Spider Bite and Moron Squirrel
7/5/1

I was going to quote some lyrics from the song Spiderman �79 from Veruca Salt, but upon closer inspection, I don�t think that song has to do with the Marvel Comics web slinger after all.

I�m on Slaughter Road, cruising south in the Kronos, on my way to work. I shaved my head again yesterday after seeing myself in pictures with it shaved. I�m also going to be goateed by Sunday. I�m currently in a transition stage.

A fly had bugged me when I was backing out of the driveway, and I had shooed him a few times. So when I felt the spider on my head, I thought it was the fly. I turned my head and saw in the rearview mirror a small, dark thing on the side of my head and SMACK. I brushed it off my head with such insufficient aim that I also smacked my head pretty good.

A third a mile down Slaughter, a young squirrel, a born this year squirrel, ran out in front of my car. He never looked. I went into the oncoming lane trying to miss him. He never stopped running, but I got past him faster than he got under me.

Moron Squirrel.

So, then when I get to [Old] Madison Pike, I�m noticing that my head kind of itches/hurts where I smacked it. I figure that I really smacked it.

By the time I was on the Parkway, I knew that it wasn�t a fly. It was a spider. And I�d been bit.

I�ve been bitten by a spider in the past and I developed a thick, pink pad of welt, or however you use that word, all over my back and parts of my arms, with patches on the front of my torso. This was when I was poor and lived in Villa Dos with my cat, Dakota.

I so loved Dakota. I gave her up because Aisai and I had moved into an apartment we couldn�t afford and the only way we were going to make it would be to cut the expenses a good deal. We managed to get a three-bedroom apartment in the old cinder block dorms at UAH for $400 a month with the utilities paid. No animals though. I let a family out near Woodville adopt Dakota.

The woman who picked Dakota up wanted her for a very specific reason, Dakota had bonded strongly with a male. She had a cat, and they had gotten a cat for her husband. But that cat had actually bonded to her daughter. After a few weeks, the lady gave me a call. She said that Dakota had bonded to her daughter�s cat. That's D for you.

When I got to work today, I mentioned to T-boss that a spider had bitten me. He said he thought it was where Aisai had kissed me on the head with lipstick on. I went to Labman to see if he had a mirror. No, he didn�t, but he suspected that the ladies bathroom would have one. It did.

The red area was rather red and about 3 cm by 2 cm. If Aisai had put that on with a kiss, she would have done so in the manner of a headbutt with her lips. Not pretty.

I call Aisai and tell her. She is concerned and says she�ll bring the Claritin into town and give me a call when she�s in her office.

I go to the lab to see what�s in the first aid. Relief was the name of the product. I sprayed a little on my index finger and rubbed it on the bite. The itching immediately stopped.

When TC came in, I told him that I�d been bitten by a spider, and pointed toward the red spot on the back of my head.

He said, �Where?�

No way. I went and found T-boss and asked him if it was still there. He said it was completely gone. Whoo hoo. I said, �Whoo hoo� and walked out of the office he was in.

Arriving back where TC was, I raised my hands above my head, in the same manner that Space Ghost does when he flexes his muscles, and said, �Mutant Healing Factor. Yes!�

I then stuck my hands to the wall of the hallway and tried pulling myself up. My hands slipped off the sheetrock and control panels. �Damn!� I said.

[See, it was Spiderman humor.]

I�m thirsty and edgy now. It�s the dumb spider.

I refuse to go home because I feel like crap since today is a very little workday. July 5 in the US is not a hard workday. Many of my coworkers are trying desperately to metabolize the sugars that the alcohol they consumed last night has broken down into. Everything is quiet except for my typing.

Too bad the military guys are off. This would be a great day to get them talking. I think I could ask �Have you ever wrecked one of those big trucks, or seen someone wreck one?� and then sit back for an hour while they told stories.

Veruca Salt�s Spiderman �79 seems to be about a kidnapper. It is sung in first person from the kidnapped point of view.