AUG 30, 2010 – 12:00AM

I like spiders. I really do.

I marvel at their webs, refuse to free squirming food from their sticky homes and scoop ’em up and deposit ’em outside rather than splattering them with a shoe when they creep out family members by creeping across the floor or wall or ceiling in our home.

If a hairy, fist-sized beastie crawled out of the bananas on my kitchen counter, I might not be so understanding, but, yeah, I can live with spiders.

But I can’t help but wonder just why, lately, I seem to be besieged by them — or at least their webs — on my after-dark bike rides to and from work.

I’ve been webbed on the bike before.

The first one down a mountain-bike trail in the morning is bound to be mummified, and I recall relatively early-morning rides along the Clinton and Perry Lake dams where I’ve reached the end of the dam road on my road bike and found the handlebars covered with sticky strands.

But I’m mystified by the recent spate of webs I’ve run into, literally, lately on my evening rides on city streets.

Just about every day over the past two weeks, I’ve felt the familiar tickle at some point of a web on my face or arm or, in one memorable instance, in my mouth. Yum.

As my wife likes to say when, during an early-morning walk or run through the neighborhood, we encounter a web left over from the night before, the problem isn’t the web itself, but the fear that “somebody might be home” in that web that’s plastering your nose flat and crinkling across your ears.

It’s a rather disconcerting feeling to be riding along with a couple of cars to your left and a curb to the right and then feel the unmistakable sensation of first a web stuck to your face, followed by a tickling along, say, your neck. It doesn’t take much to picture an arachnid leisurely eight-legged-strolling along your vulnerable carotid artery, sizing you up with its creepy, multi-faceted eyes as it selects the perfect place to sink its poison-dripping fangs.

Of course, most often nobody is home, thank goodness, but just the other night I rode through a web about a mile from work. I brushed it off as best I could as I rolled along and didn’t think much about it until I arrived in the office.

Riding up the elevator, I bent over to look at something on my bike and felt a tickle on my forehead. I swiped at the sensation and was surprised to find a hitchhiker — a small spider, about the size of the end of my pinkie.

There’s no telling, of course, if it’s the one that constructed the web through which I rode, but I’m betting it is.

I watched it crawl around on my hand a bit before I rode back downstairs and let it go outside.

Maybe he’ll go tell all his bigger friends not to bite the nice guy on the bike.