Man, do I sound pretentious in that previous post about having dinner at Republic? Like its name carries so much cachet that people will immediately assume I know everything there is to know about New York. And then the part about going to Spa? Who the fuck do I think I am?

If I committed some crime of pretending to be someone I wasn't, I have most certainly paid my debt to society, as I spent all of Wednesday night curled up on the bathroom tiles, hugging the toilet bowl and praying that I would just vomit. I have never felt such stomach pain.

I think I was the victim of food poisoning, most probably at Republic. I had ordered my meal by the number, and I am convinced that the waiter brought me the wrong meal. Beef noodle I wanted, chicken I got. After sending it back, it returned, with a little attitude and a firm statement that I had ordered the chicken, worded and with the tone that I was not able to remember what I ordered.

Unwilling to argue with this arrogant fuck, I accepted the chicken ( it's all noodles anyway), and was about to dig in when the waiter reached in front of me and planted a squeezable bottle of hotsauce next to the bowl. "I always use this sauce with this meal."

Perhaps I was overzealous with the sauce, but most likely it had gone off. Lucia had a bit of it, and she could not sleep due to her stomach ache. She got off easy though, because I spent from 1:30am to 5am in the bathroom, writhing, aching, bitching about that waiter as I was convinced that he planted the sauce on me to make me sick, just to show me that no one questions his waiter abilities, especially some provincial fuck from Vancouver with last year's Campers shoes. "That motherfucker, that motherfucker..." I kept repeating all night.

I had to sleep all yesterday, but I was well enough to get to the play Flicker, put on by the Big Art Group. All I can say is that I would never see anything like that in Vancouver.

We did end up going to Spa, which I recognized immediately from the movie Made. I only had one drink and went home, but it filled my checkbox under the "visit a club while in NY" category.