Odd

I'd like to meet:

“My story began on a Tuesday. For you, that is the day after Monday...” click here

“Stormy Llewellyn, a woman of unconventional views...” click here

“In addition to the lingering spirits of the dead, I see one other kind of supernatural entity. I call them bodachs...” click here

MY NAME IS ODD THOMAS, though in this age when fame is the altar at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist.

I am not a celebrity. I am not the child of a celebrity. I have never been married to, never been abused by, and never provided a kidney for transplantation into any celebrity. Furthermore, I have no desire to be a celebrity.

In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.

Now, I am twenty-one years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I'm old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless. I lead an unusual life.

By this I do not mean that my life is better than yours. I'm sure that your life is filled with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and abiding fear as anyone could wish. Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.

I mean only that my life is not typical. Peculiar things happen to me that don't happen to other people with regularity, if ever.

I see dead people, spirits of the departed who, each for his own reason, will not move on from this world. Some are drawn to me for justice, if they were murdered, or for comfort, or for companionship; others seek me out for motives that I cannot always understand. This complicates my life.

I am not asking for your sympathy. We all have our problems, and yours seem as important to you as mine seem to me.

Perhaps you have a ninety-minute commute every morning, on freeways clogged with traffic, your progress hampered by impatient and incompetent motorists, some of them angry specimens with middle fingers muscular from frequent use. Imagine, however, how much more stressful your morning might be if in the passenger seat was a young man with a ghastly ax wound in his head and if in the backseat an elderly woman, strangled by her husband, sat pop-eyed and purple-faced.

The dead don't talk. I don't know why. Perhaps they know things about death that the living are not permitted to learn from them.

I see them and wish I did not. I cherish life too much to turn the dead away, however, for they deserve my compassion by virtue of having suffered in this world. I am a companion to the living dead who sometimes come to me for justice.

Nevertheless, an entourage of the recently dead is disconcerting and generally not conducive to an upbeat mood.
STATUS: Single
ORIENTATION: Straight
HERE FOR: Friends
HOME TOWN: Pico Mundo, CA

I’D LIKE TO MEET:
God. But not immediately.

INTERESTS:
Staying alive, perfecting my homefries.
MUSIC:
The Decembrists, Death Cab for Cutie, Elvis, Franz Ferdinand, Sinatra, Gregorian chants, swing, zydeco, and anything by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.

MOVIES:
Spider Man 1 & 2, The Terminator, Philadelphia Story, Aliens, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Bringing Up Baby, The Sixth Sense.

BOOKS:
A TALE OF TWO CITIES by Charles Dickens – This is a serious novel of politics and revolution but is also darkly comic in places. Dickens does not shrink from the depiction of evil, and some scenes are horrific, but he also tells a story of redemption and self-sacrifice and hope that some (never me!) would consider almost sentimental.

THE MOVIEGOER and LOVE IN THE RUINS by Walker Percy -- I am drawn to writers who believe in timeless virtues, who have a tragic sense of the human condition but remain hopeful.

THE ABOLITION OF MAN by C.S. Lewis – The society that Lewis foresaw, arising from the “intellectual” elite’s contempt for such virtues as courage and honor and selflessness, is the crumbling civilization we now inhabit.

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF T.S. ELIOT – He demands much of the reader, but no other poetry so richly rewards close reading, repeated reading, and contemplation.

THE BUSY BODY, THE FUGITIVE PIGEON, and THE SPY IN THE OINTMENT by Donald E. Westlake -- These are among the funniest suspense novels ever written.

THE COLOR OF LIGHT by William Goldman - This is one of the most dead-on portraits of a writer's struggle ever written, and it's hugely entertaining.

THE DREAMING JEWELS by Theodore Sturgeon -- This science -fiction novel has more stunning ideas packed into a couple of hundred pages than some authors' entire bodies of work, delivered in a limpid yet magical prose.

TELEVISION:
24, House, Ghost Whisperer, The Office

HEROES:
Ozzie Boone, Stormy Llewellyn, Chief Wyatt Porter, Dean Koontz

ODD QUOTES:
“I’m seldom afraid of the dead. Mostly, it’s the living who scare me.”

“I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning. As does death.”

“”When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.

“Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

FAVORITE QUOTES:
In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.
-- T.S. Eliot

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