A True Enough His/HerStory, Book 1, Section 1, draft 1 ...

A True Enough His/HerStory, Book 1, Section 1, draft 1 ...
One day, at about midday, I woke, bathed, breakfasted, donned a blue-themed outfit, and lit another cigarette.
'Out! Out! Brief Candles! Such fleeting moments of apparent enlightenment!'
And so it was that in a smokey haze, I found myself in a somewhat vaguely abstracted state, as if recalling bardic'ly confuzed lines that had almost actually passed between some him-and-her/her-and-him at some indefinite time.
'How much do you love me?'
'There's beggary in the love that can be measured!'
'I die to be loved so imprecisely!'
'Then you die for someone more adept at co'kmanship than myself, dear lady! You should have died hereafter, there would have been time for ...'
At this point I broke off from a travesy of MsMelodrama's diverting attempts to make a tragic mockery of my comedy, and attempted a return to romance.
Unfortunately, so voided had my inscape become, that romance proved impossible, and all too rapidly turned to rather dark-tinged lowly forms of irony/satire travestied from [as if?!] Lucian.
Said another: ''tis no matter!'
I almost agreed.
But then ....
On another day shortly after midday, I heard on the grapevine - or perhaps it was UncleBeeb's MrJeremiadVine show - that rumour had it that recruits were being sought among what sounded to me like 'ne'rdowells' for a futile-seeming quest on a SpaceTimeShip, to be known as TheSearchForTheFoolsParadise.
I thought myself more than a little well qualified to volunteer for this quest.
And so it was that, years later, having been-there-got-the-tee-shirt available exclusively - and for a bargain fee, VAT and P&P excluded - only on that quest, and getting on for one hour after midday one day, I re-read the following personal (b)log-entry: ...
Thursday 16 August 2007 (Eurocentric Dating System (EDS))
On this day, starting from an uncertain place at an, in fact, uncertain date from near the Pillars of Heracles, we sailed with a fair-to-middling wind into the Atlantic.
There we landed at a previously uncharted island peopled by tax-exiled offshore traders.
Shortly after landing we were greeted by a self-proclaimed financial market expert who cried: 'Beware! Beware! Here be bears! Here be bears!'
Thereupon MrDavidCoverdale, a tax-exiled Tyneside-born lead singer of the rock group sometimes known as Whitesnake, who had a hideaway on that island, appeared, as if from nowhere, and said: 'Fear not! Fear not! For I know how to dance bears into harmlessness - having recently, strangely but truly, had a real life invasion of such creatures into my house, albeit in another part of the world.'
And in such unlikely ways a day of surprizes on the island of tax-exiled offshore traders unfolded.
It has to be admitted that, whatever the truth of such interventions, the motives of our voyage remain uncertain.
A certain intellectual restlessness, a passion for novelty, a curiosity about the limits of the cosmic ocean and the beings who might dwell within - or even beyond - it. Perhaps such motives drive us on.
With a view to pressing on further into our formless quest, we delayed on the island to provision and water our spacetimeship on a generous scale.
This gave me the opportunity to review the crew which circumstances/chance had thrown me in with.
They seemed to be of mostly motley make-up, and, for this and other reasons, I had some sense of 'fellow-feeling'.
There was, for example, the ElvisCostello impersonator also known as MrDeclanMcMurphy, and others whose musical interests, as well as their years, roughly corresponded to/with my own.
A search of the stores we had brought with us revealed we were well provisioned with a good supply of vinyl records.
The playing of these items on a more often than not unstalbe spacetimeship brought a mix of melancholy and merriment, as well as much earnest discussion on the seemingly crucial issue of whether '70s and '80s rock music sounded more 'authentic' in the hissing and crackling medium of vinyul rekords and torntibles than in some digitally remastered form.
With such disorientating transition issues to deal with, we clearly needed some skilled and well-spoken navigators and link-people to guide us.
