OK, Off To The Store. You Need A Cobweb Rake

I give up. What’s that big, steel girder doing there? It ain’t holding up the house, that’s fer sure

Alrighty then, we’re going to fix the basement. We’ve got the nerve, we’ve got multiple hundreds of dollars at our disposal. We’ve got a teenage boy, or we will when he wakes up. And of course, we have our cobweb rake.

How’s that? You don’t have a cobweb rake? By gad, what sort of toolset have you accumulated? What about a Johnson bar? Howza ’bout a board stretcher? Any left-handed paint paddles lying about? Sounds like you don’t have any sort of good stuff hanging around. But above all, you’re going to need that cobweb rake. You better get a good one. Don’t go cheapskate here. You can use one of those cheap table saws made of lead and plastic by the Chinese low bidder, the ones that sound like a hive of bees and a pound of washers being agitated in a clothes dryer, they’ll do fine. But you need a real, good cobweb rake. Don’t skimp.

I suppose you’ll go to Home Depot, or if you’re a Unitarian-Universalist, maybe you can afford to go to Lowe’s, I don’t know, but when you go to the cobweb rake aisle, don’t just settle for the first one that the cobweb rake salesman tries to palm off on you. I’m in Maine, so I needed the Charlotte’s Web Deluxe Extra-Premium High-Strength Ergonomic Cobweb Rake. If you live in most of the rest of the lower 48, outside of Maine, maybe you can get by with a lesser model without all the features. If you live in Florida or Hawaii, there’s nothing left for you but prayer. Santeria prayers work best on the bugs you’ve got. But none of them can compare with Maine spiders.

What’s that you say? The clerk at Home Depot didn’t think he could find a cobweb rake? You know he’s lying. Guys like him hoard important stuff like that in the back and ease it out the loading dock door to select friends and assorted palm greasers. Go back there again, and lay a double sawbuck across that guy’s palm, and see if you don’t end up out by the dumpster, waiting for your special delivery. It’s not right, I know, but it’s how the world works.

Of course, I’ve owned my own cobweb rake since the early eighties. I’ve put it away every fall, after a generous soaking of tonsil polish, of course, to keep us both withy in the joints. I remember the first time I used it. We were installing hot and cold running potato chips in some rich guy’s house, and I drew the short straw and had to make my way through his root cellar alone. I’ve never forgotten that afternoon — if that’s what it was. It was dark down there — and I was proud that even though I’d just gotten the schematics for the apparatus, I put the hot pipe on the left on the first try.

Say what? The Lowe’s lady didn’t know what a cobweb rake was, either? Well, you can show her a picture of mine:

Remember to buy all your cobweb rakes through my Amazon Portal, I get a commission

Of course, that’s the lightweight one I use for the easy stuff. I’ve got a metal one, too, for under the stairs, where the albino spiders go heavy on the silk. The stuff’s structural, I tells ya.