Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations (7 page)

SAM
: An earthquake broke open his cage. Then two lightning bolts knocked the guards unconscious. It’s sort of like God was doing everything he could that day to make sure this horrible thing would happen to me.

AL
: Jesus.

SAM
: So … do you buy lottery tickets often?

AL
: Actually, this was my first time. I was in a store and I saw the “World’s Biggest Jackpot” sign so I just kind of bought one on a whim.

SAM
: I buy lottery tickets pretty often. About five or six a week. I still haven’t won anything.

AL
: Why do you keep looking over your shoulder like that?

SAM
: Checking for bears. I know it probably won’t happen again, but I don’t want to take any chances. It’s a crazy world. Hey, what are you going to do with all the money?

AL
: I haven’t really decided. I’m still a little dazed by the whole thing!

SAM
: You know what I would do if I won the lottery? I’d build myself a suit to protect against bears. I’d wear it all the time, for the rest of my life.

AL
: You know, if you want, I could buy you a suit with my winnings! Seriously, I’d be happy to do it.

SAM
: What’s the point? Some bear would find a way.

where are all the time travelers?

Stephen Hawking once said, “If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers?” Everyone I talk to thinks this is such a great quote and that it proves that time travel is just a fantasy. But what people are forgetting is that Stephen Hawking is obviously a time traveler.

Think about it. “If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers?”
That is exactly the kind of thing a time traveler would say
. Everyone’s like “Oh, Stephen Hawking, you’re so smart, of course there’s no such thing as time travel!” Meanwhile, Hawking is probably at the dog track right now winning trifecta after trifecta.

Let’s think about this rationally. If you were a time traveler who had visited the future, and someone asked you point-blank if time travel was possible, what would you say? “Oh, yeah, time travel is definitely possible. In fact,
I’m
a time traveler—confiscate my gambling earnings”?
No. You would make some witty quip and change the subject. Then you would politely excuse yourself, call a bookie, and bet on Duke to defeat UNLV in the 1991 NCAA semifinals, even though they were eleven-point underdogs.

Where are all the time travelers? They’re on Wall Street, smoking Cuban cigars and laughing so hard that tears are streaming down their fat faces. Meanwhile,
we’re
sitting around like morons, betting our money on random dogs and horses and talking about how smart Stephen Hawking is. He probably didn’t even write his books! If you could magically travel through time, think about how easy it would be to bring back some smart book from the future, retype it, and pass it off as your own.

The following people are also probably time travelers:

• the woman who married Bill Gates before he invented Microsoft
  

• the guy who just
  happened
  to be filming JFK when he got assassinated
  

• George Foreman (how else would he know to sponsor that grill?)
  

There have always been time travelers. And anyone who says otherwise probably has something to hide.

desert island

I was chatting with a girl at a cocktail party last weekend and she asked me, “If you were stranded on a desert island and you could only take three possessions with you, which ones would you pick?”

“That’s pretty tough,” I said. “I guess my first-edition copy of Bob Dylan’s
Highway 61 Revisited
, James Merrill’s
Collected Poems
, and my lucky Sonic Youth T-shirt.”

Well, it turns out the girl was a government research scientist. It’s a long story, but basically when the drugs in my cocktail wore off, I woke up completely naked on a sandy strip of land in the middle of the ocean. A few hours later a jet plane whizzed by and parachute-dropped the record, book, and shirt onto the shore.

I realize now that I definitely could have chosen better items.

The last three days have been hell. I have no food, shelter, or medicine. The Sonic Youth T-shirt has an enormous tear through the front. It’s pretty cool-looking, and it shows I’ve had the shirt for a long time, since before Sonic Youth got big. But the tear lets in
a lot
of cold air, and the larger insects keep getting trapped in it.

Every few hours I flip through the Merrill anthology in the hope that one of his poems will be about fire building or water purification or how to make medicine, but so far they’re all useless.

I spent yesterday morning tying the Bob Dylan record to a stick with weeds and swinging it over my head to try to receive radio waves. I don’t remember why I thought that would work.

If I had asked for a Bob Dylan
CD
, I could have at least used the reflective surface to maybe heat up some sand. I’m not sure what that would accomplish, but at least I’d feel like I was
doing
something.

This morning I ate the poetry book and the shirt. Tonight, I’m going to try to eat the record.

Let me tell you some more about this island. During the daytime, the sand is so hot that I need to constantly
hop from foot to foot to prevent my feet from getting burned. At night it’s below freezing. There are no trees. There’s just sand, weeds, and some kind of volcano. Every fish I’ve caught so far has been poisonous.

I just realized that, technically, my house counts as a possession. I could have asked for my entire house.

I don’t even like Bob Dylan. I just wanted to sound cool.

the dog x-files

Here are some scenes for a TV show I came up with that’s exactly like
The X-Files
except all of the characters are dogs.

REX
: Thank God you’re here. I didn’t know who else to turn to. No one believes my story.

DOG SCULLY
: Tell us what happened.

REX
: I used to go into the living room every day. I’d run around, scratch up the couches—you know, have a good time. Then yesterday, I went inside and all of a sudden a horrible electric shock shot through my entire body.

DOG MULDER
: Unbelievable.

DOG SCULLY
: Did you try going in again today?

REX
: Yes. The same thing happened. I don’t even want to go into that room anymore.

DOG MULDER
: Wow. I have no explanation.

DOG MULDER
: I’m Agent Mulder from the Dog FBI. Tell us what happened.

SKIP
: Last week, my face was really itchy. I kept trying to scratch my nose, but … I couldn’t reach it.

