up against the spider line

where agreeableness ends and chicken feed begins

Spiders? You feed your chickens spiders? How could you? I love spiders.

There comes a point in every relationship when it’s time to stop being agreeable for the sake of being agreeable.

Whether it’s a romance or conversation with the lady at the cash at the home despot, there comes a time when enough is enough.

In this case it was spiders.

Spiders.

I drew the line at spiders.

My husband was so gentle, he would never hurt a fly. Even spiders, he would always throw them out of the house.

I don’t like spiders. They bite at night and are generally creepy. If they were big enough, I’d boil them alive and serve them with butter.

Wait.

I already do that with the water spiders that some of you call ‘lobster’.

I’m doing some handyman work for a lovely woman. She’s in her seventies. Her husband died from Oldtimers disease a while ago and she lives in a big home with her special olympian son.

They are religious.

They are kind.

They are lovely.

And she’s crazy.

Now being batshit crazy is something I expect from every human who has a mouth.

This includes you dear reader.

And this lady?

She’s self aware enough to admit to much of her crazyness.

One of her vices?

Animals.

She has seventeen cats and a very old dog with shit crusted to his arse.

I wake every morning at five am and scrub the floors! I have to always be scrubbing with all of these animals.

We’ve had great conversations about hoarding, about the book of Jobe, about the frailty of life and of course, about animals.

I cannot stand to see an animal hungry. Me and Junior? We go to the Chicken Burger in Bedford and there is a rat who lives there under the dumpsters. We go there and we get a chicken burger for me and a chicken burger for Junior and also one for the rat.

She paused. This was likely her attempt to shock me, to push me away, to create some distance and difference between us.

I was unflappable.

I feed rats too. I give them special treats.

I didn’t tell her that my treats include rat poison. Given her love of bald tailed plague spreaders, and given the fact that once the job was finished she’d owe me a bunch of money, I figured it would be in my interest to not discuss the ingredients in the treats I deliver.

This rat? He knows me. When I arrive, it’s like he knows that I’m there to feed him. I told my priest about this. He told me I was crazy. I told him how could you call yourself a Christian if you would kill a rat.

I didn’t want to tell her that by eating chicken burgers she was indirectly responsible for the deaths of the chickens she ate.

But my priest? He didn’t say a word.

Now I imagine her priest thought as I did - This lady is cray cray - but she spoke as though her defiance of her better was a masterstroke of piety and a moral triumph.

We spoke more and I showed her pictures of my chickens.

Now dear reader, remove your filthy mind from the gutter. Though I showed her my birds, I didn’t show her my bird. No chickens were choked during this discussion.

They are beautiful.

Then?

We spoke of spiders. She told me about her husband and his love of spiders.

That’s when I dropped the divisive bomb.

I feed live spiders to my chickens.

She froze. It was as though I had entered her web and pissed on her blackflies.

You feed your chickens spiders?

I felt the shift. In an instant, we became a little less close. The barrier of separateness of you are you and I am I and we are different crystalized. I sighed with relief then said to myself fuck it. If she doesn’t pay me I’ll sue her ass off.

Then to her I told her about my chickens.

They love spiders. And worms. And you know those horrible Japanese beetles? They’ll eat as many of them as I can feed them.

The colour drained from her face.

Your chickens eat bugs? I thought they only ate grain?

No, chickens are opportunistic omnivores. They’ll eat anything. They’d eat a rat if they could corner one.

Now you are just kidding with me. Stop messing around.

The look I gave her let her know that I was completely serious. She knew.

I knew too. We were different. For her, that hurt. It was disappointing, It left a scar.

The scar between us was liberating to me. There was room for me to be me, free from her projections and exectations of what it means to be a good person.

In a gentle little whisper of - fuck you I feed spiders to my chickens, I found relief and freedom.

The next day I arrived with six eggs.

These eggs are for me? Eggs from chickens who eat spiders? No thank you.

Fine.

Just pay your bill on time and everything will be ok lady

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