with man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
i’m in a strangely beautiful and lovely form of life right now. the form life is taking right now feels resplendent and beautiful and well and good.
some time ago i saw the biggest ant colony i’ve ever seen. or at least the most well-connected, or at least the one that took up the biggest area, or at least the one with the longest pheromone trail, or maybe all of the above. it was in [park], and...
it started at this post at the end of this bridge. i had gone to mcdonalds, and i was taking a really slow walk through the park, starting at the entrance which announced “[park]” in big, rusted letters. i had never used that entrance before.
rewind i’ve been off weed for two weeks—the longest i’ve gone in three years—and it allows me to move so much more slowly. it was this slow movement, combined with there being nothing left to do today, that allowed me to notice these ants. i’m considering it my first proper encounter with an ant colony this year. i’ve had encounters with individual ants here and there, and those were still really cool, and i still love individual ants, but today i remembered what i truly, truly love the absolute most about ants, and that is their
i got to the end of this bridge that connects the dry pieces of land and allows one to walk over a marshy area in a thicket of trees—or, i guess, some lilac-looking things... not really sure what plants they are. i’m no botanist. i’m nothing of the sort.
i got to the end of the bridge, and there were posts which presumably are intended to prevent any large vehicles from using the bridge. one of the posts had a metal sheet over the top portion of it, but the metal sheet was peeled forward, creating a sort of downward-sloping ramp on which i saw some ants crawling back and forth.
behind where the metal sheet had once been, there was a sort of little hollowish area. in the hollowish area was a sort of black box,
from which ants were emerging, and from where ants were carrying little particles of something. they would go down the slope to the very edge of the metal sheet and release the pieces of particles—the little light-brown things—release them from their mandibles, and they would make this sort of spitting motion with their mandibles, too. i was able to get close enough to get microscopic with the view. they were spitting and sputtering the stuff, and the particles would float down to the ground on a little breezes, and then the ants would crawl back up the slope of the metal sheet, back into their black hole.
i can say this is the first time i’ve seen an ant colony take over a manmade thing. sure, it’s a piece of wood, but it was put there by man, and it was cut into a rectangular prism by man and driven into the ground by man, and that metal sheet was put over it by man. who knows what bent the metal sheet into that slope, and who knows where the ants are getting those little brown particles and how they figured out they can just dump them off the metal sheet.
it did remind me of how in the olden days it’s said that people would dump their poop and pee out their windows in cities. it was pretty much exactly like that. it was the closest thing i’ve ever seen to another species littering. it was pretty humanlike if you ask me. it felt pretty intelligent of them to dump that shit off.
but then you always gotta
to see where they go, you know? and this colony had ants which were not only shuttling particles back and forth from in and out of the post, but also a sect of ants that was traveling up and down the post itself in a very, very straight line. of course, they kissed each other as they passed one another bidirectionally. it’s called trophallaxis, and i know this now, as an ant scholar. i’m almost a year into the game at this point, so i know about trophallaxis. if you ever see it, you gotta look at it. it’s so fucking cute. it reminds me of how people will do some kind of nod of acknowledgment, or a fist bump, or a dap, or a kiss, or a handshake, or something when they pass each other on the street. eye contact, at the very least.
when it came to these ants, i started to see more of a value in the trophallaxis, and that is because of how far-reaching this line of ants was, and how many different offshoots they had. it made sense that they would want to compare notes to the oncoming ants: ‘this is what it’s like where you’re headed.’
the ants that traveled down the post were walking the length of the bridge, so i followed them back from whence i came, crossing the bridge back across the marshy thing, through the thicket of trees or lilacs or whatever, keeping my head to the ground, looking at the line of ants as it followed the gap between two planks, away from the heavily human-foot-trafficked zones. they were on top of the little side-rail on the bridge, and then they were on the side of the side-rail, and i followed them and followed them until i found where the pheromone trail terminated. it led off the bridge in a seemingly random spot, nowhere in particular, and not all the way across the bridge. i hopped over the side-rail into the marshy area, and i saw that the antssssssssssssssssssssssss went into the marsh itself... into the grass and mud and leaves and branches, underneath which my naked eye cannot see.