DOG MULDER
: What do you mean?

SKIP
: There was some kind of cone-shaped force field surrounding my head.

DOG SCULLY
: Incredible!

SKIP
: The crazy thing is, three days later, I fell asleep … and when I woke up, the force field was gone.

DOG SCULLY
: I don’t understand. This defies all logic!

DOG MULDER
: Not everything can be explained with logic, Dog Scully.

BOOMER
: This is really hard for me. You’re the first people I’ve told.

DOG SCULLY
: Tell us what happened. Maybe we can help.

BOOMER
: Okay, here goes. Yesterday I fell asleep, and when I woke up, my testicles were missing.

DOG SCULLY
: Jesus. This is the fifth case this month.

DOG MULDER
: There’s something happening out there. Something beyond our understanding.

ROCKET
: I used to have fleas all over my body. Thousands and thousands of them. Then, yesterday, I felt a tightness around my neck … and within hours the fleas were gone.

DOG MULDER
: (Spits out coffee.)

DOG SCULLY
: For years, I’ve tried to be a scientist, to live by the rules of logic and reason. But now I don’t know what to believe.

DOG MULDER
: Please use your magic to kill my fleas.

animal cruelty

In order to learn more about animal cruelty, I built a translating machine and interviewed several farm animals about their current situation.

C
OW

—You’ve been incarcerated in this slaughterhouse your entire life. How has it affected you emotionally?

—I am cow. I eat grass. Grass on ground. Me move mouth down to grass. Chew up grass.

—Do you think animal slavery will end in your lifetime?

—Eat grass, rest. Eat grass, rest. Sleep.

—Do you feel that animals deserve the same rights as human beings?

—Grass on ground. Eat it all up.

C
HICKEN

—You’ve lived inside this 26- × 22-inch cage your entire life. How does it feel to know that you will never meet your family?

—Food in bag. Eat it up.

—Are “free range” chickens truly free? Or do they suffer the same indignities as standard, factory-produced chickens?

—Me eat food in bag. Rest. Sleep.

P
IG

—Human beings have mistreated your species for centuries, caging you in tiny prisons and pumping you full of dangerous hormones, just to make money. If you could say one thing to your human oppressors, what would it be?

—Give me more of the things that go inside my mouth. I like the things that I put inside my mouth. Chew it all up good. Rest, sleep.

—I understand that your owner castrated you at birth and then branded you with a fiery hot iron. Does it ever get so bad that you wish for death?

—Give me more of the things that go inside my mouth.

lost puppy!

Our beloved family pet is missing! We lost him on
this
block
and he probably hasn’t gone far. If you find a dog
that matches the following description,
please give me a call!
Thanks!
—Suzie

Large claws

Extra set of teeth

Red eyes

Quick to anger

Often unreasonable; lacks the self-control of other dogs
Likes to stand on his hind legs and rise to his full height
so he can look people in the eye

Often stays in shadowy areas; very hard to spot sometimes,
except for his eyes, which always have a faint
red glow

Fast

When he stands on his hind legs and looks people in the
eye, he expects them to maintain eye contact; if they
look away even for a second, he has a kind
of breakdown

If he’s having a rampage and someone escapes, he likes
to come find them, usually on the one-year anniversary
of the rampage

Answers to the name “Ctharga,” but if his name is said
three times, something weird happens to his eyes and he
somehow becomes even faster than he is normally

Silent

————————
glorious battles of
the american revolution

The British redcoats were excellently trained. But their conventional battle tactics failed to subdue the ragtag American troops.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
S
TONEY
P
OINT
— 1779

George Washington’s minutemen attack the redcoats with pitchforks. Cornwallis, the British general, stubbornly sticks to his strategy: offering the Americans tea and then cleverly giving them none.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
H
OBKIRK’S
H
ILL
— 1780

The Americans kill five thousand redcoats by hitting them on the head with rocks. Cornwallis and his surviving
men retaliate by throwing an elaborate dinner party and not inviting any minutemen. Washington comes anyway. During sherry he makes an extremely lewd toast. Out of politeness, the redcoats pretend not to hear him. But a few minutes later Washington repeats his toast, loudly. One by one, all the redcoats make very courteous excuses and leave early.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
G
RIME’S
R
IVER
— 1781

At 9:30
A.M.
, the redcoats assemble on the battlefield, but as usual the Americans are tardy. Furious, Cornwallis marches his infantry up to Washington’s tent and requests permission to fire his gun at him. Washington, still drunk from the night before, stumbles out of the tent and starts dancing. Cornwallis is enraged, but etiquette demands that he join the dance. The redcoats retreat slowly, careful to avoid any eye contact with Cornwallis.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
H
AW
F
OREST
— 1782

General Washington sets a forest on fire to show Cornwallis that he’s ready to fight. As a gesture of good faith, Cornwallis executes his five best men. Washington goes on to win the battle by poisoning some local Indians and
forcing them to kill the redcoats in exchange for medicine. In accordance with British military law, Mrs. Cornwallis bakes General Washington a congratulatory scone and invites him to her drawing room for whist. Washington insists on having sex with her. They have sex.

————————
a day in the life
of the swiss army

All right, everyone, listen up. I’m not going to lie to you. We lost a lot of good men today. But we haven’t lost the war yet. It’s time to hunker down and talk strategy: Has everybody been taking care of his fingernails? Because yesterday, during the battle, I noticed that some men—in fact, a
lot
of men—were having trouble opening their knives. Remember, you have to dig pretty hard to get the blade out. It’s not like the magnifying glass.