06/03/2014
Caumsett
Hey there faithful brethren... I know I only have two entries on this blog in over a month. I feel like I should apologize for that. Thing also is in the last week I have written a lot. I just don't know if all of it is fit for being out here in this ether.
The first entry was inspired simply to start the thing in some loose sort of a direction.
The second was a fairly complete thought or idea that maybe carried on in that same direction I'm not even really sure.
Over the past week I made a commitment to myself to write a minimum of one thousand words every day. So far I only missed one of those days. Maybe not the most mind blowing accomplishment in the world but I am actually pretty proud of myself for that. It's not been often in my life thus far that I've made a commitment to myself and stuck to it for any length of time.
The commitment came about as I was musing how I truly do believe that writing for me is (or at least can be) therapeutic in a number of ways. In addition to that it is something that I have always (since around the age of five or so anyway) fantasized about possibly doing for a living. Or if not for a living then at least enough that I could in good conscience call myself a writer.
For years and years this fantasy (for that's all I've ever allowed it to be) has played at the back of my mind. Through all the dark, dirty, nasty, bogs of life I've dragged myself through as well as the brightest and sunshiniest moments along with everything in between... Being a 'Writer' was always there lurking in the background. If you look at most of my life and how I lived it and what spent most of my time doing you'll see very clearly that I was going to be the world's first writer that almost never wrote. Absolutely never edited anything. And above all showed almost no one the tiny bit of writing that I did manage to eke out unless it was three o'clock in the morning and there was a few gallons of booze and some cocaine involved. And despite all this my words were someday going to change the world.
Fast forward to a week ago and there I was... five months sober with this 'fantasy' still gnawing away in the back of my mind. So I decided to move it a little farther forward in my mind and put in a little effort. I know that if I'm not stopping every thirty seconds or so and there's any kind of flow going on a thousand words takes me about thirty to forty five minutes to commit to a blank screen. If this writing thing is actually something I want to do in any seriousness whatsoever that half hour should not be something that I can't dedicate out of every twenty four hours. So I did!
Now, as I did not envision this forum to be about me coming to terms with my inner writer it is something that for me is tied to my recovery from alcoholism. I also see it as tied to my foray into alcoholism in the first place.
Let's start with how it ties into my recovery...
I've lived my whole life with this idea that I want to be can be and should be a 'Writer'. I've also lived pretty much my whole life running away and hiding from anything and everything that I actually am and certainly from anything and everything that I can be. The most profound and damaging way I enacted this escaping from myself was through active addiction. (I know I tend to switch back and forth between the words alcoholism and addiction. To me there is no difference between the two and frankly I think that if anyone wants to quibble their priorities need readjusting)
One of the reasons I still hold on to this idea of writing being in my productive future is the age and the state of innocence that I held when it first became a dream of mine. Five, maybe six years old. And it's stuck with me all this time through thick and thin. Maybe I just want there to be something to that maybe there is something to that. Doesn't really matter because if I stick with it there WILL be something to that.
Now one of the things that was always able to put me and keep me in a place of horrific self pity was the fact that I had this dream and never did anything about it. Sure I dabbled here and there. I joined a website for artists of all kinds and began to put some stuff out there. I built a website and even started not one blog but at least two during my last dip in the pool of sobriety. But once I leaped off the wagon again it all went bye bye along with the job I had, the girlfriend I had, the apartment I had, the self respect I had, the respect of those around me that I had, etc. and on and on.
Well kids, it seems to me that if I am to stay on the straight and narrow for a little longer than I have in the past I need to do some things differently than I have in the past. Makes sense right? I think so. So do most people who stay sober for any significant length of time and are happy to do so.
Well... Enter a commitment to no one but me. A commitment to find out what might happen if I put effort into writing. A commitment to give myself a chance in a way I never have before. The obvious fact is I certainly have nothing to lose. What would I be doing for the half hour that I spend writing those thousand words? Watching TV? Playing a video game? Doing nothing but wondering what to do? Most likely that last one but none of the other choices are more fulfilling in any way shape or form than the feeling I have when I complete another day.
So to sum this up because boys and girls we have reached our thousand word mark and as this is intended for the blog I don't feel it appropriate to ramble much further. Just another little slice of 'ol Burton(your sometimes humble narrator)'s inner goings on.
