Be Lucky
Rewilding Memoir with Gogo Germaine & Sid Pink
“Winterhearted” an excerpt from Be Lucky
By Sid Pink with Co-conspirator Gogo Germaine, Art by Dale Nason
In early 2020, the author was found unconscious in the streets of Paris, and suffered a weeks-long coma resulting from a traumatic brain injury. Friends in his hometown of Denver rallied support, and Pink made it back home. Many of his physical and mental functions stayed intact–as did his idiosyncratic, wild personality beloved by friends and fans. But some of his acquired foreign languages and creative writing skills were altered, and he can no longer write with the deliberate style and flourish of his pre-injury creative self. Now, in 2024, he has partnered with bestie and award-winning author/memoirist Gogo Germaine to compile his memoirs using text-to-speech and AI technology–and lots of editing. Gogo Germaine and Sid Pink discuss the rewilding of memoir in this accompanying audio conversation. “Winterhearted” is actually pre-injury writing, but will be featured in the forthcoming memoir Be Lucky.
– N. Kimber
Art by Dale Nason
Winterhearted
I could disappear into Helsinki, or Dresden, or Riga. Something with winter hits you and you get used to it; you have cold on you and in you. Somewhere terribly small and out of everything – like Faroe, Krasnodar, the north of the North of Iceland; there’s not even a town, just a collection of ideas from the here-and-there. Frosted Cluj or gray-clouded Torun, or the high Switzerland roads dumping you – along with snowflakes – in a remote village that will let you read all your books in front of a fireplace.
Winter doesn’t need to be quaint or bold, peopled by kept-to-themselves or a throng of smiling clientele, never “worse” to “worst” in the local climate. The only thing to worry about is your attire.
* * * * *
When did you ever feel that those who you love, love you? The easy flinch, just based on school teachings; of simple poems; a fall-easily nodding watching the simple cinema – Spring. But it’s not. Not really.
As winter it primavera-estes, it surely clings to the optimist… but also awful-ist. Because the loopholes are like a tunnel for the silver Zephyr. It isn’t that it’s “wrong” explicitly, just singing a tune of Less than More; the blooming flowers and leporine leafs leaping, and greeter greater greens grow. Those all count; a melancholic midterm or sparkling smile can both sense something wander inside themselves. And they can wonder themselves, too.
The petals are gorgeous, but tattle-next – sweeping or dried they fall – and then curses not to believe. Dies the bunnies, by the hundred; old trees to timber.
Yet underneath every snowscape, riding atop the land, the glacier. The freezing unchanged, except the pack of Earth.
Winter never dies, not even under your feet.
Photo by Shon Cobbs
“Enough,” Permission clipped a Peruvian cigarillo – cheap in flavor but expensive in travel. To the upstairs downstage; the penthouse on the palazzo.
My eyes didn’t roll, but hers captivated the ceiling. She used a match on Inka Red Chico.
“I prefer Panter Blue.” I crossed my legs the other way.
“Ugh,” smoke crawled out of her teeth. “The Dutch.”
“Wrapped in Ecuadorian,” my eyebrows lifted.
She rolled the emeraldines again; pretending not to be pretending. I must have used to care, but that bubbly midnight has been a dry bottle. Years.
She wasn’t old, but her youth and her mouth have taken Permission on far-and-wide; a great steamer trunk bursting with her busting. Tales unbuttoned, button-downed; never button her lips.
Permission was the only name I knew for her. Maybe the only one she knew as well. She made rules. Always approved approval for applications. Per was Each, and Mission, a Profession – but Per Se was Alone.
If you met her, and she gives a designation name rolling around in her words, you’d already learned everything that Permission was, and wasn’t. At least – to you. She didn’t meet anyone else, ever. Her special was spatial. Conversations were on her game, with or without tokens. A fiery cleverness lay in levers, wherever she was and whenever she left.
“So…?” I opened the ending of the question. Didn’t assume one sand in the seaside beaches in the entire world. She smiled, with a seasoned, downgraded chuckle; she’ll often, in emergent immersion, hiding in plain sight – a miracle map to the confused.
