Last time I was in Dallas, I picked up another Laurie Notaro collection of essays, this one called “We Thought You Would Be Prettier.” It is HILARIOUS. I was reading it last night in bed, and laughed so hard my sides were hurting. In particular, the story “The Unseen,” about the rat that took up residence in her kitchen, was side-splittingly funny. Here’s an excerpt.
After several days of this sort of taunting, I was getting a little freaked out. Fighting the unseen can be a tricky business, as my husband learned the hard way after reading the Dhammapada and refusing to kill a blithe little spider that had occupied a parcel of our dining room in between a lampshade and an aromatherapy candle because she “had as much a right to a peaceful life as we did, and she was an exceptionally talented web weager.” Sure, it was a pretty web, but the Michelangelo of her species had woven her beautiful home especially so that she could lay about ten thousand eggs in it that would all hatch one day while we were at work, only to be discovered when my husband came home and walked into a solid wall of minute teeny-tiny crawling spiders eager to make his acquaintance. It was not exactly a scene out of Charlotte’s Web. After he twirled, most likely seizurelike, in the giant wall web, gasping, battling at it and making monkey noises, he realized he was surrounded, and although the infant spiders were practically invisible, he could sense that they were in his hair, under his clothes, and th at one crawled near his nostril. He grabbed the vacuum cleaner and in an act of sheer self-defense, massacred them all. He later recalled, “No Navy SEAL could function as well as I did. It was like a horror movie. That was Satan. What was in that web was Satan!”