Dry

What am I doing in Dubai?

Fantasia (2019), Flora Yukhnovich

My commitment to excellence in all things is going great, thank you for asking. I am already looking fit and I am always sober, every hour of every day. It’s easy to feel like you’re special when you refuse to allow alcohol to touch your (dewy) lips because it violates your (brand new) principles. I am not making cavalier jokes about booze in order to denigrate those who struggle with it, I am doing so to celebrate my sober brain, which runs as smoothly and efficiently as an integrated circuit — as opposed to say, an ancient subterranean sewage system, sluggish and stinky and prone to catastrophic failures.

Yesterday I wrote, walked three miles, did a p90x3 workout (a lot of moaning and gasping on hands and knees, so much suffering), ate some pecans and an apple (both tasted incredible), played pickle ball for an hour and a half, ate a leafy salad, and then went to Whole Foods and bought a few things for dinner.

All day long, my family was awed by my energy, my proactive spark, my detail-oriented mind, my calm demeanor. Actually they didn’t notice any of that, but it doesn’t matter because I was awed by my own tenacity and audacity and capacity for sagacity. “Today I worked out twice and I ate only healthy foods and I bought groceries and I’m going to make dinner, too,” I announced to my husband and kids.

“That’s nice,” my older daughter said.

“I feel great!” I said.

“Excellent” my husband said.

“I’m so positive and energetic, it’s crazy,” I said.

No one looked up from their phones.

“I’m so cheerful and clear-headed.”

“Everything is so much easier now.”

“I’m just so healthy. It’s almost perverse how healthy I am.”

***

When it was time to make dinner, I discovered that I had purchased a completely random assortment of groceries that didn’t form an obvious meal. I thought we already had black beans and cheddar cheese and salsa. We did not. We only had flour tortillas and two cans of chick peas, plus an onion and some old carrots and a few stalks of celery.

I didn’t panic. I started by cubing up a butternut squash I had purchased and roasting it. Who doesn’t like roasted squash? I thought. I diced up the onions, carrots, and celery and cooked them in olive oil. All good meals start here, I thought. I added chick peas. These are exactly like black beans. The same exact thing. There was some feta in the fridge. Everyone likes tacos. Literally no human dislikes a taco.

My chick peas were very bland. They were nothing like black beans. So I added vegetable broth. I added red pepper. I shook in some habanero sauce. Still too flat. I added tomato paste. Better but not great. Finally, I broke out the random refrigerated bottle of cilantro chutney I’d purchased earlier, and added about three tablespoons, maybe four.

PERFECT.

As I transferred the brown mush into a serving bowl, I thought, “I’d better tell them this is some kind of Indian-Mexican fusion recipe I found online, or else everyone will hate it.”

Sure enough, my younger daughter sat down at the table and looked skeptically at the tortillas, the pale mush, the squash, the feta.

“Did you make this up?” she asked.

“No, it’s a recipe,” I replied without hesitation.

“Where did you get it?”

“I found it online.”

“Oh!”

“Yeah, they’re called Dubai tacos.”

“Dubai tacos,” my older daughter said, spreading chickpeas on a tortilla.

My younger daughter took a bite. “This is really good,” she said.

“Dubai tacos,” Bill said, “Wow.”

That’s when I realized that I meant to say Mumbai tacos. But Dubai was even better. Less crowded trains, more shiny skyscrapers. Who knows what kind of tacos they serve in Dubai? Literally no one has any idea.

That’s excellence. The sober microchip inside my head produced a beautiful lie, and the next thing you know, three humans go from eating canned bean mush to discovering the delights of fusion cuisine from the Arabian peninsula.

Excellence is all vibes, that’s what the kids today understand and what I am just beginning to grok. Here’s how it’s done: You wade right in and start talking before you even have a chance to think. Your brain is simple, a microchip, just zeros and ones, nothing complicated. There are no devastating logjams, no massive sinkholes formed by corroded pipes overpacked with raw waste. You do not second-guess yourself. You do not read the room. You do not respond to conditions on the ground. (Fire? On fire? This girl IS on fire, thanks for noticing!) You speak without hesitation, you slay, you ate, period, no notes, no cap, no crumbs.

Such vibes are only possible when you’re utterly sober and so turgid with bovine peptides and serums and seed oils that you automatically take whatever you need and leave / ignore / abolish anything you don’t need. The second I spotted that refrigerated bottle of cilantro chutney, for example, I said to myself, “I need this.” My sober brain could take that enormous leap of faith. I didn’t even look at the price, but this was Whole Foods, this was a refrigerated item. I already knew I didn’t want to know. The microchip speeds past irrelevant information that will only make it less efficient.

All I had in my cart was two red pears, three tangelos, and one huge butternut squash. I added the cilantro sauce. “I probably don’t need anything else,” I said to myself.

Then I sort of drifted from aisle to aisle, reaching for big bags of walnuts and special-sounding teas and innovative flavors of sparkling water and putting them back on the shelf again. This was a meditative process, so I was allowed to take my time.

