That Fact About Eating Spiders in Your Sleep

You know how in middle school, you’d have indoor recess when it rained outside?  And you’d be minding your own business – sitting at your little desk, organizing your eraser collection (which had grown massive and now needed to be relocated from its original home in a soft purple bag to a larger, hard top pencil box that your mom had written your name on in Sharpie because damn those fourth grade thieves from your predominantly upper-class white suburban home town and fuck, how stressful is it to be nine years old, if that even is how old you are in the fourth grade?) and then all of a sudden, all six of the popular boys would appear out of nowhere and stare at you until you acknowledged their presence.  So you’d sigh and look up at them, already crying on the inside, and say “Hi Bobby” to the most popular one.  And he’d be all “Vick guess what?” and so you’d say “What, Bobby?” (because by then you’d learned that people can tell when you’re annoyed with them if you keep repeating their name).  And the fires of Hell would flame up in his eyes and he’d lick his lips, and all the boys in his little group of future Frat freaks would be leaning in closer to you, touching all the shit that you had JUST fucking organized on your desk in an attempt to weaken your already fragile emotional state, and he’d go “Did you know that when you’re asleep, spiders crawl into your mouth and you eat them?”  And they’d all stare at you while you tried to maintain your composure until you start blushing from the stress and then they’d laugh and run off, most likely to go and suck Bobby’s dick because Christ he was just that popular.

And remember how then you would try to go to bed that night and lay flat on your back with your hands over your mouth, but you couldn’t fall asleep because all you could picture in your mind was Bobby’s face on the body of a dancing spider, and the image was just floating around in circles in your head until you started crying and had to sleep in your mom’s bed with her?

I’m SO glad I never had to go through something that soul-crushing for the entirety of my middle school experience . . .

All I wanted to do was just organize my erasers by height, weight, and genre.

Flashing forward to present day, Bobby and his band of asshats may have grown up to become mediocre-looking, overcompensating Bros about the graduate from college and live out the rest of their boring fucking lives in a landscape of beer-bellies and premature balding, but regardless of their karmic fate, that disgusting fact about eating spiders in your sleep is still sitting in the back of your mind.  It’s just rotting there, resurfacing every couple of weeks, and on a scale of one to Sarah McLachlin’s “In the Arms of An Angel” Abused Animal Ads, it’s topping off at about a seven in terms of ruining your entire fucking day.

"You know why I look so happy? Because I'm about to shit on your chest with these images of one-eyed puppies."

Where did this fact even come from in the first place?  Is it just based on probability, or were actual studies conducted where a person was observed day and night for his entire life, and researchers just watched as spiders would crawl into his mouth while he slept?  Aren’t there Good Samaritan laws that state you have to protect your fellow human beings from obvious harms, such as but not limited to eating a fucking SPIDER in your SLEEP?

And this one fact isn’t even the worst of them.  Here are a few more that will make your skin crawl (Editor's Note: You're better off just skipping this portion of the text.):

• One pound of peanut butter typically contains five rodent hairs and 150 bug fragments.  (I’M SORRY BUT WHAT THE FUCK IS A FUCKING BUG FRAGMENT.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME.)

• Cockroaches sometimes lay eggs in the adhesive on envelopes.  If you’re licking an envelope and you get a cut on your tongue, the eggs can go in there and then baby cockroaches will be born in your mouth.

• An average person who consumes fast food regularly will ingest about 12 pubic hairs per year.  (I’m not really buying into this one because who has pubes these days?  Honestly.)

• The tips of bananas are where spiders lay their eggs.  (This is false, I just found out.  But even just knowing that its a possibility is enough for me to quit eating bananas all together.)

I guess I’m just not entirely sure why it is that we all need to know this stuff.  I mean, this isn’t hidden information by any means – all you have to do is Google “gross facts” and you’ll be overwhelmed with a plethora of nauseating tidbits.  And sure, maybe some of these little facts are simply false, made up by some sick fuck who just wanted to plant mental Heebie-Jeebie grenades in people’s minds for his own sociopathic pleasure.  I hope for all of our sakes that they aren’t true at all.  But if they are, if you were the person who discovered that yes, we all eat pubes and cockroaches will get born in our mouths if we lick envelopes and whatever, if you found out that information – why, WHY couldn’t you have just kept it to yourself?  Why did you have to be THAT guy, and surround all of our desks with your creepy friends and lick your lips so you could tell us that there are bug fragments in the peanut butter sandwiches our mom’s made us for lunch (with love)?

BUG FRAGMENTS IN MY MOUTH.

Halfway into college, I was repeating the sleep-eating-spider fact to some friend, and they brought up an interesting point – that specific fact could just be a general conclusion for the entire world, based off data gathered (but how is it fucking gathered) in Africa and India and all those other countries where it seems more plausible that a spider would crawl into your mouth while you slept.  This friend assured me I had nothing to really worry about because I live in a country where our houses don’t just have spiders crawling all over them, waiting to get into our mouths the moment we fall asleep.  I was put at ease.

Then I went home for Thanksgiving break, and I found a cricket in my bed.  And it's unwanted coincidences like this, coupled with disgusting facts like eating spiders in your sleep, that are slowly ruining my life.