All My Entertainment Weeklys Ruined

Went to storage last weekend because my folks continue to get on my ass to clean my room in a reaction to throwing Grandmother out of the house late last month. The more shit they don't see at the house, apparently, the better. My God, clutter is the scourge of modern times.

I did have a second reason: To find last year's taxes. I was damned if I have to pay a grand this year. I actually was given money last year and I was in a similar position, or at least I thought I was. So I wanted to find last year's taxes to see what it was. (I couldn't find it; later, like I said, I went to the library because there were people there offering tax advice and reminded me that last year was a credit that is gone for this year.)

I have at least a dozen bags full of papers and magazines in this storage room. It's one of the many things that are in this spot, so I took about an hour to dig and dig through. Couldn't find last year's tax copies. But unfortunately I found something worse.

Rummaging through the bags I started to notice that some of the mags and papers felt sort of soggy and looked wavy. This is an outdoor storage unit; it's not air-conditioned, therefore it's susceptible to the weather outside of the door. Didn't like it, but hey, what can you do, and besides, it was just papers.

But then I got down to the bottom-rightmost bag, the one where, if you open up the door, you'll see on the ground to your right. I leafed through the copies. They weren't soggy, they were soaked. And as I went from one to the next, I could see that they were so wet the ink ran and copies stuck to one another. Fuck.

These weren't newspapers because I knew I had so much shit I was going to throw into the unit that I needed something strong at the bottom. However, I apparently threw enough Entertainment Weeklys in there that it was a sturdy bottom that filled the entire bag. I put that down first, then put a couple of bags on top of it.

One final thing that sets up the body of this story: When I moved my things in there for the first time, the owner/operator of the storage facility recommended I take one of their pallets because moisture often seeps up from the concrete floor. But the pallet doesn't cover the entire square footage of the bottom of the room, and I have so much shit, that I have shoved bags inbetween the edge of the pallet and the storage room walls.

So, when I was at the point of stowing my EWs away, I was faced with the possibility that they would draw moisture from the floor. I guess I took the chance because, hey, where the hell in the storage unit can I throw a heavy bag of magazines? So I set the bag down on the floor and if something happens, it happens.

I honestly did not foresee that the mags would be so heavily and thoroughly soaked. Worst of all, these aren't just any run-of-the-mill EWs, these are the first ones I got when My Father subscribed to them as a way to get into Publisher's Clearinghouse's sweepstakes. With a month-long break excepted, we have been a subscriber to Entertainment Weekly since Issue #11, and with the exception of several copies that I forgot to pack away during my years at USC, I still have every single one.

But these, I'm afraid, are ruined. I looked at that Issue #11, the one that promoted a TV biopic about Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. (She was played by Bernadette Peters; he was played -- and I did not know this until I inspected the magazine -- by none other than Kevin Spacey.) The cover is bled through and I can't open up the pages. Some other editions have it worse. When I took them out (pretty easy when the bag they were in was so unusable it immediately broke apart when I pulled on the paper handle), put them in bags that I got from the trunk of my car, and tried to separate them so some wind can go though them, I tore the covers, and the printed front halves of covers, from the next EW they were stored next to. These copies were still so wet it was like pulling down a blanket so you could get out of bed.

I have these grand plans to seal every single issue I have in a plastic bag (backed by cardboard) and store them in these boxes. Why the fuck should I do that for these? But I am. I'm trying to air them out now in two paper bags that right now reside in my trunk. They're still stacked one on top of the other, so I try and turn the bags over once a day. Sometimes I try and separate the magazines, but they are still so wet I might make things worse.

What I plan on doing is keeping them there for the month. For Memorial Weekend, when the 'Rents are out in Vegas, I'm going to lay all of them out in the back deck and let the sun bake them dry. Maybe -- of course this may be wishful thinking -- I can dry them to the point where I can go from one page to the next, even if the pages are now permanently wavy and are now all smudged. And I can see myself storing them anyway. Hope that works.

Two other things. First, I only think these got wet from the floor up. When I first saw my ruined EWs I thought that the rainstorm the previous evening somehow got through the door and onto the mags. But then I realized that the bag on top of it, also filled with Entertainment Weekly issues, had some moisture but was nowhere near as waterlogged as the ones in the bag below. If rainwater was penetrating through the door, wouldn't the top bag be wetter than the bottom?

Second, I blame My Fucking Father for this. Mother too. Yes, I could have been more careful, and I had at least a passing thought that the owner/operator did warn me about setting things on the floor. But I wouldn't have even had to worry about getting my Entertainment Weeklys wet if they didn't continue to fucking harp on me to clean out my room. If I was able to keep them in the house I wouldn't have this problem. Now the best and most valuable copies of a magazine I've read since 1990 is just about unsalvagable. It's all their goddamn fault.