On Squishing Bugs

Further evidence why I am either a terrible enlightened being or a terrible candidate for doing drugs:


There is a spider on my ceiling and I don't know what to do about it.

(S)He is going to die. As soon as I finish writing this post, in fact. The arachnid has merely as long left as I have verbiage within my heart. Not a great while, but an unknown, much as all life seems to be, though I certainly have a better idea of it than (s)he does.


I feel bad, killing spiders. They're chill. They relax. They eat the bugs I dislike having in my house. Overall, I would prefer this spider to live, and serve our mutual good. However it is directly over my head were I to go to bed without smooshing it, and so it must die.

I tell myself it will not matter, that the spider is not truly alive, only a biological robot acting out its base functionality in a predetermined manner. Put any other spider in the same situation and the same decisions would be made. A meat-bot.

And yet, while that may be true of, say, fruit flies, I've seen spiders stick out a leg inquisitively, then retract it, thinking. Sure, it may be running an Enigma-level punch card system in an Apple A6 world, but that little guy works on the same principles I do. I've looked it up, (s)he has a brain. And a heart, and some truly horrific looking internal bits, but that spider can feel and make decisions.

Truly horrific.

Is it better that I tell myself it would be quick? The complete annihilation of a small, crunchy life so instantaneous that life itself would cease before it realized such? I have heard that when you are shot, you feel the bullet burning through your insides the entire way. You feel the life siphoned out of you. Is this what I condemn another creature to? A reduction of its form to a small puddle of guts and goo and twitching legs in the crumpled ball of some tissue?

I tell myself that I am not snuffing out a life, that evolution will continue on and one day perhaps create a spider smart enough to have its rights protected like a dog or a dolphin or specially educated gorilla or chimp.

Perhaps it will even be smart enough to stay the hell away from Kleenex-toting humans.