Mush! Gee! Haw! Easy! Whoa!

This past weekend, I experienced something that very few gnomes can ever lay claim to. DOG SLEDDING! Master and Goddess of all gnomekind, Alyssa, was kind enough to take my brother and I in her coat pocket to experience the mushing first hand.

We give all the credit to two amazing guide companies who have a true passion for their dog and the sport of mushing. S&L Arctic K9 Dog Sledding (http://www.dogsledmichigan.com/) and OCM Mushing (http://www.ocm-mushing.com/).

Look at me! I’m the one in the pointy orange hat mushing dogs!

Gnome Mush

Our guides were incredibly knowledgeable and had a true passion for the sport. They have taken their dogs up to Alaska in a pimp-mobile to compete in Iditarod. The dogs so well behaved and treated so well by owners. Some dogs were even fashionable enough to bring the 80’s back with leg warmers!

Doggie leg warmers

If anyone knows of any breeders of miniature Alaskan huskies, please contact me through this blog. I’d love to start collecting them for form the world’s first gnome mushing team and amaze the world as it has never been amazed before.

Covered in fur, still shivering, but super obsessed,

Alfredo the Gnome

Rake + Skull = Trauma Drama

The morning started off like any other morning. George sipping a flask while digging a hole with a shovel for no apparent reason. I was raking some leaves under a bush, keeping an eye on him. A thunderstorm had come the night before leaving the yard just a horrid mess. That lazy Alyssa really should appreciate all the yard work we do for her while she is out gallivanting around. I don’t even think she notices. I digress.

I glanced up at the clouds just in time to see a huge clump of dirt flying in my general direction. I tried to duck. I tried to cover. I tried to stop, drop, and roll. But my efforts were futile. I was knocked flat on my buttocks and my hat flew off and blew across the yard. I screamed at George to be more careful. He had not only ruined my perfectly groomed leaf pile, but now my ceramic skin was totally dirty.

I brushed myself off and went back to raking. All the sudden…another clump of dirt! What the hell, George! What the hell!? I marched over to him, shaking my rake above my head with more anger than I’ve felt since that whitewater rafting trip went awry last spring.

George threw down his shovel and started screaming in unintelligible gnomish. I was still swinging the rake above my hat-less head screaming in incredibly intelligible gnomish. In one swift drunk move, George grabbed my rake and it came loose from my overworked and underpaid hands. He swung it above our heads and the rest all seemed to have happened in slow motion.

I felt the rake hit my head and brought my hand up to hold it. I wondered why it felt warm. Then I looked down. Blood! Blood! Blood everywhere! I didn’t even know ceramic produced blood! But there it was. I looked in the mirror and puked the egg salad sandwich I’d had for breakfast just at the sight of my own horror movie reflection.

George sucks at life. But he was at least smart enough to run inside the house through the sliding glass door and dial 911 on Alyssa’s rotary phone (she really needs to realize it’s 2012).

The ambulance rolled up to find a bloody gnome screaming in the grass. One paramedic hesitated to take me in considering my non-human status. George was nice enough to pull  my wallet out of my back pocket and flash my Blue Cross Blue Shield card. Next thing I knew, I was lying on a huge white table with bright florescent lights and there were eleven staples in my head holding my skull together.

Rake Axe of Death

The nurses called me a “freak accident” and hypothesized that there must have been an axe attached to that rake to create such a long and wide laceration. They read me my discharge instructions to not come with a 100 mile radius of a rake for the next three months. I gotta go hat shopping because I’m totally self conscious about all this metal in my head. I hate George’s stupid drunk ass, I really do. But in the end, I suppose he kinda sorta saved my life. And he has a whole stash of Vicodin in one of those holes he dug, so that makes me like him even better.

Yours in heavy metal,

Benjamin The Gnome

Not a Teenage Latino Beached Whale Boy

I always have credited my buddy, Sheldon for his good taste in music. Then last night I find myself at the Rihanna concert. I heard that name before but I always thought it was a teenage Latino beached whale boy with a speech impediment. Tickets were as expensive as hell but we hopped into the coat pocket of some big guy and didn’t pay a dime.

All they served at the Riv was Bud Light. Sheldon and I sat on the floor with our mouths open waiting for drunk bastards to somehow spill out of their gawking mouths. After we got about ten or eleven drops, the music stopped and the crowd cleared. Someone or something scooped into me and Sheldon into its hand and I whipped around, ready for the fist fight of a lifetime. Instead I was patted on the top of my little gnome hat by a very nice looking human figure and handed something burning at one end and smelling like road kill. I didn’t really care what it was because this is who handed it to me:

Not a Teenage Latino Beached Whale Boy

These are the moments that remind me that there are new things to be learned every day and that not all teenage Latino beached whale boys are half bad.

Highly magnificent,

Pablo the Gnome

Rock Bottom: Literally and Figuratively

I’d been blowing off my buddy in the suburbs for a few months and the guilt trip was starting to work. I mean the suburbs!? Really?! The traffic, the tolls, the pretentious bitches and their purse-sized dogs and baby carriages!? No thank you.

