You sort of want to feel sorry for Metro Boomin, The Weeknd, and 21 Savage.

They’ve been informed that their partner is unfaithful.

Someone said they saw her kissing someone who wasn’t them.

They choose to bottle this information up, not emotionally mature and available enough to confront a difficult conversation.

Instead, they decide to levy a demand unto their beloved which is impossible to fulfill.

They insist that she somehow ensure they not know what they know.

That even though they already knows she is creepin’ she must paradoxically creep lower, creep more quietly, must creep profoundly well.

So while “kissing someone who isn’t me” is the partner’s originary fault in “Creepin” her real failure is to have crept without creeping.

Creepin’ as in staying prone, stealthy, moving slowly and close to the ground.

Creeping as in Old English creopan and Old Norse krjupa.

This paradoxical desire to not know what you know reminds me of the trial of Socrates, when he tells the jury about the Delphic Oracle saying “no one is wiser than Socrates.”

He didn’t believe it, since his famous philosophical position was that he didn’t know anything.

This message sent him on a years-long journey to prove the oracle was wrong, instigating countless and deeply annoying conversations.

Then later he was like oh right, that’s my wisdom, being so ignorant.

This recognition launched a competitive meme in the philosophy scenes of Ancient Greece: who can know less.

A couple hundred years later, Metrodoros of Chios said that he not only did he not know anything, he didn’t even know that he didn’t know anything, like that.

Every time 21 Savage says that the partner who is creeping “used to ride in the rinky-dink” it makes me laugh.

I often say the phrase with him out loud, on a forlorn and aromatic bench at Planet Fitness on MacDonald Avenue.

Try it, it just feels so good in your mouth to say “Ride in the rinky-dink.”

I just learned that “rinky-dink” derives from the word “tink” like what a triangle sounds like.

Now I’ll never not know that.

One of the messages the mushroom brought for me was that I should try to live my life in a way such that I would never need to lie, never need to go creepin’.

Occasionally in the twenty years that Alli and I have been together I have gone creepin’ in the formal sense of playing her, keeping it on the low.

And sometimes I would tell her about it and sometimes she’d say “I don’t want to know.”

Mostly though when I went creepin’ it was to use nicotine

Around the corner of the house, huddled in the bathroom of a Thai restaurant, in the receiving dock of the SF State Library, anywhere that would have me.

I just opened my QUIT VAPING app and it tells me that I have been nicotine free for 138 days 6 hours 11 minutes and 31, no, 32 seconds.

The QUIT VAPING app is my only social media and when I need to do something, anything on my phone what I do now is creep on the community message boards of the QUIT VAPING app.

Like @redpanda just posted, “Going to game night at my sister’s house, about 3 out of 5 people there vape.

They know I’m trying to quit but I’ve told them there’s no need to hit their vapes away from me.

I’m an adult who should be able to control myself lol.

Any advice would be appreciated.”

I go right in a tap a heart unto them and give them some advice.

I sometimes worry about Earlie sucking his thumb, like when you see yourself in the mirror and the mirror is a little too clean.

When I put him to bed, I say Earlie you don’t need to suck your thumb why don’t you try going to sleep without sucking it.

And then I turn on white noise, nestle him close to his bedmates Wild Pig and Creature.

I say good night I love you Earlie close the door, turn on the baby monitor, where I see him pause long enough to make sure I’m out of sight, before his thumb goes in mouth, creepin’.

And I get it.

I sucked my thumb until I was forty five.