Mother and Daughter

I’m sure there’s some sort of life lesson to learn from the massive striped spider which has been constantly making a web on the side of my car door.  But I really don’t care because the damn thing scares the crap out of me every time I jumps out at me.  Perhaps the lesson is that I shouldn’t go to McDonalds because that’s the only fast food place around here that has a drive thru.  When I open my window to place my order, I get a corner-of-my-eye view of this trapese artist the size of my thumb quickly repairing wind damage from driving.  And I’m partially afraid that the checkout girl will see this huge spider and drop my drink all over the ground while handing it to me.  I have to say, on a black car, the spider web is completely invisible.  The spider hangs out inside my side view mirror.  Sometimes when I first get into the car and notice the web is back, I slowly reach for the attachment point which is on the end of the mirror.  I peer inside the darkness of the sideview mirror housing and see nothing, but I know the spider is in there looking at me through it’s 6 eyes or whatever.  As my hand gets closer, I can hear a girl crying from inside the theater in the back of my mind, “Don’t go in there!”  Sometimes the spider times it perfectly so that when my hand is 0.2 inches away from the web, it comes screaming out flailing a bunch of its arms as it ziplines down the web to the door handle like it’s going to figure out the locking mechanism, open the door and pull me out of the driver’s seat.  That would be horrible in an awesome kind of way.

In my mind, I think of the spider as male.  But come to think of it, there could be a whole little egg sack inside the mirror housing.  Or it could be the Sex in the City equivalent of a spider and just be an old floozie living alone in my side view mirror drinking until something better comes along.  It would be nice to think of the spider as a single mom with one daughter working every day on the intricate web with the same skill that my own mother has always had when it comes to drawing, sewing and all things involving fine craftmanship.  But that loving image is ruined every morning when I’m driving and I see it with its arms wrapped around its body in aerodynamic mode shaking on that super strong web glaring at me to slow down.  I tend to stare at the thing which is a great way to get into a car accident.  I can see it all going down now at the police station as I explain how I was staring at this spider, the lifer behind the counter completely unphased at my descriptions of the stripes on the fat little body.

Today’s blog photo comes from Bethany Pegues, a fan who contacted me about a Photoshop lesson I wrote back in 2004 that she discovered.