But Donatello is a pathetic son of a bitch who drinks himself into oblivion anytime he lacks the company of others. He’s unemployed, he’s never even seen a girl gnome, let alone gotten laid by one, and he’s pretty freaking fat. Lately, I’ve had my own shit going on. I’ve been job searching in the non-profit sector and scoping out networking events at overpriced strip clubs.

Anyway, tonight was the night I sucked it up and went out to visit that old bastard. He loves the freaking hell out of karaoke. I have never understood why anyone in their right mind would want to karaoke. I guess that’s why drunk people usually karaoke so that they AREN’T in their right mind.

There’ this spot in Warrenville called Rock Bottom Brewery.  Apparently, on Tuesday night this was the HOT SPOT for the karaoke crowd. Donatello and I clearly have a different opinion on the the term “hot spot” because there were literally six people in this bar besides us. Each and everyone of them sang a country song. Country?! For real?! You live in the goddamn western suburbs of Chicago and you think that qualifies you to sing country.

Needless to say, the performances were horrendous. Donatello is one of those guys who only has two karaoke songs, “Living on a Prayer” and “Don’t Stop Believing”. Although he has an awful singing voice, he has practiced them so many times in his pathetic lonely shower that he’s actually mastered those two “masterpieces” to a T.

Meanwhile, I got drunk. This is what I had to work with.

Hitting rock bottom

I started with the Dochness Monster and Donatello started with the coffee-infused Dochness Monster option. Quickly after obtaining our “warm up beer”, Donatello remembered that he hated coffee. He grabbed by non-coffee-ish beer and marched up to the stage in his cowboy hat with that whole “corn-cob-up-my-ass” kinda swagger.

I hated him so much at that moment. The original Dockness was pretty good…not too heavy but with a good flavor. That coffee infused version was like drinking straight up black coffee when you show up to work late and hungover, not having time to stop at Caribou and disappointing finding that there’s no flavored half&half or Splenda in the office fridge. Blech.

“Whooah we’re half way there. Whooah livin’ on a  prayer. Take my hand – we’ll make it I swear. Whooah livin’ on a  prayer.”

Dear god, how long do I have to stay out in Warrenville. What is my exit strategy. How many more of these mediocre brews can I take down before I get another DUI?

“I’d like a Topple Bock, please!” I screamed to the unconcerned waitress across the Bon Jovi massacre. This is the moment the night started looking up! This stuff was awesome! Not too hoppy, not too sweet, lots going on where you couldn’t exactly pinpoint the exact spice you were experiencing, but it didn’t matter because your taste buds were dancing a jig. This was the kind of thing that justified that miserable drive out to the ‘burbs.

“Don’t stop believin’! Hold on! Streetlight! people!” belted out Donatello with a unnecessary use of hand gestures.

Alright alright, so maybe the the old boy wasn’t sounding quite as bad now. But I hear a vacuum. Vacuum in bar/restaurant code = get the fuck out and go home. Okay, fine I get it. One for the road. I think I got some gum in the arm rest of my car anyway. Cops never can tell you’re drinking if you’re chewing gum. Dumb bastards.

“One Catcher in the Rye, please!” I yelled to the average looking waitress as last call was being announced. Honestly, I only ordered this beer because  J. D. Salinger was the only one who made sense to me as a lost and confused 14 year gnome and the reminiscence value brought great expectations.

Big. Freaking. Mistake. I couldn’t even choke this down. I mean sure, sometimes I eat rye bread with some roast beef on a sandwich at lunchtime but I’m not sure where the disconnect comes in when combined with beer. It was overly bitter, hoppy, and carbonated. Maybe that’s what the brewers were going for….something as painful as the novel that defined my teenage years. Irregardlessly, yuck. Time to head home.

Since Donatello had already sang his two signature songs and yet again, there was not even one girl gnome in the bar to flirt with, he was ready to call it a night too. All in all, I learned a couple new things about a couple new beers and he did the same old shit and cried himself to sleep cradling his stuffed orange lizard.

At rock bottom (for real, not the brewery),

Leonardo The Gnome

 

The day I found a magazine

These walls. These walls are closing in around me. I have got to get out of this hellish backyard full of all of these stupid gnomes going about their stupid days.

My shrink said I have a moderate form of social anxiety and tossed some Zoloft my way. But the only doctor that would accept my insurance plan was a human and those crazy pills we’re as big as my foot! There is no way in heck I’m putting my foot in my mouth. Well literally anyway. Figuratively, well that’s pretty much a daily occurrence.

I have never been the least bit athletic, but this morning I read the most interesting article. Little Joey accidentally left a copy of DPM Magazine on the lawn chair back here.There were all sorts of amazing photos of amazing athletes scaling huge walls of rock and stone.

The article that appealed to me the most was about this guy, Andrew, who is a midget (a real freaking midget!) who taught himself to rock climb despite his tiny size. He had custom made climbing shoes and aeasiness made and seems to be making a documentary abouthis accomplishments.

If a midget can rock climb, why not a gnome?!

These walls that confine me to this stupid widow’s garden definitely are tall. But not impossibly tall. Could I learn how to rock climb? Could rock  climbing be the key to my freedom? Can a gnome like me find peace and solitude all because of a magazine article?

Time for me to do some research about gear and training programs. I will keep you updated. I’ve never felt such hopefulness!

Climber wannabe,

Horace the Gnome