October 12th, 2011 | Author: trancejen
People, I am so distressed.
As you know, I am a basement-dwelling troll. This means that deep in the dark recesses of the TranceCave, I am often plagued by all manner of creepy-crawlies, including large centipedes and spiders.
Now let it be known that I am not just your average arachnophobe. The eight-legged freaks not only strike terror into my heart, they chill me to my very soul. Even the small ones get to me, and upon seeing a spider, I spend the rest of the day frantically clawing at my skin; believing in my heart of hearts that something is crawling on me.
I know it’s ridiculous, I know that I’m a frillion times bigger than the arachnids in question and that all I have to do is stomp on the damn things, but I just can’t help it.
Anyway, recently I found one in my bathroom that was the size of a small tarantula. I swear to God I’m not exaggerating. Its body was the size of two quarters put together, and its hairy little legs were thicker than matchsticks. I screamed, ran to get a broom, and beat the shit out of it for a half an hour until it was completely eviscerated.
This sent me into a panic so badly that I couldn’t even sleep that evening. Surely there were more, and surely they were going to suck my blood until I was nothing more than a pale, crispy corpse.
I wasn’t wrong.
On Monday I headed to the downstairs fridge to grab my twentieth Diet Coke of the day and There I saw one of its evil brethren poised above the washing machine, staring at me, daring me to make a move in its dark direction.
I couldn’t approach it. I did what I had to do.
“MAAAAAAAHM!”
I’m not proud.
My mother, assuming that I probably had fallen and couldn’t get up or was bleeding from the ears, came rushing down the stairs breathlessly.
“WHAT?”
“Giant spider!”
“Where?”
“Look.”
“GAH!”
“You have to kill it. I can’t go near it.”
She took a page out of my book and grabbed the broom and proceeded to beat the hell out of the nefarious little beast.
We then grabbed a can of Raid and sprayed the living hell out of the laundry room, about which I had mixed feelings. Were the spiders going to relocate, possibly to my bedroom?
I wasn’t wrong.
Monday night when B. came over, he was in the bathroom and I noticed something moving slowly across the tile floor in the cave.
It was another spider, another huge one, just ambling around in plain sight as the useless cats watched and did absolutely nothing.
I screamed and hit it with my boot.
Surely this was the last one, I thought. Surely there had to be some sort of cap on giant spiders.
Today I woke up at six and went to feed the cats. I moved the bag of cat food, and out skittered another giant motherfucking spider, who immediately dove under the dryer.
Surely this particular mutant is going to wind up in my bed and eat one of my toes.
I am so frazzled that I can’t think.
I’m ready to set off bug bombs in the house, poison be damned, to hell with the residue. My nerves can’t take another one of these gargantuan monsters.
If you could only see them.
I live directly in front of a cornfield (yeah, make all the Indianny jokes you want), so I can only assume that the creatures are coming from there, so obviously the solution is to soak the field in gasoline and burn it down.
Burn it. Burn it all.
Either that, or I’m definitely going to have to move.
My only consolation is that I found the spiders and not the J-Man, because he’s even worse than I am and surely would have had a fucking aneurysm.
My stepdad thinks that this is all a hoot and when he finds a big spider outside he intones, “Got a big juicy one for you!”
Have I mentioned my distaste for this man?
Yeah.
Anyway, Happy Wednesday. May your day be spider-free.
1) How odd, I just made a Kingdom of the Spiders reference the other day. What a fantastically horrible movie, as one would expect from the name and the Shatner.
2) I try to keep my sanity around spiders by remembering that they eat the other bugs. Still, I laid myself out on my porch steps last week when I nearly walked into a yard-wide web stretched across the porch stairs, a web with a big yellow and brown spider right in the middle at throat height. It hurt, but it was better than walking face first into that thing.
You have my sympathy, but you can’t borrow my spider-eating dog.
big brownish-gray hairy things? kinda like this guy? we get these in our family room because its on a slab instead of a basement. the last one freaked my 11yo out so much, he wouldn’t come in that room for two days.
But if you burn the cornfield, WHERE WILL THE SPIDERS GO, JEN?
EXACTLY like that, Michele. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
And Karen, you know my feeling about dogs, but damned if I don’t want to borrow yours!!!
Melanie, you are probably correct. Damn it.
Oh god – NO SPIDERS ! *shudder* I can handle a lot of creepy things that nature likes to thrust upon us silly humans, but spiders are just too damned sneaky and all of those eyes? Just plain wrong I say. My porches and the garage in Phoenix were totally infested with Black-fucking-widow spiders and no amount of poison or stupid cats would stop them from multiplying, spinning their nasty sticky webs and those horrible white coccoons that were full of hundreds of black widow babies just waiting to burst forth and lurk in the shadows with their poison-filled bites…Fuckers, all of them !
Ok, I’ll stop the visual assault now. I sure wish I could give you advice on keeping the hairy 8-leggers out of your home other than setting off a few bug bombs in the Trance cave. Those things do work well on fleas and roaches so I imagine that they make bombs for spiders too. Time for a little online research my dear. I’ll do the same and if I come up with anything positive I’ll let you know sweetie. In the meantime keep the faith and your broom on high alert.
– John in Tucson
BLACK WIDOWS??????? GOD, John. Oh my GOD. I would have packed my shit and moved immediately. (and you did) good move, my friend. Good move.
So…while I’ve arrived at the truce stance of ‘dead in my house…live outside (their house)’ cuz I am right there with you, if you really want to deter most crawly things, try some food-grade diatomaceous earth. I’m no expert, but if you Google it, follow the directions – it works on fleas, and can be used ON the cats – you could have some bug relief. And it isn’t a poison, its not the same thing used in pool filters – that has been modified to work in the filters.
I’m hoping to use it in the late spring to deter the ANT invaders. gack
Thanks, Anne! I will look it up!!
OMG!!! I am right there with you! Hell I was so eeked out reading your post I almost tossed my laptop. Oh and then Michele felt she had to share the image of the spider! Damn you Michele! And damn me cause I had to click on it!
Fortunately I have a spider killing husband, because my 14 year old gets as freaked out as I do. Heck, he wouldn’t sleep in his room for 2 days cause he saw one…until his friend killed it for him.
You know, you would think that the KIDS would at least kill the spiders. Sheesh.
I thought of you last night as MyMan and I were sitting in our rockers (heh) on the back patio. First he shooed a lizard away and then stomped a black widow spider. Fortunately, the gigantic bees stayed over in the jasmine. Sometimes there’s just too much nature in nature.
The thought of a black widow spider strikes so much terror into my soul that I can’t even breathe. MOVE, Amy. MOVE.
Supposedly placing hedge apples around keeps spiders away. Not really sure if it works or not, though.
Go to your nearest home supply store and buy a supply of boric acid. Put it in a squirty bottle (it’s powdered, so think squirty like ketchup bottle, not squirty like windex). Squirt that into every crevice you can find. It dries out their exoskeletons and kills them dead. It’s also a good treatment for ants.
Just be sure to wear a mask because it is toxic.
Also, glue boards.
Or call an exterminator. We have a guy who dusts our crawlspace annually with some kind of chrysanthemum powder stuff and that keeps them down pretty well.
Would all this hurt my cats?