Doppelgänger

... there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable:
I simply am not there"...

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During a lapse of almost three years from 2004 till late 2006 I coexisted with my shadow. It was at first, a creation of mine, spawn out of boredom, idleness and despair. I was sitting comfortable in my swanky office at the top floor of Club Otto Zutz in Barcelona when I first had the thought of it. In the beginning, he was to be the character of a novel I never finished - though the manuscripts still remain - and eventually he rose to a status where I was becoming a victim of my own ruse.
My alter ego, Christian was increasingly taking pre-eminence in my daily life and even my dreamworld. It felt as if he were a twin brother, who certainly had a life of his own, his own relations and a very well crafted persona. He eventually vanished, leaving those who had met him confused and saddened.
This is an homage to the existence of my twin, hope he can live somewhere across the globe, happily ever after. He, who fancied himself a bit of a Shelley, crafted these words

Suggested tea choice for today is plain English, the sort that is round and goes right in the kettle.

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This is the winter of our discontent, in Shakespearean words I note that it is I who cannot bear a single thought of this existence. The vagueness of thought, the disappearance of the tantalizing moments, which make life worthwhile in exchange for the tiredness of the soul, has drained me all contempt I had for life as it was.
The dreamlike imagination I so much helped grow since my childhood seems to be fading; there is war between perception and the realms of the mind. Which is stronger? Which is finer?
Looking at my back pages I realize youth is like a bird fleeing the warm heart of a home, a home which disappears at some point, becoming a lost Arcadia where we long to return though we cannot. I fathom this is the very point of life, a race where the point of no return becomes the realization that only the start mattered, that there is no winning this race without losing yourself in the course of it.
I have dreamed and longed of so many Utopias, I have fancied myself so beautiful and sublime in my pretty syllogisms, just to become the shadow of what I was, when I thought I knew the point of the race. When I imagined I might even win.
Only now it becomes obvious that the very point of the race is to keep the soul oblivious and distracted from reality. But what is reality? Is it tangible form and matter, is it thought or is it feeling and perception?
You may roam centuries dwelling in these conceptions, attempt to find illumination from better minds, but in the end you’ll come to the pointless realization of the futility of it all. We are but pawns in somebody’s game; as the little mice imagine their little lab mazes to be their world, never noticing the white coat gazing down at them.

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Prometheus Unbound
1820
Percy Blysse Shelley

"Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dear child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more...."