Kate Berlant has a recent standup comedy special on HBO where she says that she did a therapeutic magic mushrooms session with like a guide and she thought she was gonna peel back the layers of her ego and see who she really was while tripping but she ended up just talking about the TV show Succession for hours while crying.

Such a funny concept to be like, dang this is it? no hidden knowledge or epiphanies about enlightenment? Can’t even pretend that the weird shapes you saw in the bushes were significant messages from the cosmos?

This is pretty good as a joke, but imagine this as a horror story. Here you are hiking a notoriously remote and dangerous mountainside and you come around a bend to find a man casually waiting in your path. Dressed for the office, carrying an umbrella, wholly unequipped for this location but looking for all the world like he just showered, shaved, dressed, and walked to the bus stop on the corner. This clothes, his posture, his expression say nothing of the week long hike it took you to get here, he smells of freshly applied cologne. He glances at you with the benal expression of the Thursday office grind, too early to be excited about Friday, to late to really care about the events of the week, and steps slightly to the side and back as if making space to form a queue as he waits. If he recognizes you, he makes no expression of it, nor does he react to the look of terror you fail to hide when you see he is identical to you, not in the way that a mirror image is, but in that slightly wrong way that forward facing cameras flip the image.

Do you pass him, daring to get close enough to do so? Do you turn around and risk putting your back to this thing? Do you join yourself in queue? No answer truely seems appropriate.

Is this a deliberate reference to Stanley’s Parable?

If that was my true self, I’d be tempted to push them off.