Bummerang

I wouldn't say that men live in denial so much as we are blissfully ignorant. And I think I should stress blissfully. You see, we all think we're as sexy and desirable as we were in high school and college, even 30 years and 55 pounds later. I mean seriously, sometimes we can't believe how lucky our wives are. And what a shame it is that we can't be shared with more of the female population.

Now, about the desirability part, high school or otherwise. See, a dude really only needs to get laid once in high school to get the "I'm sexy, I'm cute. I'm God's true gift to boot" mindset. For us, the girl's high levels of intoxication, desperation, and/or self-esteem issues simply do not come into play. We slept together therefore "I am darn sexy!" Fortunately for us, that never goes away.

OK, moving on. I got some serious stuff to tackle so I need to start edging the tone thataway. But first, red hair. I love it. It turns my head. It tingles my love receptors. It doesn't matter if she looks like a goddess or a truck driver, she has my attention. My eyes don't wander quite as far afield on the truck driving misses. Thems the breaks.

I bought some Reese's Peanut Butter & Banana cups yesterday. Yes... they WERE as good as they sound. Reese's implored you to check inside the wrapper to see if you had won some fanglorious prize. Which I hadn't. But I always check, thinking "This might be the time." Anyway, can't remember exactly how it was worded, but it basically said, "Congratulations. You're not a winner." Congratulations? For not being a winner? Not being a winner is, for lack of a softer term, being a loser. Congratulations. I'm a loser.

Which brings me to the homeless. I know, I'm sounding pretty bleeding heart today. Although it's not like I have done anything more substantive than to ponder their plight. Well, that and give the clothes I have outgrown, and there are more than a few of those, to the League of Mercy. But still, I was looking at how many of the homeless are not unemployed. They work as day laborers and such, but cannot afford a home on the wages.

See that kinda smacks up against the stereotype of drunken, drugged, and demented little bit. It is easier to think that they have chosen to be homeless somehow and therefore deserve, if anything at all, a lecture on the finer points of capitalism. Clean yourself up and get a job is pretty easy to say. But if you couldn't shower in your bathroom, print out resumes on your home computer, and drive to a job interview, well, where would you be? That's as ridiculous as assuming someone somehow chose to be born mentally unstable.

Anyway, you should rightly blast me on actionless compassion. I don't have a real answer and am not really looking for one. Sometimes I will hand a buck out of my car window, but not always. My support tends more towards supporting the notion that churches and rescue organizations that help the homeless should not keep getting shut down over petty city and county regulations. I know, big whoop. The moral of this whole thing for me is: Do we denounce the homeless and talk loudly of tough love policies simply because feeling like they are not doing their part makes us feel less guilty about not doing ours?

Well I came across a child of God, he was walking along the road

and I asked him where are you going, this he told me:

Well, I’m going down to Yasgur's farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.

Got to get back to the land, set my soul free.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,

and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog.

And I feel like I'm a cog in something turning.

And maybe it's the time of year, yes, and maybe it's the time of man.

And I don't know who I am but life is for learning.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,

and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,

and everywhere there was song and celebration.

And I dreamed I saw the bombers jet planes riding shotgun in the sky,

turning into butterflies above our nation.

We are stardust, we are golden, we're caught in the devil’s bargain,

and we got to get ourselves back to the garden, out

Ramblin' Ed

I think mine just may be bigger

Every so often I cuss. The occasion calls for it. What occasion? Well, if I cussed, I cussed. So it was an occasion. And it must have called for cussing. What else can I tell you?

They say if you cuss it shows you have a limited vocabulary. I beg to differ the point. I have a fairly extensive vocabulary. Large enough, it would seem, to include cuss words. So by my reckoning, if you also have a fairly big vocabulary, but it doesn't include cussing, well.... looks like mine's bigger. Sorry, chap, it's a cruel, cruel world.

When I was a kid near Wilmington, NC somehow the word "shoot" got into my vocabulary. "Shoot! I missed the bus." "Well shooooot.... what are we gonna do now?" One day my normally mild mannered dad surprised the heck out of me when he semi-snapped and hollered at me, "If you mean SHIT then say SHIT!!" Well, shoot Dad, I didn't know it was permissible. Have you conferred with Mom on that?

