this morning, it was my fortune to read a help wanted ad in a local tabloid left just begging to be riffed through atop a safety orange d train bucket seat polished gleaming by a wide ass of a harried commuter.
a writing job, actually. writing fortunes for a fortune cookie company. i couldn't remember now the name of the chinatown based company. something that bore a random set of numerals and boldly employed the word harmony, although it didn't sound harmonious, at all, the name, that is. something like harmony 976 fortune cookie company, or something sounding discordant like that.
all i remember is this breezy rush in my head as i tried to come up with my own fortune portfolio, carefully avoiding those vague motherhoods, like, today, avoid taking unnecessary gambles, then racked my brain up just trying to resist the urge--if there is such a thing--to enumerate, along with each of my fortunes, a set of lucky numbers, something like 4,6,9,22,36,42. (which actually won a second tier lotto draw somewhere midwest, mind you!)
in my mind, i was trying to carefully give my fortunes a nice, personal, really personal touch, you know, include a very particular idea. no set of lucky lotto numbers. only something a fiction writing professor, perhaps, would be proud of, notwithstanding my use of the very unexceptional adjectives nice and personal in the previous sentence.
something that would behoove the fortune cookie eater/reader to take one's fortune into one's own hands, be creative and not just sit it out while this blithe universe blows all our puny asses into the thin, unconcerned air.
something like, today, be more like the portuguese mares that pliny, the elder, the first ever naturalist the world ever knew, got all worked up. i would tell the fortune cookie reader to just raise your tail to the wind "and turn them full against it, and so conceive that genital air instead of natural seed."
and should i get the job, i would demand only a pittance for all my juices, for i would be gratified already to know that the fortune i just wrote would be this wriggly, motile, harum-scarum of a sperm that would fertilize that seed in the reader just waiting to conceive and give birth to something fast and fleet-footed, something, i do hope, to help one outdistance the illest of one's stars, all what is unfortunate in one's stuck life.
