You’ve gotten past any false expectations for something good to come of Christmas and New Year’s, or whatever Christmas substitute your faith, ethnicity, and authenticity will allow for. February and all its Mardi Gras goodness is still an impossibly long way away.

So it’s a good time to die.

I’m thinking a lot about death right now because I just finished a writing project. It’s a script. There are zombies. It probably sucks.

I can’t even say it’s done, as all I’ve done is finish the rough draft, which is now, and has been, sitting on my desk for nearly a month. Looking at me, like some endgame cancer patient, too weak to twist the dial to give himself enough morphine to end the pain.

See, that’s the thing about writing. A lot of people – stupid people – compare it to childbirth. They’re wrong.

The birth part comes early, when you’re fleshing things out, creating your story. The little bastard grows up before your eyes, makes its way into the imaginary world you’ve conceived, and stumbles awkwardly along toward some sort of greater understanding. Or, more often, just bumbles about aimlessly, confusing and alienating anyone who reads it that isn’t a blood relative.

By the time you get to the end, all the bumbling and stumbling about is done with. It’s lurching toward a conclusion, and that conclusion is, if you’re honest with yourself, its death.

That’s why the old-fashioned way to end a novel was simple. You came right out and said it.

The End.

Or you went with the slightly more “full of yourself” version I prefer and just typed “END.” It has that prissy sense of finality, like the book was a shell, and you just cast it off because you’re now a beautiful butterfly. One with a strong taste for scotch and an even stronger desire to get loaded.

But the book, it’s a part of you. So when you finish it, really finish it, it’s kind of like putting a bullet in your own head, then somehow walking away. Stings a little.

And it’s not something I usually feel like celebrating, even though I always feel as if I should. Mostly, it’s something I shy away from, like dentist appointments and health food.

Still, everybody, and everything, dies. This episode of Red Shtick will die.

Riddle me this: You are reading January’s issue. So where the f–k is October’s, eh? That’s right: long gone to the recycling bin, or possibly the trash. You people are young, hipster types, but a lot of you are drunk, and this is Baton Rouge … so there are plenty of reasons you’d send this puppy to a landfill rather than some eco-friendly center where it could be reborn as scratchy, industrial-grade toilet paper.

I wonder, as I look at the soon-to-be-rotting corpse of my script: How long ’til I squeeze the trigger and dig this one a grave? It sure ain’t smelling any fresher, the longer it sits on my desk.

So maybe January. Like I said, it’s a great month for suicide.