As Promised

It was a good weekend--hung out around Shakespeare's hometown, saw a ridiculous production of Midsummer Night's Dream, spent a night in a Bed & Breakfast, hit up Oxford for a couple hours, and then went to the Thames Festival last night, which was crazy even though we got there fairly late.

But who the fuck cares about what I did? Anyway, as promised, this is something I wrote with a pen I bought in the church where Shakespeare is buried, in the pub where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien used to have philosophical conversations and get drunk all the time when they were at Oxford. If only I had written it on paper manufactured in the place where J.D. Salinger shed his first tear I'd be set. Next time, I guess.

Chapter 1

It wasn’t like him to sit alone in a pub. He typically enjoyed quietly eavesdropping on his friends as they chatted exuberantly amongst each other, occasionally tossing in a lackluster joke or adding a few words of encouragement to a particularly impressive story. But he was sick of it. So, cooped up in a darkly lit quiet corner he sat alone, notebook open, pint a quarter gone, dreaming as he liked about the most notable difference between English and Scottish dragons, or how quickly one would have to travel through space to be able to move the earth backwards through time. He deduced it would have to happen quite quickly indeed, the traveler would have to enjoy the most immaculate weather conditions, and would probably employ the use of a pair of magic shoes to be able to pull off the stunt successfully. All of this has little bearing on the story, other than that the reader may have been curious to know the types of ideas flowing through our hero’s brain, or at least might enjoy reading an excerpt of the curious paragraphs he was leisurely jotting down in his notebook in between sips of bitter ale.