The Vinyl Café Notebooks Read Online Free

the one with the little yappy dog that is starting to drive me crazy. Honest to God, when are they going to take that dog inside and feed it?
    Where is my list? I want my list back.
    You can have my glasses. And my keys. And my cellphone and all the other things I’ve lost. Just give me the list. And then you can do whatever you want to the dog.
    I will look after the dog right now if you will just give me the list .
    Listen to me. Do you know what would happen if I don’t do the things I am supposed to do? If I stop calling and writing and showing up? If I unplug?
    You don’t have to answer that.
    Okay, I warned you.
    I’m over it now.
    It’s gone. Do what you want with it. I don’t need it anymore. I am done with “to do” lists. I am beginning again. I am starting fresh. I am going upstairs to write out a list of things I don’t have to do.
    You can have my “to do” list. I am starting my “to don’t” list.
    And I don’t care what happens to it.
    18 January 2009

ANTS
    I have had, for longer than I can say with certainty—more than a few days or weeks, but not years, so for a certain number of months that I have not kept track of—a solitary ant on patrol in my upstairs bathroom. Always one, never more, often in the sink, but not always in the sink. Sometimes on the counter.
    I say on patrol , but I don’t know that. I have no idea if my ant is there with any purpose in mind. I just know he is there every time I go into the bathroom, or almost every time, so he is clearly not just passing through. He could be on guard, but on guard for what, I can’t imagine. He could be a spy. He could be there for any number of things really, including because he is thirsty.
    I can’t say much about him with any certainty, except that he is almost always there. I don’t even know if, in fact, he is just one ant, or one in an ever-changing number of ants. A revolution of ants.
    I don’t even know if it is biologically possible that he is, or has been, the same ant all these months, because my lack of knowledge when it comes to ants is almost complete, and includes a lack of knowledge regarding the life expectancy of ants.
    If I had to guess, I would say they live for a season. Although exactly what a season is where ants are concerned is beyond me. And surely these chilly January days are not that. Ant season, I mean. Yet, if I were to get up right now, and we were to go to my bathroom, we would find it is ant season there. Or it is for my ant. Because if we were to do that now, check out my bathroom, we would almost certainly find him.
    I say he when actually I know one thing about this ant. He, it turns out, is a she .
    I have been reading up on ants and have learned they are almost always she s. If there is work to be done, it turns out, women do the work in the world of ants. The men are there for the purpose of procreation and then they take off.
    Anyway, as I said, if she is working, I am not sure exactly what she is working at.
    There was a time when I might have known this. If this was a Victorian January for instance, I probably would have known this. Victorians are renowned for their knowledge of the natural world. They would talk about these things at dinner parties: about their latest birdwatching trip, or their collections of curiosities, feathers and eggs, whatever. It was part of the Victorian tradition to study and observe nature. We don’t do that so much anymore.
    I think 2008 was the year when, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities than they did in the countryside. We city folk are more intent on poisoning ants than observing them.
    Little surprise then that most biologists agree that we are in the middle of the Sixth Great Extinction. There have been five already, according to our understanding of fossils. Thelast one was the extinction that took out the dinosaurs, and a lot of other things as well.
    And while you get the feeling there will be ants around long after ...