I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have spidey senses.
About spiders.
You know when you’re watching a horror flick, the feeling you get when shit’s about to go down? Like when the creepy music swells while the chick with the finicky flashlight is walking cautiously through the spooky house, and your heart is pounding because you just know one of these times when the camera angle changes, there’s gonna be a ghost-demon-thing right fucking behind her?
Or when it’s nail-bitingly obvious that the hot skinny dipping teens in the lake have only moments in which to keep giggling and making out with each other before some sort of Cthulhuian nightmare grabs somebody or other’s foot and drags them down into the deep?
Or when you see a bunch of children with 80s hair standing around a yellow kitchen and all the knuckle-whitening signs are there that the Kool-Aid Man’s about to burst through a wall and cost little Kimmy’s parents thousands of dollars in property damage?
*shudder*
Anyway, I have that about spiders.
I’ll be sitting on the toilet, or curled up in bed with a book, or checking the fridge for the 17th time in a five minute span to see if a large stockpile of chocolate mousse has magically appeared inside it since I last opened the door, and I’ll know.
There is a spider somewhere nearby.
Watching me.
Waiting.
But the spiders have their timing down to a science. They never come out right when my spidey senses start tingling. They wait. Until I start to doubt. Until a moment when I’m distracted enough to let down my guard.
And then…SPIDER SURPRISE.
But not really a surprise, because I fucking KNEW it was coming, and that just somehow makes it all so much worse. The knowing but still not knowing.
I would like to give this gift back, please and thank you. It’s not good for what remains of my rapidly dwindling sanity.
My spidey senses tingled yesterday morning as I was getting ready for work. I checked under the bed. Looked behind the dresser. Shook out the shower curtain and peered into the tub.
Nada.
I shrugged and went to work. But I knew there was a spider in my near future.
It was a long day at the office. When I got home, I decided to take a nice relaxing soak in the bath. Still on high arachnid alert, I conducted an even more thorough search of the bathroom for before running the water, but there were zero signs of any eight-legged intruders. I tossed in a bath bomb and let the faucet flow while I went to pick out a book to read.
The water was silky and aromatherapeutic and just the right temperature when I stepped in. And spider-free. Let the record show that there were absolutely no spiders in the tub when I got into the water. I checked. Multiple times.
So why the hell, two chapters later, did I look up from my book only to see one slowly drowning by my big toe?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGGGHHHH$&#$1%@ JESUS FUCK NO NO NO DO NOT WANT
So yeah. There he was. And there I was. We sat there a moment, just being there together. Well, I sat. He continued to drown.
I don’t know how he got there. I checked everywhere. Unless God or Loki or Alanis Morissette or whoever is getting their rocks off by chucking spiders into my bathwater out of thin air, I cannot explain this sudden spider.
And indeed there may have been some sort of divine intervention at play, because I had the strange and entirely un-Nut-like passing thought that perhaps I should do the charitable thing and scoop him out of danger.
Instead I took a picture, pulled the plug, and waved goodbye with my favorite finger.
What?
Bad enough the little fuckers are stealing my birth control, now they’re using up my bath bombs too? Bastard deserved it.
Spoken Like A True Nut 
That was friggin HILARIOUS! I’m still laughing. Sure its one of those kinda rude “guy laughs” and if I were around I’d probably tell you something completely not comforting like spiders are our friends(they eat the friggin’ mosquitoes and bugs that cause nasty diseases) but still…
made for an hilarious story. so now you have TWO super powers.
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I’m pretty sure the spiders in our place don’t do jack to help us out in the insect department. The web weavers, at least, whom I leave alone if they’re out of the way because I’m not a TOTAL monster, set up in the absolute dumbest places imaginable and never catch anything and end up dying of starvation, leaving me to clean up their corpses.
As for the house spiders, I don’t care whether or not they’re pulling their weight. Both my childhood homes were rife with them, and left to their own devices they grow way too big for me to ever be able to willingly coexist with one.
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Are you sitting down? Ok, good.
*reaches over and takes your hand gently*
The spider was probably ON you when you got into the bath.
I KNOW…I know. I find it as horrifying as you do. Finding a spider on my person is grounds for self-immolation and/or bleach baths. I feel all twitchy even thinking about it right now, in fact. Gah.
