“Shut up,” she said, “or I’ll have you buried in it.”

So, here I am trekking to The Wharf looking like something Picasso threw up. But I’m warm and comfortable enough to not curse at every snowflake in sight. Warm and comfortable enough to stop for a little rest in a snowbank on the side of the road, where I spark up my doobie. It’s not long before I’m deep in the throes of some wide-eyed stoner wonder. Enthralled by the way the piles of whiteness contrast with the tough, tenacious greenery. Mesmerized with how the blue shadows on the ground are edged with the sharp sparkle of sunlit diamonds in the snow. I notice the space. The silence. Until a big black crow comes flailing out of the woods and lands on the telephone wire that stretches overhead as he lets out a wicked string of clicks and caws. I click and caw right back at him.

They’re not just noisy, beady-eyed scavengers with a penchant for anything shiny. They’re better problem solvers than the average snot-nosed human kid. They learn the tweety dialects of other birds so that they know what they’re saying to each other, and they mimic those sounds just to fuck with the neighbours sometimes. When one of their own dies, they have funerals. They gather together in the same tree, and holler in unison, and if the dead bird was important, other murders will come from all over to pay respects. And wild crows don’t actually even steal and stash shiny things. They are too busy just trying to survive to be bothered with stealing anything they can’t eat or make a nest with. They are practical creatures. It’s only the young, foolish, spoiled ones that are thieves.

When I start thinking I can communicate with the woodland creatures, I am baked enough. Two spit-dabbed fingers pinch out the cherry on the joint. I awkwardly push and pull myself to my feet, stash the stubbed out spliff in the pocket of my new coat, and stroll down the road to The Wharf, as I consider my options for how to spend what might be my final New Year’s Eve. I could go be depressed with Allie at the General Hospital in Town. Or go be nuts with Char and Horatio at the Regional, in Town, Town. I could join Mama for a meeting with Jacinta, the lawyer down the road, about how to screw Sarah Spenser’s plans, before she heads off to scrub toilets. I could sit alone in my closet, wrapped in an old flannel shirt, eating one of the dozen pans of broc-o-glop that Mama hyper-efficiently assembled and froze on Christmas Day, before I even got out of bed.

Or I could try and hitch a ride into the KoC dance that everybody and their dog will be at tonight. I could go there and hang out with Willy and Chrissy. Probably run into Duke the Puke and Becky Chickenshit. Maybe even Weasel Tobin, or one of his kids, all named Weasel Tobin Jr. by their different mamas. I could go there and pretend to try to not make a scene, and then end up making the most scenic scene all these yahoos have ever seen.