I have a spider in my rearview mirror.<\/p>\n
This not a metaphorical spider in a symbolic mirror; I’m talking about a garden-variety California orb-weaver. I’ve only seen it once, but it lives in the gap between the rearview mirror’s glass and housing. Every night it comes out, spins a little web between the mirror and the window, and retreats back to its lair. Every morning I destroy the web.<\/p>\n
Occasionally, I try to root out the spider with a twig, but I can’t seem to get at it. I could probably flush it out with a blast of water from the hose. But I haven’t bothered yet, because what really fascinates me about the spider is its tenacity, its single-mindedness. It doesn’t get discouraged. It doesn’t move its home to a more promising location. It seems to have no ability to process this particular input and react accordingly. The spider and I, we have a failure to communicate.<\/p>\n
Fundamentally, I think this is why arachnids and insects are so creepy. Sam raised this idea a while back. If you’re hiking and you step near a snake, it will rear up and hiss at you to warn you off. You scared it, it’s trying to scare you. Message sent, message received. Reptiles, mammals, birds… there’s something comforting about how you can communicate with these creatures, at least at some very basic level. The Brotherhood of the Vertebrates.<\/p>\n
But arthropods are alien creatures. Little unfathomable machines. Is it going to bite me? Scuttle away? Ignore me? What is the spider thinking when it fastens those eight beady little eyes on me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reptiles, mammals, birds… there’s something comforting about how you can communicate with these creatures, at least at some very basic level. The Brotherhood of the Vertebrates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":891,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}