Snakes and Spiders

Thanks to the recent weather, we thought we would have to cancel the termite inspection but the guy said he'd do it anyway because the rains would allow him to see where moisture may be coming in under the house. Sure enough, he discovered a place in the back where the soil eroded enough to allow water to flow in around the water pipes (no big deal – I’ll take care of it this weekend).

After the inspection, though, he asked my wife if she heard him scream while he was in the crawlspace. She said “Um. No. Why?”  “Well, I came around a corner and found a five-foot-long snake skin and it startled me.”  After a brief discussion my wife assured him that I would deal with it because “my husband is not afraid of snakes.” 

Now, while that statement is true, it is really only a first-order approximation of “true”.  Yep, it's a fact that I am not overly concerned going toe-to-toe with most animals that I outweigh by a factor of 50 or more, but there are limits.

 

I don't mind spiders, for instance. When my son and I go hiking I always “take point” during this time of year because our little arachnid friends get super ambitious for the Halloween season. At the end of the trail I often look like I should be holding some chains and warning Ebenezer Scrooge to change his ways. Discovering a spider is crawling on my backpack is an annoyance – not a fear.  

But it's all about context.  You really should have a “confirmed kill” on a black widow or a brown recluse, say.  Seeing one in your house and shooing it away or flapping your hands at your wrists and yelling “Ew ew ew ew ew OMG OMG OMG ew ew” until it wanders off… somewhere… is not really a future-forward plan of attack. Additionally, battling my weight in black widows is probably not going to go well for me and is going to take more than a wadded up Kleenex to deal with. I would also be less than happy scrapping with a rabid raccoon while unarmed and blindfolded.  I would also not like to fight one teaspoon of Hantavirus although I’m about a billion times bigger than those punks.

Like I said: context.

So, without context, I am pretty upset about being volunteered to hunt and murder a five-foot snake of unknown type in a dark, enclosed space armed with anything short of a bandolier of hand grenades and/or the Sword of Gryffindor. 

Although I like to think of myself as a DIY’r, I'm also thinking in this case that this is exactly why God invented other people. “Hi, is this Joe’s Critter Removal? How much would it cost to get rid of a slightly-larger-than-five-foot snake in my crawlspace?  I'm not sure what kind. Hmm, that seems pricey but ok, can you come out ASAP? No no no no no…  I'm sure it's nothing to worry about but could you do me a solid and check on the other guy? I mean, I'm pretty sure he's still down there and his truck has been parked in my driveway for over a week now. Hello? Hello?”

So there you have it.  I am probably just going to end up patching the hole and heading on down to the pet store to buy a 40-pound bag of Basilisk Yum Yums (it sounds fancy but it’s really just, like, twenty puppies) and hope for the best.  What’s the worst that can happen?

Right?

Forget Something?

There was this guy at the gym earlier this week… Hold on… hold on… I’m gonna throw up again.

Oh man, that was a bad one.  I’m going to try to push through writing this but just know it is making me physically ill to recall this bit.

Ok.  So there I am in the packed gym halfway through my Zero to 5K routine on the treadmill listening to Warren Zevon ask for assistance to get out of some kind of jam he had gotten into in Central America when I see something in the mirror.

It was a dude.  A big, loud dude.  One of those guys that are “linebacker fit”.  Six-four, two-seventy-five-plus, 55% muscle, 45% fat.  You have seen and heard them in the gym before.

He was wearing shorts.  Well, I think they these could be called shorts because, technically, they had just enough material to qualify as “not quite underwear at least in the back”.  There was very little left to the imagination, especially since the material in the back had to do triple-duty constraining his pumpkin-sized cheeks from breaking free.  So the front part was sort of… sort of drawn up under his gut and… hold on… hold on… I’ll be right back.

Oh, God.  Dry heaves are the worst.

Did I mention the “shorts” were zebra-striped?  Yeah… they were zebra-striped.  Did I mention that he strutted?  Yeah… he strutted like a boss.

So, like I said, the place was packed with clients.  The trainers/managers were there.  Even with my headphones on and with the various machines running I could tell that the noise level in the room was deafening – packed to the rafters with the sound of everyone carefully saying absolutely nothing whatsoever.  Several dozen people participated in “synchronized looking anywhere but over there”… Unless you were one of the few unlucky souls trapped on a treadmill facing a mirror.  Then the game was “count the pieces of gym equipment that should probably be destroyed by fire immediately after he leaves”.

I have no idea how long he was at the gym before I got there but he left before I got off the treadmill.   He was wearing sweatpants and left with his plainly-dressed workout partner.  You read that right.  He had appropriate gym clothes with him and he was not by himself. 

I couldn’t hear what people were talking about one millisecond after the door shut behind him but eye-rolling, pointing, and snickering are pretty universal parts of human-to-human communication and are pretty easy to make out from across a room. 

I haven’t seen him there again since what will forever be etched into my mind as Skivvies Tuesday so I am wondering if management said something to him.  I’m doubting it, though.  Lawsuits, you dig?