So there's this guy in "American Gods," Czernobog - a curmudgeonly old immigrant with rounded shoulders, dark features and eyebrows like a cat's whiskers* - who coincidentally is an eastern-european god of winter, darkness and death.**
Sounds potentially creepy, I know, but like most gods in the book, he's portrayed in a more neutral light -just a dude*** struggling to get by and make sense of his life in an ever changing world.
(As I continue to write this, I realize the challenge of this next part -but- here goes...)
Kinda reminds me of me.
(blink, blink)
Yeah, not so much in the hitting-things-in-the-head-and-eviscerating-them sort of a way (read the footnotes, dude).
More like an aging-with-grim-determination-as-I-try-to-redefine-myself-in-this-shifting-landscape sorta way.
But the part I haven't gotten to yet, is where Czernobog is actually two guys at once. Kinda sorta.
'Cause when spring comes (and spring can mean so many things) Czernobog morphs into Bielobog, his estranged brother, and becomes...
The god of spring,
light
and life.
Maybe even redemption.
So that's the crux of it really - how this dark, aging curmudgeon, transforms into something lighter and... regenerative.
And the darkness ever waits it's turn.
But for now, I"ll dance in the light.
*At least that's how I remember him in my minds eye, Horatio! :)
**Who not so coincidentally made his living after coming over as a "knocker," the guy at a slaughterhouse who hits cattle in the head with a sledgehammer, just before they get cut up into little pieces.
***"Dude" here, incidentally, can be interchanged with either "guy" or "person" and is meant in the universal sense, regardless of sex, creed or color. And deity status.
