It's All Fun And Games Till...

I live in an area where grass spiders, wolf spiders, jumping spiders, and their kin are pretty common.

Most spiders spend their time sitting (do spiders sit?) in their webs waiting for the opportunity to suck the liquified guts out of trapped insects. It's all very civilized. 

But not these things. They are generally characterized by spending most of THEIR time running around at high speeds and freaking people right the fuck out.

And, more specifically, they spend as much time running back and forth on my carpet as doing anything else. It may be weeks or months between spider-spottings, but when they start to show up, it's not uncommon for two or three over the course of a single evening to make repeated death-runs from one hiding spot to another.

I'm beginning to think that I'm running a spider boot camp of some sort, the idea apparently being that to be a truly successful spider, it is necessary at some point to run for your life in jerking bursts of high speed across several yards of short-shag blue carpet. 

My job is to improve the stock by selective breeding. This task is accomplished by mashing the ones who are too slow or who spend too much time frozen motionless, trying to see if I'd noticed them, thereby demonstrating that their genes should not be passed on to the next generation of recruits.

Needless to say, after all these years, my local crop of grass spiders are faster than shit through a greased goose, and my kill ratio is WAY down.

Now, I have one of these things:

This, in case you don't have one (you poor, sad, deprived soul, you) is a Nerf gun. It shoots Nerf bullets with suction cups on the end. I generally use it a lot while watching political stuff or Glee on TV.  Turns out I can stick at least three suction-cup bullets on the foreheads of any scumbag politician, whiny gayboy or overhyped brunette vocalist who dares to appear on the screen for longer than about 5 seconds, even though it has to be cocked between every shot. I'm getting REALLY good.

But for some reason it hadn't occurred to me to try it on moving targets (unless The Beneficiary's butt counts, but we've agreed I shouldn't do that anymore as she doesn't need the exercise and I don't need the beating.)

Last night I was finishing up a blog post having to do with hot lesbian swan sex when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. Sure enough, it was a high-stepping, very large grass-spider, and he was running across the carpet kinda leisurely, if that's possible, more just trotting than running, headed for the safety offered underneath the TV shelf/stand unit. Then he stopped, watching me. 

He was a big one, as I said, which indicates that he's been around for awhile. We've doubtless interacted before. After he'd stood motionless for a bit, it occurred to me that he might not see me at all. Maybe he was just scanning the neighborhood for spider-babes or bugs who needed their guts liquified or something. So I slowly put my foot down off my footrest - INSTANTLY, he moved, and moved FAST about another two feet from me and stopped. Every time I'd move an inch toward him, he'd zip back a foot, then stop.

He was baiting me. He was FAST, he'd escaped me before, and he knew I couldn't catch him. He was jerking my chain.

Bastard.

Enraged, I snatched up the Nerf gun and fired - and got him.  He jumped straight up in the air about a foot, and was running before he hit the ground. He was probably doing about 30 when he got to the TV, then he stopped again and looked back at me, quivering.

Do spiders have telepathy? 'Cause I could totally hear the little shit. And he was some kind of pissed off.

"WTF?" he said "You hit me in the FACE with that thing! You could'a put an EYE out! This ain't over, asshole!"

Then he disappeared under the furniture.

I Think I Gave Him A Black Eye

I went to Wal-Mart today and got an entire box of Nerf ammo, and have set up a bunker around my recliner. It's gonna be a long, sleepless night tonight.

In Our Next Episode:Trying to decide if I should escalate this with a bug bomb or two, or if I should just try to low-profile it with some quick Predator strikes.