A Spider

I’ve been deeply into the fall malaise that hits me every other year or so, and have been feeling really shitty about how little I’m getting done and how much effort it takes to not do it.

A few days ago, I noticed this spider on the wall, a few inches from the doorframe that leads into the den. You know what? I just decided I’m going to start calling the den “the library.” Doesn’t that sound nice? It has a lot of books in it, so it’s the library now. Who can stop me?

Anyway, this spider just sat in that same exact place for like two days. And gradually, I began to feel superior to him. I mean, here I was, feeling like a slightly mobile pile of dirty laundry, dragging myself from the library to the office to the bedroom, not really managing to do much but work and sleep. But compared to this spider, I was a whirlwind of productivity. This guy couldn’t even be bothered to move an inch a day.

Not long after that, he moved to the doorframe proper. So, that took him about a week for maybe a five-inch journey. Sucker. I was absolutely smoking him, running circles around him. I started getting a little boost every time I went into the library, and saw his sorry ass, still pinned there, not succeeding.

Two days after that, he made it to the middle of the doorway, where he hunkered down underneath the loose floor rim thingy that I can’t be fucked to fix, and he nursed himself there for several days, ruminating on how far he’d come.

I was literally bounding over him, the idiot!

The next day, he pulled himself out from under the rim thingy, made quite a good bit of progress toward the sliding glass door, flipped over on his back, and died.

So, I’d been competing with a terminally ill spider, turns out. I’d been assuming this was the laziest, saddest, most chronically depressed spider ever, and all the time, he was making a heroic journey, one last major push in his very old age to die in the sunshine of the glass door. And he made it, the crazy bastard!

If I were a better sort of person, I’d take inspiration from this, but I’m not, so I just feel annoyed that even a spider is doing something more impressive with his life than I am.

His little corpse has been lying there for days now, because I’m too tired to sweep him up.