Harbinger of the Apocalypse perhaps?

Lately a lot of strangers have told me that I look familiar. They ask me if I know them. They ask me two or three times. People I've never seen in my entire life.

The last occurrence was just yesterday. A young man walked slowly past me, the entire time staring me in the face. He didn't even blink.

It happens a lot.

Sometimes when I'm out at a bar, it'll happen a couple of times a night. It happens more in the city, a city I don't live in.

I guess I just have one of those faces. That's my response every time, only to cover up the fact that I don't know what to say.

I can't help but shake the feeling that there is another me out there somewhere meeting all these people and having all this fun. My more fun, more charming doppleganger. Me in the bizzarro universe. Maybe I'm really my shadow, stretching and deforming over the landscape behind me as I walk perfectly into the sunset.

That's ridiculous though. It sounds like something someone who majored in philosophy would say. Their failing grasp to use a very expensive and worthless degree.

When I was little I used to think my life was being broadcast on TV, on some channel I never saw or wasn't allowed to see. This is long before The Truman Show or even the Twilight Zone episode The Truman Show ripped off. Anyways, I'd always think I was being watched and I'd never want to slip up or look stupid because then everyone would know. I felt like weird things would only happen because they were supposed to. Maybe this was just a very uneducated belief in God.

I think most kids who grew up in the TV generation think like this. It's a false sense of notoriety. It makes you feel like you matter. Like you're not just living and nobody cares.

It's all scripted, this is supposed to happen. This is just the episode where Dad takes me to a bar and I sit and watch him drink all day. This is the episode where I do math homework and feel stupid and not good enough.

It's not really happening if it's not happening to you.

Maybe the reason people think they know me is just this residual faux-fame from back then, when I thought I was on TV. The once child star, now has-been of my subconscious.

Maybe it's the internet. Maybe these strangers have seen me on myspace or stumbled onto my website. Maybe that's it. Honestly though, the numbers just don't add up. Nobody goes to those pages.

But these people, they never tell me where they think they met me and I never ask. They simply feel I should know them. As if my face is familiar to them and they can't explain why.

Searching my memory banks for anything only brings up cobwebs in forgotten corners. Sorry people -- it's not that I don't know you -- it's that I never knew you.

You've been drinking and you have me mixed up with someone else.