I fucking hate bugs. You think of any insect, regardless of how much they "help the environment" or assist in the control of the population of other disgusting creatures that seem to somehow seem to look like them, blahblahblah. I'm still killing them on sight. This applies with the greatest possible gusto to spiders, or any insect unlucky enough to even vaguely resemble the nasty little bastards. Go ahead and argue with me that arachnids are neither insects or bugs or some such bullshit, I will not listen and do not even care. Although I can kind of respect your point of view or your spurious "reasons", I'll even nod and say something quite full of shit like, "you know, I've never thought of it that way. Thanks for enlightening me upon this subject, friend". But deep inside, I'm smashing 8 legs into something that could never be recognized as once having even been a spider. Please do not confuse this sincere and righteous hatred for some kind of phobia - I am not afraid of them in any traditional psycho-babble way; I just believe they need to die. In nearly all other arenas of life on this spinning blue marble called Earth, I am a remarkably non-violent and peaceful individual. I've seen enough violence to have learned to honestly abhor it in nearly all modes. But this predilection for pacifism really only extends to human beings or animals that do not completely disgust me on the most primal of levels, like the aforementioned 8-legged bastard children of Satan. Even pictures or art that contain an image of these things can make me wince and reach for a tissue or or shoe to annihilate them with.
People who consider them "useful", "cute", or worst of fucking all - keep them as 'pets'...Dear God in wherever-you-are, what the fuck is wrong with you people? I've not seen the insect population decrease anywhere that I've seen these nasty bastards webs. Show me some motherfucking science, hard numbers and shit. Meh, nevermind...I still won't change. They are easily on par with the people who think iguanas are pets. They aren't pets, they are fucking freaky gyroscope-eyed undesirables who rightly live naturally where nothing else with a functioning brain would choose to inhabit. Fortunately I live in the Inland Empire (there's a phrase I never imagined that I would ever utter) where these arachno-assholes are in good supply. The creature, not the deluded people calling them pets and making habitats for them. Almost daily I get to stomp, smash, and or end their useless ugly asses in a variety of tried & true and sometimes quite original ways.
I was once bitten on the arch of my foot by a black widow and had a terrible reaction which forced me to spend some time on crutches when I was a wee lad of 10 years. Now, mind you, at that tender age I was pretty scared of spiders, especially Black Widows. But when there were any about that were more dangerous than a Daddy Long Legs, I still had my father around to take care of them. After that time, I became the go-to guy in the house for arachnid extermination - I DID have 2 sisters and I know that, "it's a spider!!!" scream when I hear it.
It's understandable that human beings have a primal reaction and even fear of spiders of nearly any of their gross-assed varieties. Surely our ancestors learned many lessons the hard way before they figured out that they really should just leave the nasty bastards alone or find ways to kill them that didn't endanger themselves or their loved ones. Some of those accursed things have venomous bites that sting, itch, burn, bruise, swell, and even kill. A few thousand years of that kind of nonsense will instill a healthy fear in your life, if not a healthy respect to use caution around them. I mean, we know by now that these motherfuckers aren't going away. So, even the smallest of them can have an effect on people that is vastly disproportionate to their size - this makes our first interactions with them quite often the "EEEEEEEK!!!" experiences that generally decrease in severity over time. Most people aren't afraid of them, they just don't like being close to them....kind of like how I feel about people who have spiders as pets. We become aware that they are a lot like communicable disease and periodic plagues...an unfortunate part of this vast and otherwise glorious world we inhabit. Now, as an erstwhile peaceful man, I also feel completely karmically assuaged in the killing of so many and the waiting for more by knowing that no matter how many of these things end up as goo on the bottom of my sneakers, I've done absolutely nothing to diminish their disgusting population. If they were somehow endangered or in any way useful to humanity I might (probably not) lose some sleep over my all-too-effective elimination of these fuzzy freaks of nature, hatched from the fevered dreams of the devil himself. Don't give me the bullshit about controlling the insect population - that's some public relations bullshit doublespeak from the spider-loving lobby of those weirdos who keep them and name them. Yeah, fuck them.
