So. Here we are at last. You, me, maybe some snow, and this: the December 2011 issue of Defenestration. It smells like pine needles and pinecones and pine-scented floor cleaners. Very piney. Pinish? That sounds awful. But the smell? Ridiculishious.

You might be thinking, “This is a winter issue,” which is true if you don’t live in like, Australia, where everyone is wearing bathing suits and taking photos of themselves in bathing suits and them uploading them to [insert social networking site here] so all their American friends (they don’t have any other friends) can feel sad about everything. That’s a very Australian thing to do, I’ve heard. Anyway. You might be thinking “This is a winter issue,” which is true, only not really. In fact that’s wrong. Totally wrong. Nothing in this issue has anything to do with winter. In fact, if we were going to choose a theme for this issue, it would be poop.

It was April when it began.

It might have started earlier, but that was when I noticed the first sign. I was chatting to my mother, the phone in one hand and a pen in the other. It was only when I hung up that I looked down and saw, in thin black strokes, that I’d absently drawn a round little banjo.

And that’s how it started.

When ghosts moved into my house, my first thought was live and let live. Actually, my first thought was, Great, here comes the dementia. My second thought was that I was the victim of some kind of perverted trick, played out by one of my friends. I hoped it was my perverted friend Bob, so I could flatten his nose so bad he’d only smell lip.

But no, these were definitely ghosts.

I’m sitting on the couch watching TV with the kids when the Party Action Party Packrat explodes out of the screen and into our living room.

The kids, of course, go absolutely wild.

“Hello friends!” says the Party Action Party Packrat. His name is Pizza Pete, and you never see it in print without a tm at the end.

Gary divorced Gabriela over what he termed as her ‘lack of support for my shoe choices’. In the settlement, Gabriela kept the house, and Gary moved into the Capri Village Apartments. Now single, he felt freer to explore his shoe preferences. Taking a walk, he noticed a shoe store around the corner. “What a stroke of luck!” declared Gary, eyeing his chipped wobbly clogs.