I have commanded my minions to change the title of this page, from the anemically bland 'Blog' to the slightly more interesting 'Thoughts & Tales' . (actually, I figured out how to change that myself.... I am my own minion). Not being completely comfortable writing in first-person confessional, I feel better about this new sobriquet.
My first and only "Blog" entry on this page thus far, "Morning Joe, Trump, & Me", was a clumsy attempt, but I'm going to give it another go here and really lay myself bare with this one. Though there will probably be a few "Tales from the Present” appearing here soon, and possibly even some “Tales From the Future”, I will begin with this...
Tales from the Past
Part One: Ants Make Ammonia!!!
In my twenties, while working as an insurance agent by day and playing music in clubs, restaurants, and concert venues at night, I lived in a small, 2 bed/1bath house with a fairly large backyard (small town– low rent). The yard was perfect for my sweet, active doggie, Tosh, a Siberian Husky named after reggae musician, Peter Tosh, of whom I have been a fan since the age of fourteen.
During that time, I was often gone for short stretches, playing on the road across this great land of ours with bands of pop, rock, and reggae. I couldn't take Tosh with me, so while I was gone, my girlfriend would visit my house frequently to feed and play with him. One afternoon, as I was loading musical equipment into my truck, getting ready to hit the road again, I realized I hadn't topped off Tosh's water bowl in the backyard. He would need a full one to keep him cool until the GF could make it over. When I went to retrieve his bowl, I saw that it was still nearly full, but the surface of the water was completely covered with hundreds of little black ants... dead ones... hundreds... floating. Apparently, while seeking a shorter route to India, the insect-army had followed their leader up and over the bowl-rim, and drowned, en masse, in the doggie water. Tosh gave me a look that said "I'm not drinking ant-water, thank you. Please get me a fresh bowl."
At that point, I made a decision that some might find strange. Most people would probably have just tossed the water into the grass, rinsed out the bowl, and refilled it. But, I am an existentially curious sort, and was fascinated by the fact that these ants would march to their doom into a waterbowl that was surrounded on all sides by grass, dirt, weeds– you know, ant-friendly terrain. On the cement porch-step nearby sat an old Mason jar, abandoned from some forgotten purpose. I unscrewed and removed the two-part metal lid, then held the glass jar horizontally over the bowl and dipped the bottom lip into the water, breaking the surface tension so that the mass of water-logged ants flowed swiftly into the vessel along with enough water to fill the jar.
As I write this, much time has passed and it's hard to recall my exact motivations for isolating the evidence of this lemming-esque, group suicide. My guess is that I wanted to study the little black specks in their suspended state and further contemplate the phenomenon. But I was in a hurry to get on the road; (I had a gig at Club 150 in Dallas with an eight o'clock load in at the end of a six hour drive). I screwed the jar lid on tightly and took it and the water bowl into the kitchen, where I set the jar of ants on the windowsill above the sink. After refilling Toshie's water bowl, I gave him some good good lovins and said goodbye, then put him back outside with the fresh water, and left.
By the time I returned home a few days later, I had forgotten all about the jar of ants, and when I saw it sitting on the sill, I was amused at myself for having done such a thing. But did I open the jar and throw them down the sink at that point? Negatory, my friends. In the days that followed, it became a self-created curiosity, and whenever I stood at the kitchen sink, I would look at the jar and again wonder not only why these ants had taken their perennial death-dip, but also why I had scooped them up and saved them. In my days as a single man with no roommates, I didn't think much about interior design or superfluous decoration, and an army of dead ants suspended in their own sauce in a Mason jar on my windowsill was just enough of an esoteric novelty to satisfy my domestic aesthetic. There it sat on the kitchen windowsill for days, weeks, months; until not only did I stop contemplating the existential conundrum, but the jar became just another household object that I ignored.