There was to be found on our mission control airwaves at least one fine navigation guide sometimes known as MsHalfEmptyHalfFullMonty.
She was misquoted in another today's log as saying: 'I am 69 and when I saw the man urinating in my rose garden I rushed out ... and to my surprize found myself pressganged into a lunatic spacetimeship enterprize ...' 
The navigation guide's first mate was sometimes known as MsPosh.CassGreen.
She was misquoted in the same log as saying: 'And next up my channel is that shuddder-in-my-loins MrWillyClinton.'
The log then recorded this verbatim statement: 'MrWillyClinton: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman! - whose moniker is MsPosh.CassGreen."'
With scenes involving such potential steamy-seeming-scene-stealing-semenators to be incorporated, it was clear that our spacetimeship required an imaginative upgrade ... perhaps into a some sort of slappyhappyslippysloppysloop-like vessel ... ecstatically and otherwise(E)specially strengthened for some long and arduous passages, with baggage allowances made for fuckers, suckers, friggers, wankers, allsortsofsocalledsodomites, to say nothing of other mild perversities, and needlesstosay diversely allowed-for distorts of consentual adult play-making/mating.
In the new improved vessel of our wildest dreams we carried on, for at least another day and night.
We were carried quite quietly along as if on a soft breeze, while the crew were mostly distracted by self-and-other-indulgent pursuits.
'Well ... with a void seemingly before and after us there seems bugger all else to do,' one crew member was heard to tartly observe.
I was almost inclined to agree.
But then ...
As if to frustrate further the forementioned types of fore-and-after-play, on the next day's dawn, the previously soft stellar winds rose to a harsh tempest.
Caught up in this heavy cosmic turbulence, with inexplicable dark materials and inscrutable particle-wave ripples in the background, we found ourselves unable to control our vessel.
And so we surrendered ourselves to the elements ... let the ship run ... and were storm-driven for more than eleven weeks ...
On the eightieth day a sun came out quite suddenly and surprizingly, and we found ourselves close to a lofty wooded island, round which the waves were murmuring gently, the storm having almost fallen by this time.
We brought her to land, disembarked, and, to recover from our long tossingly turbulent voyagings, lay a considerable time idle on shore.
At last we made an attempt at a fresh start.
Some previously attention-demanding impetuous teens or twenties numbers of crewmates fled the womb of the spacetimeship to pursue their own courses.
This left the maturer-seeming remaining rest of us with more freetime to fill.
So ...
Leaving a thirty-or-forty-something of our number slumbering in drugged/drunken states, pretending they were guarding the ship, a soberer fifty-or-sixty-or-something of our party set off on a tour of inspection of the mysterious island.
We had advanced about half-a-mile/a-kilometer inland through woods, when we came upon a brazen phallic-shaped pillar, inscribed in characters that seemed like Greek to to most of us, but which however were worn and dim and difficult to decipher.
A classically educated former public school boy/girl disclaimed:'It most truly and absolutely surely reads: "Heracles and Dionysus reached this point"'
Those of us more comprehensively educated expressed some scepticism.
Not far off from the pillars there were two footprints on rock-forms.
One footprint might have been an acre in area, the other being smaller.
The classical scholar conjectured that the latter was Dionysus's, and the other Heracles's.
A wag who had spent schooldays at the back of the classroom retorted: 'You mean BigDick and LittleDick!'
We did obeisance, according to bent, with laughter or disdain, to these observations and proceeded.
Before we had gone far - would you believe it? - but we found ourselves falling into a river which ran wine-filled.
It flowed full and copious, and might have been navigable in parts, had we not all got rather rapidly drunk on the free bounty it offered us.

This river of wine, the classicist maintained, was sure evidence of Dionysus's sojourn in these necks of the woods.
It was just as surely sufficient evidence to convince others in our party that the inscription on the pillar was an authentic indicator of TheArgumentForDesign.
