Arachnophobia at 2:14 AM

Another sleepless night. Another forced technological intervention. Facebook at 2:14 am, hoping to fall asleep on the banalities of others' lives, when suddenly - a spider - black, but subtly back lit by the spill from the laptop monitor against a dull, yet rough white wall. Jesus! Arachnophobia past mid-night. Surely, there must be a law against this kind of behavior somewhere, but not here, heck no, this is Hollywood, man. We snack on spider tissue because we are cool and need to tell everyone how much. The desk lamp is turned on and renders a little orange warmth to the cold blue light of the laptop.

What are you doing, man? You are not Peter Fuckin' Parker. Run around, make some noise, wake the neighbors, call the super. Sanity versus Exhibitionism. Front row tickets. I fight the urge to let the battle ensue in that brilliant light. Meanwhile, the poor bastard is running towards Lennon and his lyrics of Imagine on the wall. Light doesn't affect his motion I noticed. Maybe the sucker is blind. Maybe it's a blind spider. Or maybe, all spiders are blind. They are supposed to be. Not evolved enough. If this was taking place centuries later and I were just telekinesising the fuck outta this blog post, maybe the spider would stop, do a steamy little number for me, sing in a deep Kathleen Turner voice and take a bow, but not tonight - this is just a post-modern saga, not some futuristic Phillip F. Dick novel.

The ten count is over. Exhibitionism is lying face down in a pool of its own blood somewhere in my subconsciousness. I walk over to the bathroom, trying not to shake for my companion, but once out of sight, my dirty little shaking hands tear a piece of TP off - a clinical move, reeking with mercenary efficiency. I walk back - an epitome of Nihilistic Buddhism, TP in one hand, silence hovering over my lips like a mistress at a funeral and nothing but the creature's reflections in my two eyes. It's almost over now I tell myself. We look at one another. It stops, for what can only be melodramatic effect. "Breathe, muthafucka. Enjoy the last five seconds of your miserable, mountaineering domestic life." Strong words for a monster-slayer. Pulp! It's done. Just like adolescent sex - anticipation far outweighing the act. I crush it between my thumb and forefinger a couple of times, just to be sure.

I bury the fucker in my trashcan, where rest countless other household bugs. If these goddamn animals have afterlives, they are bitching about me right now over some dirty Tecates and mouthfuls of crunchy pork tacos. Ouch! That must have hurt. Sanity is suddenly coughing blood as Exhibitionism punches him under the belt while I type this out for other insomniacs awake at this hour. As they say, it ain't over till the fat lady squeals and we all know Exhibitionism is one large bitch.

Ladies and Gentleman, please fasten your seatbelts - tonight's meal - BBQ-ed medulla oblongata

I am a blind pilot, passing over some ice-topped mountains in Greenland. I can't see anything of course, but if I could, it would be like a dessert cooked in a household of Irish-English heritage, if such a thing is at all discernible. But there lies the quandary, because the smell at the time would just be stale, metallic, reproduced oxygen - your staple fare at 3000 feet above air. And what good can descriptions by unimaginative over-traveled heavily mustached colleagues paint.

It's not like I'll loosen my thin tie and wipe my broad forehead between adjustments of the sexy, sleek pilot's hat when we cruise over the vast chromeness of the Sahara, dotted with occasional black olives of royal guards. Sounds like Colin Firth in A Serious, no sorry, Single Man, innit? Fidgeting around the autopilot controls and seeing the black sheen of a .38 caliber flashing the finality of death. For that one tenth of a second, the urge to be engulfed in the dull chromeness, ostensibly in an effort to pick out and eat the olives, french-kisses the hell out of me.

As the mustaches demand an urban detour, the blindness whisks away like a particularly persistent cloud cover, leaving me in the realm of the .38 caliber's ugliness, to sculpt the patron's unpleasant wife or the neighbor's leprous maid. I choose Khartoum with its beautifully carved chess pieces for us to tamper with. The mustaches are happy. They can cover themselves in white rags of comforting cotton while their bosses slug it out over games of chess between puffs of mint flavored hookah.

And so to Awadh, which would be modern day... , wait lemme Google, aah Lucknow, my initial hunch was right - the land of kababs and shayari, though right now, it's probably festered with terribly accented call centers and smoggy dark gray traffic. Fuck, I would kill for a kabab right now, which is ironic, because, if you don't kill, you can't produce a kabab. Why do some people spell kabab with an e? It might be a Turkish conspiracy to recapture the world in the name of commoditizing world peace. I have a hunch - personal interaction with modern-day Ottomans I tell you, not the kind you put your feet on, well I suppose you could, but they tend to be bony and fuck with your ankles. If only I had a pig like the Queen of Hearts, but the stink, oh the stink. Haha... irony alert again - pigs taking over Ottoman jobs!

Maybe I'm just hungry. BBQ pork chops would never taste better, I promise. But something tells me the magic is in the BBQ sauce and not the meet. Can you imagine tasteless crap like veggies, that your mama gets you to eat every living hour, with BBQ sauce? This is bigger than world peace, man. This is the Food Network on acid. Just dab the damn thing in BBQ sauce and voila, you have solved world hunger. Why are we dropping food concentrates in African wastelands? Let's shower them with BBQ sauce. Take that UN!

Aren't some African societies cannibalistic? Would they try to eat each other then - dabbed in BBQ sauce? If only Hannibal Lector were more white-trash than such a cultured prick, we would know what BBQ sauce on human meat tasted like. None of that 'I fried his liver with some flava beans and had it with a nice cianti' crap, I'm talkin' about downright BBQ-ed medulla oblongata here. Is 'cannibalistic society' an oxymoron? Is 'oxymoron' an oxymoron?