Spider God

Maybe there’s a family of spiders living in my car. I’ve never told anyone this. I couldn’t imagine anyone would care, but I care, and maybe someone else might too. That’s how caring goes. The spiders live somewhere behind my sideview mirror, inside the enclosure. It seems like whenever I get in my car—not often nowadays… nowhere to go and not enough gas to get there—another, maybe the same one, has spun a scalene sling between two points of the mirror and the window gasket of the driver-side door. I take pictures of them to compare between, but I purchased this cell phone because it was several megapixels “worse” than the next most expensive model and I didn’t have the $30 to spare, and even when I wrangle a decent picture out of the fucking thing, the results are inconclusive. I thought the shittier camera would dissuade me from sending pictures of my dick to women, or perhaps from getting into those exchanges with women who’d note the lower resolution. It did not.

I keep taking the photos though. And as I get out of the residential streets onto the state highways and interstates, I check in my peripheral vision to see how long the little bastards can hang on, like Jackie Chan on the bus in the beginning of Police Story. I track only the approximate duration of their ride, unless it’s truly an outlier, but I do note the miles per hour at which the webbing gives way. They consistently stick around well into the mid-60s miles per hour before the wind takes them. If I hit several reds before the highway and/or that day’s victim is clever, they can reel themselves back in behind the sideview mirror. These I note with asterisks.

They are my frightened villagers, huddling in their cave against a world which seems big and arbitrary and on borrowed time even to me, trying to maintain and propagate although their mortality is contingent on peculiarities in my schedule and temperament which will forever elude their comprehension.

I am a benevolent god, or perhaps not entirely malicious. I don’t go out of my way to drive when I needn’t, or faster than I need to. I’ve never torn away the enclosure to expose and kill them. I allow the survivors their peace. There are worse places for a family of spiders to live than a later model Toyota Highlander, I suppose. I do not fear them. I write this in my car because I only think of them in my car. As soon as I enter my apartment, they take on Schrodinger’s affect.

There were those who flew off before I noticed this phenomenon let alone began my documentation, and to them I’ve dedicated their own document in the SPIDERS folder on my phone’s home screen. DOC OF THE UNKNOWN SPIDERS.txt

For a long time, DOC OF THE UNKNOWN SPIDERS.txt was left intentionally blank. I would open it periodically between doomscrolling marathons and flick my thumb across the screen through that white abyss, progress evident only through the movements of the light gray progress bars on along both axes of the screen. But again, I’m not the kind of god you hear about. I’m fallible. I’ve copied and pasted this into the white memorial void these words:

Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?

They’re in a serif font, and the Roman embellishments of the ends of the computer’s pen strokes are more beautiful than the whiteness on its own, I think, and it’s my private memorial after all. If you’re reading this and I’m dead, I’d appreciate it if you extended this spirit to my memorial, if any.

The other document in the SPIDERS folder on my phone’s home screen is called THE ONES WHO GAVE EVERYTHING. This document is the list of the ones I have tracked. The title is a reference to the tiresome verbiage you hear about America’s war dead. Did you know that in the actual court proceedings of the Chicago 7, the defense stood and read a list of the names of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians that had died (so far) in that police action? Did you know for his Oscar-nominated liberal kitsch movie, Aaron Sorkin changed the list to the names of the American soldiers who died? Nobody cares. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t, not like I do about these spiders. I’ve given them all names. I have refrained from explicitly naming them after people in my life. I’m not projecting anything onto them. They are their own spiders. I have their names, the date we played our game, the weather in broad strokes, the file name of the png I took of them if I took one (kept in subfolder in the SPIDERS folder called FACES, the approximate duration of the race, and the approximate speed they were released at, or as mentioned above, an asterisk if they survived this trial.

This is the sort of thing I will probably mention to my therapist, but my intake appointment is schedule for about 17 weeks from now. Perhaps I’ll have run out of spiders by then. Perhaps I’ll be killed rear-ending someone as they enter my lane because I was checking on Darrell or Genevieve in my peripheral vision by then. And if that happens, and there’s no more spiders and no more god, then it won’t matter anyway. I write this in my car because I only think of them in my car.