It's time for the march of the creepy crawlies

You can hear the pitter patter of little feet around the house now. Well, actually it is more like the pitter patter of six or eight feet. With the cold weather those tiny ants, spiders and other creepy creatures are moving into your home.

Now I say this with all due love and respect in my heart, but there is something about a woman who spots a spider scurrying across the floor that makes her go into an exorcist frenzy and beat this microscopic thing to death, over and over again.

If she had a block of cheese the size of a car battery and dropped it on the spider’s head from a stepladder for a direct hit, it still wouldn’t be enough. She would have to keep smacking it, stomping it, screaming at it, whaling at it, until the aneurysm she didn’t have before she saw the spider breaks and oozes carbon monoxide out of every orifice in her body. Not that I would ever do this or have any experience in the arachnoid area, but I hear things. And no, my pants aren’t on fire and I am not running for office!

Men seem to have the opposite reaction. If a woman doesn’t alert a guy about a spider, then it really doesn’t exist. In fact, even if he is alerted to a spider, he really won't show any interest until at least the 50th bloodcurdling scream or half time, depending on which comes first.

And insects and spiders especially know this; for years they have studied the human male species and used the material they’ve accumulated in a scientific, constructive way, mostly at their stag parties and at Saturday night comedy clubs.

Just showing a PowerPoint presentation of a human male in his Barcaounger, eating a bag of corn chips in his NFL jersey will have them rolling in the aisles, holding their sides and gasping for spider breath.

There aren’t many things insects are sensitive enough to fear. You see, insects can handle even exterminators. Usually they meet them at the entrance to the development, and some money changes hands, or sometimes with the more resistant ones an all-expense-paid cruise to the Caribbean.  Hey, these guys have to make a living too. I’m not saying all of them, but I hear things.

Sometimes when a house is sold, the contract goes with it, but often the arachnoid community has to chip in when a new exterminator is brought on board. These things can be worked out.

But women are a different entity. Spiders especially spend postgraduate work studyig the female human. It is mandatory that every spider from birth sign on to attend training camp, where they are outfitted in special Air Jordans for quietly sneaking across the floor. You can imagine how expensive this is when the average spider goes through 16 a day.

A mock-up cardboard female human figure is used, usually someone like Margaret Thatcher, for dry runs on being spotted, for they know women can sense the slightest movement out of the back of their head; this sense has been honed by taking sharp instruments away from children.

Then they learn tactics where they tuck and roll, zig and zag and are heartened by the theme song, “Run Forrest Run.”

I’m not being hard on the insect community, believe me or not. It’s just that now is the time when they load up that little Bekins moving van and head inside. They’ve had all summer to study. They know it’s a political year and you will believe anything.

So unless you have DNA or can make a chalk outline, be prepared to go the distance.