What The Arachnid Did

A slim fiber was tapping my forearm as I tried to bridge the gap between falling and actually being asleep. It was pitch black in my room so I couldn’t see exactly what it was.  It could be my hair, which is long enough to drape down to where my forearm was tucked up under my chin. Or it could be the bedclothes settling in the breeze from the ceiling fan.

The cat, Tom-meh, was in his spot at my feet so it wasn’t him whisker tickling in prelude to affection. 

Tom-meh

I flexed my forearm and the sensation ceased. 

Then it started again, so I flicked my arm slightly to dislodge the gossamer annoyance and settled into my pillow fortress aggressively confident I had solved the problem.

All eight legs touched down on my arm as though the thing had taken a few steps back and pole vaulted down onto my quivering skin.

Torn between thrashing like a maniac to get the thing off me or slowly moving toward the door to shed the arachnid outside, I attempted a little of both. I flicked on the light and stared at the interloper.

It stared back. We had a moment.

This monster was no Charlotte and I expected no pithy life affirming messages spun in a web above my head. Unless it was something like “Bite You.” 

It was one of Florida’s finest, a gigantic Wolf Spider. They like to come in out of the rain and heat. To mate. You can actually hear them scuttling about when they dash across the ceiling.

When I was younger after a night of tequila and who knows what else, I woke up splayed on my bed with a half-eaten quesadilla in my hand and one of these spiders studying me from about two inches from my face.  Life altering.

And then there’s the Jonny Quest episode with the big gi-normous one-eyed attack robot spider…Cue the high pitched scream here.

This one had a brown fuzzy body about the size of a dime and long spindly jointed legs all splayed out on my arm for stability.  Or to make its next jump. Which would be right to my face.

And what’s with the attitude?

This spider had swagger, thuggishly bobbing up and down, popping and locking,  preparing its next move.

Which was to jump down into my sheets and run like hell using the wrinkles as causeways to a hiding place behind my bed.

When the last of the adrenalin leeched out of my overtaxed system, I slept in the recliner with the lights on.

Next morning, geared up with my son’s paintball helmet, gloves, a large plastic cup and stiff paper, I set about capturing Mr. Legs “Fuzzy” McSpiderson for release outside in a more suitable environment.

Terrified of spiders, I still won’t kill one if I can help it. My method is usually really effective and better than flailing at it with a tennis racket as the thing limps away with maybe four legs left. Even more better than drowning it in bug spray until it flinches no more in a curled pile of imploded exoskeleton.

I place the cup over top of it and slide the paper between it and the wall or floor.  Then I run to the door and throw it all in the yard like a nelly-girl usually with a scream and a little nervous dance. Spiders get it and, even after a rough landing, they scurry quickly away.

I looked for Legs, but not for long.  Alas, there would be no pee-inducing nervous dance in the yard, no paper cup forced relocation of an alien life form to its former planet. 

Tom-meh found and assassinated the Spider with Swagger and left his exploded dismembered carcass on my pillow as a gift, as cats will do.

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And just so you know I am not lying, enjoy these two clips.

Random Nuggets of Wild Animal Spoor

May I respectfully encourage everyone to comment on blog utterances with abandon?  Don't be a'skeered. Go ahead! It's fun.

Here're some comments I left at my favorite Bloggers' sites like little random nuggets of wild animal spoor marking the trail where I have been.

~ I awakened draped across my bed clutching a half-eaten quesadilla in my hand once. It was still good at room temperature. I think I was trying to multi-task. Then there was the dinner-plate sized housekeeping spider that captivated my peripheral vision and I forgot all about the quesadilla and the sleeping.

~ My Dad does what that horse did. It's esophageal spasms...Same string of horrifying finger-poised-on-the-1-button-having-already-dialed-91 neck contortions followed by the saliva thing and the eventual gacking up of whatever hairball could afflict such a cranky old man. And, yes, after incinerating every last ounce of adrenalin trying to figure the thing out, seratonin overachieves and sleep, albeit weird, takes over. I can attest...

