here's what i liked, relyn...

so i told you i'm reading american gods. love it. love a myriad of things about it. but when i tripped through pages 394 and 395...i don't know...something. just. stuck.

a friend of mine always rewrites excellent writing. just to see how it feels...

"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 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 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 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 casual 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."

i could read this a thousand times, i think, and still feel a thousand fleeting bursts of some feeling that comes so fast i can't figure out which one it is. maybe it's faith. in myself, maybe. because i believe in pretty much everything, and this worries me. i look at someone like uncle sugar, who believes in very little. shockingly so, in fact. but the five or six things in which he does have faith? dead-certain. shockingly so.

it's one of my favorite things about him. when that guy believes, there's nothing like it in the world. you can trust it with all you've got. bet on it, pony up, double-down, shoot the moon, and take it to the bank. he is black or he is white, while i slide easily into silvery shadows.

i love this about me. but i hate it, too. i'd love nothing more than to be more certain. less precarious.

the best sort of writing, for me, is the kind that makes you hope for more or different or better or makes you simply wish to change. this made me want to start a list of my own. a list of my own beliefs, which will end up certainly uncertain. i'm certain. i'll share it with you if there's anything to share. promise.

could you write a list like this? sure and unsure and golden and as true as you know it? tell me if you have a minute, will you?

that's all, i think. plus lisa solberg's work. my favorite paintings are from set one. the second one, titled snow in the white, reminds me in the most brilliant ways possible of van gogh, don't you think? ok. xoxo. and have a sweet day.