Did anyone else see The Giant Spider Invasion? Since the 4th grade, I’ve been haunted by a scene where the drunken wife, who gets blamed by her no-goodnick farmer husband for all the spiderwebs suddenly appearing around the house, makes a shake in a blender filled with spiders. My nightmare came true this morning. Sipping some OJ in bed, I glanced into my glass to see a GIANT SPIDER squirming in the bottom of the glass! AAAAAAhhhhh! When I poured it out, it seemed like half of its legs were missing. AAAAAAhhhhh! EEEEEEEwwwww! AAAAAAhhhhh! Will I be climbing walls tomorrow? Fighting crime?
Speaking of movies, Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton did Jerome’s paintings in Art School Confindential! Anyone who’s been to my house has seen her portrait of me “Kissin’ Bunny,” and in the old days might remember the portrait that she made of Bob in black and white makeup as my Genet-inspired Prisoner of Love. I haven’t seen the movie yet (going with #4 on Monday), but she says they really got the art school experience right on. Yay Caitlin!
Back to the spider experience. Why is it that these things–spider, snakes, mice–make grown men, well, this grown man, behave like someone about to be knifed 50 times in a horror film? I scream, really, like scream, an involuntary blood curdling hands thrown in the air 5-alarm scream. Spiders are all over my garden and house, but as soon as they get in my orange juice, they become something else, a threat so deeply frightening that some inner alarm goes off and my head pops off like in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Did you see that Spongebob about “Wormy”? The one where Sandy goes on vacation and leaves Spongebob and Patrick to watch her little friend, a caterpillar that she calls “Wormy?” After a day of fun with their new friend, Patrick and Spongebob come back to find the glass bottle that Wormy was in broken, and they see a butterfly flit by. Suddenly cut to an extreme video closeup of the butterfly’s real face–“A monster!! It ate wormy!!!”–something so terrifying to them and the inhabitants of Bikini Bottom that the whole town ends up in flames as the citizens run in terror from the delicate little butterfly.
The sun is shining, the tea is steeping, and lover man, oh where can you be?