Sometimes the universe just ticks me off. Last week I was re-reading one of my favorite books on my Boox e-reader, a handy li’l device a bit smaller than a Kindle. The Boox supports several different ebook formats, so I’m not stuck with only reading ebooks through Amazon. 

As an old person I haven’t quite figured out all its features.  For example, I don’t know how to embiggen pictures, so any illustrations an ebook may have are as clear to me as the Boox manual is: a bad rendering from Chinese. 

In the book, some of the stories relied on a couple of pictures my Boox showed me only through a glass darkly, so I knew I was missing important points.  A bit different from my usual condition of being pretty sure I’m missing something but don’t know what, exactly.  

Later that day,  I was reading a Substack on my much larger-screened laptop by a completely different writer, who published in that Substack the exact same pictures I couldn’t make out on my Boox; now I could clearly see what the first writer was talking about.  

Comets, schomets. If that isn’t a sign from the universe, I don’t know what is. 

 Between its expanding, collapsing, exploding supernova-ing, Kali-dancing- creating-and-destroying-worlds’ duties, the All-Encompassing Totality of Matter and Time decided to send me, a tiny speck of infinitesimally short existence on a minor planet in a rather out-of-the-way galaxy, an oracle! 

Through the medium of the internet, of course. This is the 21st century.

The universe made one small, tiny mistake, though.  

It did not give me an intellect equipped to understand it. I call that unjust. 

It was clearly a message; it was clearly for me. But I, feeble smidgen of being that I am, don’t get it.

 What secret meaning can a picture of a columnist balancing a basketball on his middle finger on the cover of Miami Tropic magazine have? His editor immediately regretted approving the cover. That might imply my editor hates me, but that’s too easy an interpretation. [Ed. note: Eh, you could just ask her.] It could just as likely have meant my favorite author is giving me the finger, but I hardly think the universe would have taken time out of its busy schedule to tell me that. 

The other picture, a profile of George Steinbrenner’s prominent protuberant paunch, illustrating a profile of him inside the magazine, seemed even less relevant. 

But maybe I was reading the message wrong, and it wasn’t a picture that was important. Maybe that was just letting me know there was a special meaning there for me, and I needed to seek further to find out what it was. The book’s next chapter was about the author’s proudest work.  After telling his own colonoscopy story, many readers wrote him to say that they got colonoscopies because of his column, which may well have saved lives. I could have taken that to mean the universe was hinting I should get a colonoscopy, but mine was scheduled for the very next day and I was already going through the prep. I was not about to back out after that. Even if, after the procedure, my lower digestive tract felt like Steinbrenner’s gut looked. That would have been a waste of the universe’s prophecy by intestines. 

Cosmic intent seemed much clearer several years ago when I very, very gently, with an almost featherlight touch, bumped my car into the wall of a grocery store, which led me to get an MRI, which led doctors to find aneurysms in my brain which might pop at any time leaving me either dead or in pretty bad shape, which led to me having brain surgery three days later. Now that was a nice, clear augury.  

But I would have been just as happy with something simpler, like skywriting overhead: LEAH, YOU SHOULD HAVE YOUR HEAD EXAMINED!  Or George Carlin’s suggestion of a neon sign on the forehead signalling whatever needed to be signalled. And it wouldn’t have cost $5,000 in car repairs. The brain was insured; the car wasn’t.  

I’m putting this out in the universe: If anyone can interpret this sign, let me know.