Ash Wednesday

Hey there, Lucille,

How are things going with you, ex-neighbor? Did everything go as planned with the move? Damian and I walked by your building the other night when it was about to start snowing and peeked through the glass double doors. Gosh, it's so beautiful Lucille and oh my god, the doorman's so sexy. I actually waited in front of the entryway for about 5 minutes, pretending to discuss Sudanese politics with Sherine Levinsky on the phone, and totally checked him out, ha ha. You're living the dream, my little pumpkin. So many people fantasize, for years, of having a Fifth Avenue address and I'm so happy for you that your hard work is paying off. Perhaps five years down the line, you'll be a Society lady, tip-toeing across Manhattan in your Weitzman heels, decorating your home with Tiffany crystals and polishing your face in unreal charades. Or maybe you'll be the small-town Lucille, the Lucille I know -happy and satisfied with small things in life, appreciative of simplicity and quintessentially poise.

You know, my grandma, Jocelyn Horowitz, used to live in the penthouse of your building and was there for 32 years. After Lenny died of cardiac arrest, and her affair with the massuer, Eli Margolin, ended, she moved across the country and resettled in San Diego, in a lovely beach home in La Jolla Village. Maybe you, Eric, Aaron, Melanie and I can plan a little vacation there this summer.

I ran into Tom and Patricia this morning at the Peacefood Cafe on 82nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Remember Tom and Patricia Abberton from Perry Hall? We chatted for a bit about his material engineering courses at Columbia, Patricia's new job at Morgan Stanley and the Dave Eggers title I was reading called What Is The What. I was slightly taken aback when I first spotted them at the opposite edge of the counter top because I never would've thought they were religious or the church-going type. There they were, standing by the scone rack, chattering away and smiling occasionally, with 2 ashen thumb strokes chalked across their foreheads; one vertical, one horizontal, intersecting as a cross. It looked freshly done, but the tail ends were already narrowing with the sweat and their unusual hair-fixation tic. I presume they stopped by St Gregory's for the morning service, but then again I don't particularly keep track of their day-to-day whereabouts.

Just before they were about to head out Tom asked, "So, you giving up anything for Lent?" I laughed a little and said, "No, ha ha. I'm not Christian or religious for that matter. What about you guys?" Patricia said she was giving up desserts and Tom said cigarettes -both of which sounded reasonable. In the middle of the conversation, I glanced at the wall clock by the espresso counter and it was already 9:30 am. I needed to hurry up to be able to reach work on time. The M66 crosstown bus ride takes about 32 minutes and then there's a 14 minute walk. I paid for my coffee and bag of muffins, shook their hands and said, "Happy Ash Wednesday guys and also Happy Easter if I don't see you before that." They wished me Happy Easter as well. I slung the messenger bag over my shoulder, draped my scarf around my neck in a Parisian knot and stumbled my way out to the 79th Street subway.

One of the things I never told you about when we were at Goldman together was that I went to a Catholic school, kindergarten through 12th grade. It was of the Jesuit order, a burnt down theater space converted to a school building in 1863, educating boys, only, for years on end. St. Ignatius Collegiate School had a reputation for upholding strict traditions, churning out dedicated and respectable Catholics and helping students become 'mature, spiritually-oriented men of character.' They believed that 'the Catholic school is a learning community animated by the Divine Spirit of Love and Freedom, and living the Gospel values. It shares Christ's concern for the liberation and fullness of life of all peoples, especially of those in greatest need.' They admitted, however, a fair number of non-Catholics every year, true to their Educational Policy which stated "young people of any religious family find scope within their own cultural milieu to reflect on their lives in the light of their faith and to develop not only in knowledge and skills but also in wisdom which is the fruit of reflection on life and its lessons." I was one of them.

I didn't really care much about Jesuit values, attending weekly catechism or knowing anything about Catholicism till about 9th grade. I was raised Hindu till a certain age, then asked to choose what I wanted to believe. My beliefs collapsed shortly after, and I became an agnostic, and continued to be one for a very long time. During my phase of agnosticism, I had made a lot of really close friends, many of them Catholics. We kept religion out of our day to day conversations, our day to day lives. Whenever they needed to go for Mass, or confessions or other religious commitments, they would politely excuse themselves and slip away. I would stand in the hallway, the one close to the playground, and gaze at my reflection on the green polished tiles and look up to see them walk towards the stained glass corridors, smiling and laughing, chirping and beaming, and dissolve into the distance. They all looked very happy, like genuinely happy, apparently sincere, and soon embraced a culture that helped them feel worthy and re-congeal as a united entity. I, on the other hand, felt really left out; unwelcome to the brotherhood of Catholic boys, which had come to be such a defining part of their lives. I knew very well that I wasn't one of them, blaming it on my unfortunate fate, but shortly after, I knew that I wanted to be, really badly.

I could've bonded more with my non-Catholic friends, or attempted to anyway, and do random activities perhaps, like talk about agnosticism or cute college boys, discuss soccer, cricket or neighborhood chess clubs, but I didn't and I don't know why. I guess the reason was that I felt really root-less as a non-Catholic in a Catholic school, a lot of the time. I felt like a misfit, constantly, and started to become dissatisfied with my surroundings. I felt unusually cornered in an otherwise welcoming environment that scrunched me into a darkening tunnel space. This fear, or stance, or whatever else you want to call it, was probably something I constructed entirely in my own head, cared about too much and dramatized without any concrete bases. But the desire that I had to become part of the "Catholic boys club" was overbearing and strong, compressed like a metal spring ready to stretch, roll out its arms and pounce and leap in a quizzical release, crashing to an end in the midst of a calm whorl of silence.

