Brenna Hillier last compiled a catalogue of imaginary girlfriends for us.
What are spiders even for? Has anybody ever proved they fulfil a useful ecological niche? I ask this while covered in dozens of mosquito bites, and surrounded by the buzzing of flies, before you break in with that guff about them keeping insects under control. What possible use is a predator that sits around hoping the more stupid examples of its prey will just happen to fall into its web? Spiders are probably just making insects stronger, via survival of the fittest. A three dollar plug-in zapper is several thousands times more effective than a spider. My mother once told me the resident huntsman kept other spiders away. “Mother,” I said, with great patience under the circumstances, “That is like hiring a thief to guard your treasures, only the thief is terrifying and could kill you at any moment.”
I come from a long line of arachnophobes (and pyromaniacs and psychics, but that’s a story for another time). My father is terrified of spiders. My grandfather was terrified of spiders. My uncle is so terrified of spiders that he once slammed a log through the windshield of the bobcat he was driving at the time, just to slap away a huntsman. My father, surveying the damage, correctly concluded that he had acted rationally.
Family legend has it my first Australian forefather left Kent after being ordered by his master to get a spider out of the bathtub. Preferring to risk Penal Transportation, he cleared out the cutlery and legged it (bravely making it as far as the stables before being collared and hauled away). England is an old country, sagging with history and especially with cobwebby little corners in looming country mansions. Australia, he reasoned, is a roomy country. Plenty of space to get out in the open and build a spider-proof house with glass walls, so you can see them coming and load the trebuchets.
If this does not demonstrate the need for wider education of the downtrodden masses I don’t know what excess of ignorance is required. In Australia the spiders bow the floorboards when they scuttle across the living room carpet; they are so big that, so the old gaming joke goes, they have health bars. The ones that aren’t gigantic are poisonous, and either kill you so fast you can’t get help or so painfully that you wish they’d just get on with it. (Nobody has died of spiderbite in Australia since the 1980’s, apparently, because of the wide availability of anti-venom. Possibly this is spider propaganda.)
While my defensive tactic against spiders is to lay down enough barrier spray to raise a visible welt at all entrances, my housemate prefers a reactive response. Many are the mornings I have awoken to the merry sound of him screaming in horror at whatever has crawled out of his bath drain, followed by the whirring of the vacuum, which goes on for several minutes in order to “break all their little legs”. (Yes, I’m sorry, but otherwise they might crawl back out and seek revenge, he says.)
There really are a lot of legs. Too many legs. Far too many knees. It’s unnerving. It was my theory for some time that spiders did not originate on Earth; they were the putrid offspring of Ridley Scott-style aliens and demons from some forgotten dimension accessible only in all-night shopping malls in the middle of convention season. Now that I am a modern enlightened woman I know that their offensively non-standard physiology has to do with the Earth’s lacklustre approach to mass extinction.
Earth is not a great place to be a species because it’s forever being hit by space rocks, having ice ages, letting bacteria fill the atmosphere with that radically poisonous “oxygen” stuff, and routinely setting off massive chains of volcanic explosions, the seismic equivalent of rolling over in bed and farting hard enough to blow your partner, pet and duvet across the room, where they explode.
Every time life starts really getting somewhere on Earth, really settling in as a dominant paradigm of megafauna, something horrible happens and it all goes back to the drawing board. That’s why pretty much everything* wandering about on the surface today is built to the same basic plan of “head and spine; limbs optional”: everything else is dead.
If you go to museums (I recommend the old-fashioned and perfectly lovely South Australian Museum, if you’re ever in the hemisphere) you can sometimes see slabs of sea bed covered in fossils from, for example, the Cambrian period, in which the great canvas that is evolution got into the hands of forces equivalent to you in your second year of art school, you know, that phase where you smoked a lot of clove cigarettes, wore berets and went out with a philosophy major (thank you) while turning in decomposing sandwiches draped over chrome-plated dildoes and sneering a lot.
