Solomon Says.

This is how it will go. I will no longer, by omission, pretend to know things I do not know. Lana makes an obscure reference, I nod my head. I didn’t know she was breaking up with me. Lord knows, I probably had an inappropriate expression for the situation. Lana and I standing in a phone booth, waiting for the rain to ebb, her wondering why I’ve suddenly borrowed Ethan Hawke’s tick of smiling when his character is sad, or doesn’t understand something. Then, the rain subsided a bit, and she ran off to the steps of her apartment and I walked in the drizzle towards the covered bus stop.

Here is how it went. She bought me a present. A book. Not a first edition and not by anyone I’d heard of or could be bothered to feign interest in, but still a beautiful book. Exquisitely bound in some young animal’s skin and with gold gilded pages. She wasn’t used to giving books. I could tell by this one’s complete lack of inscription. Nothing to personalize it from her to me. On the inside I wrote, “A gift this beautiful can only be returned.” And I gave it back to her after a respectable amount of time. I should know by now that nothing lasts and that I need to appreciate everything fully, in the moment.

Even in the moments of pure bliss, the two red punctuation marks of our cigarettes after love making, the time she turned to me as the clouds rolled over the sun and the wind blew in cold as a front passed over us and kissed me hard with her eyes closed, the way she wore her scarves to lose them, even in those moments, I am reminded of how everything is transitory. "This, too, shall pass." I think the intention of that sentence is that it works for sadness, too, but its effect is more sobering and momentous in the happy times. When I’m good and sad, and letting my sad wear on me like clothing, wear on me like the water on the rock, at best, these words are a pat on the shoulder from an old friend. Because even as the sadness passes on to happiness, that happiness will move on in its own time.

This, too, shall pass. I used to drink cheap whiskey by the handle. Cigarette chaser. Drag, shoot, exhale. These days, I sip. Even so, it’s usually watered down with melted ice. Two weeks ago, my friend Irish asked me to call him Kyle. Said it was his name. I think I knew that, but I might not have. There was no need to know his name when he would always be Irish. I don’t know the names of trees or flowers. I don’t know the names of clouds, or the parts to an airplane. I don’t read T.S. Eliot because I don’t think poetry should have book length annotations. These are things I will no longer pretend to know. I have not decided whether I will make an attempt to know them, spending hundreds at the bookstore or even more in late fees at the library, or if I will remain ignorant. There’s a certain bliss in ignorance. I will try not to be proud of my ignorance, but I will not be ashamed of it, either.

Having said that, I wonder how many times I’ve said “I love you” without having any idea what that means. Every time?

“I love you.”

Really? Have I ever even stepped outside myself long enough to know anyone well enough to love them? Have I ever let anyone know me well enough for them to be honest in saying those words to me? Has anyone ever, in the history of everything that is and was and will be, ever known anyone well enough to make love anything more than a very uneducated decision?

The day after Lana broke up with me, I slept with her sister. Well, two days after. I keep forgetting she actually broke up with me in the phone booth, not directly, but using a baker’s dozen of filthy rodent birds to deliver the news instead. Lana’s sister, Helen, was so similar to her sister that when we got done, naked and sweaty, I stared at the ceiling and told her I loved her. God, what a sap. In my defense, she was just a softer, more handsome version of the woman I’d been saying those words to for the better part of a year before that day. She smiled a polite smile, or the smile of a foreigner who just didn’t get the language and wants to impress the native, and said nothing. I smiled back, but mostly because I’d won the contest every broken relationship has of who can sleep with someone else first. I’d hoped.

Even break ups are contests to the wooden boy who doesn’t know he could be real. After Helen left, I realized that Lana had left the book we’d exchanged back and forth on my bookshelf. I took it out to the grill and lit it on fire. Petty as f**k, but another victory. I went back in and got dressed to meet Irish...Kyle at the bar.

Evenings at the bar are getting old, but that's okay, so am I. The mix of people is good. Twenty somethings shooting pool and enjoying the night off. The old timers that have been there since noon visiting their two best friends, the bartender and what she serves. I usually offer to buy the drinks if Kyle can quote ten lines of Shakespeare or something equally British and literary. Young kids come in and try to pass off their fake or “lost” IDs, and we jeer them for their smugness. We ridicule their youth and offer to buy them a round on their twenty-first. If they ever make it, we say, because they’re so stupid for bringing that weak s**t in our bar. Kyle and I talk to the barflies, and send them drinks and haiku written on napkins and half-heartedly try to sleep with them. We are the missing link between the billiard kids and the elderly alcoholics. For some reason, we are very proud of this, the way Bigfoot must be proud that his knuckles don't drag.

Nearly six hundred years ago, on St. Crispin’s Day, Henry V led a vastly outnumbered gaggle of British knights against the French. And won. Everything I know of war, I know from literature. WWI goes to Hemingway. Vietnam to O’Brien and Wright. Korea wasn’t a war, but it was still hell. I like seeing the big pictures in the smaller stories. But I still know nothing of the bigger picture. All I know of war is the smaller pictures that attempt to make a mosaic, but my eyes refuse to see it. WWII was a wild, fantastical time-traveling journey. Thanks, Vonnegut. I understand the Holocaust happened, or it didn’t. If it did, it was horrible. And “horrible” doesn’t do it justice. “What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?” The Holocaust. Even if it didn’t happen, it still trumps everything.

This is why, whenever the subject of the war comes up, I can’t provide facts and figures. I don’t read a newspaper, but I hear in random conversations about soldiers coming home and killing their families. I don’t know how many died there and aren’t coming back. I don’t. Does this stop me from pretending like I understand and joining in the conversation? No. But it damn well should! Instead, I take a page from Ernest and quote John Donne. I use sermons from religions I don’t believe in to feign like I even give a s**t about the war. Wait, wait. Let me clarify. I don’t care about the war because I can’t do anything about it, other then to write letters to people who care even less than I do and won’t read them. I used to care, but then I realized how bad the form letters I got in return were for the environment. But that doesn’t mean I don’t tell people that “I am involved in mankind.”

Here’s the point: I’m a s****y person! I got broken up with and didn’t know it. Is there a higher shame then showing up at your ex-girlfriend’s apartment and have her explain to you that she broke up with you like you’re a child being taught phonics. Sound it out: “bro-ken up.” If there is a greater shame, it’s probably not in having a gift you gave burned or your sister fucked. It’s not a shame you can give back. It’s not some beautiful book that you can write a note in and hand back to the person. And the worst part is that I couldn’t even admit then that I had no God damned clue what she meant by her reference.

“Pigeon...oh, yeah. Yeah. I thought you meant something else by that. I thought you were talking about Shari and Sheila,” I said. She wasn’t buying it. You could see it in her face.

“I’m so sorry, Tucker,” she said. And then she bit her lower lip. She used to do that in bed, too. I thought it was sexy. I didn’t know it was her go-to expression for Pity.

Gracious as she was, I left there and walked home. Three days later I found myself walking in to an internet café near my house. I looked up “The Thirteenth Pigeon.” After several pages of links to hunting events and the use of military pigeons in the twelve hundreds, I finally found it. A poem. By the author of the book I’d given Lana back to one-up her. The book I’d burned. The book I hadn’t even bothered to f*****g read.

Everyone struggles with themselves and with change, and even more so with trying to change themselves.

Only fools think it’s easy. But fools die for want of wisdom.

Never again. What’s worse than the shame of this? The Holocaust. This isn’t so bad, relatively speaking. Like everything else, this, too, shall pass.