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.

a short recollection

one use of social media that remains behind the limelight, in a mechanical hush-hush, is that of the conveyor of death news. overtaking the job of the elusive postmaster from the golden era of paper mail, this avenue, rather, this route of social media is a bold spin-off. uncalled for, perhaps, but in careful existence; brash alertness and dreadful alarm, matter-of-fact and dispassionate.

the rabble-rousing, ruminating siren went off before my eyes, Tuesday night, with the circuitous rollicking of elegies, outcries, outpourings, down-pourings, remembrances, confessions and hysteria. Christopher, my chum from college, is dead. his blood cells were awry, imposing and misbehaving to a point where they needed help from brother cells, and in spite of a temporary fix, the hullabaloo never went away. this led to severe physical constraints, mellowing of humor, a daily worry, indecent consumption of ATP and glucose, perhaps even bodily nitrogenous substances leading to a severe internal atrophy where the boy became, merely, a conflation of chaotic biological processes capped with the essence of a personhood. but the liveliness was unfazed, the spirit of cheerfulness untouched and the population of smile preserved. when physiology and pathology collide in devilish throes of chance, the foundation of routine disrupts. the needle of the spinning top, keeping alive the breaths and pulse of a nurtured existence, slip and slide, against the effect of lawless gyroscopics, and come to a halt. the cartons and crates of the human machine fold, in and of itself, into a tidy molecule, to be later stowed away on the sleeve of a memory. and that is the end of human x; now a statistic, a collage of photographs, a foliage of thoughts, but above all, back to being a part of Nature's maniacal carbon treadmill.

you may call this train of thought inappropriate, belittling or even inconsiderate. you may emphasize the point that x is now in a 'better' place and you could possibly be right. i cannot, however, make that visceral separation or, rather, transposition to a heaven or a hell that does not exist in my closet. to maintain a serene sense of tangibility, then, x gets recycled in Nature's machinery and continues to exist in my planet as carbon sub-structures; perhaps as nutrients for bacteria, plants or crustaceans that cradle up the food web in conspicuous bellies or as fuel for volcanoes. who knows? i do not. but this non-other worldly existence brings about in me a sense of closure, while minimizing a feeling of ungraspable loss, division and piercing numbness. when i think of x, i look at a lump of clay and find in there a peaceable home for an ex-presence, with nanometer arms and whiffling aromas percussing around its amorphous boundaries. perhaps the idea is semi-humanoid, this envisioning of a person in the middle of an organic soup. but the broader scope lies in explaining the origin and demise of human animals within the spectrum of a touchable, liveable, adventure-loving Nature. this brings me comfort, composure and an impetus to carry-on.

the financier

my mind is whirring on the collarbone of the public transit vehicle, during my afternoon commute from Pink City to White Marsh. it has been a prompt take-off from the South corner of 11th Avenue and we have driven past a pair of bicyclists, a homeless Bencini, a Carolina pantaloon, a frayed Bengals pennant, and a pregnant mother chewing on a grilled shrimp sandwich. for reasons even unknown to myself i am carrying a postcard from 1923. it is Klimt's tree of life; with curious brown concentric circles twiddling against a parched canvas, bulletined and patched with tremendous speckles of humanity, love and Egypt. somehow, the botanical connection of mammalian evolution and the simplification of a leviathan conceptual complexity of the history of humanity to the level of a tree, has left me dissatisfied; to an extent, largely unfulfilled. in science, as in other areas of specialty, too much emphasis is laid on perfect explanations, simplicity and a tidiness of theorizing. the world, and life at large, are messy and anyone who says otherwise makes me nervous. makes me feel an artificiality in the thread of reasoning, and i sit down and agree because circumstance and inevitability compel me to do so. many of us are peculiar neo-Darwinians -prattling on a self-effacing circuitry of a godly creationist, a Proustian recollection and Dawkins -but without reason, rationale and conviction. we are led to believe by either the hounding Right-winged man or the country libertarian on the brink of a rolling collusion, clashing and exploding in the temperature of disagreement to only be left with a hymn of pleas, obscurity and semi-truths. this is an aside, however, but an important seed of my neuroticism.

the sky looks a little unsettled today; like my favorite Kandinsky art of the white dot. a patch of stratus clouds are meandering on the left field of my myopic panorama, in a slovenly turn of an incomplete 9, whispering to a rainbow, perhaps, and singing a Pebbles song -mother army- to the nearby cosmos. on the right ring, is the unison of a cirrus pattern; like a tertiary brigade devolving and frittering into a half-eaten doughnut, wheeling and carting in high-frequency whistles to the point of exhaustion. but the drop-ules, like drop-lets, never tire in their duty to a mathematical infinity. the rest of the clouds form a network of guitar strings, reciting aloud, to a bolting airplane, the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. what peers through the triangular wiggle of the central emptiness is the right eye of a sunset, almost 76 years old, fifty feet tall and ten feet wide.

there is a Joe Bertrand sitting to my right, listening to soundtracks from Bonnie & Clyde, loudly, on large Bose headphones. i imagine he is not a day older than 28, but has a certain maturity about him. a dark brown Elvis hairdo, artificially whitened teeth, ultra-thin nose, delicately crusted cheekbones and cobalt blue eyes make up the facial particulars of the young financier. he is playing Candy Crush Saga on the large screen of his phone and occasionally screaming out, 'what a fucking idiot!' after 24 minutes of one-sided banter i turn to him and say, when did you graduate college? interrupted and violated by human interaction he says, two years ago from Stony Brook, what about you? last year. and then i pause, and smile, and scratch the scruff of my dotted orange left sock and say, so what do you do now? he produces an answer with a spectacular amount of jargon from which i can identify the words equity, interest, profit and loan. he sounds rather metallic and non-spontaneous, quite tacitly rehearsed. the goal is to work with a select pool of people to make them wealthier; it comes with a lot of perks, you know? yes, i know. and i can imagine the 'perks' of your polished limousine, the silver tickets and platinum memberships, the specialist terrain of Melville living, a credit chauffeur, a hand-laden Ferris Wheel of glamorous twinkles, and with it the shamelessness of profiteering, the dissolution of a fraudulent magpie, the irrelevance of a hunger crisis, the cold-shoulder engineering of a green Utopia, steering on a monumental disgrace of your personal multiplication, your self-lionization and cantilevered stardom at the arrest of universal suffering. to me you are a sly, self-aggrandizing thief who displays arrogance in the name of professionalism, deceit in the domain of conviction, fraudulence in the name of customer service. your heart is of a burnt polyester, ribbed and corrugated around the edges, hardened with sulfur, and dipped in a Burlington opioid of sinister luxury. 

i am restless. i am angry and in the middle of a civil pretense with my fellow financier. i feel the insides of my brain fluttering with spasms, whirring like a hurricane, hissing like a serpent, bleating like a sheep, shrieking like a widow, and screaming and shouting to the roof of my skull. i sweat through the pores of my inner skin, oozing resin, salts and camphor oil. i am harrowed by the mono-molecularity of a corporate vision, triumphing over the cause of a microbial venule, slithering in a door of violent collapse. you cannot be so selfish, so self-righteous, so self-sufficing to think about the upgrade of a privileged eternity, sacrificing with your hunger a usual love, a celebration of dimes and the pedagogy of orphans. 

to all of which you say, money is what brings us ultimate joy -would you agree? i am smiling, courteously, and wishing you the very best in your future of stealth. my eyes shift focus to the cumulus Kandinsky; trotting to the tune of a Sunday mazurka repelling in the embrace of a Southern sky.