PretentiousPie

 Ants are probably one of the better-known insects in our world. Of the family formicidae, ants are considered to be pests, and possibly for a good reason. There are more than twelve thousand different species of ants, which means there are more than twelve thousand threats to our pantries. You can ask anyone residing in the suburbs—ants are a menace. But it’s overlooked that ants are completely spectacular. Their colonies are well-oiled, high functioning machines. Superorganisms, if you will. The colony knows how to work. The dull light flooded from the city of angels, paving the way for its inhabitants. It was a bleak sunset, on

 Johnny Hoskins was a good man. He used to loan me books and mike-stands (you know, when I was thirteen with pipe dreams of being the next Joe Strummer but couldn’t play a damned chord). He even got me a subscription to the Socialists Review. One day we were reading through the latest copy, and I was stumbling on the name of some country I couldn’t even pronounce. Something with an “an” sound at the end or something. But anyway, the article was about some lady that moved there all the way from New York and about the change and shit. It was bull shit. She moved there for some stupid hippie reason, like keeping the peace. I

 When I was young, I couldn’t wait to grow up. After a while, I was dreading it. Unless of course, I could be just like him. See, I had this neighbor, Johnny Hoskins. He was a bitter old fuck of a guy that drank and cussed like a sailor. My parents were idiots to let me hang around him. I swear he lived through more shit than anyone else on the planet. Born sometime late in the forties, the dude had seen it all. The cold war, Vietnam, the hippie revolution, the punks when they tried to take over the city. He had literally seen it all. For a long time it felt like God entered the room whenever he walked in. I still don’t know

when we let balloons go, or when they fly away, where do they go? do they fade away? do they get hit by planes or birds or whatever? do the clouds eat them? or are they crushed under the pressure? do they make it out of the atmosphere, only to be destroyed by satelites? what if they keep going? and they go on and on, further out into space until they break free from our solar system and make it through the kaiper belt alive, out of the galaxy with an "au revoir" to the milky way, and deeper into the universe? maybe a microscopic speck of dust, propelled by a nearby collision between two monstrous bodies of rock and ice, shoots through