Series 1, Episode 44: The Story Of Gretchen

One day, not so long ago, I was simply walking across my living room, when a thought hit me and stuck in my head that there was a wealthy elderly man sitting in his den playing a video board game that he had invented. The board game was somewhat magical and most complex. I stopped in my tracks and thought deeper. I realized that he was a God like figure and the board game was us, here on Planet Earth. We were the result of his invention. That was about it. I smiled and moved on across the room. 

But the notion stuck with me. I laughed at the thought and wrote it down on a slip of paper: Living In My Video Game.

Perhaps several years later, here is the result of that pause in life.

Theater of the Imagination is presented by Watchfire Music https://watchfiremusic.com/

Transcript

Peter Link 0:08

Welcome to Scattershot Symphony, the music of Peter Link. It's me. Hey y'all. This week being the forty-fourth episode of this podcast, I prefer to let the music do the talking. However, if you need to know more about me, please visit wikipedia.com, Peter Link. This episode is entitled The Story of Gretchen Living in My Video Game. Long ago and far away, on the planet of Zebulon, lived a being named Gretchen. Gretchen Ixfrokanja Palosticu. That's as close as the English language can get to the Zebulonic pronunciation of her name. Surprisingly, Gretchen is an English word that lies somewhere in the vicinity of the Zebulon pronunciation. I say lies in the vicinity because the word is more like a crackle of the gums and an added touch of German and Martian. To you humans, Gretchen's singing on the song called Living in My Video Game sounds more like an earthen male. But if you think her voice sounds low for a female, well you should hear the Zebulon males' voices in their subcontrabass substratum well below twenty hertz guttural. Gretchen is what you earthlings might call a tinkerer. Highly intelligent, she loves the concept of invention, and coming up with Rubicscubule structures and pognoms, often the size of the Empire State Building. Her father scoffs at her inventions. She has no equivalent to an earthen mother on Zebulon because males morph into females at age 209. Though their calendar has nothing to do with yours. So don't even begin to try to figure that out. The actual planet Zebulon is actually a total wasteland, but houses an alternate reality that is over four million Earth years old. The actual planet caught fire and burned approximately 400 million Zebulese years ago. But who's counting? Suffice it to say that the Zebules reached a kind of intellectual perfection just 365 years ago. This is a body of beings who have no problems whatsoever. They all live flawless lives of purity, constant triumph and magnificence, and of course boredom. Gretchen, in all her spare time, turns to invention in order to tolerate her Zebule's perfection of emptiness. Of course, Zebulon is a kingdom of board games. Or board games. Board games, get it? Board games? Yeah, anyway, with nothing to do but smile, its beings turn to imagination as their savior. Unfortunately, imagination on Zebulon is illegal. If caught as chastisement, another three hundred Zebules years of perfection are added to their lives. So, Gretchen creates her mad inventions hidden away in what we might call her fungus attic, hidden away from the ever-searching tentacles of the Zebulese eye watch. Her latest is her favorite invention, and also her most favorite board game. Saving Planet Earth. That is the subject of our gathering today. Come with us now as we travel across space and time, past galaxies of the living and the transpired, through the black holes and white light of a zillion stars, to the outlying regions and radio wave ticklings of the exosphere, deep down to the bottom of our cardboard box. Entitled Gretchen's Latest Invention. A work in progress, an exploration of miniature beings saving Planet Earth, the board game. We Zebules just love long titles. We leave no stone unturned. Consequently, they're all just perfect. So, in order to escape the scrutinizing and downright nosy eyes of the authorities, Gretchen works her inventions in worlds of quarks and leptons, in diminutive miniaturization. This way, when not playing or inventing, she can hide her illegal doings cardboard box in the thread like filaments of the eukaryotic cells of fungus that line the walls of her invention workshop. Still with me? Good. Most Zebulese beings who are even in the slightest bit familiar with Gretchen consider her simply kinda shy. A neighbor once called her Gretchen the Introvert Wallflower. Of course, the translation into Zebulanese is a bit more derogatory than it sounds in English, because the Zebulanese don't have tongues. By the way, not having a tongue, as you can well imagine, presented for Gretchen a tremendous problem in translating the human's English into Zebulanese. Words like filibuster or zigzag or even Zebulon for that matter, were nearly impossible to pronounce without a tongue. For the average Zebuloner. Try it yourself. But but maybe not right now. And of course, translations into French, German, and Swahili, not to mention Mandarin, each took an extraordinary amount of time to create. However, she had the most fun creating all the sounds of various animals, bird calls, and insects, not to mention whales and minnows. It took her an entire Zebulon week to create the language of flies and the ugly garble of roaches. At the end of that week, she had