Date: 2010-01-25
To: "You will be compelled..."
Miles today: 0.0

I am not, by nature, a superstitious-type person, and I certainly don¢t believe in crystal balls, fortune telling, or palm reading. On the other hand, just before my ¢05 hike, when I was feeling kind of apprehensive about whether I would be able to complete the journey, or even whether it was wise for me to be taking on such an enormous task, I was unusually open to ¢omens¢ ¢ providing they were positive ones. I also like Chinese food, and never hesitate to grab a fortune cookie at the end of the meal. In the weeks leading up to my first hike, two of my fortune cookies contained fortunes that seemed to me to be really appropriate. The first one said: ¢A dream you have will come true.¢ Well, as you can imagine, that one felt pretty right to me! The second one, a week later, said: ¢A new voyage will fill your life with untold memories.¢ That one was equally welcome, and proved to be equally true. I took both of those messages as good omens, and I¢ve hung on to them. In fact, I taped them onto the big map of the Appalachian Trail that hangs on the wall next to my desk in the basement where I am typing up this journal entry. Next to this map I¢ve taped up a bunch of photos, including an enlarged one of me with the famous sign on top of Mount Katahdin. Others photos are mostly of me hiking in the Shenandoah¢s or at scout camps with my kids. I also have the photos of my finishing a couple of Ten Miler road races, and of me riding a jungle penetrator and being hoisted into a helicopter during field training with the Park Rangers in the SNP. I guess you could call it my ¢trophy wall¢. Its main purpose, however, is to help me maintain the fiction that I am still only 18 years old and can accomplish whatever I set out to do. For last year¢s AT attempt I hung up another trail map, this one a bit smaller ¢ long and narrow. My family uses it to track where I¢m at, and to log my progress toward Maine. I¢ll use the same one this year ¢ since I only logged the first 400 miles last year. More recently, I¢ve also been keeping my eye out for fortune cookie messages that I could tape onto the map as good omens. They¢ve been sort of few and far between, however, and I¢m not sure why. Frankly, I think it has something to do with the recession. My theory is that they fired all the old-timer fortune cookie fortune writers, and hired a bunch of amateurs just so they could save money. The reason I think that is that I¢ve been getting some pretty strange, almost pathetic fortune messages recently, and almost none of them even come close to relating to my upcoming hike. In fact, I¢ve only found one that was worth saving. It reads: ¢You will be compelled to manifest self-transformation.¢ You see what I mean? Does that sound like a normal fortune cookie message to you? Not even Confucius was quite so obtuse.   My first reaction was ¢what the hell does THAT mean ¢ ¢compelled to manifest self-transformation¢?¢ (Frankly, it sounds like something Break would write, but that¢s another story ¢ written up in my ¢05 pre-hike journal entry # 13.) But then I started thinking about it, and it began to make more sense. See, if I¢m going to hike from Georgia to Maine, and I¢m actually going to make it all the way, then I¢m definitely going to be losing a bunch of weight. That would be a really good thing, for reasons we don¢t need to get into just now, and would explain the ¢self-transformation¢ part of the message. And the ¢You will be compelled¢¦¢ part, well, that would just reflect the compulsion I have to make it all the way this year ¢ come hell or high water, so to speak, both of which I encountered during my first hike and neither of which stopped me. If you put those two elements together, I¢d have to consider that fortune message to be a good omen. So tonight I taped it onto my AT map for 2010, as the first of the good omen fortunes that I¢m sure will turn up in my cookies over the coming days and weeks. Well, except maybe for those two weeks I¢m going to be spending in Yemen next month. There aren¢t a lot of Chinese restaurants in Sana¢a, and I don¢t expect to be eating much outside of my hotel in any event. Hmmmm. On second thought, you don¢t suppose that message about being ¢compelled to manifest a self-transformation¢ has anything to do with my trip to Yemen do you? Naaaaa.   I can never lose weight when I travel. Buffet breakfast, buffet luncheon, buffet dinner, all that airline food over and back. Not a chance.   I¢m good. They just really need to hire back some of those old guys who knew how to write a decent fortune!!!