It is better to know and regret than to live in ignorance

I killed a thing on this night. A spider, so large I felt it cracking beneath my shoe. I nearly cried. It is harder than you..d think to kill a thing that big. At first I examined it, in wonder at how it got so big in secret in this house. I blew on it to see if it would run, it did not. I saw that one of its legs was injured. I walked off to continue my painting. The thought that it might be poisonous crossed my mind. I went back to examine it further, though I wouldn..t know how to tell a poisonous spider save the red shape on a black widow..s belly, as if I..d ever turn a black widow over to see its belly. I could glean nothing from what I saw. Again I went off to work on my painting. The thought occurred to me that perhaps someone in this house could die a strange death and later it would be determined that it had been a poisonous spider. It would have been my negligence, so I determined to kill the poor injured beast. I grabbed some excess paper towel leftover from cleaning the glass for the frames I just bought. I used it as a shield for my hand as I pushed down, then attempting to pick up the corpse; instead I saw I was cruel, that the spider now had three injured legs, crushed up against its body. I tried again, this time injuring all of its legs, and then, when I lifted up the paper towel and saw it failing as it tried to writhe, is when I began to hold back the tears. What right have I to cause such suffering? I put the paper towel back over it and stood, I pushed into the crippled creature with all my weight on the ball of my foot. Through the towel, my pink embroidered sock, my black shoes, I felt the crunch. I hoped that was it. I picked up the creature in the towel, this time it did not scurry away, and I took it and dumped it in the toilet someone had not flushed. I felt like pure evil, if it was still alive, it would meet finality drowning in piss water, and then I flushed.

Perhaps I lack perspective, but I snuffed out a life, I brought an end to existence. This weighs heavily on me. Usually I leave spiders I find. I destroy their web, careful not to hurt it, if it is in a high traffic area of the house. I cover my food well and let flies be. I capture earwigs and release them outside. Why did I kill this thing? Did its size invoke some hidden territorial instinct? I don..t know.

One night, eleven years ago I was doing something perfectly ordinary, so ordinary that I don..t remember what it was. I was listening to music, singing along, pretending it was my feeling, my song, or I was watching television, laughing, wanting, hungering, imagining it was my great adventure, or I was reading a book, crying, longing, learning that those could be my words. It does not matter. I was twelve, my brother was seventeen. It was late, but how late I don..t remember. It could have been eleven at night or three in the morning. My brother came into whatever room in which I was doing whatever it was I was doing. He said, ..Mark is in town, I know where he is. Let..s go see him... He was speaking of my father who we had not seen in five years. I did not remember much of my father, for it had been not even a year that he was in my life those five years prior, and before that I had not seen him since I was two. I remembered the smell of beer and peppermint schnapps and how he terrified me because he did everything you weren..t supposed to do. I remembered watching him get drunk, and proceed to give my brother and his friends a ride somewhere and I was there too, and he sped through the piles of leaves that had been raked out in the street, and I remember thinking I heard somewhere that people put cinderblocks in their leaves to keep people form doing these things, and we would hit one, and my dad would lose control of the car and something horrible would happen. I remembered his constant encouragement, his words of wisdom, sometimes so slurred I could not understand them but still got a sense of grandiosity from them..he was my father. I agreed that we should go see him, and we snuck out of the house..my mother was asleep already. He was in the Valparaiso motel, which was a decrepit little place and I..m quite sure is closed now, I don..t even remember fully where it was. We got to the room and there he was. Long frizzy red hair frantically sticking out like it would break off if you touched it, blue eyes all the more brilliant for being blood shot, splotchy red skin in resistance to tanning during his long days working out in the sun. I knew I was looking at a broken man, but it didn..t matter, this was my father, I wanted to know him, for I..ve always held this belief that your heritage is your legacy, you carry it with you and it continues after you. There were beer bottles in varying degrees of emptiness on every horizontal surface in the room, there were clothes strewn about, and garbage on the floor, fast food bags here and there, ashtrays overflowing. I remember being drawn to his acoustic fender guitar, he had some months before sent money to help buy my first guitar. I picked up the fender and started playing the chords I knew. He asked me about music and I spoke with the enthusiasm of an almost teenager looking for what would define me. So simply my father came back into my life. And later I would bitterly scorn him for consigning the fender, and I would scream at him when he was in his drunken stupors, and I would cuss at him when I felt like it, and I would break things periodically, and once I even injured him as his rage fed my rage. He would also ritualistically bring me treats when I lived with him, cigarettes, candy, cookies. He would buy me so many albums, my first amp and electric guitar, a nice shitty little squire, and then he bought me the jagstang that was so easy to play and laughed at my weak fingers and called me electric guitar baby, and then he bought me the twelve string, and paints, and whatever I wanted and he saved whatever artwork I discarded, whatever poems I discarded, he encouraged me every time I picked up one of my guitars, he gave me books to read. He was never abusive, just drunk, abrasive, inconsiderate, inconsistent, and sometimes embarrassing. Perhaps my anger and violence were necessary to get over his absence in my childhood, perhaps I should thank him for coming back and letting me work through that for there is no doubt I am a calmer person for it today, if not much less mean. He has gone again on his journey, and it has been nearly a year since I have seen him. I can honestly say I miss him.