The Cookie Grumbles

Are you feeling tense? Me, too. I write and edit a daily cartoon strip, and an almost daily Substack newsletter, and live in a house where a large dog and a fat cat are perpetually on the brink of mortal combat, all less than two miles away from the place where an evil lunatic is dismantling democracy. I work for an incompetent and irresponsible boss — myself — and subsist on the kindness of strangers — you — who, I fear, don’t like me very much. The world seems a fragmented global powderkeg, like just before World War I. The Balkans are still in turmoil.

My refuge, in times like ours, is early evening, when Rachel and I are usually alone, having dinner in peace, sometimes in the blessed, welcoming embrace of a nice restaurant, say, a place with the pleasant, pastoral name of Chinatown Garden and a welcoming, fusty, pagoda doorway…

… where the outside world disappears, if just for an hour or two.

At the end of a fine meal just the other day, I opened my fortune cookie.

Here is what it said:

Sigh.

Okay, the fortune cookie was telling me: It’s hell out there. It made me sad, but I was grateful for the straight talk. We need to face reality. I began to feel almost good about it.

Next, I turned the fortune slip over. And this is what the other side looked like:

Now, direct your attention not to the “lucky numbers” — they’re humiliating for humanity — but to the QR code. I fed it into my phone.

Did you vote? Good, because I am going to give you the answer below.

Ready?

Here comes the answer.

But vote first.

—

Okay, it was choice number one: An alternative happy fortune! Specifically:

You will be advanced socially without any special effort.

—

This really brought me down, because it is what our country is doing to us, too. The Republicans are doing it by lying. The mainstream media is doing it by sane-washing. The Democrats are doing it by being wimps. The radical-left are doing it by their intractable idealism.

So, let’s just reiterate: There is no happy alternative. We are in hell. We are in this together. We have to get out of it together by whatever will work, not necessarily whatever we want.

—

That’s it. Except for this:

You know the drill.

(This one’s like me: It’s old, but it still works.)

See you tomorrow in The Invitational.