The War in My Bathroom.

The semi-annual invasion of my bathroom by ants has begun, and I was absent-mindedly squashing them with my thumb while shaving this morning and musing over the fact that many people feel that the solution to violence is more violence…and here I was killing ants!

I started to think about my battle with the ants. They seem to show up in the middle of the summer, and then again sometime in the winter. In the summer, they seem to be thirsty, as they make a beeline for a leaky faucet. But my faucets were recently replaced, so I’m not quite sure what they’re after now.

I have learned that they always send out scouts, and they tend to travel in pairs. If I kill one, the other will appear out of nowhere, frantically looking for his partner. If I kill both of them, another pair of scouts will show up almost immediately. So far, they’ve only arrived in small numbers. If they find whatever it is they’re looking for, then they’ll bring in the inf-ant-ry to carry away the loot. And that’s usually when I escalate from “conventional” weaponry (squishing them) to chemical warfare (RAID!).

I also have an ally in the insect world…spiders…and me and the spiders have a spoken agreement that as long as they stay out of sight, I won’t kill them too. And they can have all the ants and other insects they can catch. This deal usually works out well, and my place at least appears to be insect-free. But occasionally the spiders get lazy and we’ll surprise each other…I’ll pull back the curtain for my morning spider and catch one napping in the tub, and it will surprise ME by how disgustingly big it is. They must get pretty fat on ants.

I killed a spider in my bathroom a couple of weeks ago, a damn big one. Before I delivered the death blow (conventional weapon), I reminded the scoundrel that it violated the terms of our deal. Now, I know that I’m making a big assumption in assuming that the spiders have agreed to our truce. For all I know, they may be ignoring me completely, just like the ants do (when I talk to the ants, they don’t even act like they hear me…obviously we have a language difficulty). But the spiders do a pretty good job of staying out of sight, so as far as I’m concerned, the treaty is working.

But what to do about the ants? If I see many more than I saw this morning, I will be moved to unleash the chemicals. But what really puzzles me is why they are there in the first place. Granted, my bathroom could be cleaner, but it’s not like I’m leaving food crumbs in my bathtub. What is attracting them? I feel like if I can understand their motivation, I can be more successful in keeping them out of my house…without resorting to killing them all.

By now, dear reader, I am quite sure you see the similarities between my bathroom battle and that of the current “War on Terror”. The Western world is justifiably annoyed and concerned by the ant-like extremists that periodically make grand nuisances of themselves by way of suicide bombings and the like. We (the West) can continue to use our arsenals to kill more and more of the extremists (even though they have shown great propensity to kill THEMSELVES), but at some point in the very near future, we will HAVE to identify the motivating force that is animating these vermin. Maybe it’s as simple as cleaning the tub with bleach….or something like that.

In my case, if the entire ant colony were to attack my bathroom, it would be a horrible sight…millions of ants pouring out of the wall, converging on…what? Whatever, I would be forced to bring in the heavy artillery: commercial pest control. Chemical warfare on a large scale. We might even have to tent the house and literally soak it in poison…which, of course, means death to the spiders and other non-combatants…”collateral damage” so to speak. This will be costly, but it won’t require that I “understand” the ants and work to remove their motivation.

Can’t we all just get along?

More later…
Paul