Well, friends, family, and loved ones, it finally happened. I had a run in with a spider that met all the criteria for me to do a new spider post. (Namely, I ran into a spider, and my reaction was funny enough to document.) Naturally, this blog is the most important thing in my life, coming in far ahead of family, friends, my actual job that pays me in real, American dollars, physical comfort, and so on. So why does it take me so long to update between posts, you ask? I'll tell you: any professional writer knows that the key to good writing is accurate research. So that's what I've been doing. Tons and tons of research. Now, to the layperson, this may look like me sitting around, watching funny videos of kittens on the internet, but I assure you, this is a vital part of the process. Because, you see, if I sit around long enough, spiders inevitably build webs all over my house, get productive jobs at the Horror manufacturing plant, get married, eat their husbands heads, and settle down to have 10,000,000,000 babies. You know, the american spider dream.
And once they've done all that, one day I will decide to do something that will cause me to meet one of them. And that's what this blog is all about. Take, for instance, what happened to me today.
So, once a year my mother's side of the family gets together for a family reunion, there are games and swimming, and this year I'm pretty sure someone said we are having a bouncy castle. So you can imagine how excited I am for this event. Anyways, I needed to pack for this momentous occasion, and naturally my first thought was: "I know! I think I'll subject my nearest and dearest to what I like to think of as 'music' and bring my guitar!"
Now, I believe I've mentioned before that my living room looks like it was designed as a labyrinth to contain the Minotaur, but if the architect of said labyrinth only had access to guitars and amplifiers. There's a lot of musical crap in the living room, is what I'm trying to say. At any rate, I've made a few (mostly futile) attempts to clean and organize, with the result that my guitar cases mostly live behind the couch. You, know, the place that basically doubles as suburbs for spiders (Or the outskirts of Hell, as I prefer to call it.) (Not its real name, of course. The developer wouldn't allow it. They had to choose between "Willow-Brook Farms," and "Oth'pthalla, the Unmentionable Lands, Where Hope Goes to Die.")
You can see where this is going.
Anyways, I get out my guitar case and there are a few cobwebs on it, but nothing crazy. Exactly what you would expect from the aftermath of just having destroyed the homes of fifty spider families.
As I go to unzip the case, however, I notice what appears to be an egg sac on one side of the case. Now this will not stand. Research is research, but I refuse to let some eight legged horror from the shadow realms hatch it's evil brood all over my sweet beloved guitar's protective case. So I got a screwdriver to scrape it off (as one does,) and squished the ever-loving Jiminy crickets out of it with my flip-flop. (Of course.)
If that was all, I wouldn't be writing this today. I squish egg-sacs all the time. Literally dozens per day. (Not literally.) Anyways, I go to put my guitar in the case, and right there on the front of me is an enormous freaking spider!
This is where my years of training took over. I started my attack with a psychological element, by jumping backwards and saying all the curse words I know. I did this based on the assumption that the spider had laid the eggs I had just destroyed and I presumed that like all mothers, (especially mine) she would be offended by the cursing and it would distract her from the fact that a) I had just killed all her children, and b) I fully intended to kill her as well.
Now, the spiders I usually deal with in my household are wolf spiders, which means that they look terrifying, are tremendously quick, and are basically completely harmless. If it wasn't for the fact that they usually choose to show up in and around my personal business, I would have no problem with them at all. This spider though, was a different beast. It was round, and glossy, and I was 99% sure I had discovered the famous and horrifying black widow in its natural habitat.
If you read my last post, concerning horror movies, you will remember that I mentioned something about the questionable motives of their protagonists. Basically, the inevitable urge to do really silly things that may or may not get them killed. Now given what I said at the beginning of this post about research, it would be very easy to write this off as a courageous, or even (dare I say it?) noble attempt to keep my beautiful and nice-smelling readers informed with the most up-to-date information on what spiders, exactly, live in my house, but I cannot tell a lie. Basically, sometimes you do dumb crap because you feel like it. Probably there is a psychological term for it, and I wish I knew what it was, because it would make justifying my stupid shenanigans much easier
At any rate, I grabbed my trusty screw driver, and attempted to flip it over to verify said Black-Widowness. And this is where things got really weird. Usually when you start missing around with spiders, they run away as quickly as their horrifying number of legs will let them go. This one did not do that. It actually curled up into a ball and tried to wait it out. Now, at this point, it would be nice to say that this touched me, and I let this loving spider mother loose outside, or some hippie crap like that.
I did not do that.
Having verified an entire lack of black-widow markings, I grabbed my flip-flop which was conveniently handy from earlier, and squished that spider as though I was second place in a spider-squishing contest and the front runner and I had a million dollars bet on the outcome.
Now happily secure, I went back to packing my guitar when to my dismay and horror, what do I find, but a second egg-sac tucked INSIDE my case! You might think that this would make me happy, because it proves the success of my research program, but oddly, that was not the case. I was forced to fish out my handy screwdriver again, fish out the egg-sac, and crush another 10,000,000,000 babies into oblivion.
Now that I have got myself onto an FBI watch list for typing the sentence "Crush 10,000,000,000 babies," and coincidentally having written the most metal lyrics ever at the exact same time, I'm forced to take a long hard look at my research program. Now clearly, it's been a rousing success, based on the criterion of "Number of Spiders Evan is Forced to Interact With Annually," however, after dealing with it's aftermath, I'm forced to conclude that this particular branch of research is not only unnecessary, but ultimately may hold negative consequences. So, after due consideration, I've decided to not only shut down that particular program, but to start new research in two separate fields: "Mental Health Effects of Arachnids in a Closed Environment," and " "Fire as a Method of Reducing Arachnid Populations in Urban Environments." Based on the success of my previous research, I hope to publish within the next year!
