June 9th 2017

Arachnids and myriapods. in People suck. Cats are awesome. Dogs are alright.

•  June 9, 2017, 12:46 p.m.
 
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• Public

I like spiders, generally speaking. I sympathize with anything that gets hated and killed purely on the basis of its looks. It’s not his or her fault that he or she is a spider. So what if it looks creepy to you, he’s just trying to survive.

At my longest lasting job, I was the unofficial spider catcher. Cashiers would call me over the intercom to come and get one, and take it outdoors. The husband still does that.

I bet I took a dozen brown recluses to the abandoned bar across the street from the store. (In small, plastic, deli containers, of course.) Homeless people later started camping behind it, which amuses me greatly. Homeless shelters there turn away anyone who is noticeably intoxicated; so these were people who made a conscious choice to be drunk, rather than indoors. Knowing that I inadvertently made their lives more difficult makes me smile. (Yes, I know I’m “evil”.)

All of that said, my basement is on the small side. It’s a single room, about eight by fifteen feet; with a ceiling height of about eight feet. It has two, framed, openings; one on each side, that open into the crawl space under the house. One has a board over it, the other I leave open for the feral cats to come in if they get cold. (Yes, I heat the crawlspace; just “wasting” heat, as my mother would say, to help the feral cats.) I feed them on the ledge of that opening.

So of course, every summer, my basement becomes spider and centipede central. To the point that even I get unnerved going down there. I walk down the stairs saying, “Okay, spiders and creepy crawlies, I’m being nice and not killing you all, so kindly return the favor and don’t drop onto my head. Okay?”

And there is one creature that leaves me hopping, and shaking my hands, and going “Aaaaaa!” for several minutes after merely seeing it. The large, adult version, of that most Lovecraftian of common, house dwelling, arthropods. The House Centipede. The little ones aren’t so bad. They sort of resemble living feathers. But the big ones? Dear gods they are among the most hideous animals in North america. Maybe the most hideous.

I’ve tried to overcome my irrational phobia by learning about them. So I now know that they live for years, mate for life, and usually like to be inside of your walls, discreetly eating the spiders that might otherwise come out and bite you. They’re helpful, harmless, and normally go completely unnoticed. - Unless you’re like me and go invading their territory like a weirdo.

If you know someone that you enjoy bothering, find a video of a big House Centipede, and present it to them on your phone, as if it were some adorable animal video. Like “Oh hey, you gotta see this! It’s great!” Holds video of two inch long unspeakable horror up to the other person’s face. And watch them back away in horror.

Something about those legs. I saw seven or ten of them, just sort of barely in view from the basement light, over the left side edge of the ledge on which I put the cat food, one day last year. I saw them after I’d put the food up there, and the realization that my hand had been within inches of that thing, sent me shaking and yelling nonsensically up the stairs.

I think it’s part of evolutionary psychology. The instinctual “fear” of things that a cave man would be safer by avoiding. Heights, dark holes, snakes, and of course, creepy, leggy, arthropods. (I put “fear” in quotation marks because I’m not “afraid” of them. Not like I was of a growling dog one night, on an otherwise empty, dirt, road; for example. I know that they’re harmless.)

But there has to be way to encourage them to stay under the house. I’ve read that they hate light. So maybe I should install a couple more light fixtures down there, with 75 watt bulbs or better, and just leave them turned on. And a clamp lamp, right on that ledge.