Thank you for reading listening imagining. Thank me for giving myself the chance to stretch my fingers. Thank my evolutionary predecessors for developing the fingers in the first place, they come in quite handy...
...and so on...
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Monday, May 12, 2014
A Total Eclipse
05/12/2014
Caumsett
Hidey ho again neighbors...
I might have something interesting to say today seeing as how it is shaping up to be a very beautiful day (thank you)...
Last week I was walking along the shoreline of the Long Island Sound trying not to think much at all as thinking usually only complicates and frustrates me when I allow myself to engage in it for very long. I was trying to simply allow myself to be exactly what and where I was, a late thirties 'man' walking by himself in the sun on a beach. All I wanted out of the moment was the chance to simply be in the moment. Just a brief respite from living in the past or engaged in fictitious conversations in the future or any of the myriad of non-realities my wonderful mind is capable of dragging me through simply to fill precious dead space. In the midst of this I was overcome by a very vivid memory. It is a memory that I have carried with me in all its technicolor glory for most of my life.
I remembered being a young lad of perhaps around seven or eight years old. A far cry from the world weary and wizened old gentleman you see before you now. At the age of seven or eight I lived in my Grandma's house (my father's mother was always called Grandma and my mother's parents were Grandmother and Grandfather to differentiate) with my parents, my then two younger siblings, my aunt, and of course Grandma. Quite a packed house. This particular memory took place on a rare afternoon when I found myself in the house alone. I don't remember at all the circumstances which would have allowed for this but that's memory for you, all picky and choosy about details! Anyway, we had in the house at that time cable TV and therefore MTV still in its infancy when 'music television' still meant that there was music. I, at my young impressionable age was generally not allowed to watch the MTV as my mother was unsure about all the rock and roll music and possible demonic imagery involved in bringing it to life, so naturally whenever I found myself alone or at least devoid of parental supervision MTV was the first thing I put on hoping to see or hear something I wasn't supposed to.
On this particular afternoon I saw the video for the song "Turn Around (Bright Eyes)" by Bonnie Tyler. Right from the opening bars of the song and a camera shot of Ms. Tyler leaning against a window staring longingly out at nothing my seven or eight year old self was overcome by the 'idea' of emotion that I was nowhere near understanding (and probably still am nowhere near understanding all these years later). I was suddenly awash in a great sense of sadness. Sadness in particular brought upon by loss. In particular the loss of love. Now, having had only about seven or eight years on this fine planet among the rest of you humans I had not (at least to my knowledge or awareness) experienced any great loss. I certainly (again at least to my knowledge or awareness) experienced any great loss of love. As far as I knew in my own life the only love I knew was that of my family, certainly not the romantic boy-girl love depicted as so painful and deep in the song.
The crazy thing to me (and this is also part of the memory) is that at seven or eight years old I knew to myself that the sense of emotion I was getting from this song was not an emotion that I had any right to feel (here's a concept that will definitely come up more at some point! therapy bell please...) let alone understand. But my mind latched onto this 'idea' of profound emotion and I could not stop thinking about it. Thinking about what it must be like to be deeply in love and to have that love dissappear or go away or turn on me like it seemed to in the song.
Even seeing the video for this song now with all of my thirty some-odd years of much experience behind me most of the imagery used doesn't make any sense to me as far as the context of the lyrics (acrobats in silly suits doing backflips and wearing masks, lots of gossamer fabric blowing through open doorways, etc. (definitely don't get the acrobats!)), however that one image of Bonnie staring out that window as if looking for the love that was lost stood out in my young mind as the image that represented the feeling of the song as a whole.
So for weeks I obsessed over the 'idea' of this great and deep emotion of which I had no real understanding at all and despite the fact that I understood that it was painful and really not a good thing to have to experience I wanted to feel it. I wanted to be that person staring out that window. I craved to know what that really felt like. To have the memories in my own mind of the events that led up to that moment. (yeah, I guess I was crazy from a pretty young age!)
Well friends and neighbors, the memory doesn't end there...
