Grumpycloud Pinnacle

grumpycloud

Well, li’l Thunderers, I haven’t been supremely regular in my writing this past week. I hope you’ll forgive me. The truth is, I’ve been a bit soggy, in body and spirit, after an attempt to transcend some of my childhood trauma ended poorly.

Remember when you were growing up, and there was always one big, dumb kid who lived down the way and who would make you miserable for fun? I’m assuming that you do, since you’re literate, so you probably weren’t the big dumb kid in question.

If you’re a Tauren, you remember, and you will also remember that that big, dumb kid was probably named something-or-other Grimtotem.

Tauren are often, though not always, named for some circumstance surrounding their birth. I guess there was quite a storm going on when I was born. Thunder sounded ten times while my mamma was labourin’ on me, so there you go. Ten Thunders.

My childhood bully’s name was Mudpuddle Banjo Onionfart Grimtotem. I guess his daddy got a little excited and just started rhyming off everything in spitting distance. Anyway, I don’t think being stuck with that name did ol’ Onionfart much good in the socialization department. I have enough trouble living up to the machismo in the ol’ monniker. I can only imagine (with an empathy born of him having been eaten by lizards several years ago, the dummy) the existential pain brought on by trying to decide between a vocation as a country musician or a professional flatulant, all with the brain the size of a gopher’s.

Onionfart chiefly demonstrated this turmoil by chasing me into briarpatches, or just sitting on me and pushing my face into the patty-pile, until I would agree to do his chores for him. On one spectacular occasion, which I’m sure he remembered smilingly when being sucked down the throat of a thunder lizard, he found a heap of off-brand Venture company blasting caps and spent a whole day pinning people down and seeing where he could stuff them. I still get itchy on rainy nights.

Anyway, Thousand Needles is a traditional territory of the Grimtotem clan, and they hold their moots at Grumpycloud Pinnacle, the entrance of which is just off the road to Freewind from the Lift. You will know it by the grumpy-looking totem posted at the entrance. I thought it would be a good idea to drop in, pay my respects and give you a survey of some Tauren life in the Needles that you may not yourself be able to see, since the Grimtotem have never surrendered their traditional independence, nor joined the Warchief’s Council or the Horde. They still live in Thunder Bluff and come there to trade, because they’re still our people, but we have grown apart. So Grumpycloud is now their real home.

I also thought that it would serve as a healthy corrective to my clouded childhood memories of the clan. Surely, now that we are all full-blooded and initiated adults, we can get along, Tauren-to-Tauren.

Surely, one of these days I will stop being such a damn sucker. When my goblin companion stops laughing at me and develops the Gramma-humping spasmoluminographs, you will see that today was not that day.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 10:08 am and is filed under Kalimdor, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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