What you never asked to know

Sure I write some stupid songs. You can't listen to John Prine and write death metal.

I am not politically correct. Nor am I studiously politically incorrect. I am more what you would call unfiltered between brain and mouth.

I don't care what anybody says about Jane Fonda, I think Barbarella rocks!

A lot of my friends don't know they're my friends. I am low key and stealthy.

I remember when, if your music was skipping, you just put a penny over the needle. See, that's back when a penny was worth something.

I used to date a blonde haired, blue eyed, large chested girl named (no fooling, this is true) Barbie. We had been friends for a couple of years before I asked her out (as in low key and stealthy). When I did ask her out, I learned that she had been waiting ever since we met for me to ask her out, which is how I learned that just because she looks to be out of your league by a long ways, you should still go ahead and ask. Anyway, the reason I finally asked her out? We had an Aerie Magazine awards dinner and I was going to be dressed up for it. I had a motorcycle. Barbie had a car. So I asked her to go with me and then I asked her to drive. Admit it, Ramblin' Ed is a smooth operator.

College basketball and football season are overlapping. This is the time of year that I go into sensory overload.

I used to tell the Filipinas that I didn't eat rice or seafood, and that they shouldn't either. When they asked why I'd get real serious and tell them, "If you keep eating that stuff all your kids will be born nekkid."

I had to jump the turnstile one night in Yokohama Station because the machine started buzzing angrily at me and ate my ticket. I hated to jump like that as it infers you are gaming the system somehow and I was not. I had legitimately purchased the correct fare ticket. Therefore I was very, VERY embarrassed when an old Japanese woman, with a stern, disapproving look on her face, walked up and handed me back my ticket. Apparently, I was trying to go through the turnstile backwards. Huh! What a goober-san.

One night, as the senior military guy present at a dinner with some officials from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Shipyard, I gave a toast in which I promised the full cooperation and support of both the navy and the federal government to something that they were getting started up. I didn't mean to, my mouth just kept talking on it's own. I think it is likely that I did not have the authority to do that.

I never remember to ask somebody their name when I meet them. I just get to talking and it goes from there.

I can't imagine I would ever get married a third time. That's kinda like admitting you don't have a clue that maybe it IS you.

I may never own Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon or their Wish You Were Here CDs. I would like to, but I am engaged in a one man protest over the fact that neither disk, despite being 30 years old, is ever even the slightest bit discounted. I have been waiting since the '80s, so I have the patience. Wish You Were Here, by the way, is one of my all time favorite records.

I hate to shave, but don't think that I want a beard. I have thought of using Nair as a facial scrub butI haven't done it for fear of accidentally removing my eyebrows. Or worse, removing just one eyebrow.

Words are easy. I can glance at a page and see spelling and grammatical errors as if they were bolded or something. What I want to say, whether in a letter, a descriptive paragraph, or in song lyrics often flows out in my mind much like the plot setup at the beginning of the Star Wars movies do when they scoll upward and off into space. Often times, I cannot type fast enough to keep up, but I do not suffer from a lack of material. Numbers, however, are like little aliens to me.

My strongest belief is that I have business and you have business, and it is a full time job for each of us to mind our own.

How does someone get to the point of practicing canibalism? When does that start to become appealing?

Politicians should have 2 year terms, all of them, and cannot campain for re-election. Instead, their resume and voting record should be posted alongside the resume and voting record (if applicable) of any challengers on a government website to be voted on by the public in much the same manner that the NFL Pro Bowl voting is run now. There, done. You want to be elected/re-elected? Then concentrate on the job and post the strongest voting record and resume you can. Ramblin' Ed, problem solver.

I have ridden on an elephant's head. He did not seem to mind. The elephant owner/operator let me ride here when he realized I was finding the ride on the elephant's back way too uncomfortable.

I was afraid to go to Burma (Myanmar, I guess it is now) the time I had the chance. I take pause about visiting any country whose form of government is "secretive military junta".

I do still strive to traipse around the sub-continent some, starting in the south and traveling northward.

Like a fine Italian slate, out
Ramblin' Ed