Be vewy vewy quiet...

i'm huntin' spiders. in my basement, it is always spider season. tonight, i have whacked a total of five spiders. yeah, i know they're quite useful in keeping other insect populations down, but i grew up killing them.

granted, i won't go on a rampage and seek every single one of them out (with a loony glint in my eye), but if they're within a few feet of me...*SMACK*...see ya!

i guess the bad thing is that i believe in reincarnation. with my luck, i will not come back as a well-treated dog, but as a fly or a male black widow - great.

any spider stories out there? recently, Laura got a weird insect bite and someone mentioned Brown Recluse horror stories. i do have a story, but it didn't involve any lethal arachnids.

ten years ago, i spent a summer working in San Andrés Cholula, Mexico. i was sharing a house with a dozen other archaeologists; we were excavating two sites, one pre-classic (around 2000 years old) and the collapsed wing of a convent that was being transformed into a five star hotel .

anyway, there were numerous daddy longlegs and some assorted spiders that were about the size of a pencil eraser which shared our room. i don't even recall killing one single spider that summer...hmmm. daddy longlegs never hurt anyone and the teeny ones that lived in the dust next to my bed never bothered me.

well, about a month into excavations, i received two small mosquito-like bites on the joint of my right thumb. no biggie. i did find it a little strange since it was a bit cool that summer and the elevation we were at (7000') really didn't get many skeeters. i was okay for about six hours after getting up. sometime after noon, i came down with a horrendous fever and an EVIL case of diarrhea. i still remember hoofing it up to that damn 3rd floor bathroom every fifteen minutes.

somehow, i did survive the workday and even trudged on over to the Mac's (a local mexican version of Denny's...although the official Mexican version of Denny's is called VIPs) for dinner. two of my best pals on the dig, Antonio and Mechele, kept ribbing me about the look the waitress gave me upon seeing the shape i was in. i know i looked like death warmed over, but bring me my order you bitch! it didn't help that my 'pals' were making crude jokes about a syphilitic dishwasher in the back, giddily wiping off the spots on the glasses with one of his sores...some friends!

luckily, the fever and diarrhea passed (no pun intended) within the next 24 hours. however, the spider venom wasn't finished with this dumb chink. i later developed a rash that shot through my body in different places for the next six weeks. after the rash disappeared, i started getting bumps on my elbows...which would also go away...and come back for two years. in between the bouts with the bumps, my elbows would peel. this peeling lasted exactly six or seven years on my left elbow, while the right elbow is finally dissipating, TEN years later!

all this shit because i didn't kill those tiny dust spiders...