Saved by the smell

This is where I used to fish in Pascagoula, MS. I loved the old, sunken shrimp boat. It was like a post card and it said, "Things are not real hurried down here." I do love the south.

Even as a boss I was pretty quick witted. You gotta be, especially working around so many youngin's. One guy, who I refer to here as Anger Boy, when I refer to him at all, was one who got zinged. The setup:

Ol' Anger Boy, that whining, complaining, non-anger managing, Phish listening youngster that somebody left me and called my Computer Room Supervisor (Bush Man had not yet arrived on the scene) didn't like Japan. At all. Then, one Japanese girl, who I must assume suffered the dual afflictions of far-sightedness and hearing loss, found some occasion on which to smooch him. His tune immediately changed. As did his speech pattern. Now every recollection of his began with Aiko and / Aiko said / Aiko did... you get the idea.

Now, it is about this time that Anger Boy decided he needed to feel sorry for me for not having a steady girlfriend. Never mind that, after 13 years together, me and the wife had gone our seperate ways. Never mind that I was finding it kind of nice to do what I wanted when I wanted. Or to buy whatever I wanted, subject to the sole constraint of whether or not I could pay for it. I was not in a real big hurry to have to compromise on how much football I watched or how many obscure Texas songwriter CDs I intended to buy.

So, when he tried to zing me as I came in to work one day, he wound up on the business end of a rather cutting response. Please, allow me to recount:

Anger Boy: Guess what, Senior Chief. Aiko's pregnant.
Ramblin' Ed: OK. Good.
AB: Isn't that cool?
R'E: Maybe
AB: Well, heh heh (and swelling up with obvious pride in himself) , at least that proves I get laid.
R'E: No, Anger Boy. At least it proves she gets laid.

Another time I walked in on two of my younger sailors having a conversation. One was from the city and one grew up with a more sheltered background. And I still laugh a hearty, evil laugh at how I jumped in and finished this exchange:

City Boy: I'm going to go see an X-rated movie
Sheltered Boy: Why?
CB: Because I can
SB: But I don't understand. Why would you want to?
CB: Because I can
SB (Trying a different tack): But what would your mother say if she saw you heading in to an X-rated movie?
Ramblin' Ed: She'd say, "Seven dollars, please."

They say sometimes you've got to be cruel to be kind. A lot of times I was just cruel. (Which just made me think of CRUEL TO BE KIND by Elvis Costello, which in turn got me thinking of ALLISON, which is now completely and utterly stuck in my head).

Jn pointed out that my blog is not particularly snippet friendly. I think this is true. I don't really mind. I mean, really, most of my stories are fairly long and detailed and meander along until they reach no point. Then I end it. In other words, I start slow then taper off. In fact, much like the Japanese National Anthem, my posts have no real beginning or end. They are all middle. That means you are really trying to make a snippet out of what is really no more than a verbose snippet to begin with. But now a whippet... that, my friends, is something completely different. So whip it. Whip it good. (When something gets you down, you must whip it!!)

By the way, as I am sure you already know, DEVO was short for devoloution. A little eighties humor from the guys with yellow pants and flower pot hats. Are we not men?

What good are friends if you can't steal from them a little bit? I lifted this from AI because it was so eloquent, and at the same time, so powerful. When he's not popping a cap in a forest creature he's quite the wordsmith, as evidenced with his "Last Hillbilly Standing" piece here:
People look at these Mountains and see Heaven, but there's a touch of Hell here. Sometimes we're our own worst enemies, there's our Anti Intellectualism, Inertia, lack of unity and sometimes no purpose that anyone is willing to unite on. You can call this Blue Ridge megalomania, but, I believe the last man standing on Earth will be an Appalachian Hillbilly somewhere between North Alabama and the middle of Pennsylvania. He'll live just for spite.

By the way, AI, the wife's starting to talk about a run to NC to get some more livermush and cheerwine, so we may face to face yet. I only tell you that as a way to let you begin to prepare for a slight disappointmenent. You know how folks will say something like, "Gee, I thought you'd be taller"? What I usually get is, "Gee, I thought you'd be cooler".
I watch a lot of A&E. Not sure how that happened but with shows like Intervention, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Roller Girls and Dallas SWAT, perhaps it was inevitable. But my point is this: If you know what A&E stands for then maybe you can tell me if there is any A left in their programming. Because if there is, I can't find it.

My current favorite commercial is the Latino tumbleweeds for PSP. I like the part where the ones says he's going to "shoot her with my love gun, man".

I had one of them strong, silent, muscular dudes worked on the Phalanx gun for me. He was a good kid, pretty young but still the others looked up to him. And they looked up to him for all the right reasons. Anyway, one day, out off the coast of Tiawan, we were working out in the sunshine. Most of us had our shirts off and many were in shorts. I was not wearing shorts because everything south of my belt buckle is already in the shade.

Now Gunner, in a very uncharacteristic way, was complaining about something and the level of whining was way out of proportion to whatever it was that he wanted. On top of that, I had already told him I would make it happen right after lunch, so as far as I was concerned we had us one of them "case closed" sitchy-ations and it was time for him to close mouth and get back to gun maintenance.

Yet for some reason, he persisted. Gunner had his last name tattooed across his stomach in big, bold, slightly gothic letters. From the top of his left waistband, up and over the navel, and ending at the top of the right waistband. It actually looked pretty manly. Of course, he was still young and the belly still flat. But I digress.

Finally I had had enough. I looked over at him, squinting through the sun and said, "Gunner, what the heck were you thinking when you got that tattoo?" "Huh? What do you mean?" "Well I mean, look at it. It's your last name." "And...?" "Well, gunner, it's just going to change when you get married, right?" Zing! Pow! See... it's because I was saying he was complaining so much he was sounding like... a... girl... nevermind. It was funny then.

One thing I have learned after a few weeks at a technical support call center is that natural selection doesn't really work. You'd like to think it does, but, nah. It's broke.

OK, the photos and then I'm outta here.

The bird hit here and, I suspect, died right about back here. I had just rolled up the window so I could hear the radio better. That turned out to be a good move.

Now, we take an already damaged car and a dead kangaroo, mix 'em together, throw in a little mischievieousness, and...

...you have instant conversation starters.

Billy, don't be a hero. Don't be a fool with your life, out

Ramblin' Ed