a part of Joshua

my name is Joshua Brubeck and i am a creation of my illusory imagination; like a fictional man, with confusing facts, multiple personalities and a fear of foreignness. i am twenty-six years old with coffee colored hair, a passivity to glamor and self-regarded scholarship. i buy four dress shirts per year, one pair of gray trousers, a woolen muffler from a local yarn shop and three sweaters. i wear orange-striped tennis shoes to work in my laboratory that fit my twill socks perfectly around the diameter of my heels. and my other material fascination is with fragrance and perfumery; a musky aroma from Tiffany and Co. that i carry around in pockets of my pits, the atlas vertebra of my neck and the two leaves of my shirt collar.

i like to improvise on the piano when i get tired of playing Mozart or Gershwin or Berlioz, for that matter; typically starting in A minor and invariably ending in C major. it usually involves some intense trills, some discontinuous arpeggios, elaborate scale runs and irregular chord patterns. i will admit that i have an odd obsession with the way crescendos sound. the way they erupt in the belly of my cochlea and spiral springily to the webs in my brain, i feel entirely dumbfounded, humbled and muted. my other infatuation is with an arrhythmic pulsing of my finger tips on the ivorine plastic of piano keys; when i feel my heart beating erratically, puzzlingly, discontinuously and forcefully, as if creeping and crawling out of a gooey salt marsh to leaping on a quintal of air beds and sprinting to the brink of an outer stratosphere.

the critical passer-by or the experienced bourgeois will compare my music to that of the dead geniuses. the Remsburgs will say, it sounds too much like Liszt or Sharla Romer will remark on the elements of Bach-so-and-so. but i am not thinking about Liszt or Bach while i improvise the tune; coincidental similarities are not necessarily causal influences and should not be my concern. this melody is the procreation of my neuronal circuitry, the embellishment of my ulnar sockets, the epilogue of my creative art; this is a slice of me. every note, every rest, every modulation and modality is an outcome of my brain cells firing, toggling and warbling with each other; an outcome of my pulsating arteries jiggling and jittering in the temperature and firewall of a compositional milieu streaming directly and consciously from the crown of my identity. i feel the chaos of compressions and rarefactions against the dents of my lateral sphenoids; the pressure pulses created by my resonating motifs gibbering to the sky, humming to the corner automobiles and preening on the patios of churlish neighbors. restless with confusion, dreary with monotony, i re-give a personal cheer, one of my own, bare-exposed to the gnarly fangs of greed and malicious contempt. in creating, i will admit, there is an unexplainable comfort. there is a snug sense of monopoly and self, attached to the skin of the final outcome. this is, perhaps, a consequence of a monophasic desire to be singled out and remembered, to be held in an eye for the unique experience. to be given an esteem-able valuation and set free on the edges of a creative furor, gyrating and discerning behind the silence of a glass wall. i am not apologetic for this penetrable craving, but perhaps it is the voice of the fictional man.

when people ask me where i am from originally, to some i say Cambodia, or India and to others i say Indiana or Delaware. when people ask me what i do for a living, to some i say, a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley, a dual-degree MD/MBA student at Columbia University or Psychology graduate student at the New School and to others i say, a philosopher at Crown Heights writing a text book in Informal Logic on the virtues of argumentation from an amoral analyst's perspective. this hibernation and circularity of identities, this duplicity of personal history is an exhausting game to be continuously playing. the weirdest and most surprising part, however, is the naturalness with which the deceitful concoction perfuses from the tip of my tongue. it starts with a warm, insidious spark in the right corner of my hypothalamus and leaks into the embroidery of my cavernous cerbellum, from where the itchy, cable-car electricity flairs to the root of my cranial florets, slides down a bundle of narrow, vascular arterioles, knocks on the mid-riff of my mucosal pharynx and darts to the tip of my punctuate taste receptors, biting ghoulishly at musculature to reach the tip of my tongue. and from there the words, the sounds, the graphemes and phonetics dive into a thin nest of huddling dust rings, bugles of air, and pools of fluorine in a smoky, mercurial splash. the sound is gone, absorbed by hair cells of radiating frequencies in the innermost chamber of ear anatomies, triggering a re-rattle of particulate matter and fueling the wheel of infinite resonance. this is how my biographies travel, from person to person, time to time. this is how i am a thousand people, little edges and speckles of put-together puzzles on the road of a parallel existence. keeping track of my many narratives comes with its layers of difficulties, adjustments and unrehearsed spontaneity. there are tears involved, quite evidently, along with severe heart thumps, geysers of adrenaline, tattletales and lies. but lying becomes the new convention, the new trademark, the new reality, molded synchronously, tied quizzically, like spinning reels of basket weaving, formulated in my brain. the lie becomes the new truth, the architecture of a new reality; like an overlooked memory hauled from the ancient book of self-history. it is a tangible vernacular; it all makes sense and has meaning to me. but i am not apologetic, and never will be.

none of this is to say that slips do not happen. Stacy Sullivan, for example, saw me at a Madison Avenue bodega last Monday and shrieked palpably, in her normal voice, about her imminent confusion when she discovered that my LinkedIn profile listed me as a lawyer at Braverman and Associates. she has known me as a medico-business student for fourteen months, and has been curious to know if it was an internet 'mistake' or she remembered the crucial detail incorrectly. my stance has continued to remain unquestioned, however, and the double standards of this situation brings on my face a satisfying grin. Callan Koster, the penthouse manager of my tenement apartment, mentioned something enticingly similar after my sprint in Riverside Park last Tuesday. Carter Capehart and Bryne Danziger caught me off-guard during Shabbat Kodesh at Temple Emanu-El, questioning my confessed atheism, nonchalance to Judaism and the lineage of my immediate family. and Irene Cohen, last Friday, broke into a fit of unstoppable perspiration when she saw me leave my apartment door holding hands with a boy, instead of Edna Gerstein -my marriageable beloved. while collecting mail on Sunday, we locked eyes, awkwardly, and she hesitantly asked me, almost with a splutter, by the gilded banister, was that your true love? your real love, Joshua?

when you lead a duplicitous life like mine, poking and prodding, creasing and hoarding around the gentle edges of your social fabric, how do you answer the question of whether your love is real, whether your love is true? perhaps, you cannot. perhaps, you are unable to. perhaps you make yourself believe that you do, right now, at the snap of an instant, but it is an ever-morphing phenomenon with its multiple shades, facets, hues and colors. even with a poly-chromic life and irreverent biography, the piercing twinge of longing and desirability, deeply mammalian and evolutionarily primal, continues to burn through my house of blood, my emotive pitch, the intensity of my hominid luminescences. i am learning to love, i am learning to sing, and i am learning to speak about one stanza of living, that is genuinely true, crystalline real, and outside of the theater box.