Pre-Empative Strike

This is an example of a type of story you tend to hear a lot if you run in the circles I run in. It's the story of a smart person, doing a dumb thing, and then trying to be smart enough to undo it before it hurts them.

So, on Saturday we had an all day gaming session, as we often do, and we bought various food items. Today I remembered that we still have the remnants of those items in the back of my car. Most of them are guaranteed to be fine. The soda isn't really food so it won't rot. The bananas are fine because they weren't quite ripe when we bought them, and they're sealed in. The salad though...

The salad is a boxed salad from Trader Joes. It looked fine, and it smelled fine, and that seemed like enough to try it and see. The first bite tasted... okay. It wasn't fresh any more, but I don't like to waste things. The second bite was another story. With the second bite I had a keen awareness from my body that this was poison. I let that bite fall from my mouth back into the box, and threw the whole thing out.

So now we have the setup. Smart person, dumb behavior.

So at this point the part of me that has intellectual strength wakes up and realizes what we just did. So from my semi-educated perspective the objective understanding of the problem is this. There is a substance in my body which is contaminated with pathogenic bacteria. The body has a defense system in which it violently expels everything in order to counteract that, but I really want to avoid that process. Luckily the digestive system is also pretty aggressive. The substance will be exposed to very very harsh conditions, so there's a reasonable chance that it will be killed off naturally. I want to be a bit more proactive then that, so it seems to me that what we need is a substance I can introduce that will kill off bacteria, and won't kill me.

Alcohol.

I want to pause and note that this may not actually be a story of smart people doing stupid things. Hindsight tends to support the idea that this is a story about a series of dumb things I did today.

So, Alcohol. I know it won't hurt me, not that much anyway, and it will discourage bacteria. It's times like this that I wish I had more in the house. What we did have left was a bit of Juniper berry mead, so I drank that.

Now I think I've established that what I did was logical, if not reasonable, but the real story will be told in the next 18 hours. If I wind up blogging tonight because I'm up vomiting then this will be a story about learning an important lesson. If I'm not then this will be a story either of luck, or of unusual but clever solutions.