I really have no reason to complain. I'm in good health, and none of my family or friends is in desperate trouble. My mortgage got paid this month, my car is running well, and there's enough wood to last me through the rest of the winter. My life is actually fine, it only feels like I'm about to go stark raving mad.

For one thing, ants are invading the house and walking off with all the cat food. They've made a little black trail of themselves from the back door, along the kitchen wall behind my grandmother's old high-boy, down one short step, and then across the tile to the cat food bowl. They have somehow managed to lift pieces of dry cat food — which in human terms would be like me and all my friends getting together to raise a gas station off its foundations and take it home with us — and drag them back toward the door.

This is amazing, laudable, and revolting, all at the same time. But mostly what it is is expensive. I know this because every so often I've had to get an exterminator to spray the outside of the house. One trail of ants and some missing cat food I can handle, but it doesn't stop there. Unchecked, soon there will be ants crawling all over the ceiling, getting into the flour, the sugar, the yellow raisins — their writhing mass too horrible to contemplate.

And speaking of revolting, there's half a squirrel currently lying on the living room carpet. This used to be a whole squirrel, which, when the cat brought it in this morning, grossed me out so much I walked right out of the house and closed the door behind me, paced around in the driveway thinking that I just couldn't stand it any more, the way the cats are always bringing in gruesome things and there's no one here but me to cope. Bad enough to have to pick up cat barf that has little feet in it. Bad enough the sweet yellow and black feathers I keep finding under the bed, and the tidy piles of rodent intestines here and there.

I eventually went back inside where Gracie was crouching over her prize, picked up the squirrel by its beautiful gray tail, and threw it off the deck. I closed the doors and windows so she couldn't bring it back in. But then, you know how it is — I went about my day and it got sunny and I left the back door open and now here's the squirrel's nether half: tail, back legs and most of its torso with a gaping wide red hole at the top, making me want to puke. And I don't want to know what happened to the front half. I hope it's at least the same squirrel.

Most of the time I love the world, but right now I'm on Woody Allen's side: I am "at two" with nature. How am I supposed to get any writing done with battalions of ants crawling everywhere? It just makes me itch. And what if the cats bring in some godawful thing while I'm trying to teach poetry in the living room?

I need help. At least tell me how to get bloodstains off the carpet.