He's back, alright. It's now like he never left at all and I'm more terrified than ever after the messages I received today. The Femme Fatale and I were on the bus and I looked out the window and there he was, coming down Powell toward Geary at a mean clip.

I exclaimed, "Look- it's the Little Chinese Man!"
"Where?"
"Right there!"

Having fully descended into madness, I bounded from the bus onto the street, the Femme Fatale running behind me. He was moving quickly. "Hand me my crappy phone," I asked of her, which she had in her bag.

I got one off as he stood proudly surveying the street. He never even knew I was there. He's been shopping it looks like- another new jacket.

Yes, I realize I've crossed the line. Come undone. But what can one do with one's Double?

The Double, according to Sophie De Mijolla-Mellor,

 ... refers to a representation of the ego that can assume various forms (shadow, reflection, portrait, double, twin) ... as a narcissistic extension and guarantee of immortality, but which, with the withdrawal of narcissism, becomes a foreshadowing of death, a source of criticism and persecution.... It was Otto Rank who in his essay "On the Double" (1914) was the first to develop this idea in psychoanalysis. 

Today Anne Enigma boldly stated " the only thing scary about that guy is that he is wear a jacket trimmed in fun fur, circa 1991 Contempo Casuals."

But wait! The theme of the double is taken up by Freud and integrated in his concept of the uncanny.

"The 'uncanny' is that form of terror that leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar" but has become terrifying because it corresponds to something repressed that has returned. "The double," Freud wrote, "has become an image of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons."

Also today, a professor from UC Berkeley wrote to me elaborating on the Freudian aspect of my madness:

This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is found [to represent] castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.

He closed with:  "Now, John, liberated by understanding, you can advance into a glorious future."

What future?

Is this my future?:

The Little Chinese Man, my "Double," standing on the corner of Geary and Stockton this afternoon.