Until Death or Lapse of Renewal Do Us Part

A man in this age of uncertain loyalties can be forgiven for embracing those who well and truly love him, like the subscription departments at the various magazines he subscribes to.

These fine people don’t simply accept your presence on the planet with resignation as so many others do, they embrace it.

From the first oblique communications that arrive in the mail unannounced – “are you the kind of man who subscribes to Exalted? We’re betting you are” – through an escalating series of mash notes regarding your elevated tastes, sure judgments, and openness to civil discourse on any number of matters, they are unusually prescient on understanding your ranking among today’s intellectuals, jet-setters, and fashion-mongers.

Why it should take the staff of a magazine on the east coast to realize this when those closest to you don’t, I cannot say.

It speaks to the modern ability to slice and dice data in order to come up with just the characteristics that go to make up the upper echelon of magazine subscribers.

Not everyone makes the cut, you know, this at least is the message, and it’s not so much a matter of you choosing them as it is them choosing you, similar to a secret society for justice always on the lookout for new recruits.

That makes it all the more painful when a breakup looms on the horizon.

You cannot say why the charm has gone out of the relationship.

The art design seems a little garish perhaps, and the celebrities selected for interviews are no longer people that you recognize by face or name. The ads seem to speak to a man much older than you or one much younger.

Add to this the fact that you never were much good at paperwork or keeping up on things like subscriptions, and the additional fact that you tend to subscribe to these things in great soaring swoops as you clear your desk of offers, so that you start getting a reasonably-sized wheelbarrow full of magazines on a Tuesday in February, and, likewise, they all seem to run out at about a similar pace and a similar time.

We can all hope for one another that we have received few if any ‘Dear John’ letters, the kind of note that briskly disposes of the relationship that you otherwise had a pretty good feeling about, in the same manner that you might get from a company where you have applied for a job and now are told that it never will be yours.

They tend to be short, to the point, and allowing for no latitude of interpretation.

A typical Dear John letter might read:

Cedric, it’s just not working. What I thought was the Shangri La of relationships turns out to be more like the parking lot of a convenience store. I do not say that there is a chain link fence to one side of the parking lot of this convenience store that I have landed on as a symbol or metaphor for our relationship, nor that old torn newspapers are thrown against the rusty chain link fence surrounding the property by the bitter wind, but having said that, I have said just about all I can say.

It’s been a blast, and you sure know how to show a girl a good time. But I’m running away with Artie from the hardware store. We met in the electrical section and by the time we had moved to the plumbing goods aisle I knew he was the one and we were bonded for life. Toodle-oo.

You get my point. There isn’t a lot of give to this piece of communication. There is no entry point for a counter-argument. The door has been politely but firmly shut. Common ground does not exist and it is clear that the best advice is for you to pack up your own feelings and move on with your life, making sure to avoid the hardware store and any painful thoughts that might be triggered there.

Magazine subscription departments intend to never, ever, be in the position of getting a note such as this, however obliquely you, the other party, might handle it, even if that takes the form of your simply fading away.

Have they collectively been burned many times over in the matter of romance? Is this perhaps a prequalification for getting the job in the first place?

At sometime in their past they may have missed the signals of a relationship that was going invisible in the manner of Captain Kirk and others on the Star Trek television show being teleported from one place to another, and have been hard on themselves ever since.

“How is our relationship now? How about now? Now? How about now, now, now?” This is the nature of their communication from the get-go. They intend to head off any trouble at the pass, in the early innings.

Their style is one of regular iteration. You come to expect to see four or five a night in your mailbox, all of them a variation on a few themes:

How Could You?

Don’t Be a Fool!

We’ll Perish Without You!

These are powerful messages, and they start at the point of, say, a day and a half after you receive your first copy of the new magazine.

By recollection (of course you have no record of the transaction, we have already specified that you are bad at the bookkeeping side of life) you have signed up for the 40-year deluxe subscription package for this whole slew of publications, precisely because you did not want to be thrown into the emotional and moral squalor that a dissipating subscription always throws you into.

If you have set a goal in life, one of them is to receive two full issues in a row of some periodical in the mail – I don’t care what it is, it might be Mollusk Monthly – without getting a lapsed subscription notice the next day in their wake.

Two only.

Two of the 500+ issues of that magazine that you have subscribed for.

Two.

After that, let them throw at you what they will. You will only laugh gaily and relish the memory of those two issues and the period untainted by renewal notices.

It is like a clock ticking down, these notes, similar in tone perhaps to that Doomsday Clock put out by that group of scientists.

Maybe a little worse.

Doomsday only spells the end of humanity and everything living upon the earth. Letting this subscription lapse is much worse.

The tone of the messages varies. One might read:

We had you pegged for the type of reader who always wants to keep up on the news/understand particle physics/converse in French/admire well-made gourmet dishes/shoot remote rapids. Have we made a mistake? This can’t be true. Everything we know about you tells us that you will return the enclosed card with your credit card information so that you can continue to receive your personal issues of Aloof without interruption. We appreciate your attention to this matter.

This business of ‘without interruption’ is a recurring theme in these notes.

You are not to think that sometimes you pick a magazine up and flip through it and at other times you just are not in a magazine-flipping mood.

No, the contents of Anthill Gazette must be delivered and consumed on a regular basis, like antibiotics, otherwise it does you no good at all.

Now this gal whose literary output we examined earlier, likely had dropped a hint or two over the preceding few weeks. Let us examine an earlier note:

Dear John,

I dropped your suit off at the cleaners and on the way home I stopped at the convenience store to pick up some dog food. Man, have you see that chain link fence off to the side, with the old yellow newspapers being blown flat against it, and the leaves whirling around on the asphalt just to show how dead they are? Reminds me of something, but I just can’t put my finger on it. OK, Toodle-oo, I have to hit the hardware store tomorrow, remind me if you would.

You see what she’s doing here? It’s the deft clue, the sly hint, pointing to a darkening horizon that even she hasn’t fully apprehended yet.

The fellow who gets a letter like this and studies it intently will go heavy on the flowers and chocolates for the next few weeks and make a point of making the hardware store run on his own. There’s just something about that place he doesn’t trust anymore.

So it is with the magazines. They are hyper alive to any drift between you and them, and are likewise going heavy on their version of candy, flowers, and communication, as early in the game as they can manage. “How is the relationship now? How about now?”

Over time the reminder notes gain in force and number, now arriving in a kind of flurry, gale, or even blizzard.

The tone is ever more panicked – “this can’t be!” – and even well after the subscription has well and truly died and distinctly shows no sign of life at the autopsy, the notes still come, mournful now, as for something great that once was and now can no longer be.

It’s a hard thing to take, so this time you take up a pen and sign up for the lifetime package of three, no, make it four, dozen publications, putting the next three mortgage payments in jeopardy, simply so you don’t have to go through this emotional turmoil again.

They ought to start arriving any day now, and at some point in the future be delivered to your grave, but first of course, as a kind of appetizer to the main meal, several renewal notices are wending their way through the U.S, Postal System.