My basement is a terrifying place. Here's why: crickets. I fucking hate crickets and spiders and all their evolved friends (I believe they're called Camel Crickets, but we call them Sprickets, because they're like a mix between spiders and crickets.) Goddamn the arachnid that was first attracted to the long, luxourious legs and music of the cricket. I must now suffer for the political incorrectness. Yesterday, I decided to do laundry for the first time in a few weeks. I get a very full basket and start the fearful decent into our basement- at noon, when the sun is the brightest and the beasts from below are far less likely to be patrolling the floor. I make it to the bottom of the steps and hurredly snap on the lights to the bar room. So far so good. I run across to the laundry room where I quickly flick on those lights and take inventory of the floor. My heart is literally beating wildly at this point and I'm already super jumpy and out of breath. Then I see it. Running from under the dryer, the biggest spider I have ever seen. It's brown and moving more quickly than any bug I have ever seen. I take a few seconds to panic and decide that if I don't do something now, it'll be loose in the laundry room and I'll never ever ever get laundry done again. So I do the only logical thing at the time- I throw my laundry basket on top of it. So, I'm bent over, holding the bottom of my laundry basket over a spider that I'm not even sure is there and suddeny I have a horrible thought! The bottom of the basket is concave! What if it gets out from under and crawls up onto me!? WIthout even giving it a second thought I jump into my laundry basket like a crazy person and start jumping , trying to smash the spider under me. Once I'm pretty sure it's dead, I hi-tail it out of there so quickly, I think I leave a trail of smoke. Dead spider, heart attack and still no clean laundry. I finally get up the courage to mosey back down there, and I really want my Dad around to lift up the basket and check out the situation. It's then that I look around the basement and realize that a lot of things are missing and that there are boxes on the floor, half packed. I'm 21, but I still need a Dad. The thought stops me dead in my tracks. I can't decide if what he's doing is enough to cancel out the fact that he's not going to be around anymore. I can't decide if I'm going to miss him.