It's a scant season for optimists. Post-Christmas Portland is a ponderous fucking bummer. It's your living room the morning after you hosted a party, and you're left wondering if the previous mirth was worth this mess of twisted, unCanDoable beer cans, red cups full of bloated cigarette carcasses, and barren beef jerky bags.

We don't get natural disasters here in Portland. (I know we're supposed to get a total bro of an earthquake at some point, but I'm pretty sure that's why Danny Glover lives in Forest Grove... to save us from that earthquake.) Instead, we spread our natural disaster out over nine months. We become "Portland: Home of the All-Day Evening." For a while, our disgusting weather is charming because y'all stylish motherfuckers can wear your pea coats, thick Irish sweaters, drink tea, and almost buy The Bell Jar, and then it's Halloween in all of it's unimpeachable dopeness, and then it's Thanksgiving and you can get drunk with people from high school, and then it's Christmas and all the things people love about Christmas (whimsy, Jesus, limited edition beer), and then it's whatever the fuck you young go-hards do on New Year's Eve and then... this... whatever this is.

Did you know the six weeks following Christmas is when 98 percent of heroin addicts try heroin for the first time? There is absolutely no evidence behind that claim, other than come on—it's totally when people try heroin. What the hell else is there to do?

Eggnog lattes become ridiculous in January—it's like looking over at the car next to you and seeing a clown driving a Chrysler. If I see some dude use his Oregon Trail Card to buy a loaf of Dave's Killer Bread in December I feel compassion, empathy and joy—everyone deserves delicious bread now and then. If I see that same dude using food stamps to buy spendy-ass bread in January, I want him to die eating it. YOU BUY ENRICHED WHEAT HOME PRIDE AND DIE SLOW LIKE THE REST OF US, YOU DOWN-ON-HIS-LUCK DORK.

What is there to look forward to? Valentine's Day is fine, but nobody has an appropriate opinion on Valentine's Day. Some people get all saccharine (stuffed kangaroo holding a heart, accompanied by a card written and directed by Garry Marshall) and it's obnoxious as fuck. But it's sweet. I mean... it's sweet like Fun Dip, but it's still sweet. Then there are the motherfuckers who want to spit in your Fun Dip and remind you that it's a holiday created to sell chocolate, flowers, greeting cards, and to make single people feel sad. Fuck you, single people, with your entire beds and your freewheeling handjobs. Buy yourself a milkshake and holster your meme snark. So what's left? Tax service commercials, jokes about how Black History Month is the shortest month of the year, paying a full month's worth of rent for 28 days of roof? Fuck.

I don't know what to do about it. Spend time with your friends, maybe shoplift something stupid, hope it actually snows (and actually sticks), and know that if shit really starts to get awful Danny Glover is never far away. Nobody actually do heroin. @IanKarmel