A Passage from American Gods

I was recently chewed up and spit out by my culminating project book in the most sensual way possible. In other words, I stayed up into the late hours of the night just reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman and have yet to fix my sleeping schedule. 

 

It's almost as bad as the cruel clutch of the internet.

Over and over I have been amazed by Gaiman’s ability to create a relatable main character and, if you can’t relate to him, relatable side characters. What impressed me the most about the following passage is that this character, after 394-ish pages, has only appeared 3 different times. It was only until this tie that I realized how much I liked Sam, but I will explain that after you read the passage. No background is needed, and I’d also like to mention that there are a few mature statements in the passage, but nothing too graphic. So, without further ado, here is Sam’s monologue.

“I,” she told him, “can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.”

“Really?”

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe in things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe people are perfectible, that knowledge in infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on the 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 of drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that it’s better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink in the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that anti-bacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we will all be wiped out by the common cold like the 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 a thousand years in a former life I was a one-armed Serbian 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 bumblebee 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 universal 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 go hang out with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims they know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe it’s 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.” She stopped, out of breath.

Now, I’ve always considered myself not exactly a completely opinionated person, but more so a person who likes to play Devil’s Advocate. I don’t usually have real opinions of all, but you can tell when I am serious about something. The reason I like Sam so much is that her beliefs contradict in such a way that makes her seems like a very open-minded person, much like myself. I also like how Gaiman mixes serious topics with absolutely ridiculous ones to make it almost satirical and constantly entertaining to read. 

So, yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed this because I really wanted to share it with you and give you a bit more of an insight on who I am. Now maybe you don’t think I’m a completely snarky, critical person. 

I also highly recommend this book for mature audiences who aren't bothered by sex, strong language, and violence. But, I mean, who wants to read anything without that?