Fortunes Falling

I recently discovered that the Chinese food place by work, Foo Kin John (no joke), has $5 lunch specials with huge portions and happens to be passable enough to sate my Brooklyn-bred palate. And as we all know with Chinese food orders, the fortune cookie is a staple. However, I recently got the most baffling message of all time:

On the right track, means need to run even faster, or got run over.

Aside from the stilted structure of each clause, the tense change creates intriguing temporal dissonance. The sentence begins in the present, questions how to proceed in the future, and then analyzes how the past developed into the present. This seems to echo human nature on its own, reaffirming humankind's search for meaning; it is a deep cookie.

Parsing the text itself, if one acknowledges the "or," then it's natural to group clauses 1 and 2 ("On the right track, means need to run even faster") and also clauses 1 and 3 ("On the right track, got run over.") Taking each of these alone, the first is telling you not to be satisfied with your successes, but to build on them. The second is that if you're succeeding, it's because you previously failed. However, a combined reading leads me to believe the ultimate message espoused is:

If you're not building on success, you've already failed.

Run with that. See how it works for you. Try it on and put it back on the rack if it doesn't fit. I'm just throwing it out there. Littering life lessons, as it were. Do you, kids.

HeyPS - I'm gonna do that thing where I sneak in a poetry recap with retroactive timestamping. Just so you know.

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