Unfortunate

I decry a great public evil that has reared its ugly head these last few years. An insidious plague that threatens to rob us of our hopes and dreams has made its way unremarked upon by the general populace and now it is so widespread that our means of fighting it have almost been robbed from us before we realized we needed them.

I speak, of course, of the awful decline in the quality of fortunes found in fortune cookies.

I had occasion to eat Chinese food the other day, which always makes me happy. And, as always, I approached my crisp dessert delicacy at the end of the meal with anticipation and delight. But what I found within was not delightful but insipid and uninspired.

You hardly ever get an actual fortune in your fortune cookies anymore. I mean a solid, straightforward, honest-to-goodness prediction of a future event. I like my cookies to perform as advertised, so that little slip of paper should read something like, "You will die in 17 minutes," or, "Something slightly unpleasant is about to happen to you, like having an onion drop on your head."

But nowadays cookies at your better Asian restaurants come in three varieties: Compliment Cookies, Advice Cookies, and Aphorism Cookies.

Compliment Cookies are the cheap substitute for fortunes. They say something nice about you, as if that was what you turned to baked goods for. "Your kindness is evident to all," or, "Your hard work makes you stand out," are not predictions of the future. I don't know if a compliment from a cookie is meant to make me feel better, but it doesn't usually work. How does it know? I bet total jerks get cookies that say, "You are warm-hearted and well loved." Where's the mystery in that?

Now, if there were insult cookies, that would be worth the price of admission. "What are you looking at, asshat?" or, "You've put on a few pounds--maybe drop the rest of this cookie, eh, Chunk-style?" I'd pay extra for those.

Advice Cookies just seem pushy and unhelpful, like an elderly uncle who always thinks he has the answers to all the problems in your life even though he last knew what was going on during the Cleveland administration and has never had successful human contact. "Always do your best," "Do the work you love," and, "Save a little every day," are not any more useful than the morals of after-school specials and motivational posters. They're also kind of insulting in that they suggest you are slacking before you even start. I usually hold the cookie in my fist and shake it, yelling, "I'm already doing my best, evil pastry!" before hurling the sharp fragments across the restaurant.

Aphorism Cookies, though, are the worst. At least Compliment and Advice Cookies show some slight interest in you as a person; Aphorism cookies just have bland admonishments about general topics. "A clean workplace is a good workplace," "Chopsticks don't kill people; people kill people--with chopsticks," "British television is often more pretentious than witty," or, "Licking toads is a cheap and effective high," don't even speak to me where I live. There's no mystical insight into my soul, no numinous foretelling of my fate, just some tired quote from Benjamin Franklin wrestled into no more than nine words for space considerations. I could get that from opening the almanac randomly, or by reading matchbooks in cheap midwestern diners. My oracular cookies are supposed to do more than the placemats at Cracker Barrel, you know?

I'm about to give up my stereotype of the Orient as mysterious and mystical if this keeps up.

It's late--can you tell?