Snackin Frackin @!!#??*!, Out
Ramblin' Ed

Let's start with Andrews AFB

We'll throw some pictures out . I usually add them after, but lately when I do, blogger adds all this weird spacing to the text that I can't seem to un-format. It is quite upsetting, really. So, here are the pics, followed by the post. I admit it, I bow to the reality.

Here is my company provided "intermediate sized, automatic" rental car. Pretty snazzy, huh? I'm not a Ford dude generally, but I am enjoying these wheels a lot. Hey, I never said I had a rough life.

A view of Waikiki Beach from th 18th floor. Today or tomorrow I will walk down there for some pics. But yesterday was a battery recharging time. I'm not the go, go, go youngin' that I once was.

Number 1 on my list of unnecessary things. Judge fer yerself.

I had a good frend in the Pittsburgh (PA, not KS) area. He had a couple of sisters. One, as it turned out, was a lesbian. Seems that the first lesbian I ever knew, I didn't know. In fact, much later, after she had already joined the Air Force and shacked up off post with her girlfriend, the conversation between me and her brother went like this:

"Ed, hyou know she's gay, right?"

"What? No."

"Yeah. Always has been."

"Really? I never knew that."

"What, you didn't notice she was always wearing a baseball uniform?"

"I just figured she liked baseball."

But I went to spend the 3 day weekend with her anyway because my problem is naiveté, not intolerance. And we had a pretty good time. She even offered to take me on a tour of D.C. And this is where today's blog really begins. Because her offer went like this, "I'll take you to D.C. if you want. I can drive you straight there, but I always get lost and drive around a lot getting back."

Well of course I went. And we went straight there. And we got lost coming home, but I got to see Arlington Cemetary because of it. The lostness, that is. And we had a great time.

OK. So I am in the Doubletree Alana Hotel in Waikiki. I have a special government rate, which I still think is twice what the room is worth. Coming in night before last, I drove around and around in circles looking for the hotel. Unexpectedly, I passed it once. I say unexpectedly because I thought it was still a few blocks off, and, after discovering I was in the wrong lane to u-turn, and the next street was a one way... that forced me to turn on another one way (read wrong way), it was indeed a few blocks off. Anyway, I finally got there and chalked the confusion up to a 26+ hour trip getting here.

Yesterday I decided to make a practice run to the airport and back just to make sure I had it down. I DO NOT. I got lost trying to find either Nimitz Highway or H1, instead finding my way to the entrance of Diamond Head. Asked directions to H1 and found the airport fine after that. Coming back, I once again got within a few blocks of the hotel but was over an hour again driving in circles on streets that were named using only enough consonants to hold the strings of vowels together (why do you need 6 u's in a word, anyway?) trying to find the hotel. I would spot it every once in a while, but.... Like my little Air Force friend leaving D.C.

She'sall the proof you need, by the way, that when I joke about the Air Force's lack of masculinity I do know better.

OK, so besides the practice run fiasco, mostly all that I did yesterday was lay around in the sun. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I am at least one quarter pure lizard. Give me a nice flat rock in the sun and I'm in heaven.

Cleaned with care by LORETA, out

Ramblin' Ed

Drive By Trucker Videos

This is a long post, maybe 20 minutes or so. Maybe less, who's counting. Anyway, for those of you who have heard of DBT, but not heard them, well here you go. I was feeling generous this morning.

I'll take two of what your having, I'll take all of what you've got, out

Ramblin' Ed

Never Gonna Change http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3icBcr1_Tw

GD Lonely Love http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYdiAz4ddIg

Daddys Cup http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex4yddZL_PQ

Gravitys Gone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUaBH_-tuI0

Randumb thoughts

I cannot be the only one afflicted with this particular silly phobia, though phobia may be too strong of a word. Cautionary behavior is how I think of it. I almost always have a cup of coffee in my hand. Sometimes it's a cookie. Sometimes it is both. That is not really the point I am making. But hold that thought.

I, like everyone else, routinely go to the bathroom. I have a steady job, so I am often at work when the occasion arises to urinate. Pee. See a man about a horse. Sometimes my timeframe for such action coincides with a co-workers. Sometimes them other boys can be a bit, um, smellferous. It happens, but I do wonder about their diet sometimes.

