I parked my car in a garage today and as I stepped out of it and shut the door, I turned to walk away and instead stopped dead in my tracks because of the quarter-sized spider hanging precariously between my car and the one next to me, dangling on an invisible spider high wire. Coming face to face with a dangling spider obviously fucked up every plan I had for the day.
For a long time, forgetting that I was in the garage to park my car and go meet someone, I stood there paralyzed by this beigey-colored spider with black spots and crooked legs, all splayed out before me like some sunbathing predator perched in midair by magic. I was completely STUCK between the cars watching this spider and wondering why spider maneuvering isn't covered in any kind of required college course, or at least for elective credit. That's a class I would have taken instead of ballet, which sure, I got credit for, but there's no way to pleia yourself out of parking garage spider showdown, is there? Wait, is there?
I had two options, three if you count my plan to befriend the spider and invite it to come hang out with me for the day, thereby neutralizing the threat of it crawling all over my face. I would get its email address and send it an Evite for a day of fun, I'd use a whimsical theme with cupcakes and a cartoon girl on a scooter. We could do Sudoku and it could put corn rows in my hair and we could play this other game I made up since I've been working from home called How Many Coke Zeros Can I Consume In One Day. The spider would probably win that game, with the 8 arms and all, and that ability to consume 10 times its body weight.
The more realistic options (since when do spiders have email?) was to either duck under the spider and quickly run away, hoping to God it didn't plan a sneak descent during my dropping and rolling and start crawling all over my face, or I could inhale deep, blow the spider out of my path and run for cover before it swung back to crawl all over my face. I tried out both of these options with a quick limbo under the spider and a test of my lung capacity, and neither seemed a practical solution.
I was out of options. I'd been standing there theorizing resolutions for Spider v. Human for over ten minutes, which is a long time when you're staring at something that's staring back at you with 8,000 eyes and practically as many appendages. There was absolutely no way I could get around this creature unless I actually got near it, which would only lead to the disastrous event of the spider possibly having a 1 in 100 chance of maybe coming close to being near enough to touch me. So I did the only thing left to do, the only practical thing to do. I got back in my car and moved ten spaces over.
