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--

Dedication

For my parents.

For my family.

For everyone who helped me up and for everyone I let down. You know who you are.
Sincerest thanks and most heartfelt apologies.

Cory

--

1.

I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and
Western medicine thus: "Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you
discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is
based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans."

The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and stilted, and not
particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from a top-40 song, sticky in your
mind in the sleep-deprived noontime when the world takes on a hallucinatory
hypperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a
sanatorium in the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual
construction of Boston that it's merely a cloud of dust like a herd of distant
buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit here with a pencil up my nose,
thinking about homebrew lobotomies and wouldn't it be nice if I gave myself one.

Deep breath.

The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the dissection
versus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference between reading a
story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and
killing the story and looking at its guts.

School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I'd escaped