Most of those things went extinct, the way most of everything that has ever lived on Earth has gone extinct, but knowing they were there exposes the contingencies of evolution. If you don’t think about evolution that much – and why would you? You are behind on Hannibal – it’s easy to think of it as somehow purposeful; as having intentionality, or a plotline, with the end result of intelligent chimpanzees. Human beings are the perfect shape for human beings – mostly – so naturally this is how Things Are Supposed To Be. But life could have evolved in trillions of different directions and we could just as easily (if not more easily) have been seventeen-legged slug-like creatures who suck food up through holes on the back of their heads and consider it perfectly normal. Being the shape we are is exceedingly unlikely (this is one of many reasons why Star Trek is ridiculous but if you mention this while Captain Janeway is talking I will cut you) because being any shape is extremely unlikely.
In this context then, spiders make sense. They are a leftover from a time before our particularly attractive branch of terrestrial life rose to dominance. Unfortunately, they are not a dead end but a rather successful model. They hang around reminding us that if we could be transported into contingent realities populated by the never-born descendents of things that were less good at hiding when the rocks fell out of the sky we would be terrified and cry and run off cliffs. Probably while the seventeen-legged slug things laughed at our unwieldy shapes.
Something about a creature with eight legs and an exoskeleton reaches right down into my hindbrain – and the hindbrain of anyone likely to contribute increased life-expectancy to our gene pool – and flips all the switches marked “horror”. I often try to reason with spiders. “Please just don’t ever move, ever,” I beg them. “It will all be fine if you never move in that inexpensive stop-motion animation that makes me want to claw off my own skin and bleach my eye sockets.”
Later, the debate takes a different tone. “Please move, spider,” I plead. “Please don’t sit there, three feet from my face, staring with your ten billion tiny eyes and gently twitching your enormous fangs. Scuttle off. The momentary fear will be worth it. I just don’t want to see you at all.”
Then, perhaps encouraged by a few lobbed shoes, the spider goes away, and you no longer know where it is. “Where are you, you fucker,” I roar, perched on a carefully inspected stool in the center of the room, waving a can of Mortein and a lighter (a thing you must never do except in extreme cases of spidmergency). “Are you in my bed? Are you under the toilet rim? Are you crouched on the shelves ready to spring on my fingers as soon as I reach for a Margaret Atwood novel? I need to see you.”
I have heard it espoused that spiders would be much more bearable “if they would just make a high-pitched screaming sound, so you know where they are at all times.”
I patted the hand of the earnest-faced friend who suggested this. And then I went home, to cry in the shower. I will never sleep again.
*
*”Everything” by broadly recognisable type. There are more species of insects on Earth than there are human beings, let alone individuals – many of them in your mattress. Try not to think about that at two in the morning when you wake up worrying about the super volcanoes.
Tags: animals, brenna hillier, insects, spiders
I understand.
The great joy of my two cats is that they eat all the spiders and all the flies in my house. I have seen only three spiders in the last two years, and one of them was dismembered bits in cat puke.
The old place was full of spiders, and one once crawled over MY FACE AS I WAS WAKING UP AND OH GOD
IT WAS A HORRID BLOBBY ONE WITH THOSE FLOATY LEGS SO THEY LOOK LIKE THEY ARE FLOATING
(British spiders in order of most loathed first: Brown angular ones, horrid floaty blobby ones, big grey scuttly ones)
Man I guess it’s all relative cause in the colonies daddy longlegs are maybe one of the more pleasant things to greet you in the morning. http://www.dirkspestmanagement.com/wp-content/upl…
I’m not talking about daddy long legs. Daddy longlegs fly, and I quite like them.
No, there is a type of spider with a horrid round blobby body and nasty long legs and it moves like each leg is being independently controlled and urrrg urrrrg urrrrg
Ok that was the most floaty spider I was aware of, you are perfectly free to keep your awful monarchist spiders that all float down here
I think this is one of those separated by a common language things. The spidery/10x big mosquito looking things that fly, I’d call a cranefly. Daddy longlegs to me are these
And to me they are harvestmen, not real spiders.