to take three smoochows and a dogger roll before she moved on to the hippopotamuses. Or was it hippopotami? There were times when she even had to Enufrau. Um that's a Zebulon word for to punt, before she moved on to inventing each species nest. At this point you are probably wondering how in the world she could ever possibly invent something like music, especially jazz. The fact of the matter is that after one very long and frustrating Zebulon afternoon, she gave up and decided to give the humans the imagination to each create their own music. As it turned out, she was delighted at the variations that these humans came up with over time. Some of her favorite human inventors were Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, John Lennon, and of course Indonesian Gamelan. She was also fascinated with the idea that the humans from their very beginnings loved to paint pictures of themselves on cave walls, the skins of animals, things called billboards, and eventually even these moving things called televisions. Some of these humans were quite good at this in their attempts to leave reflections of themselves to posterity. Most of them didn't even come close to Zebulon perfection, of course. Then they invented these things called mirrors, and that seemed to work better for especially the female humans who often would stand and look at their mirror, fascinated for what seemed like centuries. She considers writing a book about her adventures, but finally realized that no Zebulon nor Earthling would ever care enough to go through the trouble of reading it. Here are some of Gretchen's early random blueprint notes, the building blocks and creative ideas of her most secret invention. One, give the humans of Earth many different languages. This will make the Earthen experience much more difficult, though dramatic, in their ability to communicate. Two, they have these little funny things on the side of their heads called ears, because they use them to ear with Wow. Three, make Earth round and constantly turning, heated by a star. What a novel idea. Four, give Earth giant pools of H two O to bathe in, so that we do not have that odorous stink problem. Five, consider where the H two O comes from. Perhaps water comes out of their eyeballs when they are sad. Marvelous. As you can see here, not all of Gretchen's early ideas were developed to fruition, but you can see traces of a start. It could also be just a problem of translation. Actually, translating Zebulonese to English is often a problem. Believe me, I know I am her editor. six give the humans reproductive systems that are enjoyable even when they are not multiplying. seven somehow endow them with the universal language of music. eight give them the ability to think for themselves. Beware of this, watch over it daily. If mishandled can result in nothing but trouble. Nine give them the ability to remember the past, but not know the future. This she realized was a brilliantly creative idea. ten give them the impediment of hatred and the gift of love. This, of course, should be paramount in creating great drama. And one bonus extra. Give them poverty when they misbehave. Oops, nearly forgot. Number eleven. Consider that you might want to create two games, one for Zebulon beings to play, and the other for earthling humans. Yeah. She's gone way out on a limb here. By the way, that's a human expression. Going out on a limb. And she's given these beings the ability to think for themselves. I know, that's dangerous. But they are such little tiny things that I can't imagine they could do much harm to the universe. Most beings that have that thinking ability will ultimately get in some form of trouble. And so far they have done as expected, but fortunately the damage has only been perpetrated on themselves. Gretchen really enjoys watching them trying to figure it all out. They are clever and range greatly from good thinkers to terrible thinkers. Example, conquering the world for many, seems to be more important to them than living happily ever after. It's fascinating to her to see how long it will take them to figure that out. Of course, we here on Zebulon figured that out nearly 500 years ago. So, periodically, she just kind of swoops in and saves them. Gretchen once told me, quote, once upon a time, some of them built a wall between two what they call countries to keep other human beings that they did not like out. I had to laugh. They never learn that when you do that, the people that are out want to get in even more, and will actually give up their lives sometimes that even others might get in. That all took place in a place called Berlin. Or is it pronounced Berlin? I don't know. But it made such a mess that finally she said, quote, I simply took the wall down, and then everybody got back to living more peacefully. For a while. They didn't know the old Zebulon expression, the higher you build the wall, the more they want to get in. She goes on to say, also, then occasionally I simply start the game all over and give things a fresh start. I sometimes just get bored watching them fight each other. For what? A little this and a little that silly really. That too is a Zebulon expression. We learned that five hundred years ago. Silly really. On rare occasions, one of our beings gets a little loopy and out of line. But we take care of that pretty quickly. Gretchen says, what those earthlings are really good at is making a mess of things. But for some reason, I find them fascinating and have fallen in love with the act of