american gods :: essays research papers

American Gods There was silence as they crossed the bridge."Who did kill those men?" she asked."You wouldnt hope me if I told you.""I would." She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a cabernet right now."Its not easy to believe.""I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.""Really?""I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that arent true and I can believe things where nobody knows if theyre true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and loony toons and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, 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 uniform wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I b elieve that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one solar day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyones ass. I believe that all men are just exceed 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 well all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the farthest 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 mankinds destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that its aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that theres a cat in a box someplace whos alive and dead at the same time (although if they dont ever open the box to feed it itll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.