French for Grapefruit

Jimmy McJames had been tasked with a very important… task… that he was having difficulty completing. The night previous he had been challenged on his Livredevisage Message Panel to tell a friend a story. Unfortunately, being put on the spot like that had crippled his ability to write something that Jimmy, let alone anyone else, might want to read. Steeling himself against his inevitable failure, Jimmy decided he didn’t want to let a friend down. He opened a new email message in Macrocorp’s Viewpoint and began typing, because it was much less obvious he wasn’t working, at work, when he wrote this way.

Over the next several hours Jimmy started, and subsequently abandoned, a number of stories.

The first story focused on a group of magical ponies. The Ponies, or Magonies as they were called, were locked in an eternal struggle with a cadre of devil worshiping ranchers who plotted to boil the ponies hooves into glue. The glue, of course, contained magical powers that the evil ranchers would use to conquer all the farms in the world. This idea was rejected almost immediately after it was written for the very obvious reason that it was almost wholly derivative of the great French author Franco Frenchsalot’s seminal masterpiece, “The Wizard Horse of Albankazartoffizan 4.”

Jimmy then tried to incorporate his Magical Ponies concept with some kind of benevolent Space Ranchers from Mars, and the adventures they had together saving the universe. But again, Franco Frenchsalot had been there and written that in his prequel to “The Wizard Horse of Albankazartoffizan 4”, “The Sorcerer King of the Miniature Horses.”

Somewhere around the seventh try Jimmy’s story had morphed into a piece of improbable Fanfic involving Batman & Robin (who were now a monogamous, married homosexual couple) teaming up with the Magical Ponies to overthrow the evil reign of the formerly benevolent Space Ranchers of Mars who had undergone a tragic fall from grace.

He had planned on wrapping this story up with a fantastic battle in which The Magical Ponies used their space magic to manufacture a solar eclipse by using a powerful blackout ray spell. This spell would rob the Space Rangers of the super powers their suns solar radiation gave them. When the Space Rangers lost their powers Batman and Robin could then apprehend the Space Ranger General and lock him up in Arkham Asylum. Of course, everyone lived happily ever after.

However, a quick perusal of the newsgroup “alt.magic.ponies.space_rangers.batman&robin.fanfic” revealed that Jimmy was once again duplicating work already published by that basted Franco.

Besides, the piece would have taken months of polish to make it shine, and Jimmy simply didn’t have that kind of time if he was to tell his friend a story in any kind of timely manner.

Jimmy tried and tried, and then tried again before trying one last time, but each aborted attempt at spinning a story became stupider then the last. As he gave up on his latest attempt Jimmy cursed himself for a fool and decided to take a break. He loudly cursed himself again after he stubbed his toe while on his way to get a drink of water. This loud cursing scared his kitten, which then hid in a dresser drawer. Jimmy then had to spend an hour coaxing the kitten out of the drawer with treats. It was, all things considered, very cute.

When he returned to his computer Jimmy abandoned his attempts at writing and spent almost three hours on VousTube, during which he got angry at the amount of idiots leaving negative comments on videos he enjoyed. Then he checked out a website called French for Grapefruit, which he found so hilarious and hysterical that he couldn’t believe no one read it, linked to it or enjoyed it. Honestly, Jimmy thought the writer of that website was a genius!

Jimmy never did get around to finishing the story for his friend, and he was forced to admit to himself a few days later that he was a complete slacker with no follow through, and that maybe, just maybe, if he buckled down and dedicated himself to his craft he could be something special, or something mildly successful. At the least someone so hackish that his work could be viewed and read in that detached, ironic way that people do nowadays. You know what I mean don’t you. It sort of the same way certain people enjoy like bands like Dragonforce.

Anyhow, Jimmy eventually did write that story for his friend. It was very Meta, as Jimmy based it on his inability to write a story when he was asked to by a friend. Also, the ending was a little lackluster.

~Fin~