On Spiders, part 2

“On candystripe legs the spiderman comes

Softly through the shadow of the evening sun

Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead

Looking for the victim shivering in bed

Searching out fear in the gathering gloom and

Suddenly! 

A movement in the corner of the room! 

And there is nothing I can do 

When I realise with fright 

That the spiderman is having me for dinner tonight!”

~ ‘Lullaby’, by Robert Smith

from The Cure album “Disintegration”, 1989

Last week, you were treated to two terrifying tales of terrible terror involving me and dirty great spiders.  Spiders, as you’ll know, are the ninjas of the insect realm; by the time you know they are there, you may already be dead.  Please, don’t try and convince me that due to my greater size that they are not both scary and out to get me.  I’m sure that’s exactly what they want you (and me) to think.

On to the next sordid tales.  Please don’t send me your therapist’s bills.

3.  The weapons of warfare employed by my unpleasant enemies are varied.  Occasionally, the nasty little blighters don’t use subterfuge, but lay in wait where they know you’re going to be.  I returned from work very late one balmy night after dark, at a time I shared a home with my father.  He was home, but very likely settled for sleep by the time I pulled up in the car.  As I stepped up to the porch, I realised to my dismay that entering the house was going to prove impossible with the dinner-plate sized horror perched proudly in the middle of the front door.  Palpitations ensued when I even considered approaching the door, let alone walking through it.

My best idea was to yell out to Dad, but given the hour, I thought it too inconsiderate to the neighbours.  The back door was not an option without leaping over a few fences.  A brainwave hit - I could throw something at the waiting spider, which would either mash him or at the very least hit the door hard enough to wake my father.  I took off one of my shoes and hurled it from a dozen or so paces.

Shoes are not even vaguely aerodynamic so the intended target was very safe from my first effort.  I missed everything, although the shoe landed close enough to the door to make retrieving it out of the question.  I had another shoe and took another shot.  It hit the door but missed the spider.  A terrible thought occurred to me that perhaps the spider retreating only to resurface at an equally inopportune time, was not the most elegant of solutions.  After a few minutes, there was neither movement from the spider or the house, and I realised that I was not a quadruped and hence had exhausted my missiles.

Just as panic was rising to a point past my control, the door was answered by Dad.  He dispatched the huntsman in quick order.  Not a moment too soon.

4.  Everything grows bigger in the tropics.  This is especially the case with insects.  And spiders.  On staying with my brother during the North Queensland wet season, I often found a small amount of respite lying on the bed under the fan in the room I was staying in.  During a relaxing doze, I languidly opened my eyes only to see the single biggest huntsman (size: think of the biggest dinner plate you can possibly imagine) not just sitting on the wall adjacent to my head, but madly scurrying across it.  Seriously, this thing was the Mr Universe of spiders.  I swear it had muscles complete with pulsating veins.  By it’s size I could instantly see that it had obviously just dined on some poor soul’s brains and surely meant to make mine the next tasty course.

I attended to the involuntary scream-and-dance act that my body feels obliged to observe at times such as these.  It had the necessary effect; Mr Universe continued his scurrying to a vent in the wall that I had not noticed previously.  He squeezed his way through it to freedom in the damp air outside.  After fear and palpitations mostly subsided, I found myself seething at whichever house designer thought it wise to include arachnid escape hatches in the walls of the home.  What on Earth was the fool thinking?

Despite emptying half a can of insect spray on and around the vent, I still couldn’t bring myself to sleep in the room that night.  He was out there.  And he had my scent.

~ - ~ - ~

In more recent times, my family has encouraged me to form what has become an uneasy détente with the spiders around my home.  The big ones seem to stay away for the most part.  The smaller ones, like the garden spiders that form large intricate webs near the front door and the daddy-long-legs that usually take up residence in the corners of the bathroom keep the numbers of mozzies and small annoying flying bugs from reaching epidemic proportions.  So, as a rule, they can stay, as long as they keep their distance from me.  But get too close to where the water from the shower can flush them down the plughole, and all bets are off.

On Spiders, part 1

“But I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid of you

I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid

I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid of you

I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid”

~ ‘I’m Not afraid’, by John Mark Painter and Fleming McWilliams

      from the Fleming and John album “Delusions of Grandeur”, 1996

I’m one of those lumbered with the dire curse of the phobia.  I suspect that I developed the phobia after one particularly nasty experience that you’ll hear about should you have the intestinal fortitude to continue reading the horror that is to follow.  My confession: the very sight of the furry monstrosities known commonly as spiders makes me quiver and squeal like a little girl.  So!  For your amusement, I bring you...

