I want to talk to you about two things.

One of them is my shoes. Before I left the country, my mother bought me a pair of shoes, intended as walking (not working) shoes. They are black - if I wear light-colored shoes all I see is my own feet - and for once in my life they are not Vans or some other Airwalk clone. No, these are not cheap skater shoes to be worn heedlessly until their death. I have weird feelings about these shoes. Are they awesome because I want them to be awesome? Or do I feel like they're awesome because they're so awesome? Regardless, I find myself cleaning them like a mendicant, wincing over every spot of dust and regretting every scrape with a feeling not unlike religious guilt. Mother, you needn't have worried that I would work in these shoes; I would go barefoot on gravel before sloshing through mud and briars in these. I would rather kill a man, or at least punch him right in the face and not say I'm sorry. Call me a lame old square, a sell-out tool of the corporations, whatever - that's all fine as long as you don't touch my @#$%ing shoes. I will bite you. Okay?

Great. Pictures of my shoes in next post, maybe.

The other thing is: spiders. Now some of my friends and family members know that I have an ambivalent relationship with spiders. For a while I despised them all due to a nightmare I'd had in which a gigantic spider with an armored carapace menaced me outside the shed at my dad's old house in Abingdon. I killed them on sight for about three years. Recently though, due in no small part to a short story I began writing (entitled, yes, "The Boy Who Admired Spiders"), I have been trying to chill out and appreciate them. The variety of species alone is cause for wonder - here in Italia as well as at home. They love to spin webs among the grape vines and nest in tiny, dried-out husks of grapes that will never be. I have seen tiny green spiders, little ones so white they're almost translucent, long ones with bodies almost as big as my thumb (although Lex says she's seen wolf spiders at home that are bigger) and dozens of "daddy long-legs" arthropods.

But one day at La Monda, I encountered the most hideous, disgusting, evil-looking spider of my entire life to date. And by "encountered" I mean "unexpectedly touched with my bare finger."

Listen: I am not particularly squeamish. In high school biology, I cut open the skull of the fetal pig and removed its brain without missing a beat. On my dad's farm, I have hauled boxes of rotten potatoes and mounds of decaying hay reduced to primal black sludge. I grew up turning compost piles and I have seen gross human injuries in person since I was very young. Okay? But this spider was so nasty I almost tossed my cookies right then and there.

Have you seen that kind with the fat, bulbous bodies the size of acorns? I mean, disproportionately large, to the point where a reasonable person's only conclusion is that they are either swollen with young or bloated with poison? If you haven't, STOP LAUGHING. I touched one of those spiders, okay, and it felt scaly. I won't even show you a picture of it, it's so gross. I would hate for you to, say, puke all over your computer, or weep so copiously with terror that you shorted out your keyboard.

In any case, Lexy and our Swedish friend Amir made fun of me mercilessly until I went back into its lair (i.e. the high tunnel where we'd been pulling up old tomato plants) and confronted it. I am not lying or even indulging in hyperbole when I tell you my *@$#ing heart was pounding. I put on my gloves, zipped up my rain jacket to cover my face (because the only thing worse than an evil spider is an evil spider ON YOUR FACE) and picked up a garden stake with which to dislodge the villain. Let me tell you that while things that move very quickly intimidate me, things that move slowly make me sick. I sat there for close to a minute poking this creature with a foot-long wedge of plastic and it barely moved at all. Finally, when my adrenaline threatened to give out, it hauled its bulk off the string I wanted and down the metal pole toward, I don't know and frankly I don't care. It was gone and I was free to leave. I've never had a more primal confrontation with evil, except that time I was working for the Democratic Party of Buncombe County and I got stuck outside a polling station against a fat little Republican lady from New York City who told me seventeen times that Rudy Giuliani was "the best thing going."

... and now back to your regularly scheduled updates.