Scarey Dante comes to Grandma's house

Here is Dante, 13, who drank that Monster drink when he arrived at Grandma's house around 7pm. He drank it and got on the computer. About 1am I suggested he might go to bed. He said Monster drink had caused him to go wide awake. We let that wear off. About 3am (dont tell dad) he was still there, so I made him stop for a little bit and explain to me what he was doing, what had preoccupied his mind so completely from 7 pm to 3 am. He said it was a project, he was BUILDING A GAME! He was programming. I said do you realize you have now been doing this non stop for 8 hours. That is as long as people work. How can you be so fascinated with this. I looked. There was maps. Piles of stuff going here and there. Charts. I said how did you find out how to do this? mumble. I read a book. How long have you been doing this? Oh, about 2 months. Does your dad let you do this. Oh yes, some. I said, I do not understand you, Dante. This is not how I grew up. We did not have electricity. We worked all day. Well, I did read a lot, but this fascination with building a game I do not understand. This morning I saw evidence he had gone all over the Internet. I went back to bed At 5am he was still building. I glanced at the screen and saw that a game of some sort seemed to be in progress. I went back to bed. when I woke up again at 7 am, guess what he was finally conked out on the floor. Oh yes, he had said to give him a tylonol and maybe that would relax him enough so he could wind down, so I did at 5am. I said no more monster drinks for you but then he always acts like this to a degree. He is an extremist. He made no noise. Oh no, he was supremely quiet the whole time, eerily quiet. So at 5am, the last I saw of him, still at his work, I said in the morning I will go get a paper and what do you want for breakfast. Sausage, egg biscuit. Okay to Circle K. Orange juice. He also said he agreed to do another video. I said I might bring up the video camera and tripod, if I was not too tired from contemplating what you are all about. What will we call it "Going into the mind of Dante?" Ten minutes will not suffice. He is deep. I said his mother would probably call for him to go to church by 11am. I said, do you like Church? Your mom said she hoped it would help you. He said, no it was very boring, he hated it, but he could not convince her of anything. I said, well, no, how do you like school. Some classes are boring, but the girls like him. They love him. Oh oh. But he does not let them kiss him unless he says so! Kiss??? Oh no. Well, enough of that subject after some dire warnings. He must have gone to bed about 6am after a busy night on the computer. My computer looks okay this morning. It went on its usual little journeys. But I don't ask much of my computer. I thought well, it is just a computer, so risking its life and limbs seems worth it in order to keep investigating the mind of Dante

My alien Doc video gets 5 stars on Youtube!

Folks, I could hardly believe my eyes, a 5 star rating for saving alien Doc too brilliant for this earth. And Connie sent me this tag that just fit!
I have also received some very good criticism I thought. A very good friend tactfully told me I should not interrupt Doc and refuse to listen to him so often on my videos. I have been watching them with this in mind, and by golly, she is right. I told Doc and of course he agreed, but I warned him he better not sound too drunk and vacuous in his remark or I just won't use that a video. I will make him redo it and redo it or wait until morning and he is nearer to sober. Anyway, I was glad to get some encouragement just when I was in despair over probably being thought to be just a chatty old woman who never got to be famous and is therefore frustrated in life. Did I deserve to be famous? Of course, but life is not fair. Well, I deserved it as much as anybody. And so do you. Doc has seen this tag and says to the artist, you have the wrong end showing.

III- Gerry saves alien Doc too brilliant for this earth

Being the self appointed therapist to a suffering genius alien like Doc is no small task. He is his own worst enemy and does not recognize me as his benefactor. As an alien, he has failed to integrate himself on earth.

II- Gerry muffs chance to see extraterrestrial

I- Gerry, UFOs, and near death experiences

What better day than Halloween to launch off my new 3 part series on the UFO experience. You know what, judging from my first near death experience, I think we might be the extraterrestrials on earth with the space traveler within we know as a spirit, which zooms off into space when released from the body at death. I remember being so impatient with the slow ponderous pace of bodies, and I often had flying dreams in which I would launch off into space and fly around a while for my own entertainment. Did you?

Are we selling our country to finance our wars?

The fact that our national debt is growing larger every day worries me immensely. As a country I think this indicates we have been living beyond our means for some time. Or more to the point, we have been fighting a war we could not afford. The war in Iraq I believe came out of panic and paranoia over 9/11. What to do, who to punish? This was a puzzle that would have confounded any president. Our president, unfortunately, had a thing about Iraq because his father fought the Gulf war with Hussein and decided not to march to Bagdad when he was winning. I think Bush senior had gotten extremely sensitive to the criticism he had received over that war. I remember well all the justifications he brought before us for saving Kuwait's oil from whatever nefarious thing Saddam Hussein might do with it. It seemed like a good time to stop the war when Kuwaiti oil had been secured again, to be owned by the Kuwaitis who had it in the first place.

