Did you know that the word gullible
is spelled with only one L in the dictionary?
It isn’t true. I had to check.

In high school,
just a little bit before
the twenty anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s,
Corin told me
that Lennon and McCartney
originally wrote the song
“Ticket to Rye,” but wanted to make it
more universal, so they changed it to
“Ticket to Ride.”

“Really?”
I had no reason to question the story.
I was not the student of the Beatles
I would later become
and there was no Wikipedia
nor smartphones to immediately challenge
every word every other human said
at the end of a sentence.

So I swallowed the story
until Mitchell later laughed at me
when I regurgitated the tale.

I felt foolish.

Why would Corin fuck with me like that?
I’d done nothing to him
and I had no motivation to doubt his words.
He hadn’t presented anything outlandish
in his report. Why wouldn’t I believe it?

It turns out there is a Rye
in England,
so the story could make a certain amount of sense
were it true.

It’s not, though.

I just checked again.
I got taken for a ride.