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Liberty, Santa, Musicians, Clowns, Doves

Taste: a pasty, cooked kidney bean
Touch: Pain, scaled: Pain on a scale of one to ten with ten being the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life, the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life
Sight: A man dressed as the Statue of Liberty, in a sickly green robe, the shade of oxidized copper, jumping holding a sign with an arrow that says, "Taxes"; a shell pink sunset falling over the snow-covered mountains textured by evergreen trees into fluffy looking mounds like coral; a pale crisp moon in a sky the opposite of shell pink, depths of the ocean blue; a square of flat salt and pepper ceiling in the speckled corner of which someone has hung a translucent blue mobile over the place where the patients all look up waiting; blue shadows and black holes, an ultrasound; blood, the color of Syrah, in two vials
Smell: canned dog food like a stew that has sat out overnight
Sound: Tasmin Little's Naked Violin, Bach, the difference between her own 1757 Guadagnini violin and a 'Regent' Stradivarius of 1708 from the Royal Academy of Music; a vibrating whoomp, whoomp, the sound part of ultrasound; "Sorry," and "Just think of Santa Claus coming down the chimney."
Extra: jobs it is evil to pay people to do; and what does the foreign man see when he peers into the folds, staring at their secret history of endless encounters, a place where he does not belong and yet which is far less foreign than the city in which he lives; Said in a dream: "Things are safer with the appearance of openness than if we were to erect barricades."; cliche, an anemic vegetarian; this town survives on a tax base of pawn shops and tattoo parlors; on this block live from north to south: a pole dance instructor, an accordion player, a clown, a DJ at Muslim weddings, and a man who builds trebuchets; the word, "libertine"; "Having the eyes of a dove means not stopping at the literal meaning of words but knowing how to penetrate their mystical sense." — p354 The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco

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