As some of you know from my very first post on SD, I am deathly afraid of spiders. I am trying to get control over my fear of them by telling myself that I am 10,000 times bigger than they are and they are more afraid of me than I am of them. I am still having trouble with the latter part of that strategy. Spiders are an abomination to man, especially this man, if you still call me a man when my short little tale is over.
This morning I started the shower and got in just like any other morning. I take my contacts out at night, so the world is a blur to me in the morning. Blurry vision, combined with sleepy-headedness, makes it so that sometimes I don’t catch everything right away in the morning.
I was showering in peace when I noticed a brown blur in the back of my 1973 avocado green porcelain tub (the far side away from me and the drain). I bent down to look at it. I am very nearsighted, so I have to get pretty close to see without my contacts. As the blur got bigger and bigger and clearer and clearer, I realized I was face to face with a Carolina Wolf Spider with a leg span the size of a coaster. I managed not to scream like a little girl, backpeddled a little bit, and stood back up. Trying to be a man about this. I told myself to let the spider be, the water should keep it from coming towards me, and this will be good to test my fear. I bravely continued my shower as quickly as possible, casting a glance towards the blur every few seconds to make sure it hadn’t moved.
The eight legged freak was smart. It waited until I had shampoo in my hair to make its move. I peeled one eye open to check the whereabouts of the blur and found that was creeping slowly in my direction! I then tried to be quick about finishing up and getting out, but in my haste, the water splashing around must have startled it.
I will now pause to take the time to point out that Carolina Wolf Spiders run very quickly across wet porcelain, a fact that I was previously unaware of.
The abomination dashed towards me. This time, I DID scream like a little girl and stood up on my tiptoes, a-la stereotypical 50’s TV suburban housewife seeing a mouse. Now, being neither petite nor graceful, I found it quite a challenge to pirouette around the bathtub as the spider chased me all the way around the tub not once, but TWICE. There’s not as much room to move about a bathtub as you might think. I don’t know how I managed to not slip and fall, except that I did have the presence of mind to grab the towel rack and hang on to it as long as I could on each lap as I pranced around the tub. I’m glad the spider stayed on the perimeter of the tub while it chased me. I would probably be writing this from a hospital bed if it had came across the middle on me.
The spider finally stopped its pursuit, but I had one problem - it was between me and the shower curtain. I looked around, gathering up the courage to rip open the shower curtain and make a leap over the side of the tub, possibly breaking my neck when I landed on the tile. Yes, I have a bath mat, but I’m sure that I would have jumped further than that in my escape attempt. It was then that I spotted the blue cup on the side of the tub. I could trap the spider with that! It was just a plain blue cup that I used to rinse out the tub when I clean it, but to me it looked as glorious as the Holy Grail. I snapped the cup up, plopped it upsidedown over the spider (which barely fit), made sure I had a good seal, and slid the trapped spider / cup towards the back of the tub. I quickly rinsed my hair and exited the shower safely. I don’t know why I didn’t just kill the spider with the bottom of the cup. Panic does strange things to reasoning.
The spider is still under the cup, probably seething and plotting some sort of delicious revenge.
