Travelogue Month Continues(!) With A Thing From August
The Sternal Journal
Pretend this is a work e-mail by muttering "Ugh, more duties?!" as you read.
Greetings Sternal Journalists!
It's *travelogue month* here at the Sternal Journal because I did a thing about travel last week and am doing it this week, so I'm pretending it's intentional.
(Travel month may be ending this week due to (a) COVID19 or (b) me not having any more travel stories).
First up! Show tomorrow night. It's at Copper Still Comedy, which is at Beverly and Vermont. Unless you live on the West side, this is like 15 minutes from everywhere, so come on out! They got improv, stand up, and me (stand up)!
I'll be telling my hilarious new Biscoff story, and depending on how confident I am, I'll try a new joke that might be dicey and is extremely difficult to get out of quickly if I feel it going downhill. It'll be a spectacle either way!
Before that, I'll be going to Austin Davison's show COFFEE TIME at UCB Sunset. Austin is a crazy person and it makes him a very talented writer. If you come, do you wanna sit together?
Moving on: last week, I got off stage and the host said, "Hey, well this is the experimental hour, so anything goes!" Which is a very polite way of saying, "Julian really swung big and whiffed that one."
And in this life, sometimes you gotta whiff. Sometimes, you gotta take a biiiiig whiff. But you always gotta take big swings.
And today's big swing is publishing a never-before-seen, arguably unfinished Sternal Journal from my trip to England over the summer.
But my friend Joe said he liked it, so if you don't like it, blame him. If you do like it, check out his website where you can find his writings, vids, and pods. (And now that I think about it, if you don't like it, still check out his stuff! He didn't write this, he just encouraged me. You're so judge-y!)
Alright, here it is. A Sternal Journal within a Sternal Journal:
Good day, Sternal Journalists. Or should I say cheerio, old mates.
As I type these words, I am hurtling through the English countryside thankfully enclosed in a train car operated by the Great Western Railway (You don’t want to just be hurtling through a countryside rawdog; it’s best to be encased within some sort of vehicle).
Beside me is my trusty steed, Francois, who is not a horse at all, but a really reliable friend who tends to not be flustered by many of the worldly matters that fluster me, so in some ways he is a horse.
Just about 18 hours ago, we were returning from a wedding (this wedding being the reason that we soared, becondomed by a commercial airliner, across the Atlantic Ocean at all) with a group of honestly just really snazzy British people. All of us were staying in the same bed and breakfast, which I should say was some very cute shit.
They had two guys named Mark (“to make it easy for ye’!”), old scary rooms, and no computers. They actually a pen-and-paper ledger to find our reservations (I very rudely popped my eyes open comically and said “WOW!” when that happened). They also had a pub, and our little group found ourselves asking the Mark working the pub if it would be alright if he served just two more - okay, one more drinks? Per person?
Now, here’s the thing about pubs! In the states, a pub is more of a theme of restaurant or decorating scheme than anything else. But in the UK, I've learned that to be a pub is to exist in various pub-specific legal realms, both municipal—closing way earlier than real bars—and social—seeming to only be allowed to contain the friendliest or least friendly types of people, never anything in between (This is similar to bus drivers in America).
So we found ourselves—myself, Francois the un-horse, some Brits, and honestly a couple Americans I didn’t mention before because it sounds cooler if I’m just hanging out with Brits—in such a pub, subject to such laws when Mark #1 very unfortunately turned us away because it was just after midnight, and even thought we did a great job of pretending not to know the rules about pubs, he was very good at kindly explaining them. In a town with effectively no other drinking establishments, sent straight to bed, straight past go, prohibited even from our civic gift, nay, right of two hundred smackeroos.
So anyway, Francois and I get up to our room, ready to go to bed, and then her turns to me, eyes alight with mischief: “I think he’ll serve us if it’s just the two of us.”
And guess what? Mark fuckin’ did!
If we promised to take our beers up to our room. Which we promised to do, and then very much did not to. No, on the contrary, we walked straight outside with them and all around the tiny little cute town we were in, sipping pints that we absolutely didn’t need and staring at the stars and talking about Brexit.
Hi,
It's present day Julian. What a lovely little sketch of a story. Thank you to Mark #1 for serving us those beers, and sorry to all of England that Brexit eventually happened (back then, it was just theoretical).
I'm in a hurry today (apologies for any typos, inconsistencies, or vague discrepancies in output vs what you think I'm capable of), so my recommendations are Listen to Megan Thee Stallion and wash your hands.
TTFN!
Julian