… around our fucking necks!
Just the other day, The Bug uploaded its 3500th post penned since Australia’s oldest and least profitable satire publication was resurrected as an online project only.
Three fucking thousand, five fucking hundred posts! That’s slightly more than two a day on average since the first day of November in 2018 – getting close to five fucking years ago.
Over that time, my co-writer and I have not missed a single day. We’ve each written at least one yarn seven days a week, every weekend, even on the Sabbath which frankly we detest doing being fairly devout and all, every public holiday, on Christmas Day, on New Year’s Eve… every fucking day.
To the countless hours of writing involved here, add the countless hours of creating images for each post.
Pretty sad, eh? While the annual ongoing costs associated with such a project are not enormous, they do add up, and seeing not one red cent has ever been made to offset those expenses, there’s a pretty plausible case there for both of us to be committed, right?
So why do we do it, seeing the profit-and-loss column is eerily similar to when The Bug was a hardcopy newspaper from 1989 to late 2007?
To that simple, logical question, I’ve got no fucking idea of any possible answer that makes the remotest of sense.
The only thing I can offer is that we love writing and we think, rather immodestly, that we’ve developed over decades a talent for penning satire. And we remain supremely confident that every now and then, glimpses of that satirical ability peek through the dross of scatological nonsense, childish undergraduate humour, double entendres and biting, jealousy-driven, putdowns of successful people that drives most of our scribblings.
My writing partner and I started this collaboration 40 years ago when we published Baby Koala Blender Horror, the complete guide to Australians emigrating to Queensland.
That complete commercial flop should have rung the loudest of alarm bells as to exactly what lay ahead over the next 40 years for the pair of us as creative writers and part-time publishers.
But we didn’t. Flush with that unsuccess, we launched the hardcopy satirical newspaper The Bug later that year in the heat of the famous 1989 Queensland state election that saw Labor take power after 500 years in the wilderness. Took us a week to deliver 13,000 copies all over Brisbane and there wasn’t a single fucking ad in it.
Yes, you read right. Not on single fucking ad in it! Well, not a paid one, anyway. Some fake ones. Anything for a laugh, right?
Four decades later, we still don’t know how to pronounce “monatise” let alone spell it properly.
So forget the van and the men in white coats clasping their straitjackets. Will someone please get a fucking gun and shoot the two of us! We haven’t learnt a bloody thing over all those years, have we?
Don Gordon-Brown
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