getting better ... filed a food poisoning complaint

Last night after I went to bed there was no pooping and no cramping, so I slept more normally.  This morning's BM was closer to normal, without cramping.  Perhaps the OTC medicines helped, perhaps my body was about to feel better anyway.

But immediately before I went to bed last night was the worst, the pain and cramping were the worst of the 36-hours, and I was starting to feel depressed and broken, this was unsustainable, I thought.  T suggested if I wasn't better in the morning to call my doctor, and I agreed, although if the pain and cramping had continued through the night I might have gone to urgent care at 2am.

So far, I don't think that's necessary now, but if that level of pain and cramping returns today I'll definitely call.

Nothing too rigorous on my work calendar today, I may try napping instead of using caffeine and chocolate to power through.  If I move my body at all today, it will be to take Dax on his regular 1-mile walk, and to do some stretching.  I'll decide about tomorrow, tomorrow.

I want to blame that new restaurant I ordered lunch from on Monday, although it is impossible to know for sure.  I'll never order from them again, though.  I do not have any remains of the food to send for testing, not sure whether I should make a complaint to DC Health when I can't be certain.  I'd ordered two dishes from them, one for lunch, one for my afternoon snack.  The dish I had for my afternoon snack didn't taste right to me, so I didn't finish all of it, but then I moved on ... until Tuesday around Noon when the symptoms began.

There have been times when I could be more certain of tainted food, because I vomited that food up before my next meal, but this food seems to have made it all the way to my large intestine before my body became upset about it.  And the irritation remained in my large intestine, it seemed my stomach and small intestine continued working fine.  That's what was different about this bout of food poisoning -- it caused pain and cramping from my lower intestine to the outside of my butt.  I fear including more detail would be too gross, but, the effect it was having on my butt was highly unusual, and I'm somebody with a pretty darn strong butt.  I guess "rectal cramping" is the official term.

OK, I did file a complaint with DC Health, that was an easy process.  I'm not certain of the cause but if other people experienced the same thing and also filed complaints then there would be a group of complaints pointing at the same restaurant.  ChiKo @ Dupont Circle.  You couldn't pay me to eat their food again.

Fingers crossed that the worst is over now.

Clostridium perfringens

After comparing and contrasting various common causes of food poisoning with my own facts & circumstances, I blame Clostridium perfringens for my late difficulties.  If so, it should be over now.  Haven't had any issues today, I'm just tired, I'm going to nap now :-)

yay, nap

BTW, one of the weird things about the N word is that it's perfectly fine to say "the N word".  Is there any other word like this one in American English?  We don't have the F word for "faggot" or the B word for "bitch" or the C word for "cunt".  It's weird how we feel the need to wrap the bad word inside a special wrapper like this, and that doing so makes it OK.

experimental music and voices of the dead

I was thinking about picking a slightly different pen name, one that wouldn't sound 100% American male anymore, so I was wondering whether "Mattin" is a name, and it is, but the DuckDuckGo search engine led me to a Basque artist from Bilboa who already goes by the name Mattin -- as one word -- and the more I looked at what he's been up to, the more entranced I became with how he thinks, and now I finished listening to a one-hour experimental album of his (Lagos Sessions by Billy Bao).

And then I bought it; I want to listen again on some good speakers rather than my good headphones.

And now I'm getting more excited about making my own music again.  But will I put the time into it, taking away from my relaxation time?  I've gotten into a groove of work, chores, exercise, relaxation, that's mostly been working for me during Quarantine, compared to the difficult emotions I had for much of last year.  I want to spend more time creating music, but I'm concerned about giving myself too many things to do, all work and no play ... I'm afraid of turning music into work by creating an expectation for myself ... it's more something I want to focus on after I retire, or after I'm living by myself in a lower-maintenance dwelling.

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I like that Mattin takes the phrase "experimental music" seriously.  Even more seriously than Autechre, which was my last extended foray into listening to experimental music.  After listening to Mattin for an hour I feel like he blew up what I used to consider music.  He focuses on improv, performance art, confronting audiences rather than catering to them, and theorizing about the role of art both under and apart from capitalism.

He used to give away most of his expansive oeuvre without charge on his website, but he says he lost most of it -- didn't say how -- I presume a hard drive died and he hadn't made backup copies -- but as an improv artist he doesn't seem too upset about it -- which reminds me of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who would probably be appalled today if he were to discover that many of his buildings are not lived in but are preserved without change as tourist sites.

Recording music is like drowning that prehistoric dragonfly in amber and displaying it on a shelf millions of years later, excised from its context.  It's dead.  It's never going to sound different, it's never going to grow.  Recording music fossilizes sound, trapping us in a past.

But, then, so is writing, a form of recorded speech, it's dead.  As soon as I finish typing this, it's dead.  As a photograph is dead, a motion picture is dead.  A painting or sculpture is dead.  I never thought of it all this way before, but if you aren't interacting with others, give-and-take in real time, you're surrounding yourself with the dead.

Growing up, when I spent my school bus commute reading books instead of interacting with my fellow students, I was retreating into a world of the dead.  More literally so when reading an author who was no longer alive, but the published work of a living author is no less dead.  Think about what we mean when we say we're attending a "live" performance.  How did that adjective come to fit our description?  Perhaps when recordings first arose, people experienced them as voices of the dead.