So the new house is freaking perfect in every respect except . . . ants.  There must be a mutant mother-colony under this house, seriously.  I’m paranoid about leaving things like alcohol and  . . . um, resin from my tobacco pipes, yeah, that’s it . . . where the ants might possibly get to it, simply because those German-efficient fuckers don’t need any help in developing their master plan, right?

I tried all the natural solutions.  Borax mixed with oatmeal just made them swarm the butter dish like it was the G-damned coast of Normandy.  Cornmeal seemed to mutate them from scrawny soot-colored scurrying creatures into brawny, Iowa-quarterback-cocky motherfuckers.  A mixture of cayenne pepper and vinegar was fun for an evening spent painting them into stampedes, but proved utterly ineffective once the vinegar dried, as far as long-term control is concerned, and frankly, I don’t get drunk enough most nights to find much satisfaction in spending half an hour painting an organic barricade around the fresh loaves of sourdough cooling on my kitchen counter.

So I went to buy the hardcore, Armageddon-of-the-Ants-type poison bait-traps today.  Seeing as how I blew a radiator hose pulling into the store parking lot, it’s not terribly surprising that I didn’t immediately perk my naughty little ears up when the clerk required proof that I was over the age of 18 in order to purchase little plastic packages full of ant death. (Well, kind of surprising, since I’m reaching an age where a request for I.D. for any purchase just makes me feel like hot shit.)

But when I was putting them out tonight, I noticed that one of the packages bore an ominous warning to the effect of, purchasing this product for purposes other than those stated on the box is a federal offense punished by up to blah blah blah.

That, I took notice of.  Usually those types of labels are reserved for things that will, or can be used to make substances that will, get you high as fuck.  Or kill you.  Or both.  You know, it’s a free country and you’re free to kill yourself being a dumbass. 

Dammit, but I love being an American, most days.

Now, I’ve made a few horrible, lethal substances in my day, not even counting the time that I was six and decided that if bleach cleaned the toilet, and ammonia cleaned the toilet, then both together should clean the toilet twice as fast and I could get back to that awesome Steven King novel.  Lucky we had an attic fan, is all I can say about that. 

My dad and I made some home-brew Napalm back when I was going through the inevitable “Huh!  Fire!  Cool!” stage of adolescence, not to mention a few potato guns and a Floppy Disk of Doom or two.  (Did I mention my Daddy is cool as fuck?) 

Having a vagina and a big mouth, I was never privy to the *exact* formulas of the incredibly intoxicating substances that I helped manufacture and transport in the Long Long Ago of ten years back, but I got the gist of things, you know?  I may not have passed chemistry in high school were it not for my teacher’s middle-aged perversions and my own precocious development, but that doesn’t mean I never learned to pay attention when substance A met substance B and resulted in substance How The Fuck Did You Make That Shit, I Think My Brain Is Going To Explode. 

Never in my wanderings had I run into a use for ant poison that would either get you high or kill you.  But you know, I’ve friends on MySpace who regularly go out on weekends and ingest chemicals I’ve never even seen speculated about in sci-fi, so I had to jump on Google and check it out.

The worst I could find is that this chemical, hydramethylnon, might give you flipper babies and maybe shut down your liver if you eat it on toast five times a day for a year.  Maybe.  Of course, that’s just my inept boiling-down of what I read on three dozen abstracts or so, but still.  No poppingly sensational news articles on stupid shallow emo teens either trying to get off or get out by ingesting the substance in any fashion, no Asian apartment complex’s near-massacres attributed to its fumes, not so much as a wrinkled old lady collecting fraudulent Social Security checks after feeding it to a boarder over the course of five years.  Fuckin’ nothing.  What a waste of an hour I could’ve spent watching bootleg cellphone footage of Tori concerts, I tell you.

Just a bunch of shit that, when it gets boiled down, says, “This shit is poison.  Don’t let your babies eat it, don’t slurp it up if you’re pregnant, don’t slather your butcher-shop counters in it, try your best not to introduce it into the water supply.”

Since when did this require the threat of federal prosecution?  Sorry, but if you have your genetic immortality gestating in your guts but you’re still reduced to ingesting ant poison to either get high or raise your blood sugar . . . . it’s probably best that you die in a pool of your own vomit, or at the very least, that your retard mutant-child get expelled like a particularly gory visit from the Cardinal. 

Too bad, so sad . . . next, please.

Damn, but I’ve developed the soul of a DMV clerk, and I’m not even thirty, yet . . .