Just call me Spiderman

22 octobre but event took place on the 20^th - Mostly written on the train to Auray.  Clearly I was very productive.

You’ll all remember the incredibly large spider that I found walking across my crotch a while back.  Well, here’s round two.  I wanted to get up early on the 20^th to get some stuff done before school, so I asked Alexis to knock on my door when he got up to be sure that I would wake up.  He did, and I walked over, turned on the overhead light, and went back to bed so I could do my early morning facebook check.  Well, there from my bed, with my groggy eyes, I happened to see something very large on the inside of my door.  I wasn’t totally sure what it was, but I had a good idea, and I didn’t like it.  After I double checked to be sure I hadn’t shit myself, I got up to get my camera.  This thing was too big to be real.  I started next to my desk, taking a picture across the room.

The I put on my big boy pants and approached the 8-legged beast.  He was so damned big and brave he didn’t even flinch as I moved closer.  I guess that really shows how much weight I’ve lost.  I don’t even scare spiders anymore.  Putting my hand on the door, I got my first sense of the monster’s size.  

Well now I had a problem.  What was I going to do?  I couldn’t open the door!  If I opened it he could easily scurry away and make his way into my clothes, or worse: my bed.  Dilemma!  Then I remembered that there was a glass in my bathroom from earlier in the week.  I ran in there, grabbed a sheet of paper, and caught the BASp (Bad ass spider).  This one was much bigger than the last one.  And was very much alive.  I did not like this at all.  

That's an American quarter

Having now caught Spiderzilla, I went about taking a shower and getting dressed.  I was very happy to take a shower, because I had definitely worked up a sweat in the struggle to capture the beast.  In thinking about catching the spider, I reflected back on a story told to me second hand on Cranberry Island originating from a great storyteller.  As the story goes, a squirrel showed up on Cranberry Island, clearly brought over to the island by Southwest Harbor fisherman, because squirrels don’t naturally appear on Cranberry- they can’t swim.  Southwest Harbor fisherman, jealous of the Island’s great fleet of navigators and fishing professionals, have allegedly been known to drop the occasional miscreant critter on Cranberry to drive everyone nuts.  Personally, I wondered if it was a reference to what the Backside fishermen were good at catching?  As the story goes, this particular individual got the squirrel caught in a tree, and then climbed the tree to wrestle it to the ground.  Once back on an even playing field, it took a few blows of the right hand, a few blows of the left, a handful of gunshots, and finally the aid of a poison dart to rid the Island of its one and only squirrel.  Maybe my capture of the spider wasn’t so eloquently written, but in my mind, it was every bit as exciting and death-defying.  

Having caught the spider, I placed him on the living room mantle piece, with the other one from a few weeks ago.  My host mother said she was going to bring the first one to the guardian to show what a problem the spiders were, but she never did, and it has long since turned into a dried homage to its former glory.  Now the new one was there to keep him company.  He’s still there today, and my host mother looks at him, as do I, with pride and sheer horror.  Once the second one finally dies (I’m almost positive he’s bionic at this point), I’m considering putting one of each side of the mantlepiece, like the two stuffed duck heads that hold court in my grandmother’s dining room.  You may just start calling me the Great White Hunter.