25.1.08

Apathetic Al the Spider... a lesson in futility by Shem





This is Al.


He just can't be bothered.

He created his web on a spoon, and it's not much bigger than he is.

This is the sum total of his ambition for the day.

We could assume several reasons for this:

One, that he's not very smart.
Two, he is incredibly over-confident.
Or the third possibility, which is the correct one, that he has absolutely no motivation.

He just can't summon enough energy or drive to do anything more than what he's doing now. After all, he's known for some time that flies don't exactly possess the largest amount of brain cells in the insect kingdom, so why go to all the effort of producing an elaborate web that breaks if someone so much as looks at it, just to eat some struggling emaciated insect he can't even have a decent conversation with. Besides that, Al knows that the spider web is an idea that might well have been effective for a few million years, but frankly, doesn't provide much in the way of job satisfaction. As you can see, Al is hoping winged prey will accidentally wander into his trap by distracting them with an alluring sales pitch about low interest home loans.

There's a few reasons for his lack of motivation. It's not been the best of days. This morning, his wife packed her bags, took the kids and moved to another web to live with a ski instructor named Sven. To be honest, it's not like Al hadn't seen this problem coming for some time, but he thought that they would wait until their six thousand children had moved out. It would take a joint income to put them all through college. But no, it turns out that a six pack abdomen, eight muscley hairy legs and a six figure income was all it took to make his wife leave him. He promised her money, success, glory and all the flies she could suck the juices out of, but that wasn't good enough. He had a great business plan to get all the spiders to join all the webs together to catch one of the humans every six months or so and then eat like kings. He called it the 'World Wide Web', but it turned out someone had already taken the name for something completely different (it would never catch on, was Al's opinion), so that was another idea down the proverbial toilet.

Now on top of all that, some damn great human with a big metal box had just flashed him in the eye with the light of a thousand suns and totally blinded him. So even if a fly was stupid enough to fall into his web, he wouldn't be able to see him to eat him! Al was so down, he was contemplating suicide by drowning himself in a drop of water, or hanging himself on his web.

Being a spider isn't all that its cracked up to be. Sure, some can get up and pull a beautiful eighteen pointed web strung across and twenty foot gap with dew ornaments out of their ass every morning, but that wasn't Al. He never subscribed to the whole 'Hope and Equality for Female Arachnids' (HEFA) movement. Seemed a bit over the top to him, proving they were equal in the work place by biting off the heads of loving spouses after sex. Most of them were already twice the size of men anyway, not that Al minded that. What a lady did with her weight was up to her. Al was more old fashioned, that a woman should stay at home and take care of the spiderlings and the man should go out an bring home the fly-meat. Seems the world had upped and moved on without him.

So next time you're out in the early morning air, admiring some beautiful, artistic masterpiece of spider architecture, catching the sunlight as it shimmers gently in the dawn breeze, spare a thought for Al.

Because some days, you just can't be bothered.

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