The Crooked and the Straight

Long story short (too late!): After toiling away for years in a musty Faraday cage working for Northup Grumman doing who-knows-what-and-if-you-do-know-they’ll-kill-you for the sorts of people who fly around in black helicopters, Ken came to his senses and has moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft. (Now, having recently quit my job at Microsoft, I could reasonably argue that this is less a sign of having come to his senses and more a symptom of finally having lost them completely. Nevertheless.)

The other day I get a phone call from Ken, which goes approximately like this:

“Hello?”
“Hey, Joe.”
“Hey Ken! What’s up?”
“I’m living in Seattle now. Want to get some dinner?”
“Sure!”
“Great. And could you bring your TiVo remote with you? I need to borrow it.”
“No problem.”

Some of you may be wondering at this point, “what’s with the TiVo remote?” Others of you may be wondering “yes, yes and what of the spider webs?” I’m going to ignore the latter group. Nobody who knows Ken is surprised in the least when he makes unusual requests, like “Can you bring your TiVo remote to dinner?” Or “Can I borrow a ball of silly putty and some wire mesh?” Or “Do you have a pencil?” Ken asking for ten square yards of wax paper and a tuning fork is rather like Emmett “Doc” Brown asking for some heavy-gauge cable and a clock tower: you don’t know exactly what he’s doing, but it probably involves time travel.

Where was I? Ah yes, spider webs. The thing about spider webs is you never see them coming. From the spider’s point of view, of course, this is the whole point of the spider web, although when you walk into a one there is an issue of massively disproportionate size involved. The spider has built his web so that he might catch things that weigh a few grams or so which he can eat for dinner. You, on the other hand, weigh many kilograms, and might, if you were so inclined, eat the spider for dinner instead. The net result of all of this is that you are left very cross about having walked into a web, and the spider is very cross at having captured what is, as far as he can tell, a small moon.

Okay, now I am cleaned up and on my way out of my apartment. Locking the door, TiVo remote in hand. Door is locked, double-check, yes, it’s locked. Turn around, take a couple steps towards the stairs, and ACK YEEECH OH WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?! I’ve just walked into a spider web.

Now, the spider’s problems at this point have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably be expected to get. My problems, however, have just begun.

Because you can’t see the web, in the first moments after colliding with one, your brain simply doesn’t know what to make of things. Something has attacked you but you cannot see it. Your first reaction is to try and get whatever it is off, so of course you begin to swat and flail about trying to do just that. Your brain takes this as a cue to go off and have a think about what’s just happened, and when the answer comes back: “Ah-ha! Spider web!” things get stupendously worse. Now, of course, you know there’s a very real possibility that you have a spider crawling around on you. So what does your body do? It freaks out.

So here I am, a few steps out of my apartment, my keys in one hand and my TiVo remote in the other, thrashing wildly about as if I am trying to audition for the Lord of the Dance while being electrocuted.

And now my neighbor comes bounding down the stairs. I’m only just peripherally aware of this, however, because my brain has chosen that precise moment to inform me “Spider web!” and so now I’m spinning madly around while, as far as he can tell, I am trying to remove my underpants by pulling very hard on my ears.

He stops at the bottom of the stairs, not moving because he’s both distracted by my flailing and also deathly afraid of getting caught up in whatever has transformed me into a whirling human maelstrom.

After a few frantic seconds, my brain sounds the all-clear, and I stop and catch my breath. It is at this point that I notice my neighbor.

“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I reply. And as if this helps explain anything at all, I mumble, “uh… spider web.”
“Yeah.” And he hurries of into his apartment.

Making my escape now as quickly as possible, I trot up the stairs waving one arm around in front of me so as to be able to detect any other lurking webs between me and my car.

There were none.

I met up with Ken for a nice dinner at Coho Café, and then we walked to the Monks to bother them for a while and eat ice cream and pet their cats.