Finally, upon placing a very healthy-sounding bag of ancient grains back on the shelf after discovering its disturbing price, I said to myself,

“I need to get the fuck out of here.”

***

Excellence, fast and slow. You follow your gut. Your gut did 10 minutes of burpees earlier in the morning. Your gut does not go on social media or watch the news for any reason, because ewww because toxic because why bother. Your gut has not digested tequila in approximately 96 hours. Is there a medal for 96 hours? There should be.

I’m drinking some flat municipal water right now and it tastes great. I’m about to do another workout. It’s going to feel so good to cry on my hands and knees on my mother’s dog-hair-covered rug. I relish suffering now. I’m not on some kind of an escape route away from pain. Pain is purifying, you know this in your gut you just keep resisting it. Why do you turn your back on what’s real? I wish you would face reality.

I’m going to vacuum after I work out. Then I’m going to move my daughter back into her dorm so she can start her second semester of college. Then I’m going to come home and make dinner from three sweet potatoes, some leftover rice, and a handful of dried cranberries: Kazakhstan wraps. Addis Ababa bowls. Dhaka crunch.

Is there a medal for lying to your kids about what you made for dinner? There should be. I deserve one. 2025 is all about the accolades, period.

***

My friend is texting me now. She says the editor she was trying to reach doesn’t work at that magazine anymore. She says being a writer is stupid and embarrassing and she’ll never get paid for the feature she wrote now, she’ll probably get a kill fee for two weeks of work, how is this reality?

This is not my vibe at the moment, but luckily I’m spilling over with compassion because I have so many antioxidants in my bloodstream right now. Antioxidants regenerate your compassion engines. This is science, I saw it on TikTok. It’s not science but it is science vibes, that’s factual, I checked it. Anyway I have to call her back later because I need to work out first, but when I call her back I’m going to tell her that she needs to run five miles to the grocery store, buy a vegetable, and then run home and make something with it.

Nothing is stupid and embarrassing. Never getting paid is definitely fine. Just write five books in one year like I’m doing. It’s painful but that’s what’s so good about it. It’s excruciating and impossible, that’s why it’s so vital and life-giving.

She says she’s feeling humbled. I want to scream at the phone: Do not humble yourself, ever. First you’re humble, then you’re smoking a cigarette outside an AA meeting. Don’t go there.

If you’re wondering how to live, all you have to do is observe me right now. I don’t need a sponsor because I’m too good at everything to defer to someone else’s guidance. I don’t need to surrender to a higher power because I’m the highest power of all, I’m high on plant matter and I’m powerful beyond measure. I don’t need to leave behind the detritus of the past because some of my closest friends are drunks and they all need to hear me hold forth about how incredible my life has become since I stopped drinking. They might need to be drunk in order to listen to this, but that’s just them, that’s not me, I have firm boundaries, I know the difference. I don’t need to remain anonymous because if I do then I can’t promote the 7-9 books I’m going to write this year.

Of course… ahem… we’ll all be rendered anonymous soon no matter what we do. We’ll feed our words into the abyss faster and faster, and the abyss will keep chewing them up and spitting them out into other little baby-bird mouths. Everyone will eat our words and repeat our words and nothing will be attributed and nothing will matter. In fact, I got a letter from my publisher just now offering me $2500 to surrender one of my books to an AI company. It’s part of their deal with the company and I can opt in or opt out. Here’s the fine print:

The AI company represents that its technical guardrails will disallow the inclusion in AI output of (i) more than 200 consecutive words of verbatim text in a single output and/or (ii) 5% of the text of the book across a series of outputs during a user session.

Hmmmmm. My gut says fuck that. My gut says no way. My gut says who cares. My gut says take the money and run. My gut says then you’re part of the problem.

See how I just outsourced a decision that was only going to slow me down? That’s excellence, the fast kind.

That’s how we’re getting through 2025. We’re doing this the pure way: digital, on / off, clean, efficient, zero doubts, zero hesitation, no delays. Work smarter, work out harder, never hit pause, no rest. Shiny like a skyscraper, pointing at god, reflecting miles of desert in every direction. We can do anything we set our brilliant minds to. 2025, a year for excellence.

In 2026, we will look back and say: We chewed up 2025. We ate. Period.

I feel great, don’t you? Everything is so much easier now. I’m sober as a judge and I don’t own a single word I’ve ever written. I guess those words never belonged to me in the first place. What a transformative lesson. Nothing adds up. Do you feel lighter? I do. So unburdened. Erasure is salvation.

No crumbs. No notes. No cap.

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Thanks for reading Ask Molly! I have several close friends in Altadena whose houses burned down in the Eaton fire. My friends Erin and Jeff lost their house and their GoFundMe is here. (Erin has MS so I’m particularly worried about her right now.) My friends Steve and Heather lost their house and their GoFundMe is here. And my friends Shannon and Justin have a house that’s damaged by smoke and currently unlivable; their GoFundMe is here. None of these people are rich and they all poured their life savings into their houses. Every tiny gesture helps!