“Questions, always.” She snubbed the Inka Red Chico, right on her floor. Without looking to me, she stood up, dressed up in a massive mink and immense pashmina, held up at her corridor door. “You up?” Permission asked; nodded slightly, almost annoyed. I stepped to the hat-rack to get my coat. It was enough, so she blazed her beat into the cold day, darkening in the fading of the light. Both unable to talk to another, the cold clattering, hands buried in pockets, frosted sharps in our breath.
We were happy. We felt living in this moment, We were winterhearted.
***
Producer, punch-up writer, fashion anomaly, z-lebrity, pointy shoe aficionado, international darkweird traveler, and NOT a vampire, Sid Pink has spent over 25 years making his ‘ribbon-candy-and-shoelaces’ money in video production and cable television programming. He’s worked as a freelance producer, writer, content developer, director, and editor (but don’t tell anyone he was an editor because eeeww). He’s been repeatedly tapped as a casting agent because he has diverse and fetish-model friends, a legitimate boon in homogenous Colorado. His work ranges from broadcast commercials (shudder) and branded content to (gag) to live events and long-form documentaries. There’s nothing he can’t ruin if he sets his mind to it. Additionally, Sid Pink is proud to have been a Mentor at the AIF Interactive TV Conference, on the Board of Directors for the Open Media Foundation, host of PBS’ Sounds on 29th, Lucha Libre promoter, and devoted husband (2006-2007).
In his life’s devotion to dark tourism, Sid Pink embarked on 89 trips visiting 72 international cities on a whirlwind tour of dirtbaggery, some of which he documented in the outcast jetsetting duo the Sinlings. During a fateful trip to France in February of 2020, he was mysteriously found unconscious, his brain bleeding, in the streets of Paris. He woke up from a three-week coma in a global pandemic, his memory of the night gone. At that moment, Sid’s mantra of “Be Lucky” was solidified, as he could have died or worse, suffered his brain injury in the expensive U S of A. Since then, it’s been a slow slog of re-learning language, but the rest of his brain’s as eccentric as ever.
Since Paris, Sid has released two singles under his musical moniker Psychology Bag, and is an actor in Myth of Man, a feature to be released early 2024 by Double Edge Films. He’s currently writing his memoir Be Lucky about how this mantra of chosen gratitude has imbued his many wild adventures. He lives in Denver with writer Gogo Germaine, photographer Shon Cobbs, and Gogo’s tiny punklets Camille and Harry–where together, they own ALL of the sunglasses. Photo by Shon Cobbs.
Gogo Germaine is the punk alter ego of Erin K. Barnes, a Denver-based writer of memoir, speculative fiction, music journalism, lifestyle, and travel. A synesthete, PR wing woman, mother, and Denver denizen, she penned a travel book called Easy Weekend Getaways from Denver and Boulder, published by Countryman Press (W.W. Norton). She currently spends her days working in a phantasmagorical wonderland as a PR manager for Meow Wolf. Her debut memoir, Glory Guitars: Memoir of a 90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl, (University of Hell Press, 2022), became a hopeful platform for her to reclaim her agency and make sense of the heartbreak of being a differently-wired girl in a predatory world. Critics compared it to Kids, Thirteen, Cherie Curry’s Neon Angel, and “if Howl had been written by a 15-year-old fanzine writer high on life, booze and illicit pharmaceuticals” (Louderthanwar). Follow Gogo’s instagram @gogo.germaine. Photo by Shon Cobbs.
Dale Nason presents outcomes from creative practice research in printing typography and related communities of practice. His relief printing plates are made using subtractive 3d printing (CNC milling). This inquiry is situated in overlapping and abutting communities of practice, where activist printmaking methodologies coexist with design education, and bureaucratic affect is adopted to develop an ongoing simulated-workplace situation. The resistance of play, and a reflection on the fragmented archives of letterpress printing combine with speculation into material waste, socio-technical tolerance, resource supply lines, and individual glyphs to spell out variable prompts. Follow him on Instagram @macrocilix_maia