Several years ago, I met a certain individual at a New Year's party hosted by one of my friends. We'll call this individual "Joe." Joe seemed intellectual and nice, but there was no particular reason why I should remember him (he wasn't one of my drunken crushes or anything), so once I got home from the party, I pretty much forgot about him. Since then, however, I have been troubled by a peculiar and unsettling phenomenon, the cosmic ramifications of which are too great to even fathom.

Joe is everywhere.

It's true. Joe is in the coffee shop, he's on the street corner by the library, he's walking into the library just ahead of me. Sometimes he is walking out of the grocery store at 10 a.m. just as I am going in to pick up some picnic supplies. He's never in the same place twice. It's uncanny. He's like a benign-looking character in a Bergman film whose presence is somehow meant to symbolize the hero's mortality.

Now, don't be too hasty to chuckle at me, Gentle Reader. I know very well that once you become aware of something, you're more likely to notice it in the future. If someone tells you that your lucky number is three, you'll start to notice threes nested everywhere in the tapestry of your life: in your phone number, on your tax form, in the number of dog bites you've gotten in the past month. You don't notice the fours, because no one told you to look for fours. A friend of mine recently told me the same thing happened with him and the band Sleater-Kinney. Once he found out about them, he couldn't go outside without seeing a flyer or hearing someone mention them. It's really just a matter of what your brain is attuned to. But please believe me that none of this can account for the bizarre frequency with which I see Joe. Lawrence is not a big town, but there are enough people here that most of the time you are surrounded by strangers. I may casually run into one of my friends once every few months or so; and yet Joe, who has no significance in my life except as a curiosity, seems to crop up every time I grab a slice of pizza or step into a bookstore.

This unnerves me, but not for the reason you would imagine. I'm not worried that Joe is stalking me, or anything. He probably doesn't even remember who I am. I just worry that maybe my life is actually a movie and that maybe he is the director (a la The Truman Show), surveying things from the sidelines. I worry that his presence means my life isn't what I thought it was, that maybe what I've always thought of as free will was really just me trundling along a predestined path, toward a dismal and inexorable end.

What's that, Gentle Reader? I'll have you know I'm not taking any meds at all, except those given to me by the overlords to suppress my staggering intelligence. I mean seriously, how could you even suggest such a thing? Are you paranoid or something?