I have to admit that I'm on the eccentric side. You know how frozen French fires look before you put them in the oven? I used to like eating one while they were still frozen! I used to rub orange peels on my face. And I have exactly 24 shirts that I wear in a regular cycle.
Some of my biggest heroes are eccentrics. Like Mahatma Gandhi, who was a first-class kook even by India's liberal standards. And there was Queen Desideria of Sweden. She started out as Desiree Clary, daughter of a Marseilles silk merchant, became one of Napoleon's many lovers, then married a French general, Marshal Bernadotte, who was chosen as the next King of Sweden. There's a Hollywood movie about her, Desiree, with Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando. But the movie barely mentions how kooky she was: she liked to visit the opera house after the performance was over, and take her carriage out for long nighttime rides. And she'd invite kids in off the street and give them candy. ("Come, come" was about the only Swedish word she knew!)
For some reason, you get a lot of eccentrics in frontier societies, like Johnny Appleseed and Emperor Norton of San Francisco. And British Columbia in the late 19th century had a politician who took the name Amor de Cosmos, meaning "love of the universe."
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