just watching them go through life. They are really harmless to nothing in the universe except themselves. I can't imagine them ever being a danger to the universe. However, sometimes I think what have I done? As shy as Gretchen seems to be, she actually is quite talented. She has developed her exopluterus in such a way that she can sing and perform Zebulon songs with the ability to harmonize, and within the music itself, to create up to 37 channels of independent sound all at the same time. She is what the earth humans might call a one-man band, even though at this point in her life she is not a male. I'm not sure that her music would go over big here in Zebulon. But who knows, it might just work for some on planet Earth. Have I enlivened your curiosity? If you would like me to continue, I have a rendering of her latest efforts and would be most happy to play it for you. There might be a tiny delay in that we are over 300 million light years away. I can probably send you this to listen to through the new black hole transmorgifying system that will only require a few moments to arrive. The wonder of modern science. However, you might have to do what the humans call turn it up. I suspect they are speaking of what they call the volume. For those interested, here it comes. Count to three, and it will begin. Remember? Turn it up. One, two, three. Correct to four seven eight three nine or two sixty-six twenty-four thirty-one three planet first. I don't know. Take a walk. I'll leave it again. So I can come back later to a raid to stay okay. Just the time to give the game in my video game. And I'll be able to bring the most in the end called human industry. Yep, street is so how I love my microscope, yes, magnificent legend the being so wondrous It's human And yet so full of flash And so I felt Think Contemplate Hunger It's content Sometimes to my shit I think Think Perhaps to the world Start the game all the way Android How I come a world that became How about a ship relieve them to their own devices And watch them from their own world And screw it all up If they only knew what I know That's what's so frustrating When it's all right there In that thing they call the books But very few human Very seldom pay attention to me The master of the game The architect of the mainframe And the engineer of the tiniest of deteriors of the human The agility of the tongue the pancreas The egg This thing call Yes We're all living in a video game We're all living in a video Cancata and maintain I'm the players I built this little world So I could watch them treat the music compassion Perfect As the humans run around stopping to game All the while one round is baby after the flame For all the trouble they try to talk to me Oh free to me Walk three to me Yeah maybe I'm amazed at the differences of their attitude Yes it's a case of patience and fortitude I got to persevere But oh how I love my humans Oh I left them run a bit amazing strength before the technology in the game ontology The one responsibility The result of many of my passion Attention To the best and found the music out of my mind I may be flat all how I love my humans and their feeble butterings and their triumphs And this thing that they all call humor a strange When they all accomplish it then they all together smile and make a noise call laugh delightful Yes oh how I love these curious but inexplicable humans challenging my powers They fascinate my house and captivate my being all the same No I don't know what I'd do without them Or hear from the Vilama Life can be in just a fiddle The monotony of perfection can oftentimes get quite tedious And I find myself gone to the endless drama of my human Love the top and trancing Why I may the birthday dancing Low humans Lose curious complex humans Living in my video game Yeah yeah yeah yeah We're all living in my video game cocktail by me play it one I am From Debula From Debula Fourth Galaxy from the right time like you I play the game of ontology Just on the Up time I get bored Stop beat myself Just the do stop play I'll leave in the game to play it back later to a break of eight Just the time to be the game adapting to play in the world with the video game Hello I love my human bow I let them run a month baby charge amazing training for Jimmy I don't really absolutely no life on the very radio signal coming from below the owner recorded and when they play this word forty four story for his masterful mastering of the song living in my video game and I'm alone for his fabulous rendering of Greg's wondrous board game in a cardboard box a game also please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and to keep abreast of the latest episode you can subscribe to Scattershot Symphony from your podcast app of choice and thanks to Watchfire Music and the entire staff for all your work in producing and promoting this podcast a very special thanks also to Stuart Barefoot our associate producer for all your invaluable knowledge and great vibes and lastly a posthumous thanks to Ludwig von Beethoven for your opening four bars this podcast is presented with loving care by the staff at Watchfire Music. If you liked what you heard we got lots more where that came from in the meantime you can find the songs you just heard on WatchfireMusic.com forward slash podcast there you can purchase the singles or albums and have access to all the lyrics also there you will find all previous podcasts and future scheduling if you just became a Scattershot fan tell your friends and stay tuned