I used to know this guy when I went to university, and he was pretty fucked up. He was thoroughly alcoholic, yes, but what that article doesn;t tell you is that he had some issues with ritalin. I remember him shoving a few into my mouth one night (I'm not kidding exactly) and thinking later "Jesus, this shit is awful, how can he do this stuff? I feel like crap!" But he did, and throughout that period of drinking and pill-popping it was quite difficult to call him a friend. I didn't dislike him. In fact, I found him at first to be rather expressive and intelligent, albeit a little crazy.

I didn't know him as well as a few of my friends did, and I can't say I ever grew close to him, but he was a person I hung out with from time to time in group situations, usually partying. Ater the first few times I hung out with him, he degraded rather quickly to a state of rampancy, growing more eccentric as the weekends rolled along. Eventually, he just became the kind of guy who would walk from place to place saying non-sensical, almost schizophrenice things to everyone and no one in particular.

I remember once he approached me at the bar and said "Steve, there's some obvious tension between us. We're not communicating", explaining that a girl I had dated briefly was "coming between us". I didn't really know there was an "us" to come between. At my band's last show, he came up to me after every song and asked that I announce my roommate's birthday, even though I'd mentioned it three times already. In his mind, he totally tuned out the facts because he was drunk and high and couldn't bother to apply facts to reality. He had these imagined concepts of what the world was like around him, so I suppose his inner world must have been intensely subjective and suspended from the real chain of events that comprised his social life.

A lot of people avoided him. He was simply too much, and it was quite often a sad thing to watch. We often felt for him, but we really couldn't do anything. We accepted him not solely as a casualty but a powerful warning as well. We saw this shadow of a person

But once I ran into him during exams and he had decided to take them seriously that semester. He had spent all day in the library and was going to do more. He was rationally discussing the topics of his studeies in a scholarly fashion, coherently and with conviction. It was ike I had seen a completely different person that day, as if I had met him that night at that party and instead of him putting pills on my tongue, we sat down and had a conversation about something of interest. It was as if all that time in between our initial meeting and that moment had been rewritten. I could almost see flashes of Kyle as a someone capable of motivation and thirst for knowledge.

Having read that article just now, I realize that he had it in him to change the whole time, and he's had the sense to do so before the situation got any more desperate. I'm very happy to see Kyle's story portrayed in the context of a relatable issue at Queen's, particularly after the wholeHomecoming mess. While Kyle is definitely a unique guy, there were most certainly others like him who were maybe less outward about their vices than Kyle but just as mired into to bog as he had been.

It's not limited to gender or race either. Queen's was probably the only scene I've ever experienced where I could count on two hands or more the number of actual drunks I knew at any one time. None of them were suffering as physically as Kyle was, but their emotions and health took less than desirable turns when they upped the sauce intake to daily occurances.

Queen's culture is ambivalent towards alcoholism, there is no question about that. To students, it's a humourous addition to someone's character. To Kingstonians, it's a nusance that nobody really wants to do anything about. To the administration, they only care about it when the headlines start blasting on the ticker.

I've been to other universities. U of T students are afraid of hangovers and McGill kids like their wine with dinner and a joint. When I visited Reed College in Portland, Oregon (which I always felt was Queen's if it cut 90% of its population down and kept only the smart, cool people who actually gave a shit about anything) I was amazed to see a nearly dry frosh party with a fucking salsa band headlining the show. People were dancing exotically! What I would have given to see that at Queen's, but instead I got people's chants of "ohhh-laaayyyy oh-lay -oh-lay oh-lay" outside of my window until 5 am because Queen's students have centered their lives around drinking. I watched akid rip the seat off my toilet because the drama students initiating him into his forst play made him drink whiskey and shots of cooking oil. I saw a drunken mob maraude a cafeteria on a Friday afternoon, turn the place upside down and then get arrested for smashing stolen glasses on the ground and blocking fire trucks. One of my friends stole a car from some driver who had left his keys in and the motor running for a minute, all because my friend was loaded and didn't have the sense to ask himself basic, logical questions like "should I be driving drunk in a stolen car right now?"

Don't get me wrong, I loved a ol' good belt once in a while, and still do, but for CRYIN OUT LOUD! I don't need to deprive my brain of oxygen that many times a week, and if I ever choose to do so, I'll make sure I don't wake up my neighbourhood while I'm at it. I won't flip any cars and I won't go fuckin bananas when someone tells me I shouldn't flip cars and I certainly won't tell old Chinese people that "it's time to leave the neighbourhood".

And neither should you! Think about what you've done like our friend Kyle and start making things right again.