On the morning of Ash Wednesday, back when I was 15, I walked up to Malcolm George after Biology class and said, "Hey man, what's going on after school today? Aaron, Josephine, Kartik and I are going to The Dandelions to hang out. Do you think you, Crystal and Sebastian can make it?" Apology clouded the rim of his eyes. His pupils narrowed and became shamefully dark. He shook my hand, patted my back and said, "I'm sorry man, we have to attend evening Mass today at St Paul's and then have a registry meeting for Easter services. You guys should go ahead and have fun." My jaws made a violent twitch, and hatred pierced me unflaggingly. I was pissed, I was angry and I took it really personally. Why were my plans, my invitations, pushed around, always, behind stupid and meaningless religious commitments? When I think about that time now, I realize how silly and immature and irrational I used to be, but when you're a heady 15 year old agnostic, who has completely unfounded personal theories about agnosticism and religion, there's very little that you can justify without having your hormones do the talking. You don't understand why they choose Jesus over your dinner invite, and even if you did, you choose not to understand it. But that incident came to serve as my ultimate tipping point, and I knew exactly what the solution was going to be. I was going to be Catholic.

I showed up to mass next day in school, much to everyone's surprise, wearing a crisp white poplin shirt, tailored white pants, a dark blue and white striped tie, and my Buddy Holly-style brown plastic frames. I gelled my hair to a side part, sprayed cologne and wore deodorant and carried with me a mini-Bible that I found in the library 2 hours prior. I sat in the last row of the entire chapel and heard murmurs of "What's he doing here?" spread across the pews; first like ripples of water waves, then like a Mexican wave and finally fleeting like wildfire. I had done some homework the night before: looked up 'How to be a Catholic' on catholic.org, drank wine from a plastic goblet, read about the Eucharist and memorized the Apostle's creed. When the choir started singing and the priest walked down the aisle, I will admit, however, that I felt very nervous. What if I got caught? What if they punished me? And then I thought, the priest has never met me, he doesn't know who I am, I could very well be the new kid in school, or even a new Catholic;  no one would want to see a baptism certificate in the middle of Mass. I must have looked really confused or nervous, however, because someone to my right nudged me a few times and asked me if I was doing okay. I said I was, and that I was just taking it all in.

The hymns were easy to follow. I didn't know the words by heart but I had the book open in front of me. One of the things you probably don't know or care about is that Christmas carols and hymns, in general, have a very simple, predictable melodic structure. They all follow the very basic principles of music theory, without altering any of cadences, and the verses just keep repeating the same tune over and over. I couldn't sing them well, I shall admit, but I could easily hum them and predict how the songs would end. An astonishing number of people around me had them memorized, and had a very forgiving and sincere look on their faces when they sang. Their eyes were squeezed to a rolling crease, lips gently parted, head slightly tilted, and breaths like riots spiraled the sanctuary. When it was time for the Eucharist, I did not hesitate one bit to get up and stand in line. I looked around, saw what others were doing, and when my turn came, I said Amen, the priest slid a wafer on to my tongue, we both bowed and then I left to go back to my spot. For the first time, in a while, I felt good and happy, sprinkled with this sense of inexplicable accomplishment. A sense of belonging had overtaken me that morning, and I left the chapel, content and satisfied, with a wide smile on my face. 

I told Malcolm, in the following few weeks, that I was gradually starting to see why he was so forthright about his religious commitments. Sometimes he would say, "You want to attend Mass tonight with Carrie and Christina and then hang out for a bit at Flurys?" I would smile and say yes. And this went on for a while -for almost 2 years. I was the new Catholic in the parish, who regularly confessed, learned all the hymns and dedicatedly prayed. I prayed every single day, can you imagine Lucille? Sometimes even multiple times a day. For courage, power and strength like Loretta Bradner had asked me to do. Daddy would drop me off at the church on Sunday mornings with the notion that I was playing the piano for the services. Of course I had lied to him. He was thrilled that I was getting more musical exposure and I was overjoyed with my new clout, my Catholic brothers and sisters, and the novelty of it all. I was not a minority anymore -can you picture this, Lucille? I had a straight face, was apparently devout and restlessly religious. 

Things finally went downhill after 2 things happened. Malcolm left St Ignatius because his family was relocating to a different continent, a different country, a different city. They ended up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. New opportunities, both fiscal and social, lured the George's to the Southern Belt. We lost touch after a few weeks of his leaving; I'm sure he found new friends, some real Catholics and a vast new space to adventure and explore. Tracy Swanson, from the Regent's Society, mentioned last Thursday that he's an administrative assistant, now, in the department of Geophysics at Remington, and has been for the past 3 years. His leaving, however, had really pinched my intentions. Why am I doing this? I often asked myself. Was it because I was in love with someone who would never know or never care? Because I wanted to do things to be around all the time, and enjoy the company? That was probably a large part of it, but then there was another thing. My prayers had turned extremely material-driven. It was like I was testing God every day -if you exist somewhere out there and are listening to my prayers, then you will make me get an A in the quiz tomorrow. Or it would be about winning a prize, getting money or a new sweater as a gift. The longer this didn't happen the angrier I became, and the angrier I became the more I prayed for immediate gratification of things. Where my logic ran away, or my rational edge, I do not know. But I felt annoyed, all the time Lucille; I felt completely betrayed and defeated by a God that I tried to believe in. So when Ash Wednesday came around, in 11th grade, and Anthony Mendonca asked me if I wanted to attend service, I peered into his face, completely crestfallen, and said, "I'm done." 

You know, Lucille, I realize that the entire phase was an outcome of infatuation, of wanting attention and being completely irrational. And I realize, very well, that religion is not about rewards, prayers are not about gifts, and confessions are not about being the trendy thing to do. I mishandled religion to gain personal favors, and I do not know what the retribution is. Isn't it interesting that I believe in retribution without being religious or spiritual? But what I do know is that because of the 2 years, I cannot look at religion, think about it or believe in it, the way others can. There's a stain, a serpentine trail of squalor and filth that rains in my brain, every time I think about it. And I cannot get over it, just as yet. Maybe someday, in the distant future, the metal cast of atrocious lies, will wince away from my inner self, and then I will come out a better person. 

This has become a lot longer than I had intended to be and I'm sorry about that. Stay in touch, my little pumpkin and tell Edna Weinglass I said hello. 

