The Arachnid Housing Crisis, or, Thank God It’s Fall

I’m not a summer person.

Some people thrive in the hotter temperatures, revel in the heat, and enjoy being outside on even the hottest days. I…do not. I wilt like supermarket flowers a day after they’re bought. This time of year I want to be air-conditioned, indoors, and away from the merciless sun. I hate summer. I really do.

Another reason I dislike summer? EVERYTHING IS ALIVE. Especially the spiders.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a lush green landscape, but those things that live in it? Nope. Nope to the nopeth degree. I don’t care how important to the ecosystem they are, if it’s got more than four legs then it is NOT welcome in my house. Stay outside. Go about your buggy business. Do your thing and I’ll do mine.

Listen, I understand that when a mother has millions of babies in one go she doesn’t get a chance to teach every single one of them high society manners, but some common courtesy would keep many an insect from an undignified death at the bottom of my shoe. At least proselytizers knock! Did the spider that ran across my bed last week knock on the door and ask if it could come inside? NO IT DAMN WELL DID NOT! Where’s the politeness? Where’s the couth? Surely Mama Spider could have at least taught her numerous babies ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ What about Grandma Grey Widow, crocheting her silk doilies and shooting disapproving looks from behind her four pairs of reading glasses? She couldn’t find the time either?

A spider’s life can’t be easy. I look in the bushes outside my apartment building and I see that the housing market is a real mess. Web after web is crowded together in the burning sun as low-income families compete for space, food, and a better location. They have no shelter from the heat or the rain. Just inside are the luckier ones who can rent their own property in a nice location along the doorframe, while those up in the corners pay a little more for a better view.  Life, for them, has to be nice.

Of course, not as nice as it is for the 1%. Right outside my window, in a spacious silk penthouse, lives Friedrich. While the families in the bushes are stuck in webs half this size, he luxuriates, soaking up the scenery from a premium second floor windowsill. It’s a premium example of how circumstances and gentrification force out long-time residents to make way for increased demand: after a thunderstorm destroyed the previous tenant’s web, Friedrich swooped right in. Much like a Whole Foods suddenly appearing where that Mom and Pop grocers used to be, the old was gone without a trace. I bet he didn’t even build his own web, the fancy bastard.

And then, one morning, I woke up to see Friedrich had added an extension. Lovely open space is now occupied by an ugly tangled mess of shoddy craftsmanship and cut corners. He could have used his resources to build a lovely orb web and beautify the public space for everyone’s enjoyment, but no. More architectural sprawl with no artistry whatsoever. It’s a disgrace.

Today, on the first day of Fall, Friedrich’s web is empty. Those silk fibers that could’ve easily been reused now hang abandoned outside of my window, a testament to the slash-and-burn urban blight faced by all corners of the spider community, but that’s not my cross to bear. With a little bit of investment and some planning, maybe next year they’ll have a community center, maybe a local theatre group for at-risk arachnid youth.

Just…not on my windows, okay? Okay.