Greetings everyone,
I am back from the Feline Journalist Convention. It was awesome, kind of like a TED event, but with cats. Dan Savage was there! I even met up with Grumpy Cat to ask her what the hell her problem was back in July. I was supposed to have lunch with her at the Licensing Expo in Vegas and she pulled a Diva move and blew me off. Apparently she actually had a good reason; she needed to nap.
So I’m back in LA today and it’s a blast furnace, so this week, rather than answering a reader question, we’re going to talk about spiders.
I can’t speak for what’s happening in Idaho or West Virginia, but here on the 34th parallel, every September any creature with eight good legs must produce a Broadway musical.
Yesterday morning, I did my usual routine: coffee, yoga, the sports section, my morning constitutional in the garden, then sat in the living room window to watch “Spider Follies.” A brown and orange spider the size of a hubcap zip-lined from a 72 foot tall fichus tree. She caught a breeze no one else could feel and landed on the doorknob of a green Prius with an Obama/Biden bumper sticker. From this one string, she somehow anchored six more points, but I have no idea how. I’ve watched her act every day for a week now and still can’t see the moment when she whips out tent stakes and a mallet. It’s like watching a Chris Angel show.
By 7:30 she had wrapped the entire front of the house, including the car. Yesterday she caught the UPS guy. She wrapped him in two seconds flat and liquefied his guts while pretending to sign for a package from Amazon, which I’m certain was my cat-nip. Yes I have a prescription. I get headaches. Don’t judge me. His desiccated carcass is hanging over the air conditioner that’s about to blow a fuse. I’ve been batting at it for a while. Knocked off a shoe.
This morning the people who feed me walked out the front door directly into her new web and did the 
spider dance, which involves screaming made up cuss words and spinning in circles while slapping your head. Spiders live for this. While you flip out, the spider swings on a loose thread laughing her head off. Spiders are jerks. Don’t let that Charlotte’s Web book fool you. That whole project was paid for by the Brown Recluse Liberation Front. It’s total propaganda.
So be warned. This is happening every where for the next three weeks. Spiders will be staging practical jokes across every mailbox, under car door handles, in guitar cases, over the baby’s changing table, across the dog’s food bowl, in your underwear drawer. Last year one of them started a Tumblr page full of videos of people flipping out. I’ve seen it. It’s hysterical.
If you do happen to wander into a web, please don’t kill the spiders. Please catch them and bring them to me, or any housecat. We gently pat them, over and over again until they are dazed but not dead. Then we play hockey with their twitching bodies. After three goals, or a shoot out, we eat them.
The weather reports say that this heat wave should abate in a few days. I hope you all have a bougainvillea bush to lie under for 8 hours a day.
Watch out for spiders. They are using this heat as an excuse to go completely out of bounds and produce questionable performance art.
Hi, I’m Jethro. 
I take questions from all animals,
even Banana Slugs.
I’m here to help. And you know you can trust me,
because I have an awesome soul-patch.
Submit questions for Jethro via his website: www.TheAnswerCat.blogspot.com.
This column will be posted there one week after its publication here in the absolutely awesome Culver City Crossroads.
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