This is the year

According to that fortune teller in Guangzhou, this is the year i will die. The guy was nice. I was begging for money to get to Hong Kong, and he lent me some and read my palm on the train. That i didn't ask him for, but thought it'd be a fun, silly thing to try. I still do.

Now, if i actually do die, will it be because he was right, because i believed him, or because like Laius in Oedipus Rex, Basilio in La vida es sueño and finally Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter, my trying to avoid the prophecy will be the means by which it is accomplished?

To prevent this last, at least, i should strive not do anything different from what i would otherwise do. But then, how can i be sure of what i would really have done if the prediction hadn't been made? Plus, what an irony if, after having made an effort to live life as usual, i ended up dying of something that could have been easily avoided with just a little deviation...

Maybe the answer is to copy that character of Borges, who tried to imagine all the possible manners his death could take in the hope that, simply because he had imagined them, they could now not happen.

Of course, if i do die, it could all simply mean that he made a lucky guess, and me an unlucky choice.

Finally, if come march 3rd 2009 i'm still alive, then it'll mean that, once more, i'll have paid enough attention to another silly piece of religious baloney to have it occupy some of my neurons for decades on end. Obviously, if some part of my mind didn't still keep a measure of forbearance for "the occult", i would simply have forgotten the episode. It makes me angry and sad to think i have such little control over my brain that it may still casually focus on any kind of hocus pocus.

I can imagine the following scene, too: somehow, somewhere, a few years from now, i run across this guy and, obviously, he sees i'm still alive. When confronted with his failed prediction, he may very well say that fortune telling is no exact science (although, at the time of his prediction, and upon my asking whether any of what he said was avoidable, his answer was something about it being pretty much not so, and that destiny was destiny).

More creatively, he might say: "Ah, yes! I remember you! Of course, i knew back then you wouldn't die, but telling you you would set in motion a chain of events that meant that your life today is much better than it would otherwise have been".

If he came up with something like that, i might even consider giving him some money for sheer chutzpah. What would need no consideration at all is the well-centered and quite mighty kick that would soon meet his ass, of course.