Sometime later (I have no idea how long, could've been a week could've been six months) I once again found myself alone in Grandma's house on an afternoon. Now I honestly don't remember if it was actually raining out or if I only imagined it to be raining because that would've gone with the mood so much better, but I had on MTV and here came "Turn Around" through the glorious one speaker floor set tv. Right at the opening of the song I got up and went to the front door of my Grandma's house, leaned against the doorframe and stared out the window in the best recreation of Ms. Tyler's pose that I could muster (certainly not my most masculine of moments). (you see why now I might have imagined it was raining even if it wasn't) And for five and a half glorious minutes I had lived and loved and lost in a way that no other seven or eight year old boy ever had! If I could have mustered up tears on cue the waterworks would have been flowing that was how lost in this manufactured sadness I became for those five and a half minutes. I didn't want that feeling (or the song that was feeding it) to end and when it finally did I believe I did experience a little piece of loss in seeing it go.
This, while it may not be the actual beginning is my earliest memory of something that would recur again and again in my life in various ways. A secret emotional life if you will, for this was something I kept completely to myself and never shared with another human being for a very long time. But this concept of manufacturing emotions that I did not think I had any right to yet used to escape would later become a major theme in my life which tied in very closely to my struggles with addiction as these emotions and concepts which I used to seemingly escape my own life were almost always those that leaned towards the darker, more painful side of things and despite how dark and painful my actual life became I still held on (hold on) to the idea that I have no right to feel some of the things that I feel. (therapy bell again please...)
For now I will leave that there to marinate as it will...
Caumsett
Hidey ho again neighbors...
I might have something interesting to say today seeing as how it is shaping up to be a very beautiful day (thank you)...
Last week I was walking along the shoreline of the Long Island Sound trying not to think much at all as thinking usually only complicates and frustrates me when I allow myself to engage in it for very long. I was trying to simply allow myself to be exactly what and where I was, a late thirties 'man' walking by himself in the sun on a beach. All I wanted out of the moment was the chance to simply be in the moment. Just a brief respite from living in the past or engaged in fictitious conversations in the future or any of the myriad of non-realities my wonderful mind is capable of dragging me through simply to fill precious dead space. In the midst of this I was overcome by a very vivid memory. It is a memory that I have carried with me in all its technicolor glory for most of my life.
I remembered being a young lad of perhaps around seven or eight years old. A far cry from the world weary and wizened old gentleman you see before you now. At the age of seven or eight I lived in my Grandma's house (my father's mother was always called Grandma and my mother's parents were Grandmother and Grandfather to differentiate) with my parents, my then two younger siblings, my aunt, and of course Grandma. Quite a packed house. This particular memory took place on a rare afternoon when I found myself in the house alone. I don't remember at all the circumstances which would have allowed for this but that's memory for you, all picky and choosy about details! Anyway, we had in the house at that time cable TV and therefore MTV still in its infancy when 'music television' still meant that there was music. I, at my young impressionable age was generally not allowed to watch the MTV as my mother was unsure about all the rock and roll music and possible demonic imagery involved in bringing it to life, so naturally whenever I found myself alone or at least devoid of parental supervision MTV was the first thing I put on hoping to see or hear something I wasn't supposed to.
On this particular afternoon I saw the video for the song "Turn Around (Bright Eyes)" by Bonnie Tyler. Right from the opening bars of the song and a camera shot of Ms. Tyler leaning against a window staring longingly out at nothing my seven or eight year old self was overcome by the 'idea' of emotion that I was nowhere near understanding (and probably still am nowhere near understanding all these years later). I was suddenly awash in a great sense of sadness. Sadness in particular brought upon by loss. In particular the loss of love. Now, having had only about seven or eight years on this fine planet among the rest of you humans I had not (at least to my knowledge or awareness) experienced any great loss. I certainly (again at least to my knowledge or awareness) experienced any great loss of love. As far as I knew in my own life the only love I knew was that of my family, certainly not the romantic boy-girl love depicted as so painful and deep in the song.
The crazy thing to me (and this is also part of the memory) is that at seven or eight years old I knew to myself that the sense of emotion I was getting from this song was not an emotion that I had any right to feel (here's a concept that will definitely come up more at some point! therapy bell please...) let alone understand. But my mind latched onto this 'idea' of profound emotion and I could not stop thinking about it. Thinking about what it must be like to be deeply in love and to have that love dissappear or go away or turn on me like it seemed to in the song.
