[ All credit to alan shapiro photography, whose lovely picture may be found here.]
“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
with anything of relative importance;
much less matters of life and death.
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.”
[ Neil Gaiman – American Gods ]