Oh, Other Chris… If you could only spend a day in the life, seeing the world through these scarlet & gray-colored glasses. Life in Buckeyeraq is anything but a charmed existence; the tranquil serenity of the ambiguous hum of your office desktop writing to its hard drive, the siren glow of the soda machine in the staff lounge, the minutiae of life that you and so many others take for granted on a daily basis are reserved only for our wettest of dreams. Sacrosanct ideals like witticisms, derision, and internet “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” beefs are incomprehensible, socially incompatible abstracts within our world views. You too would know the plight, if when you tried to shut your eyes at night, you awoke, fully alert, heart racing, with post traumatic night terrors of Jarvis Moss, Derrick Harvey, and Ricky Jean-Francois impaling you and finally re-uniting you with the brothers taken prematurely from you so many months earlier. I can’t even leave my I’d-compare-favorably-to-a-1930s-prison-mortar-and-pestle-crafted compound to head to market without fears that I too may be violently thrown to the ground by a stalwart, ox-strong like man of southern rearing. They say I came back from Arizona and Louisiana, but I never really came back, you know? I read (or rather am verbally told, by a local elder as having attended University of Ohio State, I’m illiterate) of what I expect to be progress in the dehumanization of our admittedly culturally inferior peoples, only to find admonishment and denunciation and inside, I am saddened. While I do my best day in day out to be strong, and know that odds are, I will not be violently throwing to the ground with no forewarning at a moment’s notice, there is no way to be sure. When I pray 4 times each day, I do so, for you Other Chris. I pray, that some day, the great and glorious nation of Io-wah, may someday understand, and empathize, with the struggles that we are going through over here.