I’ve seen my share of fucked up since moving here to Texas. Aside from the wild obsession Texans seem to have with their own state (etching the state’s shape into the windows of their homes, outfitted with a burnt orange longhorns flag), or the star spangled cell phone holders, or the roadside jerkey–I’ve seen scorpions in my house (in my makeup drawer!), had a coyote in my backyard during daylight, have heard of rattlesnakes being on the trail in my backyard, but this, this I didn’t think happened anywhere but in the Brady Bunch Hawaii episode.

I was startled for a moment when I saw a Halloween gag on my window. “Ha, ha,” I thought to myself. “Norma got me this time.” There, outside my window, she stuck a pipe cleaner tarantula. Then I looked a little closer. HOLY MOTHERFUCKER. It was moving. Right there, on the window, beside my front door. A TARANTULA. Where the fuck am I living? Seriously. Who sees tarantulas?! Pictures of my window and our guest, who decided to be fashionably late for Halloween:

Slightly less troubling, I then googled this creature to see what people were saying about it’s death factor if you’re jabbed by one of these buggers. Guess what I found? People touting them as great “beginner spiders.” As in, what a great pet these guys make. They’re totally underestimated. Yeah, I don’t know who these people are, these exotic pet owners who prefer reptiles to puppies, but a tarantula is NOT a goddamn pet. Look at it. From this picture, it looks like it has one cyclops of an eye, with a gaping hole in the middle, that I can’t help but think of as an ass instead of a mouth. It looks like one of those anal sex porn DVD covers, where they show some gaping ass action as an enticement to buy. Then I watched this video on tarantulas, watching a man who looks like he’d be the type to have a tarantula as a pet, fondle his friend, telling us all about the tarantula nemesis. How thoroughly disturbing. And yes, I’m judgmental. One of my closest friends in college had a pet snake in her dorm room. She once showed up at a judge’s house wearing nothing but a trench coat, heels, and her pet snake. He asked her to leave. So would I.