Even seeing the video for this song now with all of my thirty some-odd years of much experience behind me most of the imagery used doesn't make any sense to me as far as the context of the lyrics (acrobats in silly suits doing backflips and wearing masks, lots of gossamer fabric blowing through open doorways, etc. (definitely don't get the acrobats!)), however that one image of Bonnie staring out that window as if looking for the love that was lost stood out in my young mind as the image that represented the feeling of the song as a whole.
So for weeks I obsessed over the 'idea' of this great and deep emotion of which I had no real understanding at all and despite the fact that I understood that it was painful and really not a good thing to have to experience I wanted to feel it. I wanted to be that person staring out that window. I craved to know what that really felt like. To have the memories in my own mind of the events that led up to that moment. (yeah, I guess I was crazy from a pretty young age!)
Well friends and neighbors, the memory doesn't end there...
Sometime later (I have no idea how long, could've been a week could've been six months) I once again found myself alone in Grandma's house on an afternoon. Now I honestly don't remember if it was actually raining out or if I only imagined it to be raining because that would've gone with the mood so much better, but I had on MTV and here came "Turn Around" through the glorious one speaker floor set tv. Right at the opening of the song I got up and went to the front door of my Grandma's house, leaned against the doorframe and stared out the window in the best recreation of Ms. Tyler's pose that I could muster (certainly not my most masculine of moments). (you see why now I might have imagined it was raining even if it wasn't) And for five and a half glorious minutes I had lived and loved and lost in a way that no other seven or eight year old boy ever had! If I could have mustered up tears on cue the waterworks would have been flowing that was how lost in this manufactured sadness I became for those five and a half minutes. I didn't want that feeling (or the song that was feeding it) to end and when it finally did I believe I did experience a little piece of loss in seeing it go.
This, while it may not be the actual beginning is my earliest memory of something that would recur again and again in my life in various ways. A secret emotional life if you will, for this was something I kept completely to myself and never shared with another human being for a very long time. But this concept of manufacturing emotions that I did not think I had any right to yet used to escape would later become a major theme in my life which tied in very closely to my struggles with addiction as these emotions and concepts which I used to seemingly escape my own life were almost always those that leaned towards the darker, more painful side of things and despite how dark and painful my actual life became I still held on (hold on) to the idea that I have no right to feel some of the things that I feel. (therapy bell again please...)
For now I will leave that there to marinate as it will...
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Here I am...
Ok boys and girls and friends of all ages... Here goes nothing... My mind beside itself is going to see its first post...
I have been inspired by someone very near and dear to my heart to give this a shot and just see what happens. Surely nothing bad could possibly come of it right? I guess we shall see.
As is very common with me upon sitting myself in front of a blank screen with fingers poised upon keys awaiting instruction from my oft muddled mind to strike downward in such an order and a fashion as to form words upon said blank screen, I find my (now) muddled mind not initially wanting to cooperate and send the necessary electricity down my arms and through my patiently waiting fingers.
How does one start something like this? I can assure you that this one has not the faintest of ideas so I will do this... I will pretend that I am talking to someone (unlike my usual imaginary audience) who does not know a thing about me and I will introduce myself and we’ll see where we end up from there. Sound good? Good. Let’s begin then...
I will begin by informing you that while Burton J Lomax may not be my given name that makes Burton J Lomax no less me than my “Christian” name. In fact it may even make Burton J Lomax even more me than even I realize. Perhaps simply based on this information alone you can see where the name of this blog might have originated. So now you know that you don’t know my "real" name but if our relationship works out the way I hope it will you may get to know the “real” me and the name thing won’t seem that important anymore.
I don’t feel my age is very important (at least not at this particular juncture so I will leave that where I left it in my profile. I’m old enough to think and express anything that ends up on this page and for me and for the moment I feel that that is enough.
I suppose what is a very important thing to mention to anyone who might stumble across this thing is that I am a person who has struggled for most of my life with addiction. Particularly addiction to alcohol. It would then be just as important to note that at the moment I am engaged in a period of recovery from that addiction. This is far from my first period of recovery from that addiction. It is not something I am unfamiliar with but becoming reacquainted with. I mention this mostly because I think if this blog continues anyone reading it can most likely expect this and all kinds of things associated with it to be a part of what goes on here.
