It could be worse. We could have icebergs ripping down the Androscoggin, taking out bridges and flooding the riverside bars.

We could have polar bears stealing in from the tundra to eat our womenfolk. We could be forced to live in houses made of ice and to gut seals for blubber to heat our homes.

We could unearth giant alien ships hibernating beneath the snow, like those poor saps in “The Thing,” and then all of our friends would turn into screeching monsters and they would eat our faces in the never-ending night.

We could have Sarah Palin, who believes Maine is a province of Greenland.

We could have all of those things with just a short shift in the Earth’s tilt, but we don’t. What we have is November, a month that reveals 30 days on the “Far Side” calendar but which actually has 60 days and 100 nights due to some weird fluctuations at the planet’s inner core.

We have trees that stand gaunt and leafless hurling their bony shadows onto the land. Those shadows begin to die at 3:30 p.m., when the sun starts heading west, laughing its white hot glee at all those shivering saps down below.

And cold. November will tease you with a short string of 50-degree days. But then, just when you stop wearing thick sweaters to hide embarrassing cold-weather eruptions under your shirt, it slams an icicle into regions of your body most susceptible to the cold.

In downtown Lewiston, drug dealers have changed their hours to make ample use of the 20-hour nights. They have started accepting Paypal because it’s too damn frigid to accept crumpled $20 bills from icy addicts’ fingers.

Panhandlers, too. Forget that, “Brother, can you spare a dime” crap. Dimes are cold in already reddened palms. These days, they will shuffle up to you outside 7-Eleven and ask, “Brother, can you forward your loose change to my account using encryption technology so that I might pay for my mother’s tongue replacement operation?”

Hookers stay on Craigslist where it’s warm. Street fighters have organized and hammered out treaties declaring that brawling will be done only in basements and only where no less than four space heaters are breathing warmth into the arena.

Stray dogs and cats look outright depressed. They scamper through the parks, searching for scraps of food under all those dead leaves. They wish they had been chucked to the curb someplace warmer; maybe San Diego or Marina del Rey. You will find these strays committing petty crimes just so they can get tossed in the pound where they will live in warm cages getting three squares a day.

November rots. It’s like the page in the calendar upon which someone spilled rancid tuna juice. It stinks but you just can’t flip past it.

I think of it as the Reaper, all dark and skeletal, like the month itself, coming to announce the death of good things. Summer, baseball, beaches, barbecues. They died in the month that came before. It spun in … there were no survivors.

There is just not a month like November. December is a hollowed corpse of all things that were good and warm but there’s Christmas and the lunatic fervor that precedes it. January is like a death march through a walk-in cooler but it does not pretend to be anything but winter. February ought to be taken out into the woods and shot, but it is also a big, cold stone leading across the frozen pond into spring and better times.

November is the Evil One with that capital E and that capital O. If you were thinking about becoming an alcoholic but just couldn’t find the time, this is your month. If you were thinking of quitting your job, leaving your family and heading to Miami to collect bottles and cans, friend, take me with you. I have my own garbage bag.

Lord, I hate November. There is no snow for the big snow machines to scream across. There is no ice on the lakes to be drilled into so that fish can be plucked from the depths. There are no frozen ponds where pickup hockey can be played with the twist that hard-skating defensemen might crash through the ice and disappear at any time.

November is Purgatory, the ultimate limbo. No amount of coffee, booze or optimism can stave it off. That’s why I’ve switched to seal blubber, chopped up and snorted.

My God, but I hate November.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail November commiserations to [email protected].