The War Against the Ants

Holy shit, all true. My pal, Dave Sequera, brings some huge old growth cedar logs down from Northern California. Wants to store them at my Acton place. Big bastards. four foot high, twelve foot lengths. Carved looking bark. Smelled wonderful. It was also winter. In the spring, I’m looking at my new barn and something catches my eye. A black line going up one side of it. On closer inspection, I see that its a conga line of large, ebony black ants. Big ones I’d never seen on my property before. I hit the plywood siding with the butt of my steel framing hammer to shake them up. About twenty resonated off the siding, right onto me. Every bite and sting was worse then the last. I slap at myself and run for the mules trough. Welts the size of quarters welled up. The war had begun…Later, I track some or their scouts back to one of the huge log rounds. I pop off some of the thick bark to get a better look underneath. Out of hundreds of perfectly round apertures pop hundreds of warrior ants. Not panicky. Ready to kick some ass. They stood stock still in little units, waving their antennae and making their mandibles open and close in a sort of cadence. I was transfixed at how brash and brazen they were. Didn’t these pricks know the giant could crush them at any moment? Some blow torch stings on my ankles brings me back to reality. Their pals had come out of the hay covered corral and come inside my pants while I was busy inspecting the other guys. Once again, I run. Right for the hardware store and some ant poison. I sprayed those logs with one of those pump spray deals from one end to the other. Adios little ass holes. I then moved the logs down below, away from the barn…War has just been won…Saturday morning. The night before, my freshly installed power on and off switch mounted by my water bed by Pixley, straighten out a little problem I had been having with Townsend, King of all Morons. He lived in the Viking house for 18 years. He rode a loud Harley and did lots of drugs. At night, on speed, he would start doing his vacuuming at four am. With the new shut off to his house next to my pillow, I just rolled over, hit the switch. Instant quiet. Well, for a minute, then, the crying and begging started. “I’ll be quiet dude. Come on, give me some power man, I can’t on line gamble!” Life was sweet. To put in that switch, a conduit had been put through my wall. I hadn’t put putty into the extra hole space yet. As I go to roll out of my water bed, I’m looking eye to eye with five big, black ants on my bed railing. Huh? I raise my hand to smack them, they open their big jagged mandibles and brace themselves…Scary. Not afraid…I Windex the patrol of ants then paper towel them into oblivion. I shower, then head for the wood rounds. My sons Noah and Ty tag along. We use steel bars and my Power Wagon to roll the logs to inspect them. HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of pissed off ants are boiling out of the very first log we rolled. We actually ran for our lives. Army ants have nothing on these guys. The poison seemed to do zero to the colony. We head for Barnes and Noble for ant books. The library? Don’t even go there. Not with my kids banned for life. I try all kinds of things. Nothing works. I end up telling Dave to get the logs out off my property. I was to get one log for storing them. I gave up that idea. Just get ’em gone. After the logs were down the road, we finally high-fived each other. Game over…They had queens popping out new colonies all over my entire property. They didn’t need those logs any more. I ended up paying a pro, eleven hundred bucks to exterminate their sorry ant asses. Even with that, we found one more colony the next spring. I made sure my weed and brush pile for burning was right over their heads, then, nuked ’em. They are very worthy opponents…

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