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SPIDERVANIA — I've come a long way in my personal battle with mild arachnophobia.
Exacerbated by my childhood tendency to repeatedly watch the Jeff Daniels feature film of the same name, spiders have always given me the creepy-crawlies. A common fear, anxiety over arachnids frequently makes the news. In fact, one of my favorite stories of the year is about police in Australia responding to the sounds of a woman screaming in an apartment only to find a man inside — alone — terrified of a spider that had infiltrated his residence.
Maybe the most accurate description of spiders on the Internet is from the tragically defunct blog Hyperbole and a Half, wherein author Allie Brosh describes spiders as "little pieces of death wrapped in scary."
That being said, ever-encroaching adulthood made me confront an inconvenient truth: Sometimes, you have to get rid of spiders. If there is no roommate, spouse or parent in sight, the onus is on you to squish the sucker under a shoe or capture it in a cup that will never, ever make its way back into your cupboard's rotation.
While I will gladly kill a spider that's made its way into my home rather than go to bed in fear of ingesting it while I sleep, I would never do what one man did in a recently viral video.
User Wheatbreat uploaded a video to YouTube that could only be equated to one of the 12 hellish Labors of Hercules. The video shows him reaching into a hole in a cliff wall and pulling out a giant clump of daddy long legs (which are technically not spiders) that disperse in nightmarish fashion after falling to the ground.
Is anyone else feeling itchy or is it just me?
Yesterday's HYST?
