Gloria came over last night. I showed her my bites above my ankle and behind my shoulder. She tried to determine what they were. Not hives, not flea bites, not mosquito bites, maybe mites, not this particular kind of skin sickness (I forget what it was called). I already realized it wasn't poison ivy or poison oak. Besides, I don't know the last time I was actually in a grassy area aside from crossing somebody's lawn. Though based on how they looked, she concluded that they were spider bites. I was purposefully not mentioning anything about my dream, so she did in fact come to the conclusion on her own. But later I did tell her about the dream. "Have you been feeling nauseous?" "No, not at all." I guess it wasn't that serious then.

I was rather disturbed about all this, and she noticed this at dinner that night. I've always been a bit arachnophobic. I don't mind rats, snakes, cockroaches, or other things many people normally freak out about. But I can't stand spiders. I don't mind daddy long-legs or even the look of a tarantula too much, but anything in between that freaks me out. Even the shape of that in typical silhouette drawings of spiders just gives me chills. If I find a spider in my home (or any insect for that matter), I'll immediately kill it. So I guess I'm not a pure arachnophobe if I can at least do that. But damn, I hate spiders. And now after a dream like that here I am with huge bite marks on my leg and back. Can I turn this into some kind of arachnophobia-relieving experience? That the worst that could happen, several spider bites, did happen and it's not so bad? I don't know.

I put on new sheets. I cleaned up any laundry on the floor. I did a few other things Gloria intelligently suggested. But I was still wondering where the spider could have been. On Saturday I was sitting on a bench outside with a friend and somebody else. There was a tree over us. The friend said to me "Oh, you have a spider above your head." I looked up and noticed a tiny spider lowering itself down on a web. I grabbed the web with my hand to cut it, and tried moving the spider aside. I think I was having trouble getting rid of it, but I saw it jump to the ground and start to walk away. Hmm, I never thought about the similarities of this and my dream. This was Saturday night, and I think the dream was Sunday night. But still where was the culprit? Gloria asked if I had any plants at work. "No, and the people on either side of me don't have any either." And I've only seen maybe one live bug in my apartment ever. And I haven't slept window open in a long time (even if it has a screen).

We were sitting on the bed while she was talking about her weekend, and that's when I noticed something. I started to crouch down and stare at it as she was still talking. On the wooden chair next to my bed, in front of my computer desk, I could see a black ball dangling from the side of one of the chair's legs, about 1/2 an inch from the ground. "The chair," I said, "which I put my fan on top of, which points to me at night." "Good eye!" I think it was crumpled up and dead, but I grabbed it with a tissue and crushed it anyway. I wiped away a few loose cobwebs. Then I folded the chair and looked on the bottom, where I saw a little spider moving. I killed it just the same. It didn't look anything like the other spider, though. Then I was wiping other parts of the chair. Oh shit, what are these two tiny beige bumps, eggs?

Tannin suggested I leave the chair in a trash bag overnight, and wipe it down with rubbing alcohol the next day. I had rubbing alcohol in the house already, so I carried the chair to the kitchen and rubbed it down. This was around 9:00, and we still hadn't gone out for dinner yet, but I wanted to just do this right away. I should have known better than to take an old folded chair from my parents cellar, even if it was the "clean"/mock-living-room part of the cellar.

I ended up having the usual fun night with Gloria, but she initially just wasn't turning me on in light of the whole spider thing. I put on my black-on-black sheets, and saw her sitting there in her translucent black robe and facial piercings that now looked like multiple symmetric beady eyes. All I could think of was some kind of "spider queen" character from a bad R-rated suspense movie. Eating multi-legged foods like squid and crab that night didn't help much either. It was just a classic case of having something stuck in your mind, and then "seeing" it everywhere you look. I know that. And again, things were reassured by the end of the night, because things turned all around as it got very sensual and sexual, as it always does with her. I was really glad she came over, for many reasons.