My Top Bottom 4 Experiences With Vile Arachnids - Part One

Ironically titled as there is quite simply no other kind.

1.  My earliest memory was when I was still in short pants.  Memories of childhood have always been a little fuzzy for me, more like snapshots of events rather than a whole experience, hence I have little recollection of the surrounding time.  All I know for sure was that I was of primary school age.  I was pottering around the garden finding small amusements in the nooks and crannies of the yard while my father dug in the veggie patch.  My sweaty Dad caught me wandering past him out of the corner of one eye, and as I drifted past, lost in innocent thought, I suddenly found a cloud of dirt penetrating my personal space.  I jumped back in surprise, as was the old man’s intent.

To this day, I’m reasonably sure what happened next was not his intent.  This particular patch of ground hid a dirty secret which became apparent to me as I glanced down to my chest.  Sitting on me was a huntsman the size of a dinner plate.

For the merest of seconds, we connected, my spider and I.  He looked at me and he spoke words that seared into my brain.

“Michael,” he whispered (arachnids need not raise their voices to be terrifying),  “I am a spider the size of a dinner plate.  I have very hairy legs and 6000 eyes which are right now all fixed on you.  Now, forget all you have learned about me and remember this whenever you see me or my kin; we know where you live and eat and sleep.  We will, at times of our choosing, make ourselves known to you, usually in a shocking and horrible ways.  At none of those moments will you know whether we are randomly in you vicinity or if we have in fact come to suck your brains out through your ears.  A good day to you, sir.”

No doubt, dear reader, should you be of an appropriate age, you will remember that one day you heard an inhuman wail the likes have not been uttered by the human voice in the history of mankind.  Finding no source of said scream, you went about whatever business was pressing upon you.  Now you know, that was me.

The scream was soon joined by a furious flailing of arms and legs in every direction possible.  Several impossible ones too.  My fate with respect to spiders was apparently sealed.

2.   I need not explain that during a drive is possibly the worst time to encounter that which you dread.  But that’s what happened to me one sunny day on my way to the local shops.  It was close to peak hour, so the roads were busy if not completely congested.  Enough to require a reasonable amount of focus to avoid potential tragedy.  It was just at that moment that another dreaded huntsman decided to traverse the driver’s side window.  He seemed to almost cover the whole window, but in reality, he was probably only about the size of a dinner plate.

Rational thought decided that that moment was a good time for it to go for a nice, quiet lie down.  In rational thought’s absence, my brain was absolutely convinced that the most sensible course of action was to urge my body to propel itself at great pace from the vehicle.  Fortunately, the instinct to preserve my life decided to have it’s say and reminded my brain that (a) I was in fairly busy traffic, (b) the car was still in rapid motion, and (c) I was driving the car.

Conscious thought then raised a valid point.  What was that ungodly noise?  It then realised that the noise was indeed a scream, lifted to the level of cacophony within the confines of my small hatchback.  It also thankfully saw fit to remind me that my hands were likely better served steering rather than furiously trying to push the spider away from myself, which wouldn’t have worked anyway as the spider was on the outside of the car.

How I am here writing this and not a half-forgotten smear on a patch of bitumen is frankly beyond me.

So there you have the first two of four tales of abject horror that I’m sure gave you as many palpitations reading them as I had writing them.  Be sure to come back next week for more terrifying confessions!  

On Writing #1

“I paint a thousand pictures here

on the inside of my skull,

Sometimes I'll crack it open

though my instruments are dull”

                                                                       ~ ‘Writer’s Block’, by Terry Scott Taylor

                                                                       from his album “John Wayne”, 1998

It has been said that every writer has a million bad words inside of him; he needs to write all of them out before he gets to the good stuff.  I figure that I’ve written much, much more than a million words, from student essays, through to short Facebook witticisms, to reams of work related writings courtesy of an anachronistic legal documentation process.  There’s no way to be sure if all this writing counts towards my personal million.

I write now because I must.  I write because what is inside needs to get out.  There is choice, there is always choice, because I don’t want to give over my free will to characters on a page.  And yet, there remains a compulsion, born in a degree of natural ability (not more than a reasonably functioning brain, really), nurtured by education, refined by writing out a million damned words. 

