Doug's Future Shock
Dear Journal, it's me again, Doug Funnie. Ever since I surprised my family by graduating with honors from the Moody School, it's been hard to find the one little voice calling me. After no luck finding a decent job in Bluffington with my art school diploma, I lowered my expectations and got a minimum wage job at Swirly's. This proved to be a mistake from day one because as soon as I stepped into my Swirly's uniform, Mr. Swirly suddenly changed from a polite Southern gentleman into a demonic taskmaster who makes Mr. Bone look like Mr. Dink. And if it weren't for Mr. Swirly's meanness, I'd never have found myself in my current predicament. You see, every day at 5 PM, Mr. Swirly leaves his ice cream parlor for his house in the hills. Unfortunately, one day, I was dazing off in the parlor, dreaming up a new Race Canyon story, when I tripped on an old concrete Bluff Scout bar I had neglected to pick up and landed inside the refrigerator. The handle wouldn't work, so I started to panic. This was New Year's Eve, 1999, and everyone I knew was out at a New Year's party, anticipating the dreaded Y2K.
Well, to make a long story short, Journal, it would be one thousand years until anyone found me, frozen alive in that refrigerator. Mr. Swirly died of a heart attack on New Year's Day and they shut down the parlor, completely neglecting the inside. Then there was a nuclear holocaust and everyone in Bluffington died, except for me, because I was safe in the fridge. Race Canyon was right in Castle of the Chrome Cranium. The next thing I remember, an elderly professor with glasses so thick you couldn't see his eyes unthawed me.
"Good news, everyone," the professor spoke to a spacecraft full of humans, an alien, and a robot alike. "My ancestor Doug Funnie has been defrosted!"
"Ancestor?" I asked the professor. "Who—who are you?"
"Greetings, I am Professor Hubert Farnsworth, a mad scientist and the owner of the Planet Express delivery service!"
I viewed several inventions in the spacecraft, and assumed Farnsworth invented them. They all looked very expensive, and I wanted to show them to Mr. Dink, as I had not realized at this point that Mr. Dink and the rest of Bluffington as I knew it were long gone.
Then I viewed the most beautiful woman I had ever seen since Patti Mayonnaise, regardless of the fact that she had only one eye. She appeared to have athletic abilities which exceeded even that of Patti, and didn't seem to be someone to cross. "Doug, I'm Leela," she said. "I'm the captain of the Planet Express spacecraft which you are currently aboard."
"Is that the Silver Skeeter?" I asked Leela, pointing to the robot, who bore an uncanny resemblance to my old friend Skeeter's superhero equivalent.
"To all skeet skeet mother…" began the robot, smoking a cigar and drinking a bottle of Old Crow in unison.
"No, this is Bender Bending Rodriguez. He's a bending unit whom we also employ," explained Leela.
A small black alien with multiple eyes crawled up to Leela and stared at me. He was about the size of Porkchop and seemed incapable of human speech like Porkchop, but looked much hungrier than Porkchop. "That's Nibbler," Leela said.
Leela began to introduce me to the rest of the Planet Express crew, which included Amy, a wealthy Chinese girl in a revealing pink jumpsuit who reminded me of Beebe Bluff, a rotund, studious-looking bureaucrat with a Jamaican accent named Hermes who was munching away on beets (he claimed that even in the year 2999, beets still had not been legalized), and Zoidberg, a lobster-like doctor who also seemed familiar…
"Are you a nematode?" I asked the doctor.
"For this you bring me out here?" Zoidberg asked the rest of the crew. "Dumber than the robit, this Doug Funnie is!"
"I'm not dumb!" I yelled at Zoidberg. "You don't know dumb! There was this kid Willy White at my old school…"
"Willy W. White, the President of the United States?" gasped Leela. "You know him?"
"Yeah, he was the ex-mayor's son, but he didn't exactly have political aspirations back then," I explained. "His dad Bob White, who lost his position to my neighbor Tippi Dink, thought that his seldom-seen other son, Jeb White, was more suited to the position, but regardless, Willy became the mayor of Bluffington by 1999. I wish my Bluffington friends were still with me."
"Doug, your Bluffington friends are still here," said Professor Farnsworth, and led me through a corridor to several shelves filled with glass jars holding the heads of everyone I knew back in the early 1990s. Skeeter, Roger, Patti, Chalky, Judy, Beebe, Connie—literally everyone except for Willy White.
"Willy escaped from the lab earlier this year and seized control of the U.S. government," Farnsworth told me. "The fact that you know him makes you the ideal candidate for tracking him down and returning him to Planet Express."