One day, when I was at primary school, a special man came in to give a talk on sex education. I've forgotten all his awkwardly-imparted wisdom now, but I keenly remember asking a question that still boggles the mind today: "what happens if a human female 'has it off' with a male dog?" Readers, I'm sorry... My enquiry was couched very crudely, yes, but a longstanding interest in cryptozoology has never diminished the supreme relevance of this question. The question of creating an
animal / human hybrid is one everyone should be asking. Duplo and Nod Gods thrive on cryptozoological musings. But the question was scorned at the time. Even my obese classmate Danny Maddell damned me as idiotic for asking it...
To put that in context, this was a classmate who willfully misunderstood the word "playtime" - foisting the concept of self-pleasure onto the playground with his groundbreaking breaktime self-touching episodes that saw him slumped under a tree, intoning the name of
Streetfighter II's sole female character "Chun-Li" repeatedly whilst kneading his nascent chub, dribble-faced. Wretched, in hindsight. Whereas some may be content with reverie, I want to know the ins and outs of half-human half-animal hybrid possibilities. Could it happen? Certainly in more youthful days I would've happily given birth to such a thing myself, but of course now I'm not so flippant to potentially offend female colleagues (if any) with these kinds of proclamation.
Many of the Duplo sketches were imbued with the sense of a possible future. For me personally, I fully expected to be living under a techno-fascist regime by the year 2015. And I suppose this came true, given the present government. Yet within the mental researches of Duplo, possibilities were hatched whereby authoritarian regimes may be brought down. The key seemed to lay with the Nod Gods - lowly, naturally impedimented creatures whose circumstances excited sympathies so profound that one was obliged to will into existence solutions for their plight (at the expense of proper schoolwork): vehicles, slingshots and happy-go-lucky frameworks. Ennobled with inked amendments, those cryptozoological blighters could achieve anything (within the confines of their media). But how to bring them
out from ink and paper, and into reality?
First, to wrench the Nod Gods out from their extracurricular niche, I attempted to include them in schoolwork (
as stated previously). So this was (supposedly)
illegitimate work placed within
legitimate work: imposed schoolwork. Title pages for new syllabuses often featured the Nods embroiled in interdoodle warfare. Bizarrely, these nearly always excited the teachers' delight, as shown above and below here...
But... there was the one time that I was hauled before the Head of Department to explain why the topic "chemical reactions" required so many graphic decapitations. I couldn't answer the question at the time. Now I can:
read the whole of this blog for the answer.
The stride from thought-world into reality continued with the (
previously documented) extension into the virtual 3D world of computing. Various disoriented states of consciousness were also
conducive to the presence of Nods. Still, riffing on the idea of the dog/human hybrid, I wonder - although unethical - whether, ultimately, the conjunction of
human and
blobfish might bring *real* Nod Gods and their instrumentality in social revolution a step closer? My young teenage self would've been amazed that in 2015 no accessible facilities yet exist to breed new creatures.
 |
| A blobfish |
Ah nevertheless - I'm only too aware that we must be careful what we wish for. Unexpected developments have a habit of making our giddy appetites look error-addled. Why, just a few weeks ago a young man told me of his burgeoning interest in Satanism, only hours later to be bitten so unwelcomely by a drunk gay guy (so I'm told). [This incident also reminded me of the possibly apocryphal story of Aleister Crowley finding an eyelash in his food at a restaurant - he went mental.] So likewise, we may greatly esteem cryptozoological hullaballoo, yet when an idealised creature finally arrives in our midst, our doorstep, our living room, our kitchen and bathroom, and we are expected to tend to it, its dietary requirements, its idiosyncratic toilet habits, and we feel the social unease of having to cart the monstrosity around public arcades and shopping centres, etc., we may begin to quiver in apprehension. (That is not to say that I don't want to be bitten by a drunk gay guy - I do. No human has ever bitten me, and I wonder what it would feel like). So all in all, that's why Duplo exists - to moderate the interchanges between the thought-world and reality. As I write this, Halloween is in full jinks, and I stare at all the efforts of costume - vampires and human-werewolves and other amalgamated animalised miscellany - and thoughts revert to the innocence of my enquiry all those years ago at primary school, and hence this blog post.
