I am a humanitarian.
And therefore, I will not squish spiders. If I see them on my ceiling or in my shower or on the carpet or near the cupboards or crawling outside on the street or on my shoe or in the rim of the toilet or hanging by an invisible web near the light outside my front door… I will leave them alone.
Because I am a humanitarian.
I will lay in bed after seeing them on my ceiling and wonder if I fall asleep where they will end up later that night. Will the welts on my shoulder and sides have anything to do with the missing eight-legged bug that has infested my bedroom? If I stare at the spider long enough on the ceiling I will notice that he’s not really moving much. Maybe he’s literally just working on setting up his home. And as we all know, except on Extreme Home Makeover, it takes months to put up a new house before you go back out into the world, exploring. So, too, I think to myself, is the scenario for spiders spinning webs on my bedroom ceiling. He’s gonna be there awhile. Probably until the morning when I am awake and no longer in danger of being used as an egg-laying depository.
Yet in the morning when I awake and am startled to find that my friend has disappeared and instead is now residing in the bottom of my shower, the issue of being a humanitarian grows much more complicated. For, how will I wash my body without drowning said shower-dweller?
As I am a humanitarian, I must go without cleansing for today.
Down in the living room, my little friend’s cousins have arrived, crawling around with abandon near the TV stand, the speakers and the couch bottom. I think for a second about the possibility that my little friends may crawl near the skirt of the couch, climb up into the couch then nest among the cushions. Then later when I arrive home, tired from a day of work and lay my head down on a pillow, be subjected to a swarm of baby spiders all hungry for human blood.
I will, instead, use the chair for my TV watching activities. As I, am a humanitarian.
Out the front door, something scary occurs. Apparently, spiders have slung their webs across the entryway to my house. And upon walking through their “invisible home” I am immediately thrown off guard. I stumble through, waving my hands in all directions, feeling the stickiness of the web all across my face.
Across the street, neighbors wonder how the retard stumbling down the stairs and into the street really fares in society with all those facial ticks, rubbery-flailing arms and tourette-style vocal moans.
I immediately decide that killing spiders is OK.
Besides, being a humanitarian is all about being nice to humans. It has nothing to do with spiders.