The Rite of Spring

Most people know it’s spring because of sudden, all consuming, uncontrollable thoughts of love.  Or the sight of the first shock of color against a grey-smeared landscape. Or the heady, intoxicating, sweetly ephemeral scent of the air.  Not Life in the Boomer Lane.  She knows it’s spring because the ants are back in her pantry.

Over the years, she’s done about everything there is to do and spent about everything there was to spend.  In the pantry, she scrubbed, she sprayed,  She set traps.  Outside, she paid several different professionals to hunt down nests and do their dirty.

The ants came back.

LBL put the sugar and the honey in the refrigerator. She placed everything in the pantry into space age, non-permeable, zip lock bags  The only thing the ants had now were canned goods and dry pasta.

The ants came back.

Then LBL read Empire of the Ants by Bernard Werber. This is an outstanding book to read if you have never had an ant in your house.  It is a very bad book to read if you have ants.  It humanizes ants.  It is a novel, but it is based on about a million hours of observation of ant behavior, which LBL could have had if she had moved into her pantry.  In this book, ants were heroes.  They fought battles with beetles and spiders and they passed heroic tales on to their young.  Mostly they communicated with each other using pheromones.  And their ultimate reward was to get screwed by people (no connection here between the screwing and the pheromones) all in the name of science.

LBL didn’t want to be one of those people.  She wanted to make up for human foolishness and violence.  There was only one way LBL could do that.  She stopped killing the ants.  Instead, LBL stood at the pantry and sent the lone ant scout overwhelming thoughts of mutual respect and love.  And it was obvious that he understood the olive branch LBL was offering.  He scurried (or whatever it is that ants do with those teeny little legs that you can’t even see) back to the nest and communicated her 60s flower power message to the others.  They responded with all of their millennia of antlike emotional being: They turned her pantry into World Ant Central. It was completely and totally disgusting.

She started killing ants again.  Bare-handed.

The ants are back.  And now things have gotten worse.  Thanks to Elly at www.Bugginword.com, a blog LBL follows religiously (Elly has more followers than a Queen Ant, and she doesn’t even have to lay millions of eggs to do it, although LBL suspects she’d be really proud of herself if she could), has called LBL’s attention to the advent of “Zombie Ants.” LBL looked it up, and it is totally real.  Scientists have identified four new species of brain-controlling fungi that turn ants into zombies that do the parasite’s bidding before it kills them.  The article went on to say that Dick Cheney originally discovered the parasite and experimented with in on (Note to readers:  LBL will NOT stoop so low as to complete her George W Bush joke, here.  The man is no longer President.  Let him rest in peace).

So that’s it.  LBL has ants in her pantry.  And they are, She is 100% sure, Zombie Ants.  And they will completely take over, not only her pantry, but Miracle the Cat’s brain (which she’s thinking would be mighty easy to take over, since it is composed almost entirely of cells that tell her to stare for hours at blank walls).

LBL has to find her copy of Empire of the Ants, go back to the pantry and start beating the shit out of the little f—kers with it.

(Aunt Gert.  Sounds the same, but isn’t.)