I remember those British spiders from when I lived there! Every year, around August, it seemed to become “Spider Season”, and those guys would make their webs and chill out in the dozens in the railings of the bridge I walked over to get to Tesco. It was the season of infinite tiny screams.
I cannot BELIEVE the tourism board isn’t jumping on this whole “spider season” concept.
Well THAT photo just woke me right the fuck up.
I thought that would be a picture of a daddy long legs but IT WASN’T and now the inside of my brain itches.
I screeched in my office.
That looks like a house centipede? Gross as all get out, but I let them live unless they get in my space. They don’t eat my food, my books (like silverfish), or my flesh; they just eat other bugs.
The things we called daddy longlegs growing up were these guys, though they don’t look so big and gross in person.
That’s what I call a daddy longlegs, and I don’t mind those. That other thing is a horror of a thousand legs and it needs to die, posthaste.
Yep, that’s totally a house centipede. I try to leave them alone too (for the reasons you listed plus the fact that, if you kill them, they make a mess and their detached legs KEEP WIGGLING), but the reality is I loathe them. Utterly.
This one time in either late middle school or high school, I was at a sleepover and we saw a house centipede in the corner…. and then the three of us spent the rest of the night huddled in the the bathtub (it had sides and was therefore defensible). (I actually was not as freaked out as my friends were but, you know, group mentality.)
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS THAT.
No amount of money in the world would get me to click on that link.
I’m crying.
Obligatory What ARE you Daddy Longlegs
AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH. Vomit vomit vomit why!
Also, we call those “Cop Mustaches” where I live.
I love this taxonomy dearly.
1. This was goddamn delightful.
2. Is this another good place to tell my spider story? I have told it here before. I was in my living room, minding my own business, and heard a small, fairly regular clicking noise. I realized it was going to bother me and wandered around until I found the source: a wee spider snacking on a bug in such a way that it was making AN AUDIBLE SOUND. I thanked it for disposing of the bug but informed it that it was bothering me and then I sucked it up with the vacuum.
My favorite gif of all time, that one.
Yeah they bite the heads off of pincher bugs. I find heads in random spots… bleh.
The human brain is wonderfully tuned to protect us from creeping horrors by magnifying tiny sounds. I once woke up to the soft scuttling of something crawling up the inside of my mosquito net (marvellous yes technology is really working for me) and found one of those stinging ants as long as my thumb about 20cm from my face. Woken by the footsteps of an ant! That’s real princess and the pea stuff, although significantly less pleasant.
GOOD JOB, BRAINS. (Bad job, mosquito net.)
DON’T CRY IN THE SHOWER THE SHOWER IS A SPIDER’S FAVORITE PLACE (shudder, shudder, shudder)
Shower spiders are the worst. I am very myopic and so I can’t see them when I get in the shower, and then I turn around and OH GOD IT IS NEXT TO MY FACE GET AWAY GET AWAY
Spiders in the shower are better than spiders everywhere else because:
– you can easily drown them and wash them away
– if you resort to fire bathrooms are generally pretty resistant to massive conflagrations
– you can always have a wash at the kitchen sink, whereas going without food or sleep because one is squatting malevolently above your fridge or bed is a problem
There’s a children’s song in Germany about spiders liking to sit in the bathtub.
Once I was on a night hike in a forest where there are known tarantulas (looking back, WHY?) and when I was sad I could spot no cool critters by their eye shine, one of my companions helpfully pointed out that all the pretty specks of glitter covering the forest floor were ACTUALLY THE GLOWING EYES OF HUNDREDS OF SPIDERS LOOKING BACK AT ME.
The rest of the hike was not as enjoyable.
NOOOOOOOOOOPE NO NO NO NO
:-O
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Please tell me where this was so I can never, ever go there.
It was in the rainforests of Borneo, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised, but still. Up until then the spiders and I had been doing a pretty good job of each pretending the other didn’t exist, and I was happy that way.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
NOPE.
