The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

        I awoke.
        A melodic burbling sound bubbled up and down the musical scale. Curious hoots and whistles frolicked together in my head. Or were they in my head? I rolled over.
        I was on a soft, springy surface of unknown origin. My cranium throbbed like a steel drum as I opened my eyes. I slammed them shut in denial, then opened them again.
        I couldn't believe what I saw. Egghead was in front of me, seated upon what appeared to be a large, semi-transparent bubble. Before him hovered a chessboard. Egghead pointed to a piece and it moved to another position. This elicited an excited squeal from whatever was seated across from him.
        I would like to kindly ask my tasteful and refined readers not to shut the book - or exit our fabulous website - at this point. Please put your disbelief into suspenders, and lean your ears this-a-way.
        Across from Egghead, on another bubble, sat a sort of spotted, multicolored sack. It had about eight long limber arms, or legs, or whatever. It burbled and hissed. It honked and whistled. It squirted puffs of yellow smoke out of tiny portholes that spanned its circumference like vents on a Day-Glo bagpipe.
        It was a bona fide alien critter, as wild and weirdly wooly as any alien could be. It smelled like a landfill after a rain.
        At this point, a familiar voice spoke out of the thick bluish haze.
        "Artificial rainbows showered us with opaque bags of natural gas," rapped a familiar guitar maniac. "Egghead has caught a tubular brainwave of radiomatic radiations, and can dig or grasp the strange and effervescent speechly improvs. This is way far out, man... even for me." It was Zeb, of course. Nobody could adlib free verse or rip off a quatrain of Redneckish Nanometer like the ol' Zebaroo.
        Egghead turned around and looked at me, lifting his brows questioningly.
        "Are you finally awake?" he asked.
        "I reckon," I blurted. "Who's your friend?"
        "His name is Bill," said Egghead.
        "He looks like a neon garbage bag," I informed him.
        Egghead's buddy Bill lit up with a wild, florescent green glow. His body spun with several swift revolutions like a psychedelic globe. Puffs of red and blue smoke shot off in different directions as he droned and hooted like an electronic music composition.
        "He says you're uglier than he is," translated Egghead.
        "What are we doing here?" I asked the Abdominable Egg-man.
        "They had a breakdown in their thought generator. Because they could generate no motivating factor with which to concatenate a logical course, they took their vessel off autopilot and hunted me down.
        "Why you?" I wondered aloud with my own gobular mouth.
        "Who else in this quadrant of the galaxy is qualified to engage in Eureka-driven engine repair?" he asked me.
        I stroked my chin soberly, pretending that I was capable of mooing an intelligent reply. To maintain the illusion of intelligence, I kept my mouth shut.
        "Far out," said Zeb.
        "Hey, man, let's get out of this burg," I blurted, looking around at the whited oval contours of the spaceship's interior. "Let's am-scray… fly the coop… shake off the dust of this ship."
        "Cop a groove, baby," instructed Zeb. "Chill out into a mellow Jell-O bowl of cruising laidback vibes. Let peace like a waving frond sway gently over the sun-warmed beaches in the fair far outback of your mind." Hearing his comments, I began to wonder if perhaps Zeb was not quite as normal as the rest of us.
        "They want to entertain us, Hooter," added Egghead. "We're their guests of honor." A loud burble punctuated his remark.
        The side of the spaceship opened, revealing the starry, starry night. The dusky wilderness was at least a mile below us. I fielded a glimpse of a faint, glimmering speck of light on the earth far below. It must have been our campfire.
        A well-lit stage appeared and floated into the darkly benighted sky as out from a flexible porthole plopped our friend, the garbage bag. He floated over to the stage.
        I couldn't believe it. Perched upon his squishy spineless torso was a shiny top hat! In one of his tendrils he held a fancy black cane. He had just begun to spin and puff, glowing in different florescent hues, when suddenly a similar critter was spewed out of the porthole. This new critter was hitting a geometrically-shaped crystalline object that he held in his tendril.
        Music enveloped us.
        "Shine fire!" I exclaimed.
        "Floating squishbags can jam," said Zeb.
        Suddenly Zeb and I looked at each other. We both had the same thought at the same time. We grabbed the two similar crystalline objects that hung on the wall beside us.
        We began to jam. Heavy country riffs soared out into the starlit sky.
        "Pop!" went the porthole, "Pop! Pop! Pop!" Like newborn guppies, several smaller garbage bags squirped out of the porthole and floated into our section of the ship. Some had on cowboy hats, while others sported red lipstick. They began to tap the floor in rhythm to our music, hovering above it as they spun, whistled, and hooted. They were having a hoedown!
        "Possum in a gum tree, Zeb," I cried, "we're having us a frolick!" I began to clog, dancing the buck stomp while the garbage bags spun and tooted around me in a bizarre frenetic frenzy, unleashing untold volumes of noxious gas as they danced as if their lives depended upon it. It was great!
        "Blurple glaze, all in my brain," sang Zeb, "hip blips, honking space refrains."
        Suddenly my head jarred painfully. Light shot outward in fiery splinters. I tried to focus my eyes.
        Gravity pulled at me heavily from behind; I moved my head, and the pain jolted me again. I heard frogs and smelled smoke from a fire.
        I was lying flat on my back. I opened my eyes and beheld the concerned faces of my fellow band members and the scraggly puss of Zeb Hendrix.
        They were all gathered around me, gazing down upon my supine form. A Coleman lantern cast harsh light upon the scene; I was stretched out upon the grass, looking up at them in bewildered wonder. A rolled-up sleeping bag cushioned my aching head, and a Nowhere County sheriff's deputy stood in the background.
        "You guys are a sight to make eyes sore," I said.
        "Hooray!" they hollered, effectively clubbing my cranium with a painfully intense blast of unwanted sound.
        "He'll be all right," said the deputy, "I'll see you boys later." I turned my throbbing head and watched as he walked down to the bank of the Little Flipper and paddled away in an inflatable dinghy.
        "What happened?" I asked, sitting up painfully. My head pounded like the inside of a kettle drum; I touched my swollen temple and winced.
        "You were hit by a grappling hook trailing from a Nowhere County Sheriff's Department helicopter," said Egghead. "They had a false report that somebody was lost on the lake."
        I looked upwards into the deep purple sky. Multitudinous clusters of twinkling stars were strewn extravagantly across the unmeasured reaches of space.
        Soon the lantern had been turned off, and we were ready to fall asleep beneath the stars. The fire flickered softly as the translucent rivers of flame flashed intermittently across the burning coals.
        As I gazed upward into the majestic void, strange and colorful memories floated through my mind. The chess game, the garbage bags, the geometric guitars, the alien hoedown.... these fantastic events really hadn't occurred after all. Or had they? I looked around in the dark at my buddies, lying on cots around the fire. It was good to be here.
        A faint hum seemed to suffuse the tranquil scene with energy. The chopper was droning away into the night, leaving us with a sweet and drowsy silence that liquidly enveloped the strange and beautiful wilds.
        The clear, melodious hoot of a hunting owl sounded in the woods. Far away, almost beyond the limits of our hearing, a sound like a woman's scream reverberated through the darkened wilderness. It was a panther.
        "Far out," said Zeb softly. The fire popped and hissed quietly while a distant owl answered our closer one. Saying grateful prayers, I sweetly savored the sights and sounds of the untrammeled wilderness.
        Then, breathing a sigh of pleasure, I fell asleep.