Confessions of -dMa-san

Now that I don't have Friends anymore I was thinking to myself that it is a good thing I'm a Survivor buff because it's going to take all I have left to face what's down the road here.

That's when my daughter Lil Lisa Lou asked me for a bedtime story. This was an unusual move since Lil Lisa Lou knows by heart the one story that I am capable of telling her. I rifled through the file drawer of my frontal lobes for something else but as always came up with not something soothing but something I was once sued over. It's just another hard luck story and I am reluctant to keep on telling her the story night after night because a) I don't need to expedite her transition from a skeptic to a cynic and b) the Missus thinks we should stick to the tried and true like tales about vegetables.

But Lil Lisa Lou was more persistent than usual so I relented, tucked her in, and began. "Once upon a long ago in a war torn land lived a slightly bulging mostly quietly reserved three-legged sycophant named Yakuza. Yakuza had alabaster skin and liked to call himself Nellie McKay. He spent much of his youth wandering his land looking for God. Unfortunately he allowed the light to blind him of the danger of blurring what words mean and what words we assign to different feelings as if it were that simple.

Deep down Yakuza realized at a prematurely young age that he wanted to leave his mark on this world and the only way he knew how to do this was to invent a new word to describe a feeling that had always been felt before but had never been shared with another and get it all down on paper for historical purposes. He had a deeper than most capacity for love of things great and small though he lacked others' ability to be socially graceful and forceful.

He made the mistake as an adolescent of mixing up love and inspiration. He wasn't sure if his perpetual falling in love inspired his desire to write or if it was the other way around- that he yearned to write so he looked for anyone or anything to inspire him and thus he fell in love more than his share."

Lil Lisa Lou tried her best to stifle a yawn.

"One day Yakuza had a slight mishap if being hit by a busload psychological baggage could be called slight in any way. But just as all was looking bleak, just as the sun was being blotted out in a permanent and personal eclipse, Yakuza stumbled upon a walker. And step upon step that followed the solemnity, the weight of it all lessened if only for a moment. But it was this lingering moment long since gone that Yakuza continued to live in far past its expiration date.

Years passed by and Yakuza never felt the same again. He just kept pressing on no matter what happened, no matter how much it felt like he had a leak inside and the numbing thing dripping slowly out was his spirit. Then beauty in its purest form appeared and made Yakuza stand up and pay attention. Eanad's life might have been ended before it began and more than once she was close to her last breath. But she persevered and it was that quality that alone could have made him fall deeper in love than anytime before but there was so much more.

Nothing could last forever and a friendship encased in eggshells was bound to crack now and again. Eanad made things hard for Yakuza. He wasn't even sure anymore where the professional ended and the personal began. And as an adult he had spent most of his energy trying not to be in love and thus he rarely felt inspired anymore. That alone drained him to dangerous levels and the emptiness only exacerbated the hole where his soul used to reside."

Lil Lisa Lou was drifting away. She knew the rest of the story. She knew how it always ended. I wasn't reading from a book so some of the details were bound to be different but the words were certainly not in random order and none of them were of the originality that I hoped them to be.