EPISODE 534: INVISIBLE MAFIANTS
In which the author becomes the Colonel Kurtz of insect skirmishes
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hey you! Welcome back. How have you been?
Things have happened since last we spoke!
For instance, the entire West Coast was either on fire or covered in smoke.* The San Francisco Blade Runner shot was this year’s Driving Past Fire on Either Side of the 405 on the West Side of Los Angeles. Where I live in LA you couldn’t see or smell the fires the way you sometimes can. But there was a cloud of pollution every day for over a week. We’d only see the sun at the end of the day in the clouds as it set. It looked like a bleeding orange.
*Much of it still is.
How I dealt with it:
By the way from what I gather if you had a day late last week where you had kind of a crazy sunset, too, that was because our air got sucked all the way to the East Coast by the big tropical storm.
You’re…welcome?
Because the internet is in its own way endlessly wonderful, someone took the occasion of our air nightmare to evaluate the AQI for different areas of Middle Earth.
My only note would be, if any chart needed a Smaug reference it is this one.
Then came the dark times. Â
The initial skirmishes of the Ant War, many weeks ago now, seem like a child’s distant memory, an amusing story to tell about the ants that kept trying to sneak through the screen and under the patio door. I dealt with them mostly by playing giant to their Jack and called it a day.
But their subsequent silence was deceptive, dear reader, not the surrender I believed but a search for another, more amenable front – like behind the desk, where they could achieve greater numbers before I realized they were there, or traveling along the seam in the baseboard, where they could move very quickly and more or less in front of me without being seen. Â
One very brave group of Formicidae troopers somehow traveled into the tank in the toilet and started to emerge from there – a foolish move in the long run, my reaction at finding ants on my toilet seat being pretty immediate, but still their courage, my friends. Their creativity.
I don’t like killing animals of any kind. If I see a spider I try to capture it and put it out if I can overcome my instinctive goosebumps What is Happening Right Now? fear.** But when it came to The Home Invasion I went from zero to 360 in about 3 seconds, bombing each beachhead first with Windex, then when that ran out  with bathroom cleaner which based on the smell alone I suspect is the equivalent of mustard gas (and probably for me, too).
**It’s a fascinating thing, that instinctive terror we feel at certain creatures. The Cut did a piece on this, saying it happens because our brains confuse disgust with fear. But I’m not disgusted by ants. Or spiders for that matter. I think it’s far more because they seem so alien. Which is a great cautionary tale about our endless fascination with meeting life from other planets. What if we finally meet aliens and they prove to be, you know, alien.
After that, things went silent. I was more skeptical, wandering my room – not that much space – looking closely for signs of life. I’d find one or two here and there, but nothing of substance. Some lost soul left behind enemy lines, I told myself smugly.
Except that is not how ants work. They are always explorers, and they are always coming from a much larger group somewhere. By the time I discovered their newest breach, they had more or less taken over a 12’ freestanding bookshelf. I spent the better part of my Friday night freaking out as I stacked books everywhere, working to figure out what exactly was happening and what to do.
You learn things in war (the more I’m writing on this the more I feel like you should imagine me telling it to you while in camouflage and sitting before a fire, the light glittering in my eyes). Â
Like don’t have your bookshelves – or anything else – touching any wall. Also, when you don’t see any ants on the ground, look up. These monsters may not be able to fly but they can still play chess in three dimensions, and they are very good at it.
They’re gone from there now. Also gone forever is the sleep I stole from the guy below me, as I stomped around into the wee-est of wee hours of the morning. There really is nothing quite like discovering ants in your books to drive you momentarily insane. I think it’s what it represents – We can reach you anywhere, the ants are telling us. See you soon in your dresser. Or your bed.
Since then there have been new beachheads. Basically if you live in a place where there are earthquakes you are going to have a lot of unseen places for things to get in.
Also – it’s very disturbing to think about this, but also true – our walls, ceilings and floors are basically the same as the deepest parts undersea, teeming with spooky life. And when the weather shifts – say from drought or poison air lol – that life changes its patterns. And it may be a while before they change back.
