Mind Your Own God Damn Business

So, it’s no secret that spiders freak me out. For a while, I let them hang out in my room because they weren’t bothering me. Then, a few bad apples ruined it for everyone, and I now have a “Kill on sight” policy.

With that in mind, let me tell you a little story about something that happened to me yesterday.

There I was. In the bathroom. Using it and reading a book, because that’s kind of my thing.

I finished up, marked my book, and started “cleaning up”.

All of a sudden, there he was.

Checkmate, household pests!

A spider, once again completely ignoring my dictum that he and his kind had to vacate the premises, was skittering down the wall to my right. He paused for a moment, at about eye level. I froze, mid-wipe. We sat and stared at each other for a moment, eyeballing each other. We weren’t speaking, but I could almost hear his thoughts: “That’s right, motherfucker. I’m coming in. I’m gonna walk down this wall and then put a bunch of creepy webs around here, and there’s not a god damn thing that you can do about it!”

At that point, my brain did some quick mental math, and in a split second, it came to the following conclusions:

• There was a spider in the room.
• That spider had to die.
• Before I killed the spider, I would need to get some toilet paper, my weapon of choice.
• The item I needed, toilet paper, was already clutched in my hand. How incredibly convenient!

Instinct took over, and I whipped my hand holding the toilet paper out and crushed the spider on the wall.

Almost as soon as I did this, I realized that there was an incredibly important fact that my brain had overlooked while it was assessing the situation:

The toilet paper in my hand was in the process of being used for something else only moments earlier.

I flinched and pulled my hand away from the wall.

The toilet paper, however, did not pull away from the wall. It stayed firmly in place, almost as if it were affixed by some sort of feces-based adhesive.

I sat there for a little while, stunned for the second time in less than a minute. How the hell are you supposed to react to something like that? Especially when it seems like I have at least one moment like this every day? I mean, imagine if a police profiler examined my living space – “Hmm, the walls are smeared with semen and feces, there’s poison everywhere – I think it’s pretty obvious that whoever lives here is a mentally retarded serial killer.”

After some of the crazed cackling that always follows one of these moments, I came to a few conclusions:

1. This method of execution is several orders of magnitude more humiliating than my normal method. I know what you’re thinking – “For you or the spider?” The answer is an emphatic “Both”, but why don’t we focus on the spider for the moment.

"Tell me again about the rabbits, George! I like beans with my ketchup ... and the look on a man's face when the life drains out of him...you can see it in his eyes, that moment when he realizes that he's going to die."

To understand, imagine the following hypothetical situation: Suppose, and remember, this is completely hypothetical, that I’m a mentally retarded serial killer, and I’ve decided to murder you. I capture you and give you a choice: either I smother you with a plastic bag, or I smother you with a plastic bag that I took a dump in earlier. It’s not really even a choice, right? Right.

(On a completely unrelated note to police investigating the infamous “Brown Bagger” murders of the early 1990′s that remain unsolved to this day: You should completely ignore this post. There’s nothing to see here. I already pointed out that the whole scenario I just described was purely hypothetical. I’m certainly not describing in eerie detail the technique that some deranged serial killer who the police dubbed “The Scatman” used to off his victims, if that’s what you’re suggesting.)

2. Killing spiders this way is probably a pretty effective intimidation tactic for other insects and arachnids who are thinking about trying to sneak in. If you’re a bug, maybe you want to get away from the birds and cats outside, but maybe you don’t want to get crushed by a towel smeared in duke more, so you take your chances with the great outdoors. I know that I would go out of my way to avoid areas where there was a risk of getting killed that way.

3. No matter how humiliating or intimidating bugs find it to die that way, it is SO not worth it. The disaster that I had to clean off of the wall after that kill was NOT fun.

…I don’t know. I think that I have dementia or there’s a gas leak in my house somewhere. I do way too much stupid crap like this. I’m going to have to start counting to ten before I do anything so I have time to consider the consequences, or something. Or maybe not, because if I don’t accidentally get my feces on the walls, what am I going to post on the Internet for everybody to read?

Either way, if you’ll excuse me, I need to eat some applesauce, put on my helmet and then buy some plastic bags, some Metamucil, a bone saw and some lye.

Have a great weekend, folks!