I am pasting a scene here that I wrote in January sitting next to Artem Lensky at the Nero Molos in Limassol, in Cyprus as a part of a story treatment for a movie idea I have. The scene description is more or less a verbatim narration to the best of my ability of an actual event that happened to me in November or December in 2010 on the way to Joint Base Lewis-McCord. I got the idea to paste this scene description on my website in the early morning hours of 4 March 2026. I’m going to backdate this to 24 January on my website. These dating issues do not mean that my blog was put together by the Jawist, Eloist, and Priestly voices over the course of many centuries. This really happened.
The Bag of Fortune Cookies
The scene opens with Ben driving a U-Haul to what would be his last duty station. It’s the smallest U-Haul the producers can find, as Ben doesn’t have much stuff. His soon-to-be ex-wife has it all. He is driving up PCH to the Army base in Tacoma, Washington late at night when he pulls over to a Panda express for some food. Not wanting to drive the U-Haul through the drive through, he parks and enters the restaurant. On exiting the vehicle, the sleeve of his jacket catches on the door handle or the side mirror or something as he slams the door shut causing a huge rip. He swears, looks up at the sky, and thinking of his divorce and miserable trek to his new job, says, “at least this shit’s almost over.”
He goes into the restaurant to order food only to find that the restaurant is closing and the kitchen is shutting down. Think Falling Down kind of annoyance. Out of the corner of his eye he spots a giant bag of fortune cookies on a shelf surrounded by various boxes of food ingredients. He tells the old Chinese lady at the register, “I’ll take those.” Surprised, she rings them up and hands him the bag.
Back in the U-Haul, the famished future prophet starts cracking fortune cookies and eating them, looking at the fortunes as he eats. The first fortune cookie says: “It’s not almost over.” A strange fortune for a fortune cookie. The second says: “You have a long road ahead, but you will ultimately find what you seek.” Ben says, “What the fuck?” opens another fortune cookie, pops it into his mouth, and reads the fortune: “Confusion is part of the plan…it’s finding your way through the confusion that will define your path.” An amazed look overtakes Ben’s face as he pops another cookie into his mouth and reads the fortune: “The amazement you feel now pales compared to the amazement you will cause others to feel later.” Ben keeps opening fortune cookies, eating them, reading the fortunes, and they ultimately appear as a kind of a monolog from God that interacts with his general situation and thoughts. There are a lot of fortune cookies in an industrial bag of them, so fortunes can be added as this movie develops in form, and this monologue from the fortunes can say a lot of things. However, toward the end of the monologue, Ben mutters to himself, “no one would ever believe something like this,” and then reads a fortune that says “you will be famous.” That one was one of the most impactful fortunes of the monologue. The scene ends with Ben wiping fortune cookie crumbs off the corners of his mouth, belching into his fist, and then the U-Haul driving further up PCH into the light of a full moon toward Tacoma.
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