Hallo, my name is Bruce. I like books almost as much as I like fish. I met a very pleasant and engaging elderly gent the other day at the local Fish Are Friends meeting, and we quickly hit it off talking about books. The conversation meandered here and there covering all genres of books and our favorite authors before it turned to the topic of writing. Mr. Taylor, for that's the fellow, mentioned that he is currently working on three different projects, each chronicling some of his adventures throughout his long and storied life. One is a series of short stories that read like sci fi or fantasy if they were fiction, another is a series of his quite fantastical adventures, and the third is a very grandiose and broad sweeping retelling of yet more of his epic adventures, although it was in the extremely preliminary stages, as he is trying to remember all the details of his adventures. As bloomin' fantastical as it sounds, it appears that he's lived enough lifetimes to satisfy ten tens of men! It sure sounds odd, mate, but as far as I could tell, he was telling me the truth.
Anyhoo, he lamented the fact that he didn't have the time, busy as he is chronicling his exploits, to keep his friends and family appraised of his status. By this time, we'd been talking for hours upon hours and had retired to a local bar. Over shots of Floridian seawater, I mentioned that I was pretty handy with blogs and offered to set a blog up to keep his friends and family appraised if he'd keep in touch with me from time to time. His eyes lit up at the offer and he indicated that he was quite interested in the prospect. The bartender, a tuna friend of mine, gave out last call, so we adjoined back to our respective houses with the promise to keep in touch the next day.
The following morning, I received a letter written in a flowing script from Tim. He said he had been urgently summoned away on a matter of great importance, but would contact me as soon as he had some free time. The next several weeks passed rather uneventfully, but seventeen days later, I received a package addressed to me with no return address.
Opening it, I found another letter written in the same familiar script. Tim apologized for having to act somewhat clandestinely, but the situation he was dealing with was even more important than he'd expected, and he wouldn't be able to drag himself away for the forseeable future. He entrusted the contents of the package to my care, and recommended that I meet a fellow named Mueller at the provided address at my earliest convenience. I finished unwrapping the package to reveal a stack of books. I flipped through them, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about them. How odd.
The peculiarity of the whole situation excited my curiosity for the rest of the day, and I looked this Mueller fellow the next day, carrying my package of books. Mueller had a shop down in the depths of an old WWII shipwreck, a small, dingy looking shop tucked away in a corner under a spectacular mushroom of rusted, twisted metal. The sign proclaimed the establishment to be Mueller's Oddities: Purveyor of fine short stories, novellas, and novels. Curioser and curioser. I entered the shop and ran into the only fellow in the store.
A tall, heavily muscled man, he wore a dusty outfit that looked like it had come out of the pages of an old American Western novel. I introduced myself and told him about Mr. Taylor's cryptic letter.
"Ah," he exclaimed. "You've met Mr. Taylor, too! Please, please, make yourself at home!" He hustled around and cleared off a table for me to set the books down upon.
"I spoke to Mr. Taylor last week and he mentioned that you'd be coming along any day now. Has he told you of how we met?" I indicated that he hadn't, so Mueller continued. "We met, oh, about 15 years ago. It was out West just after the War Between The States. Yes, yes, I know the dates don't line up, but that's part of what makes Mr. Taylor so special! Anyways, we were mortal enemies at first, but several years later we ran into each other again and we became business acquaintances. For the past ten years or so, I've published the chronicles of his exploits." He waved his hand at the contents of the bookstore. "All those are his exploits. I must admit, I can scarcely fathom how he can do all these things, and how he aged half a lifetime between when I first met him and when I met him the second time a few years later, let alone how I'm here and now."
Wow, that was a lot to take in. I took out a braided rope of kelp and started munching on it as I pondered what Mueller had said. Around a mouthful of kelp, I asked what Mr. Taylor had in mind for me.
"My dear fellow, I've got no capabilities with computers and the internet. I am a man outside of my own time, after all. When he communicates with you, he'd like you to turn said communications into a blog to share with his friends and family. No, I don't have any clue who his family is, either, let alone if they are as singularly impressive as he is. If you'd like to use his blog for your own purposes, you are more than welcome to do so, as long as your uses don't impinge on his communiques."
I mused it over for about half a second and then whole heartedly accepted. This sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime! I stayed around to chat with Mueller for a while longer, then departed to head back to my abode.
Later that evening, as I sat in my great chair before the fire, I looked at the stack of books Mr Taylor had sent, and then picked up the first off the stack, opened it up, and started to read. Later that night, when my eyes had started to tire of the printed page, I turned on my computer and sat down to write about the most peculiar events of the last few weeks...
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