I had
Chinese for lunch and my fortune cookie told me “this is a wonderful time in
your life to look inward for answers”. Now I’ve taken advice from snack foods
before. A cinnamon roll told me once it was my lucky day and I should play the
lottery. 227 losing tickets later I couldn’t pay my rent but Mrs. Henrietta
Lautenschlager von Urm had an oversized check written out for $151 million so
she and her pug dog Wellsley could move into a mansion with carpeting on the
ceiling (Mrs. Von Urm was a bit of an iconoclast).
You’d
think I would have learned, but a few years later while eating a container of
caramel corn one of the kernels whispered to me that I should loosen up and
dance in the rain as if no one is watching. One lightning strike later I have a
titanium plate in my head that picks up FM98.7 The Cornstalk out of Demoines
every Thursday night during Moondog Murphy’s Six from the Sixties show. Really
Moondog? You have to play “I’m Henry the 8th”every week?
My point
is I have no reason to listen to this fortune cookie, but I’m a sucker for
words typed on rectangles of paper. I began my inward journey with the question:
Why? I’m not sure what answer I was expecting but I received a Jungian treatise
on the disingenuousness of my psyche that I would even ask that question. I
only understood about every fifth word and wondered why my soul was so much
smarter than me.
I decided to
press on and next asked: When? I girded myself for another lashing of words and
concepts I couldn’t grasp, instead receiving the answer “Thursday”.
By now I
was more confused than I am when I watch an old Italian-made Hercules movie. I
shouldn’t ask “why” and “when” is Thursday. What did it mean? I tried again and
asked: Are fortune cookies reliable forms of life philosophy?
The answer
came not from my inward machinery but from a chocolate chip cookie I was eating
at the time:
“Pour
yourself a glass of milk and stop trying to figure it all out you schmuck.”
I didn’t
think the “schmuck” comment was necessary but the milk was cold and the cookies
tasty. Maybe that’s all I need right now.
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