"I don't like spiders and snakes."
- song title from Jim Stafford

"A coconut shell full of water is a sea to an ant."
- Indian Proverb

"Well yes, a spider web would reveal an arachnid presence. "
- Delbert McClintock (John Goodman) from Arachnophobia

"He's Hitler with a tail. He's "The Omen" with whiskers. Even Nostradamus didn't see him coming!"
- Ernie Smuntz (Nathan Lane) from Mouse Hunt

"The venom of the black widow spider is 15 times as toxic as the venom of the Prairie Rattlesnake. "
- about the Black Widow Spider from http://www.desertusa.com

August 8th, 2004

My life is a nightmare.

Oh, I know you've heard me say this before but, now, the sheer nonsense of my wife's pacifism has reached a point where I may need to commit homicide. And after that, I'm going to commit other types of "'cides" as well. Someone and some things are definitely going to die - how and when they will die, I haven't made my mind up on.

The entire thing started on Tuesday. I had just finished a three week period of professional hell. There were long hours and aggravation to contend with and my body decided to rebel against me. I got sick. The combination of overtaxing my body, not eating right, lack of sleep, emotional pressure and stress took its toll when the first virus I came in contact with took me out. I called the office and told them I wasn't going in.

In return, I got to enjoy the wonders of a gastrointestinal virus which kept me running to the bathroom when I wasn't hunched over in pain with stomach cramps. I spent the day between watching Spider-man cartoons from the Ralph Bakshi 1967 series, mentally making my critique and wondering how and why Bakshi had not been exposed as a complete and utter fraud of a cartoonist. They actually allowed him to make an animated Lord of the Rings in the same stock footage manner albeit he cheapened it when he decided rotoscope technology was the thing to do for this movie.

Contrary to what most people nowadays would nostalgically remember as a cool cartoon, the 1967 version of Spider-man, especially the second half of the serial generally blew dogs. This for the most part was due to Bakshi just not caring anymore. I believe he probably reasoned that since we were kids we wouldn't notice the fact that 60% of what we were watching was reused stock footage and the plots for many of them were the same with maybe one or two slight differences. I recommend that if you are feeling nostalgic and want to see the cartoon again, wait until some poor sucker like me decides that it was a poor investment and sells it on ebay.

Don't pay full price for it. Trust me.

When I wasn't doing that I was answering e-mails from my good friend, Vinnie Recoppa in our perpetual debate on the 2004 election. He is pro-Bush and I... am not. I will not bore you with any point / counter point discussions we have had, but I really do thank him for giving me issues made on the other side - ad nauseum. I may catch up with everything he's e-mailed me by the 2008 election. Ideologies aside, I appreciate his frankness on the issues.

But I digress.

After a day of convalescence, I decided that since my wife was also having a bad day that I'd brave the virus and pick her up some East Indian take out. Of course, it would be only for her as Indian food and my present constitution would be the equivalent of pulling the pin out of a live grenade. So, for her, it would be bon appetite. For me, it would be something light and non threatening. I grabbed a book for the wait and did my good deed for the week. When I came back to the house, I saw I had a visitor. There, hanging on my door knob, was a list of townhouse violations that I had to clean up in 10 days. Now, the fine, if not attended to in the 10 days, is twenty five bucks. I don't want to pay it so I thought I'd try to take care of it over the weekend.

Here is a bit of irony. Condo Associations give the tenant a specific amount of days to take care of any of the charges they've made. However, when it comes to them actually taking care of anything for you, you could wait years until anything gets accomplished. I have written them frequently on this and it is part of the war I wage to this day. However, in this case, I thought it was best to acquiesce to their request.

She mentioned in her chicken scratch, something about keeping storage stuff outside of the bin and my recyclables were in bucket and not in trash cans. The recyclables would be taken care of on Wednesday morning and the only reason they were in buckets was because I missed the pickup date from the last time. It was just that there was too much stuff for my closed trash can to hold, so I put some plastic water bottles in some buckets. It was a non issue as that was a day away anyway. This was a case of bad timing, nothing more.

The other charges were going to take a bit of work. I have an old trash can that I have to get rid of. How do you throw away a trash can?? Leave it out for the garbage man to collect and he'll just leave it there. Please, if any of you readers out there know what to do, e-mail me. This is a mystery to me.

In the trash can, I have an old rubber based area rug that I kept for the kitchen. Unfortunately, Killian kept peeing on it. So, I threw it out and put it in the old garbage can. I forgot about this for months and left it in the backyard. I also have a couple of large plastic buckets I used for tie dying and thought leaving them in the back was a good idea. Well, that would just have to go in the shed after I dumped the water.

So, today, I found that I finally had enough time to attend to these problems. As bad luck would have it, I decided that the first thing I was going to do was the wrong one. I decided the rug would change garbage cans. The rug was a sad, smelly, thing that had fulfilled its purpose once upon a time and that time was long passed. Like an old soldier, it stood rolled up at attention with large slack rolls in the middle. I picked up the rug to do the transport to the new garbage can and felt something at my elbow. One yellowjacket.... two yellowjackets... seven yellowjackets... a swarm.

I was for dinner.

Hidden within the folds of the rug was a yellowjacket nest that I vaguely remember my wife telling me about. I, of course never saw it. After two stings on the elbow and me frantically backpedalling and tripping over my own feet into the poison ivy patch I fell into last year and skinning my knee on one of the bricks to get away from the now angry swarm, I decided to educate the neighbors' children with a new string of profanity.

"JESUSCHRIST!!!! YOUSTUPIDMUTHERF$%&RS!!! SONOFA$%*@BASTARDS!!!!! YOUPIECEOFSH%*!!!!!!", I screamed quite undignifingly. You have to understand, I was incredibly pissed.

