So i was wondering through the posts of this site and i didnt really see a post about anyone finding magazines in weird places, just about how they bought them in a store.
for example whenever im in a place like a washing salon or a hotel i just check to be sure if no one left a magazine in the room or if the hotel for example puts fashion magazines in their lobbies. I know it would be theft would i take them but its something so unimportant that i dont really feel bad for doing so.
Sometimes when its that time of the month to put your paper trash outside for pickup i go out at night to look into people’s trash to go looking for any magazines or catalogs i can find, i try specific places like barbershops since i expect them to have some magazines in their bussines they get rid of after a while. Sometimes finding a vogue, elle, bazaar or any other magazine in there turns me on more then just buying it because it has been read through and you can see the folds and the scratches on the paper as it has been read, even better if i find one where there have been pages or words cut out perhaps for a collage or something else.
i also go to the shopping streets once in a while when its garbage pickup to search for posters or stands they throw away and i find some great things sometimes.
I have just gone so far into this fetish im doing things like this now and i dont know if anyone else is doing it, do you guys think its weird to do this?
be honest
Oh, this post really is for me….
Full transparency : I don’t do this anymore. But back in my middle school / high school days when I still had too much time in my hands, and when buying stuff like this was outright impossible (strict household and all that), I used to do this all the time. I called it “scavenging”… which probably sounded better in my head than calling it outright theft. It was even kind of a part of my “identity” back then, being a scavenger… And I have a lot of stories!
Still, one important thing to note…. I didn’t really search for magazines. Young me thought it was too “hot” and “dangerous”, as it would be hard to explain why I had them if I were to get caught. Instead, I searched for newspapers, catalogues, and most importantly, women’s tabloids. Basically anything that might have usable pictures for young me to… blow some loads into, while not being too suspicious. Students keeping boatload of newspapers and tabloids seemed more “normal” than saving magazines.
I was so good at scavenging back then, I could differentiate different newspapers / tabloids just from the font / lettering. Not exactly a useful skill, but I did…
I used to live not far from this… more affluent neighborhood. Kind of a semi-gated community… I would often rode my BMX after school checking each of the garbage bin for those newspapers and tabloids. I had many good catches over the years, and still kept some of them even today (probably, have moved out from my childhood home so not sure if they’re still there).
Sometimes they would leave a stack of old newspapers / tabloids outside for the garbage men to collect, and I’d swoop in to grab them first, stuff them in my backpack. Or if there’s too many of them, I’d snatch them quickly, put them all in this abandoned security post not far from there, and spent my saturday morning sifting through them, bringing home the best ones only.
One time my school had this renovation thing and they were repainting the walls. They brought in stacks of old newspapers in, many of them weekend editions which I knew usually had lifestyle / fashion pages in them. I made up excuses of not going home after school, waited until it was deserted, and brought those newspapers home. Cue the workers being confused on where the paper went the next day. They ended up using some plastics for the job.
I guess I don’t have to talk about the barbershops / car wash / doctor’s office ones, because they’re kind of… so-so. Everyone does that. And I guess they were much more understanding about a little young kid taking stuff from the waiting room.
I didn’t have much material to… “satisfy” myself back then, so I had to use anything that was available…
Case in the point, one time my mom had this “tupperware party” with the neighbours. I managed to snatch one of the catalogues. Yes, I did it with a catalogue of some plastic containers. The models were quite cute… Also did the same with a handbag catalogue, and a makeup one. That makeup catalogue, unfortunately, was my first exposure on how good it felt to…. “draw” on a closeup picture of a model… It was a revelation…
Speaking of, there was this park not far from where I lived where there were so many street food stands each evening. You know, hotdogs, kebabs, the likes. Some of them would use newspapers to wrap their food or to just line the counter (oh, another story about this). I would often buy some from them, and then make up excuses on why I need extra papers. They would often give them for free. One core memory I had was me getting a tabloid page featuring Lily Collins which I thought was really adorable… And yes, I ended up… using that page eventually…
Circling back to some school stuff. This one warrants an entire post, but I’ll try to write it all here because it’s such an important memory for me.
Back in high school we used to have this so-called “Student’s Digest” kind of thing. Each semester, a handful of students (usually around 10) would be hand picked by the teachers to write for the digest, they each would write a “feature” about… anything they want, which would then be collected, edited, and printed in tabloid-like form, where it would then given out to every student, teacher, and staff of the school.
