Magazines: I love you. But the affair is over.

I’ve been a regular subscriber to… well, too many magazines, probably. Esquire, Wired, National Geographic, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Game Informer, uhhh, and probably more. Oh. Entertainment Weekly. Right. And that’s just what I was getting in and around 2009.

I really dig the magazine format. I can pick it up during a commercial break, flip through some shiznit, learn about Portal 2 or read Funny Jokes From Beautiful Women or learn how to cook fish superfast. Of course, I don’t dig the crapsplosion of little subscriber cards — the magazine detonates every time I pick it up, cutting my fingers with paper-cut shrapnel, and I further don’t understand why I as a guy who already subscribes might make use of that wholly antiquated method — but hey, that’s a complaint from like, the ’80s and ’90s. I can practically hear the accompanying Seinfeld routine.

Now? I say, “Fuck it.”

I’m done with magazines.

Boom. Game over. It’s Murder Time in Magazineville. Two bullets in the chest, one in the head.

The strongarm tactics, the greasy sneaky bullshit, the ploys and plots — they gotta go.

We’ve been under the slippery eel tactics of the magazine publishers now for quite some time. They pull all kinds of tricksy shit: “Holy crap! Your subscription’s about to go dark! You cannot live without Pinochle Dogs Quarterly. What will you do? You’ll probably put a bullet in your sad, weepy brain, that’s what. It’s dogs! Playing pinochle! All the time! By which I mean four times a year! Don’t let your subscription lapse!”

Then you check, and you realize that they’ve been doing this to you for years, and you’re paid up through the next glacial epoch. They’re not lying. Your subscription is going to lapse. Just not tomorrow. No, you’ll stop receiving the glossy canine sweetness of Pinochle Dogs Quarterly sometime in the year 2061.

We get so much junk mail from the magazine publishers, it’s insane. Were you to fly over the rainforest, you could probably find a quarter-mile by quarter-mile bare patch where the trees have gone only toward printing the junk mail that comes to our house.

Recently, though, the magazine companies attacked us with two particularly shitty tactics, and these shitty tactics are what’s driving us to hold a funeral for all of our magazine subscriptions.

Those two tactics?

The first? Food and Wine.

The tactic? “Hey, we signed you up for the Special Preferred Subscriber’s Advantage.” (That’s quite a mouthful.) “We guarantee you a hassle-free subscription. We do the work for you by automatically extending your subscription each year for as long as you want. We guarantee to send you advance notice before your new term begins. We will send you a notice that spells out: your rate, your number of issues, and when your card will be charged. If you don’t wish to continue, you can simply cancel before the new term begins.”

Ahh, the piquant odor of lies. It smells like a wet ermine.

What they mean is, “We’re going to triple your subscription price, and then we’re just going to charge that shit to your card, and we’re not going to say one tiny little thing about it. We’re secretly hoping that it’ll get lost among your other charges, and you’ll just drool and gibber and go back to sleep like a good American consumer! We aren’t going to tell you Dick Butkus about any of it! Oh, and when you call? To complain? Yes, we’ll refund your money. But not before keeping you on hold and trying to get you to agree to a lower rate (which is still higher than you paid last year)!”

Mm-hmm.

Pop, pop. Pop.

Two in the chest, one in the head.

The second, even shittier tactic?

Hearst Corporation magazines. In this case, for me, Esquire.

First letter is basically passive-aggressive: “When you ordered your magazine subscription with the convenience of being billed later, we fully believed you would send payment on receipt of the invoice.” Okay, what? We never do the order now, pay later bullsnot. We order, we pay. The letter goes on to say: “Your good standing with us is at risk.”

My good standing? Do they talk about me at the office? “What a gentleman that Charles Wendig happens to be!” they say. Do they have pictures of me on their desk? Am I suddenly losing favor? Do they turn my picture face-down moments before wiping away a lone tear, a tear that tastes of salty shame?

Hrm. Right. Well, we ignored it. Seemed like just some douchey letter. Fine.

Ahh. Then comes the second letter.

This one, a lot more threatening. They tell you it’s going to go to collection. They refer to your “delinquent account.” They say, “take a moment now to settle your obligation with us.” Now, collection is serious. I’ve been there. Years back, I had an apartment, and I moved away while the roommate remained for a couple months. The roommate did not clean the apartment before leaving, my name was still on the paperwork (but not my phone number). They charged a substantial cleaning fee ($25 for each “unclean burner,” so that tells you how steep it got), and the roommate didn’t pay, and it went to collections. Which is when they tracked me down. Collections is full of dickhats, and they will hound you unmercifully and make you feel like a clot of scum caught between the treads of an old boot.

So, when the magazine company says, “Hey, this is going to collections,” I have flashbacks. It’s like Vietnam. Except with less “people dying in the rice paddy” and more “there’s a douche on my phone and he’s threatening my credit rating.” So, erm, maybe nothing like Vietnam after all.

We decided to do a little investigation before blindly throwing money at them.

Ah, first thing we discovered: this isn’t for our current subscription. No, we paid that. This is for a subscription that we haven’t even ordered yet. This is for a subscription earmarked 2010-2011 — wait, what? They’re just trying to force me to renew, aren’t they? I haven’t agreed to anything. I haven’t re-upped my subscription. And now they’re trying to fake me out with bullshit collections? Starting with passive-aggressive letters and then just… dropping the “passive” part of that equation and going for straight-up aggression? For real?

Here I am thinking that we failed to pay for the subscription I’m getting. Oh, no. This is for a future subscription. Months in the future.

Second thing we discovered: they’re doing this to a lot of people. The complaints on the ‘Net from these guys are endless. And it’s been going on for years. Hell, we’re luckier than some — a lot of these complaints feature these letters and a subscription that never manifested in the first place. Or, “I got one magazine, then never got another.”

We called, we canceled.

And that’s what’s going to happen with all the magazines.(Game Informer might be the fluke there, because it renews me whenever I re-apply for my Gamestop card.)

You’d think that, in a day and age when print publishing is already on wobbly legs, they’d try to go above and beyond the call of duty to treat their current customers with respect. Mmm. Guess not. What they’d rather do is try to bend back my fingers until I acquiesce and Cry Uncle.

Hey! No. Not going to do that.

I will do something with my finger, though.

(This is like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel: “Turn to page 36 if you want Chuck to give them the middle finger. Or, turn to page 45 if you want Chuck to stick his finger down their throat and yank out the larynx with a Kung Fu Fishhook maneuver!”)

What’s that quote from Star Wars?

“The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers…”

(Hm. Hey, “fingers” again. It’s a motif!)