R-ant

So remember the "Bring out your dead!" scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Well, it is being re-enacted as we speak in my bathroom on a very small scale.

Up until recently we had an ant problem. They liked to sneak in through the gap where the top of the bathtub and bottom of the tile meet. Which meant there were always lots of tiny ants crawling around the ledge of the bathtub and the occasional pioneer who would climb down the porcelain canyon toward the drain in search of gold. Or a nice spot to put the homestead. Or a better life for their family. I don't know. We rarely spoke. They had the decency to turn the other way while I showered two feet away.

Now I don't really have anything against ants, but when they hit the 1,000 mark in population, I draw the line. Being the googlenut that I am, I spent at least 5 hours looking up old wives tales on how to get rid of these things without using pesticides. Honesty Corner: 4 hours and 55 minutes of that time may or may not have been spent at thesuperficial.com following the sordid details of the Linsdsay Lohan/Samantha Ronson saga. In the remaining 5 minutes I found a commonly agreed upon method of mixing icing sugar and borax together and sprinkling it around as food. The smell of the sugar attracts the ants and when they start eating it, they also ingest the borax as they can't distinguish between the two granules. Then I think it just sort of poisons them (in a loving non-pesticidey way; like morphine to a eutheniz-ee) and then maybe they bring some back to the rest of the gang and it poisons them too. Or maybe its more Heaven's Gate-ey and there's a whole wacked-out ceremony surrounding the sweet Borax cocktail consumption. Ha! Teeny tiny ant Nikes! What, too soon? The statute of limitations has definitely run out on that one, people.

Anyways, I did that for about 2 weeks and they ate it up like candy. Borax-laced candy that is. This reminds me kids: stay away from creepy Philip Seymour Hoffman look-alikes in brown panel vans offering candy. Even the non boraxy stuff. Their sinister plans might revolve around making you watch Capote over and over. Or worse yet, Marley and Me. Oh the humanity!!!

Right, where was I? Ah yes. Two weeks of happy poisoning. And then nothing. Not a single ant. Tumbleweeds. The sound of crickets. A creaky dilapidated door swinging in a tension-filled breeze. And then.....the dismembered ant bodies started to appear. Everywhere! Think Platoon meets Terminator 3 meets Quentin Tarentino's entire filmography meets Wile E. Coyote meets The Spanish Inquisition. And not the John Cleese Spanish Inquisition. Ant arms, ant legs, ant heads, ant abdomens, ant second abdomens, ant brains, ant spleens (at least I think it was a spleen - my Grade 12 high school biology is a little fuzzy at the moment. Did you see what I did there? I just used that spleen comment to let you [the reader] know that I [the author] took Grade 12 biology and am probably smarter than you. Unless you took Grade 12 Biology too. But even if you did, can you honestly tell me that you got 96% in it? I can. I have the transcripts to prove it. Don't MAKE me get out the high school transcripts people, because with it comes the stack of Grade 11 Creative Writing assignments I kicked ass on).

Whoops. Off topic again. Recap: War Amps Society worst case scenario in my bathtub. And this has been the state of affairs every single morning when I go into the bathroom! I have been washing them away at night and then waking up to a plethora of more ant chunks strewn about. It's like Attila the Hun lives in the crack above my bathtub.

So what we think is going on, is that another ant colony has moved in (or a Russian spider) and is basically cleaning house and quite literally bringing out the dead. And in this little play, I'm merely the cart pusher, submissively rinsing them down the drain each night. I'm worried that I may have setup a dependency situation. My bathtub is the new transfer station for the insect world. I have considered putting up a tiny "No Dumping" sign but ants don't read English. And mistranslations can be damaging. That's how "Grandpa Fucking Space Shuttle" came to be printed on millions of children's t-shirts in the Jiangxi Province of China....

So, what the hell?! How long is it going to be the killing fields in my bathroom? This is really creepy stuff. Maybe it isn't a new ant colony cleaning out the nest. Maybe its a sign from the Ant Mafia. They know what I did. Its only a matter of time until I wake to find a severed horsefly head in my bed....