Spiders

There are fucking spiders everywhere.

Giant, black, eight-legged, slightly fuzzy spiders about the size of a watch face. There are dozens of them on almost every body. There are thousands of them in almost every room. Basically every direction that you look there are spiders— save, perhaps, for staring at the ceiling idly for long enough as to allow your mind to go blank (But seriously, who does that anymore?) The spiders are present in all places, in all interactions, crawling up and down our floors, our walls, and indeed our bodies at all times. I generally find that the more people you have in a space, the more spiders there are, swarming us in greater and greater numbers, but it doesn’t take much. There are spiders on me right now as I write this at 5 in the morning.

I take steps a few times a day to get the spiders off of me. But they are fucking everywhere. You almost can’t blame me for just ignoring them for most of my life. Almost.

I don’t remember when I first started noticing the spiders. The spiders were something that had been described to me in the abstract: intellectually, I knew that the spiders were present to some extent, or had been for some time. Certainly when you look at old photos you can see the spiders quite plainly; when you read a New York Times article from a hundred years ago or whatever, very often the writer is talking about something weird and legged and so ubiquitous as to not really even be something they’re consciously thinking about, and you’re like, “oh. He’s talking about the spiders.”

I needed to have the spiders pointed out to me. There are spider-seers, people who have a natural eye for the spiders, largely people who needed to understand the spiders for the sake of their own survival. Those people are not hard to find. Spider-seers write about spiders, they talk about spiders, many of them make it their life’s purpose to communicate to you that the spiders are fucking everywhere and that you should do something about them. Or at least acknowledge them. By reading and hearing what the spider-seers have to say, it’s become clear to me that the spiders are ubiquitous. They permeate all facets of life in all space and all time. Maybe there was a period, a place, a time in the way long ago where the spiders genuinely didn’t exist, but they do now. And now the spiders are everywhere. They’re in our hair, they’re in our food, they’re in our bedsheets.

No one wants to acknowledge the spiders.

And it’s quite remarkable how little anyone seems to care, even though the spiders are actively harmful. They’re not just annoying and gross (though they are annoying and gross), they bite! They clamp their little pea-sized fangs into our flesh all the time. It hurts. It weakens with its venom. I have to assume it often kills people. And while the spiders do indeed tend to prefer to latch onto some people more than others, all people are affected by their venom. Some people just get bitten more. They’re not some made up affliction that you can remove yourself from or ignore just because of who you are. They are spiders. Nasty, disgusting spiders.

I am not a long-time spider-seer. I know very little about the spiders, and the bite marks that I can see on myself are pretty faint. Despite their eternal presence on my person, the spiders actually don’t hurt me that much. I am more of a carrier of spiders. My presence, my words, my arms and hands spread the spiders to others like some sort of disease. So from my person, the spiders latch onto others and bite them. It is hard to definitively argue that it is my fault per-se as a spider-carrier, as someone else would have done it if I hadn’t. But I am complicit in it. When I contaminate a room, a conversation, a friend with more spiders, I either did not realise I was carrying spiders (because I didn’t check), or I just couldn’t be bothered to get the spiders off of me.

Both of those excuses are ridiculous, by the way. They are spiders.

It’s just so crazy to me. I can pluck a spider off of someone’s jacket, its nasty little legs thrashing in my hand, and hold it up to the person’s face point blank and say “look at this. It’s a spider. It is on you. There are twenty on you right now.” It is remarkable how often people refuse to acknowledge it. Or even look at me like I’m the weird one for even pointing it out. And maybe I am crazy, maybe I am being neurotic and antisocial and a “buzzkill” for observing the spiders.

And yeah, some people notice the spiders but they make a point of defending them— that nasty doublespeak where they both shrug off the existence of spiders while also acting as though they are a good thing. “There aren’t any spiders,” they say, immediately followed with “spiders are just fine. I mean, they might annoy some irrational people. But they protect us. They eat the mosquitos. Their venom is a potent antibiotic. People like being bitten by spiders! And besides, do those of us who get bitten less really have any obligation to those of us who are bitten more? It’s not our fault the spiders don’t like our taste.”

It’s sad when such arguments are made. But it’s even sadder when the argument is made by a person whose dozens of bite marks are plainly visible. Because, come on. Any semblance of a pro-spider argument, any rhetoric about their practical utility or the nature of the human-spider relationship is so easily realised as bullshit when you remember that we are talking about spiders. Eight-legged, creepy, crawly spiders.

To be clear, and I cannot stress this point enough, they are fucking spiders. I too would love to ignore the spiders and pretend I can’t feel them crawling around on my neck and nipping at my fingers. Sometimes I can still pretend. But no matter how deep I bury it, no matter how hard I try to just “be normal”, I see the spiders. In conversation my eyes shift from the lips of the person speaking to the half dozen spiders scurrying around on his torso. At parties any sense of fun I’m having quickly doused by the spider swimming around in my cup.

It’s so frustrating, because a world without spiders is possible! They’re not some kind of natural law of existence. They’re like cigarettes. We could all just collectively decide that the spiders are gross, scrape them off of our bodies, and stamp them to death. Yes, some eggs would survive and there would be strife as spiders continued to emerge, but if we collectively decided tomorrow that we are done putting up with the spiders, then my future children would never see a spider. They’d be gone. This is what us spider-seers have been saying the whole time.

To anyone reading this, don’t be scared of the spiders for the spiders’ sake. They are nasty and venomous and scary to look at, but they are only spiders. You do not need to read a million books on arachnids or have a deep history of personally being bitten over and over again. If you really want to see the spiders, you will see the spiders. And yes, you will never look at the world the same way again, but what’s the alternative? Pretending the spiders aren’t there, forever? Grow up. See the spiders. Talk about the spiders. Because one day, if all of us can see the spiders, we’ll inevitably all decide that the spiders are gross and we should do something about them.

Because there are fucking spiders everywhere. And we don’t have to keep putting up with them.