i can’t see where they ended up, or if there was a destination in mind. i don’t know if their main location is inside that post at the end of the bridge, or somewhere underground in the marshy area.
one thing i do know is that while i had my head down, staring at the ants disappearing under the grass and mud, this man came up to me and asked me
i didn’t know where the nearest pond is. well, i did, sort of, but not from where i was standing just then. i could imagine the pond in my mind, because i had gone there a couple weeks ago when it was raining, and i saw some geese and ducks, but i didn’t know where it was, so i told him i don’t know. he was unfazed, and he asked me if i had a lighter. i knew there was a lighter in my backpack at one point, but that must have been before i had gone sober for these two weeks. i looked around in a couple pockets of my backpack, not finding the
360 that i thought might have been in there, and i told him, ‘sorry, i don’t have a lighter, just like i don’t know where there’s a pond.’ but i smiled at him, and he smiled at me, and he gave me a fist bump.
he was an older dude, and his fly was completely down, and the vein on his right shoulder was sort of protruding out, and i didn’t know if his mental status was somehow altered. it might have been, or that might have just been him. some more people passed by us—me in the marsh area, him on the bridge—and he asked these people in spanish if they knew where there was fishing. they pointed vaguely in some direction, and he said, ‘okay,’ and he asked them for a lighter, and they said no. then he asked me again, ‘where is there fishing?’ and i said, ‘i don’t know. are you trying to go fishing?’ and he said, ‘no, but my son is fishing,’ and i said, ‘huh.’ i don’t know what else i said. but i smiled again, and then he fist bumped me again and smiled at me, too. then he said, ‘i’m gonna go home,’ and he sort of walked aimlessly away from me. and then i went back to watching the ants.
i followed their trail back to the post, and i looked at the post a little longer, watching the ants go up and down the slope of that metal sheet, throwing their litter off of it, the litter floating down to the ground, landing not at all in one distinct pile but rather all over the place, and i thought, ‘i’ll be back,’ and i started walking home, in the direction of the not-fisherman.
i want to talk about some of the netizens that have been on my mind recently. for one, there is digitalhumus, who recommended that i read the book ishmael. once i started reading, i found it difficult to put it down, because i felt that it was speaking to me specifically. i felt that the gorilla, the
was speaking to me, and i was the student, and he was the teacher.
i read most of it outside. i read it the other day in [other park] under a sakura tree, which, by the way, shoutout to thricegreat, who seems to be having a moment with sakura trees right now. i remember pacing around under the tree, reading the book, feeling it change me in the way that a good book can change one.
i particularly remember reading this section about how trial and error is a fine way of learning how to fly, but maybe not the best way of learning how to do a civilization. the point being that we’re just in this big old flying machine,
thinking that our rapid pedaling is somehow helping us fly, but as it turns out, we’ve built our machine in discord with the laws of aerodynamics, and our pedaling actually has nothing to do with the aircraft’s ability to maintain flight, and we are getting closer and closer to the ground, and we are noticing more and more the other crafts that have crash landed on the ground, but we’re mostly thinking to ourselves, ‘huh, why are they on the ground, when they could be flying? why would they be dead, when they could be alive? well, it probably has nothing to do with this aircraft that we’re on, and if we keep pedaling harder, i’m sure that we will avoid whatever it was that caused them to come crashing down.’
i would take little breaks from reading to look at the ground, to look at a tree stump nearby, to look at the highway next to the park, to look at the river, to look at the runners who would pass by, pause their running, take photos right up close to the cherry blossoms, and then keep running, their lululemon matching sets bouncing with their steps.
and then, after i had that afternoon under the sakura trees, i went inside, and i consulted chesca’s list of yaoi. she had mentioned that she had a yaoi collection, and me being a gay person, i love the idea of any media that depicts
and stuff like that. so i asked her for recs, and she sent me her list, and one of them is called cherry blossoms after winter, and having just been in the company of cherry blossoms, i decided to start reading that one.
