Les Bonnes Choses

I was sitting at the desk in the "office area" at the back of my house last night. On my computer monitor was a walk-through on disabling superfluous notifications on my phone. Despite my personality deficiencies, I find myself with friends, some of whom live in Europe, and some of whom are night-owls. Consequently, I have had my room illuminated at odd hours in the night as the charging iPhone beside my bed notifies me about some comment or other on Facebook. So I sat back in my swivel chair and put my foot up on the desk to locate the facility on my phone to make the appropriate changes to my phone's settings.

A small dark spot moved quickly across my right peripheral vision along the lip of the desk, only to disappear underside the desktop.

I am keenly interested in how your various senses are wired together. I would wager heavily that those neurons that fire in response to rapid peripheral visual motion have a communication super-highway leading to the most ancient part of your brain stem that registers terror.

An expletive later, I was blindly spraying toxic bug spray under the desk, not for the first time that evening. The first application of what is no doubt an airborne carcinogen was to get a cocooning garden spider out of the corner of the ceiling. I asked myself, not for the first time, what the hell these damn things are doing in my house. I felt my objections, though rhetorical, were worth repeating in an open letter to the spiders and centipedes that cause me so much grief:

Dear Spiders and Centipedes,

I understand you perform a valuable service in the ecosystem. You are both predatory arthropods, and therefore can be counted on to control the populations of other pests that may otherwise damage my garden or get into my Cheerios. The problem is this: the only pests I regularly have in my house are you.

I see you in the corner, Mr. Spider. When you move into a room, I can always count on you to take up your position where the wall meets the ceiling. I knew you were in the room because I just walked through a strand of silk you cast off when you dropped from the ceiling. I didn't see the silk of course, which is why I walked into it. I never see it, because you never catch anything in it! There are no flies in the house, Mr. Spider. Why do you think that you will have better luck in the opposite corner of the room? You do not starve to death fast enough for my liking.

I see you in the bathtub, Mr. Centipede. I used to think you came up through the drains, which really creeped me out. But then I learned that you do not swim, and instead are finding yourself trapped by the too-slick enamel when you went looking for water. I resent having to look in the bathtub before I take a shower. I know you eat ants and other insects, but I really only had an ant problem for a month or two back in 2010, which I solved with a clever application of Borax. You know what Borax doesn't do? Scurry across your desk. It also helps clean laundry. Mr. Centipede, you are bloody useless at cleaning laundry. In fact, the one time I found your ilk in my laundry, it freaked me the hell out. I know that you are purported to hunt spiders, which might be construed as useful given the previous paragraph. Unfortunately, as I'm still seeing them, you seem kind of useless at carrying out even that function.

So I propose Mr. Spider go outside where the flies are, and Mr. Centipede can follow Mr. Spider out the door, and the two of you can have a little Sharks versus Jets face-off in my back yard and stay the hell out of my peripheral vision.