Dropping Like... Flies
So I have this completely irrational but totally founded fear of spiders. Spiders of all sizes, all shapes, all colors, all genetic make-up (although I do have a soft spot for Spiderman, namely the geeky Peter Parker). Say someone throws a rubber spider at me. It's quite possible that after completely freaking out and breaking windows with the staggering force of my screaming lungpower, I'd crumple into a ball and start crying. And so you won't think I'm just a complete wussy (which I am), I'm going to explain the biggest reason why I dislike the creepy eight-eyed, eight-legged freaks.
Okay. Imagine your vision's getting blurry, and you're seeing waving lines. We're traveling back in time a few years, a time when I was the height I still am now, except thirty pounds lighter. That's right, I'm a freshman in high school. And yes, I was deathly afraid of spiders long before ninth grade, but I don't care so you just shut up about my inconsistencies so I can get on with my story. To continue. I'm a freshman. And even at the tender (ha!) age of fourteen my nocturnal tendencies were most definitely prevalent...
So it's about six years ago, three or four in the morning, and I go to bathroom to do the standard bathroom duties. (Ha, doo-doo duties! It's funny, really. Say it out loud!). Anyway. Everyone else in the house is asleep, and has been for hours, so I'm trying to keep quiet and whatnot.
Which is why when I started screaming about thirty seconds after my ass hit the toilet seat, it was quite a shock to the rest of my family. My brother was the only one who actually cared enough to get out of bed (after awhile) and see the source of my hysterics, and when he did, he screamed louder than me. Well, okay, he didn't, but it took a lot of convincing to get him to take care of the problem instead of leaving it to me... (I had to remind him about that Barbie game he promised to buy me when I was like, seven. The one I never got.)
So I know I'm completely ruining this story with all this stop-and-go stuff, but I've got to digress a bit and explain the basic layout of my bathroom. Well, okay, just a bit of the basic layout. See, there's the sink and tub and toilet, right? And above the sink are the regular lights for the bathroom. And above the toilet is the fan and the sunlamp, they're combined to be more economical or efficient or some other crap.
Yeah. And there's a big area around the sunlamp bulb, you know? Like, a lot of space. Enough for say, a spider to lay her egg, and then later for the egg to hatch. Which is precisely what had happened, probably about an hour before I went to the bathroom.
Yes, the climax is soon... So I went into the bathroom, turned on the SUNLAMP because it's brighter and I prefer it to the other lights, and sat on the toilet. It was late, my eyes were a bit blurry. I rubbed them, and I noticed that they were still blurry, and that I was seeing spots. Little black spots. Millions of little black spots. Crawling on the walls, crawling on the mirror, crawling on the floor. HANGING IN THE AIR ALL AROUND ME.
Two words. Absolute fucking terror. Okay, yeah, that was three. But I'm sure you get the picture. So once again, I'm sitting on the toilet, and insects are attacking me. Millions of them. And personally, I didn't care how small they were, because the minute I opened my mouth to scream I realized that they could FLOAT INTO MY MOUTH. See, they had originated from the sunlamp. And the sunlamp, like I mentioned earlier, is conveniently placed directly above the toilet. And the second I turned the sunlamp on, even MORE baby spiders began doing that creepy dropping-right-in-front-of-you-hanging-from-the-thread-coming-out-its-ass thing.
Basically, it was a damn good thing I was already on a toilet. I might've pissed my pants if it had happened somewhere else.
But yeah, that's the climax, and now here's the depressingly dull denoument (I hope the climax was at least a bit exciting, though I'm sure it was fairly predictable). I screamed, quickly clamped my mouth shut, and kind of wiggled my way out of the bathroom, trying to avoid the spiders that were dropping from the ceiling. It was like that scene in Charlotte's Web at the end where the baby spiders let loose their butt-threads and the wind carries them away, you know? Except that there was no wind in the bathroom, so instead they decided to crawl and drop from the ceiling. ABOVE ME. ALL AROUND ME.
Egads, I've got the heebie jeebies just remembering it. Anyway, so I made it out in record time, and I was hopping around and taking off my clothes (leaving the underthings) while I ran the whole two feet across the hallway and woke my brother. Having been woken up already by my scream, it only took about ten minutes to get him out of bed, and then I showed him the bathroom. And like I said, he freaked out as well. It was seriously creepy, straight out of a movie or something. I'm just glad they weren't any bigger, or else we'd've (yay! another double contraction!) made my parents find a new home.
So yeah. We argued for a bit over who should take care of it, and he basically got guilted into it. Plus, his room is right across the hallway from the bathroom (easy target for an eight-legged invasion), and he hates bugs as much as me. Though he's not really afraid of them, so long as they're not bees... But that's another story.
But like I was saying, he took care of it. Although I still played a bit part. As in, I was the one who went out to the garage and got the shop vac. He was the one who sucked up all the spiders. And then together we decided to suck up a lot of water through the hose and whatnot, and then some pesticide spray, just in case any of the little buggers (haha! punny!) decided they wanted to crawl their way out. Oh, and while the shop vac was whirring away at its obnoxiously loud level, my parents were screaming at us to quit that damn racket and go back to sleep.
Well, the next day when they found out what had happened, they were a bit more sympathetic. A bit. I suppose my arguing with them didn't help. See, I figured the night/morning's events were proof that it's okay to stay up late. Because then you discover things like baby spider infestations before the issue becomes too big to handle without bringing in the bigguns.
Too bad my parents still don't see it that way, which is why I've got to turn off the computer now. Ta!
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