Eastern Standard Tribe | Page 4

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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 into, laid
open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals with polite sterile
drapes, recorded dutiful notes *en masse* that told us what the story was about, but never
what the story *was*. Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune
system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open
and they're as naked as a nightclub in daylight.
The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: "What is the theme of this
story?"
Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand it. The theme
of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?"
This is a work of propaganda. It's a story about choosing smarts over happiness. Except if
I give