Ants Marching

(From the movie “Waking Life”)

Soap Opera Woman: “Excuse me.”
Wiley Wiggins: “Sorry”
Soap Opera Woman: “Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven’t met, but I don’t want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it’s like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. “Here’s your change.” “Paper or plastic?” “Credit or debit?” “You want ketchup with that?” I don’t want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to be an ant, you know?”


When was the last time that you had a real conversation? I’m serious. When was the last time that you shared ideas and emotions with someone? When was the last time that you were just lost in the moment of conversation, losing all track of time? When was the last time that just the act of talking made you feel truly alive?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this weekend. This has been one of those cold and gray January weekends where you never feel like doing anything. Honestly, I’m pretty sure that the only people that I have talked to since I left work on Friday have been cashiers and bartenders. No offense meant to my bartenders, who have helped me out of more situations than I can remember, but that just seems so shallow of a life. And when I think about the conversations that I have at work, endless discussions about numbers and spreadsheets and presentations, I keep on feeling that none of those conversations are real, either. I’m just an automaton sitting in a box five days a week, making sense of numbers and creating more data in order to summarize data.

That’s why I keep on thinking about this quote about being an ant and wanting to be more than an ant. Our culture really does run like a massive ant colony. Everyone doing their own thing for some bigger purpose that they don’t quite understand. An ant is digging tunnels not really knowing why; other people are working cash registers not knowing what the end result actually is. That at the end of the day they can simply be viewed as cogs in the great machine of capitalism, faceless and easily replaceable. Even The Onion joked about this once with the great line of buying ant farms as gifts for children since it teaches them about the endless toil and utter meaninglessness and unavoidable death that is all part of modern industrial life.

But the thing is, ants don’t know that they are ants. The ants in the ant farm that I had as a kid didn’t suddenly realize one day that there was no queen there so they might as well stop digging tunnels to nowhere. Much in the same way that the people who wake up on Thursday morning happy solely because it means that there is a new episode of “Joey” that night never realize their fate either. But I do. And there’s the rub.

I have an idea though on how to deal with this and it just might work. I can’t become blissfully ignorant of the world and lord knows that I would never want to. I’ve always feared that society would become Brave New World’s vision of a drugged out populace, merrily oblivious of the situation (and depending on how you feel about Prozac, we may or may not be at this point already). So, I don’t want to retreat and I don’t want to live a life of existential angst. I want something different.

So, I’ve decided that I’m going to make the rest of this year a search for what is real. I’ve done this before, looking for music that comes from the artist’s soul and not a corporate hit making machine. I’ve done it with movies and that is how I come across brilliant pieces of art like “Waking Life”. But now I want to do it for real. To search for reality in my real life. To have real conversations and real interactions and to see meaning and beauty and life in what can otherwise be a cold, bland, preprocessed, pre-portioned world. A buddy of mine asked if I had any New Year’s Resolutions and at the time I didn’t know but this is it. To find real people and real experiences. To stop feeling like I’m just an ant, scurrying around and doing its job, always fearful that a nine-year-old’s shoe is about to drop on his head. I don’t know what this will entail but if I commit myself to the concept, I know that life will become much more interesting.

The five random CD’s for the week:
1) 10,000 Maniacs “Our Time in Eden”
2) Richard Buckner “Devotion + Doubt”
3) Freedy Johnston “Never Home”
4) The Jayhawks “Blue Earth”
5) The Mollys “Only a Story”