Tarantula Stew

"Ew, no. Gah."

"Just try it, a tip on your tongue..."

"No. Look, it's not even soup, it's just a big vat of tarantulas."

"Have you ever had tarantula stew?"

"No, but what you've got there is a teeming mass of pissed off bugs."

"Well, you can hardly call them bugs, they're spiders."

"Fine. Not bugs... not stew."

"But really, how can you say you won't like it?"

"Because I've had spider before? Hello? Remember? Eat the poor little saucer eyed spider who wants to go to heaven? Ring any bells?"

"Oh. Yeah. I thought you looked familiar."

"What is it with you and spiders anyways? You just sit around here trying to foist them on people?"

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. You see anyone else here pushing spiders? Any body else slinging arachnid aperitif?"

"Oh, that's good."

"Yeah. Well, you're the only one who'd think so. So what's the story... why're you doing the hard sell on the spiders?"

"Everythings got to have a place in the food chain."

"Uh huh... and spiders already do, don't they? Birds eat spiders. Snakes eat spiders. I betcha all sorts of rodents each spiders. I used to have a dog that ate spiders."

"What about Renfield?"

"Renfield?! He was fictional. Besides, he was working his way up the food chain. From flies, to spiders, to ... to ..."

"See! See! What did Renfield eat next? You don't know... because there's no clear cut succession."

"Birds!"

"Birds eat worms."

"And spiders."

"No. There's a clear cut line. There's always a clear cut line. Mice, cats, dogs. See?"

"When was the last time you saw someone give a dog a big bowl of kitty-flavored dog food?"

"But..."

"What, you get all your reasoning from Sunday morning cartoons? You suspect that maybe mailmen and fenders are also beneath dogs on the food chain?"

"Wait a sec... let me think."

"Your pot's boiling over."

"Oh, it can't... there's no actual heat."

"No, I mean, they're climbing over the edge."

"Oh, just give it a good stir."

"I'll let you do that... too many chefs and all that. Look, why do you need to have a clear cut order in the food chain? It's a messy messy chain. I mean, look at the shark. Are we above the shark or below the shark?"

"It's just... I don't... I don't want them to feel left out."

"Left out? From not having people eat them? Why, on God's green Earth do you think that the spiders want to have someone who'll consume them? I certainly don't stay up late at night wondering about who'll consume me."

"Well, the worms'll get you."

"Yeah, unless that shark does."

"What if the worms didn't eat you?"

"Hmm?"

"What if your body just sat there in the ground? No rot ever took place, no consumption. What if all the forces of nature rejected processing your body. It just lied there, deep in the ground, cold and clammy... left over... like discarded rubbish. What if future generations eventually cursed you for never having the good graces to release the resources you jealously hoarded after death?"

"ew... well. I could always chose to be cremated."

"ok... ok... I can live with that... can you loan me some money?"

"For what?"

"I need to build a little spider funeral parlor with a crematorium."