THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

Lately, I have felt like the most recent days of my life are going by at the speed of those old, calendar page-flipping movie montages which turned decades into seconds. It’s hard enough being a man, a toe-tapping creature who is bred to be goal oriented, impatient and always in a honk-honk from the driveway hurry.   I was even antsy writing that last sentence.   And now I’m fretting about the next one.   Are we there yet? When I was young, time felt like it was made out of Silly Putty which could stretch for miles and turn virtually anything into a child’s game.   Planet Earth  was the very same globe that Charlie Chaplin blissfully toyed with, in The Great Dictator. Words like “someday” and “forever” made up 99.99% of my vocabulary.   I dreamed from the holy valleys and mountain peaks of the still-forming heart with wide open eyes, often while staring at the vast duvet of stars and planets like the Little Prince that I was then, sitting perched, knees t

THE SANTATORIUM Written by David Steven Simon Thehollywoodragepage.blogspot.com Now that Christmas is finally in our rearview mirrors, yet still closer than it appears, it is finally time for our official release from Merry Happy Hospital, or as I like to call it, the Santatarium, as we brace ourselves for that hard, Bogart gangster slap in the face known as reality. I honestly cannot attest for my whereabouts since Thanksgiving. Evidently, I lapsed into a meal-induced coma and have been in some kind of Snow White Christmas state of vegetation ever since. Christmas, counter to the #metoo movement, shamelessly flirts with us and then goes in for a full-on seduction, whose afterglow leaves us feeling uncommonly loved and blissful as we spend the rest of the season, twirling around like toddlers who got into the liquor cabinet, whose job one is trying to capture every snowflake, whether real or imaginary, on the tips of our lips and fin