McMullen: An all-out insect assault

You only need two words to properly describe a Missouri summer to someone: heat and bugs. The heat seems to be showing us a little mercy but the bugs just don’t stop coming. The bugs are relentless, and like a real army they all have their areas of expertise when it comes to inter-species war.

My home has been invaded by ants. Not in a health code violating sort of way, though. They don’t cover every square inch and they don’t take up much square footage in the grand scheme of the house, but there are a lot of them. The house is like a picnic and the ants are like ... well, they’re like ants. They are the grunts in the insect war on Travis McMullen. These foot soldiers with six feet each have infiltrated my headquarters and are seemingly eating something in the house, even though we haven’t yet discovered any rations that they have ravaged.

They like the kitchen and they like the bathroom. The kitchen is an obvious choice, but I can’t imagine why they would have any desire to hold the bathroom position. That’s probably just where they have found a new way in. They weren’t always in the bathroom but they sure have stepped up their ant presence there as of late. It makes me want to go down to the hardware store, buy some caulk and fill every nook, cranny and hole with it. It’s no use; the house would probably look like a gingerbread house by the time I do all that and they would just gnaw themselves new entrances.

The first answer that popped into my head was to continuously smash them like some sort of angry ant deity. When something that small is invading me, my first instinct is to crush it. I must be holding back some barbarian urges or something. I’ve smashed more ants than any human, past or present, would be able to count — and they keep coming back. I put a little food in the bathtub and drew in a large number of them, and then I flooded them out. I thought maybe a show of force like this would intimidate them but they seem unimpressed with my ability to control large amounts of water. There are literally millions of ants living in or around this house and simply killing them the old fashioned way is never going to have a serious effect on their efforts. They have the advantage when it comes to numbers.

The only way a conventional squishing would work is if I could find the queen(s) running the operation. Maybe I’ll catch her going out to rally the troops; she’ll be ripe for an antassination. (I’d like to apologize for writing that.)

Yes, I’m sure that the ants in this house view me as some sort of mythical beast who takes out entire ant families with one stomp of his foot. Karma is going to catch up to me one day and I’ll get smashed by a giant appendage right after I realize that we’re the “ants” of an even bigger civilization.

After a long day futilely smashing ants, I expect to get a good night’s sleep. When I get up, I realize that they have been attacking me while I slept. It seems like I wake up with a new bite or scratch or some kind of battle wound. I’m pretty sure that it is various bugs eating me alive; I don’t think I could sleep through anything much bigger than that gnawing on me. 

But it is hard to know because they send only the stealthiest of bugs to attack me in my sleep. The insect kingdom knows that any bugs that get too close during the day will be diverted quickly, so they attack me at night. They must train these bugs to go on covert missions like this because I simply don’t understand how getting attacked by bug(s) doesn’t wake me up. I think I need to whip my nerve endings into shape and give them a good bit of sensation training. Some of these wounds end up awful big and it is simply unacceptable that I didn’t wake up when big skin craters like the ones on my back were being made. 

The bug air force seems to be doing the most damage though; those mosquitos like to launch air raids on my back in the early hours of the morning when I’m out with my friends. I don’t know if anything special happens to a mosquito when he inserts his nose needle into a hemophiliac, but I guess any negative effects haven’t made my tasty blood any less appealing. (It probably flows easier than normal blood and they probably enjoy that, or maybe they like the fact that the puncture wound hasn’t begun to clot around them by the time they are done.) I hope it makes them have joint problems and such — they deserve it.

Yes, the insect forces are out to get me. I have two advantages in this conflict: I’m much larger than any of them and I have a much longer life span. I guess I’ll simply have to wait them out. We’ve tried fancy powders and liquids and it doesn’t seem to be infecting the ant population on any meaningful level. E-mail me with some common household bug solutions, because the stuff we’ve got isn’t working. 

The Missouri State Fair hasn’t even ushered in fly season around here yet. Boy, I just can’t wait for the invading bug forces to get more flying backup. Just a week or two before the fair starts you’ll start seeing a lot more flies and the pests will really be out in full force.