Notice How I Didn't Soil Myself

Sometimes an event will take place that is so earth-shattering, it knocks aside my typical writing and boatbuilding self-indulgences. This happened last night, and it involve a four-foot dowel and a shot of single malt!

Everybody knows the spider armies have been massing in my lawn, preparing a nightmarish assault on the world of giant bipeds (us). For a few nights now I've been shiveringly shining my not-nearly-bright enough flashlight on the driveway next to the garage, where a palm-sized, starfish-lookin', kitten-eating wolf spider flexes its arachnid biceps and makes faces back at me.

Ha ha, I tell it nervously, hopping sideways to avoid turning my back on it, ha ha, there's a good spider, you just staaaay there.

So when I came home after work yesterday to find a spider curled inside the top corner of our entryway like a brown fist, I calmly changed into biking clothes and rode as fast as I could for an hour and a half.

Later in the evening I (my wife) decided the spider had to go. While it was great that our house was instantly cleared of bugs, one of our cats was unaccounted for and that wouldn't do.

At this point I discovered I have a mild phobia of spiders, and that things I thought I was afraid of (heights, biting deer, grinning old men in the dark) were in fact not phobias whatsoever. I found a four-foot dowel and a large glass bowl, and, sweating, tried to knock the spider off the ceiling into the bowl.

Was the bowl in my hand? No it most certainly was not. It was on the floor, where the non-web-spinning spider would fall into it.

When the dowel approached the hell-spider, it curled up, then reared back and attacked the dowel. The thing was fighting the dowel. This would be akin to me, upon encountering, say, the Eiffel Tower poking at me, assuming a kung-fu pose and beckoning fifty stories of steel to come dance, mofo.

The spider fought; I clenched and sweated, and eventually knocked it down the wall. At which point the non-web-spinning spider lowered itself on a strand of silk and dangled there. So much for bug identification. We looped the strand, dropped it into the bowl, and I took it far, far away outside to release into the darkness.

I dried my palms and decided the salty brown fire of Talisker would be the best thing for the shaking. And it was.