My wife heard me cursing up a storm as I ran in through the sliding glass door. "THAT'S IT!!!! THAT'S THE LAST STRAW!!! THEY ARE DEAD!!! I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS SH&%T!!!!!"

Okay, let me back up a bit.

My wife is a child of nature. That means she loves animals and she won't consciously go out an kill anything. I, on the other hand, have no real issue with this. Especially when it comes to bugs. I lived in Jersey City and can clearly remember waking up one summer night with a cockroach on my neck and accidentally smushing it when I thought it was a mosquito. I have absolutely no issues with killing ugly, nasty, bugs - ESPECIALLY, yellowjackets. We not only have one nest of yellowjackets in the rug but also in the patio umbrella, and under the balcony. Every once in a while they decide to come out of their nests and remind me that they live here as well and I scream and yell at my wife that I'm going to get rid of them.

She usually manages to talk me out of it and persuades me to wait until the winter when the yellowjackets are dead anyway. Such is the problem with being married to a child of nature. She lives by the rule of "harm none". I live by the rule of "harm some". Really, I like to live in a realistic world where some animals are just pests. My job is to know the difference.

For example: I believe that the following are fair game - ticks, gypsy moths, mosquitos, wasps, yellowjackets, spiders, snakes, fleas, lice, cockroaches and, yes, mice and squirrels. Okay, maybe I won't kill the mice and squirrels, but I can tell you things are getting really close.

Now, listen, I had mice as pets at one point. They are cute intelligent little things. We had a mouse for two years, which was old for a mouse, and when he died, I was sad. I understand that they are just trying to survive and that is okay. However, I also have an $80,000 mortgage and I would like to keep my house from getting infested with vermin.

Eight months ago, we heard noises coming from the kitchen. I had no idea what they were. One day while I had the light off, I heard it again and saw a field mouse under the stove. I tried to catch him but he got away and went into a small hole in the wall where the gas line comes in (I know, it's like a Tom & Jerry cartoon). I was about to call the exterminator and my wife stopped me.

"C'mon it's cold out there. And if you didn't leave dishes in the sink, he wouldn't have come."

To a degree, I agreed with her. So, I practiced being neater. Two months later I heard skittering over the ceiling in the living room. The sound was too big to be a mouse. I figured it was a squirrel.

I grabbed a broom.

Methodically, I started poking the ceiling to get the squirrel running to the back of the house where it probably got in. This time, I told my wife that something must be done and she had to try to figure out a humane way of doing it before I got involved. She told me to wait until the spring and then the squirrel would be gone because it would probably live outside.

Earlier this week, I heard what I can only term must have been the squirrel Olympics in the attic. At first, I thought it was raining and the drops were hitting the roof with that familiar "pitter patter". No such luck. I checked outside and saw that it was bone dry outside.

One month ago, a baby mouse ran across the floor. My wife failed to catch it in order to move it outside of the house. This time it was "But it's just a baby." Christ, the things I live with.

So, today, it's yellowjackets. As I was trying to calm down my wife asked, "What's a black spider with a red spot?"

"What shape is the spot?", I asked.
"I couldn't tell."
"Is it an hour glass?"
"I don't know. I couldn't quite see it outside."

I was on my PC at the time and did a search under the probable spider. Yahoo Search: Black Widow.

I showed her a picture. "Did it look like this?"
"Yeah, it had the pincers, too."
Getting agitated, I asked, "Where did you see it?"
"On the mop outside."

Swell.

So, that's it then. I'm in hell. I'm in the fifth circle as Dante described it. I have bugs that can sting or kill me just in my backyard and my hippie flowerchild wife doesn't want me to call an exterminator because of her mother earth "agreement" with the insects. You have to understand how insane this sounds, don't you? Now, my grip on my own sanity is tentative, at best. But in no way, no how, can I possibly understand a metaphysical agreement between my wife and the insect world.

I said, "Fine. No problem. You have three days. Get rid of them or I call an exterminator. I've had enough of this crap. You complain that this house is too small, but at the same time you are not letting me do anything to make this house marketable. This is now your problem. Not mine. In order for this house to be sellable, it can't have anything other than us living in it. A potential buyer will have this house inspected. One way or another, if there are any mice, bugs, squirrels, yellowjackets, or vagrant spirits living here, they will have to be gone. We do it your way or we do it my way. My way will work. I suggest that in three days you get on the yellowjacket negotiating table to get them out now and then table the meeting to mice and squirrels. Convince them that they may not wish to be around in the next couple of weeks because it just won't be healthy - not with Terminix or the Orkin Man coming to town. I WANT THEM GONE!!"

That's where I am as of this writing. I am nursing a stung elbow with witchazel and mud. I'm also wearing grass stained jeans from where I fell into the poison ivy patch. I'm not a happy camper.

On the one hand, I truly admire my wife's commitment to nonviolence. It is a Zen Buddhist path she is walking. Non violence and pacifism were the way of Ghandi, Buddha, Confucius, and most eastern monks. It takes a great show of strength to NOT hurt something. Who knows? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio... Her little spiritual negotiation may work.

I am not like that. Were I going to live that kind of life, I certainly would have planned better. I would have made no effort to be as materialistic as I am. I would care less about the health of my dogs (I know that Guinness has been stung by something once. Whatever that might have been.). I also would not have invested any kind of money in a place which I eventually would have to sell. But I have and that is the place where I am at, right now. Eventually, I may walk her path, but so long as I have this unwavering fear about getting bit or stung by something that day is a long way off.