Est. Read Time: 5 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections.
New to the SternJourn? Check out the best of 2021, 2020, or whichever random classic this is.
UPCOMING SHOWS:
Tuesday 4/12 10:30 — Roast Battle at The Comedy Store (Hollywood)
Thursday 4/21 9PM — Shut Up and Laugh (Hollywood)
Hi Sternal Journalists,
Hoooo-hoooo-hooo-EE! I was sitting down to finally finish and publish a Sternal Journal I’ve been working on for a while now and realized that somehow, I deleted the edited file. This was very annoying. It is yet another setback in a series of setbacks, but it is
also very okay. I didn’t actually lose any raw work, it’ll just take the process of editing it over again. An annoyance, not a tragedy.
And with all annoyances, I think it’s important to seek out a lesson—any lesson you can find—and pass it along if you can. In this case, I’m actually really proud of the way I was able to let the fluster pass through me and then move on to problem solving.
Once I exhausted every possible way to solve the problem, I moved on to doing something nice for myself before deciding what to do for this week’s suddenly blank Sternal Journal.
For me, this week, that nice thing was drinking a beer in the shower.
I remember the first time anyone recommended a shower beer to me. I was twenty years old and working as a food-runner at a fake Irish pub in Midtown Atlanta. We were opening for the day and the bartender on shift was one of those older adults who seems really mean when you’re a twenty-one-year-old fresh out of college, but then later you realize they were just exhausted. He was twenty-three or twenty-four, which was about the oldest I could imagine anyone my age would ever become.
We were talking about what we’d done the night before, which when you work in the emotional trenches of the service industry, is something you still do with people you think are really mean. I can’t remember what I’d done, but what he had done was something along the lines of “I got home, drank a beer in the shower, and went the fuck to sleep.”
I can’t remember my reaction but I think I must have thought it was a waste of a good time to drink a beer and intentionally drift straight off to sleep. However I verbalized my skepticism, I remember he scoffed and then smiled—a rarity—and said, “A shower beer after work is one of the greatest fucking feelings in the world.”
And while I don’t think you always have to do it, if someone you think is mean but is actually just tired all the time tells you that something is one of the greatest fucking feelings in the world while giving you a rare smile no less, and that thing isn’t super illegal or harmful? It’s almost always worth giving a try.
Mind you, I was fresh out of college and absolutely one hundred thousand per cent had drank many beers in the shower, but they weren’t Shower Beers so much as beers I was drinking—or shotgunning—or beer bonging—in the shower. The intention lacked.
Because the thing that I understood instantly but couldn’t have verbalized for a while is that a true Shower Beer makes the shower about the beer and the beer about the shower. It gives the mundane a dash of the spa treatment; it makes the party vibe cozy. To have a Shower Beer, you have to really want a Shower Beer. Otherwise, you’re just sipping a shampoo-y Coors.
But all of this is intuitive and that’s the beauty of it. The one non-intuitive Shower Beer secret I can impart to you, and it may seem like a curveball, but I’m telling you to give it a try…
BLAST SOME ENYA.
Specifically her fourth studio album, The Memory of Trees. That’s really all I was here to say from the beginning. If you’re in any sort of bad mood and a Shower Beer is the type of thing that helps you decompress, you are going to love doing it while listening to Enya.
And the first two tracks of Memory are an excellent one-two punch to get you out of your funk. The first, the title track, is incredibly majestic and solemn and honors the shitty mood you’re in. The second, “Anywhere Is,” is plucky as hell, has some drums that will have you marching while you scrub, and should get you to the end of your beer and washing time. But if it doesn’t, you can honestly keep vibing to the whole album.
And… that’s all I have to say this week! I hope to have some exciting stuff next week, and I hope you let yourself indulge in a Shower Beer or whatever your version is sometimes this week.
Recommendations
Death on the Nile. Film. If you liked Kenneth Branagh’s last Agatha Christie Poirot adaptation Murder on the Orient Express, you’ll like this one. Light, fun, dubious acting chops but incredible charm from Gal Godot. What more could you need?
Things Fell Apart. Podcast. This BBC series from Welsh writer Jon Ronson explores the striated histories of today’s culture war. It’s all handled with empathy and maybe even optimism, but if you’re understandably tired of hearing about the things we argue about these days, it might be a bit much.
Underwater - Orchestra Version. Song. I’ve surely recommended the full-orchestra version of this Mika classic before, but mentioning it again because it’s the only song that comes close to rivaling anything Enya as a sonic shower beer companion.
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop. Book. More on this in a later journal, but I keep having parts of my OCD bit blow up on social media. It’s very cool to have such personal jokes resonate with so many people, but it also has made it so I’m thinking about OCD way more than I normally do. As a way to hopefully process those thoughts in a productive way, I thought I’d pick up a book about it so I’m not just hearing about it from people’s TikTok comments. This book from David Adam—a science writer who lives with OCD—looked really compelling and so far, it is! Perhaps I’ll give a full report once I finish it, but if you’re interested in learning about OCD for any reason, this is a great place to start.
Alrighty! That’s all this week! Sending all the love!
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.