I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and out… - Harlan Ellison

You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the fucking game.

Griffin stood silently, watching the waterfall, sensing more than he saw, understanding more than even his senses could tell him. This was, indeed, the Heaven of his dreams, a place to spend the rest of forever, with the wind and the water and the world another place, another level of sensing, another bad dream conjured many long times before. This was reality, an only reality for a man whose existence had been not quite bad, merely insufficient, tenable but hardly enriching. For a man who had lived a life of not quite enough, this was all there ever could be of goodness and brilliance and light. Griffin moved toward the falls. The darkness grew darker.

Gods can do anything. They fear nothing: they are gods. There is one rule, one Seal of Solomon that can confound a god, and to which all gods pay service, to the letter: when belief in a god dies, the god dies.