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99.9% sure it wasn’t that either. But thanks for that thought. I wasn’t planning on sleeping ever again anyway.
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I have that spidey sense too. Only in my case it’s called the sense of hearing, because my wife screams bloody murder when she sees one. I’m required by our spider sighter / spider killer relationship agreement to come running with nothing less lethal than a flame thrower.
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Bless you, sir. Bless you.
Alas, my husband has proved himself useless at killing spiders (I suspect his less than stellar reflexes around them arise out of sympathy and a vain hope of allowing them to escape my bloodthirsty clutches), so it’s up to me to do the murdering around here.
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Contrary to the assertion made by Rhubarb Swank (a name I’m repeating because it’s so hilarious) I’m pretty sure the spider was not on you but above you and dropped down into the bath. This was probably not intentional on its part. The steam might have caused it to lose its spidery footing.
I feel bad for saying this although if you didn’t check the ceilings before you will now.
And because I feel bad I’ll just throw in this completely random joke that checking the ceiling reminded me of: What’s the difference between an escort, a lover, and a wife?
An escort says, “Was that good for you?” A lover says, “That was so good.”
A wife says, “I think we should paint the ceiling blue.”
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I do in fact check the ceilings, because that is where the giantest of the giant cellar spiders like to set up camp, and while I do not begrudge those particular spiders the space I still don’t like to be caught unawares by any sudden spindly long-legged movements.
At this point I’m pretty certain some prankster just opened up a wormhole and chucked the bath spider through to mess with me.
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Reason One-Million-And-56 We Should Be Besties: We spend our evenings the same way… “checking the fridge for the 17th time in a five minute span to see if a large stockpile of chocolate mousse has magically appeared inside it since I last opened the door…”
I adore you.
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Likewise, dahling, likewise.
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I know I’ve already commented on this post, but you haven’t given me a new one to comment on, so, here’s my comment: I want to comment more, so give me more to read and comment on!
*comment done*
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Working on it, my dear, working on it. I’m having a bad mental health year (or, at least, worse than usual) and thyroid-related brain fog and depression are currently kicking my ass. I can handle the 140 characters of Twitter okay, but every time I try and sit down to write something more substantial it feels like an insurmountable task…
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I completely understand, and I promise, my peer pressure isn’t real. I just want you to know that I love your writing and will be reading the fuck out of it when you do have the brain power to provide it. And, yes, thyroid shit is the worst.
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I inherited my fear of spiders from my mother and I was determined to not pass it down to my daughter, so when she ran up, pleased as punch, to reveal a little arachnid curled up in her open palm, I fought every single natural urge I had and organized my face from one of disgust, to one of gentle curiousity…Until that sneaky little, eight legged freak ran straight up her arm and sent me into a panic induced rage. I literally beat her from open palm to the top of her shoulder before I could be sure the spider was dead, and then realized I now had a screaming toddler on my hands who now had the kind of spider related issues that would probably need to be worked out with therapy later…On the brightside, I didn’t pass it down as much as drive it home, so at least I can feel more assertive in the delivery :s
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Could’ve been worse. You could’ve smacked her upside the head with a paddle, like a woman did to me on a whitewater kayaking trip when she swore she saw a spider drop onto me from a low-hanging tree.
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ouch! an armed spider fighter…very dangerous!
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Just being there together!
Oh, I’m sorry to laugh at your pain, but that was pretty awesome.
You’re my favourite nut!
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D’aww. 😀
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Bees. Yellow Jackets. Wasps. Hornets. Honey Bees. Bumble Bees. Even Horse flies and those big-assed blue bottle flies. I think it’s the deep humming sound they make; it vibrates in my ears and sets every damned nerve in my body on fire. I can’t help myself. I just lose my shit! I once jumped out of a vehicle when a bee came in through the window. I was actually driving the said vehicle and my sister – the passenger – took a ridiculous amount of time to forgive me. So kudoes to you for your self control. Water and panic don’t often go well together. :o)
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Hahaha thankfully a spider has yet to cause me to prematurely exit a car, but I’m not ruling it out as a possibility. Funnily enough I can keep my calm just fine around things that actually have the potential to hurt me (like the time I stepped on a wasps’ nest), but give me the irrational fear of a harmless, easily squishable spider and it’s all I can do to keep my shit together.
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Me too! I’ll take a snake and a rat any day over bees. :o)
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