Spider Kingdom.
I love my house. I realize how lame it is to be in love with a material item but I can’t help it.
I grew up sharing a room with my older brother and then when I went to university, I ended up with a roommate in a 20′ x 20′ square dorm room. I had roommates all through college and it was a long time before I ever had my own ’space.’
After I got my first solo apartment, I had neighbors everywhere. Loud neighbors. Nosey neighbors. And eventually, one of those nosey left a cigarette on his bed when he went to work and the apartment building burned down. I basically lost everything I’d accumulated by the time I was 27.
Without exaggerating, it really, really sucked.
I finally purchased my first home at the age of 32. I was super stoked. Finally, space of my own. Property of my own with some privacy and some room to do whatever I liked without worrying about making noise or a cranky landlord.
My place is one of a kind. I bought it off of an artist whose husband had designed and built the home after a Mies van der Rohe plan. There is a lot of glass and the place looks in on itself with a courtyard in the middle. It was built in 1969 and is definitely an amazing work of art. The best part is that since it’s outside of Dayton, Ohio, it wasn’t expensive. I could actually afford it.
Here’s the problem:
Every summer, spiders take over my house. Literally.
And there’s nothing I hate worse than spiders. Maybe ghosts or satan or something but as far as real-life shit, spiders have always been it for me. I get shit for it. But it’s not so much a fear as a serious hatred. I won’t try to dissect why I hate them; for me, it seems natural.
But every spring they start to trickle in. One by one and then by summer, they’re everywhere. On the porch, by the doors, hanging from trees and lights, crawling into corners and hanging from the rafters.
At some point, it just gets to be too much. Which brings me to the point of this blog:
Last night I was brushing my teeth and noticed a baby spider by the faucet. And then another. And then another. Finally, I realized THREE things:
1. Spiders have been fucking inside of my house. FUCKING spiders. Seriously. It’s bad enough just having a few in your house, it’s a whole other thing to have them FUCKING in your house.
2. So two spiders met in my house at some point and decided they like each other enough to fuck and the female laid her giant eggsac in my bathroom to keep it nice and safe.
3. That eggsac hatched and now I’ve inadvertently adopted a bunch of tiny, baby spiders. And they’re all just chilling in my bathroom waiting to grow up and become gigantic, killer spiders.
Exterminators work for a while. The problem is nature and there’s no way around nature. I have trees hanging over all parts of my home. The glass panels allow for cracks where they sneak and slide their way in. The garage is easy for them to get into so they go in there, grow up, go through spider adolescence and then become full grown spiders and move into the house.
What can I say? The babies had to go. The problem is, there’s no way to track down 100 baby spiders. Or 200. Or whatever amount they have when they hatch.
‘CHARLOTTES WEB’ IS GOING DOWN IN MY BATHROOM.
I hate spiders, man. I hate ‘em.
RSS-Feed
31. July 2008 - 08:47 Uhr
you and me both dude. but hey, mies van rohe? in ohio? I think I am getting myself a plane ticket like right now.
31. July 2008 - 08:55 Uhr
Maybe this will help you to see the human side to your little roommates:
The reproductive ecology of spiders basically involves three steps:
1) a male has to find a female
2) he has to succeed in mating with her
3) the female has to lay and protect the eggs.
Within this simple plan spiders have evolved a wonderful range of strategies and behavioural characteristics. The greatest diversity of characteristics is found in the moments immediately after contact. Spiders are carnivores, and cannibalism is quite acceptable to them.
In many species the male has to work hard to convince the female that he is a potential mate and not dinner because there are species where the female often eats the male before mating (and/or after mating) and there are also species where the male and female live together in the same web but the male is able, one way or another, to leave the female and depart from her web after mating. The idea that all female spiders always eat their mates just isn’t true.
The male will follow the traditional courtship rituals and as you can imagine male spiders tend to approach the females cautiously until they they are convinced the female knows who they are and even then many of them like to have some insurance. In many species the males have worked out clever methods to ensure their survival, in others the male is so small he is of no interest to the female and in a lot of cases the two live together quite happily.
It has been documented that a lot of adult male spiders simply die of hunger and exhaustion because they spend all their energy finding and courting females and never stop to eat!
—
kind of scary how close their behaviour is to our’s. well, not literally. but nevertheless, there are parallels
good look for you.
peace.
31. July 2008 - 08:55 Uhr
good luck, i meant, of course.
31. July 2008 - 08:57 Uhr
It was based on one of his plans but they had to ‘americanize’ it for privacy reasons. To make it practical to live in, they shifted some walls and added a few walls to the interior but it’s still got that modern feel to it.
31. July 2008 - 09:04 Uhr
julia,
That’s really interesting. I know that Black Widows can be a bitch and are famous for killing their mate after the act. It’s funny to me that spiders actually fuck and have a mating ritual. If I were a spider, I would try to buy my female spider a drink and ask her if she’s into Joy Division. And then I’d totally split after I was done so she wouldn’t try to kill and eat me. Of course, I’d be wearing a spider condom so I wouldn’t get her pregnant.
I think spiders will eventually take over the world. When they do, I’m in trouble.
31. July 2008 - 09:21 Uhr
I just hate spiders. I couldn’t spent the summer at your place Don - hubby, you have to go alone and check out the architecture, I will visit in winter when its so cold that these little bastards have to die! …just try to imagine the bathroom scene…thanks not for me!
If you need a place to hide Don, then come over to Berlin. Sometimes we have a bumblebee on the balcony - that’s that!
nx
31. July 2008 - 09:28 Uhr
i think we should check if there is a Joy Division Spider fanclub somewhere
31. July 2008 - 10:12 Uhr
Don, sounds like a perfect plan. except for the splitting part. you shouldn’t generalise, I think, and give the spider lady a chance. maybe it would be the spider love of your life and you missed the whole thing cause you were scared. that’s not very manly.
31. July 2008 - 16:31 Uhr
I hate spiders too. My house is riddled with them as well. But I hate caterpillars more right now as they’re eating all my wife’s cherry tomatos in the garden and I get the job of getting rid of all of em. Lil fuckers!