Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The Quality of Mercy

This morning I did battle with a spider. Not an eensy-weensy spider, but one of those huge, brown arachnids whose very presence dredges up primal terrors from the times before men could speak. This hapless beast committed no crime other than to find itself trapped in my bathtub at 4:30am. It's odd how the human mind works. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that large though the creature was by spider standards, compared to me it was a speck. A mere two inches or so of chitenous exoskeleton and a few grams of internal goo. Yet to my mind it was a hulking leviathan; too large to slay outright lest it fight back and give me a terminal case of the screaming heebie-jeebies.

I pondered how best to dispatch my foe. The proverbial shoe? The can of bug spray out in the carport? Ignore it and hope it just finds a gap in the dimensions and vanishes from my reality? No. None of those were acceptable. Then it hit me. THE DRAIN!! But the cover over the drain has holes far too small for this behemoth bug, and is secured with a screw in the middle, and my screwdriver is in the bedroom with my sleeping wife. I tried a pair of nail clippers, but the handle was too thick. Then I went to the kitchen to fetch a butter knife...every housewife knows that a butterknife makes an excellent makeshift screwdriver. Upon my return, however, the horror had ramped itself up a notch or three. The alien in my bathtub had made its way from the far end of the tub to rest RIGHT NEXT TO THE DRAIN!!!! Well, attempting to put all of my knowledge of such critters ahead of my dread, I knew that it would ignore me unless I actually touched it, so I unscrewed the drain cover and turned on the water. It put up a valient struggle against the tide, but ultimately gravity and water pressure won. And, tho it may just be a mental balm to ease my bleeding heart liberal guilt, I like to imagine that where ever the water sent the eight-legged interloper, it is filled with lots of yummy roaches and other spider delicacies, and it is a much happier beastie.

And now I have to go take a...gulp...shower.

Pray for me.

Marius the Merciful

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude;

Two words: hair spray.

Unknown said...

Alas, I'm bald, and my wife doesn't use the stuff. But welcome to The Corner, .:[g]:. :-)

Queen Bad Kitty said...

At least you didn't try hitting it with a hammer!
hahahahahahahahahahaha
Oh, the poor bottle of Capt'M!
P

Anonymous said...

could be worse...could be raining.
Or you could have the Oak Ridge boys taking up residency in your building for two glorious days of twang and four part harmonious country glee.

Anonymous said...

Big brown guy, slightly hairy?

That's a wolf spider. We like them because they eat other bugs. Even my bug-phobic daughters will scoop them up with a plastic cup & piece of paper and release the captive outside. (I do that with those itsy frogs that make their way inside... except when it's just a squirming torso because Delphi likes frog legs...)