Hugging the Bar Presents: Hangover Cure

Take a break from beer with a weekly round-up of fun recs.

Howdy and welcome to the first ever edition of Hugging the Bar’s Hangover Cure! This is a weekly little companion piece to the main newsletter, and it’s just for paid subscribers (after a few weeks, I’ll make each issue available to all, but these are worth having immediate access to!). Basically, after all that beer talk, I figured it was worth taking a break and highlighting some non-beer things we can just get some joy or learning or feels or all of the above from. It’s something that comes up a lot when we talk about avoiding burnout: step away from the “all beer, all the time” and embrace other things you love and want to learn more about. Doing so helps you keep your sanity, is just plain good for you, and can even inform your work and inspire your creativity. You do not need an excuse to keep your free time free, but if you’re like me and can’t stop rationalizing it…there you go.

So, every Friday, we’ll step away from the booze talk and give our heads a rest with TV, movies, books, music, podcasts, and more—say, two-to-five things, each week. Sometimes these recs will be hot off the presses, sometimes they’ll be old and under the radar. And you are definitely invited to comment with whether you love them or hate them, and with your own recs! Let’s get into week one, shall we?

READ: Zach Zimmerman’s “Is It Hot in Here? Or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth?”

I’m a big fan of Zach Zimmerman’s stand-up, and he is also a great Twitter follow. (By the way, his Twitter bio has a link where you can sign up to be notified when he’s taking the stage in your city, and if you’re in New York, you can catch him every other Tuesday at Union Hall hosting Pretty Major with also-brilliant-and-hilarious Jay Jurden.) I snatched up his debut collection of essays and let me tell you, it was the only thing keeping me sane when my flight into Nashville for CBC spiraled into a mess of delays and reroutes. This book is a quick read, 146 pages, and you will fly through it—it will obviously make you lol a lot, but there are even, surprise!, moments that will make you think about things or your own life differently, and plenty of loveliness, too. For example, I really appreciate how Zach approaches both holding love for his family as well as complicated feelings toward their South-grown, evangelical Christianity-fed belief system. If you’ve done a lot of changing and growing into your own person on the way from young adult to adult-adult and that’s presented new challenges to work around in loving your friends and family—so, if you’re a human and alive—this book will speak to you. Find it here.