Why Spiders Are Terrible and Should Be Feared

I was going to tell you all why I'll never eat another Oreo in my life, but I'll save that story for another day.

Instead, I thought I'd talk about something I'm afraid of.

I often tell people I'm not afraid of anything, and it's true, in a way. I don't really have any phobias, like other people I know. I know some people are afraid of heights. My mom is scared of the sight of blood. Other people have more unconventional fears like aliens, or Men in Black, or clowns. Well, I guess clowns can be pretty scary. Some people are afraid of dogs, or cats, or snakes, or sharks. People can just about be afraid of anything and everything.

I'm not scared of any of those things. But there are things in this world that make my heart explode into bloody shreds of terror.

Those things are SPIDERS, and there are many perfectly sane reasons to be terrified of them.

If a spider crosses my path, or is somewhere in my house I do not want it to be, it will be a dead spider as soon as I can find something to smash it with. As much as I love the animal kingdom and life and love and all of us getting along, spiders have to die. A spider is one of the few things that'll make me scream like I'm being set on fire. I'd rather be on fire than have a spider crawl on me.

1. If you live in Oklahoma, you need to find a way to GET OUT. There, spiders will inspire you to become country bumpkins. When we lived in Oklahoma, I started to believe the state animals should be the skunk (you couldn't drive anywhere without the aroma of roadkill skunk making your child vomit in the backseat) and the spider.

Here's a GE street view recent image of the house we rented in Oklahoma, when our family just had three members:

Spiders were ALL OVER my house. And no matter how often I had the pest control guy spray, they'd always come back. Our house was backed up against a field with tall grass, and every time I mowed the lawn (yes, I was the one in the family that would mow the lawn), spiders of all kinds would literally leap out of the grass ahead of the mower. Just the thought of those spiders crawling all over the mowed grass gives me chills. And God forbid I should glance down and see one on my jeans...my ear-piercing shrieks made the neighborhood dogs howl on more than five occasions.

Needless to say, I didn't mow the lawn often, and my neighbor and friend, JeanAnne, would joke about getting a car on blocks to put in the yard.

2. Spiders are Masters of Disguise with just one motive--to strike icy fear into your heart. One time, I was out sweeping the prolific Oklahoma dust out of the garage when I saw a giant spider gamboling around like a fat little sumo wrestler. I took my broom and thought this would be an easy kill. But I was so woefully wrong!

I smashed the spider with the broom, and about a billion tiny baby spiders exploded from the big spider, spreading outward like a black tsunami of vile awfulness. I never screamed so loud in my life.

Imagine this times a million:

I dropped the broom as those little things washed over it's bristles and up the handles toward me like I was to be there very first meal. I ran into the house, grabbed a can of Raid, and raced back to the garage. I swallowed my terror just long enough to thoroughly poison the spiders and myself with a whole can of pesticide.

I will never poke a gamboling sumo spider again.

Do not let a spider fool you:

3. Some spiders are venomous, and they all like to bite you. Most spiders in the house could be killed leisurely, meaning I had time to go grab a shoe and come back and squash it. But there was one spider who struck more fear into my heart than any other spider, ever. And our house had a healthy population of them--the brown recluse.

Being an animal lover, and having researched animals all my life, I know about everything poisonous and venomous. I knew exactly what a brown recluse looked like. The first time I saw one in the house, I think I nearly had a heart attack. I can't remember what I was doing when I saw the first one, because there were many, many more to come, but I was probably watching TV or cleaning and saw it try to stalk stealthily across the white carpet.

Right away, I recognized the violin or fiddle shape on it's back, and knew it had to immediately die. I raced to grab the biggest show I could find (my husband at the time's combat boot worked nicely) and raced back to the spider, who noticed me freaking out, and started to make a run for it to the corner where it could slip into some crack like something out of a horror movie.

4. Brown recluses are aggressive magicians. Those spiders are fast. And, I didn't know it at the time, but they're also pretty fearless and aggressive. When it realized it wasn't going to make it to the safety of the crack, it stopped and reared up on its back legs, raising it's front ones in the air like some kind of evil spider magician weaving a curse to hurl at me.

I have never been more afraid in my life than when that spider raised up like that. Before it could hurl itself on me or fling the curse of death at me, I smashed it.

5. Spiders are incredibly hard to kill. The thing with spiders is that although you may smash them, and although they may appear to be all curled up and dead, they might not really be dead. They might be faking it. They're incredibly devious creatures, and they love it when you think they're dead. When they see you leave the room for gloves and a five feet long wad of paper towels to pick them up with, they laugh and uncurl from death, and start toward the crack in the wall, vowing to return when you're sleeping.

After a while, I learned you pretty much have to chop them into little pieces to really kill them.  So, I had a couple strategically placed spider-killing shoes placed around the house.

What a freaking liar:

6. Spiders purposely taunt you at the most inappropriate times. The problem was we had a lot of the aggressive, evil-tempered brown recluses. I would sometimes kill six to eight a day. And Aidan was about four years old at the time, and sometimes, I would find those spiders in her room, often when I was tucking her into bed. I did my best to hide my abject terror when I would see one taunting me by strolling across the carpet toward her bed while I was trying to sing her to sleep. I probably looked pretty terrifying myself as I grabbed the nearest spider shoe and pounded the thing into oblivion before resuming "You Are My Sunshine."

I eventually grew so rattled and so paranoid that I researched ways to keep them out of our beds when we were sleeping. Those spiders knew that we were most vulnerable when asleep and unable to wield a shoe, and they were just waiting for the right moment when we were in the deepest sleep to crawl in our mouths and bite our tongues.

I discovered a wonderful product then--two sided tape. It was recommended as a way to keep spiders out of the bed, and I went all out by tucking Aidan's comforter between the box spring and mattress so that it didn't touch the floor, then taping rolls and rolls of two sided tape to the legs of her bed.

I was in x-ray school at the time, so I was home a lot, which gave me time to eliminate as many spiders as I could find. Which was typically A LOT.

Anyway, I can't even express how happy and relieved I was when we got orders to leave the spider and skunk infested state of Oklahoma to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

7. Spiders think it's funny to hide in the very shoes you kill them with. It took just one horrifying experience of a long-legged joker hiding out (and probably chuckling) in a hiking boot I wore to mow the yard in for me to check every single shoe before putting it on for the rest of my life.

8. Spiders enjoy a sense of irony, and if they don't get you in one location, they will in another. During our two year stay in Oklahoma, I was never bitten by a spider. Then a couple years into our stay in NM, I was bitten by a black widow, and that was probably one of the most painful and worst experiences of my life. I'll save that story for another time, but the whole horrible experience only heightened my fear.

9 & 10. Spiders are evil and they are from Hell. And I don't often say this word, but spiders deserve it--spiders are assholes. I really don't think I have to convince anyone of this after my list of highly accurate and damning evidence, do I?