All Ants Must Die.

Yeah. You better look worried, you motherfucker.

You know what is about as worthless as Charlie Sheen’s publicist? Fucking ants. God, I hate ants. My distaste goes back a long way to a simpler time when young children spent a quiet, summer, middle-of-the-week day fishing at the family pond instead of flitting from soccer practice to baseball practice to swimming practice to Tai Kwon Do to gymnastics class to dance class, and then, if they were boys, to de-gaying class after dance (A.K.A.-church), all before 6 P.M. My grandparents owned property with a large, stocked pond in which I lost many a worm after it was sucked off my hook by the evil catfish who lived below the surface. To this day I eat catfish with a particular vehemence. But the ants. The ants were even worse. They were devil spawns.

Just because I accidentally stepped in their hill one day while standing on the bank watching my daddy fish, the fiery fuckers thought it was acceptable to swarm up my legs and into my shoes and proceed to sting my baby flesh repeatedly, lighting up every pain-sensing synapse in my parietal lobe and forming some new ones in the vocabulary-creating temporal lobe, which is clearly the exact moment that I learned the word fuck. 

My cerebellum, which controls the moving of my ass as quickly as possible, definitely failed because I just stayed there, cemented in that mall of misery where every store sells agony, only agony; and I knew that hell was real, only the idiot Sunday school teachers whose leg fat had slid down to their ankles got it all wrong with the lake of fire. If you do not repent, there is only the standing in a fire ant bed for eternity. The only reason I survived is because my father, who inexplicably found the episode hilarious, snatched me up and out of purgatory.

So you can understand why I detest ants and believe that the only good ant is a dead ant. The thing is that if you kill one ant, four hundred come to the funeral. Right now, over at my daughter’s apartment, there is a veritable carpet of ants on the walkway to her front door. I am not kidding. There is a moving black welcome mat of mania. No matter where I step, I am inviting hordes of crazy pests to rush to the area, so that they can check out why their relations have raised the insect warning screech and why there are now thousands of fucking flat ant corpses in the vicinity.

And then they are going to plot their revenge, which includes waiting until I fall asleep and then paralyzing me with their toxin and feeding on me until I am nothing but white, white bones. Ants can annihilate a whole lizard in under a minute, and, yes, I know that translating that example means that it would take five-and-a-half months for the ants to consume me, leaving me plenty of time to seek medical attention, but I think you get my point. Which is why I now officially love Phorid flies.

Most fruit flies are so annoying because their origin is Gilbert Gottfried’s vocal cords, but these babies, I adore. Why? Because they are the only predator of the freaking fire ant. And guess what they do to fire ants? Oh. This is good. They lay eggs in the ant’s thorax, which is kind of like its throat. Then, the larvae caravan up to the ant’s head. And feed on its brain tissues for about two weeks until the ant’s head falls off! Sweet. If I were in charge and had that technology, about two weeks from now, this would be the headline: Headless Hysteria! Without Warning, Charlie Sheen’s Head Falls Off.