Fortune cookies are strange. They happen to be the only sort of divination I trust. What other form of prophecy is as accurate, as prescient? Magic eight balls, chicken blood, turtle bones? I think not. Once, as a child, I opened up a cookie to pull out my thin, paper, snake-tongue fortune. It said: you are about to eat a cookie. Holy fucking shit, how did it know? Luckily, my order of General Tsao came with two cookies, so I quickly cracked open the next one to see what other futures were trapped inside. This one said: you are getting fatter. Whoa! I was so awed, borderline frightened even, that I sat there frozen, with a forkful of pork fried rice orbiting my slackjawed mouth. The brilliance of these one line fortunes lies in their vague, nonspecific tellings. Always alluding to a future happiness or happening, they exploit the vagaries of fortune; a pleasant surprise is in store for you; all your hard work will soon pay off; you will inherit a large sum of money. I've yet to receive my inheritance, but it's coming! I can fucking feel it!
We like to play pretend, to think that for one instance the universe has consorted to deliver us a secret gift. One to distract us from our existential woe. We'd like to think we're special, that the world owes us; that we might, at any moment, through some divine act of kindness, be awarded a reward for our troubles. We like to believe - especially in our delusions. Fantasy is a powerful thing.
So back to fortune cookies. I got one yesterday that is perhaps the greatest fortune I've ever received. It said: you will be coming into a fortune. A seemingly simple sentence, one would think. Further investigation reveals multiple levels of potential meaning though. The first, is that this is the most meta fortune cookie ever written; predicting its own appearance, a veritable Nostradamus. The second, most literal interpretation, is that I will be coming into a large sum of money. I think we can all admit this interpretation is Dubois at best. There is in fact a third interpretation, a not so subtle perversion, which I believe to be the most salient.
It involves me glazing the cookie with a testicle sized packet of boy sauce.
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