Yours,
T. 

fetishizing

I had been thinking about writing to you for a long time, Rosemary, and am finally getting down to it. it's been really hectic here, you know; trying to plan for Cecile's college visits, setting up my new business, buying a car and looking into osteopathic schools for a potential career in primary care. I've been learning more and more about osteopathy, and the psycho-somatic aspect of it is really latching on to my interest. It's amazing how my interests have changed over the years; there was music first, then women's studies, then radio voiceovers, then pediatrics, media and sex-work. i've been passionate, however, about giving care. about providing care. the concept, how my tongue feels when i say providing care, the psychology and the drive, throughout, has really been strong, even though it has surfaced back and forth, like frozen balloons, in a steady stream of my biography. my focus has shifted from kids, specifically, to under-served minorities; the piece of my identity that i forget sometimes and i am okay with that. i'm sure you'll get updates from me in the future, but i did want to let you know that I'm doing more policy work in the fall.

I was sitting in my apartment last week on 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue, reading My Dangerous Desires by a Leftist ex-hooker Amber Hollibaugh, when someone named Robert chatted me up online.

"Hey, how's it going Tom?"

"Going well, how're you man?"I responded.

"Fine fine. Just chilling in my hotel room on 54th/Lex. What're you upto?"

I didn't reply till about 5 minutes later. I was in the middle of reading about Hollibaugh's views on the butch/femme dichotomy and forgot to check my phone.

"Reading a book about queer women. Ha." I replied.

There was a 2 minute pause. I read ahead, sipping piping hot coffee from a tangerine-striped mug; occasionally staring at the print of Roy Lichtenstein's Kiss V hanging on the wall across from me. 

"Cool. Are you looking?" read the next message.

"Not to hook up, no. Just looking for friends. Sorry. How are things in the hotel stud?" I asked.

"I'm horny man. I wanna be used as a human toilet. Like right now. Wanna come over?"

I was a little baffled. What exactly is a "human toilet"? What does this guy want me to do? I was confused and curious at the same time, perhaps slightly taken aback.

"Well, Rob, I mean...what exactly do you want me to do?" I asked. 

"You should just use me like you use a toilet. Ya know, like piss on me, or make me drink your piss. Also, don't shower, please. I want to lick your ass. Make me lick your ass, like you would use toilet paper. Do whatever man...spit on me, abuse me, whatever gets you off." 

I didn't know what to say. I just said, "Okay."

He wrote back thirty seconds later. "I can leave the door open. You can come, tie me up, slap my face and go from there. I wanna be your pig, man. Bring friends along if you know anyone in the 'hood. You up for it?"

No, I wasn't up for it. But I wanted to know more about what he had in mind. I wanted to know who this person was, his background, etc. 

"Maybe in two hours. I'm a little busy right now. Where are you visiting from?" I asked.

"From Silver Lake, LA. You a local here?"

"Yea." 

"Oh cool cool. By the way man, this has got to be discreet. I'm a professional in private equity in a big-name company and know people all around. Gotta keep it between us, you okay with that man?"

"Of course. No worries." I replied. 

There was another minute long silence. I didn't know how to react. I was entertained and confused and surprised and piqued at the same time. it made me grin. just another example of Aristotelian metaphysics, of man as a rational animal? of man the logical, the moral, the professional human being? or maybe this is man the animal? the subconscious, the unconscious desires of the dirty and filthy, the wild and the uninhibited, sprouting through the soil of propriety and reasonableness? what happened to the conventional morality, the compact set of rules that govern what men and women are allowed to desire, allowed to express? I thought of man as a coin; a two-faced entity, one surface on top, and another on the bottom. Sometimes when you flip it, or spin it on its diametric axis, you see both sides in spurts, in momentary glimpses, till you settle on seeing one side. and then, an external stimulus, will switch it back, or make it twirl, or dance in air and re-settle. new mood, alternate side, but still the same, within.

"So when are you coming man? I have a 13 inch dildo in my suitcase. You can beat up my hole with it." he wrote.

I didn't respond. I wasn't going to any more. 

Five minutes later. "I'm getting a group together with 3 other guys. They're all gonna use me, spit and piss on me, and use me like a total bitch. You wanna join dude?" 

No response.

"Well I guess not. Delete my face pic please. Don't want anyone to know. Also if you want to use me, let me know. I'm free tomorrow AM as well."

I deleted Robert's face picture. I wasn't interested in meeting up anyway, and I wanted to respect his desire to be anonymous. But my point is this, Rosemary Stevens. There are so many Roberts out there, who cannot express their desires, their fantasies of sex, their urges and wants and innermost wishes because they're afraid of being judged. they're afraid of being improper, being caught in a media hyperbole which could cause professional damage, bore a hole through public identity, and cost a toll on social rubrics. desires out of conventional mores cannot be discussed or described unless you find refuge in a sexualized sub-category, unless you're part of this other "culture" that all the new academics come out to study, and theorize about and criticize and rip apart. i thought, again, of all the men who told me they feel like "human ash trays", or the ones who get turned on by licking boot polish, or the 40 year olds who like to drink breast milk for fun, or snort cocaine and draw rings on their nipples. i thought of all the men who told me about how they get turned on thinking about sprinkling pepper in someone's asshole, or making someone gag on a beer can or getting their penises stretched with retractors. things that can only be talked about in private circles, desires that are never taken seriously, cravings that are looked at through the lens of absurdity. this is the sad existence of fetishizing, the side of humans that cannot be explained through nature or nurture or a combination of both, the origins of desire, the theories of attractions. that's just absurd, is always the reaction, as we sit on this buoy of normalcy, hiding behind shades, the spectrum of monstrosity. running away from the deepest voice of the pathway to pro-creation. 

I'll write another letter to you sometime next month. till then, be good. and know that I'm thinking about you.

