The New Year is starting with pink skies each morning and night. This compels me at my core in ways I don’t understand, but like.

What started out as a lovely day for a tending of our palm tree turned into a quarter hour’s digging into my leg until the surgeon found this bastard burrowing under the fat layer of my shin. Deeper, he dug, deeper…

Xmas Reflections – Pops is climbing out of his funk with help from the Circus band.

Xmas Reflections from a serene winter Skyfarm garden, with a glimpse of the new Circus project afoot.

As easy a transformation as John Malkovitch into a puppeteer, with a little help from my friends and a growing menagerie of finger dicing tools, I’ve taken, like Harrison Ford, I like to think, to the wood in my off time.

My Fearless Assistant, Bodyguard, Confidant. Blue haired and beside me in my adventures as a professional photographer.

…it’s Summer. To the rest of LA Spring, and on several days Fall is just budding.

The wacky tales are born everyday.

There was Propero’s ether mask suiside found by burgelers a few weeks into decomposition after his mis-fired auto-erotic Popular Mechanics experiment in the garage.

There was the screaming wife on the lamb and on the heroin and the claims of coming to LA for TB to jilt her husband and have a thing with the young Handsome Bill who didn’t like being eventually jilted himself so he gave her the brick and the silk dress tie up of the neck as she screamed and the stenographer and her mother downstais who heard the screams and then the thump of the Murphy Bed closing….

Some of us are blogging, some webcasting – see www.talkshow247.com – there’s singing by ukelele, and stories of gore and sills of 1920′s hootch, Cadillac repo’s gone wrong, Dahlia dumps, unhappy Parisian cosette breast augmentation skin rejuvinators turning on the gas, and general Darwin Award type partings from this coil. And through it all, a lone rider in a private dick hat pulled low is taking copious notes.

Kicking off with Marvin Gaye’s house where his father did him in. A Fundamentalist vodka lover and a misogynistic sex addict, who collected guns and had gifted an unmarked Saturday Night Special to his father… You get the idea. They didn’t get along and were known to quarrel and grapple. Then daddy brought the gun upstairs, knocked on the bedroom door, and put it to Marvin’s chest. All his millions had gone up his nose and now the bullet went into his lungs.