EVERGREEN RESTAURANT FORTUNE COOKIES

From April 15, 2007

Living on Nicollet and 25th I have many choices for Asian take-out. My favorite is the Taiwanese place, "Evergreen" Their chicken and cashews is the best around. But the prognostications in their fortune cookies are always well off the mark.

Here is what it foretold:

"There are many paths up the mountain, but the view is the same."

This is how it should have read:

"You will get an order of chicken and cashews on Tuesday because you are too lazy to cook for yourself. Delicious though it will be, it will give you gas that smells unsettlingly like the dish itself for 16 hours afterwards. The balance of your work-week will be tedious but tolerable and the weekend will bring no real surprises. On Saturday morning you will wake up and brew coffee while listening to a Rudy Ray Moore record lent to you by your friend Srinivas. By the time side "A" is winding down you will realize that you probably should have cleaned the record before you put it on. When you flip it you will clean side "B" and when it's done there won't be a big wad of dust on the needle when you pick up the tone arm. You will make a breakfast of scrambled eggs and Bays Brand English Muffins and eat it while watching the last half of "Citizen Kane" on TCM. You will have another cup of coffee and a cigarette and then you will do all the dishes from breakfast. You will shower and dress. Dave will pick you up and you will go to the practice space to do guitar over dubs because you can do guitars at the space because all the basic tracks are already down. You will take a break for dinner at 7:30 and go to "Whitey's" for a roast beef sandwich. You will watch the TWINS kind of pound the shit out of the DEVIL RAYS on the TV set. Then you will grab more coffee at the really gay coffee shop in North East that's name references Oscar Wilde and in your five minutes there will have occasion to always remember 'Key Lime Pie and Chocolate Cake!' as being something really funny someone said. You will go back to the space to do even more guitar shit and it will occur to you that you are drinking coffee later than you ordinarily allow yourself to. You will get a bit twitchy. You will try to combat this by drinking two bottles of the SPATEN pils you bought at Surdyk's earlier in the day. Then you will remember that just this morning you were looking on the internet to see if any of the weird small towns in Germany that you had visited a decade ago were noticeably different. They didn't seem to be. But who knows, really? Strange interlude where you and Dave try-out all available keyboard instruments in the practice space to try and salvage a perplexing verse part in a song that didn't seem perplexing until just now. Hairs are getting pulled out. Time to quit. Go to the Triple Rock for last call. Doug Stanhope did his act there earlier. THE STNNING followed. See a girl who's bra seems to be doing something bra's shouldn't be able to do. Randomly end up talking to her and she's a a world class twit. Imagine that? Bar closes. Go home. Open a beer because you knew a long time ago that you had too much coffee today."

Hungry?

Fortune Cookie anyone?

The fortune reads, 'There are many paths up the mountain, but the view is the same.'"