Great. Just Great. Leave it to the news media to go out and cover a story that never, ever, in any form should have been covered. Sometimes it just takes a little self-control and public decency. It takes knowing that you shouldn’t do it because you will scare the ear wax out of people the minute you apply the ink to the newsprint.
And this story did it: “Doctor finds spiders in ear of boy with earache.” Son of a biscuit!
It ran everywhere, from here in The Record to CNN and USA Today. If you missed it, a boy who had been complaining of a popping sound in his ear went to the doctor where his ear was flushed out, turning up two spiders — one still among the living. They were living quite peacefully in there — had a condo association, were ordering furniture from an online retailer and in general had it about as good as you can when you’re living in the ear of a 9-year-old that hasn’t been cleaned since birth.
The popping noise, the boy said, was the sound of them walking around on his eardrum, probably doing the rumba or throwing keg parties.
I read this piece and have since stuffed 1,100 Q-tips in my own ear canals, hoping to maim and mutilate any insects who might be surveying the place or ordering drapes. I’ve now plastered up my ear holes, and while I can’t hear anymore, I feel a lot safer.
Dang-blasted story! Don’t you journalists realize that people like me hear popping in our ears all the time? Didn’t you think about the thousands of us who would be freaked out, spraying Raid in our ears or thinking about jamming kabob skewers in there whenever something doesn’t feel quite right?
Worse still, I have popping in my knees, a cracking in my back, a squishy noise in a shoulder and my jaw snaps when I open it too wide. Now I’ve got to worry about all of these, too. I hurt my wrist moving bricks a week or so ago or did I? Maybe it wasn’t the bricks at all, but instead a boring weevil or a Guatemalan squatter’s rights cricket burrowing below the skin.
Just great!
There are a lot of paranoid people out there just like me. People who read about how meteors could slam into the earth and then go outside to string huge nets across the tops of their houses to catch them.
I worry about so many things, like flesh-eating viruses, for instance. I know a guy (won’t use his name) who told me he once contracted a flesh-eating virus while living in South or Central America. That bugger treated his leg like a hamburger, and the thought of it has haunted me ever since. In fact, I won’t travel any farther south than Daytona now, and whenever anything lands on me, I freak out, start screaming that the “flesh-eating virus is after me,” and race into the bathroom where I douse myself in hydrogen peroxide.
Things like this already run in the family: My brother had a moth fly into his ear and refuse to come out. He had to go to the doctor who pulled it kicking and screaming from his ear with a pair of tweezers. That moth had already started a Starbucks franchise inside there, which explained his reluctance to come out.
So now I’m worrying about spiders, a species I don’t trust in the first place. I don’t like ’em big, when you need a car to run them over, and I sure don’t like ’em small, when they can go sneakin’ around in your crevices. Think about it, people, we’ve got an awful lot of wide-open crevices!
Thanks a lot, media. Thanks a lot for giving us one more thing to worry about. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go put a second coat of plaster over my ear holes before going to bed.