Freaks me out, man!

Insects freak me out.
And by “freak me out” I am not meaning that they scare me or that I do not like them [even though I do think that most of them are rather creepy and I have a serious life-long phobia about grasshoppers jumping onto me]. No, when I say “freak me out” I mean moreso that certain things about them are horribly interesting to me.
For instance, spiders.
Today at work [I work in a huge, dark, warehouse] I was walking along a dark, neglected aisle way at the back of the place when I dropped my pen. I bent down to pick it up and then noticed this spider web structure-deal way down in the corner, like attached to the floor and the wall. I was going to sort of sweep it away with my boot when I noticed that there was a tenant on that web. A spider.
Species: arachnis warehouseis. [Very rare].
“Certainly this thing cannot be alive” I thought, and so I tapped it with my pen. It scrambled away and basically invisible-ized itself into some crevice and I turned and walked away.
But seriously, for a long time afterward, a question plagued my brain.
“What does this thing expect to catch down there?”
What does it eat? How long has it been waiting?
I mean really, I cannot imagine that this dark corner of the warehouse is situated along any sort of migratory flightpath of anything that would be small enough to get trapped in this ambitious little enterprise! I have worked in that warehouse for years. In all that time, I do not think I have seen one fly in there. Or mosquito. Or whatever else a spider may want to eat.
Good Lord! If I am a half hour late for lunch.... I am just about ready to start eating my own arm! And now here is this spider that’s been sitting on this web, for perhaps five or six years, hoping that some sort of.... thing will fly by and get accidentally stuck on this contraption. Or [what?] some other sort of bug walk by and decide to climb up there and surrender itself? These are really the only two possibilities, right?
I am going to visit its little area again tomorrow, and I am actually hoping to see some sort of visible signs of carnage. Like perhaps the inedible parts of a fly down on the floor, little fly-boots or aviator goggles, you know? Stuff even a spider wouldn’t eat!
OK, secondly.... [still on the topic of spiders here], I live on the fourteenth floor of a building. It’s a fair ways up. When I look out the kitchen window, invariably, there is a spider, or two or three spiders, busy either building their huge webs, or perhaps just sitting there being spider-like.
Species: arachnis highriseis.
I often watch them, and I wonder. Do they have absolutely no fear of heights? No comprehension of how high they are? They are running around on those little strings, upside down and sideways, it’s enough to make me woozy just thinking of it now, here in the safety of the coffeeshop, with my feet firmly on the floor.
And also, how did they GET up to the fourteenth floor?
Did they climb the entire face of the outside of the building, pausing each ten feet and saying “Nope, not this one Mildred, keep climbing.”
I mean..... “Why?”
I’ve always thought that "Nature" was this smoothly run logical and efficient machine!
Wouldn’t it be more sensible to have six or seven thousand webs scattered all around the first floor area? Isn’t that where more other bugs are anyways? Isn’t that the whole idea? To trap other bugs in your web?
If the spiders would just get together on this, pool their resources, they could just make one real big web at the front entrance and catch entire humans as they leave for work in the morning.
Obviously, the only reason they do not take over the world is because of lack of communication!
They freak me out, spiders do.

Never mind spiders, how about ants?
Have you ever been sitting at a picnic table, eating a sandwich or whatnot, and an ant starts running past your field of vision, all sixty-four of its legs hellbent-for-leather, and you’re all of a sudden worried it’s going to somehow climb into your can of Diet-Pepsi so, with thumb and forefinger you flick it off the table?
Have you ever watched where it goes after that?
Well it lands on the ground, right? But does it stop and sort of say “Whoa, whoa, WHOA?”
Does it get out its little Ant-Map and scan the terrain?
Hell no.
It is running just as fast down on the ground there as it was when it was on the table!
Yet you have just launched it into what would be the human equivalent of a different zipcode!
So I ask myself, “Where does this thing think it was going, in the first place?”
One thing is certain. It ain’t going to the same place anymore! How can it keep running just as frantically when I have just severely altered whatever destination it originally had in mind?
I mean, even if the thing had just been out for a purely aimless recreational jog, wouldn’t such a mid-course re-direction be at least a bit.... startling?
All I am saying is that this sort of thing really freaks me out.

And bees.
Bees buzz around and suck flowers.
As a kid, I remember once thinking that a certain flower looked so good, that it must have tasted good too.
Big mistake.
And you know that milky stuff in dandelions? Yep. I ate that one time. A “friend” dared me.
For the rest of the day I walked around with my lips so contorted I looked like a donkey trying to suck the oats out of a half-inch drainpipe.
Anyhow, bees, they do this stuff all day. They suck flowers.
Then [this whole process is admittedly a bit of a gray area for me] but I sort of understand that they gather later on in this frantically crowded bee-hostel and they make a real racket around the only girl in the whole place, and they try to impress her by showing how much flower-juice they have sucked that day.
“Heybzzzzzz...look at mebzzzzzz.... look howbzzzzzz much I gotbzzzzzzz.”
And [please correct me if I’m wrong here] but the only way they can really show her what they've collected is to sort of crap the stuff out into previously assigned little cylinders, no?
And she’s watching.
And she says to them ALL [typical woman]..... “No, nobzzzz. It isbzzzzzz not enoughbzzzzzzz. Go bzzzzzzget more!”
And so out they go, like squadrons of F15’s.
Like I said, I am not sure about the exact scientific data here, but if I am not right on the money I think I am pretty dang close enough OK? And here is the thing that freaks me out.
See, I don’t care if the stuff comes out of their butt, or if they spit it out somehow, or if it maybe comes out through their feet or nose.... all of that is really irrelevant.... the part that freaks me out so much is how incredibly good it tastes when you spread it all over your toast in the morning!
However these little critters do it honey..... they’re starting off with bitter flower-juice!
Insects freak me out, that’s all there is to it.
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