Recently my home was invaded by ants. This is partially my fault.
I live in what landlords refer to as a “Garden-level” apartment, or as I call it, a “Shithole buried in where the ants live.” If you think about it, maybe the ants are pissed off because I’m kind of invading their area. I think we made a deal with them long ago that if they left all our pipes and wires alone that they could have the entire underground part of the eart. Maybe worms were involved too, but maybe they had to negotiate their own peace (plus, I think that above ground all bets between ants and worms are off because I have seen ants swarming a worm like it was a long hot dog with a hole on one end, which it IS).
So when ants started trailing into my apartment, I knew it was them or me. They probably didn;t know that. But it was.
Step one is figuring out how to kill them. Let me give you this piece of advice should, god forbid, you ever be the victim of a hostile ant takeover: If someone gives you the advice that contains the word “green” used in the earth sense, completely ignore that advice and also consider hitting that person. The only thing that should be green is the rotting corpse of an ant that I jammed through a toothpick as a warning to others (by the way, does that work with bugs? If I kill a bunch of beetles in really horrific ways, will the other ones fuck off?). I did try the green solutions, not because I wanted to be green but because that’s the shit I had available. One piece of advice said to use salt, that it would suck the moisture out of an ant almost immediately. After burying this motherfucker three times in salt and watching him dig out, I decided all I was doing was maybe making him more tired. Ants, by the way, are totally awesome diggers. Pretty entertaining, but doesn’t really address the problem at hand.
Here, in short, is my advice for killing ants when you don’t have any bug killer on hand: Just use anything that’s a spray that’s not supposed to be on skin. CLR works wonders on calcium deposits, lime left by hard water, and bugs. It WILL discolor the goddamn cement outside your apartment, but that’s how you know it really works. But seriously, any spray.
I did get some ant killer after a couple days and a couple bottles of CLR, Windex, Scrubbing Bubbles, and Kaboom, I went for the real stuff. Even at the store they had green options. But I wanted something real. Given the choice, I would take something that would melt down a man. You’re hearing from someone who would use a hand grenade to kill a roach in the sink. As a side note, I also bought a mouse trap. I don’t really think there’s a mouse around, but it’s policy to just check every so often. This trap is one that kills mice with some kind of spin action. I have no fucking idea how it works. Is it like a Gravitron except it spins so fast that they die? Should I bring a dozen mice on the Gravitron at the stampede to test the effects? Maybe mice just hate spinning and kill themselves because being dizzy is really annoying.
So I got the most poisonous spray available, the one in a very unattractive purple bottle with all sorts of warnings. I sprayed the shit out of those fuckers, plus a really unfortunate beetle, and sat inside my kitchen, breathing in the wonderful fumes of chemical death.
It’s said that Hitler said something like, I’m proud that I at least wiped out the Jewish menace from Germany. Before he died, he knew his work was not complete, but he at least made progress. Though I hadn’t wiped out ants entirely, which I would LOVE, I did wipe them out from my apartment. It’s maybe not the final solution, but it’s a start.