Last week another fraternity went dry. I think that every time this happens, another angel gets its wings.

Most people drink enough in high school that they should have it out of their system before they get to college, don’t you think?

It isn’t like everyone is dry until they hit 21. If you really want to drink badly enough, you can.

Even during prohibition, people got faced when they really wanted to, and they didn’t have to go to extreme measures either. Medical alcohol was allowed … mother’s little helper, nerve tonics.

Just get a doctor’s note and you were good to go.

I would like to see more people get into the spirit of dryness around here.

I’m not some tea-drinkin’, Carrie Nation type or anything. I drink once in a while, and I used to do some binging in my heydays.

But it is pretty easy to forget about this campus culture which seems to idolize alcohol.

I can’t tell you how many people I have seen walking around loaded who had absolutely no idea what jackasses they were making of themselves.

Try it sometime. Walk around Campustown sober some weekend night after ten and see how much fun everything looks like when you aren’t completely pissed up.

It is just about enough to make you give the stuff up for Lent.

Either that or really start drinking heavily to dull the pain of the oncoming existential crisis.

It isn’t like there is a shortage of the stuff. There really isn’t. If the supply were running out, believe me, I would be out there with the other Christian Slater wannabes pounding down the beer so fast my kidneys would shut down.

It’s like half the campus is trying to capture a pure moment of clarity and believe me you will.

Time isn’t running out. Or is it. Maybe all of this hyper-celebratory behavior is tied up with the millennium somehow, the end of everything gives you a certain freedom from responsibility.

If there is no tomorrow, then we are free to act without regard to the consequence. Why not cut loose?

Believe me, there is plenty of time to develop a nice dependency on alcohol later in life. AFTER you join the work force.

That is what lunch hours are made for. Vodka gives off no odor and can be easily hidden in a coffee cup.

Nothing makes the work day go by like drugs and alcohol. When I was taking calls for the psychic hotline, nothing made the hours fly by like booze … sweet booze.

Many of my co-workers found that a fat, chronic blunt made all those prank calls MUCH funnier.

As a side note, our Canadian brothers are much funnier than we are. American prank calls are absolutely the worst fake Beavis and Butthead, no imagination, low I.Q. crap you ever heard. We were grateful to get prank calls to break up the monotony.

The average American would call, pretend to be interested in talking to a psychic, then swear really loud at the end of the call as if this were the height of comedy.

I felt so ashamed of my countrymen, it was all I could do to keep from weeping in my cubicle.

The Canadians were geniuses by comparison. They would riff on you with some witty rejoinders and if you got a good one in they would show their respect.

It must be that cold weather makes people smarter.

Ten hours or more every day saying the same thing over and over again, you can really appreciate the need to get comfortably numb.

But how does this apply to Iowa State? It doesn’t. I can see getting ripped once in a while but every other day?

If you aren’t an alcoholic, I think you can probably find a better way to spend your time.

It’s just easier to tear something down than to build it up. This applies to ourselves as well.

With all the resources we have at our command, we should be living in some magical Star Trek universe where everyone speaks a several languages, plays an instrument and is an expert in the martial arts.

All most of us can ever find to brag about is how much we can drink and how wasted we are.

“Oh, man, I was so messed up last night! Did I do anything stupid?” Yeah, genius, you drank ’til you blacked out.

So as far as the dry frats go, I figure, why not? They gave drinking their best shot for years and they must know by now that there is nowhere left to go with this but down.

In spite of the whole “greek” angle of these houses, drinking is not an Olympic event. You can’t really break any records of merit or anything.

The fraternity system as a whole will eventually be drier than a saltine and as a result, I think we’re going to see a lot of great things from these guys.

When men get together for purposes besides drinking, they can actually accomplish something.

Then again, there’s always the bars.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.