Alright just a very short write-up about this weird thing I experienced. This Saturday I went to a fish market near me (a traditional market, not the supermarket kind of market) to pick up some fishes. This isn’t my first time, in fact I’ve been doing this routine for years anywhere between once or twice every month.

I walked up to my regular guy. He sells smaller fishes, we’re talking like salmons, sardines, and the likes. We both know each other very well as we’ve been doing business for years. It was simple, you pick which fish you want from the rack, he would pick them up, wrap the fish in some papers and plastic bag, and give it to you. Then you pay.

Now here’s the thing, he usually wraps his fishes with yellow pages (which can be had for quite cheap around here, nobody wants them. They’re thick so you got a lot of paper in each of those). I suppose the page size of yellow pages fit the fishes quite well. He would pull up a big honking yellow pages and rip the pages as needed. Sometimes he would use something else, I’ve seen him using old textbooks, discarded documents, just random papers. Same deal, he would rip the pages off its spine and wrap the fishes with the pages.

But that day, it was different. He used, you guessed it, fashion magazines. Actually it was a mix of magazines and some kind of fashion catalogue stuff. I couldn’t make out which magazine title it was as the cover was already gone by the time I was there, but I knew it was a fashion magazines because it had so many models in it

Like the usual deal, he would rip pages off its spine, and carelessly use the pages to wrap the fishes. I bought my fishes (which was bad luck, as the page used to wrap my purchase was just block of texts) and decided to sit across his stall just to watch him doing his thing. I could see from the distance that he would rip some pages that had pictures so good I would personally put it inside a plastic wrapper in my collection, and used them to wrap fishes like they were just random pages. I remember seeing one full page of which looked like a cute girl in a scientist outfit ruined, and one of a good looking model with a party dress wrapped to an oily fish. Or this one which was a make-up model that was smiling to the camera, like she was trying her best to impress anyone looking at her, which fell to blind eyes and was simply used to wipe some fish blood off the cutting table.

I actually sat there for half an hour, weirdly getting excited of the ordeal (yeah, I tend to get excited when magazines gets destroyed like that). I sat so long he actually asked me what I was doing. I simply BS-ed and said that I was waiting for a call from my boss.

It was Saturday.

Anyway, I wonder if any of you felt uneasy when a magazine gets ruined? I certainly am

6 Responses

  1. I know some people enjoy watching magazines being destroyed, torn, ripped, but etc. and there are even ASMR videos on YouTube for those of us that enjoy it. But personally, I fantasize about being turned into a women’s magazine, so this sort of abuse I hate to see. I want to save the magazine. People can be so cruel. So you never quizzed him where he got his magazine. Was it his wife’s or daughter’s ? We shall never know. Bet you never asked if you could buy his second magazines….. On a similar tale, I have heard some art colleges mutilate magazines, for collages or paper mache.

    1. Indeed, I didn’t ask him where he sourced his magazine from. But if I were a betting man, I’d wager the magazines came from salons. Many salons around here have fashion magazines in the waiting room. When those magazines are deemed too old, they would discard them, usually by throwing them away or selling them to paper processing plants. These plants sell those papers for very cheap (I used to live close to one of those plants, and when I say cheap, they are really cheap. Even pocket changes could get you loads of papers if you know who to talk to). Considering my fish guy here don’t really care about what kind of paper he buys, he probably only care about the size of the paper (I mean, he only ever use A4 size papers or similar papers, yellow pages, textbooks, the paper’s size fit his needs), he probably was offered magazines on the cheap and he just bought whatever was available. I obviously didn’t talk about the magazines with him, that would be just…. weird I guess? You come to him to talk about the fishes (or how Arsenal was doing these days), not about the papers he uses to wrap the fishes.

      About the destruction of magazines, you actually still in a good position. Magazines getting destroyed do happen, but they’re kind of rare. Maybe for an art project, clipping, or collections, but not that often. Try to be me, my jam is newspapers, and people destroy newspapers all the time. I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen my favourite newspapers that I caress in my collection being used by other people in fruit stalls, wrapping random things, being painted over, used as window cleaners, used to cover animal droppings, all sort of stuff. Newspapers can be used for many things, which makes it difficult for me to walk in traditional markets where I could see countless of them ripped apart and destroyed in everyday basis. Think about it, newspapers change everyday, that version of newspaper will only be ever released once. They didn’t know they probably used newspapers that I’ve been searching for my whole life as a single use product.

      But hey, life must go on, am I right?

      1. I would actually love the thought of owning women’s magazines that had been read in a salon. I would love to have the courage to ask them for those they no longer want, or if I knew someone who worked there maybe. This would link to my fantasy of being a magazine and being read there. I do “rescue” magazines on ebay and enjoy the thought it was read by someone nice. I understand your loss.at newspapers, but oddly newsprint is a turn off for me personally. I neither like it’s scent nor it’s residue on your hands. Of all the teams, I would follow Arsenal if I liked soccer, but I was not attracted to sport. I do agree with you that single use products are awful, and that is another reason for buying on ebay. It helps the environment.

  2. For me it is porn magazines.. but…

    I have treasured them my whole life and spent “most” of my time and money acquiring and keeping porn. This makes porn destruction the highest of taboos to me.

    And guess what? I fucking love taboos. Watching super rare, never will be printed again, porn getting destroyed, for whatever reason, though preferably by a girl, makes me cum tears. You are not alone.

    1. I hear you my guy (I assume). There’s this “sensation” that you get for destroying old stuff that you know is old or rare. I also do that from time to time. Trust me, I have some copies in my collection that I promised myself to “never use”, they’re just to good to be used for a momentary euphoria. Truth to be told, I’ve broke that oath several times. Usually I’d use them after something extraordinary happened in my life.

      This reminds me of one thing. Years ago, I came across a material (a newspaper actually) which had an editorial with an interesting picture of an actress on it. I bought it and “used” it without as much of a second thought. Used the image and used the remaining pages to clean up the mess, and just threw it into the trash. It’s just another newspaper, I thought.

      Then weeks later I read a tweet where someone, actually the relative of the actress, who were looking for anyone who had that copy of the newspaper as she couldn’t find the newspaper with the editorial of her sister. I actually was taken aback a bit, there was someone out there who considered that particular newspaper as a holy grail, ultra-rare, once-in-a-lifetime thing, yet for me that newspaper was just another generic one I used and tossed. It felt weird being on the other side of the deal for once, literally ruining something that other considers rare.

      Also, I did felt evil at that time. Someone was proud that her sister appeared in a newspaper. What did I do to her picture on that newspaper? Yeah… I felt bad to be honest.

      1. I enjoy seeing magazines destroyed and I like to destroy them myself. This goes way back to when I was young. My mother use to dispose of dinner table scraps in old news papers. Sometimes she would use old fashion magazines for this. Seeing gravy and all that mess going into glossy magazines would make me crazy! Sometimes I would get them out of the trash and try save them by cleaning them. But you can’t clean a magazine that has been soaking in gravy! Now I’m older and like the destroy magazines. I posted some photos of magazines I destroyed years ago on this site.

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