Whenever I did notice the jar, however, my curiosity about the tiny ant corpses themselves began to shift from behavioral to the purely biological. From the time I first scooped them up, they had floated on the surface, occupying the top two inches of water in the jar, and I had expected that the mass of bodies would eventually start to decompose, fall apart, and form a mushy, gelatinous goo on the surface. But that was not happening. In fact, the little black ants didn't seem to change at all. Although waterlogged, they looked exactly the same as they did when I found them floating in Tosh's bowl. Not only that, but the water in which they were suspended remained as clear and colorless as on the day of the scooping.
I've always been fascinated by science and love learning about the natural world, but my personal strengths skew toward the creative arts. Though I knew there must be things happening on a chemical level inside of that tightly sealed jar as it sat in the sunlight on the sill week after week, there was no google or wiki back then and, frankly, I had many other things to think about in those halcyon days.
With a cursory search of the webosphere today, however, I can confirm that one natural source of ammonia, the colorless, caustic gas that is a chemical compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, is indeed a by-product of the nitrogenous waste in most living things, arthropods included. In aquatic arthropods, such as crustaceans, this toxic waste product is discharged into the surrounding water, but in terrestrial insects it is expelled as uric acid, or uric salts, such as ammonium urate. Suffice to say, when my jar of Jonestownian ants gave up the ghost, they also gave up all of their ammonia– into the water. And that invisible gas baked and expanded in that airtight vessel for months.
After the ants had been fermenting for six or seven months, my morbid curiosity about them had faded, and I decided enough was enough. The jar had to go.
For those of you reading this who feel compelled to wear clothing at all times, except while; a). Being born, b). Changing clothes, c). Making sweet sweet love, or d). Bathing— good for you and your puritanical self-consciousness. When I'm at home, alone, I often eschew this jejune practice. One warm afternoon, I was in the kitchen, alone and just as God made me, washing dishes at the sink with Tosh lying on the floor at my feet.
With the hot water streaming from the faucet, I grabbed the jar, held it tightly in my right hand, and quickly unscrewed the lid with my left.
It all happened in a fraction of a second, but in hindsight, I can picture the mechanics of the nearly instantaneous event as if it were a slo-mo animated technical illustration. Just as the critical groove in the metal screw-band approached the critical thread on the rim of the glass jar, the rubber O-ring gasket on the underside of the metal lid released under the tremendous internal pressure, and I was hit directly in the face with, not just the lid, but also a tremendous blast of hot vapor.
Before my brain even registered the scent of ammonia, I was already falling, straight backwards, onto the feebly thin indoor/outdoor carpeting that covered the concrete floor of the kitchen.
No dreams.
When I came to, I was flat on my back on the hard, damp carpet, staring up at the ceiling, my naked body covered with wet ants. The glass jar lay unbroken on the floor beside me. My first (and only) emergency responder was Tosh, who whined his high-pitched, anxious whine as he licked my face.
I remember trying to figure out what the hell had happened. How long had I been out? The back of my hard head had smacked the hard floor and I felt it with my hand. No cut there, but a glimpse of red flashed in my peripheral vision, and I raised myself up onto an elbow and dabbed a finger at the small, linear cut beside my right eye. I heard the faucet still running full blast, so I got to my feet, still a bit woozy, to turn it off, and found the water was cold, telling me that I had been unconscious long enough for the water heater tank to drain,
The smell of ammonia still hung in the air, and I put the pieces together and smiled to myself in bemused bewilderment. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed about the absurdity of the situation or excited and proud to be an unwitting guinea pig in my own, unintentional science project. When I felt steady on my feet again I got into the shower, and, as I watched the column of dead ant soldiers circle the drain, I thought about whether or not I was going to tell anyone what happened.
The episode was too strange and interesting to keep to myself, so I did tell my girlfriend, who is now my wife. Other than her, I never told anyone else until recently, when I regaled our two sons with the odd tale. They both gave me that look that mockingly says “We’re so proud of you dad... you dork.”
It’s possible that somewhere in my subconscious mind I processed some philosophical corollary or lesson from the whole affair of which my wakeful mind was never made aware. But these days, if I happen to pass a puddle or a pool or a bowl of water with a platoon of drowned ants or insects floating on the surface, I just mutter, “You poor, dumb bastards.” and I keep walking.