There aren’t enough nos in the world.
Thank you for this GIF (my all time favourite).
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:
By the way, in my home county, there is a type of spider that lives in the water and is about massive across and nooooo
http://www.countryfile.com/news/uks-largest-spide…
“Unfortunately, the fen raft spider is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. It has also been categorised as needing special help if it is to recover and thrive again in England.”
OH THANK FUCK.
I used to LIKE walking in the fens
I have never been to Norfolk, and now I never will.
It walks on water and catches small fish. I have to admire it for that alone. Admire from a safe distance. Like from across the ocean.
It’s a good thing you are oceans and continents away from my office, which is in a drafty old building. I find living spiders hanging out in arachnoinappropriate places a couple times a month: on my desk, on the wall above my desk, in a sheaf of papers on my desk. Desks are not for spiders!
They get scooped up onto a sheet of paper and shaken out of my second floor window. Can a spider survive this? I do not know.
A spider survives all.
‘Arachnoinappropriate’ is my new favorite word.
Am I the only one who quite likes spiders?
YES
Yes.
My friend Min likes SPECIFIC spiders and not others.
Specific KINDS of spiders, or, like, George the Spider is an okay dude?
Specific KINDS of spiders. She is a spider bigot.
I too am a spider bigot. Here is a list of spiders I like:
Yellow garden spiders that build giant gorgeous orb webs in the summer and do not touch human things
Spiders that have mirrors all over them and are also only photographs of spiders
Spiders that are not on my desk
The rest of them will be flicked right out of my office window, unless they are small and brown, in which case I have to check them for a fiddle pattern to determine fight or flight.
I’ll admit to being a spider bigot, too. Especially spiders who are NOT carrying their young on their backs, I like those spiders alright.
I, too, am a spider bigot. I tend to enjoy spiders I see in person (I live in New England, so they are generally small, helpful things) and hate spiders I see on the internet (HUNTSMAN WHY)
I am also a spider bigot! I like jumping spiders, in particular a species that (I just looked this up) is apparently known as the Gray Wall Jumper. All other spiders can go fuck themselves.
P.S. To find out the name of my spider friends I had to look at a list of all the spiders that live in my area and now I can’t put my feet back down under my desk because I know all of those spiders are lying in wait for me please someone help.
I also like jumping spiders. peacock spiders. so cute. so tiny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GgAbyYDFeg
you are not! I actually think they are kind of cute. All those legs.
Nope. I let them hang out if they make a web that isn’t somewhere in the way. Once, I woke up and a spider had created a giant web that went from one wall to the ceiling fan in my kitchen- right over my kitchen island. I felt bad destroying all his work, but he had to take his business outside.
http://instagram.com/p/N3nahnDxGf/
I like spiders! They weave pretty webs, eat mosquitoes, bite the heads off of men, what’s not to like? I get a little edgy when they’re in the shower, but generally will coexist peacefully.
I have, on the other hand, spent a lot of energy trying to convince roommates to get rid of cockroaches for me.
Ok, not so much “men” as “males of their species”, but it’s the attitude that counts.
I was about to ask exactly what kind of spiders you live with… Misandry spiders?
Shelob
No, I like spiders. Really big tarantulas weird me out from too close to them, but generally I’m fine with most others.
I love spiders! I catch them in jars and identify them in a little notebook before I put them outside. I also mark how many spiders of a certain kind I have seen each year.
I once found a hobo spider on my pillow and caught it in a jar and put it outside. My partner was horrified.
Jumping spiders are the puppy of the arthropod world and may be tolerated OUTSIDE, otherwise yes you are the only one
Another arachnophile! Yay!
My husband is an arachnophobe. We agree beautifully on everything except spiders.
I like spiders, period. I have a “live and let live” attitude towards them and frankly, kinda admire their tenacity and skill to live in nooks and crannies. Jeezus, I think I just described myself.
