Welcome back, brosif. Missed you, dawg. Feel better? Ready to listen? 'k - 1) You can do a limited deployment anywhere for any amount of time so long as it's limited. Got an email today from a guy who just finished 37 months in a federal pen. You're doing better than that. You've got your sunset - buy a goddamn calendar and start marking off numbers. It's power. 2) They don't all suck. Four of my best friends are all Ohio refugees. One of them's from Dayton. Three are from Cleveland. This implies that prior to their escape, they were awesome people in Ohio. Now - I don't know anybody there currently and as I said, the people I like rarely go back to visit, but they gotta exist. 3) Channel your inner anthropologist. There will come a time when Ohio has been in your rearview for many years. You will meet someone at a party who shall say something disparaging about Ohio. In order to bond with them, you must be educated about specific, terrible things about Ohio. Take notes. Write your diatribes down. Internalize them. Know the reasons why you hate Ohio and be ready to count them off. I once wrote bad stream-of-consciousness poetry about how much Las Vegas sucks. I still have it. It has made Vegas a tolerable thing for me, for I know its transgressions. 4) Enjoy the simple things. No matter where you are, no matter what you're doing, there's some aspect of it that is not completely terrible. The car museum at the top of the Imperial Palace, for example (before they sold it off). there's an incredible gem store in Albuquerque. The best stuffed sopaipilla I've ever had was in Show Low, AZ. I do not know what it is, but i know for a certainty there is a business, a meal, a park, a something wherever you are that isn't unredeemably bad. Find it. Cultivate it. Cherish it. Take pleasure in that one thing that isn't horrible about where you are. It will give you something to miss. For you will leave. And your life will roll on. And this chapter shall close, and another shall open, and listen close here son because I'm talking right the fuck to you: When I finally made it out of New Mexico after five years of trying, I spent a good year and a half occasionally weeping out loud at the incredible fortune of NOT BEING THERE. I knew what song I would play when I arrived, I knew what food I would eat, I knew which sunset I would watch. And I'm here to tell you - there is no exhultance like the exhultance of ESCAPE. Keep calm, carry on. This too shall pass.