Three quick anecdotes

On May 22, 2017May 21, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories7 Comments

None of these are really worth posts on their own– well, one, maybe– but I wanna record them, so here you go.

Driving home from dropping the boy off at school one day last week, a bird happens to catch my eye at a traffic light. It’s probably a blackbird, but it’s a bit too far away for me to be sure– crow-shaped, and black, but too small to be a crow unless it’s a juvenile. So, sure. Blackbird. As I’m watching it, it abruptly does a tight 270° turn and heads straight down to the ground, wings out. I think at first that either the bird has been shot and what looked like a turn was actually a tumble or I’ve literally just seen this bird die in midair— which has to happen to birds sometime, right? Surely once in a while a bird just has a stroke or a heart attack or something?

At any rate, it pulls up right before it hits the ground and lands and then I lose track of it. If it had dove down at an angle, I’d not have said anything about it and just assumed it was going after a mouse or something, but 1) it looked way too small to be a bird of prey and 2) I have never seen a bird fly straight down before. It was weird as hell.

I’m at work, and I notice a spider perhaps two feet above my eye level and maybe three feet off to my right. The building I work in has very high ceilings, and my first thought is where the hell is his web attached, because if he’s coming down a string of silk it’s gotta be thirty or forty feet long by now. Then I notice that he’s coming straight toward me, which is not something I’d expect a spider coming down a strand of silk to do. He’s a tiny spider, and I’m not frightened of them, so this provokes fascination rather than oh god kill it fear. As he gets closer, I realize that he’s not attached to anything and he’s not acting like he’s climbing a web– he’s got his legs curled up underneath him, in fact. The damn thing is floating. I even wave my hand above him to check, and the breeze from my hand stirs him a bit but I clearly don’t break any strands of web. I try to film him but he’s too small for the resolution on my phone to handle. I watch him drift onto a sofa and crawl away.

Yesterday, first customer of the day. He waves me off at first, saying he’s only looking, which is just fine. I tell him everything in the store is on sale (which is true, and is useful information, I figure) and that the way our current deal works is “spend more, save more.”

He looks dead at me and says “You mean Jew more, save more?”

It takes me a second to process yeah that’s what the fuck he said.

“No,” I reply, shifting into my Teacher Voice. “I said spend more, save more.” And then I walk away and let my manager know that this fucker will be receiving no help from me whatsoever while he’s in the store and that if he speaks to me again we’re all lucky if the only thing I do is refer him to another salesperson.

The man and his wife circle the sales floor and leave without speaking to or being spoken to by anyone else. I spend the rest of my day with half of my brain proud of me for not losing my job by lighting this fucker up and the other half of my brain ashamed of me for not lighting the fucker up anyway.

I am, much later, trending toward the second option, for the record. How the fuck are you so fucking comfortable with being a bigot that you’ll just say shit like that to random fucking strangers in public? I shoulda thrown his ass out.

Speaking of spiders…

On September 21, 2013September 21, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

This lovely darling was discovered yesterday on the door at OtherJob; he is slightly larger than a quarter and furry. The furry spiders, as you all well know, are the scarier ones. I saw him first and pointed him out to the other person I was working with, who I believe is a high school senior. He is not, unfortunately, the most masculine high school senior I’ve ever met; his reaction was not quite Scooby-Doo windmilling his legs before jumping into Shaggy’s arms, but was close enough. I proceeded to continue horrifying him by rescuing the spider with a plastic putter and, fighting off the urge to chase the kid around the golf course, deposited him safely in a nearby bush.

“He’s gonna come back,” the kid said. “Remember the katydid?”

(I never told you the katydid story because it’s sad. Short, not-sad version: we couldn’t convince a katydid that it was safer outside the clubhouse than inside it.)

“I doubt it,” I said, thinking of the wide expanse of concrete the spider would have to cross in more-or-less broad daylight. “We won’t see him again.”

Fast forward about three hours, when there is a blood-curdling scream from somewhere around course three. I rush outside to discover a female customer in her mid-forties or so jumping up and down, wailing, and waving her arms frantically in front of her face.

Her husband described the spider that had webbed down directly in front of her face as “about the size of a quarter” and said “yup, that’s it” when I showed him the picture I’d taken. His wife was not pleased when I used the word “hilarious” to describe the situation.

Well, no, ma’am, your spine-tingling horror isn’t funny. It’s just that I could have killed that spider a few hours ago and saved you the trouble. I coulda said that. I chose not to.

I’m hoping there are no insect stories today.

Don’t read this if you respect me

On September 20, 2013September 19, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

Is_it_can_be_hugs_tiem_now_spider

…I fully expect this to be my most popular post of all time, by the way.

Alongside this whole “don’t yell at kids” thing I’ve been doing lately I’ve been trying in general to become a gentler person. At some point in the last few weeks I decided (possibly at the spirited urging of some internet people) that I wasn’t going to be automatically killing spiders any longer. Seeing a spider no longer means trying to kill a spider. They eat other bugs. This is good, right? We like spiders; we should keep them around.

There’s been a spider living in my bathroom for the last week or so. Just a little house spider type of dude, one of the almost-transparent kinds, not like the black monstrosity I killed in the tub not too long ago (and, I think, blogged about, but I’m not gonna go looking right now.) He’s been hanging out in the upper corners of the bathroom, so even if I were inclined to kill him, he’d be hard to reach and I’d have to stand on something– no real point, right? So for several days every time I’ve gone into the bathroom I’ve spent a few seconds looking around to see if I could spot him. The other day– Wednesday morning, maybe?– he happened to scuttle into the laundry room before I closed the door, and I’ve not seen him in the bathroom since. Which, weirdly, was sorta sad. I’d started thinking of him as a bit of a pet. For all I know, the dog ate him.

My wife went down into our (more-or-less unfinished) basement tonight to go through some stuff and called me down; it rained like hell all day today and we had some water on the floor in the utility room and, as it turned out, some more– inexplicably in the middle of the damn room– in the main area down there. I discovered the wet area in the main room by accident– by stepping in it, wearing socks. Which led me to take my socks off and cuff my jeans a bit, as my jeans are generally a bit too long when I’m not wearing shoes. Several times as we were poking around looking for wet spots (shut up, you’re gross) I walked through cobwebs. They don’t freak me out like they do some people but they’re still kinda skeevy, y’know? Nobody likes walking through cobwebs.

Being bald and walking through cobwebs is more unpleasant than usual, by the way. Trust me.

Anyway, I’m brushing myself off every three seconds and my feet are cold and my pants and socks are wet and WHY THE HELL DOES EVERYTHING IN THIS HOUSE LEAK ALL THE SUDDEN JESUS CHRIST and suddenly it occurs to me that I have to use the bathroom. There is no bathroom in the basement. And, believe me, ordinary “have to use the bathroom” types of experiences get rather radically worse quickly when you have to use the bathroom while barefoot on a cold tile floor and wet.

“Gotta go,” I told my wife, and headed upstairs.

Where I entered the bathroom and, well, went. This was, shall we say, a multiple event, necessitating a seated position, and because I’m like that I grabbed a book on the way into the bathroom. (There’s a post coming about John Green, by the way.) So I’m seated and reading my book and taking care of business… and my fucking pet spider drops onto the top of my head, scuttles off, lands on the book, and then drops into my underwear.

I will allow you to imagine the sequence of events that followed, as my skill as an author cannot do justice to what actually occurred.

I kill spiders on sight again, by the way.