about your fortune

See, when you go and seek your fortune,
it's like you feel like it's out there
waiting for you.
It's a form of entitlement. But then,
so is destiny. Fate. Are we entitled to that?
I say yes, but
they don't exist.
So we may as well not be.

Still, something
is inevitably going to happen.
It always does. It's happening right now!
And in another moment, another thing - something.
It's inevitable,
in fact, tons of things
are inevitably, inescapably, inexorably
happening right now. Even if perhaps,

with planning and foresight,
tutored by hindsight and previous
failures to plan, many of them

might not have come
to be called inevitable. So
it makes a certain amount*
of sense, to bank on the odds
that the one of the inevitable somethings
which eventually will happen
will be good,
and plentiful, and
have some sort of positive cash-flow aspect
attached to it, in some way - and to call that thing

one's "fortune."

And if that's the case, then
what's more natural than to go out
and seek it? In fact,
in a manner reminiscent of a "time paradox,"
it's possible that your determination

that it does exist, out there

waiting for you somehow, coupled with
your decision to "go out" after it, and
compounded by all the other shit
that happens to happen (what the French call
la coincidence), is precisely

the thing that brings it about

when if you had done nothing (or
something else), it may have never
had happened at all!

This

is the kind of shit that drove Oedipus nuts!

However
in the modern age, we know
it's not that simple. It's not all
prophecies and oracles, with the exact person
we flee town not to fuck
ending up pursuing us to the town ahead
and having been in fact,
a completely different person all along
so we can conveniently fuck them and gouge out our eyes
when the cosmic joke is revealed. No,

the truth is more modern and "hip"
these days. We can express it best
using pseudoscience: The Present is
a binary probability wave,
passing over the Future
at a constant rate of Now,

converting all possible events (events
with some nonzero probability of happening)
to events with either a 100% or
a 0% probability of having happened. It
happens in an instant; it happens Now. (Note:
"events with a 0% probability," not the same
as "nonevents"! Nonevents happen,
but nobody cares). In that moment,
100% probability events happen, and 0%
probability events

do not.

There are no in-betweens, as the great probability wave
is collapsed into one or the other, by Now. By the Present,
rolling over what was until just recently the Future. The Present

is the measurement reality makes upon possibility, seen
or unseen by we
mere observers.

And the probability wave keeps rolling,
passing over all Possibility,
collapsing each possible event's quantum
indeterminacy state into a zero (0) or a one (1),
and flipping each from Future to Past for the ones (1s).
It all happens in a moment, and when it happens, it happens
forever. It's a moment that never stops happening, and never
stops having had happened.

This is what Buddhists
and surfers are talking about. A lot of the time.

*0