Chapter 59: Pub Crawl

Four supervillains walk into a bar...

31 January 2026

I’ve been having weird dreams lately. The latest, which was so vivid I’m pretty sure I wasn’t really asleep, included a thinly-veiled plot line in which Stephen Worm Tongue Miller, Pam Saruman Bondi, Kristi the White Witch Noem (on loan from Narnia), and Vladimir Sauron Putin, riding the four horses of the Apocalypse, crash through the entrance of The Prancing Pony, strip and steal all of its assets, imprison and torture and execute all of the occupants, and burn the place to the ground. Then they move on to the next pub…

It must have been something I ate, or et.

~

After that suspicious beginning, I decided I needed a hard reset break from the daily firehose of news from dystopia. I booted up my now ancient Switch, fired up my controller, ran updates (even my updates needed updates), and launched the most innocuous, peace-loving game I could find: Animal Crossing - New Horizons. There was my island, looking exactly as it had looked last time I logged in way back in November of 2022. My sweet little in-game character popped up in front of her house, shook the cobwebs from her hair, and awaited my input. Poor thing was still wearing her steampunk costume from Halloween.

I sent her back inside to change clothes, and she immediately ran into the most dreaded calamity one can face in Animal Crossing: a bug invasion in her house. They were skittering everywhere. Eww eww eww eww. It took ages to clear them all out. As soon as I stomped one dead, another one would appear. Once the bugs had all been offed, mini me could wander around breaking rocks and planting crops, rerouting rivers and sculpting landscapes to her heart’s content, and occasionally interacting with villagers who would say nice things like “Gosh, I’ve missed you – I’m so glad you’re back!” No judgement, no expectations, just welcome. Whew. A safe space.

Eventually I had to return to real life, and a nap. Because life imitates art, I awoke this time to actual live itty bitty ants…several…(ok – too many to want to ignore or count or deal with at all). What the actual heck. It’s not actually a surprise - ants are a thing here. When the weather shifts, i.e., when their ant villages get flooded by rain, they sneak indoors through the itty bitty gaps (designed to admit ants, apparently) in the window seals. They were on a hunt for higher ground and whatever sustenance they could get, and they were looking everywhere, including inside my high capacity buffering cannula (the gadget that sends oxygen into my nose so I can keep breathing and thinking).

I can handle a lot of things. I do handle a lot of things I’d really rather not deal with. But this? No. That’s a non-negotiable thing. Sorry, ants. You’re cute and all, but no. If I were a stomper, I would have been stomping little bugs with all my might. My stomping days are over. So I visualized myself dancing instead, as I sprayed those little blighters with kitchen degreaser. I know…I was doing ant eradication. It rankles that it has to even be humans versus the ittybittybugs at all.

Right in the middle of this whole it’s way too early to be hunting down ant colonies even if it is Saturday unscheduled cleaning event – we were sucking ants into the vacuum cleaner tank for immediate deportation back to the great outdoors (maybe not the outdoors they’re accustomed to, but outside my doors, anyway) – my analytical brain said, “yo – this is kinda metaphorical, don’t you think?” So of course the spicy dot-connecting side of my brain said, “Duh.” Because life doesn’t just imitate art. Art takes a good hard look at life, turns it over, twists it, bends it, and takes it apart bit by bit to show us ourselves from angles we’d never see otherwise, with the un-ironical result of we ourselves and us saying, “well, dammit.” And then my spicy brain started singing a little ditty it invented all by its own self. It goes like this:

“Not in my back yard, nimby,

not through my windows or my doors, nimby,

not in my house or in my furniture, nimby,

not anywhere, not even one at a time, nimby nimby….”

That became another dammit moment, because this is undoubtedly pretty much what the New England natives were singing after a few seasons of “hosting” the uninvited colonizers from Old England. I bet they even added a verse to the effect of “We never shoulda let them get off their boats.”

Anyway, the ants have now all been suck-ered and sent on their way to the merry old ant afterlife, and I’m sitting here thinking about the joys of living in diverse, welcoming, inclusive, supportive communities and the horrors of having those communities raided by invaders who appeared to be decent enough people right up to the moment when they donned their Call of Duty cosplay outfits because they apparently think they’re IRL video game “warriors,” and they seem to think that being bigger and meaner and heavily armed makes them divine conquerors by right.

So just as I’m asking myself for the umpteenth time what I’m gonna do about it (or even what I can do about it beyond what I’m already doing, which is everything my limited physical and financial abilities can manage), just when I’m feeling frustrated and stymied again, my amazing artist friend @maggiemetcalf sends me “Cassandra the Dancing Dragon” as an early birthday present reminder that dancing – a rhythmic form of bug stomping – is an excellent form of resistance. She’s right, of course. Cassandra’s timely arrival, surely cosmically facilitated, tells me that dragons need and want to be part of the resistance, too, to remind us that we need both joy and resilience in the fight. She also reminds me that dragons eat apocalyptic horse riders for lunch, so she’ll be quite handy to have around.

<Cassandra the Dancing Dragon – original art by Maggie Metcalf ©2026>

So, let’s dance, and maybe nap a bit, and then get back to doing everything we can do to repel purveyors of horror and reclaim safe spaces for all of us.

~

Thanks for keeping me company here and sharing my “rich interior life” adventures.

This is a reader supported substack. Paid subscriptions directly support my work by helping to keep my power on and my internet connected. Every little bit helps – thank you.

~

Please note: All writing and photography in this post is the original work of the author unless otherwise noted, and is subject to applicable US Copyright restrictions and regulations. CJ’s Dancing On My Own Grave © 2026

~