T.

february fourteenth

a photo-series of February fourteenth. imagine, behind the lights, two souls dancing, shaking heads, gripping hands, wishing well, speaking about loving, and whistling in the wind...

and the lights went out...

on a shower

i happen to have a weirdly vivid mental image of what a man ought to look like when he showers thoroughly. i try to live up to it, as much as i can. sometimes i am successful, which makes me proud and happy and cheerfully overjoyed, but at other times i am not and it can be dissatisfying and seriously unsettling beyond words can explain. today, however, i was determined to have a picture-perfect thorough shower. so after i finished reading The UnAmericans, an NPR-recommended title that E gave me for Valentine's Day, i walked over to the bathroom sink, took off my clothes, flossed my teeth, examined an itchy red spot just chilling near my left nipple, pinched around my lower belly to detect any unfamiliar ounce of fat that may have made its way to my abdominal stucco during the weekend's binge-eating spree, manicured my scruff, made a U-turn to the bath tub and pulled the plastic shower handle to let the water flow. it took me seventy two seconds to adjust the temperature, while standing by the bath tub, leaning down, and wetting my finger tips periodically. the pivoting back and forth, between sizzling hot and bone-chilling cold takes away, typically, a good deal of my patience. especially with unfamiliar showers, figuring out the mechanics of getting the perfect temperature is nothing short of a mental marathon, a brain sweat that manifests itself through after-shower erraticism, temporary bipolarity and awfully bad mood swings.

with the right temperature in check, i hung the bath towel on the hook above the edge of the tub, and inched into the shower: right toe first, then right heel, then left foot, then calves, torso and finally, head. i flinched, immediately, when the spray of water beads touched my torso, but after a minute of getting used to, stood directly under the shower head. i got wet, in a matter of minutes, and it felt exceptionally good. the sight and sounds of falling water are quite remarkable, if you ask me, and you should take a moment to observe if you haven't done so already. sometimes, they look like concrete mercury dollops or pellets of Rogaska crystals clinking in the steam, or like copper crowns swirling in the heat, making a constant shh sound, and whistling down the strings of gravitational water veins. and at other times, they look like little pearl drops forming and disappearing, clanging and thrumming along the way of the riser rail, before crashing at the base with exhaustive thuds. then they pool around the base of the feet, chirp a little, like grasshoppers in a pageant, lilt and sway in a strong physical tension and wiggle down the bare-open rubber gasket of the shower drain.

after about three minutes of standing under the pouring shower head, i took a dime-size dab of shampoo in my palms, added a splash of water, lathered it slightly and applied it at the crown of my hair followed by my hairline. a strong aroma of caramel and honey curled up in waves, and sweetened every corner of the room. i scrubbed my hair and scalp, gently at first and then really vigorously, to make bubbles. small to medium-sized macro-spheres to micro-spheroids, transparent and prismatic, round and plump-looking bubbles, revolving in nano-orbits, and giggling at each other like little children in a yellow bus, with tummy tickles and cartoons. the ecology of bubbles, the frequency, the magnitude, etc. all add to my vision of a thorough shower. i don't know why, and i don't know how, but it's an integral part of my showering scheme. the same happens with body soap, or body butter, as i use it to rub and scrape my skin vigorously, lathering up to the extent of the frothiness of histrionic mythological floods, and feel a new sensation of cleanliness nibbling at my skin tips and tickling at my sweat glands. There is this re-dawning of freshness, that is hard to explain. this feeling that someone has used a squeegee in whopping arc-radii, and cleansed every milli-pore of skin to twinkling specklessness. i feel calm, re-energized and light.

i had a lot of thoughts when i was in the shower today. various topics, various concerns, impressions, cravings and ideas. i thought about the fact that i haven't spoken to my parents in over six months since falling out over being distracted, wasting my life, and Eli Reisman. i thought about what my life would be like if i went into mainstream design writing, ten years from now or even twenty. and then there was Mary McCarthy's Libby MacAusland and the disheartened likes of Evelyn McHale sipping champagne at the Carnegie Institute, flummoxed by the appearance of Giacomo Puccini. somewhere in the middle of it all, there were thoughts about Bikram yoga, about red lentils, Naples and rainbows. and finally, that recurring thought about belonging, about fitting right in, about the profile of a minority. the fear of otherness and living as a category dishearten me sometimes. but i suck it all in, when the beans spill, and think about the positive side. the relentless pursuit of assimilation, to be just another one of those, to be a part of the mainstream, has its own status of non-scrutiny, its own stamp of consolation. to be a part of the ocean, to refine a niche, to blend into a majority growth wing, has its own array of rewards. Sarah Hellerstein asked me the other day, while i was waiting for the bus in front of the Juilliard School, why do people forget their roots? the way they evolved? i didn't bat an eyelid and blurted out because sometimes those roots evoke images of horror, sadness and disappointment. sometimes, and only sometimes, temporarily forgetting those roots gives a chance to begin, to re-form, to re-discover from scratch. the tailoring and laundering of identity politics, of stitching together and rehashing a dominant persona, sound easier in theory than done. and i have struggled with it a lot, and given it less and less thought over the years. sometimes all it takes for the complaints to trickle back down is a run-of-the-mill comment. don't get me wrong, i am not wallowing in depression. neither am i sitting here, ripping hairs with a glum face. it was merely a thought, and it has passed.

sometimes i want to scream, sprinkling colors of sounds all around me. sometimes i want to cry, with patterns and cuboids, stenciled on my face. sometimes i want to breathe in the melody of Bach, the rollicking of Brahms and the rockiness of Liszt. i want to learn how to Salsa, sing Rusalka, own a tuxedo and make a basket. i want to run to the mountains, eat vanilla beans, roast coffee and read. how the mind wanders, speaks, dances and spins, in the simple space of a shower cubicle is absolutely fascinating to me. where poets have composed, and lyricists have imagined, and scientists have dreamed of ambitious discoveries. in splashes of water, percussing on the body, in stains of bubbles, melting away, in the innocence of steam hissing at the ears, the washing away, the deep-cleansing, the therapeutics of water works is a critter of wonder. and shall remain unexplained. 

