My Itsy Bitsy Friend

World, meet Wendy.  Wendy is a spider.

I've been having a pretty rough time lately, dealing with some things that I need to deal with.  Those close enough know what I'm talking about, those that don't probably don't need to know.  I decided to get out of the house for a while and go maybe write something... so I came downtown, ordered some tea, and then started pulling up old stories and looking them over.

I thought for a while about writing more about Victoria, who's a character I dearly love, but I'm not sure what aspect of her life I should focus on next.  Or if I should focus on her alley gator instead.  Nothing spun up, so I closed that door and looked through others.  Several small snippets rose and fell before the thresher of my mind, and then I started to think about spiders.  I started to think about writing a story about how the first creature to reach space was a spider that had ballooned too high, and then I discarded that idea as lame.  I mean who would want to read that?  Seems just stupid to me, so like so many other ideas, I threw it aside.

And I'm sitting there, staring now at old photos, my mind wandering to places where no torches burn, and I look down and I have a little friend sitting on my keyboard.  This spider.  Wendy.  Nature, yet again, comes to tap me on the shoulder and say "Hey bro.  Gonna be alright."

So I sit back and watch her for a while, and she scrambles across my keyboard and skitters towards the screen, crawls part way up it then over to the side, and runs over to my phone's charge cable.  She's been sitting there for the last ten minutes as I just stare at her and sit and think.  And so I decided to take a picture, and then write about it.

My own experiences with spiders started pretty young, with one of my uncles either going through an entymology phase or just having a severe hardon for spiders.  His wall was covered in dead spiders all put up on display.  I don't remember how the conversation came up, but I do remember him telling me once that spiders are very good luck, and you should never kill one if you could in any way avoid it.  They're great house guests:  They're clean, they help keep other pests away, they prefer to stay out of sight, and they create their own art.

I could use a little luck right now, and a little art, and little Wendy here seemed to have known.  She still hasn't moved from that cable, going on twenty minutes now.  My mind spins in weird directions and I wonder if she's a happy spider.  Spiders have some pretty amazing neural work, and I figure there has to be emotions in there somewhere.  Has she already picked this place as her home?  Is she going to live her eight legged life out at the Root Note Hipster Cafe?  Will she ride someone's clothes out side, maybe latch on to some thick horn rim pair of hipster glasses and gain her freedom to the streets of Lacrosse?  Will she catch a steady wind and fly away to some exotic place over the bluffs where there is no concrete?  Will she have children, will she live a long spider life or be snuffed out by a cruel boot or some other hunter?

And I wonder what she thinks of this giant thing clattering on keys nearby.  Why is she sitting here staring at me?  I mean if I were her, I'd probably want some more distance from this giant mass of pale flesh and hair.  But she stands there fearless, keeping a few eyes on me.  

And I still can't think of anything to write.  So maybe I will honor her life by writing about a spider.