Southpaw Jones

Archive for October 19th, 2006

Thursday’s goal is your total satisfaction.

October 19, 2006 By: Southpaw Jones Category: Paw Prints, Interesting? No Comments →

Southpaw Jones presents
Is This Interesting?
Thoughts/feelings that just might not matter:

It’s Thursday. Practically the weekend. I’m at the office, pre-coffee. I like to save coffee until 10 am. It’s a nice midway point between waking and lunching. It doesn’t feel right to kick-start my heart at 8 am.

I’ve been looking into lucid dreaming a little bit. I’m jealous of those folks who claim they can control their dreams. Seems to me they get to live twice as much life as the rest of us.

Once, as a kid, I was being chased by a monster in a dream. I had bunk beds in my room, and this particular night, I was on the bottom bunk. I knew I couldn’t escape the monster by running away, so I forced my real self to sit up and hit my head on the top bunk. It hurt. With such control, you’d think I could have just willed myself awake. Apparently knot.

In my adult life, I have had only one lucid dream experience. I was on a stool, talking to some friends, when I realized that I was dreaming. I started to bounce up and down, holding the stool under me. Instead of splintering, the stool continued to bounce higher and higher, fifty feet, one hundred feet, and I got that roller-coaster feeling in my gut each time I came down. This so excited me that, of course, I woke up. It was a cool feeling, and I want to get there again sometime.

It’s fairly common for inexperienced lucid dreamers to wake up from excitement. I read recently that the trick is to spin around or start running through the dream to stay in it. Try it yourself, yo, and wish me luck.

Southpaw Jones presents
Paw Prints
Pics of Southpaw, his environ, and his interweb:

Yet another from the Harmony Oak House Concert in Houston on September 30, 2006. Thanks, Melissa!

Spike Gillespie presents
The Office of Good Deeds
Spike refuses to let tragedy get the best of us:

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Dear Everyone On My Sundry Mailing Lists,

This is a direct response to the horrible tragedy in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania this past Monday when Charles Roberts gunned down ten young Amish girls, five of whom died and five who are fighting still for their lives. My friend Chris lives in this community and I emailed him Monday afternoon to offer him my… well, to tell him I was thinking about him.

Because it had been reported that the gunman carried out these executions due to a twenty year-old grudge, I told Chris that, to honor those little girls and their community, I am taking a vow from here on out to not hold any more grudges. (For those of you who know me or have read my work, you know that me vowing to give up grudges is akin to a dog voluntarily giving up its bark. This won’t be an easy thing for me but it’s something I’ve been needing to do for a long time. I’m just sorry it took something so horrible to get my attention re: the trouble with grudges.)

I got a note back from Chris who told me he passed my message on to one of his Amish neighbors who said, “That is the best response I heard.” Honestly, I wasn’t angling for a reply, so I was surprised to get this message back. And so I am passing along to you a request that, if you have it in you, please, in honor of the Amish community, give up one grudge today, or at least try. This is what we call, in yoga, a counter pose. If you stretch one way, it’s really important to stretch the opposite way for balance. Please, join me in stretching in the opposite direction of Charles Roberts.

Before I got Chris’s email today, Herman and I were watching the news and there was a segment about the shootings. And I said to Herman that the thing that would be the most astonishing is that the Amish will find a way to forgive the killer and, I predict, they will reach out to his wife and children. This echoes two tales I recount in my last book. In one story, Amy Biehl, a young white American Fullbright Scholar working for racial equality South Africa was stoned and stabbed to death by blacks. Her parents forgave these men and went on to continue their daughter’s work through the Amy Biehl Foundation. In the other story, a guy named Bud Welch, whose daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing not only forgave Timothy McVeigh but also befriended McVeigh’s father. (My friend Hank Stuever wrote a wonderful piece about “Bud the Forgiver” for the Washington Post.)

One more thing. I am using this Drop-A-Grudge campaign to unofficially launch a project I have been mulling for some time now. I am starting, here in Austin, the Office of Good Deeds. We’ll be a virtual organization until I can find us an office and funds to pay for that office. We will match up people wanting to do good deeds with people in need of having good deeds done. We will have the following departments: The Department of Gold Stars, headed by Victoria Vlach, who hands out gold stars to people when she witnesses them doing something nice; The Department of Arts and Crafts to promote peace through felt ponies, knitted scarves, quilt making and other fun activities; The Department of Song and Dance to encourage …. well that one is self-explanatory; The Department of Witness to record good deeds you see others do; and, in honor of the girls from Nickel Mines, The Department of Grudge Release.

Please let me know if you¹d like to be involved in The Office of Good Deeds. Please email me with any good deeds you witness. I’ll try to get a web page up some time in late October or November.

I want to preface by saying that I’m not a fan of forwarded emails and yet I am going to ask you, if you like what I have to say, please forward this on to others who might be interested. I am going to go and let go of a grudge now so if you hear a loud groan or other noise of transition, that would be me, making a change.

With love and hope,
Spike
www.spikegillespie.com
spike@spikeg.com

Spike Gillespie presents
Spaiku!
A look at her world / seventeen syllables and / three lines at a time: