One dreep after another
It takes a no limit spiritual soulja to refuse to tolerate a life of one DREEP after another.
I recently wrote about how people—often women, but not exclusively—lure men into getting defensive as a way to gain control.
The pattern is simple:
We Defend, Rationalize, Explain, Excuse, or Persuade.
We DREEP.
DREEPing siphons our energy, robs us of our power, makes us malfunction, shrinkles up our donks, and serves no useful purpose. Chronic DREEPing is spiritual suicide that traps us in our own personal hell.
Fittingly, dreep is an old Scottish word meaning “to lower oneself,” which is another piece of evidence proving that the Universe is Nick Cannon–level hilarious.
I aimed that j’essay at men, but make no mistake: everyone DREEPs and everyone elicits DREEPing.
Phake Pharaoh
Lately, I’ve been imagining how I present through other people’s eyes and—my word—half the time I carry myself like an imperious pretend pharaoh. I unconsciously put folks on the defensive just by how I naturally move through the world.
When I see myself through others’ perspectives, there are often moments I want to punch myself in the face. And I’m me. I like me. I can only imagine how challenging it is for other people to suppress the impulse to punch me—and that’s before I even open my mouth.
It’s a minor miracle I made it to an age where my slight limp, grey stubble, and spectacles make me a semi-tolerable sight for the sore-eyed masses.
In the pretend biography of me that I imagine my future self reading—which tells you all you need to know about the size of my ego—I fancy my pretend biographer holding me out as some kind of antihero of the proletariat. But now I see that a lot of folks just perceive me as fake royalty.
Alas, I blame the white side of me for that.
I’m joking, of course.
And I’m also being a little serious.
Word Wizards and Homo Spiritus
When it comes to the subtle art of putting folks on the defensive, women are way more skilled than the JV men’s squad—and fancy white ladies are the varsity captains.
Men? We tend to put people on blast out in the open. Trump calling journalists “piggy” is superficially sophomoric, but it’s also surgically precise verbal violence—an evolved form of the blunt-force dominance men have used to control women for eons. Trump is elite at verbal violence—maybe the GOAT at this dubious-but-undeniably-powerful skill. And while I talk hella yang about him, I also respect the hell out of his refusal to DREEP under any circumstances.
I can’t believe I’m about to compare Donald Trump to Malcolm X—and the streetz may very well attempt to revoke my Black card for this—but in this regard, both men share a nature as revolutionaries: they protect their personal freedom by any means necessary.
And Trump’s related ability to get people to do whatever he wants with just his mouthpiece is nothing short of magic.
When I request my kids to do a thing by using my words—and then they do the thing—it often blows my mind. It makes me feel like I’m operating in a dream world where everyone is a mini genie who can grant my wishes. Only instead of three wishes, I get infinite ones.
Yet I only really have one wish: inner peace.
But it seems the Cosmos will continue to conspire against me getting my wish in the supermellow way I fool myself into pretending I want. So I’ve decided to embrace conflict and have fun doing the rough stuff.
And the rough stuff gets way funner and easier to do when you ask people for help along the way. Some of the stuff I ask folks to do I don’t think they’ll actually do—yet they often go for it anyway, especially my kids. Sometimes I suspect they ruff ryde with me because of the wyld ass adventures I rope them into.
The ability to ask people to do stuff is a very powerful gift, and I’m starting to realize that I misuse that power all the time.
Trump is the best at using his mouthpiece to get folks to do stuff. That’s why, coupled with him holding the heavyweight belt as the GOAT at verbal violence, I consider him the dopest word wizard out and the apex homo sapiens male. I would love to meet President Trump in person, but the thing that might stop me is knowing that if he called me on it, I’d have to admit to his face that he’s the manliest man to ever walk the Earth.
But I don’t necessarily mean that as a compliment. It’s just an observation.
Indeed, I believe some humans have already stepped into the next stage of human evolution—what some folks call homo spiritus, and I like the sound of that. So while I’d have to tell Trump he’s the baddest bully out, I’d also get to clap back and say: You’re not the most evolved, ‘mano ‘migo. Far from it.
Defense Wins
Women had to get good at dealing with apex bullies like Trump, and they evolved accordingly.
As any good basketball coach will tell you, the best offense is defense. And lately, the women in my life have been blowing up my spot with defense more tenacious than my favorite basketball player, Draymond Green, in the Finals.
I sense the women in my life think I’m out of control.
Which I am—out of their control.
And they don’t love that. They want that control back so badly they can taste it like sweet ambrosia. That’s why since I’ve been finding my voice, it feels like I’ve been running a full-tilt boogie DREEP gauntlet.
How the DREEP Trap Works
The game is simple:
They make a statement that forces me to either:
Go along with a program or premise I don’t actually agree with
(e.g., do this corrective thing; your conduct was wrong; you failed to act properly; you are unqualified), orDREEP
The only graceful exit is some variation of my new favorite line:
“I don’t view it that way.”
If I actually heard them out—which most of the time, I do—I’ll add, “And I hear you.” Sometimes I’ll even repeat back what I heard, because what I hear is often not what they actually said.
But it’s not just the words I have to watch for on the DREEP gauntlet. It’s also the sub-communication I never noticed before:
an exasperated sigh
a subtle frown
an eyebrow arch
All sending the same message:
Your way of being is not okay. Recalibrate. Lower yourself. DREEP.
Most women swear they’re not doing this.
And yet I’ve noticed that the ones who deny it the loudest are often the most skilled practitioners.
Women Really Do Run the World
Beyoncé wasn’t lying.
Men think we’re in charge, but we’re mostly following instructions—sometimes shouted, sometimes whispered, sometimes wrapped in an ethereal, passive-aggressive, artisanal honey glaze.
Just ask Will Smith. He’ll tell you who runs things.
Even the terminology we blithely toss around in society works to degrade the quality of men’s collective consciousness.
Take the term “toxic masculinity.”
Just hearing the word toxic shrinkles up my donk. That’s not a side effect; that’s by design. That’s mind control. And I refuse to go along with it anymore.
Because when you actually look up the definition of toxic:
harmful or dangerous to health or life; poisonous, and
very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way
…it becomes pretty obvious what’s really going on here.
What else could women possibly be doing when they attach that parade of horribles to masculinity, other than aiming—consciously or not—to shrinkle up our donks and lower the quality of our consciousness?
It’s pretty messed up.
The sad part is that most of them aren’t even doing it intentionally. It’s all happening below the surface, beneath awareness. The truth is that some women are just that afraid of men on a soul level that they end up throwing spiritual poison on our donks without even realizing it.
From my perspective, treating me—or any man—like that is the very quintessence of conduct that is “very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way.”
What women and the fake-sensitive men whom they shame into using the “T word” really mean is hypermasculinity—too much man, not a sick man.
I get that I’m way too much for some if not most people—especially the white women who find me scary as hell because I’m a big Black brother with a half-decent mouthpiece.
But toxic? Like me being me is somehow poisonous?
C’mon now.
I’m done going out of my way to make white people feel comfortable just because my mere existence gives them a conniption fit. It’s not merely annoying—it’s degrading the quality of my consciousness. These days, it’s driving me johnny bananas.
I feel on a soul level that my favorite dead rapper, 2Pac, felt the exact same way—and that’s why he acted like a damn ass fool in life. But unlike ‘Pac, I think like a white lady, so hopefully that’ll keep me alive. Vamos a ver. Guys like me usually don’t get too many years amongst the humans. Some days I’m surprised I’ve already stacked this many.
The Game
One of my spiritual Sages, Rollo Tomassi, breaks the game down comprehensively in his books, on his podcasts, and on his website. His writing helped me turn my life around and wise up to what was what.
According to Rollo, you can’t explain any of this stuff to women.
Not because women are incapable of understanding it—they most certainly are, as I get the gist of it and loads of women are way smarter than me—but because admitting they’re running game on us would undermine the entire strategy. So instead, they put up a kind of spiritual firewall.
The denial is the strategy.
So men—my brothers, my sisters who with me, and everyone else in between—we must stay alert, united, and ever-vigilant.
