Then, it dawned on me. If I know that he has been at Hastings everyday... doesn't that make me the creeper?
Yes, folks, it does - and all of the employees who confusedly watch me trudge into their store nearly everyday, plop down on a comfy couch, order a small caramel macchiato, and commence reading whatever suits my fancy most likely agree that I have maybe even outranked the strange, old man in creeper status.
Total epic win! The world could use more creepers! Here's my reasoning:
Creepers are observant, but they don't need you to acknowledge them. They are content to watch from a distance. Granted, they usually have incentive in this (A.K.A. not being discovered and having some insecure teenage girl text all of her friends saying, "OMG so dont EVER talk to the creeper in Hastings! He asked me if my cafe latte was good!!") But beyond that possible hindrance, maybe creepers just want to study human nature. Maybe they want to see if petty girls and cafe lattes are somehow correlated. Being a psychology-lover myself, I feel like you can never have enough opportunities for naturalistic observation - studying people in their natural environment without disturbing it. How better to get a holistic view of the world than to remove yourself from it? Yep, that's right. There is no better view. As Marshall McLuhan put it, "We don't know who observed water, but we know it wasn't the fish." Not that I am suggesting you quit your job and spend the rest of your days contributing to your caramel macchiato debt... because frankly, that role is already taken. But perhaps taking a creeper-vacation of sorts every once in a while can add some dimension to the 2-D routine of life. It can remind you that people are out there beyond yourself - people who have a family, a favorite book, maybe an abhorrence toward cats. Creepers can see things non-creepers can't because they aren't looking for anything in particular - just at whoever comes sloshing through the doors next.
The ultimate creeper? Alexander Fleming. Whoa now, you are starting to look a little feverish after hearing of my ostensible mislabeling - perhaps I should get you some... penicillin. We almost all know this little story of how Fleming untidily left some Staphylococci sitting in his lab one weekend and came back to unearth one of medicine's greatest discoveries. Finders may be keepers, but they're also creepers. He simply observed what had already taken place, just as it is a creeper's creed to do. He wasn't looking for an innovation - he was simply looking at it. And if he could find something noteworthy in some mold, how difficult can it be to find something noteworthy in a human being? Serious props to Mr. Fleming for outcreeping us all.
On a side note, you never know what interesting characters you might encounter while creeping. Just today, I met a woman who had a medical dog that could tell when she was about to have a seizure. I didn't even know pups like that existed. I also conferenced with an outdoorsman who thought my intense highlighting of Wuthering Heights was legit (if a good book isn't completely marked up, it probably wasn't actually very good,) and a sweet, elderly woman who told me the story of her grandson becoming an automechanic for NASCAR. Sitting silently on a couch is what brought me to these people, not joining a new club or getting an eHarmony compatibility test. Just waiting to see whose stories life was going to lend me to read.
Creepers included.
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| Sometimes, you just have to embrace your inner white van. |
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