Over the next few weeks we plan to bring you entries which were found encased in individual fortune cookies collected by customers and staff at an unnamed Mandarin buffet ($10.99 lunch/$17.99 dinner) in southern Ontario over a 4 month period.

Well over 6,000 single-lined fortunes were assembled by Edith Felene, a former airline hostess and longtime member of the Hamilton Book Club, who lists item #117 The Honey Garlic Beef as her personal favorite dish.
We would like to thank Ms. Felene for her months of toilsome work in bringing to us these entries. One cannot imagine sifting through all of those tiny scraps of paper and assembling them from random piles into the (sometimes) cohesive works that we have now. Without her efforts, these statements- however frustrating and ultimately unimportant they might be- would have been discarded in heaps of chow mien, napkins and grease.
Our hopes and prayers are with Edith as she continues to recover in Hamilton General Hospital. Please send flowers and chocolates but refrain from any get well cards with text smaller than 16pt., no run-on sentences or cookies and please- no poetic phrasing .


Soon after the first week of February (not coincidently during the same period that this blog went silent ) mysterious "non-fortunes" were the disappointing end to what had been "a very fine meal until this point thank you, but now you've scared the kids and what the hell kind of fortune is 'Each pack of Red Vines have approximately 20 pieces in them !'. (Quote taken from surveillance footage captured 3.18.07, 1:23 pm lunch rush- Cormier Family table, seat 3, westside Butterfield Ave. view.)

After numerous customer complaints the owners chose to contact the Taiwanese-based Happy-Sun Fortune Cookie Company who replied by fax with the following- "You may love the small ones but win the big ones. / Lucky Numbers 3, 18, 21, 26, 33". This message, though later used to play Lottery Canada, was ultimately of no help.

The Fortune Cookie Mystery which, like any good mystery, is always proceed by an utterance of 'why'. For example- 'why', after enjoying a nice plate of Mu Shu Chicken, 'why' was Mr. Hendricks given a fortune cookie which, when cracked open, revealed the completely useless phrase "behind a brick wall and cross through traffic". Why? Were these specific directions that Mr. Hendricks was being asked to follow? Like, that brick wall over there? (Suffice to say that Bill Hendricks did follow, only to find himself standing in front of a vacuum cleaner repair store on the other side of the traffic.)((Which actually turned out pretty well as Bill remembered Mrs. Hendricks request to purchase a new filter.))(((Which he did.)))((((But 'why'?))))
Mysteries like these need an answer and though the Chinese prophets has been known to be obtuse, sentences like "impending storms of kind bud" just didn't translate well as fortunes in southern Ontario. Something wasn't right and The Happy-Sun Fortune Cookie Company, for all of it's optimism and numerological compliments, just weren't helping.

So Ms. Felene, because of her literary ties, was asked by the restaurant owners to attempt to understand these strange fortunes. And Edith soon discovered that the disjointed phrases and non-committal assumptions that had been frustrating the prophetic hopes of diners for weeks we're not "nonsense" but rather part of "a larger scheme", a "complete thought". Which she believed to be "hardly coherent" and "never a winsome phrase as ' you will enjoy good health and financial independence' " Edith never less believed these thoughts "had something to say" but "what, oh what" and "why, oh why do I keep seeing those little red spots" for are "the little red spot people the cause of the burning burning inside of my head!". (Quotes are from Edith Felene's personal diary.)

Edith began by laying out the scraps of paper collected from frustrated diners across the carpet in her central Hamilton condo. One can picture her then, alone; glasses perched on tip of nose, that cup of peppermint cooling off in the Niagara Falls mug atop a coaster, the late winter light barely penetrating the window and Edith trying to make sense of all of those tiny greasy sheets. You cannot be envious. But Edith, in need of a project and always good at the Sunday puzzles, was fit for the task and approached it with a passion seldom seen around the Chateau Royale Condominiums (save for when Hank Jenkins cashed in his bi-weekly check from the tool company and ordered in a whore).
But for all of the shuffling, head scratching, note taking, note tearing and all-out research, it- like many brave discoveries- it was a happy accident that provided Edith the breakthrough she needed to solve the mystery.


The bottom of a cat's paw is a special thing. Some Native Tribes of Real America consider paws to be spots that are focus points of energy. Much like a vortex a cat's paw captures energy and holds it in- like a well during the rainy season it is refilled while never fully drying up. It is believed that cat's paws are firmly rooted to the center of the earth while the rest of the cat (it's mind, heart and soul) travels interdimensionally. Hence the energy held in a single paw encapsulates the power of this world and any other the cat chooses to travel within. Much like a pillow. (Which is also considered to be an energy hotspot in some cultures.)

But 'why' do these things happen? What makes one piece of paper stick to one paw and another to one more? How do these things fall together? Why do phrases coincide and, in turn, exist with one another as if they had never been apart before? Is it at this Native Intersection that all things meet? Is it here at this place that our natural instincts entwine- that one half of one phrase meets the other, that lovers become lovers, peanut butter and jelly? The spot where twins are born and an entire nation finds it's common purpose, dug into the ground, found under the stars, one paw touching the next? Who the fuck knows. . . What is true is that one small fortune was moist enough, had just the right amount of grease on it to stick to Beatrice's paw and another the same and that both of these phrases, when they were dislodged from the paws, both of them coincided, met at the core, one small punctuation bleeding into the next, one wound of word onto another- that these things embraced and become one complete thought, obscure yes and quite possibly built from the things that madness is made of- but enough of a Natural Conjunction of Things that Edith Felene recognized it as One Complete Thought and, because of those sacred paws, was able to ascertain that these elusive fortunes meant something when put together after all. Eureka! and God Bless! "Now all I have are thousands of little scraps of paper that need to be assembled (somehow!) so that (finally!) I may make sense of all of this!". Good luck Ms. Felene, good fucking luck~

And so, in continuance of this mystery, we must now reshape the big 'why'- clean it up, scrub it down with a new approach to questioning. We must squeeze it out and pat it down until it is reshaped as a fresh and squeaky little 'how'; as in- how did this happen? How did the contents of this blog somehow transplant into the ink that decorated little scraps of white paper that were then inserted inside of sleepy looking fetal shaped cookies being baked and individually wrapped inside of a factory in Taiwan only to be shipped from that place, across land and sea and end up in one single restaurant in Southern Ontario which just happens to be 114km from the place where the author was born- how did this happen?

I mean, he really can't even stand a buffet! -

How and why- well, whatever. We won't and we simply cannot, but yes, you may try. We're done with it though. And Ms. Feline, on that hospital bed- well we can only hope that her pillow is a vortex. That would be nice for her, as she deserves to skate across time and space in a volley of truth and answers and damn fine looking multi-colored nebula for all of her hard work. She will meet cats there, cats that have lived in those distant places since time began; puzzle-making cats who will challenge her skills with the finest puzzles collected over each fantastic millennium , across each fantastic dimension and Edith will sit there, on the tip of some celestial object, her glasses pushed up on her nose, and she will sit there and solve each one of those cat's tricky puzzles until one day, pressured by growing hospital bills, Edith Feline will miraculously rise from that stale hospital bed with the vortex pillow and head back to work. Only then will she remember that this is Canada and the medical bills were taken care of.