Spider Songs

Spiders freak me out. I'm perturbed by the way they look, unnerved by the way they move, and totally pissed if they bite me. But I also hate squished dead things, so I am not a spider squisher. I have spent countless occasions trapping spiders with the ol' cup and paper routine, taking them outside, and fearfully flinging it out into freedom, praying the little bugger won't pull a fast one and try to crawl on me.

Songs, generally speaking, I like. So what happens when you cross the goodness of songs with the freakiness of spiders? Well, it depends. While I love the band Gogol Bordello for their crazed, maniacal music, their song "Sex Spider" left me about as freaked out as spiders do, with lyrics like "...for even thousand of creatures/ Won't have enough orifices for all the arms/ Of a spider." It comes off more like a bad Japenese hentai than a spider song. (Also? Never google spider hentai. Mostly its spiderman porn, but the other stuff will require a strong dose of brain soap to get out of your head.)

The first spider song I learned was probably "the Itsy Bitsy Spider". I'm not sure what I was supposed to learn from that nursery rhyme. (Maybe that spiders are fucking tenacious.) But I liked the thing you do with your fingers while you sing it.

My next spider song was by children's musician Linda Arnold, entitled "Hey, Mister Spider". This was a song with a message, and a pro-spider agenda. My young brain poured over the concept that this spider is "a living thing, and he's got feelings too." This song-along with my sqeemishness for dead things- was probably responsible for me never becoming a spider squisher. The only problem was it proposed no alternative to getting the spider the fuck away, as Mr. Spider politely crawls away of his own acord in the end.

Years later I found "Boris the Spider" playing on a friend's cd of The Who.

Best.

Spider.

Song.

Ever.

A simple narrative in the first person of an encounter with a spider, that manages to totally capture the caution, paranoia, and heebie-jeebies shared by me and my fellow spider wimps. Granted the person in this song crushes Boris the Spider. "He's come to a sticky end. Don't think that he'll ever mend." But I'm ok with imaginary spider abuse.

The Who: Visionary imaginary-spider killers.

My new spider coping method: Mostly when I see a spider in the house, I remove it right away. But there are those times, like when I'm going to bed at 3 a.m. and am too tired to find proper spider trapping equipment, where other arrangements have to be made. My favorite course of action? I sing "Boris the Spider" to the spider in question. I think the Who must be famous amogst spider-kind as well as people, because remarkably, the spider almost always crawls away. (That, or my singing voice is worse than I thought.) Either way, it gets the job done.