I'd like to use this week's precious column space to talk about a matter of grave importance: destiny.
How am I qualified to speak on such a ponderous black hole of an issue? Hold your pants up and stand back, Bubba.
I finished dinner the other night when something happened to me that happens every time I go to a Chinese restaurant. (No, not the thing where they make me put my pants back on and return the buffet to a standing position before they call the cops.)
The waitress brought me a fortune cookie. This is customary at every Chinese restaurant I've ever been to, but something about this time seemed special.
Maybe it was the glint in her eye, maybe it was the egg foo yung dividing into two warring factions at the 38th parallel of my stomach. Either way, something about the cookie gave me a feeling that someone had designed it specifically for me.
I opened it, to read \To be loved, you must be lovable."" What? That's not even a fortune.
I want a real fortune, dammit, a warning that tells me something like ""Avoid State Street, as a whiskey-drunk soccer hooligan will violently shift your outlook on soccer, Bono and Ireland in general.""
I could only come to the conclusion that whoever made this cookie knows something about me that I don't deserve to know.
But hell, what can you expect from a cookie?
More than you think.
The tradition dates back to the Mongol occupation in China, when the Chinese would hide messages in ""moon cakes"" to fool the nosy invaders. Those messages were different however.
Most of those messages were something like ""Every time you see the Khan, giggle to yourself while looking at him so he thinks he has food caught in his mustache.""
The idea of ""fortune cookies"" actually came about in America, around 1915.
So why aren't they real fortunes anymore? Why are they just statements of the obvious?
I would theorize that whoever doles out the fortunes is an infallible oracle of wisdom. He just got tired of people not heeding their fortunes, and after a few years, he gave up telling us Americans.
He tried to make the world a better place by delivering John F. Kennedy an ""Avoid Dallas and slow moving convertibles this week. An assassin may take advantage of the opportunity.""
Did he listen? No.
And I know the oracle is sitting somewhere steaming about the people we do take advice from. We get our advice from the likes of Oprah, Rush and Rosie, an unholy trinity you might say has ""consulted"" its share of cookies in the past.
Whatever we do, we'd better fix this problem fast. We can only slight our omniscient friend in favor of doughnut wielding guess-meisters for so long until he gets pissed off.
Actually, the oracle is starting to screw with us already.
How do you think President Bush became the most powerful guy in the free world? You think he recognized the opportunity without any help? I could only reason that the oracle sent him a cookie bearing advice to ""Run for President in 2000, as the Democrats will run a boring puppet and you will win with the help of the state of Florida.""
Please, take my advice, run to the Chinese buffet, get your fortune and heed it if just to appease the fortune cookie deity. The oracle has got one major prank under his belt and I don't think we, as a society, can afford another of his little ""Bush for President"" practical jokes.
