The Great Spider Conspiracy

I do not like spiders.

I would not classify my dislike as a phobia, it's not as intense as that. If I see them outside, I leave them alone. If I see them in my house, but they are quietly hanging out in some quiet corner somewhere, I leave them alone. But if they are crawling anywhere near me, or are in my bedroom anywhere, they die. I am not that humane.

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I sublet my brother's apartment so I could keep my college job and take a class instead of going home for the summer. He was doing summer stock theatre and lived on-site at the theatre so it worked out for him too, since my parents paid the rent and I paid the electric, gas, and phone bills. His apartment was a ground floor apartment whereby the eye-level windows were grass-level outside. That summer, these huge garden spiders kept getting into the apartment. They were light brown with black markings, and their primary color was the exact same color as the carpet in the apartment. I could only see them when they were moving. Ugh. More than once, I caught one creeping up on me, but a little spider spray around the windows seemed to keep them at bay so I did not have to kill so many. For the record, my brother swears he never saw a single spider in the 3-4 years he lived there.

Fast forward to 2006. September.

Three times that month, I found 1-2 cm sized jet-black spiders crawling on my dashboard. While I was driving. Twice while I was at highway speeds. I am surprised that I did not crash my car into someone else as a result of my violent startle response. Fortunately, all 3 times, I was able to remove my shoe and smush said spider.

By the 3rd instance, it got to be almost funny except for, well, the spider part. So I told my coworkers and friends that it was a spider conspiracy against me. One of my coworkers, now retired, played a joke on me. She snuck into my office one night and taped a little paper decoration on my computer monitor, which is a line of spiders. She also put a plastic spider ring of the kind you might get while trick-or-treating in my keyboard. I still have them both, the ring hanging from a pushpin on my bulletin board and the border taped to my monitor, edges curling over now.

This week, while driving to work, I noticed something.

There has been another spider in my car. It spun a web against my windshield a few days ago. The silk strands are delicate and not too densely packed together. But it spreads out across nearly the whole thing, and I see it mocking me when the sunlight catches it. I keep forgetting to wipe it away when I get out of the car, and I can't reach it easily from my seat. I have yet to see the architect of this little monument.

But I am sure it is all part of the Great Spider Conspiracy against me.