Fritz the Improbable Prognosticator

I  dreamt I was a time traveler to the past
With nothing but modern money in my pockets
Thousands of dollars in worthless cotton based paper
Coins stamped with the wrong world leaders
Dates impossible for others to comprehend

So from an oriental carpeted room
On the fifth floor of an impossible brothel
I set up shop
As Fritz the Improbable Prognosticator!

With all my memory of history
Fed from grade school and high school
Community college
And Wikipedia since

I offered stock tips and sports bets
World events warnings
Natural disaster forecasts
Local election conjecture
And an editorial column in The Times

With a bowler hat and moleskin coat
I tried to grow penicillin in my bathroom
While dodging the bubonic plague
Skirting the mass graves
Being mocked for wearing a cotton mask near death
And washing my hands several times a day

Twice I was accused of being a witch
Once I hid from an inquisitor
Tripped up in a tavern with a modern turn of phrase
Forgetting myself
Trying to act out the local ways

Retreating at last to an isolated spot
Somewhere near a desert
In my mind a brown robed noble Ben Kenobi
But to the locals just another insane hermit
Writing upon scrolls and tablets in a language unknown to them
My story for my future self to find
For I was a time traveler with a major handicap
As only further into the past could I ever go