I took a little detour this morning, on account of the planned painting of the Arthur Fiedler Footbridge, which was supposed to start at eight.

I passed the bridge shortly before nine and there was nothing going on, but whatever. My scenic detour took me through some of the little side streets of Beacon Hill, and as I was cycling down one particularly narrow one, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was a car slowly—you might even say menacingly—tailing me.

Thinking he wanted to get by but couldn't I pulled over to let him. He continued to advance very slowly and as he passed he leaned towards his passenger-side window, sort of squinted at me, and said: "Hi, Steve."

I can't say exactly why this annoyed me. Is it just automatically annoying to be mistaken for someone else? Does it offend our sense of utter uniqueness? It probably depends on who you're mistaken for. I don't mind if you mistake me for Eric Bana, for example. But Steve? I don't know. I'd have to see Steve myself to know for sure.

And then there's the whole, like, feeling guilty that you're not Steve thing you have to deal with. You don't want the other guy to feel like an idiot for mistaking you for Steve, but it's not your fault he's an idiot for mistaking you for Steve, so why should you care?

I knew a guy in college who would occasionally get laid by just shouting out random names in public places. The weirdest one that worked was "Nigel!" There happened to be a Nigel within ear shot, and he came right over. We are slaves to our names, aren't we? My friend Theo just started chatting him up. They've been together now for going on twelve years. Don't underestimate the power of mistaken identity.

I don't think that was the guy this morning's game, though.

The thing of it was, here I'd sort of broken my stride—I was in The Zone, you know—and it was just starting to rain, to boot. I wasn't far from where I needed to be and wanted to get there before I got soaked. And that's probably why I found this whole scene way more annoying than it should have been.

And because I wanted to get out of the rain as fast as I could, I felt like he was not just detaining me with an understandable enough error, but actually oppressing me with his idiocy.

I was like, "dude, I'm sorry.  I'm not Steve."

He was like, "Are you sure?"

People.

I said, "Yeah, pretty sure, but do you have his number?"

Because, it suddenly occurred to me that Steve might be just the man I've been searching for all along!

Although I hope his legs aren't as skinny as mine.

So Steve, if you're reading this, and your legs aren't as skinny as mine, drop me a line!