The disappointed ant understood the power of
making chapbooks and packaging them and mailing them to people in the fight
against depression, despair, and loneliness. He made three chapbooks a night
using his antennae to carefully glue motes of sand onto pieces of leaves in an
arbitrary manner. He mailed the chapbooks by media mail to subscribers in
Williamsburg, Italy, and East Timor. One night the disappointed ant was
severely depressed. He made five chapbooks and felt better. For a few months
the disappointed ant was able (with only a little despair which was more
distracting, really, than uncomfortable) to enjoy small, private, and
ultimately pointless things like walking around pretending to be a machine;
lying in bed listening to lyrically excruciating emo music but focusing only on
the drums; and turning off all the lights at 3 p.m., drinking iced coffee,
putting down the curtains, and lying in bed thinking about good feelings it had
felt in the past.
One clear day in February while walking in a line of ants carrying motes of sand
to build a new alcove in the sand pile the disappointed ant dropped his mote of
sand and began to cry. The other ants walked around him. After a few minutes
the disappointed ant picked up his mote of sand and continued walking. That
night in his room the ant stared at his leaves and motes of sand and absently
began to glue everything together in "a giant ball of shit." While continuously
thinking "a giant ball of shit" without context, object, or tone he packaged it
and addressed it to a subscriber in East Timor. He grinned and then felt the
grin on his face which made the increasingly nauseating despair that he had
been feeling for the last five hours suddenly much more intense and immediate.
The ant felt dizzy with how bad he felt and sensed that soon he would be crying
hard and unable to function. He walked quickly to the CD player and put on a CD
by an emotional rock band called Pop Unknown and then turned off the lights and
lay quickly on his bed putting the blanket over his entire body and head. After
twenty seconds the CD began to skip.
The disappointed ant felt a thought forming in his head and slowly began to
realize that he was thinking about screaming
"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK" so hard that his head would be torn
from his body in a liberating, cathartic manner. With a neutral facial
expression and a calm and lucid pattern of cognition the disappointed ant saw
his head being torn off in a variety of angles and speeds until finally the
sequence culminated in a display of six different angles alternating in
slow-motion, split-screen, and stop-motion in the style of action movies that
came out after The Matrix. The ant let this sequence play in his head for a few
minutes and then felt a little better, got up, stopped the CD player, and went
to sleep.
