A Failed Prophesy of Failure or...
A Successful Prophesy of Failure or....
A Successful Failure Prophesy or....
A Failure to Succeed at Failure Prophesy or...
Some Other Outcome....
You Decide!
by mr strauss
According to the dictates of what is admittedly a biased, uncertain and, dare I say, arbitrary, set of criteria, I'm due to fail here tonight.
By the above I mean simply that I have been pleased by my produce (vegetables, tomatoes, etc) here at PW. Not all posts were born equal, and some, naturally, have tickled my self-satisfaction bone more than others, but none yet has left me squirming or needing to shower.
So having begun with the above weak intro, I see that I'm well on my way to proving myself prophetic. This column is sure to suck.
Good, good I feel it coming back to me. Prophecy has always been my true dream job. When the counselors in high school brought me in to discuss my future career options, and suggested I go to college, I gave their suggestion serious thought. But ultimately, I stuck to my guns. "No," I told the counselor. "No, I really want to be a prophet. I think it's my calling. And the job requires no degree or other training, so I'd like to jump right in, as soon as I graduate, you know? Maybe I can find a good internship as a way to get my foot in the door."
Well, I was naive to say the least. Intenships proved few and far between. Good ones did anyways. Most of the ones I took on just involved a lot of yardwork, with maybe only 5% of my time actually spent learning to prophesize. But eventually, I did manage to finagle some connections and I landed an entry level job at one of the bigger phophecy firms downtown. The pay was shit, but I was doing work that I loved, and I didn't care.
Everything went great at first, but then things started rolling downhill. The trouble was I didn't get along well with my immediate supervisor. He was this guy who kept prophesizing that Thursday would be declared Corn Dog day, which I just thought was assinine. "By whom?!" I kept asking him, but I never got an answer.
Well, eventually our petty bickering attracted the attention of the manager. And we were called into his office. I went into the meeting feeling pretty smug. Right as it was starting, I boldly prophesized that the manager was about to lay into the supervisor. Needless to say, it didn't prove to be my proudest prophesy. I was way off. Of course the manager sided with the guy with more senority. The manager was our union rep, so I really hadn't stood a chance. And since I had made the mistake of soothe-saying about it, in front of the manager, well... it wasn't pretty.
After I had my ass handed to me good and plenty, the company took some pity and offered to demote me to parking lot attendant, instead of just firing me. As a bone, they tossed in the added duty of prophesizing which car's alarm would go off everyday, but I just said fuck it and quit. There was no way that I was going to put myself through going to work everyday and seeing that smug supervisor drive in and sneer at me and then have to hand him his parking stub. I wouldn't be able to live through the injustice. I mean, if you compared our records, mine was way better. He was the one who should have got demoted, not me! I had successfully prophesized almost all of the major holidays in 1993. To the day! I just barely missed Easter (I called it falling on a Monday) - that was the only blemish on my record. Meanwhile, the supervisor had prophesized three times in one month that a "plague of grapefruits would destroy old town and all of its boutiques." And he was only right one of those times, and even then the so called "plague" only took out like 4 or 5 buildings!
So I just quit. And the experience so disillusioned me that when shortly thereafter a local brothel offered me a high-paying fortune telling gig as part of their public health campaign ("Preventing Sexually Transmitted Diseases Through Tarot and Tea Leaves" or "PoSaTiDoTiTAToL," for short) I just turned them down on the spot. I hadn't even predicted the job offer, and, once I had heard it, I was absolutely certain that I would gladly accept it. In retrospect, it's clearly a good thing that I didn't. Because that wrongness about my willingness to take the gig is a pretty strong indicator that had I, in fact, done so, I'd have shortly found myself reading the palms of a very syphallitic group of whores indeed. Of course, had I taken it, I'd have been right, but whatever.
So I guess the question at this point is straightforward enough?
Is my soothe-saying still unrecovered from my workplace trauma?
Did this column actually turn out great?
Or have I regained the old prophetic touch, eh?
I'll leave y'all to answer that one as you see fit.
And I make no predictions as to your response.
None at all.
