the little red friends love lozenges

So, I've been sick most of the week, something in the throat that has been causing me to watch inhuman amounts of television. It's bad yes, but please don't pity me. Instead you can send flowers and other get well tokens through cable channel 503. It'll be sure to get to me that way.

The illness came quite suddenly and I was able to follow it's wretched progress the whole through my body. In fact the entire process of going from being well to sick took about 3 and a half minutes- one moment i was sitting back, enjoying a toothpick and thinking about the future
while the next moment i was unable to breathe, my neck swelled up as though god had served a burning tennis ball from way up in that great-court-in-the-sky(tm), a hellova shot that landed right back in my throat. The bully.

I couldn't breathe or swallow or think very highly of the future. In fact all i thought of as my body temperature rose was "i have been infected by an apocalyptic virus and this is the end, this is how we will all go". It never crossed my mind that i had caught a cold- something as simple as that just doesn't fly for me in today's world. No, this was the wrath of a thousand lifetimes spent doing the wrong thing, ten-thousand lifetimes as an asshole punishable now, here at the end of the world, by a tennis ball set on fire and lodged in the throat. Now understand- I am the guy who, upon arriving home and discovering a strange smell in my apartment's bathroom one day, immediately blamed a flatulent ghost and not the plumbing. That's just the way i think.

Being sick and without medical insurance here in the last days before the aliens come to annihilate can be a problem. I'm afraid to go to the doctor for a simple cold when there are probably much more serious matters going inside of me that need investigating. So i become resigned to to few aids in regaining wellness:
1. Ricola
2. Soup
3. Prayer
4. VH1
Now one of these has betrayed me and it's not the one you're thinking.

Ricola! Why have you forsaken me!

Last night, during the closing credits to Tupac: Resurrection (part of VH1's late night rock movie showcase) i went to grab a coupla Ricola cause i like to have them in my mouth while i sleep. (I love how it creates this textured landscape in the pocket of my cheek, how they send me dreams of Swiss mountaintops overgrown with wild herbs and i like the fact that it's considered dangerous to sleep with something like that in my mouth.)
I turned on the hallway light, unwrapped the lozenge and was about to pop it into my mouth when something caught my attention- why is it speckled?

Ants. About 5 little red ants were lodged into the cough drop. I unopened another and yes, more ants. As i unwrapped the rest in the bag and found bunches of ants "sleeping" in almost every cough drop my mind raced (well, i was pretty sick and full of television so not exactly 'raced' but 'strolled') back to the many, many lozenges that i'd put into my mouth and graciously sucked on throughout the week (and while i slept), all of which were almost certainly covered with dead ants.
How did this happen? The bag contained no remnants of ants- they were all under the wrapping and stuck head first into each cough drop. Were they packaged this way? Did the ants begin their journey in a Swiss processing plant or did they go even farther back in this lozenges lifeline- did these very ants inhabit that green pasture of herbs at the base of the Alps?
Maybe these ants were from my last house in Oakland, a part of the terrible infestation that La and i battled each Spring; members of the Great Ant Marching band who entered our home from four different locations, trumpets blaring, drums calling others to this place- "they have Ricola here! and gummies! and they are too sensitive (or stupid) to really put an effort in to kill us!". But did they really march in through the house, break into the bathroom cupboards and plunge themselves into that winter's supply of herbal cough drops only to have me discover their tragic deaths a year later? If so then how did they squeeze into the tight individually wrapping? Ohmygod. I must have ate hundreds of them, sucking out their old dead blood at night in an attempt to get better. . .

Well i hope that the ants died well, with clear lungs, sinus free. I hope that the lemon and sugar made their little red bodies tingle as they sucked in more and more of the healing nectar. I hope, if they were from Oakland, that as they passed away they were swept by visions of a better place- a place of green, of butterfly fields and herbs, of mountains capped by snow and by cloud, where they and their Swiss ant kin could live peacefully in well-packed mounds of dirt stocked with the finest chocolate and spices- never a tickle in the throat again, never a need to cough or cry.