Not really.

I have printouts of a blog that I have always assumed that I wrote for the year 2005, and then for the years 2009 and 2010, and finally for the first few months of 2011, when they seem to have stopped. Sometime last week, when I finished the book I was reading, I decided my next book would be my 2009 blog. I have now read through about half of it.

But guess what? I don’t think I wrote it!! Who did?

It’s true that it was written by someone with my name, by someone who lived (and worked) in Washington DC, by someone whose wife had the same name as mine has. But it’s also true that it was written by a very busy person, who went to the theater a lot, saw many films, read books, went to museums, at out at restaurants. Did all sorts of things. The kind of things that I do now, and probably did much more of in 2009.

But I don’t remember most of the things or places he was writing about. For this reason, I must conclude that he is not me. But he is someone who shares some of my interests and, not surprisingly, now and then he does write about something that I remember. So, once in a while, we must have been in the same places at the same time.

Yesterday, for example, I read that he had watched a film called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which won the Golden Globe best foreign film award, about a young man who was totally paralyzed by a stroke, except that he could blink one of his eyelids, and that his mind was unaffected by his stroke. It was a unique and frightening story. If I had watched that film, I am sure I would have remembered it.
He also listed ten restaurants he had recently eaten in, and he rated them. I guess because we live in the same city, I have eaten in most of them, but he ate at a few that I have never set foot in. For example, he ate at Shangri La in Bethesda (he liked it a lot), and he ate at Baldwin Station in Sykesville MD (I am sure that I have never eaten there, and I don’t know that I have ever been in Sykesville MD) where he had fish and chips. Does that sound like me?

And can you imagine me sitting on the lawn at Strathmore Hall listening to a jazz concert by a Latin group called Calle Sur? I can’t.

But in fact it’s worse. Some of his entries don’t talk about things he did in 2009, but about memories from his past, when he was much younger. I remember virtually everything he says in these posts. This means, I think, that not only has he stolen my name and so forth to report on his current 2009 escapades, but that he has actually stolen my earlier life. Or to put it another way, I guess, he has stolen my earlier memories.

I wish I had known about this guy earlier. I would have sent him a Cease and Desist letter, to force him to stop publishing all of this false information about the 2009 me, and to stop publishing true information about my deep past, without first getting my permission.

It’s all rather disturbing, don’t you think??