I adore spiders! I rescue them when they fall in water and usher them off of crowded sidewalks and give the ones in my house pet names and completely forget what I’m doing when I see a particularly cute or beautiful one. Spiders are my friends. Any non-parasitic invertebrate is good, really, but spiders are a particularly classy group. I pick them up occasionally and haven’t been bitten by one since I was five (and I had accidentally stepped on that one, so its reaction was quite understandable.) Like a lot of creatures, they’re quite easy to live with if you’re polite to them. I really am sorry for people who are afraid of spiders, but not as sorry as I am for all the spiders who meet violent ends just because they got within sight of a human while going about their business. We’re a much more dangerous species. I’m not really sure why anyone is more scared of spiders than they are of each other.
Unless, that is, you have an actual phobia of them (which sounds like a terrible situation) or live in Australia, a country from which I’ve heard horror stories about just about every kind of wildlife, so quite possibly the spiders there really are all homicidal killing machines.
Maybe I should visit and meet them sometime.
They’re cool biologically and ecologically, but I can’t say as I feel particular fondness for ’em.
Nah, they’re the greatest.
I am trapped in an airport, and I am literally crying with the effort of not laughing out loud. (On the other hand, my flight has been delayed for three hours, so maybe everyone will assume I have cracked under the pressure and been driven mad.)
Laugh. Spiders are laughing at us all the time. With their many, many eyes.
Just had a knock on my door from the pest control salesman–“Half off (today only!) to take care of the brown and black widows surrounding your home!” The poor teen, just trying to make commission in his summer job, is no match for the spiders here. It’s like, every time one dies, three take its place. San Diego is not the paradise most think it is.
I am making the conscious choice to not be That Person who defends invertebrates in this comment section, though it pains me to do so.
Wait, everybody meet Kelsey:
My name is Kelsey, and I don’t know about you, but I think Spiders and Tarantulas are adorable! This is a spider appreciation blog, if you don’t enjoy spiders then please steer clear. THANK YOU FOR STOPPING BY! /
Kelsey is a TREASURE, I feel. We may disagree on things but I like her upbeat attitude and cheerful demeanor.
None of these spiders is adorable, not one.
OH god. Last night before getting in the bed I saw a giant spider scuttle up the wall quite quickly. It was killed, of course, but I couldn’t stop thinking, “where was it BEFORE?? WAS IT IN MY BED?? How long had it been there????????????”
There is a massive spider that lives outside the window in my shower. It’s like, the size of a dime, and we are friends. DO YOU HEAR THAT AUSTRALIA? SIZE OF A DIME. NOT SIZE OF A DINNER PLATE.
Was on the playground with two-year-old daughter last night. She climbed one of her usual slides and was settling in to go down until she noticed a spider sitting on the side of the entrance to the slide. She literally slammed herself against the opposite wall and yelled, “WHAT IS THAT? THAT?”
I hadn’t seen the spider, so I asked what she was talking about. She responded by backing down the ladder, saying, “No. No go down. No.”
Toddler reaction = normal, human, unfiltered, totally reasonable reaction.
The other day at work I was training a new underwriter, and she was sitting beside me at my desk. I was talking, just droning on and on, I’m sure, and … something, drifts down past my nose, probably waving as it does so because it’s so close that my breath causes it to move gently in the air. It was, of course, a spider, coming down from who-only-knows-where to render any managerial authority and dignity I might have had completely nil, as I flailed, pushed backwards in my chair and gasped, while my trainee calmly stood up and smashed it with her notebook.
I am told that Lots of Spiders in your house means you have drafts, because apparently that lets them get in and also brings them bugs to eat; they set up webs where the bugs blow in. Of course, if you seal your house too tight, you’ll asphyxiate. It’s a conundrum.
Once had a black widow in my apartment when I lived in Santa Fe, and for some reason I decided the best way to deal with it was to make sure the space was inaccessible to my cat and then wait until my then-bf and his friend were feeling really brave one night and blasted it to heck with Raid.
