RUN! Run for the hills! The ants are coming!

We are being invaded by ants. The cat was yowling this morning, as he is wont to do on occasion, but this time there was a higher purpose to his caterwauling. He was trying to alert us to the present of tiny little IAMS thieves pilfering his precious kibble. It is even possible that he was worried he was going to be carried off by a bunch of little thugs and possibly fed to their queen. I get a mental image (which I'm sure is the product of some ill-advised and emotionally scarring Porky Pig cartoon) of Hannibal J Cat, Esq. being tied up Gulliver style and stuffed down the ant hill.

Ants bring out the worst in all of us. I go to great lengths to rehabilitate spiders. Even at work I will demand no-one crush a little eight-legged interloper and run and get a jar with which to carry it outside. But ants. I draw the line. I crush them with my bare hand, feeling their pathetic little ant bodies imploding at the pressure of my thumb. Why? because they have transgressed the unwritten rule of symbiotic relationships: get the hell off my food! There is in fact nothing even remotely approaching symbiosis in the Kafkaesque-ant paradigm.

I think if ants don't want to to be mushed into little balls of ant goo, they could go a long way towards that goal by working towards this symbiosis. Perhaps they could learn to shine my shoes. Or god forbid they should water the tomato plants or something. Oh no. They exist only to fill me with a sense of disgust – and here is the part that really bugs me about ants: I think they kind of like it when you kill the guy next to them in the ant-trail.

That is the supreme ant moment: when they get to hoist their fallen comrade on their little ant back and elbow their way through the crowd, thinking "Hey! Dig me! I can lift 5 times my own body weight!" Other than that, they pretty much just ass around on my counter all day, or in the cat's food bowl.

That's another strange thing about the ants we seem to be encouraging in our apartment lately: we are pretty sure they are Meat Ants. The Meat Ants don't go for sugar or normal bits of ant goodness. Oh no. They want the meat. For what I assure you are perfectly good reasons, I happened to have a half-finished bag of Beef Jerky on my counter a couple of days ago, and the Meat Ants were on that bag like...well, like Meat Ants on Beef Jerky.

I think the Meat Ants may be starting to get ideas. In the midst of yesterday's ant apocalypse ( as I like to call my little genocidal ant murder sprees), at least five Meat Ants started crawling up my leg. And I'm pretty sure one of them had a gun.

I live in fear.