I subscribe to four magazines: The New Yorker, Wired, Las Vegas Life and Conde Nast Traveler. The New Yorker and Wired are indispensable to me; I've read them for years and will continue to subscribe to them for the foreseeable future. I used to contribute to Las Vegas Life, which is how I got on their subscription list; I should probably call them and tell them to cancel my subscription, seeing as I haven't lived in Las Vegas since May 2002. As for Conde Nast Traveler, well, a kid came to the door and he was trying to save up for a trip to Europe.

All well and good, but I don't stop at just four magazines. Today, thanks in large part to Seattle's excellent newsstands — Steve's Broadway News on Capitol Hill and Steve's Fremont news, the U District's Bulldog News and First & Pike News — my overwhelming need for all things trivial and glossy has grown to include no less than eight additional publications, and that's not counting impulse buys when a magazine I don't normally read has something shiny and candy-like on its cover.

For starters, I read two music magazines, British import MOJO and Seattle's own No Depression. I enjoy both magazines for pretty much the same reason: They ignore current trends, sales figures and even the most outrageous of rock star haircuts to simply tell me what music they think is good. No Depression focuses on country and roots rock, while MOJO covers the entire popular music spectrum, and both do so with a clear-headedness that may trick you into thinking that writing music criticism is easy. If you want to get that notion out of your head, just look at the train wreck that Rolling Stone has become. Yikes.

I pick up Bust, Ready-Made and Yoga Journal under the ruse of buying them for my girlfriend (who actually does eventually read them after I've read them). Yoga Journal is full of all manner of life-extending stretches and exercises that I plan to do someday. Ready-Made is full of home-improvement tips for the kind of homeowner who has bookshelves made of cinderblocks and wood planks. While Ready-Made sometimes tells you how to make lovely built-in shelves, more often than not it tells you how to make the planks and cinderblocks look better.

I could read Bust to discover what's going on in the Vast Female Conspiracy, but truth to tell, that information is purely the whipped cream on the cake. Bust is a terrifically engaging read, with a dynamite sex-ed column by Betty Dodson, great music and literary coverage and celebrity profiles that other magazines simply don't do, regardless of whether they're aimed at men or women. (The latest issue features profiles of writer/comedian Amy Sedaris, Onion editor Carol Kelb, up-and-coming hip-hop star M.I.A. and Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz. It's the first time I've seen Gogol Bordello even mentioned in national print.)

I hope you're still with me, because this is where things get kinda weird. Many of you have likely heard of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary publication that features essays and fiction by many of today's most brilliant literary stars including, but scarcely limited, to Sarah Vowell, Roddy Doyle, Haruki Murakami, T.C. Boyle and Dave Eggers (who likes the magazine so much he's also the editor). For the uninitiated, however, the mere act of picking up a McSweeney's is daunting — the cover is festooned with seemingly meaningless text, the letters to the editor are cryptic and the presentation varies wildly from month to month, It could be a series of pamphlets or a huge comic book.

I don't know why McSweeney's is the way it is. Chances are that even they don't know. All I can tell you is that there's good stuff inside, stuff worth reading, stuff that will compel you to shell out the $15-$30 for each new issue every season. I haven't regretted buying an issue yet.

The same is true of the quarterly Giant Robot, comparatively a steal at $4.95. Devoted to "Asian Pop Culture and Beyond," Giant Robot is a riot of pop art reviews and profiles of Far East tastemakers that's the next best thing to hopping a red-eye to Tokyo. Some of it is extremely nerdy — you'll read about a lot of kung fu and anime films in Giant Robot's pages — but how can you pass up a magazine whose advice column is written by Emanuel Yarbrough, a real sumo wrestler? The power of the Robot compels you.

Speaking of compulsions, I've saved the most controversial of my monthly magazine haul for last: Modern Drunkard, published in the apparently hard-drinking town of Denver, Colo. It reads very much as you'd expect; a recent issue features a compendium of boozer's slang ("Hooch: A derivative of 'hoochinoo,' a liquor named for the Alaskan Indians who distilled it"), tributes to late celebrity tipplers Hunter S. Thompson and Jackie Gleason, and "The Concerned Cad," an advice column "for the sad and sober."

It doesn't stop there. MD's editors take on Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (they accuse the organization of distorting statistics and pushing an agenda of prohibition), present pictures of winos looking for dates and conjecture what would happen in a drinking contest between Orson Welles and Dorothy Parker. I'd declare my undying love for Modern Drunkard, but I don't want such a statement going into my FBI file, so I'll merely say that the magazine is interesting from a "cultural tourism" standpoint.

Yeah, that sounds plausible — about as plausible as my need for a dozen magazines. At least I'll be down to eleven when my Conde Nast subscription runs out — unless that kid with the subscription quota comes back. If he knocks, I'll bury myself in a pile of magazines and pretend I'm not home.