This was in retrospect a very strange decision.
To be fair, black widows are really frightening. Who wants to get close enough to kill it?
Another possibility would have been to take the cat and burn down the apartment.
Exactly. I’m one of those people who were born without the good sense to fear spiders and snakes, but I have no qualms about killing them in self-defense.
I live in Santa Fe and black widows are a real and serious (and completely absurd) problem here. 🙁
Eight *is* a lot of legs, David.
Where the fuck is my fucking coat?
I’m keeping an eye on all of you.
Just one?
There was a spider so BIG and horrifying in the guest bathroom that my son captured it in a Rubbermaid container and put it in the freezer so he could have it identified by professionals. The professional said something like ,’holy shit that’s a big one’ and asked if he could keep it. It was as big as my hand!
Of course we said yes
This made me actually laugh out loud.
I have possibly the worst spider story ever outside of the ones where spiDERS ARE ACTUALLY ON PEOPLE OH GODS
My parents and I went up somewhere in northern Arizona (was it Mormon Lake? Idk, I think that’s it) and as all of us were cursed with tiny bladders, we soon had to pee. There weren’t any restaurants or gas stations nearby (it was out in the middle of nowhere), but we found a nice-looking and smelling outhouse nearby. My mom reached the outhouse first and opened the door — and just stood there LAUGHING.
At first, I thought the walls and ceiling were covered in clumps of hair, but when I looked closer, I realized thEY WERE CLUMPS OF GIANT FUCKING SPINDLY SPIDERS. THE BATHROOM PROBABLY HAD MORE SPIDERS THAN THAT ONE SCENE IN THE SECOND HARRY POTTER MOVIE.
My dad and I noped out of there really fast and decided to use some nice, friendly bushes a fair distance away. I think my mom did as well, but we kinda left her behind for a while because like hell were we going back over there.
That was also the vacation where a scorpion crawled into my shirt in my suitcase and stung me twice on my arms. Good times.
“I thought the walls and ceiling were covered in clumps of hair”
This is a nightmare. I think I’d prefer the spiders.
I’ve always wondered about the pain/poison factor of scorpions. Other than the terror, of course, uh…how was the experience?
Not as bad as I expected. The scorpion looked half starved (we think it had crawled into my suitcase long before this vacation and had gotten trapped) before my dad turned it into a permanent part of the hotel’s floor. Both he and one of my close friends have gotten stung by baby scorpions on their feet and got terrible numbness and pain (friend had to dig out her old crutches from when she sprained her ankle back in middle school just so she could walk!). I only got a bit of numbness and the pain was gone by the next day.
It still hurt like hell though. 0/10 would not recommend.
This is why we have winter, people! To kill the terrifying insects and arachnids and anything that spends too much time outside. There’s like three pluses to a Minnesota winter, and this is one.
I am tired and I misread your sentence as “three pulses to a Minnesota winter,” as though Minnesota winter is a blender or perhaps a Magic Bullet. The first pulse pulverizes all insects, the second pulse turns all water into ice, etc. . .
Yup. Deserts and jungles are full of creepy crawlies. Northern latitudes are where it’s at!
But not too north of course or else you get tundra-level mosquito populations. But even then they’re not carrying dengue fever!
Gonna try to remember this during the next polar vortex.
DIE, SPIDERS, DIE!
yeah, the safest strategy here in Australia when dealing with bugs of any kind, spiders and snakes, is to assume that it could kill you in 10 minutes flat, and get the hell out of the way. My husband killed a huge redback spider in our front yard the other day, it was just walking along like it owned the place…my husband also decided that wearing gloves whilst clearing leaves is a good idea!
Also yay for a mention of the SA Museum (always excited when someone mentions Adelaide, we don’t get a lot of attention!), it really is great, especially the Indigenous Australians section, also the room of taxidermied animals
I love the room of taxidermied animals.
