There's the heart shaped lid from a heart shaped box on the floor of my bedroom. Until a few minutes ago there was a spider underneath it. Now it's outside. I placed the lid over it the other night. Generally I try not to kill anything though I still eat meat and see the inconsistency there. The spider was sentenced to 30 hours under the lid of the heart shaped box because it was raining here in Vallejo CA and I didn't want to drown it by putting it outside. Generally, and I'm not proud to admit this, the spiders in my house are somewhat akin to racially profiled.

The thick dark ones get sent outside. The skinny, long legged ones I leave alone. I suppose they're body type profiled as well. My motivation for these distinctions are probably rooted in ignorance. Black Widows and Brown Recluses are dark. I can recognize Black Widows but I'm unclear on what a Brown Recluse looks like so all brownish to blackish spiders go outside. There may very well be pale long legged arachnids more deadly and aggressive than some of the dark victims of my relocation program but since I am limited in my schema about such creatures the pale daddy longleggish types get to hang out inside and the others get relocated.

My method of isolating the undesired spiders is a relative of the "Have a Heart" traps used to catch a critter in a cage and, once caught, transported away from where they were caught...probably from somewhere near where you live. I use a glass and a sturdy piece of paper. The glass goes over the spider. The paper goes under. Then I carry it outside.

Once in Oakland I used a variation of this method to capture and relocate a rat that was probably brought into the apartment by one of the low attention span cats who shared the place at that time. For this bigger game I used a bucket and an over-sized children's book. Catching a rat under a bucket was a couple of notches up the degree of difficulty ladder from a spider. The rat being smarter and closer on the evolutionary bush to me (presumably) was more stressed out than the spider. There was some blood on the bucket when I released it down the street. The removal operation was more traumatic for both of us than in a simple spider relocation.

In the 70s I lived in an apartment in Northampton Massachusetts. The apartment had mice. I don't think they would have bothered me but because they creeped out my wife we put some of the "break their necks while they nibble on the cheese" mousetraps out. We caught a mouse but the trap didn't kill it. I'm not sure of my exact motivations at the time but I think it was a fusion of "do the right thing and put the suffering critter out of its misery" and "cowboy up and kill the varmint already". So I took the mouse in the trap out on the porch, laid the trap flat side up and stepped on it. I was upset and the mouse was dead. It was, to this day, the biggest thing and the only mammal I’ve ever killed.

My next door neighbor at that time was a new age feminist man. Why I thought he would have any sympathy/empathy about my guilty feelings for killing the mouse I don’t know. But when I asked him about whether he was troubled by mice he laid a huge disapproving, guilt trip on me about how he could feel the waves of death and annihilation through his wall and how he didn’t approve of what I’d done.

I vaguely remember him writing a letter to one of the numerous hippy leftist newspapers at that time about “The man next door, a common house husband has just taken a mouse outside and brutally crushed it beneath the heel of his boot.” He equated my action with the oppression of women and any other oppressed groups and said that as a typical male my view of things was that “what is different from me is at my disposal”. It didn't matter to him that in some ways my wife was the Lady Macbeth behind this assassination. As a member of an oppressed group, I believe, she was held unaccountable.

On the one hand I thought, “What a self righteous, supercilious, condescending fuck.” but on the other hand I realize that there was something to what he said. So even though I still think he was a bit of a dick it’s probably one of the reasons I try not to kill household pests/visitors.

Next conundrum. What to do about the head lice letter we got from my son’s school?