It always starts the same way, your attention is honed in on the benign details of the task at hand. You are safely cradled in your habitual routine, comfortable after lulling yourself to the rythm of day in and day out. All is calm, all is......suddenly though there is something disturbingly different. A warning bell sounds anonymously in your head. Hairs on your arm come to attention and the snot in your nose instantly coagulates. You realize your world is under attack, something has triggered ... More

It always starts the same way, your attention is honed in on the benign details of the task at hand. You are safely cradled in your habitual routine, comfortable after lulling yourself to the rythm of day in and day out. All is calm, all is......suddenly though there is something disturbingly different. A warning bell sounds anonymously in your head. Hairs on your arm come to attention and the snot in your nose instantly coagulates. You realize your world is under attack, something has triggered your incredibly keen sense of personal awareness. Electricity permeates the peripheral vicinity, adrenaline explodes into your veins to the point where you can almost feel yourself turning green. Muscles are rigid, senses are heightened, a bead of sweat forms on your furrowed brow. Your eyes like daggers are piercing the transparent air between you and the identified threat. It is a spider. A spider in your bathroom. Is there any other antagonist so vile in it's brazen arrogant hostility. This room, your shrine! This room is a vault of secrets and dare-nots you don't even discuss with your closest family and friends ( except those of you who answer the phone in yours ). Your husband spends hours of his precious time within these four poorly sound-proofed walls. And here you are face to face and eye to eye, eye, eye, eye eye.... with nature's cruelest form of the "Yo mama" joke. Time passes like bowling balls through a garden hose as you scan the room, body still frozen motionless lest you relive your own private scene from Arachnophobia, somewhere in this bathroom will rest the perfect unassuming yet deadly household item you shall wield like Excalibur. You however eventually settle for a wad of toilet paper and the tube it came with. That is the titans clash. Never a battle has ever commenced with such fervor and vigor and flexibility that you now engage in. Hand to hand, hand, hand hand....combat suddenly your forte as you jab and block and pirouette your way around the sink. Your moves are lightning quick, your hand a lethal apparatus, an extension of your darker half, your mouth suddenly knows all kinds of new and never to be repeated four letter words. Your foe epitomizes the nightmares which seep out from under the closet doors of babes. This creature, this thing, this menace which could at any time leap with gravity defying force onto your face where, inevitably, it will obviously suck your brain through your nose, this disgusting legs of eight must be stopped. In this moment you gratefully recall with horrifying accuracy every contingency plan from every Sci-Fi movie you have every seen. Theme music echoes within your ears.
In the end a light fixture dangles uselessly over the upide down bathmat, the shower curtain is somehow caught in your armpit, a plunger is stuck to the mirror, and something somewhere is dripping. Your foe has disappeared, that coward! But you, you in that ninja stance with the shower curtain in your armpit and toilet paper stuck to your forehead, you have lived to fight another day. Another day there will be, but this one shall be known as the day you looked icky arachnid certain death in the eye, eye, eye... and said not today webhead! Today I flush out all fear like so much toilet paper down the john.  Less