This post is the beginning of a series about my favorite YouTubers. I promise they won’t all be about spiders. I dislike spiders. Immensely. I have blogged about my hatred in the past. Last fall, I went to a reptile show with D-Rock, and it seemed like everybody there had fucking deli containers overflowing with goddamned tarantulas.
What kind of insane person voluntarily brings something like this into their home? I wondered judgmentally as we wandered the aisles. I overheard a guy talking about preferring one breed of tarantula to another, saying, “Yeah, with these they don’t shoot those little hairs off. Those can really irritate your skin, so if you’re planning to handle it, you need to get a guy like this.” WTF, who would handle a spider?
These people:
This is TarantulaGuy1976’s channel. I don’t know exactly how I wound up there, because I fucking hate spiders. But I did wind up there, and I watched a ton of his videos. Why? Because I got sucked into the saga of a molt gone wrong.
Over the course of six videos, TarantulaGuy1976 documents his care for a spider that he obviously cares about very much. I started watching in the middle, when he surgically removed the hardened shell that the spider couldn’t dislodge on its own. Then I went back and watched from the beginning. I still can’t believe how invested I became in his struggle to save his pet, an animal which I would, under normal circumstances, happily daydream about beating to death with a shovel.
It’s not about the animal, though. It’s about this guy, who clearly has an amazingly open heart if he can connect with something as ooky as a giant spider, and his devotion and care. I know people who haven’t treated their elderly relatives with as much loving respect as he shows for the tarantula.
The strangest thing is, his tenderness toward this spider has changed my view of them, somewhat. Now, I’m not about to run out and adopt one of Satan’s fuzziest abominations for my very own, but I’m not quite as creeped out by them as I was before. And I was, unfairly, stereotyping “spider people” as weirdos, another ignorant assumption of mine that this guy blew all to smithereens.
If you have some time to kill- and you don’t mind watching what amounts to the spider equivalent of a dog tragedy movie- watch these videos after the jump.