Spider...Man

My wife doesn't care much for spiders, but I don't really mind them at all.

In fact, I believe spiders are your friends. I believe this because if it weren't for spiders, you know, if they all suddenly disappeared, in about six weeks we would be up to our hips in insects. And I really do hate insects. Slimy, filthy, disease-carrying insects! I hate them.

And this is from the boy who grew up in Miami where there are more insects per square inch than most other tropical rain forests. Oh, maybe that's why!

Since I do not carry my wife's gene for irrational fear of arachnids, she calls on me to administer certain 'tasks'. Like last night when she noticed a tiny little mark on the ceiling over the bed that turned out to be a spider.

"Get him for me, would you?", she asked. "he's going to drop on top of me at night and bite me!" Sure, spider-person can take of that. She didn't explain how she knew the spider was of a masculine bent.

This is what the spider looked like, except it was rather smaller than a dime. Feeling very masculine, I went down to get a glass and I asked her to turn the alarm off for me.

"Why?", she wanted to know.

"Because I'm going to throw him outside. Spiders are your friends."

"Hmmph!" she hmmphed at me, "he'll just come back in. I would have flushed him down the toilet!"

"Of course you would have", I mumbled to myself, not having the nerve to say it out loud. "That's why I'M getting him down from the ceiling instead of you." Hah! Don't tell me I don't know that discretion is the better part of valor. This is not my first hayride.

I was getting the glass because I know enough about spiders to know their hairy little velcro legs don't work on glass because there's nothing for them to latch onto.

Magazine publishers very kindly provide a supply of those little thin stiff card inserts whose only use appears to be to scrape spiders into a glass once you've placed the glass over the little bugger. So... thanks for that.

So, I took him (or her) downstairs, opened the door to the deck and gave the glass a sharp fling to send him off into the night. It was a sharp fling, just short of the fling that would have sent the glass along with it's occupant into the darkness. As I shut the door, confident of my long-tested skill at such tasks (I said I grew up in Miami), I happened to glance down and I felt my eyes bug out of my head (sorry, I didn't get a photo).

The sticky little freak was still in the glass! And I had given him my best fling. Many thoughts crowded into my fevered skull.

Had I lost my flinging skill? Was I seeing things? Had I imagined the fling, you know, projected it into my memory like we talked about a couple of posts ago?

Or, most likely, this was a mutant spider capable of walking on glass!

Holy crap! This would change everything. Spiders would be able to get to us anywhere. Could they talk now, too? Could they do long division? I can't even do long division anymore! We're doomed! Maybe I'd better get this guy to a scientist to see if he's developed suction cups on this legs.

But it was not to be, because my instincts had kicked in. Before my brain knew what I was doing, my body had opened the door and launched that sucker with enough sub-orbital force that Gus Grissom would have been proud. It's possible that he's still accelerating in the air somewhere over Schenectady. So I'll never know what his secret was, I just know he's not doing his evil dance in this house any more.

Disclaimer!! - Don't mess with spiders. Some of them can kill you or provide you with a nasty necrotic, open suppurating wound that will take months to heal. Leave them alone, they'll eat the bugs for you without your help.

I was going to close this post with an image of some terrible spider bite but you can go look them up yourself, they're too gross even for me!

Instead, I'm going to leave you with this example of something not to do with a spider. Even if you are Spiderman!