You Are Now Disinterested

Recently, a house across the street from mine has filled up with yelling people. They sleep through most of the day but when the sun goes down they rise up from their Four Loko induced slumber, put on giant nightgown-style white shirts and stand in a cluster right outside of their front door to shout weird noises at people. They're usually out there when I come home at night from anything. There are five to ten of them at any given time after Nine PM. It,s mostly guys but occasionally there is a confused, frightened female or two (pregnant). I have never heard them speak any language but they are almost constantly making noise.

Sometimes I can,t park directly in front of my apartment and run in as fast as I can. I often have to park down the street and walk several hundred feet to reach the safety of my bug filled apartment. An earwig crawled out of my computer the other morning while I was using it. The group of giant shirts would never miss an opportunity to shout something at a moving person like myself. But, like I said, it isn,t any kind of language. It,s generally a loud organic beeping. It,s a shrill ,,Yeep!,, or ,,Wheep!,, or ,,Shee!,,. It,s very bizarre and I can,t figure out what they mean by it. I think it is some sort of Hispanic echolocation. They,re just pinging me to see if I am a wounded fish or slow rodent.

One of the inhabitants of the hive is sometimes outside in the daylight. He wears the longest, whitest nightgown of them all. Here is an artist,s rendering of what his type may look like in case you ever run into one in the field.

Tammy Wynette - Your Good Girl,s Gonna Go Bad
He is the worker ant. He scouts around the hive looking for remnants of beer left to boil in the bottom of bottles and cans so he can add it to the hive,s reserves. He works quickly and carefully to ensure that the rest of ,,The Family,, has enough fuel to continue their nocturnal existence. Under his soft cloth shell he has numerous inflatable bladders which he can fill with his findings (hot beer, spit scotch, coffee grounds, blunt wrapper packages and those weird Mexican suckers that have a scorpion or lizard tail in them).

I think he also serves as a sort of guard. I almost always see him marching briskly on the same two blocks. I think I read somewhere that he can, at any time, turn the contents of his storage bladders into an intensely pressurized acid that he will use to defend his home or mark his territory. I hope he doesn,t take all of the filthy shoes we have thrown over a power line as a sign of aggression and attack me. It,s a good thing I carry a cool knife sometimes.