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SHOWS:
Midnight Madness, Third Wheel, Monday, April 24
The Hopefully Spectacular Show, The Mint, Tuesday, April 25
TBA @ The Comedy Nook, The Comedy Nook, Wednesday, May 31st (opening for a great comic!)
Hello Sternal Journalists!
This weekend, I was in Santa Fe for a wedding. When I woke up one morning, I was accused of—and most likely guilty of—having wine breath. For some reason, this made me think of “what if someone had bad breath forever,” in a playground-thought-experiment sort of way, but real. What would their life look like? What would they care about?
And, because I wanted my wine breath to not have happened for naught, I started jotting down a little story about such a guy. His name is Victor. He meets a woman named Gloria. Here is the beginning of their story. Perhaps the middle and end of their story will be published in a future Sternal Journal. Perhaps not. Entirely dependent on demand and my ability to stay excited about this. Anyway! Here’s…
Wine Breath (part 1)
Victor Reems has wine breath. He's had it for sixteen years. He brushes his teeth, he gargles every mouthwash on the market, but his wine breath stays. He actually hasn't tried any of that in a very long time. Because his wine breath stays. And Victor Reems has wine teeth. He's 38, but has surprisingly un-worked-upon great teeth for someone who's lived as an adult for a couple decades. But they are stained with wine, these genetically gifted pearlies of his. He's been to doctors and that hasn't helped. It's helped the doctors because they were able to publish his teeth and his breath in their most vaunted of medical journals, but alas, the clout they built off of his rankness couldn't solve his mystery.
And so he spends his nights in wine bars. These are the only places he's the same as everyone else. Or rather--everyone else is the same as him. But his wine bar life stays in the wine bars. He's made friends, he's had lovers in these bars. But eventually, every single one of them, despite their promises that they believe this is a real affliction not of his own doing, despite their solemn listening face when he first tries to explain his stain and stench, eventually they can't live with it. It's embarrassing to explain to others, they say, or it's even more embarrassing to not explain--to just move through the world with someone who presents as a functioning wino.
And so he spends these nights in wine bars to be around people like him, but to be alone as well. This is his system. This is his broken home, but his home all the same.
It is in this home where Victor Reems meets Gloria. Gloria is a beautiful woman. He sees so many beautiful women in his wine bars. He thinks that every woman in a wine bar is beautiful. There's a certain composure they're slathered in just by being there. Composure, Victor has always thought, is the thing that makes anyone beautiful. Physical beauty is just a shortcut to composure. He has physical beauty himself, but he doesn't have composure. Hasn't in years.
Because of this, he’s able to observe—to be invisible. He looks at Gloria; she's in her 40s, her grays are silver, not dust. She's the type of beautiful woman who looks like she's had multiple lives to become comfortable with who she is. Certainly can't have ever been insecure in this or the last one. Her chatter with the sommelier is authoritative, but welcoming. It’s easier to tell sometimes whether someone knows what they're talking about or is bullshitting, Victor thinks, if you can't hear what they're saying. Gloria is not bullshitting.
The end! (of part 1)
I like Gloria. I like Victor, too, but he seems kind of needy and like he’s let his circumstance shape his whole life, which I don’t think is a healthy person to be around. I look forward to finding out what they talk about.
Anyway!
Recommendations!
Santa Fe. City (town?). It’s a great place I explored for the first time this week. My favorite meal was the huevos rancheros, christmas-style at The Pantry.
Takin it easy to get things done. Mindset. For various reasons good and bad, I’ve been way out of my running practice for months, if not years, and in a constant state of responding to the question of “are you training for anything?” with “I’m looking for a race” while I really was not. This is because I had been trying to train for marathons, and I came to a realization a month ago that I simply do not have time to dedicate to the part-time-job-level obligation which is training for a marathon. So I’m training for a half and using a very (relative to past training plans) easy schedule, and lo and behold, I’ve just finished three weeks of meeting my running goals for the first time in a couple years. I know there are other things in my life I could apply this to, so sharing just in case you can also!
White Iverson. Song. Listen, this is an old song, and people have very mixed feelings about it, but I got this notification on Spotify today, so how am I not gonna share it??
Less impressive when I realized 1% of a billion is 10 million, but whatever.
The Georgia O’Keefe Museum. Museum. This was another Santa Fe good time, even though I was absolutely ravaged from two nights of wedding drinking, running at altitude, and Walking It Out. It’s a cool, concise museum, but my favorite thing was an empty canvas that she had ripped an apparently perfectly good painting out of because it wasn’t up to her standards.
Meanwhile, I’m out here like “I started to write an idea for a story and I’m so needy for consistency and validation that I have to sear it into the foreverness of the internet immediately!” I could stand to rip a canvas out of her frame.
Alrighty, that’s all for this week! Wishing you standards as high as Georgia O’Keefe’s!
Much 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.