Have you seen him? I had to draw this sketch because all my research on the Hinternet turned up nil.

This particular spider was last seen in the bathroom of the house I dogsat at over the weekend, home of Calvin, the giant, friendly, non-spider-eating dog. I love Calvin because he's big and happy, but I really could have used a predatory pet, like my old spider-eating cat, Mr. Boy. Mr. Boy would have been all over the situation, and then I could have given him some tuna and all would have been right with my world. But as Calvin has no interest in anything other than his soccer ball, I was left to confront the spider alone.

It happened this way: I was getting ready to go to a barbecue, and had just dried off from a shower when I saw a shadow behind the glass jar of Q-Tips atop the medecine chest. Thinking a moth had gotten in, I looked closer, which is when the giant, above-referenced spider jumped out at me, and landed on the Q-Tip jar, then jumped energetically several times to light upon the wall, where he spun in place a few times, jumping like a sparring boxer. I screamed and did the logical thing, which was to grab the phone and call Tahmi.

While the phone was ringing, the spider, who apparently sensed I was calling for back-up, ran toward me and stopped short, raising his two terrible, stripey forearms. Forelegs. They were longer than the other six, and furry and stripey. Like he was wearing legwarmers. Perhaps that is the reason for his aggression: he sensed that I would mock him for his lack of fashion sense.

Tahmi was very helpful, in that she once had seen this style of spider ("the evil, prehistoric kind," she noted) and had hit it with a frying pan.

"What should I do?" I shrieked, as the spider jumped and jumped along the wall, turning periodically to show off his legwarmers. "Run away!" yelled the people in the background in the room where Tahmi was, laughing at me, they were pretty much all laughing about the situation. "Get a frying pan," she advised calmly.

The frying pan idea was shouted down, but with her counseling, I was able to relocate the spider to a place where he will no doubt be extremely happy.

I don't know what kind of spider this was, but it may have been the Spider of Irony, based on my and Tahmi's separate experiences with them. When Tahmi saw hers, she was on the phone telling a guy she liked about how oh yes, she loved camping, and no, the bugs and whatnot didn't bother her. Right in the middle of her explanation, the spider dropped from the ceiling, hovering directly before her face, and causing her to scream into the phone. "Yeah," she mused, "that guy never called me again."

My own spider incident came on the heels of a conversation I'd had the day before with the friend of a friend, who had asked me if I had a spider phobia. I answered that I did, but that I was trying to get over it. He told me that I could control the phobia by reconditioning my thought process to understand that the spider is not some external force over which I have no control, and that I have the power in the situation, and whatever else he said is lost to memory, because I hate when people lecture me, especially when I'm holding tequila. Anyway, to prove my great "I'm in control of my reactions" resolve, along came Mr. Stripey Arms, causing me to scream loudly into the phone several times with his unpredictable jumping and aggressive arm-raising.

I did try, as I mention, to research this spider, and although I didn't find a picture of him, I found a great website, which taught me the following facts about spiders:

• The brown recluse spider is "popular in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri."


• "Daddy long leg�s legs are pretty much bent."


• Daddy long legs taste "like peppermint."


• The Black Widow is so named because "the girl spider sometimes kills the boy spider."


• "Mexican red kneed spider is very un-poisonous."


• Some varieties of crab spider may move not only forwards but backwards.

Anyway, I haven't seen the spider since Sunday, but I was all amped up when I got to the barbecue, and had to calm myself down with several drinks, and then draw a picture of the spider in red and black ink, demonstrating both his "still" mode and his "arms raised" posture. Then, as a form of therapy, I acted out the behavior to all the assembled guests.

Then things calmed down, until I caught Tahmi in the living room with my wallet in her hand, fingers grasping my driver's license, in an attempt to find out my true age, which I had not revealed to her. There was a struggle, essentially on top of our friend Christie, who was seated on the sofa where we were fighting. I got the license away from her, but Christie's husband retained a wide-eyed, happy look for the rest of the evening. Everybody loves a catfight.