Rejected Ideas for Fortune Cookie Messages
I suppose I did not fully understand the assignment.
When the past fucks you, it’s always from behind. But this can only happen if you bend over. Eyes to the front, buddy.
Save some for later. With the kind of challenges you soon having coming at you, you’re going to need the all-too-reliable comfort of leftovers.
You will never be good enough for General Tso’s Army.
It might be time to consider making a serious move. Because we will no longer be delivering to rock bottom.
You can live, laugh, love — or you can drink, cry, shrug. Choose your own adventure, baby. Either way, we’re all gonna die someday.
Fortune rarely favors the completely fucked.
You will soon be robbed of everything you love. And the assailant is already in the house. Read between the lines on this one. (Still don’t get it? You’re about to get unceremoniously dumped. She is going to take the dog when she leaves and negotiate you out of any type of reasonable shared custody arrangement, because you are weaker than you tell yourself you are. To further humiliate you, she will also take the Lovesac. And you will help her carry it to the car, which she will also be taking full possession of. You will watch her drive away, your pup Clem Fandango with his head out the window gazing at you with a mix of confusion and longing as he fades into the distance and you know you will never see him again, probably. Then you will go inside and order Chinese. It will become a habit more so than it already is. You will bloat. Each day you will pledge that tomorrow is the day you begin sculpting your Revenge Bod, just before falling asleep with a carton of pan-fried dumplings perched on your sternum. You will not work out the next day. Repeat.)
Ain’t no use in having a dick big enough for swingin’ if you don’t have the balls to keep it on an even keel.
Clear eyes. Full hearts. Still lose all the time.
You will miss 100 percent of the shots that you take. Maybe you should just go ahead and do something else. Sometimes, the best way to win is to quit.
Your ability to genuinely feel, accept and properly express love is about as real as the MSG you’re about to consume.
You either die a hero or live long enough to start ordering from the “special diet” portion of the menu. We don’t have the exact numbers for this, but can say, ball-parking it, that those on on“Team Low-Sodium Blanched Bok Choy” seem to have more longevity on average than those comin’ off the bench for “Team Egg Foo Yung Extra Gravy and Don’t Forget About the Spam Fried Rice Either Like You Did Last Time Because I Ordered a Quart and It Better Be Full.”
Your life will be like running a long, arduous marathon that, to be honest, you really only signed up for in an attempt to impress a girl. And then when she broke up with you you stuck with the training anyway, even took it more seriously, because you found the adrenaline and other chemicals that came from a form of exercise you’d always previously hated actually served to be very therapeutic, cathartic and distracting, slightly numbing the pain you’ve been constantly feeling and trickling something new into the void left in your being. You figured your running a marathon might impress other women, which would be a bonus. During this marathon there will be brief sprinting spurts that take place whenever you are compelled to move as fast as your legs will carry you in any direction that leads you away from any modicum of intimacy or commitment. Surprisingly, you will be quicker than you anticipated.
Your doctor will soon express concern for your health and tell you you’re too old to eat a family sized order of Egg Foo Yung before promptly going to bed, sometimes consuming said culinary delight in the bed itself. When you are gray in the beard, you should not also have gravy in that beard.
You will soon be shocked at the level of propensity you possess toward complete cowardice.
The higher the hopes, the longer and more excruciating the downfall.
Don’t you dare touch that carton. Lo Mein is exclusively for closers.
Say nothing and try not to show any physical reaction to what you are about to read. This is important. The world literally depends on you. No pressure, right? So, and we really hate to break it to you at all, let alone in this way, but it is the only way: The person sitting next to you is the unwitting key to unlocking a portal to hell if seduced by a shapeshifting demonic entity that most recently appeared as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the original Ghostbusters film, and is believed to have been biding its time in a semi-hibernation since. Until now. And this will happen, the seduction and subsequent catastrophic fallout. If she is permitted to live beyond the age of 38, which, in case you forgot, and you probably did, you’re somehow still not responsible enough to put pertinent dates on your calendar and have them recur annually, is a mere 62 days away. While not at all complicit in this terrible occurrence, the wooing will be via a form of irresistible hypnosis that for some reason includes an arrhythmic mimic of what we believe is supposed to be The Macarena. Unless you call merely existing a mode of complicity. She is also, as you know, not nefarious or bearing of any genuine ill-will at all to anyone ever for the most part, with her one former boss being a notable exception. Lady wouldn’t willingly hurt a fly. Despite all this, she will be an instrument that sets in motion the swift and cumulative snuffing out of all humankind, forever, that is if she were to remain unwed and still breathing at the moment she reaches her 39th year. And nobody can prevent this. You can either a) attempt to coax this woman into marrying you and doing so in less than two months’ time, with the caveat that you must stay together forever and can’t get out of it on some bullshit technicality; b) murder her or ensure her death somehow, someway, within two months’ time, be it, like, right now, not telling you how to live your life, but you could probably do it with that replica leg lamp from A Christmas Story that you keep on your end table year-round for some reason, the thing looks like it has some heft and you gotta swing like Joaquin Phoenix in Signs, or you could poison her over a period of time, too, we dunno, just some suggestions; c) choose to not trust a *seemingly* random rambling fortune cookie message that is more like a scroll than a slip of paper and do nothing, come what may. We would absolutely not recommend that final option. Unless you’re keen to find out what the sensation is to feel real, fully complete emptiness (it’s not as great as it may sound, not after a while, somehow nothing is more crushing than everything, if that makes sense), at least for what feels like eternity, followed then by another eternity, wherein you are perpetually getting your nipples zapped at a very high voltage while doing taxes for a full-time freelancer. If you do not get them the maximum possible refund, you must commence on the same return again, this time while a Slipknot cover band that calls themselves Hog Tie plays a Tiny Desk Concert on your actual desk, but the only song they know, which they repeat ad infinitum, is a rather inventive cover of Raffi’s “Baby Beluga.” We acknowledge this might actually be what blows your hair back. Not here to “yuck” anybody’s “yum.” Except for that demon’s, of course. We’re staunchly against them and their agenda. Hence, this message. But still, it’s not everybody’s bag, a kink that includes a Raffi song particularly. And this is not all about you. Once more: It’s about saving the world. At least for now, giving humans the opportunity to continue hurrying it to an end all on their own, instead of by the hands of some marshmallow-brand-mascot-cosplaying freak. Okay, calm down. We’re just fucking around. We know there is nobody sitting next to you.
