Squeeze "Tempted"

No one likes a Know-It-All.

This was one of those life lessons that I had to learn the hard way as a kid.

Someone would say "Why this?" and I could usually answer, "Because that."

I was a bright kid. I read a lot. I asked a lot of questions. And I retained an inordinate amount of information.

This has served me well in my career, where people are always asking me, "Do you know that song about the lighthouse keeper that jumps off the lighthouse?" or some such question about some forgotten details of a half-remembered song.

Yes. Yes I do know the answer to your question.

But when you're a teenager, knowing the answer to everything isn't always an asset.

Sometimes it makes you just sound like an asshole.

I was home from my first year of college on a rainy Friday night. Hanging out with my high school friends. We were shooting pool and drinking not-very-cold beer from cans in someone's basement. The radio was on.

"Can you imagine that?" one of the guys asked.

"What?"

"Your wife leaving you for another woman?"

"Huh?"

"You know. This song."

Squeeze, "Tempted" was on the radio.

"Huh?

"This song. It's about his wife leaving him for another woman."

"I don't think that's right," I said.

"Well," he said, "'Tempted by the fruit of another.' That's got to be about a lesbian."

"I don't think that's right," I said.

Now the other two guys had stopped playing, and were listening.

"I think he's just singing about her cheating on him. I don't think it has anything to do with lesbians."

He became a little more insistent. But I could also tell he was now a little unsure.

"I think it even says it somewhere in the song. At the end. I think he whispers, 'Lesbian, Lesbian.'"

I knew the lyrics. It doesn't say anything like that in the song.

But I also knew that the conversation had hit a point where I was either going to have to slam the door shut on him, or let him save face.

I looked to the other two guys for a split-second. Who were they ready to back up, the guy who offered an opinion, or the guy who shot him down?

I made my call.

"I gotta take a piss."

I headed out the slider into the cold night air, to pee into the shrubbery.

I can't really remember why we weren't using the bathroom in the house, but I remember looking back through the glass, the guys circling around the pool table, back in the swing of the game.

I knew I was right. Did it matter to me that I make everyone admit I was right?

In the past, that had been all the mattered to me. Knowledge was something that I was good at. It was my skill. It was my talent. And it was my priority.

But it was also something that could put a big, thick sheet of glass between me and other people when I chose being right, at the expense of all else.

It's tempting to choose to use your "upper hand," but sometimes lifting yourself up means pushing someone else down. For better and worse, companionship, friendship, love, basic human interaction, requires some amount of concession.

Where was I willing to give? Were the lyrics of a pop song so sacrosanct that I was willing to stay out here in the cold?

It was warm back inside. The radio was on. We played pool.


I totally forgot about the awesome "backup singers" in the video!

See the video on Youtube.