The Legend of the Spider of Death (AKA "Can you find the iguana?")

Are you a sufferer of arachnophobia?

I am.

It sucks more than a vacuum cleaner.

And that’s a lot.

One night I was in my room, sitting in bed, and enjoying writing a story about someone or something or whatever. Pen in hand, tea by my side, paper in front of me… *ah* …the only thing that could have made it better is if the tea was soda and the pen was candy… and the paper a movie starring Eddie Izzard, Ed Helms and Will Smith. Let’s throw Keisha Castle-Hughes and Karen Gillan in there for balance.

(Of course I would still wanting to be writing said movie, and would need at least a $100,000,001.82 budget. I’m not picky.)

This film would be entitled: “Snow White Powder and the Seven Dealers” it would win all kinds of awards (including “Coolest Writer”) and make me famous.

Me getting famous:

While I was trying to get famous, I innocently glanced at the floor.

*Was that movement?*

I glanced again (this time not so innocently)…

*GASP!* IT WAS MOVEMENT!

It was a spider…

…of death.

But it wasn’t just ANY spider of death. This was, I shit you not, the biggest, baddest, baby-eatin’est son of an eight-legged, creepy, crawly, she-devil I have EVER seen in my entire life.

Then it began running towards me.

Now, let me take a moment to say that I know I suffer from arachnophobia. I know that what I actually saw was probably something like this:

But that knowledge doesn’t help me.

It doesn’t help me one bit.

What I SAW, What I remember seeing, what has been seared with a hot-iron into my memory FOREVER looked like this:

I was terrified.

I was Petrified.

Mortified.

Stupefied.

By a spider.

That was charging me.

I jumped up.

And I screamed.

Like a girl.

And it ran under my bed.

At the sound of my heart exploding, Behemoth, my brother—who was asleep in his bed across the room, woke up… ish.

He (kind of) opened his eyes and (sort of) looked to see why I was screaming like a banshee.

Of course, by this point, I was merely hyperventilating.

So he did this:

And then he went back to sleep.

I was (for all intents and purposes) alone in my room with a giant, man-eating demon sent straight from the bowels of HELL to torment me for my SINS!

There was a spider in there too.

Okay, I kid…

…the spider WAS the demon.

Somehow (I don’t remember exactly how) I escaped the bedroom with my life.

I was determined(ish) to defeat this atrocity of creation, and reclaim my right as the ONLY ONE who could hide under my bed.

But I needed to find something to aid me in my quest.

I went looking for a flashlight.

I couldn’t find the bloody flashlight.

Damn.

I stumbled on an electric lantern.

After I got up again, I took it into my room and tried to peer under the bed. This is difficult to do when you refuse to get closer than ten feet from the bed in question. (I wasn’t going to stick my face down there for it to feast on!) Luckily my bed is raised a bit high off the ground, and none of my blankets were hanging down. So I could see decently well as I looked for the beast below.

I didn’t find it.

The next day my mother brought a flashlight in from the truck.

FML

I still couldn’t find it.

Actually, I never found it.

To this day a demon-possessed spider dwells in my room… and I sleep on the couch.

Did you find the iguana?

Quick--Run With Me, Friend, Towards the Danger!

Many of you who are MST3K fans will know that the title of this post is a quote from "Cave Dwellers." Any of you who know what MST3K IS will know that it was a very funny quip.
But we're not here to talk about MST3K, and for someone who's not here to discuss MST3K, I sure am discussing MST3K a lot.

Moving on...

Once upon a time there was a friend of mine who, though she thought she was a princess, was more akin to a wicked witch named Satchel. :) Even though she probably doesn't practice witchcraft, we'll STILL call her Satchel.

Satchel, as it were, had three boys who we will call, from oldest to youngest, Jose, Jimp, and Lex. (These three boys are destined to be my minions... as soon as they're old enough to understand what it is minions do.)

One day after church (where she was pretending to be holy) Satchel was leading her three boys home. They live fairly close to church, so they walk. (I don't live far from church either, and I would walk but for the fact that I'm lazy.)

The scene was one of peace and tranquility. It looked like this:

"Hmm... Hmm... Hmm... I'mma just walking home..."

Then, because my sister, Evic, is (almost) as evil as I am, she drove up real close behind the happy little family (we were in the church's parking lot) and did what any God fearing American would do.

She honked the horn.

Satchel looked back at us and smiled a pleasant, "hello" type of smile.

This was not Jimp's reaction.

Jimp flipped.

After taking one look at the looming death car behind him, the scene of peace and tranquility became anything but.

It became this:



You gotta love Jimp's reflexes though. I don't think a pouncing lioness could have caught the little guy. As he waddled away at record breaking speeds, I could almost hear his thoughts.

"Must... escape... car... QUICKLY! Run into the oncoming TRAFFIC!" <--(This is what the title's referring to... in case you missed it.)
Run to the road to escape cars? Gotta love children's logic.

Luckily for everyone involved, mothers are faster than pouncing lionesses, and Satchel reached Jimp before the traffic did. Then she shot Evic a look of "Gee, thanks for trying to kill my son."

Then she smiled again...

And it was this last smile that made me question her "I'm a saint" ploy.

Would a saint smile after their son nearly became the main dish at roadkill cafe?

Who knows?


Here's something I think I meant to post a long time ago:

Flashes in the Dark Ages
(Did I post this one already?):
Before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, great ideas manifested themselves as gas-burning lamps. This was dangerous due to the many dullards who could start the thinking process, but not quite ignite the gas that emanated from above their heads. It's true. Many would-be great innovators lost their heads in massive fireballs in those days because of an overabundance of mere idiots. (In most cases the idiots were blown away too, so it all came out in the wash.) Because of the relatively frequent nature of this phenomenon, this era of history is often referred to as the "Flashes in the Dark Ages."

It's not as funny after the Jimp and Satchel story...

...oh well...

Ciao!

And, as always, go do some evil!

~Rafe