Diana's valentine letter

Diana,

it's been almost a year since we last saw each other at the Cindy Sherman exhibit up on the 6th floor in the MoMA. You were too busy prepping for New York Fashion Week, i remember, with your lacquered nails and bouffant hair, or was it a crown braid? i complimented you on your breast augmentation surgery, your black Tafetta dress from Coco Chanel, and your McQueen ankle-wraps; ah, how beautiful you looked! i wasn't sure, however, if i should call you Diana or Leonard or something else. if you have a preference, please let me know. i did not mean to offend. 

i heard from Henriette, who i bumped into the other day at the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle first and then again at the Minskoff Theater on 45th Street by Broadway, that Susan isn't doing very well. i can imagine how difficult it must be for you -this change, this new identity, this new life, the stares you must get and the slew of explanations you are expected to provide. but Diana, if i can help in any way, please please don't hesitate to contact me. i'm here for you and your well-being is important to me. forget the nasty things they wrote about you on The Sophian; i've always disliked that group from Smith anyway. you deserve much better, and i know you will get out of this slump. 

well, the reason i'm writing this letter to you today is that i wanted to let you know that i have been seeing someone for the past nine months. we met, shortly after Stacy and i broke up in San Francisco, at a library. it was kind of a weird encounter really; awkward and strange at first, but it glided into place within minutes! finding someone to love all over again, to rebuild a faith, to rebuild confidence and assurances is always really really hard. every time you're tossed away because there's someone else who's better than you, you tell yourself this is it. i want to lead the single life right now, drama-free, care-free. and things will eventually fall in place, if they're meant to be. and then the reality of your solitude hits you, the sporadic nature of your new found conviction bears its fangs, and it slowly depresses you, as it slithers through your veins, diffuses through your mind, perfuses and effuses through your moods and hypnotizes your satiety into a vacillating feeling of comfort and emptiness. you feel dizzyingly numb, you feel uncharacteristically hopeless; to a point, where you start questioning the worthiness of your self, the value of your contribution to this gimmick of existence. am i deserving of happiness? you ask yourself. and knowing the rhetorical nature of your depressive quandary, you feel displaced, like a swollen pendulum bob, swinging on the apices of emotional extremes, dissatisfied at once, ecstatic at once, spiraling in a rut of neurotic outbursts in between. 

loneliness had become my dependable aphrodisiac. i had a love-hate relationship with it; mostly because it gave me the independence i always wanted, but pinched me to tears from time to time. when you are lonely, you have a lot of time on your hands and more often than not, find yourself mulling over personal histories, memories, day dreams and promises. it feels as if you're going through a catalog, a sheaf of paper, a bundle of circumstances, and re-living bygone moments. and you tell yourself that you were tired, utterly exhausted, of being the appendage, the second option, the could-have-been. and when that point comes at the pinnacle of your recollections, you recoil into a state of quiescence, where you exist without living. you survive without feeling. you continue without meaning. and then you learn to love this new existence, to live in the new reality, leading the cues to a complete makeover.

your mind begins to bark, slowly, at sounds of silence. it becomes a juxtaposition of the empty slots of a crossword puzzle; like the blank checkers of a scrabble board, filled and re-filled with alphabets of consolation. time and time again, you develop this strong companionship with your inner loneliness, a voice only you can hear, a voice that only makes sense to you. after you slide downhill, so easily, so smoothly on the course of negativity, it now becomes a new defense against accusation of carelessness, a new weapon, a new instrument of body politics. but you see the positive side of loneliness; the independence that comes with the lack of accountability and the focus on the self. for a while, you learn to live that non-committed life, the altruistic one, but then a craving engulfs you so suddenly, that you don't know what to do. this rousing voice unfurls within you, like an awakening tendril of a garden pea, and says, i want to be held, i want to be loved and i want to be wanted.

i was ready, both mentally and physically, before i met E in the library. you know, it felt a little awkward at first, a little forced and queasy; but we broke the shell within a minute. we shook hands, exchanged greetings, and smiled, for a while. who knew you could read so much from a simple smile? or maybe i had just forgotten what smiles meant anymore. but we ended up at a restaurant on 105 Street and Broadway, pouring liquor, clicking nails, brushing our legs under the table in gentle bumps and smooth glides. it was easy, despite the nervousness, to speak out again, to put myself out there again, to someone who would listen. and over the course of nine months, Diana, we have grown so much together, literally. with someone who has an open heart, an edge of crisp, a magnetism so smooth, you feel nourished when you enter to live a life together. i feel that with E, despite my occasional discomfiture. never in my life have i felt so loved, so cleansed, so beautifully held, and so richly infused with emotions not involving harrowing negativities, as i have in these months. the genuineness of a bound chemistry, seethed in trust, simmered in a spectrum of romantic notes, oozes in me a distinctive calm. like a powerful propeller, un-mechanizing the thrust of routine existence; it helps with a social evolution, even a personal revolution of turning over, of un-becoming and re-becoming a better person. 

my pride does remain in the identity of a sex radical, and this point has caused a lot of altercation between the two of us. i am a proponent of sexual exploration, even in the midst of a conventional tie, learning and experiencing ways and cravings of the human body, the human mind. there is love, and there is lust. the two intersect in the caricature of a Venn diagram, but their identities do not meld. and neither does mine -in my role as a practical anarchist, in using my body to test the limits of sexuality. i have no shame, and i do not blush at the ideology of body-selling. i have no judgment reserved for the hoochies and hustlers. through breaking the limits of operational elastics, the normative dicta of institutional morality, i take pride in myself, in, what i consider, extreme liberalism. the cross roads of love and lust is not clear-cut, and the quest to self is highly unwarranted. we need a middle ground, Diana, and we will work towards it. with E, talking is easy; and conversation flows. everything feels so natural, and so delicately together, that i sit and tell myself -i'm glad the hollowness ended. 

i hope that sometime in the future you will get to meet E, the person who brings so much contentment in my daily life. that gift of thought, that gift of desire, that gift of being wanted -oh how enriching it is, i cannot explain in words. to think about, in moments of silence, that someone else is thinking about you, is the greatest gift i could ever have.

