Barriers to Love

Creep – noun: the guy who stands at the edge of the dance floor licking his lips and rubbing his hands together.  He has spike-gelled hair and is slightly overweight.

We’ve heard people say, “Don’t be a creeper!”

“That’s so creepy.”

“That guy kept creepin’ on us, so we had to leave.”

“You’re a creepy bastard sometimes.”

I’ve been called a creep before, in my younger days when I did something naughty like hiding in a bedroom pretending to be a pillow until the lights went out, and then screaming.

Until I was thirteen the east and north sides of my house were wrapped in creeper vines.

The crazy woman in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—she creeps.

She narrates: “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.”

           

Radiohead wrote a song about all this once.

People want sex more than they’ll admit.  To tell a person, “I’d like to be intertwined with you, wrapped around you… right now”—that can have consequences.

Creep.  Creed.  Seep.  Weed.  Smoke.  Croak.  Frog.  Bloke.  Drunk.  Stroke.  Feel.  Weak.

In the 1990’s, young girls received the Easy Bake Oven for Christmas.  Young boys got the Creepy Crawler Oven, which allowed you to fill insect-shaped molds with goo, then cook the goo-molds into rubber spiders, dragonflies, and worms that could be successfully stuck to television screens, and could be made to look rather real if the boy-cook-bugmaker knew what he was doing.

It’s a lot harder for a girl to be a creep; there’s one social stigma they win out on. 

Although creeping is something women seem to do when trapped inside yellow wallpaper.

Creepy, I sometimes think, is nothing more than a misperception of honesty:

Actions alone (like say, masturbating) are not creepy.

Thoughts (like say, So-and-So is really attractive)... those are not creepy either.

But Expression of those thoughts and actions—that’s creepy (especially when too closely juxtaposed).

For those who speak in equations: f(x) = e(d), where e = Expression, d = Desire, x = STALKER

But we, the young men of mine and neighboring generations, are a demographic largely raised by single women.  We were not raised by creeps, but by divorcees and weekend fathers and sometimes little more than memories and stories.

Creep – verb: to attempt to deal with intense feelings of loneliness and entrapment without regard for the (pre)conceptions and (mis)perceptions of others.

TLC sang a song about this, too.

We tried to learn about love from songs and books and television actors.  We internalized.  We imitated, not realizing the extent to which our actions, when traced back to the source, were inspired by money, drugs, and sex— things we did not have, though we sometimes pretended to.

You know, creeper vines can be quite beautiful when viewed in the appropriate season’s light.

                       

I’ve gone to school and learned some skills, and on the dance floor I’m all about having fun; there’s no other agenda, really.  My Creepy Crawlers are in a black suitcase in the back of a closet, back home, and I’m not the same size as a pillow anymore. 

But none of this changes the fact that I am incredibly unsuccessful with women.