Spiders (CONT'D)

I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when I glanced over and saw a spider had built a web between the bottom edge of the shower towel hanging on its hook and the floor.

It wasn't a significant spider... probably just a cellar spider, the kind that sometimes plague my apartment in droves. Nevertheless, this would not stand, man.

I rolled up a little wad of toilet paper to use as a combination smashing/disposal device, poised over him, made ready to crush the spider against the wall...

...and it ran up to hide in the folds of the towel.

DAMMIT.

I wasn't going to dry myself with a bespidered towel. Nor was I going to throw it in the laundry basket, free to run amok in my closet. No, suddenly this was a SITUATION, and I had to deal with it.

I shook the towel, hoping it would fall out. It didn't. I shook it harder. No spider. I took the towel off the hook and spread it on the floor. Caught in the open, I'd easily be able to spot it, right? Nope... the spider was yellow, the towel a light green, and it was nowhere to be seen. I flipped the towel over. Same deal.

I couldn't full-on slap the towel against the floor, because then the spider could go flying into the apartment proper, and that just wouldn't do. (Besides, I needed to see a body... If it could hide in plain sight, until a corpse was delivered I would never 100% believe it wasn't in the towel, and chaos would ensue). So I instead engaged in a maneuver I'd like to call "aggressive flipping," roughly turning the towel over and over, hoping to shake it out without sending it airborne. Nada.

Sometimes, the way to solve a problem isn't to just keep blindly attacking it. You have to step back, get perspective. I hung the towel back up on the hook, left the room and checked my email.

I went back into the bathroom, hoping that with a fresh set of eyes I'd see the spider. I didn't.

But then I gave the towel the most gentle of shakes, and the spider dropped on a line down to the floor and took off at a full sprint... for my shower!

Caught in the open, it had no chance against my fury. Let's just say that, somewhere in the world, there are weeping spider parents.

I'm a little baffled by the spider's tactics. Why didn't it flee during the other phases of my operation? Perhaps aggressive flipping made it just cling harder to its position, refusing to come out. But when I nudged the towel, it thought, "Please God, I can't handle another round of aggressive flipping," and made a run for it. Who can tell the minds of arachnids? Not I.