Sitting on the dock of the bay. Or, rather, at the river on a big rock. This is one of the most beautiful places I can think of. It's one of those places where there is beauty in every square-inch. Ants following other ants, giving each other kisses indiscriminately as they pass each other walking down the rock, as is apparently customary. the superorganism traveling bidirectionally—and probably in more directions than just bi—kissing itself, or giving itself some other such little tap of affirmation: "we are the same." Some kind of tactile communication happens every time they pass each other by. It’s one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen, and I saw it today, on a Friday in the summer.

I like reading about staph aureus and how it survives. I like looking at ants giving each other kisses. I like sitting on the rock of the bay. I like doing things that are lifelike. I like watching two bugs on top of one another right now. Maybe they’re breeding or something. Maybe this is breeding hours. Or maybe they’re not breeding. Maybe they're fighting. But no, it looks like one has mounted the other.

When I look around in other directions, more bugs. Now a dragonfly. There are a lot of cool blue ones out here.

Now I'm standing in front of a tree. I see a moth caught in a spiderweb, writhing around. It looks like the web has been abandoned by its spider. I see no spider here to kill this winged thing.

I extracted it from the web. It took a few attempts—gentle, prescise movements. Once free, it positioned itself on the tip of my index finger. I brought it out into the sunlight to see if its cryptochromes would activate and tell it what to do, but it just fluttered its wings a bit, twitching every now and then. I noticed that it was still quite attached—tethered, even—to a dead little black bug that it had gotten webbed with. I tried to tug the dead bug away, but it was stuck to the moth’s legs. I imagined tiny cries of pain as I tugged. A tiny drop of blood came from the dead bug and sat on my finger. Finally, the dead bug let go, and the little white moth with black compound-eyes floated away, its wings suddenly working like magic. It flew into the bunches of leaves to my left.

Earlier, a little further west, toward the sun, I tipped a rock on its side, revealing a little colony of ants under its underbelly. Things seem to have slowed down over there. There are only a handful of ants still hanging out by the rock.

Watching them kiss as they traveled to and from the rock underbelly reminded me of neurons. The superorganism is well-wired, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. Something about axons……….. yeah. It’s good. Bidirectional and multidirectional transport of information. That’s what I like to see, honestly. It’s great stuff. Thanks, world, for sharing it with me.

I like being in relationship with bugs. I have never been in relationship with ants, though. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I was genuinely entangled with an ant. Me and the moth, on the other hand, are entangled now. We are entangled because, if I hadn't encountered it, it would likely still be in the spiderweb. It might’ve freed itself without me, but it also mightn't've. I don't think bugs are capable of generating that much force, and that’s what makes us so different from them. I have way more sheer force avaialabe to me. Unless I'm comparing apples to oranges somehow, and my instinct to compare the colony/superorganism to my own brain is more accurate, in which case I imagine we (the superorganism and I) might have access to a more comparable amount of force.

I see an ant wandering near me, all on its own, moving sort of erratically. Going to follow this one. Please hold.