Because consciously or not, people—especially the women in your life—will blow up your spot like Draymond Green blows up pick-and-rolls if you allow them to.
The only question is:
How much will you tolerate?
And I refuse to tolerate a life where it’s one DREEP after another.
Now that I’m not DREEPing anymore, I’ve noticed it’s often hard to have high-vibration interactions with certain folks in my life because they communicate almost exclusively in ways that require me to DREEP.
They just can’t help themselves. Especially some of the fancy white women in my orbit who feel me coming into my soul power—and it scares the dog mess out of them.
Because my mom, bless her soul, was white, that makes me white. Debatably. But as I understand the unofficial racist joke rules that I just made up in my head, that gives me a lifetime pass to crack on white folks. I believe the preferred nomenclature is self-deprecation.
Crackin’ like a pipe on the things fancy white ladies like to do and say is one of my core competencies—partly because, for cosmically comic reasons, the vibrational signature of my big Black ass kinda hits like that of a fancy white lady. So of course that’s my wheelhouse. But those jokes are probably coming to an end. I’m about to run out of new material.
That’s because once I stopped DREEPing, I noticed my interactions with many white women seldom make it past a few beats before they try to put me on the defensive. The way they work so hard to get me to defend myself is almost comical—almost—except it’s also relentless. White women can sense I crave their approval, and they’re not wrong: my dear mama, the Fancy White Lady GOAT, never really gave it.
And that, my friends, is my kryptonite.
Might could be some of y’all’s too.
My dear mama might’ve been a revolutionary, but she knew where her spiritual bread was buttered. She could get with my Black dad and birth a brown baby all she wanted—thanks, mom!—but at the end of the day, she remained firmly on Team White Woman, providing her squad with the means to control her male child.
Even my dear mama was in on the DREEP game, whether she knew it or not.
Can’t We All Just Get along?
I am not declaring war on white women. Far from it. Why would I declare war on myself? That would be irrational.
But I almost published a version of this story where I pointed out more of the ways white women like to jam me up before declaring a “white woman strike” or some such BS. My plan was to cast a defensive spell aimed at protecting my mentals and spiritual health, which turned out to be far less antifragile than I previously thought.
To be clear, at the moment I am particularly susceptible to mean missiles with all the rejection I’ve been taking on the chin. I remain unemployed. No one wants to hire me. No one wants to publish my books. I still live across the street from a loud-ass hood bar, with a racish landlord who likes to jam me up. It’s fair to characterize several important aspects of this three-dimensional existence I’m experiencing as “chaotic.” At bottom, my self-esteem is currently not operating at peak performance.
With hindsight, I can see that a “white woman strike” would’ve been something the hippy version of the white-lady side of me might call low-vibrating and what the hood ninja side would call bitch-ass shit. Both sides would called it mean-spirited. Which makes it exactly the kind of silly stunt the Retarder-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump, would pull.
As I’ve previously covered, I feel people’s emotions very intensely. Lately, the spiritual pressure some folks have exerted against me has downgraded the quality of my consciousness. That is, when folks throw shade at me, it dumbs me down. It degrades me. And the hate I’ve been absorbing of late has got me goin’ gorillaz.
That was the state of my consciousness right before I almost hit publish on that dumbass white-woman-strike story.
The only reason I didn’t publish it was because I had to head out for a job shadow with a public defender—a super cool, wickedly bright human…who also happens to be a white woman. The Universe clearly has a more refined sense of humor than my own lower-middlebrow, soundly sophomoric, bawdy brand of gut busters.
I am so grateful my friend invited me on that job shadow when she did. Because as it turns out, the experience shifted my entire perspective on the dynamic between me and white women.
For context: I hate wearing business suits. They are restrictive in fit and stifling to the soul, which I suspect is the whole point of these nonsensical things. I’ve always sensed they were specifically designed to suppress the human spirit. And as prudish as I am, I’m pretty sure at least one of my Black ancestors was a house ninja forced to wear these silly-ass outfits on the daily.
Still — if you gotta wear a suit, it may as well fit. Back in my lawyer days, even church-going brothers complimented me on my drip, which tells you everything you need to know about how I present when I suit up for court.
