Asamee Blog

We lived in a house once that had a brown recluse spider living in one of the window wells. It lived with us for 8 months until we moved. I refused to kill it. Killing spiders is bad mojo, I don't care how many females are screaming. Spiders have a communications network called The Web. It is much more efficient than the internet. You kill one spider and suddenly every spider on the planet knows about it and you are a murderer in the eyes of every spider from then on out. I swear, they know! Black widows have actually crawled on me without biting me. I swear, they really do know. They can tell your feelings towards them. So I bless every spider I ever see and I never ever kill them or hurt them in any way.

I had a long conversation with a spider once. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a pickup truck while I was waiting for the driver to return. Suddenly, a little spider came floating down from the ceiling of the truck's cab. It was hanging onto a silky thread. Just about 10 or 12 inches in front of my face, the spider stopped its downward descent and turned to look at me. It stopped all the movement of its many legs and said to me, "You're that guy I heard about on the Web, aren't you? You're the one who refuses to kill spiders!"

I cleared my throat and replied, "Well, yes I am."

"I am honored to meet you," replied the spider. "I have noticed that human men and human women have something in common." The spider fell silent, apparently waiting for a reply.

"Oh?" is all I could come up with.

"Well, yes. You both are scared to death of spiders!" The spider then laughed--although it is beyond me to describe a spider's laugh. (It sounds kind of like cellophane tearing off of rotten fruit, and it looks kind of like Dolly Parton riding a mechanical bull.)

Like a manic-depressive on a bungie chord, the spider bounced up and down as it laughed. Finally, it continued, "The difference between the human males and human females (besides which planet you're from) is in how you react to what you fear. The males react by killing us and the females react by screaming like banshees."

The bungee action intensified, but I came back with a quick one, "But there are females who kill spiders, and, lord knows, there are males who scream like banshees."

"Yes," replied the spider, "but we spiders can't see your purses and beards and breasts and fashion and attitudes and prejudices and phallic symbology and all those things that constitute "right" gender. We react to light, but we also react to feelings. The predominant feelings vibration that we get from humans is fear. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, we have determined that humans reacting in fear, react two ways: The kill or they scream like banshees. This we have decided is gender-related, and it is the only way we can tell what gender you are."

(I began wondering, ever so briefly, how one tells the gender of a spider.)

"But when a human comes to us and they are not in fear, then we can't tell what gender they are. It is such a rare occurence that we are usually at first confused. But then, from thousands of years of genetic memory, we remember that there is also the human feeling known as love. There have been enough humans over the course of time that have shown us spiders just enough love for that to be imprinted on our mass consciousness. It is always a joy to find humans like that. But dang it, when you guys are in the love vibration, we just can't tell what gender you are! So tell me, White Feather, just what gender are you?"

I was so utterly shocked, I didn't know what to say. For a minute there, I really didn't know what gender I was. I really didn't know. I actually considered opening my pants, just to make sure. But then Greg came walking out of the forest and back to the truck. He got in and started driving, continuing the long commute to work.

When I looked back at the spider, it was gone.