But that is neither here nor there. The point is you have to stop and think when you want to go to war if you can afford it, because modern war is very expensive. I remember Bush saying that as our commander in chief it was up to him to decide whether the security of our country was at stake, which he thought it was with Iraq in possession of WMD. Even had Hussein had some sort of weapon of mass destruction, to march on Iraq was a preemptive strike. I suppose Bush had jumped ahead in his mind and imagined a scenario where Hussein who hated us over the Kuwaiti war would suddenly drop the bomb on a US target and he would be to blame for not stopping him. But a president's paranoia after 9/11 could cause him to make a serious mistake. He not only had to continue with the war on Afganistan which he hastily claimed had been won (even though Osama ben Ladin was still at large) he now had to finance an even bigger and more costly war. To do that he was going to have to borrow money. Did not Bush understand that to finance his war he was going to have to sell the country back home more or less to the highest bidder?

I guess he did not understand high finance, so this did not bother him enough to think again and again. Naturally other countries want to buy the United States. It is not their fault that we have no idea what it is to be owned by the money men. They have been willing to help us go into the deepest deficit we have yet experienced, and this is not even a major war to most of us, because no attack on the US was actually perpetuated by Iraq. Bush told us he was saving us from sure attack, but it was obvious intelligence had not been good when no WMDs were found in any holes in the ground, caves, or anywhere else. It seems that the aging Hussein had just not got around to making any WMDs since idle threats terrified the presidents of the United States so effectively.

Bush ran amok with our promises to pay for others to finance this war, like a man pursued by demons. But being the president of the United States is a big job, and some men are just not up to making good decisions about all that it entails. War is a serious thing, and even if it is a mistake, it is so costly in manpower as well as war equipment nobody wants to contemplate the fearful idea that it might not even have been a good idea. I mean that the war is a dreadful drain on our finances and the longer we spend humongous amounts of money in Iraq, the more those who lend us the money for it are going to be in control of us in some degree for years to come. Somebody has to pay for war, and if we have gone to borrowing money to pay for it, what kind of price will we have to pay for our indebtedness? Our government has been as fiscally irresponsible as anybody in the private sector could possibly be, thinking war will get paid for somehow because they are necessary. Not all wars!

I remember being very worried about the deficit World War II had run up. Everybody was worried, and we had been attacked by Japan and Hitler was over running Europe. It seemed like we had to go to war. I think the fact that we came back from that huge deficit caused present presidents to think that war could always be paid for. If you will remember, the war in Vienam became a quagmire in which we were pouring an astronomical amount of money, and even after ten years commanders were calling for even more troops if any progress was to be made. I always thought that war was a mistake, the whole reasoning behind it. If we did not go to war over Vietnam the communists would take over. We did and ten years of very expensive war fare later we still had to let that happen. Now nobody even seems to know or care what it did to the world when the communists controlled Vietnam. After all the bombing and all the blood shed. Now if our young people said what was that all about we would be hard put to give them a sensible answer.

A lot of mistakes have been made by men too eager to go to war. Let us face it, some men like war games, and I am sure a nation of video game players making war for years on their computers might produce some more men that will think making real war might be a lot more fun. Will we then blow ourselves up, let alone have trouble paying for old wars? This could get worse. If McCain should lose, as far as war goes, that might be a good thing. He seems too fond of war, unfortunately. There is a bright side to anything that happens. Let us hope that the winner can add and subtract better than our present commander in chief.

"Gem of the Ocean," August Wilson play a great afternoon of theater...

My friend Joyce, in the photo, gave me a free ticket to this play which turned out to be a grand outing, of the sort I just love. The Black Theater Company is now housed in the lovely theater space in the Viad Building just up the street. The grounds are so beautiful. Joyce was considered for one of the roles in the play, written by the tremendous black playwright who has had so many hit plays on Broadway. A company that would take on the challenges of this play deserves a good review, because everyone possible should see it. I think Joyce would have been stupendous in the role. The younger woman who took on the part of a woman who says she is 375 years old, something like that, had all she could handle trying to capture the depth of an older woman. I couldn't help but wish that they had gone with Joyce because she deserved this part, but the guy who played the older man who was her love interest was a younger man, too. He performed an older man well, but that was just it, he had to perform the age as did the actress, neither were that age, as Joyce is, who has one of the most remarkable memories I have encountered in actresses. This was a big part and she might have done something absolutely stunning with it, she has now had so much experiences on the stage.
I have seen nearly everyone of her performances, and I kept thinking of how she would have said this magnificent speech and that one. Joyce has a wonderful voice for the stage, too, deep and resonant. I thought with the exception of one or two some of the performers were having trouble breaking up the sing song rhythms they fell into of this musical playwright's dialogue. They were having trouble at first especially getting into the lower registers of their voices where emotion can resonate much better than in the higher tones. But one expects flaws in a play production. Not everything can be perfect, but the performers you could tell loved what they were trying to portray, so altogether it was just a remarkable afternoon of theater. Thank you, Joyce, as always for thinking of me and giving a very valuable gift.