So I was lying in my hammock one night reading when I looked up at the ceiling and saw a big dark spot on one of the beams. Thinking it was a bat that had somehow gotten inside my house, I put on my glasses for a closer look. My heart jumped up in my throat when I saw eight hairy legs instead of wings.

Crap. A fucking tarantula. I had seen them before around the mission and in the health post, but had deluded myself into thinking my house would somehow be immune.

Now, let's get something straight. I hate spiders. Back home in the States, I wasn't too fond of even the smallest ones, and considered anything larger than a thumbnail way too big. These days, however, I can deal with normal sized spiders and think nothing of flicking the thumbnail-sized ones off my body or squishing them with my hand. It's the big mofos that still get me. How big do they get? Let's just say that, when you can actually HEAR the damn thing when it scurries around, it's too big for my taste. Like, I'm saying I can pick out the damn spider's individual footsteps as it scurries across my kitchen counter.

Anyways, there was no way I was going to go to bed with this monster crawling around above me, so I geared myself up to kill the thing. Standing on my bed, I gave a few half-hearted swipes with my broom, which the spider just waved off. "Please," it seemed to say, "You gotta do much better than that." So next I got my trusty can of Baygone insecticide, and from a safe distance I emptied about half that motherfucker in the direction of the damn thing. I was too scared to get up close to it, since it was still hanging on the ceiling and I didn't want it to fall on me. Even after about 100 ounces of insecticide was emptied in its direction, the tarantula merely started to get kind of woozy and loose its grip on the ceiling. First one leg slipped off the beam, then another, and finally the entire thing fell off and landed on my bookshelf with a soft thunk. My initial elation at having poisoned the thing was ruined when I saw it scurry off the top shelf and slip down onto the floor somewhere between me and the doorway. It was still alive, and probably pretty pissed off too. It was at this point that the kerosene lamp providing my only light went out. I was plunged into complete darkness, with the matches in the other room and a big ass tarantula high on insecticide fumes somewhere between me and the door. My heart pounding, I muttered a constant stream of profanities as I jumped off the bed, did a few weird jumps and leaps across the room towards the general direction of the door, with images of hairy spiders waiting beneath my feet. I don't know how I managed to get out of the room without clocking myself into the wall, but I found my way to the matches, yanked off the lampshade with my hand (burning it in the process), and lit the light again with a shaky hand. Turning around towards the bedroom, at first there was no sign of the tarantula. Finally I got down on my hands and knees and looked around with my eyes at floor level, and spotted a hairy leg sticking out from the space between my bookshelf and the wall. I few tentative pokes with the broomstick confirmed that the spider was pretty sickly from the insecticide, so I grabbed my bigass shovel in one hand, and a broomstick in the other. A flick of the broomstick and the hairy beast shot out from under the wall into the middle of the floor, where it met ten pounds of metal shovel. It flipped over, its legs curling, and I swung again with the shovel for good measure. This time it squirted out big drops of sticky ichor, and I was pretty sure that now it was fairly dead. Remembering what someone had told me once about disposing of dead tarantulas (their hairs are poisonous and can still harm you if they are scattered from the body), I scooped the thing up and dumped it outside my door. Then I emptied some kerosene on it, lit a match, and watched the motherfucker burn.