http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/53244483/

dA's layout is better for reading a lot of text.

heh i like it. it made me smile but i dont know why.
by the way i noticed you like tom waits, have you heard of nick cave? hes in a similar vein you might like it.

Oh yeah, I've heard of Nick Cave. My brother wanted me to download some of his stuff for him sometime, though I didn't check it out myself. Captain Beefheart is also pretty similar in style; in fact, it's my understanding that he and the Beat-generation poets inspired Tom Waits' style.

By the way, what do you think of the idea of me throwing in a little detail of the ant gathering the twigs from a bird's nest? Sort of a metaphor for things like imperialism, then maybe change around the ending where my questioning of the ant is less of a need-to-know and more criticism (like, what could he possibly be building to justify tearing apart a bird's nest)?

captain beefheart makes me laugh. hes stopped doing music now though hasnt he.

i like the idea it adds an extra element of depth, however, i dont know if i would recognise it as a metaphor for imperialism as much as i woul think it was a metaphor for loss and gain, when somthing is going badly theres somthing going well on the flipside, like a yin and yang balance idea. thats how id interpret it anyway. this would kind of fit in to your changing places with the old man. at least it would in my head.
then again im not 100% certain of what imperialism is.

Imperialism is when the more developed nation take a smaller nation for their natural resources and stuff like that. A good example is how England used to have control over India, with the British East India Company.

I wouldn't really expect the idea of imperialism to come into the reader's mind, but more just the general idea of the process people do of taking from others for their own gain.

I liked your story Tim. It's funny, today at work i ask myself the same question they both asked, out of the blue...