Strength

I used to live alone in a house which had just had about 75% of it’s interior removed, so many of the local fauna (beetles, crickets and yes, SPIDERS) quickly found themselves seeking new shelter. 

This was especially the case in the basement, there was never a time when I didn’t have to kick around some bugs when I did laundry or rotating pieces of artwork as I finished them in the studio space upstairs and brought up a new piece to work on

and there were plenty of spiders to deal with. the biggest spiders I’ve seen in the house in the entire 19 years I’ve lived there. and lemme tell ya, I was getting really fucking tired of them creeping up my legs as I did whatever it was I was doing at the time.

so one night I was particularly frustrated, and cue my first mistake. I followed this spider, I was fucking hunting the hunter. That furry, eight-legged cocksucker was dying TONIGHT.

and i decided to kill it with a blowtorch

Now if anyone’s seen Arachnophobia, you’d think setting a spider on fire would be a bad idea (and it is, but we’re getting to that) and in that iconic scene, the spider, engulfed in flame, runs around setting everything on fire in its wake. Now this would probably have been the case if I had used like hairspray and a lighter, but a blowtorch is more of pure, concentrated, firey “fuck this thing in particular” and if you get close enough, you’ll burn the legs off your prey before it can even consider running.

and here’s my next mistake. setting the spider on fire in my basement with tons of cracks in wall. now I knew that bugs smelled pretty bad when you burned them, but this was bad. 2 years now and I’m still haunted by the smell. And also by what happened next. see, in most arthropods, the smell of the dead only brings more of the living, and this was a smell so pervasive, that it lingered in the house for days 

spiders began pouring out of the walls. Easily 2 dozen of them, if not more. I SUMMONED MORE SPIDERS BY SETTING ONE ON FIRE.