elephant – My Surreal Sketchbook of Reality

The Breadandbutterfly – a 100 word story

The Breadandbutterfly is a rare species indeed. It only comes out at certain times a day, the shy little creature. The lighting has to be just right and the air has to be at just about the right temperature. The Breadandbutterfly would only eat the very rare Goldenmonkey Fruit and it would only eat it if it’s just about ripe enough. If you are on the hunt for The Breadandbutterfly, you’ll have to observe all of those conditions precisely, wear the right camouflage, carry the right scented perfume, but most of all, you’ll have to go through the looking glass.

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 28, The Right Scented Perfume

It appears we have five senses, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting, all there to help us experience the world around us. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at senses. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical, and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about senses. Sight is the most obvious window to the world around us. We generally see in colors and shapes. Our brain get those as images through the windows of our two eyes. Our brain doesn’t handle those images as a whole though. Instead, it breaks those images apart, storing different parts in different places, then reassembling them for us, interpreting them as a whole. In that way, the image we finally get is not the real image of the world around us but merely our own interpretation of that image.

Sound is the result of the movement of air. Air moves in waves, not unlike the waves of the ocean. Those waves have singular shapes and speeds. The speed of the movement of air is also known as frequency. Faster moving air has a higher frequency and sounds higher pitched, while slower moving air would have a lower frequency and pitch. The shape of the wave would shape the timbre of a sound. A soundwave with a completely random shape would create white noise while a smoother shaped soundwave would create a smoother, more coherent sound. A triangular soundwave would create a sharper sound timbre. A combination of those waves and shapes create all the sounds we hear in our world. The sounds we intake through our ears are merely the interpretation of our brain for the movement of air around us. I think I’m going to listen to air move around me for a while. I’ll be right back.

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Sky Frog – a 100 word story

A frog dropped from the sky. Not a rain of frogs. Just a single frog. Not something to make conspiracy theories about. It did surprise the frog though. It didn’t expect to drop out of the sky. It was just sitting on a cloud, then it was plummeting towards the earth at top speed. It tried to comprehend what was happening, but it was only a frog. The end was inevitable. Frogs are very soft while the ground tends to be quite hard. As the elephant watched in horror from the cloud, it couldn’t help thinking “I could be next.”

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Welcome back. While sight and sound are about experiencing the world around you from a distance, touch is about proximity, it’s about being close, about being intimate with the world around you. Touch is the feeling of something touching your very own coating, your skin. The feeling of touch is caused by something moving the atoms on your skin, so touch is actually a sense of movement, the movement of your very own body, caused by some external, and sometimes even internal force. Touch is the sense that casts down the barrier between you and the world around you which is why it is considered the most intimate of senses.

Smell and taste are connected, almost dependent on each other. While touch is about connecting with the world around you, smell and taste are about taking the world in. Smell is there to sample the world around you from a safe distance, inhaling aromas and letting your brain decode them as smells, while taste is there to appreciate the part of the world that goes into your body in order to sustain it, and it is not complete without a sense of smell to complement it.

Your five senses are there to help you appreciate the world around you. Some people would tell you of a sixth sense, a mystical sense that goes beyond the five senses, beyond the world we know. They misunderstand the role our senses have. Our senses are there to help us understand the world around us, not to invent new worlds. That is the role of imagination, and that is where the sixth sense resides. This concludes episode 28 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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The Tenant – a 100 word story

The landlord opened his mouth and closed it in a fish like fashion. A sound came out of his lips, not unlike the merger of a washing machine and a tardis. Finally, he came back to his senses and said “The sign outside this apartment strictly states ‘no pets allowed.’” I smiled and simply said, “this is not a pet.” “Oh yeh?” he retorted, now growing a little agitated “then what is it?” “Why – it’s an elephant” I stated. “And what do you need an elephant for?” he asked, angry and exasperated. “That’s easy,” I said, “to hide the giraffe.”

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Hi there and thanks for stopping by. I’m Guy, and you’re listening to my surreal sketchbook of reality.

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Episode 10, A Fish Like Fashion

Science tells us that time is a fourth dimension. This episode Is a semi-philosophical look at time. I’m not a professional philosopher by any means and my approach can be quite absurd, illogical and not at all that serious, so – you’ve been warned. Do not take this podcast too seriously. If you tend to take things too seriously, this might not be the podcast for you. Seriously. I mean it. Find another podcast to listen to.

You’re still here? Good. Let’s talk about the scientific aspect of time called the speed of time. Time is actually perceived in different speeds. The speed in which you perceive time is influenced by your own speed in relation to your environment, as well as the mass of your environment, or rather the mass of the materials your environment is made of, including the mass of the planet you are currently standing on. You are standing on a planet I hope. Anyway, if you leave your planet, the speed of time relative to that of you and your planet start to change and your personal time, in fact, speed a little as opposed to the time of your planet. The reason that happens is that the further you get from your planet, the influence of you planet’s mass lessens. You yourself wouldn’t be able to perceive that change since your personal time would run at the same speed, but for anyone standing on the planet you would, in theory, appear a little slower though the discrepancy is so small it would probably be unnoticeable. This discrepancy in the speed of time can be measured and in fact, it has been measured using atomic clocks.

Your own speed also influences the time flow as perceived by you and your environment. If you go really fast and I mean really, really fast, your time would slow relative to the time outside of speeding you. From your perspective, you would appear to be going at a normal speed. For everyone else, you would appear to slow down considerably. Time is funny that way. Speaking of time, it’s time for a break. I’ll be right back.

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Mustache – a 100 word story

They say I’m a compulsive mustache painter. I was banned from most of the art establishments when I was much younger. I have a court junction, preventing me from getting within a three hundred mile radius of any art shop. When the long playing records started appearing, many of those famous musician faces got decorated before they caught me. That’s when I started doing actual faces. They say Salvador Dali never recovered from what I did to him, went completely and utterly insane, but it was after Stalin that I was finally put away. My inmates all have whiskers now.

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Welcome back. Orienting yourself inside the time continuum can be difficult. You can make this simpler by measuring time. We do that by breaking time into regular pieces. We call those pieces hours, minutes and seconds. Time itself is a flow and does not really break, so those pieces are an illusion, put there by us to make time more manageable. We use those measurements to predict and sometimes influence the time things happen.

Time seems to flow in a single direction from one minute to the next one, things happen one after the other, or at least that’s how we perceive them. The truth might be more complicated. Using particle accelerators, scientists found out that some particles can actually go backward in time. Those particles are much smaller than actual atoms, so this is something that happens on a very small scale. We apparently can’t go back in time ourselves, though if we would be able to find a way to make lots of those particles go back in time at the same time, who knows? For now, we would have to accept that we are trapped in time, flowing at a certain speed in one direction. This concludes episode 10 of this podcast. Close the door on your way out and don’t forget – I’m just a figment of your imagination.

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