the double
A fellow Oregonian sends congrats for what he perceived as my victory in a recent street scuffle:
I saw y'all fighting. You kicked that dude's ass...after he started some trouble that he could not finish.
He provided some other details, and I was obviously not the street hooligan he saw thrashing some poor drunkard's hide. I haven't been violent with anyone in...well, let's just say a LONG TIME. Except for a couple trips out of state, I haven't even been out of the house to socialize in months. But this incident involved someone who LOOKED like me so much that someone sent me an e-mail assuming it was me.
And that's what creeps my already pale flesh. To some degree or another, everyone has heard a form of the doppelgänger myth—that we all have a double somewhere—and I sense that many of us believe it. One version says that we all encounter our double shortly before we die. Dostoevsky's early novel The Double, where a meek Nowhere Man's life is gradually annexed by his doppelgänger, is a bottomless bummer.
Now some understudy of mine is out committing crimes. I feel like beating him up.