I wrote a school essay when I was about 12 or 13, about our pet cat at the time, that Miss Cudmore felt was worthy of praise.  It was a lightly structured piece, and like many free-form essays written at that particular stage of education, found itself written without a definitive purpose other than it was required to be written.  I often though that this form of writing was at its foundation pointless.  It added nothing to the bodies of literature written by learned and wise men and women.  It had no particular audience in mind, other than those I lamely branded “cat lovers” (we had to name an audience for each of our pieces, in an effort to assign some meaning to our pubescent ramblings).  This piece and any that are to come likewise have little audience or purpose that I can derive other than feeding my current compulsion and ridding myself of any of that pesky million that remain unwritten.  I mean, while it’s true that I’m enamoured with language, it’s vagaries and nuances, and its ability to be poetic and beautiful and illuminating and even devastating, I know I’m most likely to be contributing to the white noise in an already noisy world.

What is a writer?  It is not necessarily a professional or one proficient.  Put most simply, a writer is one who writes.  My opinion is that the definition is somewhat more specific and ought only include those who write substantially.  Substantive writing can, I suppose, be defined as both volume and import, but I would add writing by some conscious choice, thus excluding incidental writing that is more borne of necessity.  Am I a writer?  As of this piece, which is only perhaps the first of many, I am well short of that definition, as it fails at the very least the volume test.  That might yet change.

I am concerned that time may be the factor that limits me in terms of my writing, in that I find so little time in my schedule for things of vastly more importance than my scribblings as it is.  It is possible that this writing represents a compulsion I don’t have as much control over as I would like, and I will simply find the time.  Using time efficiently is, after all, something that I can always refine.  At 34 years old, I have, frankly, wasted enough time in my life and achieved so much less that I can be content with.  I am finding a great deal of discontent in wasted potential recently.  I can only eliminate this with action.  And so I write. I hope it is enough, but not quite enough, lest the compulsion be completely extinguished.  Goodness knows it would be an unfortunate thing to stop writing because I don’t manage to find the time and I’ve only got out 999,000-odd of those bad words.

Of course it may well be that I simply run out of things to write about, without first finding some definitive direction and purpose to the writing.  I always enjoyed Paul Jenkins’s ‘Flogging A Dead Horse’ columns on the internet, and he always had interesting things to write about.  Granted, much of it was invented, or exaggerated to a ridiculous degree, but it never failed to amuse and entertain.  Perhaps I will follow a similar pattern, albeit through the prism of a much simpler, far less exciting life than the one Paul apparently leads.  Perhaps others will be as interested in my writing as I am in Mr Jenkins.  Perhaps I will find some inspiration at the regular intervals I will need in order to put something out with appropriate frequency.  Time will tell.  This piece will most certainly be a tremendous embarrassment if read at a later time without a body of work following it.

Before I finish, I must admit that I owe some debt to novelist/writer Stephen King, and one of the very few pieces of his writing that I have read, by way of his wonderful book titled ‘On Writing’ (a small homage to which resides at the very top of the page here).  That sharp, brief, and clear book is a definite informative influence in what I do here and beyond, in terms of the rules it employs and espouses.

And so I go forth and I write.  I go armed with little formal training, as I think I would rather just write than have someone try to teach me something that may just as likely to be innate.  I will attempt to write, I might just edit (2^nd draft = 1^st draft – 10%, apparently), I will try my best to “kill my darlings” (darlings being those turns of phrase that dance beautifully on the page but fail to be otherwise useful), and while Mr King would prefer I pluck out all the adverbs (“literary weeds”), I cannot promise I will as I enjoy the colour and humour they add.  I may not do well, but I will do.  I hope that is enough.

On Writing #1 - Preview

“I paint a thousand pictures here

on the inside of my skull,

Sometimes I'll crack it open

though my instruments are dull”

                                                                ~ ‘Writer’s Block’, by Terry Scott Taylor

                                                                     from his album “John Wayne”, 1998

It has been said that every writer has a million bad words inside of him; he needs to write all of them out before he gets to the good stuff.  I figure that I’ve written much, much more than a million words, from student essays, through to short Facebook witticisms, to reams of work related writings courtesy of an anachronistic legal documentation process.  There’s no way to be sure if all this writing counts towards my personal million.

I write now because I must.  I write because what is inside needs to get out.  There is choice, there is always choice, because I don’t want to give over my free will to characters on a page.  And yet, there remains a compulsion, born in a degree of natural ability (not more than a reasonably functioning brain, really), nurtured by education, refined by writing out a million damned words...

That's all for now!  Check FB again in a week for the URL to the complete piece.  I'll be posting a new piece every week on a Friday, all going well.  Feel free to leave a comment, recommend it to friends if you feel it worthy.  Thanks for reading!