What the fuck are you doing reading this?
Get your pasty fucking face to the beach you sneaky heretic.
BUT… if you’re trapped behind a desk, or if your internal weather is a little British… then please let me tweak your retina for a few hundred words.
I am currently sick as a dog, my face is a leaking faucet of various fluids and my coughs feel as though my body is wrenching out my organs like kitchen hands do to dirty dish rags. I’ve spent this week suffering the late night mood swings of our dear friend El Nino, pissing down rain and baking my skin all day like a menopausal minotaur.
This swift change in climate, along with the constant, Monday to Friday hunt for a story, customarily ends with me, wrapped in a doona, sipping medicine vials of dessert wine and balancing my alcohol intake with coffee and crushed Demazin.
It’s currently a gorgeous day outside and I’ll probably take a bottle of wine and a canvas into the park, or top up the oil and take the Harley up the coast, perhaps both… but for now, I’m sitting on our floral couch, with a stained Shearer’s Singlet cutting into my arm pits, coughing like a dickhead and burning my naked thighs with my overworked apple mac.
I have real, paying work to do, but I find myself in a reflective puddle, foggy from the mixture of booze, flu pills and porn (I’m still a huge campaigner for excessive masturbation as the world’s greatest cure all), and this reflective mood has me wondering about the last twelve months of SINKing.
This fucking ‘magazine’ is already beginning to take it’s toll on my (and my business partners’) sweaty organs. We’ve had some great times, but I’m 25, overweight, unwell, stupidly in debt and I owe most of it to SINK.
It’s been almost a year since a few, young lads set about to print a magazine about underground Sydney, a year of mid-week booze houndery and failed, drug-drenched adventures – all in the name of stories that barely get written, as we rarely remember them.
We’ve collected roughly $1000 in fines; a giggle-worthy rap sheet of charges for speeding, parking, drinking and public urinating (as well as having one photographer arrested and hospitalised) – while losing roughly the same amount of money on web design, printing, booze, hookers, drugs and the constant repair costs of SINK headquarters (where the carpet is now a papier-mâché cocktail of broken glass, ash, powder and pinot).
Each of us has fallen behind in our current mode of professional purgatory, often spending countless company hours working on this speedball side-project. Personal relationships have also started to slide with dinners replaced with drinks, gifts exchanged for gigs and dates missed for deadlines. And as I sit here, overweight, overworked, unpaid and unwell – I have to ponder; what have we accomplished?
Our web stats have slowed, our advertisers have all run away (after requests from their lawyers, owners and investors) and our contributors seem to be avoiding us (after request from their doctors, bosses and spouses). On paper, it seems a tremendous failure, and only an idiot give us their money… no magazine, no image, no hope.
However, whether from the coffee or Demazin, I’m on the up… I know that regardless of the paper trail failure that this magazine has been so far, what we have now can’t be measured in dollars or stats. We have grown from three, drunken dreamers; to an odd-ball team of 12, magnificent strangers. All working for free, writing for the thrill of it and behaving like the arseholes we were designed to be.
SINK is now a small, tactical team of crack, creative militia; storming the streets of Sydney for no reason other than the desire to do immoral, impractical, illegal things – and write about them in wonderful ways. So I remain optimistic for 2010, if we live to see the end of next year who knows where we’ll be? Hopefully in tangible form, sitting on your laps, bookshelves and toilet floors; crumpled from over reading, pages missing from joint rolling and arse wiping.
We’ll start the newsletter in the coming months (you can sign up HERE), to keep you all in the know, and we’ve got a bank of stupid ideas stumbling through the pebble-crete corridors of our collective, hive mind to keep the stories coming… but what we need of you, dearest freaks, is for you to send us your stories.
Chasing insanity has left our wallets dry, our livers pickled and our personal lives in ruin… don’t worry though, we’ve still got a desire to damage, but we need your help.
We’ve given up giving out briefs, as we find them tantamount to receiving stories; we no longer talk about ‘assignments’ as we find them to be a content killer… but what we do want, is your adventures from deep inside the pockmarked guts of this sunny, summer city.
We don’t care what you did, we don’t care who you are; but if you had yourself a good night – we want to hear about it.
All my unwell,
George Bannister