Araneae

Spiders creep me out. Little kids get scared of monsters in the closet and space aliens watching them while these eight-legged evolutionary malignancies crawl into their mouths while they sleep.

At my place in Victoria there were spiders. I dealt with them as I always do: if I caught any inside I would kill it, even if it meant spending an hour moving furniture and hunting around with a spray can of bug killer and then leaving for a few hours with windows open so the place could air out. The ones outside I usually let live, because that particular species didn’t seem interested in coming inside and was thus not of particular anxiety to me. There were of course a few exceptions, most notably the bastard who insisted on perpetually rebuilding his web directly across the path to the gate I used to exit the yard. It required that, on both entering and exiting the premises, I wave a stick around in front of me, lest I should walk into its sticky ass-silk and spend the next few hours slapping myself for every slight nerve twinge.

Right outside the door of my basement flat were a few red rose bushes. I never kept track of their schedule, but at whatever the prescribed time of year is they would bloom into a collection of good sized flowers. Occasionally, one of the outdoor spiders would find its way onto them and crawl around for a while, doing whatever it is that spiders do when they aren’t harvesting insects or multiplying. As spiders have always proven to be incessantly difficult to photograph clearly – when they’re still alive anyway – this afforded me an opportunity to capture an image of one with a modicum of clarity, although it did still take several shots to find a respectable one.