I distinctly remember this one time, one of my friends… which I kind of had a crush on, was chosen to write for that semester’s digest. So, she did. She wrote about baking her favourite cake, a velvet cake (that’s what it’s called, right?), and it was deemed to be the best of all the features submitted and was chosen to be the centerfold. The page featured her writing, and a (very cute) almost full page picture of her holding a cake that she made… It was… really cute…
Unfortunately, the school printed too many copies of the digest, so there were leftover prints even after everyone got one. They decided to just give the undistributed copies to the canteen. From what I heard, one time she was eating at the canteen when she witnessed one of the staff there used the page with her feature to line a messy, oily counter, without even reading it. Other rumors said that the staff actually crumpled the page and used it to actually clean the counter before tossing it aside. Whatever the case, she was so heartbroken, cried so loudly, to the point that the “big jocks” teamed up to…. “teach some lesson” to that staff for treating the girl poorly. It escalated so badly that…. the school ended up axing the entire Student Digest program, after a massive pushback from the students demanding their writing to be handled with “more respect”.
The board promised to “handle the digest with respect and dignity”, by taking back the leftover copies and kept them in the library…
Until one day I took the copies home and…. I really regret to admit this…. used them with even less respect and dignity than that staff back in the canteen. I’m sure you know how…
I accidentally hit post before I finished writing… My bad… Sorry for the horrible formatting, I haven’t got the chance to edit it.
As an extra, that picture of my crush on the digest looked very similar to this…
https://www.istockphoto.com/en/photo/pastry-chef-confectioner-young-caucasian-woman-in-the-kitchen-she-holds-out-the-cake-gm1400472278-454041706
That’s NOT her, just a stock image, but the pose, and the image in general, looks very, very similar to that picture of her.
Another story… which you might want to skip if you really don’t like magazines getting ruined…. There was this one time where we were given a task to… “make some recycled art”. My class decided to do this by covering the entire classroom with ripped paper. Don’t ask me why, the girls made the decision, us the boys were too busy talking about the upcoming Playstation games than actually doing it. So the next day, one of the girls brought a massive amount of old magazines. By massive, I mean like, hundreds of editions. They were teen magazines… which I couldn’t remember what they were. The plan was to rip them to shreds and stuck them on the walls. Even back then I was feeling sick at the thought of it, so I was thinking for a way to “save” them. So, exactly a day before they were going to do the deed, I decided to stay in class really late, making up excuses like “Oh, I’m going to clean the room a bit so you guys can do it easier tomorrow.” But what I did really was I took home as many magazines as I could to “save” them. Then I pretend to get sick the next day so I wouldn’t have to see the massacre. When I went back to class, the room was already painted with torn magazines pages all over. Unfortunately… I ended up having to discard all but one of those magazines I brought home due to…. well, reasons. I still have one of them today… somewhere…
Oh, okay, extra extra… One of my earliest experience of “coming” actually happened while I was riding my BMX. It was a normal sunset ride when I suddenly felt the urge to pee… But before I could find a proper place to let go, it…. all blasted uncontrollably. My knees instantly felt so weak, it was so hard to breathe, and my pants were really sticky. At that point, I still wasn’t sure what was going on. I tried to pee in the bushes but nothing came out. I was so embarrassed, I was already way too old to pee in my pants. I thought I needed a way to “absorb” it because it was just so wet… I went to one of those food stalls I mentioned, asked for some newspapers, and… stuffed them in my pants. It felt….. so good… I distinctly remember the pages had an article about Lorde and I felt really bad of using it to clean up my mess… Luckily, it ended up raining so I was soaking wet when I got home, no one the wiser…
Of course, all this scavenging ceased when I went to college. I was… free to basically buy anything I want without having to hide it like I did for years. So, my scavenging career finally came to an end.
thanks for the stories i can definetally relate to some of them, but i still do it from time to time even though i have all the resources and the privacy to buy whataver magazine i like just because of the thought that those magazines or catalogs were meant for the trash
i also looked for them in school a lot of time when i saw classes having to make some type of art project with magazine or catalog images.
its also true what you say thatwe can recognize whats good just by looking at the top of the side of the magazine when we walk passed the trash
anyway thanks for the response i had a good time reading it
two years ago when I went to school to accompany a relative, we had to cover an entire classroom with sheets (scraps of magazines that the students themselves had donated) I don’t remember what the theme was, but we were volunteers, since the magazines were donated by the kids, they were mostly teenage magazines, of all names, at least a few days before I saw that there were teenage magazines from 2008 to 2016, even those that come with posters, when the day came, there were other volunteers and they began to tear open the magazines, since they were teenage magazines, they were mostly materials from artists like Taylor Swift, Becky G, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, One Direction, Demi Lovato, BTS, Olivia Rodrigo, among many others, a large collage was made by tearing and gluing the pages, the posters were torn and I felt sorry for some but we had to do it, nobody could take anything, everything was to be used, I think there were more than three thousand magazines, some were left to be used for other things, like cleaning the windows of the classrooms, after the event, a few days later the students took it upon themselves to remove everything from the walls and all the magazine sheets and posters were thrown into the trash. If the experience is of any use to you, I’m glad, because I felt sorry for the teenage magazines that were torn, used, and then thrown into the trash.