The Itsy Bitsy Spider

After lunch today, as I often do when the weather cooperates, I took a walk to stretch my legs, clear my head, and think up horribly offensive shit to post on this site. Because I work next door to a luxury resort, this walk is incredibly enjoyable: The grounds are always immaculately maintained, the property is surrounded by orange trees (which are currently in bloom), and more often than not the sun is gently beaming down on a perfect Arizona day. It was 80 degrees out, and I was rather enjoying myself when I walked into a spider web. Nothing will make you look like an escaped mental patient faster than walking into a spider web.

Your instant reaction, of course, is to flail your arms wildly. When this doesn’t work, you usually claw at your face while executing a half-turn in the hope that the web will detach itself from you. Not that the thoughts going through your head are that rational. You’re thinking to yourself, “SPIDER! GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF!!!”, while anyone else watching is thinking to themselves, “That dude is either fighting off beings from the 23rd dimension, or he is off his fucking meds.” You look and act, as Robert Downey Jr. so aptly put it, full-retard.

As if the spider web wasn’t bad enough, I looked up at the end of my performance to see that a tour bus full of Japanese tourists had pulled up next to me, every single of them looking at me and thinking the same thing: “Lack of American health care has surely failed this poor, retarded man.” Embarrassing, sure, but annoying as well, because I’ve seen quite a few examples of Japanese culture, and I don’t need them fucking lecturing me on proper behavior in public.

I don’t need to be judged by a bunch of doorknob licking weirdos.

Of course, venting on the Japanese is wrong because the real villain here was the spider, who had a real fucking attitude problem if you ask me. He had the entire orange tree above me to spin as much web as he wanted, but no, he had to dangle over the sidewalk, that fucker. Had I felt the need, I could have had that entire tree gassed with Raid, DDT, and highly radioactive cobalt dust and no one would have stopped me. “Spiders,” I’d say as I lit the tree on fire, and everyone would’ve nodded as if to say, “Yes, of course. It had to be done.”

This is because no one likes fucking spiders. Some people might claim to like spiders, of course. They’ll inform you that “spiders play an important role in the ecosystem…” and if right at that very moment a spider crawled on their arm, they’d freak out and attack it with a shoe until it was nothing more than a fuzzy brown stain on the floor. So much for the fucking ecosystem.

This holds true in general. Almost all animal rights activists will not hesitate to call the Orkin man if they see so much as a single cockroach crawling across the kitchen floor. This is because spiders, as well as cockroaches, fail the cuteness test, and hence may be dispatched with ruthless abandon.

This even holds true for dangerous animals. I myself think that the lion is a majestic animal, and that we should work to secure a habitat for it so that it may continue to live freely on the African plain as it has for millennia, even though if a lion had a chance to eat my stringy ass it’d be on me faster than Oprah on a baked ham. This, on the other hand, is the Candiru:

The Candiru

The Candiru is a small, parasitic catfish that lives in the Amazon that many believe will swim into your crank, up your urethra and then extend spikes into your pee-tunnel so that it may stay there, hosting Candiru parties, listening to Kenny Loggins records, and otherwise luxuriating in your urinary emanations. The fact that this has been discredited as a myth does nothing to allay my fears, and I believe that in an overabundance of caution we should nuke South America until it is nothing more than a smoking pile of ocean. Dick-fish? Fuck. That. (Apropos of nothing, I think Spiders & Dickfish sounds like the title of a David Bowie album.)

So a lion which absolutely would eat me if given the chance, let’s save it. The Candiru which suffers from nothing more than a lack of cuteness and a bad PR rep? I’d have no problem if we shot every single one of them directly into the heart of the sun. In fact, I’d sleep easier at night if we did, especially if we put spiders and Kenny Loggins on the rocket as well.