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Stress In Fortune Cookie

Decent Essays

Can failure and disappointment, create anxiety and addiction for people? This rash assumption could be true or false, depending on their state of being and attitude towards life. It can produce pessimistic thoughts such as “should I give up?” or “why am I even doing this?” But can also produce optimistic thoughts that will lead them down a path, full of confidence and positivity. Ultimately, with all things considered the real question is, will a person, let failure and disappointment uplift their ability to become a better them, or let frustration and lack of success lead them to a crash of their long lasting life, potentially leading them into an unfortunate trap of superstition or drugs, like Harry in the short story “Fortune Cookie …show more content…

wrote the short story “Fortune Cookie”, and it is about a salesman named Harry that has not been selling what he needs be and he starts to get anxiety because he does not know what is to come to him in his future. So he turns to superstition and fortune cookie fortunes to help him produce positive thoughts, and gain confidence. These fortunes ironically start to create success in Harry’s meetings so he does not change his morning routine of lighting a candle, praying, and then going to a Chinese restaurant. For several months Harry would this do his morning routine, read his fortune cookie fortunes, and have successful meetings, until one day when he realized the Chinese food was making him sick, and since he knew he really did not need the food just the cookie he would throw out the food after buying it and just keep the cookie. Later he found a store that sold fortune cookies by the bag, so he would buy the bags, keep the cookies in his desk, and ration them out to himself, but the cookies fortunes later became unclear to him. Harry would buy dozens of bags of cookies trying to find one has good as his first ones, and the addiction just became worse, he even almost passed up on an opportunity with an international corporation just because all the fortunes he had were negative. After a numerous amount of negative fortunes Harry decided to urgently go into the meeting with the international cooperation, and after it, the Corporate level offered him a …show more content…

When Selby Jr. nearly survived and the hospital released him, he published in 1964 his first novel called, Last Exit to Brooklyn, which soon became an international best seller, due to its harsh reality of a world populated by brutal factory workers and nihilistic cross-dressing drug attics. After this hit, his heroin and drinking addiction began to catch up to him. He used the sixty thousand dollars he made of the book for drugs and drinks, also hanging out with crooks and junkies to get high, in which he believed provided and offered him support and comfort, but these things soon led him into a massive and unstoppable misery. Selby Jr. later moved to the Los Angeles, California to try and get away from the New York drug scene, but of course he fell into the Los Angeles drug scene as well. After a few years living a terrible life Selby Jr. knew he had to change or die, so in the next thirty-one years he became completely sober and wrote six books, depicting the disease of the human condition, as he focused on channeling his rage into his writings. On April 26, 2004 Hubert Selby Jr. died of chronic pulmonary disease, he was

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