Better Living Through Plastic Explosives - Pg 59 : Floating Like a Goat

   I had an advantage over my fellow students at the art college - I could see voices as colours and shapes, and without the aid of any psychotropic. As long as someone was talking, I had a palette to work with. The nasal Upper Canada monotone of my life-class instructor produced oddly compelling anorexic oatmeal-streaked buttocks and breasts (you may imagine how this annoyed the model, who was rather voluptuous and rosy hued, but the sketches earned me instant recognition as an iconoclast). My roommate's throaty smoker's laugh gave me a series of large canvas magma flares in reds, oranges, and basalt. The melancholy-flecked sound of my Estonian landlady talking to her daughter over the telephone, a small umbral gem.    Recorded voices, digitized voices, mediated voices didn't have any effect. This synesthesia only worked "live." Walking along a crowded street was quite literally a psychedelic experience. "Your voice is damaged swimwear," I told a stranger waiting for a bus, a pimply-faced teen whose girlfriend poked him in the ribs with her pointy little elbow before he could respond. "You sound like fresh cement," I said to a waitress midway through her recitation of the daily specials.