Taking objects out of my pockets has always been sort of an obsession with me. I guess that happens when you are also obsessed with pockets. I love cargo pants, shorts, anything with pockets — hot pockets, corner pockets, pockets of resistance. Oh my.
But sometimes I forget and something I left in my pocket will go through the laundry and will become mostly useless from the tides of Cheer. I found — almost a week after doing my laundry — that one of my cargo shorts pockets contained a fortune. That is fortune as in fortune cookie, not a fortune as in Donald Trump. I pocketed that fortune after cracking a fortune cookie open a week or so ago at my local Vietnamese restaurant. Well, I guess technically it is Vietnamese-Chinese restaurant. The point is I kept that fortune for some reason or other. After my shorts went through the laundry, however, I was left with a very strange and cryptic message on the small piece of paper:
“o ne ok e y as”
I thought, hmm, that’s weird. O ne ok e y as. It sounds like maybe it’s a Spanish or American Indian phrase. What could that mean? You will meet a tall, dark stranger? Or maybe you will meet a tall, dark stranger with a bottle of gin? Perhaps it means you will meet a tall, dark stranger with the rest of the letters you are missing because washing your shorts obviously washed away the other letters.
So bothered did I become over what the cookie forturne meant that I actually called the restaurant to see if they had any idea what it said. I talked to someone named Duck at the eatery. I’m not sure how you spell his name. I’m not sure he could spell his name, at least in English. That line of inquiry did not go well.
Finally I sat down with a pen and paper and tried various word combinations. I was never really good at doing Jumble or other word puzzles but I nonetheless put my nose to the grindstone (Which is why my nose hurts. Don’t ever put a stone on your nose, much less a grindstone). Maybe I’m wrong, but I think I finally figured it out. It is the only phrase that makes sense out of why I would still have this fortune on me. This is what I determined as the cryptic message from that Vietnamese dinner more than a week ago:
“Fortune cookie my ass!”