Viciously Malled
Hand in hand with my wife we strolled into a mall. Yes, this is a classic tale of horror.
We’d both spent time in our youth visiting this mall, which shall remain nameless. (Let’s be coy and say that it’s a little “square.”) We thought it would be interesting to visit it again.
We were insane.
I won’t say exactly how long it had been since my last visit, since that would date me, but it was approximately four score and seven years. Here’s to presidents that speak in code!
We circumvented the grounds but could not glean how to gain entry to the mall innards. So, we parked at one end and hacked our way through JC Penney. My tracking skills told me this would get us inside.
I was right!
Yanking my baby hard, I immediately veered left. As required by mall penal code, we pulled up at Mrs. Fields for some chocolate cookies a.k.a. “mall fuel.”
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Fortune has smiled on me
“Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.”
–Ambrose Bierce
Wow. Are things going my way now or what?
First, my wife took me to a Chinese restaurant for dinner last night. After voluntarily moving to a small town, the Chinese food here leaves a lot to be desired. The locals will enthusiastically tell you how good a place is, but when you go there it never turns out well. I can only assume these recommendations are based on the fact the person has never been outside of city limits and has never had real Chinese. Continue reading →
The boss who ated my cookie
Image source: Wikipedia
It’s time for another lesson to be learned courtesy of the Unfortunate Cookie (TM).
The boss was in the mood for Chinese and he treated the office to lunch. That’s nice. After lunch, I broke my cookie open and extracted my fortune. Something diverted my attention from the table and I turned away for the briefest of moments…
I turned back.
What the hell?!? Where was my cookie?
Naturally I played it subtle and cool.
“Where the hell is my cookie,” I demanded.
The boss looked stunned. “You wanted that?”
I tried in vain to conceal a look that screamed idiot! “Yeah, I wanted that. It was my cookie.”
“Sorry,” he said. “One you leave the table it’s open season.”
Bullshit!
“Just for the record,” I said, “it works like this. I always eat my fortune cookie. Always! For that matter, unless I say different, every bit of food that’s mine always remains mine until if and when I say otherwise. You got that?”
The boss remained the opposite of contrite. “Well,” he shrugged. “I guess we know the rules now.”
Who the fuck knew you needed a goddamn rule to protect your own damn food? Of course, this is the same guy who gulped down my grape juice because, and I quote, he “didn’t know who it belonged to.” And when I say gulped, yeah, right from the fucking bottle. I still shudder to this day when I think about how I poured myself a glass of his dribblins after that. I didn’t find out until it was too late!
Aaeeiieeeiiiieeeee! I think I begin to understand what the place where suicide bombers go to get their motivation must be like.
Luckily I had already snatched my fortune from my cookie before it was destined to re-enact a scene from Twenty Thousand Leagues Below the Sea or else it would have ended up in the bastard’s belly. He’s not exactly discriminating.
Life is a series of choices. Today yours are good ones.
–Fortune Cookie
Oh God. Another math fortune.
Let’s say I live to be 50 years old. (A long shot, I know.) That would be about 18,250 days. Now, according to my good friend the cookie, on one (and only one) of those days I’ll somehow make “good” choices. In other words, I’m smart about .005 percent of the time.
Will that one day of “good” choices be enough to turn things around? Hardly. No doubt they’ll be just enough to show me what I’m missing out on and drastically increase my misery.
About the only choice I made that day was not strangling my boss for eating my cookie, and I’m not so sure that was a good decision.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, cookie. Now that I think about it I’m glad you got what you deserved! Enjoy your reincarnation ride. Spoiler alert: You end up as boss poop.
Unfortunate Cookie
Image courtesy of orangachang (Flickr)
I used to think that fortune cookies were merely lies, or worse.
Now I suspect that they tell the truth, only in ways we don’t suspect. Clever.
Let’s use the one I received last night as an example. At the end of the meal a tray containing two fortune cookies was placed between my wife and myself. As usual, I indicated she could make the selection. “Go ahead and choose my fate,” I said. “Just like you always do.”
“But which will you choose?” I pressed on. “Will you take the cookie which is closest, perhaps the easiest, most expected route? Or will you reach farther for the one that is seemingly not for you? Or, perhaps, is that what they want you to think, and they want you to believe that the farthest cookie isn’t really for you, thus knowing that it will be your selection?”
I was rather pleased with myself.
She just shrugged and grabbed the nearest cookie.
So what great piece of wisdom was left for me? I carefully cracked my cookie open and gently tugged at the fortune inside. RIP! It just tore in half. Fitting.
Luckily I was able to use my extreme intelligence and, against all odds, reassemble the two pieces of paper and read what the fates had in store for me.
You will travel to many exotic places and learn to look within.
–Tom’s Fortune
What the fuck? What a crock of shit! LIES!!! As usual.
Like I’m going to travel anywhere. I can’t even pay for my own health care and I’m slowly deteriorating away. Travel? Ha! For me an “exotic” place is a town about 25 miles away that’s just a skosh bigger than the one where I live. And I only make that particular trip a few times a year. “Lies,” I again said to myself. “How the hell am I going to travel anywhere?”
A few moments later, however, I had a rare moment of insight and clarity. It was one of those “aha” moments. I had solved the riddle of the cookie! I remembered, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Indeed! Since the prospect of travel within my lifetime is a distinct impossibility, then there can only be one conclusion. The fortune refers to my very own death!
And, taking the inference to it’s logical extreme, there must be many layovers, aka “exotic places” that one must travel to after death and on one’s journey to Hell. And where else, I surmised, would I finally have the kind of free time required to actually dare to “look within?” Indeed, it is easy to imagine that particular activity as my special version of Hell.
Again I was pleased. Not only had I solved the riddle of the cookie but I also had gained the knowledge of my future. It turns out that sometimes I’m wrong. These damn cookies can contain truth after all!
A special kudos goes out to my wife for coming up with the subject line for this post. Woot!
Bonus: Learn how to make paper fortune cookies at the For the Love of Paper blog. Something tells me these would make great gifts and you get to express yourself via the writing form known as The Fortune. I can already think of several. Like, “You will die alone.” Of course we all have to inject our own personality into the fortune writing process, right? If you’re lucky maybe you’ll find yourself on my gift giving list and I’ll make some for you!
Interactive: What fortune cookie messages have you received lately? Enter them in the comment section below and I’ll do my best to perform a Negativity Fortune Analysis as my special gift to you. No charge.
The Cookie Story
Here’s a little something I wrote this morning that wasn’t originally intended for the blog. The wife liked it, though, so I decided to share. Narcissism alert!
Once upon a time there was a single cookie in a baggie on a kitchen counter.
The husband saw the cookie and assumed it must be the last one. So he didn’t eat it.
Later that night he went to get the cookie. He was going to give it to his wife for a treat. But the cookie was gone. The husband shrugged and said, “She must have eated it,” so the husband brought her a different treat.
The next day the husband grabbed his lunch box and went to work.
Later that day he found the missing cookie in his box.
How sweet!
Shouts from the Abyss 
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