I was working tonight with the Indian developers overseas, and then I saw this fat spider on the wall (the skinny ones are harmless, generally). I had been bitten by a poisonous spider once and it left a scar on my leg.  Jain or humanistic ideas aside, I don’t chance it anymore. I had a big candle burning on the coffee table so my idea was to push the candle up underneath the spider and make him fall into the wax. It’s less violent than smashing him, less mess on my wall, and he will be immortalized in the wax of my candle for a few weeks.

So I put the candle up there and the spider fell, but I didnt see where to, and it wasn’t in the candle. I looked around and didn’t see him so I figured he realized what kind of bad ass he was dealing with and went someplace out of sight. I flipped out for a second to make sure he wasn’t somewhere on my body or clothes and he wasn’t.

I go back to computering, and i’m sitting back in my chair for a minute and suddenly this bastard is rappelling down right onto my keyboard, about a foot up. He lands on my keyboard and i’m like jumping out of my skin. It’s like a horror movie, and he’s back and ready to rock. I menace him and he goes behind my computer which is elevated by this laptop cooler I use to keep my shitty HP Envy 17 from overheating. I mash him with a paper towel, throw it in the basket and keep computering.

A few moments later I look up from my screen, and there’s another, same species spider crawling up my fucking wall!??!

Anyhow, here is what I hypothesized happened, follow along with the photo below:

Earlier when I brought in the mail (mostly junkmail, possibly forwarded from my old address, figure 1A. right side of photo), I  inadvertently brought in two spiders who went into my mailbox to avoid the heavy rain (when I got bit by a spider last time it was also rainy).

After putting the junk mail into garbage, they emerged, one by one, and happened to travel to a place near the garbage can (my desk and the wall above it) and they came out since it’s dry here. Nothing supernatural happened, I just brought in a few spiders.

Or possibly they came in through the olden mail slot itself. Spiders are into old stuff. They are like the hipsters of the insect world.

“Hey Bernard, this mail slot looks hella steampunk, let’s go in!” 

 

And After That: 

My biological Dad died last week. I haven’t talked to him in 10 years. I regret not reaching out but I’ve decided that as far as any kind of context or natural basis for a relationship would go, even if we talked it’s been too long and there isn’t enough connective tissue to overcome the huge gaps and differences in who we are and how are lives are now. A talk or a meeting would be like a talk or a meeting with any other stranger, minus the fact that we are eternally connected, share DNA, and probably have a lot in common.

Or not.

In some weird way it’s gotten me thinking about how much impact family can have on you, and how you can really just walk away from it if you want to reinvent yourself, which might be a good thing to do if the circumstances of your family are bad enough. Mine aren’t, but at the same time it’s not necessary to consent to low-level abuse and dysfunction just because you signed up for it at birth. I can’t imagine that there is really any pay-off to this kind of action, instead I think of some kind of Charles Bukowski existence and then later meeting your long lost family at the Pasadena botanical gardens and breaking down and crying like a baby over lost time and longing and so on.

But in the case of my biological father, and I may be thinking in an unnecessarily hardnosed way in order to protect myself from any kind of really childish ideas grownups still carry about their parents, but I really believe that had he been available to me and supportive, his availability and support would’ve only been a portal into a world that I do not need to go into.

Because i’m so reactionary and action-obsessed i’ve decided at this point to start cutting off all of my currently imperfect relationships even for small reasons, so that I can focus on the bigger picture;  focus on fixing my own problems.

This is like one of those videos you’ve seen where some redneck tapes himself kicking over some old coffee can that he suspects has a spider or two in it, only to unleash a swarm of thousands of baby spiders, which emerge and disappear into crevices to grow larger and reappear at a later date .

 

 

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