"Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I have to take this home with me. Aloisa, have you ever listened to this?" he asked me. I replied that I hadn't, and he dove to the CD player to, eh, play the CD. "Where did your mother get this? Will she mind if I take it with me?"

"She said that you gave it to her because you don't like the Carpenters, but she doesn't really like them either."

"Awesome," he replied with irrational exuberance as Rainy Days and Mondays blasted from the stereo. We listened in complete silence. He stroked his beard and I furrowed my brow, pondering the meaning of it all. Neither one of us said a word. All of a sudden I was jabbed with a strange pain; a difficult to place, yet all-too-familiar feeling.

It was like sitting on an aeroplane next to a very loud person who can't seem to stop fidgeting in their seat and refuses to chew with their mouth closed. It was like standing in the aviary at the Detroit zoo, paranoid about touching the butterflies. It was like overeating before a two-hour car ride. It was like being doused in fried yoghurt. It was like watching a movie then watching it again with your grandparents, only to remember partway through that you completely forgot about the ten minute sex scene at the end.

It was the unmistakable feeling of wanting to die.

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"This is the second most depressing thing I've ever heard."

"Are you kidding?! This was the seventies! This was the happiest it got!"

I highly doubted this, seeing as how I could think of at least five bands from the 1970's that don't make me want to slit my wrists for one reason or another. It wasn't even that the music was all that terrible. It would have been soothing if it weren't all so creeping and melancholy and like wading through an ocean of bipolar molasses.

"Hey, Ticket to Ride!" he read with glee, inspecting the back of the case. "I never knew they did that one!" He skipped to the track and my ears were filled with the most morose piano intro that I have ever heard. It droned on for what seemed like eternity, scathing my once-carefree soul more and more with each note.

"Surely," I thought, "this was commissioned by Satan himself to be elevator music in the deepest reaches of hell."

"I think I'm gonna be sad... I think it's today... The boy that's drivin' me mad... is going away..." Karen Carpenter crooned to us. Her voice rang in my ears and I suddenly realised that I was lying on the floor in the foetal position, completing my spiral into miasmal depression.

"Oh my God," my father said with tears in his eyes. I had never seen my father cry before, and the sight disturbed me in every sense of the word. "This would be an amazing song to slit your wrists to, you know that? And the original is so upbeat! I think they've just ruined that song for me. That takes true talent. I really have to go."

"Are you going to take the CD?" I nearly begged. I knew that if he left it at our house, I would be compelled to listen to the rest out of morbid curiosity and end up another teenage suicide statistic.

"I don't think it would be wise to drive with this in the stereo; I think I'm just going to leave it here. I will turn this off before you hang yourself, though."

"You're the best," I whispered, all will to live sucked out of me as I lay dejected on the carpet.

I really hate the Carpenters.

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