A Spider in My Coffee

I have a Mets coffee cup. I'm not a particular fan of the Mets -- or of baseball, for that matter -- but it's a gift from a client (thanks Alan!), and I am a fan of gifts and clients.

While drinking from said coffee cup this morning, I noticed an odd smudge on the inside rim. Thinking at first it was just a patch of errant grounds, I stuck my finger in to get rid of it.

And stopped.

The smudge was a dead spider.

To make matters worse, it was on a part of the cup that was in a direct trajectory towards the part from which I was drinking. Which means that I spent who-knows-how-long within a millimeter of having a spider in my mouth.

The little fucker drowned in hot coffee, a painful way to go. Good. Though the coffee I was drinking passed across its dead, horrid body on its way into mine.

One might expect some jumping up and screaming on my part; or, at least, some shivers of deep, existential dread. But I just kinda washed it out and poured more coffee. Because this bizarre event was so huge, so horrible, my brain went all the way around the moon and came back again to calm acceptance that we live in a fucked-up world where spiders like to hide in coffee cups while people (in this case - ME) are just trying to get some work done. It was exactly what I might imagine it would be like to come home, get undressed and find a bullet hole in your hat... a close call moment to which you can only react with a curious, "How'd that get there?"

It wasn't a big spider. It was a yellow garden spider, the kind that, back in Chicago, we used to call banana spiders. (Real "banana spiders" are tarantulas). I'm sure there's a long Latin designation for this common species, but I don't give a shit. It's dead. How -- or why -- it got in there, only the spider gods shall know.

Hopefully this burns off my shitty karma for the day. Maybe the whole week. And I will say that, looking at the bright side, I got off a lot fucking luckier than I could've... There is an alternate universe version of this morning's events that involve me finding a live spider in my mouth while holding a steaming cup of coffee in hand, and the scene that would have unfolded from there.

Between shit like this, and getting attacked by birds of prey (which, thankfully, hasn't happened in a while), I think it's safe to say that the animal kingdom enjoys fucking with me. One of several reasons I stopped being a vegetarian.