[Newspoetry] week in review

[Joe Futrelle]

The Week in Review with Tinyman

One morning as Tinyman struggled to keep his Tiny mind focused on
whether or not he had remembered to unplug the toaster the previous
night, he felt his bed quiver, as if somebody were trying to shake him
awake.  How troubling, he thought, but at least it's not the largest
earthquake to strike California's Napa Valley region in recent memory,
and pulled the covers tighter over his tiny head.  He longed to fall
back into the relatively carefree slumber of his recurring dream of
submarine parts being discovered high in the mountains by drug
inspectors.  Instead, the hustle and bustle of world leaders and
protestors gathered for the U.N. millenium summit on the street below
was knifing into the soft butter of his consciousness like,
appropriately enough, a hot knife into soft butter, and his efforts to
catch some Z's were about as conclusive as the research effort by an
independent panel into the causes of Gulf War Syndrome.

With immense strength and resolve he uprighted himself and padded over
to the refrigerator, whose handle he grasped with the same ambivalence
Castro might feel shaking hands with Clinton and, after swallowing the
lump in his throat, used to overcome the titan force of the rubberized
magnets sealing the door shut.  Inside the refrigerator was a dazzling
array of chilled items, including the famed Tinyman pickle juice, the
restorative power of which has only just been recognized by atheletes
throughout the world.  After eating the last pickle in a jar he could
never bring himself to discard the jar or juice, and he thanked
himself for it now, since it kept so well, alleviating the need for
frequent and harrowing trips to the local supermarket.  Tinyman's
herculean powers of observation noted that the pickle juice had begun
to freeze, and comparing it to the past freeze-thaw records for his
pickle juice noted that it was consistent with a 150-year global
warming trend, and even with the catastrophic cooling event of
approximately 1,500 years ago, which he had deduced by careful
examination of pickle-rings in his pickle archives.

Then the doorbell rang.

Tinyman clamped his hands over his ears in agony and braced himself
for what would be an effort of almost Olympic proportions: traversing
the uncharted space between his kitchen and the front door.  Obstacles
such as end-tables and cats threatened him at every turn.  But he put
his tiny shoulder to the wheel and hoofed it over to the door,
straining on his tiptoes to look through the little fish-eye viewer.

A man in black stood in the hallway tapping his feet and eyeing his
watch.  In his hand Tinyman could make out a contract for an
independent investigation of the Carnivore internet wiretapping
device, with Tinyman's name pre-printed in the "name: print" box.  In
his other hand he held a rubber stamp.  Tinyman tiptoed back into the
room, hoping that the agent hadn't heard him knock the end-table and
lamp over onto his cat on the way to the door.

As he crept back into bed he began to wonder if he should call his
doctor, who after all could now legally recommend some marijuana to
him to relieve some of his stress; he was really living on a high-wire
these days!  Why just the other day he had yelled something mean about
a New York Times reporter to his friend, realizing only too late that
he just needed to take a chill pill and let some things slide for a
change.  But maybe it was those male birth control pills he was
testing.

--
Joe Futrelle
Editor-within-chief,
Newspoetry dot com