Boxers protip

On July 20 2011 05:52 BroOd wrote:
I would’ve had a heart attack and probably died.

Scorpions are probably my biggest “irrational” fear. When I was a kid, I learned about crabs and lobsters, and I was terrified to go into the ocean for fear of stepping on one of them and having them pinch me with those massive claws, easily crushing through the bones in my feet like garden shears through loaf of bread. There were vivid images of them spearing my feet with their dagger claws, and pulling me down underneath the water into their dark, decidedly un-Disney-like ocean caves to drown for having stepped on them. I generally spent a lot of time on dry land at the beach (except for the brief period where my cousin had me convinced of the existence of “land sharks”, a species of shark that could tunnel beneath the sand and burst forth, snatching me up like something out of Tremors, but that’s neither here nor there).

So, naturally, when I found out there were miniature lobsters that could traverse land, hide in the darkness to pinch your feet, and even inject you with poison through a built-in weaponized syringe, I was done. Out of the game. Lobsters are one thing. You can keep track of lobsters. Look around you. Are you standing in water so deep you can’t see the bottom? If not, your chances of being attacked by a lobster remain refreshingly low. Scorpions, on the other hand, continue to prowl the walking world unfettered. They look like hybrid alien bugs, genetically engineered attack lobsters, cross-bred with black widows, and with an extra-evil glossy black finish. I can’t even watch hatcheries morphing. Image the nightmarish click-click-click of their spindly legs as they hit the floor of your darkened bedroom, their claws snapping at the air in fevered anticipation of their next pinch, and their stinger cocked and ready to shoot out at your unsuspecting bare ankles. Maybe he goes full blast and injects his whole payload into your foot, or maybe he just runs up and snips a toe off. I doubt he’ll think twice about it. Either way, you might want to do like I did and set your bed up on a set of car jacks and just crank it up a few feet once you’re in. I’ve also hooked up a bunch of industrial fans to a diesel generator, and I like to keep them blowing on me at about 35 miles per hour to blow away and low-mass predators that might make their move.

I keep a scorpion trapped in amber, deep in a wooden chest in my room in case I ever need it for a Michael Bay-style plot device where I use it to figure out their secret weakness when they rise up and start their inevitable revolution. The first night I had it, I woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming the scorpion had re-animated itself and tunneled out of the amber prison holding it and was free inside my room. I actually got out of bed and pulled it out of the chest to make sure this wasn’t the case. I got out of bed at 3 AM to prove to myself that a dead souvenir scorpion hadn’t dug its way out of a block of amber in an attempt to get me. I actually did that. And, thinking about it now, it’s been an awful long time since I’ve checked on that scorpion…