As many of you already know, I recently moved into a new humble abode in the Sparta whereabouts, much nearer to my job.

This can be both good and bad, as I am sure you realize. I now can eat dinner at home (which is in and of itself both good and bad), I have less driving time to get home and to work and I have a more convenient location for quick trips to the local shops and stores.

I also have a yard that a mountain goat would be proud to mow and spiders that are large enough to pay rent.

I went through the house last night and used some of my "potpourri-scented ant and roach spray" to help take care of my large roommates.

I now have spiders that smell like flowers. In the process, I found the spray was much more detrimental to my health and well-being than to the critters. I had to open all the doors and windows and stand outside for awhile, effectively filling my house with moths and other night insects that the spiders feed upon. Thus, in trying to kill them, I instead made them stronger. Isn't that a saying or something?

While petal-scented, well-fed spiders are not bad in one way (I would rather have nicely-scented spiders than those stinky ones), I still don't think living in a house full of eight-legged creatures is a good thing. The main problem is that the part of the house I rent is mostly underground, which makes it a haven for lost and lonely spiders. They come into the house, have a few drinks, pick up a girl spider, make a web and settle down to raise their kids.

They aren't the big brown furry kind of spider or the black poisonous ones, they are the long-legged horror movie type. They leave their fuzzy little webs everywhere and creep around in the corners of my rooms until late at night. Whilst I sleep, they build their webs in areas that they know I will traverse in the morning, eyes still heavy-laden with the dew of the early morning and brain filled with a fog that can only be dispersed by very strong Columbian coffee, that black sunshine that starts each of my days.

This morning I walked through a web in the bathroom door, found one on my kitchen sink and even saw one of the little jokers building a palace on my shower head. The one on the shower head looked like it had an ‘H' in the middle, as in "Ha, Ha."

There is just something icky about walking through a spider web. I'm not really afraid of them, but when I walk through a web it sends a shudder all the way down my spine and I find myself slapping uncontrollably and trying to remove the web, much to the spiders' delight, I assure you.

It would make quite a comedy show, such as Candid Camera, to place spider webs in elevators and public doorways and film the people after walking through them. The instinct to do a thrashing tribal dance is uncontrollable, I assure you. Add in some native drums and it would really make for a show.

But as for my current woes, I'm not one to complain, well, not much anyway. I just can't live with these abominations of creation.

I still say I prefer a spider to a fly and a snake to a rat, but when it comes to living with forty-blue-million spiders, give me the flies. At least I could open the windows and some of the flies would buzz off to find some other pile of something to light on.

The thing that really bothers me is that I never see any insects in the house or in their webs, yet they keep growing. I wonder if they aren't biting me at night, those evil little blood-suckers.

Yes, my friends, the itsy-bitsy spider is the devil's minion, living right in our midst. Perhaps that little rhyme should have been named "The Icky-Nasty Spider."

"The icky-nasty spider crawled up the bedroom wall, down in the kitchen and through the bathroom hall. Down came the Raid and made the spider pout, until I took the fly swat and knocked that sucker out." You could share that one with your kids, if you want. It might make a nice bed-time story, right after telling them about the large nasty creatures that invariably live in every closet and under every bed. I think I will make a wonderful father, don't you?

You know, I haven't always felt this way about spiders. For a matter of fact, I was in my old house a while back and found a big old brown spider in the kitchen sink. I put him in a mason jar and let him out over the edge of the porch. I didn't kill it or even harass it. You see, I don't hate spiders, per se. I just don't like them living right over my bed (or under it for that matter). I have always been one to believe that everything is needed for the environment to have balance, but web dwellers can't be relocated through any means I know to employ. They must be eradicated ruthlessly and with malice (I added this in to scare the spiders, some of which might be large enough read the paper if I leave it laying around the house).

Maybe I should be nice to them, we always need more subscribers. If you recall, last year I had ants, this year spiders. I guess that saying is true, "time and bugs stop for no man." Maybe it wasn't quite like that, but it's still true.

Get more tongue in cheek commentary this week's issue of the Alleghany News!

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