Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The Ant Wars


I am having ant troubles. I thought at first my biggest enemies here were mosquitoes, but now that it's cooled down a bit, turns out I am an ant delicacy. Not little black ants. No, angry vengeful red ants. They can't get enough of me.

I discovered this first while I was waiting at the bus stop on campus. It was hot, I was wearing ballet slippers and a dress. I'm standing there waiting, sweating buckets, uncomfortable and itchy because I'm kinda allergic to my own sweat, which calls into question my very judgement in moving anywhere South instead of, I don't know, Nova Scotia. I could be herding sheep in Nova Scotia, but instead I'm a fat girl sweating my ass off in a half polyester dress in North Carolina. Whatevs. So I'm standing there, and I feel something on my cheek, and when I go to brush it off, I find a red ant on my hand. Then I give myself a glance, and notice that in fact I am crawling with ants. They are all over my legs. They are crawling down my bra straps. I freak out and start pouring my little water bottle all over my feet. I am covered with hard little red bumps for a week, on my stomach and inside my thighs and everywhere, it's gross. 

So I stop standing at the bus stop. 

Then last week I got drunk, and a friend came back home with me one night and we stayed up talking in my backyard late. I felt nothing. The next morning though, there were 8 little hard red bumps on my shoulder, and three more on my stomach, and one on my chest, and basically they had been crawling on me all night. That morning I took a good hard look at the patio, and found ant hills everywhere. Which I was relieved about, cause one of my NYC friends had suggested bed bugs, and I was just about to kill myself. 

My friend on twitter suggested the use of something called dia-something or other earth, I can't even pronounce. 
My other friend said I should burn everything. Napalm that shit. 
But Melissa had the best suggestion. She thinks I should capture a tribe of bus stop ants, and transplant them to the backyard colony, and let them slaughter each other. 

I wonder who would win? The rough and tumble bus stop ants, who scrounge on the side of the asphalt for their very existence?
Or the more civilized, large colony of domestic backyard ants, who have more to lose, and are probably more organized, but maybe not as bloodthirsty?
Maybe their reliance on organization will be their downfall, like the redcoats. 
And how many ants should I bring over? How large of a brigade would it take to give the bus stop ants a fighting chance?

Also what if all of Wilmington is just one large ant colony, and all that happens is some of the bus stop ants get chastised for being off base, and some paperwork gets filled out, and these damn things never die?

2 comments:

  1. And what if the bus stop ants join forces with the backyard ants and then it's just a giant ant armageddon? In which you may just be the unlucky Bruce Willis.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ant Armageddon needs to be the name of a band with a zither and multiple samples from Mario Kart.

    ReplyDelete

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