There is a great scene in the movie, where the Belfort character is sitting by the pool, fresh as a daisy, and his buddy asks him how his sobriety is going. He answers, “Fucking sucks. It’s so boring I wanna’ kill myself…”
That, my friends, is the crux of the matter.
I have been sober for nine months now, and to tell the truth, sobriety is kind of boring. I quit drinking because I was beginning to see the tell-tale ravages of thirty years of overindulgence, and I’m vain. I also quit drinking because I finally realized that like the old Roberta Flack song, it was Killing Me Softly.
Mind you, everyone I know drinks. A lot. My ex-husband is English and those people drink gallons of tepid beer at pub lunch, and go off to drive postal vans and school busses. I lived in the Bahamas for eight years and they call booze in the morning: Bahamian breakfast. My son Jonathan is a college student…
Suffice to say, even though I’m sober, I have plenty of fodder for some good drinking stories. I also have some things to say about Barbie dolls, hiking, non-alcoholic drink recipes, slobbering dogs, hair extensions, movies and art, Alcoholics Anonymous, the Out Islands of the Bahamas, and most of all – how I’m staying temperate in a tipsy world.
Wish me luck, people.
No woman is an island…
