January is the Monday of months. Anyway, here’s a list of 2018 New Year’s resolutions for Newfoundland and Labrador, the West Virginia of provinces:

Take up gardening! Better yet, leave St. John’s altogether and go back to the bay in a desperate bid to save your grandparents’ fishing village by transforming it into the world capital of artisanal turnip wine or whatever.

Remortgage your house and open a line of credit to buy as much Bitcoin as possible. Definitely do this, it’s definitely a good idea.

Learn how to survive in a post-atomic wasteland. Just in case.

Be nicer to people online. This feels hypocritical of me to say because a lot of my livelihood has come from being reasonably good at being a dick on the internet, but I don’t have much of a stomach for it anymore. When Twitter first started taking off in this province back in the day it was deadly. It was like the Wild West. It was all the dynamics of the mid-aughts webforums I grew up on except with celebrities and people from your regular life. But then I realized that it had all the dynamics of a mid-aughts webforums I grew up on, except with celebrities and people from regular life. So now we live in one great 24/7/365 cultural flame war and everyone has turned into a monster. Perhaps myself most of all. Anyway, this is something I would like to work on more this year.

Get in a Chris Mitchelmore selfie.

Take up smoking weed. We have skin in the game now and most of the proceeds go to the province. As it stands, Newfoundland will probably go bankrupt in the next ten years. We need people getting blasted on governmentdistributed drugs constantly if we’re going to get out of this jam without the IMF or a Canadian judge taking over our finance department.

Call Open Line and talk to Paddy about your feelings.

Make peace with the cruel indifference of the universe and/or flame out in a blaze of hedonistic glory.

Discover the lost treasures of Geoff Stirling.

Discover that the lost treasures of Geoff Stirling were actually inside you all along, waiting for your soul to vibrate up the great chain of Being in the crisp sea breeze of a coastal field in summer. (Alternatively: buddy gets back to you with the good acid in time to catch Scenes of Newfoundland on the grinding 5 am comedown).

Finally f— off to the mainland out of it once and for all.

Unlock the mysterious world of bees.

Cut the RPM album you have been thinking about doing for literally the entire time RPM has existed, but for various reasons you always flaked, but like actually do it this year, like this will actually be the year, you can do this, it will be great

Take up a new sport! Failing that, invent one.

Feel the fear and do it anyway. You’re only passing through once and you have less time than you think.

Actually go to a city council meeting or a provincial budget consultation or a town hall or literally anything that will involve you somewhat in the decisions that politicians are going to make about your life.

Hug a pug.

Get one of your memes reposted to Facebook by the Newfoundland Turnip and then explain what that means to nan so she can be some proud of you and get you a tin of Big 8 and a bar for being good at the internet.

Sign up to run in the Tely 10 but as soon as it starts immediately just start fighting people so it turns into a big brawl on the open streets over whether or not the east end of Town is better than the west end but then put aside your differences after a quick bruising in order to wedgie everyone from Paradise.

Plan a romantic getaway to scenic Gander.

Start a new summer music festival and then schedule it to take place during the exact same weekend as all the other summer concerts in the province and force everyone to pick just one instead of going to a bunch of them, for some reason.

Take at least a moment to find a good view of the harbour on a nice day or in the din of a kitchen party with your friends and just savour the beautiful madness of living in this stupid, wonderful place.

Eat as many plates of stir fry at the Red Pepper as you want. You deserve it.