I suppose I could wear gloves.

Oh god.  I was clearing out the weeds from the walkway at the community garden as it was getting dark, taking big rough handfuls of things and ripping them out.  Did this Sunday night, too, and had my second run-in with a huge green praying mantis in a month.  Both times I found out about the praying mantis by getting a big ol' handful of him.  Both times he scratched me.  Not deep or anything, but enough to shriek and fling it away and then come back to look at the eight foot long praying mantis with slavering jaws and eyes that shoot laser beams.  Tonight it wasn't a praying mantis.  Tonight I caught a glimpse of the long waving black legs in time to snatch my hand back from three huge black widows.  Three of them.  Big.  Moving and stuff.  I'm rocking back and forth as I type this. 

Right now, and probably until the feeling that anything that touches me is a spider goes away, everything is to blame.  I don't love big stripey spiders in pretty webs.  I hate them and all spiders, and I hate no-pesticide gardening with my own hands.  I love huge conventional agriculture, stripped down to dirt and clean lines of crops as far as the eye can see.  I'll buy my vegetables from Safeway, thank you very much.  I also hate community gardens, with their stupid pathways where things grow.  I love concrete pathways.  I hate nature.  Wolves are not wise and beautiful totems for lesbians.  They're varmints to be shot from planes.  Coyotes are not tawny agents of the trickster.  Varmints.  They're all varmints!  I hate fall, stupid dusk coming earlier and making nocturnal spiders brave.  Stupid earth tilting away from the sun.  I hate that too.

Right now the only two things I don't hate are my bicycle, which carried me away from the garden too fast for the black widows to give chase, and the burrito I'm about to go eat.  A burrito will make this all better, right?  Burritos contain, like, ninety percent of the restorative magic in the world.  I don't understand how you live in a place where a burrito isn't the default, the standard, the way, the cure.  Perhaps after a burrito I'll be able to see beauty in nature again.