New feature! Because of the nature of my audience (i.e. my mom and my aunt and my cousins read this), I'm going to institute an obscenity alert system. Here's how it works: if I can remember, I'll warn you in advance that there's obscenity in a particular post. Then, if you think you might be offended, you can skip the entry. Or not.

For example: there's obscenity in today's post. I'm writing about the fucking ants that have invaded our house.

Kris and I hate ants.

We have a nickname for the ants on our property. We call them motherfuckers.

We've had ant problems in the past, but last year was the first that we called Mr. Exterminator. Mr. Exterminator came to our house three times over the course of six months, and each time he claimed to have rid us of the scourge, but each time he was wrong. We especially liked the time that Mr. Exterminator told us that the ant problem was our fault because our ferns were so big that they touched the house. (We have pre-historic-sized ferns; we like them, and I'm not cutting them back.) Yet he wouldn't spray the obvious colony in the driveway.

Mr. Exterminator: "Oh, those won't be a problem. They're too far away from the house."

Right. So why are we concerned about the pre-historic ferns then?

Mr. Exterminator has already been to our house twice this year (three times?). The ants seem especially immune to his poisons this summer, and laugh off each visit in their jolly little ant voices: "Ha ha ha ha. Poison. We'll just wait out here in the driveway."

To combat the little motherfuckers, Kris has purchased enough plastic containers, of all shapes and sizes, to seal away every piece of food that we keep in the cupboards. It's a miracle of organization and neatness. No ant could possibly reach the brown sugar or the rice or the corn meal.

They try, however, and when Kris sees them, she joyfully slaughters them with Raid or with the environmentally-friendly (yet sticky and gross) Orange Guard. If Kris sees an ant, she kills it. She has no mercy.

I'm not quite there, but I’m getting close. The other day I bought an apple fritter. I ate most of it, and left the rest on my computer desk to finish later. "Ha ha," you're saying, "I can see where this story goes!" And you're right. Those little motherfuckers swarmed my donut which brought Kris and the foul-smelling, poisonous Raid while I stood back saying, "No, no, don't spray next to my computer" though really I didn't mind because I hate those motherfuckers. I hate them.

Mostly, though, the ants don’t find much to eat inside our house. They've even become a little desperate.

How desperate have the ants become?

They've become so desperate that at this moment they've made a trail that winds its way through the remnants of poison soaking the floor, up the back of the computer desk, along the side of the keyboard tray, and — are you ready for this? — into my keyboard. (I hate these motherfuckers!)

(Wait! There's more! As I type this, Kris has discovered that the motherfuckers have invaded her keyboard, too. She's in a frenzy! She's going for the Raid — no, the Orange Guard — and she's murdering them! Murdering them! She has the can of compressed air and she's cleaning her keyboard, blowing the ants across her desktop! Kill the ant! Cut his throat! Drink his blood! Sorry — wrong insect, he says, dropping a little (very little) literary joke.)

That's how desperate the ants have become, though perhaps that's more a sad commentary on the neatness of our eating habits than it is on the industriousness of the ants.

The ants had better live it up while they can.

Mr. Exterminator is coming on Friday. Again. This time, though, we're going to have him increase the potency of his insecticide, have him spray the driveway and the sidewalk, have him wreak absolute havoc on the ant ecosystem surrounding our house. Wipe them out! Drive them into the neighbors' yards!

I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them I hate them.

The only good ant is a dead ant.

I hate them.

I have a cunning plan to obtain certain ant destruction (which Kris has almost vetoed, blinded by its brilliance). Since the motherfuckers seem to love apple fritters, I'm going to the purchase a couple of them on Thursday night.

I'm going to break one of the apple fritters into pieces. Friday morning, I'm going to place these luscious chunks of fat and sugar at strategic points around the house: next to my computer, near the telephone table, by the kitchen window, in the television room, next to the toilet. Each location at which we've had a past ant invasion, I'm going to leave a hunk of donut.

(And what of the second apple fritter? Before I leave for work, I'm going to sit at the kitchen table and eat it while drinking a tall glass of chocolate milk. Mmm, donuts!)

In order for this cunning plan to work, Kris must not freak out and kill the ants with Orange Guard when they swarm the donut chunks during the morning. She has to let the little bastards eat contentedly. We're going to have five, six, seven ant highways running through our house.

When Mr. Exterminator arrives at 3:30, he's going to be able to see quite clearly the paths the ants take into our home. From the driveway. There'll be no escape for them this time. Mr. Exterminator is going to wipe them out. He's going to destroy them, kill them, kill them, kill them all!

I hate the motherfuckers.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2001 — The Things I Do   The weekend was good.