I’ve stopped with the bathroom cleaner bombing as it seemed just kind of insane. Right now I’m doing salt water and also just straight up table salt, spread around areas I want protected – supposed ants do not like salt (they have really high blood pressure, it turns out).*** Mostly it seems to be working.
But that’s also what I said the last time.
(Oh God, am I in a Stephen King story? Because that is a Stephen King ending.)
This was also Friday night:
When your sick beats are making the earth dance, you may need to pull back some.
It was a 4.8, in the San Gabriel Valley, so not that far from me. I was in my easy chair, trying to talk myself into believing I could go to bed without dreaming of ants swarming me.
Intriguingly, easy chairs are not one of the designated places to go when in an earthquake. And yet, they do provide the kind of elastic environment that makes a small quake seem less dangerous than God wanting to give you a moment’s entertaining distraction from all our worries.
Honestly I was so over reality after The Bookshelf Warâ„¢ I barely registered it happening. REALITY I AM TIRED LET ME WATCH PRIME SUSPECT #!%! IT, I might have shouted.
I’ve gotten so used to being on Zoom that now in order to pray I have to do it on Zoom.
Speaking of British detective shows, for those following/trapped in the Jim Watches British Detective Series to Feel Better Marathon (please visit my Patreon Page), I have now watched every episode of Inspector Morse twice; Inspector Lewis; Endeavour; George Gently; about half of Shetland, which I tried because a lot of people like it, but found kind of lifeless; and I’m now onto Prime Suspect.
It’s been fascinating to watch how each show puts itself together. Each Morseverse show has a signature personal issue that plays out in almost all of the cases – Morse is always dealing with women and his loneliness; Lewis with being a dad of some kind.
George Gently is a lot more emotionally distant and self-protected -- a fact the series will use to create some of its most thoughtful work in the later series. Instead every episode of Gently is focused around some kind of topic: Parenting. Miners losing their jobs. Race. Corruption. Marriage. The Argentinian ant crisis.
And what the writers like to do is come at the topic from a million different angles. So in the episode on parenting, you have parents who have had their child abducted; you have someone who can’t have a child; you have Gently’s partner John Bacchus dealing with his dad, and also with his own struggles as a parent. Each episode, then, in addition to offering a mystery becomes a kind of meditation on its topic (which I love).
Prime Suspect, I’m learning, is a series of 4-hour mysteries, two episodes of two hours each. The premise of the show is the first female head of a London murder squad, and they’ve baked that outsider quality into the stories in interesting ways. Each season seems to focus on a group that everyone else has written off into the same outsider status.
So series one it’s women; series two it’s black people; series three it’s transvestites and homeless kids; the first ep of series four it’s mothers and the adult victims of child abuse. And every series is Helen Mirren being spectacular.
If you’d told me a year ago I’d be so watching 90 minutes of British detective drama every night, I would have said That’s ridiculous. Next thing you’ll tell me that ants can somehow get into my medicine cabinet through the wall.
*sigh*
Btw, for any Shetland fans out there, I did love Tosh. #TeamTosh
So all that happened, and then, finally, this:
Part of me immediately went to the political question of what happens now – as I think it does for most people, because we are living in Crazy Times.
But attention should be paid first and foremost to Ruth, aka America’s Supreme Court Bae(-der), who just kept standing up for all of us while others around her howl at the moon and design a Purge/Pillage fest for rich white guys. Forget the Constitution, we wanna party and then move to New Zealand when we’ve burned the whole thing down.
RBG’s face told the story: hair pulled back, face solemn. Sshe was determined. She was fearless. She was competent. She was not going anywhere. She was here for the fight. Â
THREE TWEETS
Time, you have a vicious memory.
The script that absolutely demands an Emmy:
And finally, the things we do to cope with our world being on fire
To end, a song from Amelie: The Musical that I think captures something of the optimism I find in RBG.
May it bring you a ray of hope when you need one this week.
*** If you fell for the idea that ants have high blood pressure you are asked to say three Hail Marys and donate to the campaign to defeat Mitch McConnell.