Fortune Cookies in the Spotlight

Here's a question: Why do we not have ominous fortune cookies? The ones, once cracked into unequal, crumbling halves and carefully spread out upon the rice splattered table, get your heart beating just a tad faster with the simple message of "Beware". Beware? Beware of what? Your mind at once imagines a dozen different and vastly inventive scenarios.

Beware the street grate at your feet which has rusted to the point in which weight in any measure will crumble its deceptive iron bars.

Beware the tall stack of creamed corn in the supermarket which, like a teetering jenga tower, has finally had one can too many stolen by mischievous children run amok.

Or perhaps beware of the County Fair clown, who has finally freakin' had it with teenage boys taunting him with his stolen wig over the course of the weekend. That corsage ain't packin' water this time.

It could be the fortune is a bit more benign. Perhaps it only would have you beware of Mrs. Nelson and her good neighborly intentions of recruiting you to her church knitting club. All because you mentioned a passing amazement of her ongoing scarf project, which by now could mummy wrap a Green Bay Packers running back three times over.

Regardless of its meaning an ominous fortune cookie could, at the very least, get our imaginations kicked back into gear, adding to the richness of the human experiment.

Or perhaps it would serve only to make the paranoid among us even more bug-eyed.

Just a thought.