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[Cheer up, Sleepy Jean]
I really, really think I pissed the ants off this time. It's not as if I have some sort of sick fascination with killing them or anything, but this time I think I really did a doozy.
Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Allow me to explain briefly.
Every apartment I've lived in in Chicago for the last three years has had ants in one form or another, ranging from very benign to totally horrifying infestations. In the place on Halsted, for instance, there were so many of them that I couldn't leave so much as a fortune cookie IN THE WRAPPER on my floor. They were in the walls, see, because we lived above a bar in a pretty shitty apartment. They would freeze during the winter, sure, but in the summer they would be everywhere if you left so much as a breath of food within their teeny, tiny grasp. One time they even figured out that they could get on the coffee table in the living room. They were all over an Oreo that was left out and Chris walked in drunk from the night before and ate it. Bleck. Of course my room was the only room they really ever returned to, though. Ants fucking follow me around.
Anyway, the next place wasn't so bad, and this one isn't either. This is ground floor so it's natural that there will be a few here and there. I honestly haven't seen any at all until this week. Jeff left and I have this big ol Manor to myself. So, of course, the ants came marching in. They could probably smell my fear.
I carelessly tossed my pillow off the loft during a fitful slumber the other night, plummeting it onto the "couch" below and knocking off the entire bowl of popcorn that I thought sounded like a good idea at 4 am drunk the night before. When I wake up less than two hours later I go down to clean up the mess and lo! Fucking ants. I have no fucking clue where the grimy little bastards are coming from, so I just start stomping around like a creep-out. I squashed em and threw them in the garbage can to dispose of moments later and then I vacuumed.
Now comes the part that's really irking me. I was sitting at the keyboard tonight, a full two days after the incident, when I start to feel tiny sharp pains on my forearm and then the side of my hand. I look and, again, lo! Fucking ant! Just one little bugger. I usually would call it a scout, the one that goes out to see where the food is and if he doesn't come back then they know that's not a good way to look. But I'm not sitting by any food. In fact, he's treating me like food.
That's when it hit me. It's not a scout - it's an insurgent. Or a freedom fighter, or whatever. Maybe I killed the wrong little guy or something, maybe he was outraged at my ants rights abuses. If an ant can carry 5 times its own body weight, then couldn't a whole bunch of them carry me off like some kind of demented Lilliputian story line from the future? Good thing I sleep in the loft, I guess.
But now, I ask you, what disturbs you the most about this tale:
a.) That I'm dead serious about being scared of ants carrying me away, moreso than I am about serial killers and stray bullets or whatever?
b.) That I somehow brought my sad little story around to the present state of world politics, using an ant that I am seriously afraid of as a metaphor?
or...
c.) That I could be right, and I will one day be found half-eaten to death by ants.
[Fucking ANTS!]
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