Tilion the silver laptop, named after an imperfect being and given to shedding its exoskeleton, has finally had total hard disk crash. See you guys in a while. <3

I woke up a few mornings ago to find a writhing, marble-sized one of these



surface-tensioning it up in the cup of honey tea I left out on my desk the night before.

I had never ever seen ants do anything like this before, so googled "floating ant ball" combinations and found that apparently this is the flood defense of the red imported fire ant, annoying plague of the Southern USA. When water goes into their hills, they all grab each other, stick the queen and larvae in the middle, and writhe around enough that nobody is underwater long enough to drown. A massive, self-sustaining ant circle pit: eusociality is beautiful. Except seriously, fire ants? Necrotizing stings? Violent swarming? Yes they bite, but I kind of don't believe. I keep trying to find google results for any other kind of ant that makes giant floating balls when confronted with flooding, but so far, it's fire ants, fire ants, and fire ants. Good times.

My house and its ant status: the building is from the turn of the century, has wooden-floor hallways that buckle like the sides of an old boat, has a soft-story foundation that means, according to the signs posted around the first floor by the state of California, that it will pretty much collapse in the event of a serious earthquake, and has all kinds of weird sub-basement crawlspace areas that you can access from cupboards on the lower story, which have dirt floors and stretch for undetermined lengths under the house. My guess is that it's these labyrinthine not-quite-a-basement areas that the ants come from, because every time it rains, the people living here discover a fundamental truth: there is no way to get the ants out of the house. The ants *are* the house. When it gets cold, they ooze out of the cracks like mud seeping into a basement, except then you realize that you're on the third floor and the mud is actually split up into millions of tiny units that almost have brains of their own. When you realize that they are coming out of the corners of every room in the house and the amount of bleach or RAID you would need to use to kill them would probably kill you too, you can develop a kind of ant zen, watching them make their highways from one side of your room to another without making any pit stops along the way, and realizing that if this is how many you can see, the volume of them living in the walls is probably pretty epic. Like the quiet rush of being surrounded by living water in a Miyazaki film, although this water is alive in a different way. A crawly way.

Apparently, an necrotizing, imported-red-fire crawly way.

Except seriously? Oh my god, that ant ball was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. It was like seeing a dinosaur up close. I spent the rest of the day debating whether or not to leave a bowl of sugar water out in the bathroom to see if they would do it again, eventually deciding that this was either extremely childish, incredibly unwise, or a combination of the two; and also, it took twenty minutes of exposed sugarwater to draw about five thousand ants, no ant ball was in sight, and I didn't think I could excuse mass anticide for the sake of age-six science so chickened out and took the bowl away from them. But seriously, guys, the desire still pulls. Not just the little-kid desire to fuck around with bugs-- the knowledge that you don't have to be in the Amazon or a flood zone to see not just ants hanging around or ants making ant trails or even ants swarming, but A GLORIOUS KATAMARI DAMACY OF ANTS--



In related news, Mirah has a new album out, almost exclusively containing songs about bugs. Here is her ant song:

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=CFB4AFC446246B62

In conclusion: a.) OKAY IT'S FOUR AM, WHAT THE HELL, ENOUGH ABOUT ANTS. and b.) Dude, ants.

Ah, no. 28 years old. Too young.

Life-drawing in cafe with Erica. Originally this was swarming with Where's Waldo side-characters but they were all kind of horribly done; MAN, those guys are harder to draw than they look.

A failed business card proposal for a fat-activist/baker/performance artist/etc in Oakland; described as a very curvy 50's pinup girl holding up a cake. Maybe it was too raunchy? Too burlesque? Too gingham?
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Stands the well-known Galactronics/Branch of Yoyodyne.



Thom Yorke named his online store W.A.S.T.E. That probably isn't enough of an excuse for my being this pretentious, but still. Ahahaha hee hee hee.

Galen, King of the Berkeley hipsters: wearer of neon bicycle shorts, seducer of mannequins; bringer of storms and thunder and winter's rain.

Katherine Anne Butler, age 17, 1956.