During the time that I was most active in writing my diary in pen and paper in poorly written lines of my printing, I would try to give my journal volumes creative and unique titles, a challenge that perhaps prepared me a little for the difficulties of thinking of creative titles for endless blog entries. One of the more creative, and more sanguinary, journal volume titles that I had was: “The Diaries of an Ant Killer,” which was meant to convey the sort of book that would be written by some sort of serial murderer, only of insects rather than people (some people, like Jainists or more extreme Buddhists, would probably not see much of a difference).

When I was in high school, the house I lived in at the time had a major ant infestation. These ants were not the relatively harmless sugar ants that one might see in cooler parts of the country, but vicious and nasty fire ants. These particular ants did not appear interested in sugar as much as they were interested in salt, which was not a very desirable matter, considering how the heat and humidity of summers in Florida tended to make it impossible to get the sweat and salt completely out of one’s clothing, making many irresistible targets for fire ants all over the house. As that was an impossible situation, given that the ants would climb through the cracks in the foundation caused by swelling clays and Florida’s rainy climate and it was impossible to keep the fire ants from building their mounds under the house, even if one could try to get rid of their mounds in the yards, I had to kill a lot of fire ants in my youth, ending up with a fair amount of bites as well from the process.

The reason I mention this is because the house where I currently reside also has a rather notable ant infestation. For whatever reason, these ants too have odd tastes. For example, I found quite a few of them interested in my empty bottles of bottled water, for reasons I cannot comprehend, since ants are not exactly the most water-loving of insects, nor do they apparently have a taste for plastic. And yet they have tried to take over both the living room and the kitchen, forcing some rather serious efforts at elimination. Apparently these particular ants have not been made aware of my own fearsome reputation for slaughtering their kindred in another corner of these United States, for although I am not a violent person, I do tend to be rather harsh when it comes to dealing with ants, for whatever reason.

It is not necessarily an easy thing to slay ants. For one, one has to find out where they are coming from, and what routes they will use in their nefarious plans to invade one’s home and hearth. By the time ants show up in massive numbers, there is usually already some kind of nest with a nesting queen around. This is obviously an undesirable situation, and yet when I went to the grocery store to take care of the problem, I found it immensely difficult to locate the appropriate ant killers, since apparently the more gentle efforts we had been using were not effective enough. So, let’s see if the ants can be eliminated now through more drastic means, as the invasion of ants into my territory will not be tolerated. They don’t know who they’re messing with.