Arachnophobes Beware!

My Jeep does not have power windows nor does it have air-conditioning, and I am not very tall, so it's quite a reach for me to roll down the passenger side window while I am driving, but in the summer this is often necessary in order to get a cross breeze and a bit of ventilation, and so the other morning I took the time to do this safely before I began to drive; a moment later, I saw-- out of the corner of my eye, something move in the center of that space where the window was; I turned my head and observed an obscenely large and fat banded garden spider suspended on a web in the space between the side mirror and the roof . . . floating in the center of that open window, and so-- with an effort worthy of Patrick "Eel" O'Brian-- I leaned over while driving and rolled that window up so the spider wouldn't blow into the car (not that there aren't spiders living in my car) and continued driving, glancing over every so often to see if the spider was still hanging on . . . and every time I turned my head, it was still there . . . it hung there all the way through Highland Park, and onto Woodbridge Avenue, and was still holding tight when I got on Route 1 South, and so I sped up as I crossed the Donald Goodkind Bridge, I sped up to forty-five then fifty then sixty, but still the spider held on, so I drove faster (as any police officer would understand, if they had the slightest empathy for an arachnophobe) until , finally, at nearly eighty miles an hour, the spider was dislodged and disappeared, like Vin Makazian, over the side of the bridge . . . and this is disturbing to me, because that means when you walk into a spider web and try to shake the spider and the web off your face and hands, you need to generate a lot of speed to get that thing off of you.


4 comments:

zman said...

Or you could grow a pair and flick the spider away with a finger.

Dave said...

you know, i never thought of that . . . good thing you're not a police officer.

Squeaky said...

Well it seems it only took EIGHT miles per hour to shake him. That's not too fast.

zman said...

Further proof that Dave is one of the smartest and most knuckleheaded people I know.

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