issue from march 1995 when i was deputy art director for a couple of years, and then the year’s worth from november 1997 (issue 57) when i became art director, to october 1998, when i went postal and had to leave the company, and then a random few from after. yeah, i have a lot of issues.

now there’s a pile, facedown, at the top of the stairs, awaiting transfer to the recycling bin downstairs. it feels like i’m throwing out a chunk of australian publishing history, and every time i walk past i wonder if i’ve been too brutal. of course, i did keep all mine, and took clippings of choice layouts from the rest, where “choice” includes both the aesthetically pleasing and the “what the?” ludicrousness of that heady mid-nineties period of cutting edge magazine design. but aside from a very select few from the very early days (issue three, with evan dando in love beads and nothing else on the cover; issue eight: nirvana; issue 18: eddie vedder “on kurt’s death”), there they are, facedown, top of stairs.

sigh. there’s a feeling not so far back in my head that if my entire stash had not been so dotted with cockroach shit (just the outside covers, but still a misadventure in storage if there ever was one), i would have blogged instead about the extremely delicious watermelon i procured this week from the supermarket at a bargain 95c/kg.