Anyway, my point about the phobia-ish condition of mine. When I walk in to the mens room with my coffee and it is most malodorous, I cannot stop myself from exiting, placing my cup o' joe on a handy horizontal surface, and then returning to my business. See, I really feel like anything that hangs that heavy in the air must certianly be releasing actual things into the air. And I do fear the PSPs. You know, Poop Smell Particulates. I can just envision them settling on the rim of my coffee mug. It makes me shudder to think.

Tampa may be on the cutting edge of the skirmish on globbal warming and not even know it. We have a desalination plant to turn salt water into freshwater. It is about 5 years behind schedule and either tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, but heck, that's how we do stuff down here. This is Florida, man. Putting the fun in dysfunctional. But back to the brouhaha on global warming.

I figure if we could get that dang thing working, we could pass a law that everybody had to water their lawns and sidewalks at least twice a day, for an hour or so per. That'd suck up a lot of water sure, but here's the genius of my plan. It's water from the ocean. So as fast as the ice caps want to melt, we're drawing down Tampa Bay to green up our golf courses and condo lawns. Now imagine all of coastal America, or heck, even the whole darn coastal world doing the same. Shoot!, we could all go back to those convienient CFCs and start using real freon again. You're welcome.

Last passing thought for the day. The weather. I know that Florida is not the sleepy agricultural state that it once was, but doggone it if we ain't still got that 4H weather. Hazy, Hot, Humid & Hot.

If you ain't done it already, check out DREs fantastic fishing photo in the post below this.

Here's me and the Japanese students in Tampa's Henderson Ave "Parking? What parking?" Outback Steakhouse a few months back.

"Everybody's got a monkey, right?", out

Ramblin' Ed

DRE wants it to be known that he is, indeed, THE FISHSLAYER. He made a beautiful cast up under a low hanging tree branch and it looked for all the world like something was following it in, hitting at it all the way. As it turned out this here minnow was on it. There he was, minding his own bidness, swimming carefree along like minnows are wont to do, and BAM!! a giant hookfilled yellow/orange fish drops out of the sky and spears him. The story is not without its silver lining, though. The minnow was released without further injury. Probably to be eaten by a crappie.

This dude was pink, like a flamingo but had a wide, flat, spoon bill. We were just fishing along the edge of the vegetation and he come flying in and settled down. He then proceeded to pay us no never-mind.

I like to get pictures of the big water birds when we fish. They are so mellow. I like mellow. Plus, they're the only proof we have that there actually ARE fish in that lake.

This was taken from the hotel room I had in Miami. You can't get much closer to the airport than this. Amazingly enough, airplane noise was not a problem. But watching the planes as they lined up and jockeyed for their position to takeoff was interesting. I watched them a lot because, as you can see from the color of the sky, the thumderstorms kept chasing me away from the pool.

So I was thinking...

...that some things might fit together quite well, if not a bit unexpectedly.

Like maybe the doctor, the one who gives colonoscopies. What is he... a buttologist? Anyway, wouldn't he make a good vinter. He's used to observing things closely, looking for slight imperfections. Also, he should recognize instantly if his wine tasted crappy.

Or a tour guide / preacher man, although that one is a little trickier. "And-a if you look outside-a, outside and on your right-a towards the book-a of Revelations. Yes...yes...there you see Hell-a. The same hell you will go to if you don't heed my advice-a...." "But on the left... My friends, on the left-a is the peace and tranquility of downtown Des Moines. A peace-a and tranquility that can only be found-a through the grace of God-a, coupled-a with a majority population of white-a, middle-class mid-westerners."

Where that gets tricky, though, is that being at the right hand of God is good. But we have noted that Hell is off to the right. So I propose he would turn to face the people, giving him the opportunity to instead say, "If you look outside-a, outside to my left..." See? Fast Eddie does not see problems. I see soloutions.

Or how about a urologist working in customer service. Think about it, the poor customer service reps have to deal with a lot of dicks. Ahhhh, Grasshopper...now you understand.

OK, so anyway, if you think of any others, let me know.


Like a lamb lain down on Broadway, out
Ramblin' "Still Stuck In Miami" Ed