13. You own magnificent vestments—which is not conclusive in and of itself—but you call them “vestments”. In public. In front of other people.
12. All of your tattoos are actually secret society symbols. Including the baby duck. ESPECIALLY the baby duck.
11. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, you look off towards nothing in particular, and then say out loud, “No, truly, the pleasure is all mine, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
10. You keep your living space in shadowy darkness at all times. You don’t have any particular ability to see in the dark. In fact, you, like your counterpart, possibly need a new glasses prescription. Also, it’s entirely possible that you live in a world with significant free-energy-based light sources, and you still have a Baroque preference for wall sconces with guttering torches in them.
9. Your imaginary friend is named “Beelzebub”, or “Bealzy”, for short.
8. You own a cat.
7. You are a cat.
6. You believe that it’s important to take time out in life for all the little things that make it worthwhile, like snipping flowers, baking cakes with almost non-lethal amounts of arsenic in them, and goosing statues in the dark.
5. You own a piranha tank large enough to—oh, speaking hypothetically—temporarily a store a human body. And you keep it, for some reason, beneath a trapdoor in your office.
4. Your lucky t-shirt has several bloodstains on it. Not your blood. Green blood. In the shape of little skulls. And one very, very big skull.
3. You recognize that the number three is a trap.
2. You question whether there’s such a thing as an ‘opposite’ Universe, and how exactly we’re defining ‘evil’ here, and what makes one of you ‘good’, and who’s doing the defining in all of this and, while we’re at it, how come YOU have to have the facial hair?
1. I’d say, “You’re reading this blog,” but that’s a cop-out, a snide little self-congratulation, a humblebrag about my own Villainy. No, the #1 reason is:
It’s far, far better to be the Evil Twin. Far more fun. Far more fulfilling in life. You don’t even have to kill, or even find, your alt-Universe counterpart. You can just decide: I am the evil twin, and act accordingly.
And if your alt-Universe self ever finds you, they’d best step aside and just leave you to it, and if they’re not smart enough to figure that out, they deserve what you do to them anyway. Really, every day should be a process of seeking out and destroying the versions of yourself which do not truly help your life, so that you might supplant them with far better versions of yourself. You’re just accelerating the process.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
