studiosixty

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe 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 Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis 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 like wrinkledy 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 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 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 bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in the 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 that 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."

—

So I reread Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, or rather, read the Tenth Anniversary Edition, which is the “Authors Preferred Text” with something like 12,000 more words and other things. I read the original book in 2001, sometime, I think, and it immediately became one of my favorite books of all time, and when I bought the 10th Anniversary Edition last year, I planned to re-read it immediately then, but, like 98% of the books I buy it went onto a stack of books I planned to read immediately when I bought them, a stack that grows and moves and never shrinks, no matter how many books I read, for I’m always buying books and always reading books but never reading enough and always buying too many.

In any event, there’s a profound joy rereading something you love. You always take away something new (that was always there) while remembering why you loved it to begin with. It’s like a second first kiss, the first kiss after the first kiss, the one where you aren’t thinking about the neuroses involved with kissing someone and you’re nervous if you’re going to like it or they’re going to like it or if there are implications involved or if you should even kiss them again.

I reread Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself To Live every once in awhile, sometimes just the same chapters over and over, but usually the whole thing, and there’s a lot of similarities between Killing Yourself to Live and American Gods, now that I think about it.

Both are essentially road trips across America, and both deal with the fascination that comes with immortality post death, and the figures we worship in America, and the relationships we seek and the relationships we make and relationships we end and the relationships we never find.

For American Gods, it’s the Gods and gods that societies brought with them to America over the last thousand years, gods that have been forgotten and gods that have been created and gods that have floundered and gods that have prospered. Gods seeking to remain gods through any means necessary; gods who kill themselves to live.

And in Killing Yourself to Live, Chuck examines the rock and roll stars who gained immortality only after they died, in plane crashes and overdoses, through drownings and motorcycle accidents, via murder and suicide; Americans who lived like gods and whom died and whom we continue to worship.

Also, both deal with a central protagonist who is tortured by the women in his life, is saved by the women in his life, is betrayed and is forgotten and is troubled by the women he surrounds himself with. Shadow in American Gods has his wife, has Bast, has Sam Black Crow, has the goddesses who give him the moon and who steal his heart, who bring him back to life and whom kill him. Chuck has the girl he loves and the other girl he loves and the girl he used to love, he has his editor and he has his muse, and he has the pop goddesses whom he listens to as he drives.

One of those books is a true story and the other one is just true.

But, anyways, rereading American Gods, rereading anything you love, is one of the greatest joys there is. You already know you’re going to like it, but then you’re always astonished how much you love it.

Escapism is a wonderful thing, books are the gateways to the impossible, and great ones are both rare and all too common.

It’s always good to live in someone elses head, to dream someone elses dreams, if only for a few hundred pages every now and then.