So over the course of this life I have led thus far there have been bright periods, there have been dark periods, there have been grey periods. I suppose this sort of puts me in line with most other beings out there in the ether who might consider themselves human. Who knows, perhaps this puts me in a similar league as yourself.
Through all these many ups, downs, ins, outs, and whathaveyous I have learned. Sometimes more than others. Sometimes fruitfully. Sometimes fitfully. Sometimes very very repetitively. Apparently the hardest things to learn are the ones which cause the most pain and again apparently they are not really learned until the pain is so great that it really doesn’t even seem like an option to finally learn. It becomes simple survival. As the much wiser than myself Mark Twain has said, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way.” Well old friends (and hopefully new friends), this is certainly quite an applicable idea in my life. Once again perhaps this actually makes me what’s called human and means that I have things in common with some of those other humans with whom I share the world around me.
I would imagine that perhaps that may be what can be found here moving forward. Tales of cats being dragged by their tails and the results of such unfortunately necessary experiments as well as the things that can be (and are in the process of being) implemented in order to avoid at the very least carrying the same cats again and again.
I really have no idea if there is anything whatsoever in this opening post to grab anyone’s attention but I will make it a mission to stop back and leave more. Who knows... Maybe I’ll find you here...
I have been inspired by someone very near and dear to my heart to give this a shot and just see what happens. Surely nothing bad could possibly come of it right? I guess we shall see.
As is very common with me upon sitting myself in front of a blank screen with fingers poised upon keys awaiting instruction from my oft muddled mind to strike downward in such an order and a fashion as to form words upon said blank screen, I find my (now) muddled mind not initially wanting to cooperate and send the necessary electricity down my arms and through my patiently waiting fingers.
How does one start something like this? I can assure you that this one has not the faintest of ideas so I will do this... I will pretend that I am talking to someone (unlike my usual imaginary audience) who does not know a thing about me and I will introduce myself and we’ll see where we end up from there. Sound good? Good. Let’s begin then...
I will begin by informing you that while Burton J Lomax may not be my given name that makes Burton J Lomax no less me than my “Christian” name. In fact it may even make Burton J Lomax even more me than even I realize. Perhaps simply based on this information alone you can see where the name of this blog might have originated. So now you know that you don’t know my "real" name but if our relationship works out the way I hope it will you may get to know the “real” me and the name thing won’t seem that important anymore.
I don’t feel my age is very important (at least not at this particular juncture so I will leave that where I left it in my profile. I’m old enough to think and express anything that ends up on this page and for me and for the moment I feel that that is enough.
I suppose what is a very important thing to mention to anyone who might stumble across this thing is that I am a person who has struggled for most of my life with addiction. Particularly addiction to alcohol. It would then be just as important to note that at the moment I am engaged in a period of recovery from that addiction. This is far from my first period of recovery from that addiction. It is not something I am unfamiliar with but becoming reacquainted with. I mention this mostly because I think if this blog continues anyone reading it can most likely expect this and all kinds of things associated with it to be a part of what goes on here.
So over the course of this life I have led thus far there have been bright periods, there have been dark periods, there have been grey periods. I suppose this sort of puts me in line with most other beings out there in the ether who might consider themselves human. Who knows, perhaps this puts me in a similar league as yourself.
Through all these many ups, downs, ins, outs, and whathaveyous I have learned. Sometimes more than others. Sometimes fruitfully. Sometimes fitfully. Sometimes very very repetitively. Apparently the hardest things to learn are the ones which cause the most pain and again apparently they are not really learned until the pain is so great that it really doesn’t even seem like an option to finally learn. It becomes simple survival. As the much wiser than myself Mark Twain has said, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way.” Well old friends (and hopefully new friends), this is certainly quite an applicable idea in my life. Once again perhaps this actually makes me what’s called human and means that I have things in common with some of those other humans with whom I share the world around me.
I would imagine that perhaps that may be what can be found here moving forward. Tales of cats being dragged by their tails and the results of such unfortunately necessary experiments as well as the things that can be (and are in the process of being) implemented in order to avoid at the very least carrying the same cats again and again.
I really have no idea if there is anything whatsoever in this opening post to grab anyone’s attention but I will make it a mission to stop back and leave more. Who knows... Maybe I’ll find you here...
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