Oracles

I got a really good fortune cookie message last Sunday. It said, more or less, that opportunity would knock soon - next Monday. Well, like I said, that was Sunday, and so the next day was Monday, and I waited for opportunity to come a-knockin'. It didn't, or if it did, I didn't recognize it and turned it away. I wasn't worried, though, because, you know, it did say next Monday, and that could certainly be interpreted as meaning Monday a week later. Which would be today. It's almost 7:00 pm and opportunity hasn't knocked. The only thing that's knocked, in fact, is an overweight young guy desperately trying to sell home repairs and replacement windows door to door. He said I had a nice house and a pretty dog. I do. I also already have replacement windows, which you would think he could have seen, being as how I was speaking to him next to one. I sent him away and wondered if he thought it was odd that I was wearing gnome pajama bottoms and martini slippers at 5:00 in the afternoon. That was it for the knocking today, though. Maybe it meant next Monday?

My other oracle is the small battery operated electronic solitaire machine I keep in the bathroom. I know, that's way TMI, but there you have it. I have, over the years that it's lived in my bathroom, gotten rather frighteningly good at solitaire, and I use it as to foretell the course of the day. I am not moved from this course by the fact that not once have I observed any correlation whatsoever between my solitaire score and the way any given day has gone. Clinging foolishly to hard facts like that is what separates the silly and resolutely rational from people like me, who know that the world works in mysterious ways, signs and portents are all around us, and time, dude, time is, like, circular, so, okay. I know that one of these days, I will get 745, which is a perfect score, and my day will also be perfect and fabulous. It must work. Eventually. Possibly next Monday.