So this isn't meant to be a total rant against change in general but last evening, a few minutes on hand, I found myself perusing the magazine selections at Price Smart Foods.

Let's start with that.

Now I'd heard of Price Smart, caught their little spots on the radio and had actually wondered: who are these upstarts? Starting a new grocery chain and going up against the big boys can be no easy feat. They must bring some deep pockets on their blazers, which must mean back east dollars, which translates to Toronto funding, which pretty much at least loosely affiliates them to the Blue Jays, ergo, I was quite prepared to dislike them from the get go. Still, it was nearby a shoot on which I was working so I was also prepared, by necessity, really, to give them a try. Change can't be all bad, right?

Only they're not some grey smoke interlopers. I walked in and the first thing I noticed was the sign promising deals if I used my 'Save-on More' card. What the hell? They're Save-on Foods?

I've been shopping at Save-On for years - and notice I'm flexible enough to drop the formality of 'Foods' for the more colloquial 'Save-On' - and I'm comfortable with it. Sure, I've been occasionally thrown off my shopping game when I've stumbled into an Overwaitea: it looks the same, takes the same rewards card, offers the same products at more or less the same prices. This begs the question: why not just call it Save-On but I've learned to adapt. Urban Fare? Well that's just crazy. It may be the same company but the Yaletown hipness of it makes it un-doable.

So now they've got a fourth entry into a market they already dominate. And I fell right into their change trap.

I can live with that.

But I wanted to buy Atlantic Monthly. And I couldn't.

You see, the Atlantic Monthly, a storied institution in the magazine world, isn't the Atlantic Monthly anymore. It's just The Atlantic. Primarily, I suspect, this moniker makeover was the result of the ever changing nature of the publishing industry: The Atlantic, in its print edition, now only publishes ten times per year and the paper on which it's printed is noticeably smaller than that on which I used to enjoy it when I got the time to getting around to reading it.

So what, you might ask.

Before I got into this novel-writing game, I, for awhile, envisioned myself something of a freelance writer, who someday, God willing, might write for such a venerable institution as the Atlantic Monthly. Its diminutive size and reduced publishing schedule, seems to make that possibility, however remote ever it was, ever more thus.

Change is coming, and even as my writing priorities changed, so does the publishing world around me. It is both encouraging and discouraging that those very publications to which I inspired, the gold standards of writing excellence, themselves fall prey to the weaning purchasing desires of readers and the ever growing movement to the web for information and entertainment.

Of course, if you're reading this, maybe I have reason to be more encouraged than discouraged.