I was thinking of that song, "Clouds in My Coffee" the other day as I looked into a cup of my freshly-made morning brew. The whole thing started when I made a cup and then went to the bathroom, only to return and find that a wayward ant had exterminated himself in my cup.

I almost drank his little corpse and then I caught myself as I started to pick it out and drink the coffee anyway. It had stopped swimming by the time I found it and I just couldn't do it. It wasn?t one of those little sugar ants, it was a great big black carpenter ant, so it would have been easy to fish out. On the other front, I don't know why it matters if he was swimming or not, but it really does. Having an ant take a swim in your coffee and having an ant die in your coffee are two different elements altogether.

After all, I thought, if it can kill an ant, what can it do to me? The ant might have had a heart attack, but I really don't know. I can imagine that a cup of coffee to an ant would be like a small pool of expresso to a human. I can see a heart attack.

But getting back to the Carly Simon tune, I hummed a few bars of it as I unceremoniously dumped the little guy in the sink and rinsed him down with cold water. I accidentally got confused and added in a few bars of "You're so vain," but I don't think the ant noticed - after all, the song could have been about him. If there were clouds in my coffee, and the ant lived a good life, then perhaps it went on to that great steamy spirit in the sky, I pondered. However, on second thought, that isn't exactly what I would envision when it comes to being caffeinated to death in a cup of boiling hot coffee.

Shuddering at the thought, or perhaps because I splashed a good helping of cold water onto myself as I rinsed out my coffee mug, I managed to recover enough to wipe away my tears and pour myself another cup. Afterwards, I kind of felt guilty for wasting an entire cup of coffee over one little ant.

It is like dropping something in the floor - if you have company, it usually goes in the trash. But if no one is around, I usually eat it anyway. There is just something about your own germs that don't seem quite so nasty.

I even have a little blessing ritual that goes along with it. You look for foreign objects, blow it off (or rinse it off, depending on what it is) and then shrug and tell yourself, "My floor is clean." This may or may not be true at any given time, but that's alright. Of course, if it is a soft, moist something, like a pineapple slice, I wouldn't do it - but a potato chip? A few germs never killed anyone. Alright, so maybe the could. But I don't know of very many potato chip-borne diseases. In addition, a friend told me the other day that these germ-killing soaps and things need to be eliminated because they help weaken our tolerance to germs. He suggested that the common cold might become deadly at some point. You spend your whole life killing 99.9 percent of your germs and then you take out the trash one day and poof, it's all over.

Given these new details, eating a few germs might save your life and the lives of future generations. Therefore, it is not only good to eat such things, but it is also your duty to help save our country. While this varies slightly from the motherly, "Do it for the starving children in China," times are changing. All the Chinese people are now eating at McDonalds. I wouldn't feed something I dropped to a guest, mainly because I would eat it myself first. But can you imagine a guest asking, "Gee, how did this gravel get in my hamburger?"

A lot of folks just can't understand the finer points of the whole germ-tolerance theory, but as long as I drop it, those are still clouds in my coffee.

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