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Great, a big spider on the bathroom wall -- grab a hunk of toilet paper, SQUISH -- oh good Lord, a black widow!

I don't usually go around whacking spiders. All God's chillun got shoes, you know. But large shiny ones that aren't outside where they belong usually get my attention. In this case, I didn't know what it was until I looked at the underside of the abdomen and spied the bright red hourglass, aaghh! Well, so what? I've seen black widow spiders all my life, from Texas to Maryland and points in between. Back in Abilene, there were always scorpions in the shower drain, don't ask me why. New Mexico is supposed to be full of varmits, but I've hardly seen a one in four years here.

Could be I'm just lucky. Supposedly I live in a raunchy part of town, but no one in my immediate neighborhood ever locks their doors (the couple who live one house down don't even have locks on their handmade house). A couple of weeks ago there was a triple murder at a nearby gas station. Gang-related, the cops said. It seems the three victims had whipped up on the suspect earlier in the day, and when he found them hanging out at Mustang Gas around 10:00 p.m. that night, he emptied two 9mm handguns into their car (ouch). This is why I don't honk at reckless drivers, you understand. The other side of that coin is that no one honks at me, either.

Neither spiders nor 23-year-old homies with guns blazing amount to much next to the lying bull-fertilizer that got us into the New Crusades, of course. That's why I don't believe anything the government's said about the big blackout or the amazingly coincidental MS32.Blaster worm attack. A couple people have sent me semi-plausible conspiracy theory emails, naturally -- and don't forget, "semi-plausible" is what gets you in the door with this kind of thing. I don't know what to make of it all, except that I have noticed that for partisans of the execrable energy bill stinking its way through Congress, the Great Blackout of '03 is just as handy as a certain still-resonant tragedy was for the legion of neocon chickenhawks and those who think we have too much freedom already. No, I am not accusing anyone of anything, then or now. I'm just saying that they can all go procreate with radioactive porcupines for all I care, because I don't trust a one of 'em: not Microsoft, not the Heimatssicherheitsdienst, not any Secretary of Energy appointed by you-know-who, and least of all the totally useless national press corps. (Yes, that could more realistically read "corpse," but here and there one still detects a pulse.)

I used to brag about not watching any TV news and reading hardly any papers, getting my selective inputs from the Internet. That's still the case, of course, but I ain't proud no more. The reason being, I've decided that the Internet is just as bad and probably always was. As a consequence, it doesn't really matter if we all use Macs and throw our garbage in a can instead of out the window. By watching, hearing, reading almost any kind of "news," we still let someone else's fears corrupt our perceptions. What's slowly dawned on me is how much everyone has gotten used to life inside an artificial Universe of Fear. BAH! Who needs it?

People instinctively understand this, I think. That's why it sometimes seems like no one wants to know just why we went to war, what the Terminator thinks he'd do to save the Golden State, how screwed up Windows is, or what we're really doing to the Earth. The facts would just frighten and confuse us more.

Yet here I am in a house made of mud, on the edge of what passes for civilization unless you're used to living where most things usually work, and darned if I don't feel pretty good. MOST OF THE WORLD ISN'T PLUGGED INTO ALL THIS NOISE, DISTRACTION, AND CONFUSION, you have to realize. It's only we, the North American five percent and those who emulate our imbalances, who live so separated from experiencing our essence as directly as we could. The irony is staggering, if you allow the implications to soak in. Any certainty or reassuring wisdom about what's important, how to live, and even who we are could easily be flat-out wrong, in other words. I mean, ask any aborigine who hasn't been corrupted. Under the circumstances, a little humility would go a long way, it seems to me.

[Yeah, right. I won't be selling many tickets to THAT show, will I?]

Ah well. Sometimes I just have to get these things off my chest, like the way I did this morning when I tossed aside the Sunday paper and said, "To hell with everything, I'm gonna take another hike!" I hadn't even had my coffee, I 'll have you know. I just wanted to go walk out in the boonies and collect some bones.

Bones, bones, bones. I even found a sculpture! And you should know that where I walked is where they say up to 20,000 Pueblo people lived a couple thousand years ago. The ground is literally pockmarked with ancient kivas, dug-out hearths where people used to sit and chat, tell stories, cook their meals, and all the other little things we humans do, or did. Out there on the mesa without another soul in sight, I felt like I was very much a guest, if you get my drift. It feels so spooky up there, but mostly good spooky, vibes as thick and sweet as syrup that I drown my pancakes in. Sweet to me, at any rate -- there's definitely a somewhat dark and bloody edge to all this ancient hoodoo stuff, but something in me likes that. The bones and all, remember.

So there I was, standing in the cool morning breeze and taking in the view, when all of sudden I heard singing! I kid you not, I heard Native chanting, the sing-song wail of old men making music to the beat of a faraway drum. I couldn't tell where exactly it was coming from, so I turned my head this way and that. All at once the sound morphed into the high-pitched buzzing of a bee-like fly, yellow and black, that hovered in the wind beside my ear!

Whoa. I shook my head and started back. About 50 feet farther down the trail it happened again, like some kind of test, and again I swear I heard real singing, but one more time the sound turned out be coming from a black and yellow fly. This one hovered in front of my face for a moment, and I had the distinct impression it was very sternly looking me right in the eye.

HOW DO THEY DO THAT?!?

I heard singing, I tell you, plain as anything. Don't take my word for it, but know that when the show biz and the spin and all the teevee and the politicians and the talking heads and preachers and your mother have all shut up and gone away, there's other stuff out there ...

As for black widows, I still walk barefoot into the bathroom late at night and don't turn on the light. That's not trust, just mutual blindness, haha I wish. If they can't see in the dark, what are they doing out at night? And if everything that we've been told is true, how come we're allowed to learn it isn't?

Hah!

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr invites your emails.

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