Someone once asked me, a few years ago, to describe the Gargoyle’s situation. I thought for a minute, and said, “Tenuous.”

At the time, it was the perfect descriptor. A mere four years ago, the Gargoyle was under pressure from the board to turn things around – and there were rumblings of an “or else!” that would be soon to follow if we didn’t. Which didn’t help since we had no idea what the hell we were doing. We’d usually decide to print a magazine about two weeks before we sent it to the printers. On one occasion we wrote, edited, and laid out the entire 32-page issue in one marathon weekend. Actually, we might have done that more than once. I don’t remember.

Returning to things we didn’t know how to do: distribution. Whenever we got around to it, sometime between the last issue and the next issue, we’d go around with about 1,000 magazines and shove them anywhere we could fit them. I got thrown out of at least three dorms in the space of 4 hours. We jammed them inside coke machines. I almost spent the night, coatless, in a snow drift when we were locked in a court yard, while pushing mags on North Campus.

Somehow, I got through it all. Though it was only two semesters, it seemed like an age had passed. When it was all over there wasn’t a party, we just parted. There weren’t many of us then, maybe five or six people that brought the whole magazine together. Some of them I’ve never seen since.

To reiterate the point: we had no idea what we were doing.

Since then, The Gargoyle has come a very long way. For the past two years we have gotten our issues into the printer on schedule (having a schedule at all was a small miracle), continued to expand our staff (we’re a burgeoning twenty), maintained a consistent campus presence (check out our new racks around campus – they’re hard to miss), we’ve got a website and we’ve even hired people. Most importantly, the Board of Student Publications and the Gargoyle are now closer than ever, having formed a positive relationship based not on destruction, but on love.

Obviously, a lot has changed. The people that are coming in now are a very talented bunch, and it’s all up from here—a new building, a new staff, a new way of doing things. It wasn’t too long ago that a very close friend of mine confided in me that she was scared of where the Gargoyle was headed. She was worried that we would loose the crazy, zany edge that had come to define our modes publication.

But I think she’s wrong. While I may have had some interesting times when I first joined, it’s not as if I was in police riots, occupying buildings, or getting kicked off campus. Compared to that, all my crazy stories sound like young-adult novels: lame, with the semblance of adventure. (I long ago accepted that the alums are much cooler than me.) Maybe that’s how it works in movies: the guy gets rich, marries a trophy wife and forgets his friends. That’s just not Gargoyle.

The Gargoyle has this really weird habit of continuing on even when it seems like it should be put out of its misery. The magazine, in all honesty, has an identity all its own. Sometimes, it seems like it has a mind all its own, too. It’ll keep changing, and it’ll stay the same for sure. Now that I am about to join the ranks of our illustrious alumni, I look forward to being able to watch it keep goin’ and growin’, safely from the sidelines.

Max Eddy