You ever meet someone who looks like yourself? I don't mean when you are walking down 72nd Street and you pass John Tuturro, and he does a double take at you, which you can only imagine is because he thinks you look like him. Which you do, a little, but not all that much.

The point is last night I was out on the beach at a bonfire, which is what goes on in San Francisco at night. And it was pretty nice, with the ocean crashing, and when you look down the beach, which was about five miles of straight beach, there were a line of fires stretching into what looked like infinity, even though it was only about twenty fires or so, since a lot of people make fires on Sunday nights on the beach, apparently.

But I'm there, and there are about ten people eating crackers and cheese and drinking wine and making small talk. And out of the corner of my eye, I am watching some hippy type women noodle dancing at the water's edge, thinking to myself that they are probably on drugs, since it is kind of cold out when you aren't near the fire. And I notice this guy with them, who sort of looks like me, or at least what I looked like about fifteen years ago.

Then the me character jumped in the ocean. This is shocking for two reasons. One, he is fully dressed. Two, the air is cold, cold enough that I had on a coat and hat, sitting by a big fire, and it was still cold. Three, the water is freezing in the ocean and almost no one goes in without a wetsuit.

So when he got out of the water, I took pity on him and offered for him to come over by the fire. And he was warming himself up, kind of rubbing sand on his wet clothes, which was also kind of a crazy drug induced thing to do. His ears had two big holes, and he explained that he had used a leather punch to cut out the holes, which were about the size of m&ms. He did it sober, or so he said. He also had a big lumpy circle scar on his forearm, which he said he did to himself by heating a pipe up until it was red hot and touching it to himself. He wanted a circle, but then it got infected and grew a big lump of scar tissue.

Which was repulsive and fascinating. But more to the theme here, this guy was making me think that if only I had been insane, I might have wound up like this guy. The comparison was mostly driven by the physical similarity I saw between us.