Yesterday I experienced the astonishing revelation that there is virtually nothing to separate my workplace, metaphorically speaking, from an ant colony. Now, fresh in my mind, it is hard not to think about it a lot. I have many questions for myself. And what better place to ask them than here, where with my authorial voice, resplendent with awesome power, I can make up answers to them.
Q. Why ants and not bees?
A. We scurry and do not fly. We are no friend to flowers, or magical collectors of honey, but simple workers in humble pursuit of our unending maintenance. Although, on second thought, we are rather a kind of pollinator of knowledge and information, though not very effective ones, which, it turns out, is true of ants with flowers as well!
Q. Is this a Kafkaesque thing?
A. Everything is a Kafkaesque thing, but that said he was mainly concerned with an individual in Metamorphosis. This is about our nature as community, and it is open to being taken either with phlegmatic appreciation or with horror. When we humans lost ourselves as beings purely of the weave in the fabric of life we became an echo of all the works of evolution. We talk often of Anthropomorphizing, but it isn't that really. It is we who are chameleons, borrowing everything from the works of evolution before us. We are monkeys and cats, pigs, and, of course, chameleons, and, at work, in institutions, ever and always, colonies of ants.
Q. Do you engage in symbiotic behavior with other animals, the way ants sometimes do with aphids?
A. Yes, we call the creatures "Patrons" and they rotate the materials through our nest, and provide our reason for being.
Q. Do you have a Queen?
A. Yes, but as with ants, you should not ascribe too much or too little to that role.
Q. If you are so exactly like a ant's nest then where are the ant bloggers?
A. Many of the best bloggers in the world are ants, but you must be able to read chemical to read them.
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