i hope you have a wonderful valentine's day, Diana. i'll stop by Cheryl's tomorrow night to drop off a few envelopes and tell her you said hello.

all the best, T. 

dear janet

dear janet,

how are you, little plum? i left off, in my last letter to you, at the point when i went to the holiday market in Union Square and drifted off to Berry Park later, on the collar of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, only to be depressed at the sight of shrewd circus-goers vandalizing a car, a porch and a by-lane. i got on the L, hurriedly, came to Manhattan shortly after, and took the 6 back up to the Upper East Side. safe in the clasp of my neighborhood, i went to bed feeling absolutely naked; deprived, somehow, of the energy to revolt. i am a wuss, perhaps, but i felt terrible inside of me.

i am curious what you are doing right now, as i sit on my bed, by a column of lights, listening to my table fan mumbling by the door. maybe you are singing, or writing some poetry, or dancing on ice or having an orgasm. or thinking about cock, about being a hoochie, about Darla's appendicitis or Warby Parker. maybe you are showering, or wringing your thongs, or sewing your socks, or pinching your nipples, or yawning or burping or drinking coffee. i can only keep guessing, but i really want to know. i have to find a way, perhaps, to peek into your daily life and keep myself restrained, like a prisoner of reality, in a carton of milk. but i need to be sensitive, considerate and aptly articulate as your ex-affiliate of sorts, drawn by the strings of etiquette, conscience and logic. if i over-step, or if i go too far, i hope that you will bring that to my immediate attention.

come to think of it, i have been here for almost 2 years now. almost 2 years. i guess it is not considered, by most people, a very long stretch of time, but it feels almost like a century has gone by. maybe because my city has a curiously high rate of turnover, with flopping businesses and flailing commerce, moments simply whiz by. memories parachute from the present to the past in a matter of days, or even hours, leaving me wondering about the subtleties of transactions, advertising and marketing. it is as if the city molts, every trimester, like a cicada in despair, or a mischievous snake, and dons a brand new look. reasonably fresh, temptingly smooth, and passively electric; soulful and blue, tingling and cool, prickly and prim, like that muslin feel of fresh-out-of-water. ready to begin, to re-ignite and to re-inflame a second throe of adventure. 

it is winter time, little plum, and so far it has been quite severe. Hercules and Janus, the polar storms of January, have swept away a lot of lives, of trees and humans alike. my heart folds in pieces, like pleats of a skirt, when i hear the beggars roar in pain, and chatter their teeth, violently and uncontrollably, to generate body warmth and vigor. one 47 year old, the other day, was standing at the corner of 96th Street and Broadway, and seizing almost, was pulsating and yowling with every thrust of wind. it pinned on to him, like a wave of needles, like a hurricane of claws, like a symphony of blades, burrowing through his eyes, his ears, feet and thighs. i ran up to him, gave him my knit hat, and asked, are you okay? in the dimness of the streetlight, i saw his eyes roll, several times, after which he flung it away. why would you want to help a man, like me, live on like this? i did not know what he meant by that. i was trying to be nice, to be compassionate, but i felt completely and utterly dismissed. are you sure, you don't need it? i asked, hoping he'd reconsider. he shook his head, lifelessly and aimlessly, and squeezed the words out of his lips, repeating it twice. this city has defeated me, completely.

it snowed that night after i got back home, untied my shoes and doffed my coat. a warm aroma of spice lingered in the air, where pie had been baked an hour before. i poured myself a glass of wine, clipped my nails and sat by the window with a book in hand. it was sizzling inside, intensely overheated, to a point where i could almost hear layers of my skin crackle and crunch in the immensity of heat. i re-set the thermostat to 70 degrees, turned on a podcast on relaxation meditation and passed out in a matter of 7 minutes. before i slept, alone in bed, i thought about the homeless man again. where is this man? what is he possibly doing right now? did the police find him a shelter? give him some food to eat? may be they did, may be they didn't. it is possible that i will never know. he has escaped, perhaps, the embarrassment of defeat. a well-deserving man, greater than a disposable.

the next morning, around 7, i jolted out of bed and walked to the park to catch a glimpse of a still, January dawn. and what can i say, little plum? it was, indeed, the wonderland of my childhood fantasies. brilliantly white, dazzling and shimmering in the soft rays of the morning sun. my erotic city, my New York, lay curtained and shrouded in a veil of snow. so energized, so rejuvenated, i could cling on to the flecks of water, kiss the lips of dreaming cones, and play with birds by the reservoir with the passion of the maestros, the old geniuses of art, the linearity of babies, forever. the frozen lake, so delicately slick, lay bubbling and cradling in the temperate winds. a soft thrumming of marathon runners rose and fell, like doppler beads, in an abrupt emptiness. the trees in the colonnade, terse and glib, held hands, and kissed, and swayed to the winding melodies of La Boheme, wriggling and fiddling through vibraphones from the one solitary physicians home, snarling in wonderment at The Eldorado in the Upper West Side. i felt so enriched, i felt so full, i felt so emotional that i needed to pace myself, to make sure i was breathing. i was living, as if, in the interior of a snow globe, at once in vacuum as in winds, watching a race of twinkling gems, falling and fighting, ripping the brains of anti-gravity and dancing with the centers of a billion galaxies.

