A crappy Saturday morning and afternoon: I shuttle around town and outskirts to answer emergencies. Emergency at 2.00 pm means me ploughing through mud, dirt and bumpy roads on a half-assed 4WD thing with narry a hint of suspension left in its absorbers and springs.

That and, two hours into my ride around a construction site, I’m given more information I had previously requested, only to find out that I had wasted my time.

Monday’s gonna be a helluva day now, because I’ll be trudging through the same crap yet again.

Oh, glory.

“All my friends are murder
Hey, all my bones no marrows in
All these fiends want teenage meat
All my friends are murderers”
— Drain the blood, the Distillers

I get past today without doing much, sitting on my hands and wondering about the fate of my dog-eared copy of that book, whilst looking for an excuse to skip the afternoon and head straight to bed (strange, I know: none of us should need a reason to sleep).

“You shouldn’t need a reason to get depressed either,” she said. I chuckled over the phone, a wordless speech-act (sic) that has no doubt cost me a little less than a ringgit. Most sensible people drunk dial; I hardly need an excuse for that either.

“Ya, you get depressed at the drop of a hat,” I said.

“You think so?” she said, after a short pause. It’s not constructive criticism, it was a quip. She catches things like that pretty fast. Hyper-sensitive or just plain bonkers?

“I’m not saying you’re manic depressive or anything,” I said, quickly.

“Maniacal, at least,” she said.

“Yeah, maniacal definitely”.

“So you think I’m mad, am fashionably depressed when I want to–”

“Fashionably depressed?” I protested.

“Yeah, it’s so in to be depressed, sir. It’s all the rage, now,” she laughed.

“So what’s your excuse?” I asked, wondering where the conversation was heading.

“Malibu,” she said. Eh? My brain misfired for a few seconds.

“Come again?”

“Malibu. Malibu, dammit, I go to Malibu,” she said.

“Right, somewhere in the States, um.. what do you mean?” I said.

“Courtney Love and that sexy bassist, you idiot”.

And that convinced me I needed a little time away from her, at least away from conversations with her. So, obscure songs from Hole aren’t my specialty, that’s a given, but I get conversations like that all the time from her. Excuse me, ‘fashionably depressed’? A ‘wtf’ moment, if any qualifies.