I’m dithering over throwing away or recycling the first three years of Omni Magazine. It was a really cool magazine and for the first few years I bought every issue and read them. They are not in very good condition. A collector would probably rank about half in poor condition and the other half in fair condition. If I were to die tomorrow, they would get tossed. It wouldn’t be worth the effort to find collectors who might want them.

Speaking of death. An acquaintance of mine died unexpectedly a few weeks ago. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call the people involved, Ed, Bill and Susan. Ed is a close friend and Bill is a close friend of Ed. I’ll keep it short. Susan had drunk herself to death. She was overweight, most likely had high blood pressure, and had a pathological fear of doctors. On day at work, Susan hadn’t been feeling well and went home. The next day when she didn’t show up, her co-workers called the cops. They broke into the house she had rented from her former boyfriend Bill. The cops found her body sitting on the couch.

Ed went to help Bill clean up the house. Ed told me empty liter bottle of gin and beer cans littered the house. The house was filthy with only paths in the rooms to other parts of the house and he saw mouse droppings in a few places. She hadn’t used the stove in a while. It looks like she just used the fridge and the microwave. None of the faucets worked in the house except the one in the bathtub. Even the toilet wouldn’t flush. She would fill a bucket from the bathtub faucet to flush. My friend sent me some pics he took with his phone. It was a candidate for the show Hoarders.

Bill wanted to was her clothes before giving them to Goodwill. Ed wanted to take all the clothes to a laundry mat. Bill who is also a packrat didn’t want to. He wanted to wash them at the house. The problem was the washing machine and dryer weren’t working. Bill spent the next three days fixing them. And now he’s washing the clothes one load at a time.

From the pictures I saw and the description of what Ed told me there really isn’t much that’s salvageable in the house. Bill would be better off having a dumpster put in the driveway and just empty out the house then fix the all the problems the house had developed through lack of maintenance. The roof leaked in the house in several locations.

On second thought, I’m just going to put those magazines in the recycle bin.