~ pibloktoq is my kind of melt-down. Not just for Inuits any more!

~ Are you Hunter S. Thompson's secret love child? Just askin'...

~ God just gave St. Agatha new boobs to to teach those medieval titty twisters a lesson. Which backfired not on God, but on St. Agatha. Unfair! God likes to use us to flip off people with whom he REALLY has an issue. Like that time I got engaged to an atheist who converted to Catholicism who then turned gay and became a priest.

Wait. Was it my boobs?

~ The Rick James version of the Bible can indeed repel vampires.

~ Booby perfection indeed! It’s funny how God or Mother Nature or whatever entity is in charge, throws down just the right message at the right time. I have Parkinson’s, and like your RA, the whole freakin’ thing pisses me off to a somewhat lunatic degree at times.

And then up pops a Booby Mushroom, and all is well again!

~ Tim Gunn should definately think about spreading his genetics around a bit. Clone a Tim Gunn Army and we’d not only achieve world peace and civility, but we’d look pretty hot too! Gather around Designers and carry on!

~ She patted her hair, tucked in any fly-away ends and checked her lipstick for smears. She then arranged her face in that reveal-nothing rictus of a dutiful Senator's wife. "It's about time I was the one calling the press conference," she thought.

~ Mom: I just read your blog and it was great.
Me: Thanks Mom.
Mom: Only one thing though. Do you need to be so, well, earthy? And when did you get a DVR?
Me: Well, Mom blogs are our “voices” and that’s how I talk. And I didn’t get a DVR.
Mom: Who’s Tim? Is he nice? Why are you calling yourself Booshy?
Me: (Ding! Light goes on) That’s not my blog you read, it’s one of my favorite ones someone else writes. You clicked on it from my site!
Mom: Oh well she’s very good. Never mind then.

~ ‘Tis all about yer scabbard and how well the sabre fits! We’re all thievin’ wenches deep down inside, so quaff your rum and boff yer bums…There be ships to pillage and spoils to divvy up!

(oh dear God! shoot me before i pirate talk again. is an exorcism in order?)

~ Just thought it was harmlessly quirky when he turned into a seething pile of aggressively horny man-sex when I said something about kangaroos in a faux Australian accent…

Until I heard his GPS.

I’m going to snuff that Olivia Newton John Jezebel dashboard poser when he’s not looking!

~ Cool adventure! Those were some smart horses jackrabbiting for distance with their legs tied together. My fart-tard horse at camp would succumb to a basic restraint requiring no knot tying - the "stomp hobble." Just got him to stand on his own reins. Goin' nowhere. If I came back in a month, I swear my equine Einstein would still be there, a moldering corpse with the reins still under his dorky hoof! I stomp hobbled him frequently in the center of the ring where others of his kind could point and laugh at his doofy-ness; payback for when he bit me hard in the stomach once.

~ It’s Florida here. I frequently hear the soft “tick, tick, — tick, tick, tick – scurrrrrry,” of dinner-plate sized arachnids (There ya go Tim, exacerbate THAT!)as they traverse the bedroom ceiling at night in the flippin’ dark. Catch these freaks of tropical nature in a maglite beam and they jump aggressively forward in a blur of eight-legged alien horror, challenging like drunken hairy wind-up toys from Planet 9. And yet, with plastic cup and a paper plate I still catch and release. Trying hard not to irritate my already shaky karma.

~ Oompa-loompas spontaneously generate. Just leave damp rags, jolly rancher watermelon candies, and some taco meat in a warm dark corner free of drafts and they'll emerge in 10 days in their nymph form.

~ In the throes of that very same technicolor yawn, caused by too many shots of tequila and possibly the ingestion of the worm, a roommate of mine in college decided to pull up a laundry hamper and just bare her soul about how much she disliked my every molecule of being. She did hold my hair however in an act of thin compassion.