Ants Stage Sit-Down Strike, Demand Gooey Desserts

The season of comedy has recently concluded, those two weeks in the late winter when the S.F. Sketchfest occurs. Fortunately, one of the venues this year was the Dark Room, two blocks from home.

I bought tickets for Friday and Saturday night three weeks in a row (before I realized how broke I was) and particularly enjoyed Moshe Kasher and Brent Weinbach, and Dry Hump. There was also a darling woman who played the ukulele and sang a song about her favorite letter: U. She announced one song by saying, “Here’s another hit I wrote,” and reassured us a bit later, “Now we’re going to have less talk, more rock.”

There was also a woman Tom didn’t like because she talked about her pubic hair, which he thought was gross, and I didn’t like because she kept calling the people in the front row “bitches.”

In addition, there was “a straight guy who talks like a gay guy who talks like a black woman,” whose name was something like DeBrookashawn, though not that, because I can’t find that online; he was always referred to as “DeBrookashawn, y’all.”

There were improv groups of more and less talent; I thought Crisis Hopkins were particularly gifted.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally made it back to a volunteer night at the Bike Coalition, and the next night I went out to stand in the street on Valencia and hold up a sign publicizing a rally the next morning to protest the city’s idea of removing a stretch of bike lane where motorists keep turning in front of cyclists to get onto the freeway, and hitting some of them.

The city’s idea was that if bikes and cars used the same lane, ergo the cars wouldn’t turn in front of the bikes, and in theory, I quite agree, but the Bike Coalition feels that removing any bike lane is a step in the wrong direction. They also predicted that, even in the narrower space, cyclists would still try to squeeze along next to the cars, and they’re probably right about that, so, on the whole, until cyclists understand they are safer in the center of any lane that is less than fourteen feet wide, it probably is best to keep the bike lane, and a judge did end up nixing the city’s plan, so yay for us yet again.

The Bike Coalition now has more than 10,000 members, making us the largest local bicycle advocacy group in the country, even including NYC, which has many more inhabitants. And every one of us is an impassioned activist, or so it seems.

We were rich in protests that week: you had your choice of protesting the bike lane removal, the attack on Palestinians by Israel, or the shooting of Oscar Grant by BART police, and probably a couple of other things. Much protesting equals many helicopters overhead.

It’s proving to be practically a full-time job keeping my ants in peak form: they’re floating in Hammett’s water bowl, they’re walking on the bar soap, they’re strolling on the stove top. Liquid soap is very bad for ants, causing them to disintegrate in short order, which I’m sure is not a pleasant way to go, probably something like being submerged in a barrel of acid by an associate of John Gotti.

My mother says she truly felt at home in her and my father’s new house when she was sitting in what they call “the tiled room” and saw a spider making its way down the wall. She said she had been thinking of bringing some spider egg sacs from the old house so she could have the same spiders at the new house.

I was getting ready to break it to her gently that the spiders that came out of the sacs wouldn’t be the exact same spiders, but their descendants—uh oh, Alzheimer’s?—but of course it turned out she meant the same types of spiders.

One day my mother and I were conversing via email when I realized—crud!—I’d forgotten to bring a container of steamed Brussels sprouts to work. I'd left them sitting on the counter at home and supposed that, by the time I got home, the container would be full of ants.

My mother wrote, “That was kind of the ants (if they did) to eat the Brussels sprouts, so now you don't have to eat them. Ants are our friends and sisters, as someone once said. Maybe ‘Brussels sprouts’ was a typo: did you mean Crème Brûlée?”

(When I was a teenager and complaining about a spider being near me as I sat in the sun in our backyard, my mother advised me that spiders are our friends and sisters.)

I wrote back, “I don’t mind if the ants eat my sprouts (I don’t know yet if they did; I’ll see when I get home), but since I’m sworn to let no ant die in my apartment, it means I have the project of relocating a lot of ants so I can wash the container.”

Now my mother was frankly concerned. “WHY do you eat Brussels sprouts?”

“Because they’re yummy and green,” I said into the phone; the gravity of the situation had required switching to an even more immediate medium of communication.

“They are not yummy, and this is not the way you were raised. It’s like if you have a child you raise to be Lutheran and then they grow up and say they’re Catholic. This is a major philosophical difference,” my mother fretted.

We were unable to settle the question of whether, objectively speaking, Brussels sprouts are good or bad, but I can tell you that ants don’t care for them, not one little bit.