The Spider Man
I always take the same way home; straight up University Avenue, then right on Byres Road. And at the top I turn onto Observatory, then down the lane and home. I don't even think about it anymore, I just start walking and twenty minutes later I'll find myself there. But one night I found myself lost- I looked up and I was on Sydenham Road. And I'd no idea how I'd got there.
I waited for a while to see if anything was going to happen; to see if Id come there for any reason- but there was nobody about, and everything was quiet. And I walked home round Kensington Gate, and I forgot about it.
But since then more and more stuff like that has started happening. More things I used to do without thinking about them have started coming out differently, and I've started spending hours doing things I've got no interest in- with no idea why I'm doing them, but unable to stop.
I catch myself listening to bands I've always hated before, listening to their records over and over. And sometimes when I'm typing, a whole different bunch of words appear on the page from the ones I had in my head.
A few nights ago I went into Barrats to buy the newspaper I always buy- but when I got outside I realized I'd bought something entirely different. I was holding a magazine I'd never seen before, something about Science and Nature. I started reading it on the way home, and there was this article in there about a wasp that lays its eggs in the body of a spider. The wasp stings the spider, and a short while after the eggs have been laid the spider starts to weave a new kind of web- a kind of web its never woven before- without knowing why it's doing it. But when the spider dies, it turns out that what it's woven is a cocoon for the baby wasps. A place for them to hatch from. And they grow safely in there, while they feed on the spider's body.
I threw the magazine away, and made sure I took the right streets home. And I tried to remember if maybe I'd been stung by that kind of wasp.
And I started wondering how you would get rid of something like that...