A few years ago, I lived in a shithole apartment made of cinderblocks and spit. It had a HUGE black widow infestation. Bodies alone as big as quarters, just roaming all over the living room. On braver nights, I’d go hunting with a really long spatula. Mostly I sat crosslegged on carefully-checked chairs, and kept an eye out to know when it was time to run.
In the year I lived there, I never got bitten once. Then when I went down to my family’s house, where there are a few widows, but they are tiny, I got bit on the shin. Unless you are having a very bad allergic reaction, you cannot get antivenin. The only treatment for a widow bite is keep removing the necrotic flesh, and pack THE GIGANTIC HOLE IN YOUR SKIN with antibiotic ointment. 3 years on, it’s finally closed up, still feels squishier than a shin should, and kinda looks like a gunshot scar.
And I’m still waiting for my awesome powers, Stan Lee.
Please accept this small trophy in honour of today’s best spider story. You win. Nobody wants to one-up this anecdote.
Black widow bites don’t cause necrosis.
Yeah, that’s brown recluses, right? Black widows have a neurotoxin. To be fair, black widows are much scarier LOOKING. There were an abundance of them in my old home in California, and my roommate’s niece was once toddling around with an empty flower pot that WAS NOT EMPTY. I still get a little faint thinking about it sometimes.
AAHHHH on the flower pot! I’m fond of spider but obviously nervous around things what have toxic bites. I’ve only even encountered a captive black widow, but I was on a tarantula-watching hike on Mt. Diablo with a family from Germany who were horrified to be informed that black widows live in CA and like to hang out in woodpiles, like they had in their lovely new home. (Both of their children were old enough that a bite wouldn’t be life-threatening, but I’m sure kind of a shock if you didn’t realize that “oh beeteedubs, those scary animals that you think of as Living Far Away? They’re potentially in your back yard.”)
I’m probably using the wrong word. It never got the gross black necrosis look. It was an open ulcer that wept for a year that I kept having to go get debrided.
It either wasn’t a black widow bite, or it was and you also picked up a lovely bacterial infection. The symptoms of a black widow bite are like a very nasty flu – chills, muscle aches, weakness – but the bite does not get necrotic like a brown recluse bite (supposed? There is apparently some debate on this point) does. Brown recluses do inhabit the Southwestern US, like black widows.
Probably the bacterial infection. San Francisco, where recluses are scarce on the ground (said to be non-inhabiting, but I’ve also had people tell me they swear they’ve seen the fiddlebacks and all), but widows are tiny and everywhere damp and dark, and I did indeed at first think I had the flu, and had banged my leg as a separate issue, until later in the day when things finally clicked. What with the spreading red circle.
Basically, I learned to not leave laundered socks on top of the dryer overnight in a garage you KNOW has widows in it.
Spiders outside = wow amazing natural world, what a cool and amazing place this Earth is.
Spiders inside = I will never sleep again, where is it, where is it, where did it go, oh god there are probably more that I just haven’t seen, ahhhhhhhhhhh, was that one? was that one? no, that is just the wall, oh god did it move, oh god.
exactly. spiders are okay, just NOT IN MY HOUSE.
I skimmed for my sanity. I can’t handle direct mental contact with this subject.
A FOOT, YOU SAY?
*crosses Thailand off list*
“Too many legs” is what I have been telling people my entire life and it was so gratifying to see it in print. Six is pushing it, but eight? Come on. That’s just unnatural.
Is this the appropriate forum to discuss the Australian saying “well we didn’t come here to fuck spiders”?
Wow – I guess you guys don’t like spiders 🙂
Just yesterday, I found a big black house spider crawling out from under the clearance shelves of my local Ralph’s and carried it outside, doing the hand escalator thing as it tried to make a break for it. The comments section here explains why so many customers looked more than a little freaked out. Arachnophobia? That’s just a way for spider lovers like me to get through the day by scaring you guys with our latest find 😉
SPIDER PROPAGANDA
I screeched in my office.
Where the fuck is my fucking coat?
The thing that really creeps me out about spiders is how quick they can move. Don’t like it.