There are lots of things I love about my German wife — she’s smart, funny and beautiful, to name a few — but she also has this one particular characteristic which warms my heart every time I see it: Whenever she sees a spider in our home, she grabs the nearest shoe, swings it up over her head and brings it down with ten thousand times the crushing force necessary to end its life.
You see, when it comes to executing spiders, my wife tends not to fuck around. Oh, she’s not proud of herself for killing them — she knows they’re mostly harmless and she should probably just let them outside instead — but nevertheless, her knee-jerk reaction to seeing a spider is murder, and I just love that about her.
My wife is actually a very gentle person, and she abhors violence. That’s why the spider can’t be too big. If it’s huge, she starts to see it as “more of an animal,” and can’t bring herself to kill it. Me? I’m the exact opposite. I believe in spider karma, so I’ll readily share my office with a tiny little wall crawler. I’ll even talk to it. Name it Sebastián or something. But if I see some giant, hairy bastard come swaggering in, I’ll jump up and stomp that bitch straight back to hell.
I actually wrote a blog post about this very subject last year: American Expat in Germany Nearly Killed by an Acorn, Vents His Shame upon the Biggest Spider in the Universe. The spider in that story was bigger than a €1 euro coin. But just a few nights ago, my wife and I were sitting in the kitchen when an even bigger spider ran across the floor. This one was the size of an American silver dollar:
Now, we were mid-sentence when she saw it, so you can imagine my alarm when her eyes went wide and suddenly darted down and to the left. Oh great, I thought to myself, I get to spend my Friday night chasing a plague rat out of the house.
I was actually sort of relieved when I saw it was just a spider, but oh my Christ was it huge. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any spare change to toss at the beast for comparison, so you can’t appreciate its size from the video I recorded, but you can bare witness to its execution.
Check it out, and have a great week everyone!
— OGM
Oh God, My Wife Is German. 
That WAS a big spider! One of our family cats was an effective sadist: it killed bugs or spiders by pulling off all but one or two legs – then he sat and watched the victim “walk” in tiny circles till it died!
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Well done! I, too, abhor violence against any living thing, unless it’s spiders or snakes, then I become a killing machine without mercy. I try not to be, but….!
A better solution I came onto in later life, though is cats. Yes, my two cutey-pie Persians Andy and Dougy are little snuggle bunnies, but put a spider in front of them, and they revert to their true sabre kitten natures, tormenting the poor spider to death, batting it into submission, then, when it stops wiggling, eating it with gusto reserved for a can of tuna!
Best of all, if the cats kill the spider, I don’t feel guilt! “It’s just the way of cats. I can’t change cat nature after all.”
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That is disgusting and ingenious.
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