When I was still a drinker, one of my favorite fake activities to help justify my drinking was to sit at home and watch movies. “I’m just having a cocktail while I watch a movie,” I’d slur through my 9th drink as I half-watched a Tarantino movie for the 30th time.

As I approach a year off being off the sauce, I’ve gone back to revisit things I sampled while drunk to see how they come off when stone-cold sober.

Turns out, Totino’s Pizza Rolls taste like total ass.

On the other hand, movies I’d dismissed as silly and mid-80’s trash turn out to be pretty damn amazing. Case in point: Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

I remember watching it while pretty gassed to the tits on whiskey and laughing at the catchphrases. “Two men enter, one man leaves!” “Break a deal, face the wheel!” “Drinky, drinky, I am stinky!” The last one may have just been my own catchphrase for myself.

But sober, that thing is a beautiful, scarily prescient look at the sad realities of a crumbling society of selfish, needy beings who are desperate for structure of any kind in the face of the apocalypse. Mel Gibson’s charm is all but shuttered and is replaced by a stoic, almost-silent performance of a man who continues to be shocked at the depths humanity can sink to. Characters that were funny and stupid while drunk are suddenly shocking glimpses into archetypes that would survive into the ends of humanity.

It was good, it was I’m saying.

Next up: trying love while sober. I hear it’s solid.