Spider Traps

Yes, it's October and it's Spider Season in Seattle. This is when the hobo spiders come out of the walls and floor vents and scurry across the floor to find the flesh of a human. This is when I put spider traps in every corner of the house. I use about 75 at any given time.

For those of you that don't know -a spider trap is a gooey triangular box that goes along the wall and catches spiders as they emerge from the writhing nests in the frame of the house. Based on the "roach motel" premise, spiders check in, but they don't check out. Sometimes I decorate the traps to look like a motel 6, so the spiders on a budget can get stuck too.

In a sort of twisted style of origami, you fold the trap together- making sure you don't get any sticky stuff on you. I don't know if it's glue or super poison resin, but I try not to touch it. I wear a suit of rubber when I am putting them out.

I also wear the suit when I patrol the house for captured spiders. I pick them up with 20 foot tongs and peer into the housing to see if I got one.

I am always afraid a spider will fling it's payload of lethal spider babies at me as I look in, so one can't be too careful.

I hate when one is in there and still alive. As I squint to see in, I see a monster in it's trap, squinting back at me. YOW! He's built a whole world in there- biding his time like a prisoner in a cell- waiting for parole. I can barely keep from dropping the box and running outside to burn the house down.

The trouble with spiders is they are very hearty and can survive for days in there. Once I picked up a trap and two were in there, still alive, and they WERE FIGHTING. I believe they were fighting for the right to murder me. The human is mine- no he's mine, no, no, no, he's mine. (Paul McCartney, Micheal Jackson song reference here)

Other times I've picked them up and observed a spider graveyard in here. I wonder how many were able to escape by walking over the dead bodies of their fallen friends. Then I picture them back in the hive, sharpening their fangs- declaring loudly "I will avenge thee, brother!"

Oh, I've seen em escape from a trap too. Once a particularly big spider, the size of a construction workers hand walked into a trap. I stared in awe as it observed it's situation and slowly pulled up one leg, reached over, pulled another leg up, and made it's way out of the trap. As it left the trap, one of it's legs ripped off, leaving it embedded in the glue, but it kept going- like the end of "SAW."

He trickled away- like "thing" from the Addams Family, every so often glancing back at me, searing my face into his memory, for the day will come, when he gets a little spider prosthetic leg and will find me sleeping in my bed, surrounded by a ring of out-facing spider traps, and he will carefully walk past them, like Indiana Jones in that temple from the first movie, then, climbing up my bedpost, hobbling across the sheets, till he stands above me, watching my faint breathing, remembering the past, the "Kill Bill" music playing as the camera focuses in tight on his eyes, then he reaches into his spider back-sac, and slowly pulls out a large bottle of glue...

Oh my imagination got away with me.....

Happy October Spiderphobes!