ants are people, too. sometimes better ones.

elliot smith died
on my twenty-fifth birthday.
i felt (feel) guilty.

i have, for hours, been watching an ant carry the inanimate body of another ant in rings around the center of my bedroom floor. when he first picked it up i assumed he wanted to bring it back to the hill for food, because insects are good that way, waste not, want not, you know. after the first five minutes i wondered if maybe the body was making it difficult for him to see where he was going, and after fifteen i had begun to wonder whether he had any sort of plan at all. he would sometimes stop, put the body down, approach it from a different angle, lift it back up, start walking again. sometimes he would drop it and take maybe a dozen steps away from it, but then he would circle back to it and start over. i didn't know if i'd be making his life easier or harder by scooping the two of them up and taking them outside. i still can not decide, and so i'm doing nothing. hours. two hours, looping incessantly over the same ten or twelve square feet of finished wood. i think in my life i've never done anything nonstop for two consecutive hours, except maybe sleep, and even that i couldn't swear to. but this little guy's got a mission, and nobody gonna break his stride.

i'm crazy enough that by now i'm sure he and the deceased were close friends, maybe relatives, and he really doesn't have a plan, he just can't bear to leave the body of someone he loved, loves, in a strange and unsafe place. you can imagine it, can't you? coming across the stiff, clenched form of your best friend of twenty-five years, your brother, your sister, your father, on the street or in a parking lot or the neighbor's backyard and grabbing it up without thinking, drawing it close to your chest and breaking into a run . . . maybe you would unknowingly circle the block for a couple of hours. maybe when you stopped you wouldn't know where you were.

and now i am in love with this ant. now i'm sure he's exactly what the universe had in mind when it said,

maybe i'll create some intelligent life . . . THERE!

it should have stopped, perhaps, while it was ahead. i don't have any idea how to help any of the ants, but i'm rooting for them. i'm one hundred percent on their side.

no person i've loved has ever died. but i can see some of them getting ready. my parents went to visit my grandparents on mother's day, and they drove out to a small waterfall near my grandparents' house. they told my parents that they'd like very much to have their ashes scattered over the water there, because they've spent so many happy afternoons together at its edge. my grandfather says he has no regrets and he isn't afraid of anything, but thinking about dying does make him very sad, because he'll miss us more than even an angel could stand.

i'd carry him anywhere. i hope you all have someone who can say the same for you.

i think i'm going to bring the ants into the yard.