all of this made me miss you so much. i really wanted to, needed to, share my joy with someone at that moment. at that very moment. anyone, would do. anyone. but no one was around. and that made me sad. it made me think of the time when you visited me. in my second-floor apartment at the heart of the West Village. and how we trundled down Jane Street, by the Lilac Chocolatiers, by the wine shop on 43, swiveling with chirps and fluffy giggles of new-age couples holding hands. remember that time on Hudson Street? when you spotted Aaron Liebowitz, your high school crush, kissing a tranny in front of Pet Portraits? and how you laughed for ten minutes, your face turning red the same shade as in stop signs, puffing like strawberries, swelling, uncontrollably, like dough on a humid day? and then we walked to Minerva, saw Earp Dunnington and Cayla Epstein, drank three bottles of wine, ate olives and artichokes and talked about life? in the silence of mid-day my city slept like a baby, while we trekked through lanes and by-lanes of the historic neighborhood. we waved and smiled at Hawthorns and Ginkgoes, nestling to the sides of expansive homes, and ran home, chasing bikes and squirrels at the pinch of afternoon. with a cherry wine sky, at the cusp of dusk, we made love by the pane of the Western glass, pushed against the softness of my aluminum windows. rattling and tittering, squealing and moaning, we came at the end, together, our hearts united, our minds spinning with the dizziness of violent orgasm. we got dinner after, at Extra Virgin, on the east side of West 4th Street, and relaxed in the evening, as night came spinning down. bringing along a tea-gown of fresh, awakening stars, tinkling and glittering against the spire of the Empire State. 

i am in love, janet. in love with a city that dreams with me, holds my eyes and breathes with me. cries with me and sings for me at times of loss, and sadness. while he is away, studying to be a doctor, and my heart seethes with clumps of ringing memories, my city brings me joy, leads me forward and gives me a chance to reinvent myself.

i hope you are well, janet. send Harry my wishes. i love you both. 

T

my encounter with w lieberman

my workplace, a picturesque hospital from the era of Roland Flint and Irene Glascock, has a curious basement cafeteria. it is moderately populated during breakfast, intensely busy during lunch, surprisingly jittery during dinner and frighteningly vacant over the weekend. the workers are mostly Hispanic; strong, olive and supple. there are a quarter Haitians, a speck of White and a granule of African-American men and women, all lobbying for low blood pressure diets. obesity is not uncommon, unfortunately, among the staff, especially in the section of French Fries and Cheese. And the staple is fried plantain, Cheesecake yogurt, spinach pizza and soda.

the families of patients who visit this earthy, low-hum cafeteria always have an array of peculiar expressions. tied to sorrow and worry, a lot of the times, they forget to smile, forget to breathe and forget to eat -as dust and globular microbes settle on the crusts of soup, pie and meat loaves. the Jews sit in the North corner, the Arabs in the left and every one else is in between -flat, unsound and peculiarly dazed. perhaps they worry about a loved one dying, a non-fatal accident, a cousin's childbirth or colon cancer. or maybe they think about stealing food, homelessness or the irony of prayers. i smile at a few of them as i carry my tray across the unsettled, peach-colored lobby area, ringing with the sounds of climatic catastrophes, CNN fables or who wants to be a millionaire? but they never smile back, or open their lips or make any sign of eye contact.

i walk out through the set of double doors in the south side of the cafeteria, balancing my lunch box on my right calloused palm and holding a bottle of Fiji water on my left by the white, corrugated cap and take a sharp right to the docking site. the walls of the hallway are a pale shade of yellow -somewhere between Aureolin and straw-colored if i had to take a guess -and covered with palm smears, coffee stains and wet outlines of muddy shoes. they look like butterfly wing prints, or pineapple skin or a congealment of miniature moons that no one has bothered to clean in seven years. the hallway itself is about 500 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide and at the edge of 400 feet there is a sign jutting out that says medical physics.

on the left hand side, before the docking entrance, are two rectangular, spacious rooms. the doors to these rooms are sometimes latched, sometimes pad-locked and sometimes left open for transport. i noticed a pair of sky blue stretchers by one of the doors last Tuesday but did not bother to wait around and investigate what was going on. i was already running late for a Strategic Planning meeting for the College and being even a minute later would result in Rosemary Silverstein, our associate consultant, going up in arms about punctuality, unprofessionalism and faulty HR hiring policies. Diana Rosenthal and Heather McRae, the Dean's assistants, would riffle through a long line of courtesies, incredulity of the GOPs tax policies and giggle, cheekily, until another ten minutes had passed. everyone would collect themselves from a maverick of emotional hangings and then proceed with the agenda for the meeting.

today, however, there is a small body bag lying on a stretcher in front of the first door, completely unattended to despite something being inside of it. i spot it from a distance and begin to slow down as i approach it from a hundred feet away. a mild musty smell darts through my nose,wafts through the entirety of my facial cage and tingles my brain with a violent swoosh. i tiptoe forward, and move closer to the body bag. my adrenaline alarm pulsates the outer coats of my circulatory system, making me hyperventilate and roughens my skin with goosebumps. five feet away, and i finally spot an ID card lying on the floor.

name: w lieberman

age: 3 years

cause: neuroblastoma

time of death: 12:34 pm 

my mind goes spinning across the table of a hundred questions, doubts, remorse and shock. is that a boy or is it a girl? what is the pattern of its current disintegration -the effects of rigor mortis, the banquet of flies, maggots and burrowing spirochetes? what is the father doing? is the mother alive? did it have a pastor or Rabbi at the time of shocks? did the nurse cry?

i fall into a daze of alien existentialism. as if shuttling on a plunger between a wide parallel macrocosm and a white, fenestrated micro-cosmos. as if living through the eyepiece of a wide-eyed telescope; burrowing and slithering at 100X magnification on the brim of a crystal jar. as if hauling, in exhaustion, in a game of tug of war between the past and present, distance and proximity, impact and dismissal, knocking on the bell jar of slipping time. i am transfixed within the mesh of a silk cocoon, writhing and playing with chaotic pendulums, snapping my wrists and drumming the beads of molten seeds. i am paralyzed in place, pinched with forks of brazen stones, cold and vacant in the slant of daylight. i am gripped with fear, gnarled with hate and spun with words of reckless grievances. what am i to say, to the empty souls of flesh cubicles? what am i to say to an orphaned jewelry box, motionless and staunch behind the moonwalk of zippers? what am i to do in the world agape, running away from a dead history - frivolous and lunatic in the situation of times? 

i give it a moment, and walk away. through the docking site, till the end and take the elevator to the third floor. back into my own reality, in the queerness of my office space. my mind separated from my body.