The rest of us were too pissed on the free wine to care much about such speculations.
The following day, in a hugely hungover state, we took some painkillers and resolved to find the source of the wine river.
We followed the river up, and discovered, instead of an expected fountain, an unexpected lake.
Signs around the lake read in a dozen or more IndoEuropean language systems: 'Produce of the European Union - if you journey here from one of the union's disadvantaged economic zones, you are entitled to help yourselves.'
This proved an offer that could not be refused by most of our party.
Nearby were planted a number of huge vines covered with grapes.
From the root of each there issued a trickle of perfectly clear wine, the joining of which made the river.
It was well stocked with great fish, which a trade expert assured us were of the species known as 'CashCowedOpportunity', usually abbreviated to 'C.O.D.'.
They resembled wine both in colour and taste.
Catching and eating some, we at once found ourselves intoxicated.
When we sobered up, some biologists in our group dissected the fish and found them full of wine-lees.
While this biological investigation was taking place, it occurred to some of the  more temperate members of our party to mix these C.O.D.winefish with more ordinary seawater Haddock - more ordinary cod being in short supply in those parts as in others because of overfishing - thus diluting the strength of the spirituous food.
Well fishily fed and wined/watered we now crossed the river by a ford, and came to more vines of a most extraordinary kind.
Out of the ground came a thick well-grown stem; but the upper part was a woman, complete from the loins upward.
They appeared like a deranged artist's representations of a wanton lady in the act of turning into a tree just as a libertine enters her.
Perhaps for this reason it occurred to a deranged tabloid journalist present in our company to name this newly discovered vine PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy.
From the finger-tips of PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy sprang vine twigs, all loaded with grapes; the hair of their heads was tendrils, leaves, and grape-clusters.
They greeted us and welcomed our approach, talking in slurred forms of all the languages of Earth.
The PeteyKateyFlappyFlippyFloppyDohurtyMossy plant-forms went so far as to kiss us on the mouth - and whoever was kissed staggered like a drunk.
But the plantforms would not permit us to pluck their fruit, meeting any attempt to do so with cries of pain.
Some of them made further amorous advances; and one of my comrades who yielded to these solicitations found it impossible to extricate himmself again from their embraces - man-became-one-with-plantform, striking root, fingers turned to vine twigs, tendrils grew all round, and embryo grape-clusters were soon to be witnessed.
Seeing no alternative, we reluctantly left the man-plantform there in metamorphized state and hurried back to the ship, where we told our tales to the druggies and drunkards who had remained there, including the tale of our friend's experiments in viticulture.
'I saw it all without going with you,' replied one unimpressed psychaedelic experimentor.
The others expressed varying degrees of interest, incredulity and/or indifference.
Then, after taking some casks ashore and filling them with wine and water, we bivouacked on the sand for one final beach-party blowout on this intoxicating island.
Next morning we set off before a gentle breeze.
About midday, when we were out of sight of the island, a vortex suddenly came upon us, which swept the ship round and up to a height of some three hundred and fifty Earth miles above any form of solid ground.
She did not fall back into the usually mostly predictable cosmicoceanmedium, but was held suspended aloft in a unfamiliar reality randomizing medium, and at the same time carried along by a stellarwind which struck and filled the sails.
For a whole week we pursued hair-raising courses in these totally unpredictable state(s), consuming all our stocks of the wine to sooth our nerves.
On the eighth day we spotted a potential landfall.
It was an island with vapour for sea, glistening, spherical, and bathed in light.
We reached it, cast a relieved anchor, and landed.
Inspection soon showed that it was inhabited and cultivated.
In the daytime nothing could be discerned outside of it; but night revealed many neighbouring islands, some larger and some smaller than ours.
There was also another land below us containing cities, rivers, seas, forests, and mountains.
This we concluded, tentatively, to be the Earth, from which some said we had intially set out on a date sometimes recorded as Thursday 16 August 2007 (EDS).