I suddenly felt sorry this morning for my distressed leather shoulder bag, which I used to lug around everywhere. It’s big enough to carry two 15″ computers plus cords and batteries and whatnot, and I was thinking in a kind of dopey, children’s book sort of way that the bag must feel so unloved these days. Because all it does is sit there on top of a small faux-leather chest and collect dust.

I really love this rugged-looking saddlebag, and wish I could talk to it and say that it looks and feels (and smells!) so cool. If John Wayne‘s Tom Dunson needed a computer bag at the start of the cattle drive in Red River, he would have chosen this without hesitation.

Yes, it’s moronic to feel badly about a leather bag being left alone and ignored, but as strange as it sounds I feel the same way about this bag that my little brother used to feel about “fig fat”, a stuffed Panda bear that he used to carry around.

Forgive me but I’ll be taking the rest of the afternoon off in order to (a) watch a very big movie (a June release) and also (b) re-paint a couple of doors. What difference does it make?

How did it get to be Friday already? Last weekend ended only a day or two ago.

Bill Bramhall‘s latest alludes to the sudden dropping of all charges against Michael Flynn, carried out by Attorney General William Barr at the behest of President Donald Trump. For context, please read “The Appalling Damage of Dropping the Michael Flynn Case,” a N.Y. Times op-ed by Georgetown law professors Neal K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer.

I’ve been down with Saul Bass tributes for so long they look like up to me. The man with the golden arm (or the golden eye or pen of what-have-you) was born 100 years ago today, and passed just over 24 years ago at age 76. My three favorite Bass-designed title sequences remain the same (and in this order): Ocean’s 11 (’60), North by Northwest (’59), The Man With The Golden Arm (’55). And one of best tributes ever, I feel, was the decision to go solely with the crooked-arm visual on the marquee of Times Square’s Victoria theatre. That was enough, United Artists believed.

In “False Prophet,” the object of Dylan’s derision seems to be some kind of slick, double-talking Beelzebub. Donald Trump? Himself? You tell me. “I’m the enemy of treason / Enemy of strife/ Enemy of the unlived meaningless life / I ain’t no false prophet / I just know what I know / I go where only the lonely can go.” Roy Orbison?

I love the choppy, bluesy rhythm guitar…bah-dahm, bah-dahm. Cuts right through.

My beloved Souplantation, a citadel of nutrition and communal comfort eating, is no more. The self-serve cafeteria chain, which launched in San Diego in 1978, has been killed by COVID-19, or by an FDA regulation that says communal salad and soup bars are too dangerous in the current environment.

I began eating at my favorite Souplantations (11911 San Vicente Blvd. in Brentwood, the other at 100 No. La Cienega Blvd. or inside the Beverly Grove complex) sometime in the early ’90s. Those salads, soups, blueberry muffins and pasta bowls, and especially the soft ice cream covered with chopped nuts and chocolate syrup!

In the summer of ’97 (or was it’ 98?) O.J. Simpson and two or three pallies strolled into the Brentwood location, where I also happened to be. Scooped up vittles, sat and joked and smiled. Everyone did a reasonably good job of pretending they weren’t thinking what they were thinking. Quite the moment.

Over the last decade or so my Souplantation visits were less frequent. Maybe two or three times a year, if that. But it was nice knowing I could go there almost any time and not have to spend much for a nice healthy salad and a tall glass of lemonade, etc. I’m very, very sorry that this beloved chain is dead and buried.

You can feel the current right away. Judd Apatow and Pete Davidson‘s The King of Staten Island (Universal, 6.12) is first and foremost a New York extreme-behavior borough movie with tattoos and firemen…that much is obvious. And a real-deal movie about flawed or constipated or otherwise damaged or disappointed human beings trying to ignore or work through their histories and hang-ups and trepidations, and being randomly funny or nervy or guilty or fucked-up in the margins but…aahh, what do I know from a trailer? I’ll tell you what I can sense. This film is not smug or lazy or camped out in its own rectum but ambitious and probing…a go-for-broker.

“You make everyone around you crazy…you gotta get your shit together…time is passing by really quickly.”