I Met Bob Gnarly

He Has Really Long Dreads And His Name Is Not Bob Gnarly

As I’ve mentioned on the site before I am staunchly against talking shit to strangers.  You never know who just got out of prison or has micro-penis rage.  Or they might have the Almighty Hand Of Rick James, Bitch power like this guy:

Damn, no wonder Brock Lesner got cut from the Vikings.

This wisdom did not prevent me from making fun of Bob Gnarly outside a bar in Silverlake last weekend.

Call it the stress of being unemployed.  More accurately, call it eleventeen craft beers in my gullet.  It was just not going to be Bob Gnarly’s night when he decided to walk up and borrow a lighter from my roommate.  Now I didn’t know his name was Bob Gnarly when I started asking about his dreads.  In my defense I thought he was a white guy with dreads which is always a bad look.

That shows how drunk I was at the time because here’s a picture of Bob Gnarly:

Not a white guy.  Or not a full-blown white guy so he gets a pass on the dreads thing.

So after inquiring about his hair (“Those are some pretty sweet dreads, bro.”) I asked what his name was.

Bob Gnarly: I’m Bob Gnarly.

At this point, he paused and looked at us expectantly.  I was confused on whether he was being ironical or being a douche or he was famous.

Me: Your name isn’t Bob Gnarly.

Bob Gnarly: I’m a professional skateboarder.  My name’s Bob Gnarly.

It was clear at this point that he was hoping we would be a little more impressed with job title.

Me: You put Bob Gnarly on your resume?  When you go in for a job interview, do you say “Nice to meet you, I’m Bob Gnarly”?

Bob Gnarly:  I told you I’m a professional skateboarder.

Me: Nobody is going to hire Bob Gnarly.

Bob Gnarly: I have a job already.

Me:  So your driver’s license says Bob Gnarly on it?  Let me see it.

Bob Gnarly: All right my real name is Robert Rodriguez, okay?  My license says Robert Rodriguez.  Damn, dude.

Now Bob Gnarly is sad.  Probably because Bob Gnarly is actually Robert Rodriguez.  And because random drunk assholes do not know who he is and once aforementioned assholes are informed, give exactly zero fucks.

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation but it did end with fist pounds so I’m pretty sure I didn’t say any other dickish things to him.  I think I felt bad because so much of his self-esteem seemed to be tied up in his name and his flowing locks.

Of course the next day we had to look up Bob Gnarly and see if he was in fact a pro-skateboarder.  He actually is.  He skates for a company called Natural Koncept which, my roommate informed me, are hippiest of hippie skate brands.  One look at their website confirms this.  The website theme is Nintendo crossed with early 90′s hip hop:

I was absolutely stunned when a Sublime song didn’t autoplay on the landing page.

Other fun facts gleaned from Bob Gnarly’s Myspace page:

He has a band called The Dry Heaves.  Or at least he did.

He’s Native American.  And a Pisces

He doesn’t update his Myspace and he doesn’t have it set to private.

He would like to meet PUNK ROCKIN’ FREIGHT HOPPERS

He apparently did cocaine on the roof of Mike Doughty’s apartment building.  You may remember Mike Doughty as the lead singer of Soul Coughing.

All of this is to say that on a relative spectrum of all other humans in the Los Angeles area, Bob Gnarly probably is psuedo-famous.  But Bob Gnarly is not psuedo-famous enough to be disappointed/irritated when I, drunken dipshit, do not know who he is.  And though I was definitely being a cock bag making fun of his name, it is a name he introduced himself as.  A name that was clearly made up.  That is fair game for shit-talking.

I write this blog under the pseudonym Himbokal.  This is an old nickname.  I know for a fact that I have never introduced myself as Himbokal, but if I did and someone started eating my lunch about it, that’s totally justified.

He could have just as easily introduced himself as Robert Rodriguez, pro skateboarder and this whole blog post would have been about something else.  Like why you should go in and erase your Myspace page that you haven’t updated in two years so that bloggers don’t waste an entire day trying to figure out what a PUNK ROCKIN’ FREIGHT HOPPER is.

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