Job-shadow day was a suit day, so of course I came in looking sharp. I even ironed my sleeves.
Despite presenting fresh and clean af in my second-best monkey suit, the fancy white lady prosecutor presumed I was a criminal defendant and not a lawyer when I entered the courtroom to meet my friend.
I bothered to put on this silly monkey suit for my public defender job shadow and the fancy white lady prosecutor—who turned out to be super chill—confused me for an accused criminal instead of the veteran lawyer that I am. To be fair, I am wearing a zip-on tie.
Her assumption amused me, so instead of DREEPing and indignantly qualifying myself as a lawyer the way her subconscious mind wanted me to, I cracked a joke. Flashing a devilish grin, I told her that, as far as I knew, the State of Minnesota had not accused me of any crimes… but the day was yet young.
To be clear, I wasn’t flirting with her, though she was good-looking and knew it. I was just letting her off easy. Both of us knew that if I’d been a white guy in the same suit, she’d have assumed lawyer immediately.
President Trump might bully women mercilessly, but here’s the thing: he also understands them pretty well. That’s why he has legions of them in his thrall. If my ninja Big Pimpin’ Donald knows anything, it’s that it’s not hard to get a woman to like you: all you gotta do is make her laugh.
In this instance, my lightness in that awkward moment softened her instantly, and she opened up to me spiritually. We exchanged small talk neither of us will remember, but the spiritual connection was unmistakable: I sensed her embarrassment, her remorse, her shock — and yes, a flicker of fear that a big black brotha with my bop might actually be a lawyer.
To be fair, even I agree it’s wyld as hell that someone like me gets a license to sue the dog shit out of pretty much anyone I want.
Then it hit me: these white women out here fear me like I’m the Black Donald Trump.
At the same time, she could feel my gentleness and my genuine amusement at her assuming I was an indigent criminal defendant and not the veteran lawyer I actually am—especially since, truth be told, I have way more in common with those folks than with the suits. And she also sensed that, in her shoes, I might’ve made the same assumption too. In those brief beats, we understood one another on a soul level. For a magical moment, we put our differences aside and became humans again—and some kind of friends.
Had I carried out my strike against white women, I would’ve missed out on a moment where a perfect stranger and I came together to raise each other’s vibrations.
I live for connections like that.
I’ll probably never see her again, since the “progressive” lawyer crowd’s chilly response to my recent writing suggests I act like way too much of a ninja to fit comfortably inside a law office where folks like that dominate. And that’s a shame, because I believe the humans caught in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system could genuinely benefit from having someone like me in their corner.
Even if our paths never cross again, I have little doubt that prosecutor will think twice on a soul level before jamming another brother up. Women rarely remember what men say. But they ALWAYS remember how we make them feel.
And she’ll remember that instead of DREEPing or clapping back in righteous indignation, I made her laugh and feel safe.
I count that as a win for the Rainbow Warriors.
The Dreep Factory is Closing for Good
I love you, white women. After all, my dear mama, bless her soul, was the fancy white lady GOAT. But I would be grateful if y’all backed up off me, please and thank you.
I’ve always had white women’s backs and still do, unconditionally—just like I’ve got everyone’s back like a no-limit spiritual soulja (I thought I told ya). But I’ve accepted that most of y’all—not counting my public defender friend, who showed impeccable spiritual restraint in resisting the impulse to pipe up on her colleague—don’t always have mine unless it’s on your terms and your conditions.
And that is simply not going to work for me at this stage of my spiritual development. It is incompatible with the kind of human I’m evolving into.
If you tolerate a life lived one DREEP after another, it becomes a slow-motion descent into hell—death by a thousand protests, sidelong glances, subtle frowns, veiled threats, grievances, and insinuations.
That ain’t love.
That’s an assembly line at the DREEP factory.
And I’m done clocking in.
I get that people don’t always know they’re doing it—Lord knows I do it too—but some folks keep you on the defensive all the time, and it’s just too much.
I’m too old, too grey, too self-aware, and—yes—too regal to keep lowering myself by DREEPing.
So I’ll be right here, standing tall like a pharaoh, not DREEPing for nobody.
