Antibiotics

I have come down with something. I went to the doctor. He diagnosed me with writers block--Avian writers block. I sneezed. He told me to try list therapy. "Wash it down with a spoon full of sugar," he tells me. Medicine: here it goes.

1.

This summer I had a pet spider name Shelob. She was the daughter of Regina, the spider that made her home in my coffee tree plant the summer before. Shelob made her home on a web in the kitchen window just to the right of my computer monitor. She was a cute but scrawny thing in the spring. I'd stoke her chin and say things like, goochi goochi goo goo, and she'd laugh, her back four legs shacking--her venom sack wagged.

As spring turned to summer and summer into the harvest, I started noticing that my window sill looked like the floor of a bank after a robbery gone horribly wrong. There were dead bodies strewn all over the place and little bullet cases all around. I spent one afternoon, I remember, outlining the bodies with chalk.

Then, for a while, I didn't see Shelob. Then one day, I did. She was enormous. All bloated and blotchy. She looked like a buffet restaurant patron. Her appearance frightened the shit out of me so I got a bottle of ammonia and squirt about four liters of it on her. Looking back, that was probably a horrible way to treat a pet.

2.

I'm listening to Chris Thile. Irishy folk music. Check him out.

3.

The period was an old maid. She liked to play yahoo chess locked in her room on Friday nights and none of the boys ever looked at her, mostly because she never left the house. The semi colon was so misunderstood. She wore black rimmed glasses and drank patchouli flavored lattes. The colon had trouble relating to other women, finding it easier to scratch, bite or punch them. She wore overalls with bare, yellow and dirt colored, feet. The exclamation mark got all the guys. When she went out she wore a red dress with spaghetti straps. When she stayed home she made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with creamy peanut butter and strawberry jam so that the jelly oozed over the crust.