I finish my talk at the Pine Plains Library on strange Christmas myths, a talk I created years in part to sell my anthology of Christmas stories, though I don't believe the two thing have ever correlated. The people who come to my talks and those who by my books rarely overlap, because people don't go to free talks with the intention of opening their wallets for any reason. I am willing to speak to them without charge, what value can my words truly have. (I see no reason to tell them that I am getting paid for this, but partly from the kindness of the library director, who is a charming friend of mine.)

A woman, one of the five people who spent an hour of their Saturday with me, approaches me as I am packing up the laptop on which I have my cherished slide show. I am reminded of my paternal grandmother -- a sweet smile, white hair, round glasses -- and so I am favorably disposed to her and greet her happily, thanking her for coming to my talk.

"Why are you so weird?" she immediately asks in reply.

I think she means this as a joke, not a jibe, and I take it in that spirit, telling her that I was always like this and decided fantasy novels and panels are the best way to launder it into acceptability.

She does not find this satisfying, perhaps wishing instead that I had suffered some childhood trauma or brain injury.

I don't rightly know why I am this way. Other children admire the pantheon of dinosaurs and do not graduate to degrees in paleontology, though that is a far more justifiable discipline than theorizing that Aleister Crowley's acolytes opened a portal as a side effect (or off-label use) of the Babalon Working that culminated in the crash at Roswell, breaking reality and allowing more of the uncanny through -- something I do not believe, but have no issue putting in the mouths of my characters as conjecture or fact.

I tell people regularly that, from the moment I could read, I snatched paranormal books off the top shelf to the left of my elementary library's door. I read a great lot else -- even things I ought not to have -- but I returned to these staples as long as I attended that school. When book fairs visited, they never left without a few of my dollars for a book on ghost hunting or UFO sightings. I don't know what turned my head, but it was maybe the notion of a global mystery potentially in my power to uncover. Maybe I was frightened as a child -- my parents let my brothers and I watch horror movies sooner than many parents would (for which I do not begrudge them in the least as I also think it made me fearless in situations where it is not advantageous; how can you worry about bullies when you have conquered Cenobites?) -- and learning about the bumps in the night helped. I can only speculate because that early portion of my memory is nothing but a narrative haze from which I can pull only a couple of concrete reconstructions of things that probably happened, more or less.

I acknowledge that I am eccentric in a way that may not be flattering, though I am also a content expert in something I find curious and fun, something most people find interesting for an hour at a time. I do not take most of this seriously, but I do have a deeper knowledge of the rhythms of this contemporary mythology than almost anyone. If I were not weird, I would not be able to give talks equating Santa Claus to Odin or weave ten conspiracy theories into one book, and wouldn't the world be poorer for the lack of it?

I don't know that I am that unusual, except that I am open about it and have made it performative. The X-Files and much of the History Channel's latter-day programming could not exist if my interests did not intersect with the mainstream. And I have cringed behind my smile when knitting grandmothers have by consensus assured me we were in the midst of a reptilian invasion; there are weirder people out there less open about it until provoked.

I have no grand mysteries to solve any longer, though I dig up smaller ones, more explicable ones, then show them off as a child might a scrounged quartz crystal. I feel a charge smirking through slide shows about haunted ax murders, and no one seems to be stopping me any time soon, so let me be acclaimed for being weird. Let old women ask me the why of it in greeting.

Soon in Xenology: 38.

last watched: Angel: The Series
reading: The Art of Asking
listening: Starkids