I Miss Winter Already

     It seems I made a terrible error when I said that I only wrote three columns my Freshmen year.  Turns out there are a couple more!  How could I have forgotten about the spider column?  So great.  So timeless.  I even made a crappily photoshopped picture of me and a big spider for use as my author portrait in this one issue.

March 19, 2007

By Tom Ackerman

     Well readers, it appears that spring hath sprung here at Willamette and you know what that means: spiders. Yes the eight-legged denizens of our campus are out in force once again and they are doing their best to hinder the lives of (relatively) innocent college students. Seriously, why are there so many spiders here? I woke up the other day to find a busy arachnid connecting my desk lamp to my copy of Paranoia for Dummies with its tiny silken threads. Later, when I came back from class I found one of its much larger kin gallivanting across my ceiling. And there are about five other lazy-deadbeat spiders that seem to use my window screen as a web instead of making their own.

     Now, I’m not afraid of spiders. After all, I grew up in the tumbleweed-ridden wastes of Phoenix, Arizona, where the local spiders sustain themselves on a steady diet of stray cats and unattended infants. My hometown spiders never tried to invade my personal space though. Salem spiders most certainly DO invade my space, and my dorm room is crowded enough without a bunch of interloping arthropods “getting all up in there”.

     Also, I’m pretty sure some ambitious spiders want to eat Willamette students, because I cannot walk to class without tearing through the dozens of webs that have been erected between every bush and every other bush. It’s only a matter of time before they organize into a cohesive ambush task force and “take down” some poor malnourished Philosophy major (a la Gulliver’s Travels).

     Don’t believe me huh? Think I’m some crazy guy who invents spider invasions just for shits and giggles? Well then I urge you to stand under the Willamette clock tower and look up into its hollow underbelly. There you will see the most epic concentration of spider abodes in this hemisphere: spider HQ as it were. I’m confident that the webs contained in that fell spire, if laid end to end, would stretch to Venus and back. Remember that spider from The Lord of the Rings? One of her biological grandchildren became some kind of professional spider architect/city planner, and her greatest masterpiece resides in our clock tower.

     Also there are swarms of these annoying little flies traipsing around now that you can’t see until you’re practically inhaling them. But at least the trees are pretty. Too bad I can’t see them because my eyes are watering and I’m sneezing between every breath. Love is in the air though…I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to that too.

Spring sucks.

     At some point, the school did clean most of the spider webs out of the clock tower.  It must have been a truly horrendous battle.  I assume they used a combination of fire and long pointy sticks.