It starts out simple enough; you bring home a few magazines that you bought from the store and settle down to read. But wait! What’s this? It’s a bunch of little subscription cards inside the magazine. Not just one either, but several, all in strategic locations of the magazine and urging you to get a subscription and telling you what to do. Some of them come falling out in your lap to attack you, while others are stapled inside refusing to move until you take the initiative to remove the paper parasites. After you rip these out, you check your other magazines and just like the first, they’re infested as well, so you rip them out too and return to reading, not realizing that a dangerous habit is forming.
The next time you’re in the book store, you go to the magazine section again just to browse now. Once again you encounter the little cards inside. Sure you’re just browsing, but these cards, they seem to mock you and you can’t let them get away with it. You decide to do it. You look around to make sure no overzealous store clerk is watching and you tear them out. You feel that euphoric rush surge within you. When you first ripped them out, you were more annoyed, but now you feel good. You enjoy it all, the tear it makes, the crumpling of it, everything. Now you don’t even care if you rip a little bit of magazine along with it, all you want is that card at any cost.
Now you’re going to the bookstore everyday, lurking around the magazine section like the pathetic junkie you are, waiting patiently for people to move away so you can do your thing. It’s too slow! You can’t wait anymore, you begin taking more risks, you start ripping the cards out around customers you think won’t care. You get some strange looks, but nobody really says anything. It’s good! You can participate in your card ripping fix without fear! And then it happens, you get careless and forget to look out for the actual store workers who are none too pleased with you vandalizing defenseless magazines. They expect you to pay for them all, but you can’t because you quit your job to hang around in the bookstore all day. They throw you out and ban you. You don’t care though; you just go to a different one and repeat the process all over again, until you’re eventually banned from every bookstore in the state. Even convenience stores have a photo of you so they can run you off when they see you approach.
You try the old substitute of tearing mattress tags, but it just isn’t the same and can’t possibly compare to the rush of tearing magazine cards. You are sickened by what you’ve become. You eventually end it all by stealing a magazine and slashing your wrists with the card inside that made you into this empty shell today.