Happy New Year!  We pretty much always have a quiet New Year’s Eve, so did in the library – a calamari dinner with a ruby-pink Lambrusco followed by a zoom with friends in Albuquerque

while indulging in discreet slices of Lulu Beaumont’s homemade panforte, a deadly addition which had fortuitously arrived just that afternoon…in bed before midnight to read an absolutely wonderful essay on sturgeon, “The Creature Beyond the Mountains” in Brian Doyle’s

“Children and Other Wild Animals”.  I may have been awake at midnight but maybe not.  First act of the new year was, of course, to get up and pee and yet, despite Lambrusco and panforte, 2022 did not start off with a hangover.  It did start off rather remarkably pristine…

a condition persisting the Entire First Day.

That night the slide project made it into the current century, last of trailers at Wall Spring with the forte Belvedere* [“forte” thanks to its 440 V8, despite never running quite right],

first summer of House but most importantly Puppy Summer, wherein began our remarkable

journey with Dazzle and her brother Speckle.

January second became O-cast…and even colder with that back bay damp cold we all know so

well so back to the Project, by now up to 2002, with Dave in the Buffalo Hills,

one of my last overnight stays in the Radar studio and, after he was pulled from a varmint trap

on the Owyhee Desert in October, first pictures of Lefty the dancing dog.

Meanwhile over here another year and, if projections are to be believed, a “Happy Flu Year”

which I desperately hope won’t involve sneezing, as it still remains excruciating.  2003…

a Duferrena painting, West 100th Street, Nueva York; Linda’s ’50 F-350

and, inevitably, dogs;

Star Ranch, Idaho. Available now.

[La forte Belvedere, 1994 – 2004, on her way to a new life in Fernley, Nevada]

Wall Spring winter;

Lefty and

…friends.

Huerfano, June 2004

Oregon, later that year…

Carquinez Straits, early this year

Nevada-Idaho Stateline…2004 [?]

and at the old airstrip above 45 Ranch, 2005 [?], still for sale.

The pack…

Ah…well, Happy January Sixth, all you “patriots”. A day that will go down in infamy, or whatever.

In the meantime could someone please enlighten me as to what all these mean-spirited guys have to offer beyond the installation of a Permanent Kleptocracy and perpetuating the unrelenting bullshit of the doofus on those screens?