My first and only "Blog" entry on this page thus far, "Morning Joe, Trump, & Me", was a clumsy attempt, but I'm going to give it another go here and really lay myself bare with this one. Though there will probably be a few "Tales from the Present” appearing here soon, and possibly even some “Tales From the Future”, I will begin with this...
Tales from the Past
Part One: Ants Make Ammonia!!!
In my twenties, while working as an insurance agent by day and playing music in clubs, restaurants, and concert venues at night, I lived in a small, 2 bed/1bath house with a fairly large backyard (small town– low rent). The yard was perfect for my sweet, active doggie, Tosh, a Siberian Husky named after reggae musician, Peter Tosh, of whom I have been a fan since the age of fourteen.
During that time, I was often gone for short stretches, playing on the road across this great land of ours with bands of pop, rock, and reggae. I couldn't take Tosh with me, so while I was gone, my girlfriend would visit my house frequently to feed and play with him. One afternoon, as I was loading musical equipment into my truck, getting ready to hit the road again, I realized I hadn't topped off Tosh's water bowl in the backyard. He would need a full one to keep him cool until the GF could make it over. When I went to retrieve his bowl, I saw that it was still nearly full, but the surface of the water was completely covered with hundreds of little black ants... dead ones... hundreds... floating. Apparently, while seeking a shorter route to India, the insect-army had followed their leader up and over the bowl-rim, and drowned, en masse, in the doggie water. Tosh gave me a look that said "I'm not drinking ant-water, thank you. Please get me a fresh bowl."
At that point, I made a decision that some might find strange. Most people would probably have just tossed the water into the grass, rinsed out the bowl, and refilled it. But, I am an existentially curious sort, and was fascinated by the fact that these ants would march to their doom into a waterbowl that was surrounded on all sides by grass, dirt, weeds– you know, ant-friendly terrain. On the cement porch-step nearby sat an old Mason jar, abandoned from some forgotten purpose. I unscrewed and removed the two-part metal lid, then held the glass jar horizontally over the bowl and dipped the bottom lip into the water, breaking the surface tension so that the mass of water-logged ants flowed swiftly into the vessel along with enough water to fill the jar.
As I write this, much time has passed and it's hard to recall my exact motivations for isolating the evidence of this lemming-esque, group suicide. My guess is that I wanted to study the little black specks in their suspended state and further contemplate the phenomenon. But I was in a hurry to get on the road; (I had a gig at Club 150 in Dallas with an eight o'clock load in at the end of a six hour drive). I screwed the jar lid on tightly and took it and the water bowl into the kitchen, where I set the jar of ants on the windowsill above the sink. After refilling Toshie's water bowl, I gave him some good good lovins and said goodbye, then put him back outside with the fresh water, and left.
By the time I returned home a few days later, I had forgotten all about the jar of ants, and when I saw it sitting on the sill, I was amused at myself for having done such a thing. But did I open the jar and throw them down the sink at that point? Negatory, my friends. In the days that followed, it became a self-created curiosity, and whenever I stood at the kitchen sink, I would look at the jar and again wonder not only why these ants had taken their perennial death-dip, but also why I had scooped them up and saved them. In my days as a single man with no roommates, I didn't think much about interior design or superfluous decoration, and an army of dead ants suspended in their own sauce in a Mason jar on my windowsill was just enough of an esoteric novelty to satisfy my domestic aesthetic. There it sat on the kitchen windowsill for days, weeks, months; until not only did I stop contemplating the existential conundrum, but the jar became just another household object that I ignored.
Whenever I did notice the jar, however, my curiosity about the tiny ant corpses themselves began to shift from behavioral to the purely biological. From the time I first scooped them up, they had floated on the surface, occupying the top two inches of water in the jar, and I had expected that the mass of bodies would eventually start to decompose, fall apart, and form a mushy, gelatinous goo on the surface. But that was not happening. In fact, the little black ants didn't seem to change at all. Although waterlogged, they looked exactly the same as they did when I found them floating in Tosh's bowl. Not only that, but the water in which they were suspended remained as clear and colorless as on the day of the scooping.