for Schwartzberg

do you remember, Cayla Schwartzberg, when we first met at your second floor duplex apartment on the 21st of September? you probably do not. but i do. vividly, serenely and rather embarrassingly. you were wearing a black and creme, crisply fluidic A Line dress, a sequined belt with mildew-colored plaits vanishing down your waistline, a starched ribbon turban stretched across an uneven semi-circle of your anterior head cavity, and retro stackable turquoise rings on your index and middle fingers. the laced bow-tie of your bra was giving your upper breast a supple firmness and pushing your nipples up to the crown of your trimmed collar-bone, giggling playfully through the air barrels of your poplin-tulle fabric. you greeted me with a smile, a cigarette breath and a bouquet of hyperbolic enthusiasm; a general rise in emotive atoms, sprinting through an autumn air, colliding and elasticizing, swaying and lulling to the low trebles of Ella's gramophone discography. i stepped on the threshold, scrubbed the sole of my chain-leather opal Zanotti's vigorously, against the erotic bristles of your Magritte doormat, and proceeded down your hallway.

it was tremendously white, as far as i can remember. you had painted the door moldings a burnt gold and tattooed on them the anatomy of fireflies. you had lampshades of raisin, spatulas of ivory and chandeliers of tallow wax, dandelions and aluminum. bottles of cognac and Spanish wine hung from the ceilings, upside down, with cracked necks, acrobatic lips and breathless apnea. posters of Lolita, Marx, missionaries and pornography lay squatting on your bedroom walls, peering over the mythology book of Aphrodite, sleeping across your window ledge. a condom wrapper by the sofa-set lay diddling in the air, laughing at the aroma of searing spices. it was disturbingly black, julienned across the tip and shriveled with creases of phenomenal age. the topology of the Americas remained squarely displayed across the beige plywood wall of your dining room, and photo-prints and postcards hung disproportionately near the curling curves of the ceiling. you lifted two wine glasses from the kitchen counter-top, the excessive thinness of the stems projecting an illusion of dramatized fragility, and poured copious bundles of Pinot Noir into each of them. the sounds of the trickle amplified along the curvatures of transparent wind columns, resonating and gurgling in the interiors of my ear. a platter of Brie, walnuts, figs and cloves, paralyzed and footless on the teak-wood of the table, joined our smiles in awkward company, in a shawl of contemporariness, frivolity and friendliness.

you introduced yourself as a distinguished photographer, a blossoming linguist, a careful interpreter and a Dali aficionado with an obsession with neck-ties from Attolini and Harry Rosen. you are twenty two, with mocha-colored hair and a smattering of Tuxedo Red lipstick. you giggle at consonants, laugh with your head tilted fifty degrees to the air, gawk at vowels and lisp like the hiss of a neonatal chameleon tumbling and burning in respiratory distress. your fingers are soft, your lashes are brittle, and the shape of your waist is frighteningly similar to the keepsake of an ancient Egyptian cremation urn. your mother was a revolutionary phenomenon of the 80s, erupting in activism, rioting like the Teamsters, and reshaping the grounds of working class literati. you know less than little, however, about Ira Schwartzberg, your dead father, who walked away from your mother's kiss when your were the size of a marble pod, boiling in the age of lonely gestation. you are an immigrant, a second-class citizen, a subject of comedy, modeled like a tumor; a supplement, lacerated, displaced for an extra. despite the politics of an uncompromising government, who disregard your status at the cost of talent, you have managed to stage an act of happiness without a trace of doubt. in your first letter of our correspondence you wrote, i have never lived in a small town, and i feel depressed. and i traveled from Back Bay to your rural residence to provide a formal introduction, relieve your awkwardness, and provide a means for careful assimilation. 

from the very first time we met and carelessly flirted, we became an odd sensation in the binoculars of our neighborhood. we aided in the gentrification of an orchard-town, driving past the city hall, down the intersections on Marcy Avenue, and opening at the northern edge a new pastry shop named Mayefsky and Maldonado's. we talked about sunshine, laughed like parrots, danced like peacocks and dreamed like clouds, aspiring for entrepreneurship, success and education. one Saturday night you said to me, can we fuck, please? i need it badly. i refused. the next Tuesday morning you requested again. i laughed it off, oh come on! i'm not feeling it. and this cycle of lies, these packets of hush-hush excuses kept piling up, one on top of the other, leaning over, gripping under, shaking violently in the humiliation of a bawdy discomfort. the following Saturday you walked into my room, peach colored and virgin, put down a pile of books on the mahogany breasts of my corner table and said, i'm not letting you go if you don't do it tonight. i'm telling...telling you, i will go mad. and sensing your tone of flamboyant desperation, sensing the frankness of your sexual request, sensing the ease with which the words erupted, you broke into silence. and then you cried. and broke into a fit of amazing hysteria, convulsing violently in the middle of piercing ululations. you held my hand, tightly, as the candle by the bed-stand vanished into air, and demanded an explanation for my useless behavior. for the leading on, for the merry rides, for the songs of love we spilled across, for the nights after nights of dizzying words, reading poetry, cooking, clinking Bordeaux stems in vortical shades. what was the meaning of assistance in the holocaust of a heart break? what was the purpose of bed-shares if it meant absolutely nothing? the time, the effort, the collusion and bending, the tripping and gripping, the showiness and sacrifice -for what?

but i never got a chance to tell you, two years running, that none of that was for you to blame. none of my dispassionate front-twirling, hand-swinging and theater act had anything do with a rejection of you. it was me. it is me, Cayla Schwartzberg. it is that i loved solitude, Aaron Keisel, on the foothold of denial, the strawberry tutus of the jewel ballerinas, Brody Saltzman from a night at St Regis, Garvey Einhorn from the polyester store, and above all, the diary of Warhol. you were the palette of breath, in our small town charade, buckling and bending the physiology of time. for this, and the love of man, i welcome you again into my temple of paint, the masquerade of hens and the philosophy of kings.

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.