A Hobbit and Several Spiders

          The bathroom is one of the only places in my home where I can escape to read another chapter or sentence without being disturbed. I pick the parent's bathroom, because there's a heater, and even if I've never felt a mid-western freeze, a cold seat is a cold seat with jeans or without. Sometimes, I get through a couple chapters. It really depends on the book.
          Reading allows me to escape. Like many, I find that some books pull stress away better than others. Just recently, I finished J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. This was one book I actually was able to finish in bed. It wasn't because of my family, however.
          Above the toilet in my parent's restroom looms a web that stretches from the window to the towel racks, and changing his place every visit, the spider is a bulb with matchsticks for legs. Flies hang, and dust weighs the web down further.
          In The Hobbit, Bilbo handles giant, menacing spiders with the power of his one ring (which we all know without even having to read the damn thing). The spiders have his friends hang from cocoons, and their noses and toes poke out, letting Bilbo know who's who.
         I didn't even realize this bug of mine was watching me until something fell and rolled down my bare-back one morning. I jumped from the seat, clothed (no, I wasn't doing anything, just reading). Standing, I hit the web. More touches me. Thankfully, the only person awake was my father, and he spends his time in the back, so he didn't hear me yelp like a wounded Old Yeller.
        In comparison, the spiders in Tolkien's novel aren't that scary. They talk and plan, something we don't see from spiders. To me, this humanizes them and makes them no more scarier than the hairy guy in the Big Bird suit on TV. Real spiders, things, terrorize us because we as readers or viewers don't see the mind behind the creature, demon, or spirit. In literature, we see the effect it brings on the protagonists or unlucky side characters, but not once are we told why something does what it does. Worst of all, if our characters are weak or injured, our hearts begin to pound at these things.
       My spider is still hanging over the toilet, but I duck my head as to not disturb him. He's gained some new trophies, and had I caught them, I wouldn't want someone to knock them into a bowl. It turns out this is a new spider, with even thinner legs and larger eyes. My spider, who I knocked and hollered at during those early morning hours, hangs in one corner, bundled up into a sack.

Summer Time Blues: The Itch of Music

          It was 2010 when I had last marched. When I moved to Chino in 2006, my new high school was known for its award-winning marching band, and my parents wanted my twin and me to join immediately. Music became a part of us, and I sit here in my room thinking back on when I marched in a Drum Corp, an elite group of musicians working only towards the best--that was in 2009.
          The corp and I were in Wisconsin, and the streetlights had just turned on out in front of the school where we were rehearsing and housing. Crickets, frogs, and unseen creatures orchestrated the darkness, but our arc of standing musicians kept us confident.
          I held one of the larger horns, an instrument somewhere between a trumpet, tuba, and trombone--the euphonium. For my size, I was able to carry it well, and I felt my playing gave one of the better sounds in my section. We were a small corp, so there wasn't much competition if there was competing.
          Our instructor moved in front of us holding a plastic block and a chiseled and chewed drumstick. His eyes moved over us, and with a hit of the block we swung our horns up. He hit the block again, counting, and we began to play.
          Notes echoed out into the empty streets behind, bouncing from the trees we were aimed at. The sounds of nature had died as we grew louder, and to us, nothing was more important than perfection. Our twelve-hour days were nothing but back-to-back playing and running. Our legs were the gears working to form symettrical and intricate shapes to the sounds of drums and our horns. We were tired, but we wouldn't go take anything but the best.
          At the far corner of the arc, however, a trumpet player threw down his horn from his lips and slapped his neck. Then, he slapped his arm.
          I could feel the entire arc stop at look at him even as we continued to play to the beaten counts.
          Then, a mellophone player dropped their horn and smacked their leg.
          A tuba flinched and nearly toppled over.
          Two more trumpets spasmed and turned their heads. Finally, the beat stop as the conductor cried out and dropped his stick.
          For minutes, we passed around a silver can of bug spray. The mosquitoes buzzed in our ears and dug their sharp faces into our warm skin at any point they could find. I had placed my horn on the ground; the bugs forced me to move like a schizophrenic boxer, scratching and itching. We never went on, and it was decided to just go in and rehearse in a gym somewhere. When we found no such thing, the directors simply scratched their swollen pockmarks and called it a night.
        
         California is much different in that our evenings aren't so hectic with insects. The news mentions something about mosquitoes once or twice every two or three months, but bug spray sales suffer in comparison to other states.
        I've aged out, finally, and the music has died in me from where it last was. My parents still bring it up, the music, and I can find my mother watching old videos of rehearsals, performances, or going through a stack of photos unrecognizable to me.
       In my top left drawer, beneath the stacks of legal paper, pencils, and dried up sticky-notes full of ideas, I have a small black box. It's dirty, and the sticker label on it is warn out with a crust of dirt and oil. Sometimes when feeling down, however, I open it to find a glistening silver mouthpiece with one dent on the lip and grease stains at the stem from where my horn once held. That's when I feel the itch the most.