I've always been fascinated by science and love learning about the natural world, but my personal strengths skew toward the creative arts. Though I knew there must be things happening on a chemical level inside of that tightly sealed jar as it sat in the sunlight on the sill week after week, there was no google or wiki back then and, frankly, I had many other things to think about in those halcyon days.
With a cursory search of the webosphere today, however, I can confirm that one natural source of ammonia, the colorless, caustic gas that is a chemical compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, is indeed a by-product of the nitrogenous waste in most living things, arthropods included. In aquatic arthropods, such as crustaceans, this toxic waste product is discharged into the surrounding water, but in terrestrial insects it is expelled as uric acid, or uric salts, such as ammonium urate. Suffice to say, when my jar of Jonestownian ants gave up the ghost, they also gave up all of their ammonia– into the water. And that invisible gas baked and expanded in that airtight vessel for months.
After the ants had been fermenting for six or seven months, my morbid curiosity about them had faded, and I decided enough was enough. The jar had to go.
For those of you reading this who feel compelled to wear clothing at all times, except while; a). Being born, b). Changing clothes, c). Making sweet sweet love, or d). Bathing— good for you and your puritanical self-consciousness. When I'm at home, alone, I often eschew this jejune practice. One warm afternoon, I was in the kitchen, alone and just as God made me, washing dishes at the sink with Tosh lying on the floor at my feet.
With the hot water streaming from the faucet, I grabbed the jar, held it tightly in my right hand, and quickly unscrewed the lid with my left.
It all happened in a fraction of a second, but in hindsight, I can picture the mechanics of the nearly instantaneous event as if it were a slo-mo animated technical illustration. Just as the critical groove in the metal screw-band approached the critical thread on the rim of the glass jar, the rubber O-ring gasket on the underside of the metal lid released under the tremendous internal pressure, and I was hit directly in the face with, not just the lid, but also a tremendous blast of hot vapor.
Before my brain even registered the scent of ammonia, I was already falling, straight backwards, onto the feebly thin indoor/outdoor carpeting that covered the concrete floor of the kitchen.
No dreams.
When I came to, I was flat on my back on the hard, damp carpet, staring up at the ceiling, my naked body covered with wet ants. The glass jar lay unbroken on the floor beside me. My first (and only) emergency responder was Tosh, who whined his high-pitched, anxious whine as he licked my face.
I remember trying to figure out what the hell had happened. How long had I been out? The back of my hard head had smacked the hard floor and I felt it with my hand. No cut there, but a glimpse of red flashed in my peripheral vision, and I raised myself up onto an elbow and dabbed a finger at the small, linear cut beside my right eye. I heard the faucet still running full blast, so I got to my feet, still a bit woozy, to turn it off, and found the water was cold, telling me that I had been unconscious long enough for the water heater tank to drain,
The smell of ammonia still hung in the air, and I put the pieces together and smiled to myself in bemused bewilderment. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed about the absurdity of the situation or excited and proud to be an unwitting guinea pig in my own, unintentional science project. When I felt steady on my feet again I got into the shower, and, as I watched the column of dead ant soldiers circle the drain, I thought about whether or not I was going to tell anyone what happened.
The episode was too strange and interesting to keep to myself, so I did tell my girlfriend, who is now my wife. Other than her, I never told anyone else until recently, when I regaled our two sons with the odd tale. They both gave me that look that mockingly says “We’re so proud of you dad... you dork.”
It’s possible that somewhere in my subconscious mind I processed some philosophical corollary or lesson from the whole affair of which my wakeful mind was never made aware. But these days, if I happen to pass a puddle or a pool or a bowl of water with a platoon of drowned ants or insects floating on the surface, I just mutter, “You poor, dumb bastards.” and I keep walking.
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