I got pretty unsettled tonight. My friend Ethan, who was really close to our friend Steve who died, called me up to talk. Pretty soon it obvious that Ethan was completely and totally loaded, and on the phone he admitted to me that he was on cocaine, Adderall, and Vodka. We just had this ten-minute conversation- well if you could call it that- and he just kept saying these snippets of things. Like about what Steve meant to him, how I'm one of the few people that got Steve, and telling me about how he can't get the image of the last time they hung out and did drugs together out of his mind. It was so incoherent. The conversation lasted for 10 minutes until he likely passed out or something.

After I stopped freaking out, I figured that Ethan, who has kind of been serving as the backbone for everybody else in this grieving process, must have hit a snap point and he needed to unload. I was pretty shocked- I really thought he'd been handling this so well, and I'd never heard Ethan this loaded and fucked up before, and I partied with him a lot in college. But grief is indeed a long and fucked up journey to make, and there are some big detours.

The backstory to this, from what I've gathered...Steve's girlfriend T is in rehab somewhere. Ethan has been talking to her quite a lot- maybe too much, and maybe he's been the backbone so much that he hasn't really dealt. I don't know, I'm just surmising. Maybe something just set him off- and this has been his way of coping.

It was so weird, though. I haven't really dealt with people being that messed up since college, and like I said, I never heard or saw him get that messed up in college. He was a recreational drug user, yeah, but I never thought he had a big problem like I admittedly thought with Steve. I mean, Ethan DID have his sober moments in college, which I can't really say about Steve.

Anyway, if I'm right, it makes me kinda glad that I've been talking it out continually and admitting whenever I feel bad, rather than letting it all bottle up. I'm proud to say that I haven't had any drinking sessions to try and numb this...not to bag on my friend Ian for doing it, but in my own personal view, it doesn't help. It really doesn't. I've tried to tackle this as head-on and clear-headed as I can, and I think it's largely worked.

I called up a buddy and asked him for advice on this, and he got me to calm down and figure that I'll call Ian up tomorrow and find out how he's doing. I really do hope he's alright and it was just a bad night.