Gilbert Guttlebocker,

Defender of Dragons

Preface

This is the story of Gilbert Guttlebocker.

What I mean to say is this is merely a story of Gilbert Guttlebocker. Certainly far more can and will be written about this amazing individual who, although perfectly average in every way, cannot be properly compared to anyone else. His adventures, which are really quite ordinary and uneventful affairs, venture far beyond the most extravagant of imaginations.

Guttlebocker has traveled to the far reaches of darkest Jefferson Avenue; valiantly fought and ultimately vanquished over seven itchy mosquito bites in a single month; and even swallowed whole, with one great gulp, an infamously scandalous piece of eggplant forced upon him by his wicked Aunt Thelma.

But in addition to these gallant acts, pioneering explorations, and spectacular feats of strength, our hero has a much more mundane side. His life, like all of ours, has been littered with innumerable simple, bland things that would often get overlooked in most biographies, such as the slow and tired afternoon he joined the Scandinavian cannibals for lunch; or the humdrum time when his teleportation device transported him inside himself; or even the particularly uneventful day when he discovered he was the only person left on earth after a global nuclear holocaust.

Dear reader, I hope that even though I shall endeavor to cover these dull events, and others like them, with the same depth and detail as the more exciting ones (such as that fateful morning when one of his blackest socks had fallen far below an acceptable level of comfort and needed to be raised by well over an inch; or that memorable occasion when he deftly twiddled his thumbs, all alone, for a full two-and-a-half minutes) that you will nonetheless not grow tired of hearing about this truly noteworthy and astoundingly normal boy.

This particular narrative is the story of when our young hero, Gilbert Guttlebocker, reached that age at which all brave, well-behaved, and intelligent boys from Connecticut are sent by their parents to the lush, forested caverns of distant Siberia, to study to become knights under the wisest mentors in the land, the dragons.

Under dragon tutelage, every Connecticutioner studies in great depth the formidable subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with the other mainstays of a classical, well-rounded education in chivalry, namely, jousting, sword fighting, and, of course, dragon-slaying.