For some reason I woke up at noon. I closed my eyes and didn’t get out of bed (just out of spite, I think) until 2:10. I was hoping I’d miss the bus, but no such luck. Sitting at the bus stop, this corn-fed, blonde, mid-western woman with bad veins on her too-pale legs is babbling on her mobile phone. I try not to overhear but some sentences leak through. Things that are totally inappropriate say under any circumstance in my opinion, much less leave as a message from a mobile phone sitting at a bus stop on Spencer and Flamingo in central Las Vegas. “We were together in a past life” and “I have a daughter that wants to be born” are two lines that I remember clearly. The rest was crazy hippie shit. She called a second time after running out of time on the first message. After she finished with the call, she struck up a conversation with me by commenting on my nail polish (I’m wearing Revlon #360, “KhakiZING”, an odd polish that changes from purple to green depending on which angle the light is bouncing off it.) She asked me if I’d been clubbing the night before. She explained that she’d lived in Manhattan, had an apartment in the Village, and had been around such things for a very long time. She told me a story about someone she knew dating someone in Jesus and Mary Chain, she went to a show. She felt out of place since her hair was blonde (she said “no roots”, I thought “do the cuffs match the collar?”) and not total white or black. Of course I think it’s odd that this woman that just moments before was spouting psychobabble into her phone and wearing light tan shorts over varicose veins would know of this band (they’re relatively unknown, even to the Smiths/Cure/Depeche Mode set) so I listen a little more. She spoke of seeing Dave Gahan backstage at one of their (Depeche Mode’s) concerts so strung out on heroin he could barely move yet throwing a fit over the fact that there was meat on the buffet table. She claims to have said “Oh sure if the heroin doesn’t kill you I don’t think the lamb will!” I’m not exactly sure what she was doing in that situation, I got the impression she did some kind of legal work but why the hell would she be taking the bus in Las Vegas? She was right about Depeche being vegetarians (as well as Howard Jones) so if she was hallucinating she’s at least done some research.