Wednesday, Jul. 12, 2006

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Entry...


Okay, I still have that entry in my head, the one I referred to in the last entry.

But. I have to share this first.

Okay, brief disclaimer: if you are arachnophobic, you may want to skip this one. You're welcome.

Alright? Everyone left can tolerate a freaky spider story? Good.

So. I was channel-surfing last night and I happened upon one of the nature channels. They were doing some sort of "dramatic re-enactment", where they have an actor pretend to be something other than an actor, and generally, crazy and dramatic stuff happens to them. Go figure. In this case, the actor played a South American banana harvester, whom I will now call "Joe" because South American banana harvester is too long to type 687 times in an entry.

Joe is wielding a machete and hacks down a 4-foot-long bunch of bananas from the tree. He parks it across his shoulder, and starts carrying it back to wherever he takes harvested banana bunches. Stomping jauntily, Joe is probably thinking about lunch, or a cigarette, or getting laid later.

But oh, no. There will be no "later" for ol' Joe. The camera focuses on this huge-ass brown hairy fang-having spider that looks, even without a face on which to have expressions, about 48 shades of pissed off. It had been hanging out somewhere within the banana bunch, and now that it was being bounced jauntily around along the rainforest trail, it was hiking up the waist of its pants and stalking out to see what in the freaking blue blazes was going ON.

The narrative voice-over informs me that this 8-legged banana dweller is the South American Brown Banana Spider, a very aggressive, very poisonous creature. The camera pans so that it's as if we're looking out at the world from the spider's position, and what we have is a clear shot of the side of Joe's neck and face.

Okay, hold the phone, y'all. Now. One presumes that Joe has lived in or around the rainforest for a while, maybe even his whole life. As such, I would imagine that he's maybe heard a thing or two about all the crazy-dangerous and/or poisonous fauna in the trees. Furthermore, I would hope that, upon becoming a banana harvester (or whatever the Hell the technical term is for that. Fruit Transportation Specialist, probably.)... anyway, upon becoming a banana dude, the senior banana dude would have put his grizzled, tanned arm around Joe's shoulders in a fatherly way, and said to him, "Hey. I've been in this business for a long time, and I have just two pieces of advice for you. One, don't put your unsheathed machete down the front of your pants. And two, WATCH THE FUCK OUT FOR BROWN BANANA SPIDERS! AIIIYEEEE!"

Because, seriously? If anyone had even jokingly said, "I wonder if anything likes to live in these bunches...?", I would have tossed each bunch in a river first, fished it out with a tree branch, dropped it in a giant pot of boiling water with a 5 inch thick steel lid, and then paid some kid half my salary to peek in between each banana, before I would even CONSIDER putting that shit on my shoulder, near my NECK. Where there are lots of blood vessels and sensitive skin and non-puncture-resistant surfaces.

Anyhow. I'm sure you're all still in the dark here about what's going to happen to ol' Joe, so let me spell this out for you...

Joe's stomping jauntily along. Stompity stomp. Spider creeps out along the curved length of a green banana, its glower palpably felt through the television screen. Stompity stomp. Creepity creep.

Then, Satan's spiderific pet launches itself, in the manner of a kangaroo on a pogo stick, at Joe's exposed neck, and seriously tags him. Joe's grip on the banana bunch falters (No! Really!), and the spider skitters a little down Joe's shoulder and onto his chest. Joe sees the leggy bastard, brushes it onto the ground with his free hand, and introduces it to the sole of his boot. That's when we hear the narrator intone, "The spider paid for the attack with its life... but the damage has been done."

Then begins the litany of the progressive effects of neurotoxin poisoning -- blurred vision, muscle cramping, excruciating pain that will soon spread from the site of the wound. While the voiceover guy is making his buck-fifty informing us of all this, Joe is hobbling, then stumbling, along through the trees like an unstrung marionette, limbs flailing into odd and disjointed shapes and angles. We keep getting shots of the bloody hole on his neck, which I could seriously, SERIOUSLY, do without.

The narrator continues with the list -- labored breathing, hallucinations, muscle paralysis, cardiac arrest. Now, Joe's on the ground and has managed to pull himself up into a sitting position. Though, he looks to be in pretty ill repair, all sweaty and dialated pupils and junk. And, in the background, a slowing heartbeat. I'm thinking, "Damn. Dramatic, much? Oh, yeah... 'dramatic' re-enactment. Gotcha."

Then, we reach the respiratory paralysis part of our show, and Joe topples over onto his side, his sheathed machete flipping up along his hip, almost comically, like Witch Hazel's cloud of hairpins. Does that make me a freak, that I think of Bugs Bunny cartoons when I see a man "dramatically" dying from a vicious spider bite, on my tv? Alrighty then. The narrator goes on to explain that death rarely occurs any more, now that an antidote has been found. But... it *could* happen.

Yoinks!

This whole thing took about two minutes of airtime, and great flippin' flapjacks, it was like a train wreck. I hadn't even realized that I had watched the damn thing, until the end, and I blinked and asked myself, "Why did I watch that damn thing?!"

I mean, I'm not really scared of spiders, per se. I was usually the one in the house, in college, who was called upon to scoop spiders out of corners, usually into a plastic cup, to deposit outside. I'll rarely kill them, if I can avoid it, 1) because the critter might just have wandered into the house by mistake, and how rude is that? You get a little turned around, take a wrong corner, and BLAMMO! 2) the sound of exoskeleton cracking and internal organs squishing is, to me, way worse and more disgusting than the appearance of the spider itself. Besides, if there's a spider god up there keeping track of all the arachno-critters that die by human influence, I might get a couple of gold stars in my column for my catch-and-release philosophy. Hell, couldn't hurt.

However, if a spider surprises me, seems aggressive, or is of a known poisonous-to-humans variety (Black Widow, I'm looking at you. Bitch.), all bets are off. If it's me (or my kid) versus them, then I play for the humans. Go team.

But, anyhow. I'm not a spider-hater, but that little clip nearly made me into one. I've got to not watch crap like that anymore. Sheesh.

So, tonight, make sure y'all check your bananas before you go to bed. You might even want to boil them, just to be sure. I hear banana soup is awfully tasty.

saturncat at 7:04 p.m.

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