so, i proceeded to spend the last couple days reading not only ishmael—which i finished yesterday, and it made me emotional in that way that you know is more significant than you can grasp in the moment, the kind of thing that makes you want to cry, but you’re not able to cry with it just yet, and you need to let it sink in, and there are things that are working on you at the level of your subconscious which will continue to reveal themselves to you in dreams and unravel in your mind as you go about the rest of your days. and yes, i had a dream about ishmael last night. i was in the story, and i was also reading it, and it was a new ending, and it was something about there being a shadow in the place where ishmael was, and there was movement from the shadow—but cherry blossoms after winter.
anyway, thank you to chesca for sending me those yaoi recommendations, because i’ve never read any yaoi before, but this one is really beautiful. admittedly, i was looking forward to seeing some gay sex on there, but what i got instead was a beautiful and wholesome love story. i kept reading and reading, and i read it during class today, while a lecturer was talking about acute kidney injury. i was reading it quite greedily, wondering if the couple would ever get to second base, and i was fully aware of the prying eyes of my classmates who might have noticed that i was reading yaoi instead of learning about acute kidney injury. my senioritis is to the point where i can’t even bother to pretend that i’m paying attention, or if not paying attention then at least doing something academic. i will happily look at pictures of cartoon boys kissing while my fellow future doctors learn how to treat prerenal azotemia. is that redundant? is azotemia always prenerenal? i’m not going to learn. i’ve made it this far.
later in the day, i got to chapter 63, and the gay sex started. i got flustered reading it and left my school ID in the chair i was sitting in. and then i went to the anatomy lab.
we had a practical session where we learned how to place central lines in dummies known as CentralLineMan. it’s a silicone neck without a head. it had a carotid artery and an internal jugular vein. i let my classmates go first, and then, finally, when they were done, and after i had shot the shit with my classmate, and we agreed that we would go downtown to a store that sells
i got to work.
i started the procedure. i did it too quickly, too naturally for someone who has no interest in doing this on a real person. i got out the ultrasound probe and put it on CentralLineMan’s neck. the supervising doctor told me that i should put it more medial, because CentralLineMan’s anatomy is different from a real person’s. i identified the internal jugular vein on ultrasound, put the needle into it, removed the cylinder part of the syringe, put a long wire down through the needle into CentralLineMan’s internal jugular vein, pressed and pressed until it was twenty centimeters into his silicone neck, took the needle out, put a dilator through the wire to dilate the hole in his neck, took the dilator off, put the central line itself over the wire, and started pulling the wire out. my classmate commented that i was going really fast, and i felt like i had achieved a flow state with the thing, and i was becoming a champion of central line insertion, and the supervising doctor was sort of laughing, apparently amused by my beginner’s luck, or something else.
and then, right there, at the very end, i took the wire out prematurely, before the central line had gone fully into his internal jugular, and the supervising doctor was like, ‘lol, it’s not going to go in now, because you took out the wire too soon.’ i was like, ‘well, ain’t that just the way?’ and she said, ‘it’s my fault because i was talking to you. do you want to try again?’ and i said, ‘you know what, i’ll get ‘em next time.’ she said, ‘if i never see you again, it was nice to meet you.’ i said, ‘it was a real pleasure. thank you for teaching me how to insert central lines.’
if i ever do find myself in a position of needing to insert a central line into someone’s neck so that i can easily give medicine straight to their heart, then i’ll sort of know how to do it, as long as i have all these different tubes and wires and needles and a scalpel, and medicine, and a desire to inject that medicine straight into someone’s circulation.
now i’m just sitting here on the roof,
just like i was last night, thinking about all the things in the world, and all the people, and just... you know.... thinking, thinking.... thinking, thinking. mostly feeling, though. reminiscing.
it’s a good life, and it’s a beautiful one, and we’re all here, and we’re all together, and we all share knowledge with each other, and book recommendations, and yaoi recommendations, and chatrooms (shoutout barndoors), and...... and.......... yeah. life itself..... life itself. words.
i’m a words guy. i love words. words, ideas, but also clouds, sky, the setting sun, roofs, gradients of colors, people, laughter, making people laugh, looking people in the eye and feeling how things shift when you start actually paying attention, not checking out of the conversation but actually listening, even when they’re saying some small-talky shit, and then the conversation takes you to territory like planning to meet up in california, or in the more near future, planning to go downtown to look at pokemon cards.
it’s a good life. now all we need to do is stop destroying the planet.
with gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?