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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Spiders falling from the sky - eeeeeek

It's the kind of thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
A story so horrific, so terrifying I have chills running down my spine just thinking about it.
It was raining spiders in Southern Australia.
Yes, you read correctly: it was literally raining arachnids in the Land Down Under.
Billions and billions and billions of the multi-legged terrors falling from the heavens and covering the ground like a creepy crawly blanket of horror.
OK, perhaps I enhanced the numbers somewhat, but it really was raining spiders.
It would seem the spiders – called money spiders for some reason - create little silk parachutes that catch the wind and they float to wherever it carries them.
One man said there were so many of them it looked like it was snowing. I have seen pictures and it is one of the creepiest things I have ever seen.
Where they poisonous spiders? Were they big spiders?
Who cares. They were spiders, thousands of spiders falling from the sky and covering the ground, literally, like a blanket of snow.
Does it really matter how big they were? They were spiders falling out of the sky – it does not get much worse than that (except maybe a surprise visit from the inlaws.)
One local said it was a beautiful site, convincing me some Aussies are not all there.
I can not even begin to describe how creeped out I would be if I were caught in a spider storm of such proportions.
I had one little spider land on my head the other day at work and it freaked me out for the next 16 hours.
It doesn't matter if it was a few large spiders or thousands of little ones they are still spiders falling out of the sky (I can not state that enough).
In my younger years, I had a girlfriend (yes, I had a girlfriend and she was a real person and everything) who had no fear of arachnids.
She did not know about my near paralytic fear of the spawns of hell and I was fine keeping it that way.
But one day, just for fun, she flicked a massive spider at me.
I mean this thing was larger than a chimpanzee and twice as hairy.
It was a gargantuan spider and I still have visions of it sailing toward me, its bloated body blocking out the sun as it made a direct hit on my manliness.
In a situation like that, manliness goes out the window and I jumped around and flailed my arms wildly in what is known as the spider dance while making a sound typically reserved for small scared school girls.
She, of course, thought it was the funniest thing she had ever seen and she laughed and laughed.
“Yea, he-he, good one. That was great, now if you will excuse me I have to change my underwear. Yup, that sure was funny.”
I was only a teen, but I am pretty sure I suffered a minor heart attack that day. I know I suffered a major arachnophobia attack.
For the next few minutes I did the spider twitch – where you frantically brush certain parts of your body as your brain “feels” a spider on your persons and you slap the imagined eight-legged freak out of your hair, off your arm, out of your shirt...you get the idea.
Now, if one big ol' spider can induce such terror in yours truly, can you imagine what thousands of them falling from the sky would do.
I am doing the spider twitch now just thinking about it.
If I were to be witness to such an event, or even worse, caught in the middle of a spider storm I would never leave the house again.
Unless there was a spider in it, of course.

Copyright 2015, Darren Handschuh

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