I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

(Source: winter-knight, via longstory-short-deactivated2012)

If you enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods”, here are some recommendations I have for further reading!

If you want to read continue in the theme of old gods in America, try “From the Files of the Time Rangers” by Richard Bowes. If you want something in a more serious vein, try “Winter’s Tale” by Mark Helprin, a coming age story intertwined with America (specifically, New York City) and flavored with the fantastic. If you want more of Gaiman’s eloquent reflections on worship and deities, read “The Sandman” series or for more of the disjointed questing aspect, read Gaiman’s “Neverwhere”.

There’s also another in-universe novel “Anansi Boys” and a follow-up short story in Gaiman’s “Fragile Things”, both of which I’m excited to read! I’ll update my recommendations after finishing these.

Neil Gaiman is a storyteller. Not all writers are, but he is. He writes a particular type of magic, trickster magic, straight out from carnivals and shadows. Though he works in fantasy, he understands that magic! well magic is flashes and bangs and fireworks but the story is told in emotions and the relationships between two characters. His stories are more than just tales, they are truths about what it means to be human.

So yes, I deeply enjoyed American Gods. It was delightful.