I blame the readers of this blog for everything wrong

We've had to halt the beloved Dr Hagenstein series for a while, due to some fairly severe and possibly deranged reviews that have frankly cut me to the quick, at an emotional level that I don't know if I will ever get over. This series meant a lot to me and you people have killed it, and even if you beg and plead for an encore I don't think it will ever be the same as that first time in the full bloom of summer and everyone was young and beautiful and full of that nauseatingly egotistical hope for the future that older people think they've lost because no one likes them as much as they thought everyone would. 

So I need a new backstory for the set of illustrations that I created whilst traveling, and I feel compelled to explain again why I don't want to just describe the trip as it occurred, and just record the events as accurately as I can, to strain with words to hold a mirror to nature as Shakespeare himself said, and let the truth create its own art, and with that art to find truth, and let the truth come back to art again, in this ecstatic embrace of mirror images flipping back and forth at each other and sending we mortals into a delirium of experience-ness and awe with nature and the universe.  I just read what I just wrote, and in the spirit of total honesty that has not characterized any of my previous writing on this blog I now feel compelled to admit that I have changed my mind completely and I will now strain with words to do exactly all that. 

So chapter 1: the adventures of the true to life Hagen magical wizard family in Angle-Stan, or Angle-Reich as they would say over the water. Let the truth flow! I drew this picture with aid of a draw-spell. Renderanis! I shouted, waving my elf-spine wand in devious retrograde motion. The tiny witch coven in the picture had gathered in a little group on the floor of the magically moving painting museum in London. The paintings moved so vigorously that I didn't get a good render of any of them, and my wizard offspring kept grabbing at my wizard cloak and demanding treats and water and bathroom breaks so I never even had a moment to think! And every time I found a really beautiful painting with amazing masterful brushstrokes that I wanted to copy by painstaking hand to appreciate and learn from and I would whip out my elf-spine wand that had been fermented in virgin troll tears and sprinkled with finely ground fairie by a dimuitive master wizard of indeterminate age and sex and ethnicity who told me they preferred to kill the adolescent griffins by hand in the back of the magicke shop to verify perfect freshness of the feathers, then tiny hands would pull insistently at my wizard jacket and even grab at the magic wand as I tried to wave it and whiny voices would ask if they could have it and then in the spirit of demented competition both of my wizard offspring would demand to get to wave the wand while I tried to swat them away and say very loudly in the middle of the museum that it was my elf-spine wand and only I get to use it and my wife would berate me with her disgusted eyes that would shoot magical flames at me and singe my feelings and I would pull away from them and try to aim at the closest masterpiece and shout Renderanis! but I'm also swatting at my kids with the elf spine wand which emits sparkling dust and misses the masterpiece and humorously renders a group of kids with their parents who are gathered on the floor like it's a park or something and a grown woman in silly clothes is telling a pointless fairy tail in the exaggerated voice you make to morons in the seriously mistaken belief that old times storytelling is so neat that it can convince kids that paintings done to impress grown ups are more interesting than video games, as if by magic

The Last Drag Show at the Globe; from Dr Hagenstein, the U.K. Files

The Last Drag Show at the Globe; from Dr Hagenstein, the U.K. Files

Dr Hagenstein scanned the crowd nervously, his super sensitive secret agent nerves, honed and crafted by years of death match level mental combat with Russians and Atheists, spasming alarms all over his nervous system at the sight of any suspicious character, the majority of the London population of which apparently swarmed to this very spot every evening for the outrageous yet strangely antiseptic performances at this pseudohistoric place.  He sat in the upper upper deck, about forty vertical feet above the stage of the new rebuilt exactly as before Globe Theatre, the neo-Globe, the focal point of that gigantic theme park called London, where all the historically violent impulses of the Anglo Saxon peoples have been sublimated into tame homoerotic deconstruction of the most mind numbingly overperformed plays in western culture. 

Dr Hagenstein actually loved Shakespeare, some of it. The plays with daggers, anyway. Not so much the comedies, because of some childhood stuff that confusing speech and loud laughter tended to trigger. 

The enemy agent had tried to offer him a beer before the play, but he'd refused. "Our seats are high enough to kill," he said cryptically. She knew his secret weakness; his massive skull size, it's heft and mass, the catch 22 for any highly intelligent person, his body was basically a big shuttlecock. All it would take was a nudge, and the thought machine that had generated some of the most incredible secret assassination plans and code break ideas in dark web history would plummet the two stories to the stage like a cannon ball, dragging his hapless body with it. He didn't dare lean even a little forward, even during the most hilarious onstage hijinks, where the big drag queen with the beard was singing to the tiny lesbian trapped in the clothes rack and the audience roared with appreciation, relieved that it didn't matter if they understood the words or not. 

At some point he realized that everyone in the upper deck reserved seating was American, while the locals were all standing in the plebe seating below. Did they know something? The English resentments of Americans were well known. Had they chosen now, at the height of summer, when half the population of the US was wandering drunk and stoned through London, Paris, and Edinburgh, and the other half was trapped in Disneyland, to spring their trap? Wait, who was running the ship back home? Of course it wasn't the English. They hadn't been able to muster a real plot for more than 150 years - it was the White Ward all along! Drones filling the sky! They swarm the stage, playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic on their tiny speakers, chasing the screaming actors through the sophisticated series of stage doors and secret passages that Shakespeare had once used to weave his magic. The laughing audience does not understand. Drones? Hymns? Outrageous, what next?  The drones focus high intensity strobe lights on the audience, transmitting signal bursts at a blink rate syncopated with the refresh screen rate of the human nervous system, a technique proven by years of research to send the human brain into a semi trance state similar to REM stage sleep. The crowd stops laughing and begin to hum the Battle Hymn in a horrible chorus while Dr Hagenstein in one incredibly fluid motion draws his secret pen weapon and fires a burst of micro toner particles into the nearest drone's forward flight controller module. The drone careens into the standing room section, awakening several screaming audience members with a fiery crash. The other drones orient quickly on the threat, but their strobes do not seem to affect Dr Hagenstein, why?

Flashback to a rustic cabin in a secluded wood where the unnamed master of uncomfortable motions used a blinking flashlight to insert a destroy light source program in Dr Hagenstein's subconscious and set it to activate upon trance inducement, losing several flashlights to Dr Hagenstein's trip wire reflexes and nodding his ancient grey haired head in satisfaction as the final flashlight exited his grip in several pieces, impelled by a lightning fast karate kick launched by his subject. End of flashback, Dr Hagenstein firing his secret pen weapon at drones...

Dr Hagenstein started awake just as his gigantic head swayed perilously forward, giving him a brief view of a man in a leather jacket waving a fish onstage. It had been close. He peered closely at the delicious candied almonds that the other agents had suspiciously offered to him. Sedatives? Or had he lost track of the plot again