My mom listens to country music. Somehow, that’s related to my thoughts on suicide and life itself. As absurd as that sounds — and I’ll admit, the connection is somewhat tenuous — it makes perfect sense to me. It all boils down to the fact that people aren’t computers, and the relationships and connotations formed in their minds during the course of their lives is too complicated for anyone to really understand, least of all themselves. But as long as it makes sense to them, it essentially is, in a pragmatic sense. Wait, let me start this story from the beginning:

I don’t really like country music very much; I wouldn’t say I hate it, certainly, but it’s not a genre I actively listen to. Still, for the first 10 or so years of my life it was, with few exceptions, the only music I listened to. When you’re a kid, you don’t tend to develop your own distinct tastes very much, and since my mom listened to it all the damn time, country music was the only music I knew until I entered the preteen years and developed my own musical tastes. As a result, there are a great number of emotional country songs that aren’t necessarily good, but stick around in the back of my mind just because I was exposed to them so much. One of these songs, which I sadly can’t remember the title of, is about a man who gets the chance to go back in time and change one event in his life, but decides that he won’t do it. He says that even though he did things he regrets, those mistakes are what made him who he is, and he has grown to accept them as an important part of himself.

Growing up, I always thought I agreed with that song. Nowadays, I’m not so sure.

There are so many what ifs, so many if only I’d justs, and especially so many should I have saids — without earnestly analyzing every situation, it feels dishonest to make a blanket statement about them all, as convenient as that would be. And while it’s definitely true that I wouldn’t be the same person if some of these events had turned out differently, the real question is, do I actually want to be the person that I am?

Or am I just stuck in a sunk cost fallacy, in which I’ve invested too much to turn back?

An event in question that comes to mind every time I think about that song is January 1st, 2010. I can remember the night of that day with crystal clarity. It was the first time I actively decided to throw away social inhibition. It was the first time I ever thought going to Pizza Pizza at 3AM was a good idea. It was the first time I ever smoked weed.

I’m from Cornwall, a small place sandwiched between Ottawa and Montreal. If you know anything about weed, you know that places like Cornwall are the hotspots of pothead activity. (Incidentally, I saw a fairly good indie flick about that called Daydream Nation just last October. Look it up.) I was never a stranger to weed; I’d had a massive stoner for a friend in seventh grade, and I even held his bong for him a couple of times. I knew what it was, I knew what it did, and I knew where to get it. But it wasn’t until several years later — January 1st, 2010 — that I made the decision to try it myself.

If I could go back to that night and make different choices, would I?

I thought I wanted to have “fun”. Huge parts of me rejected the notion that I wanted to “see the world in a new way” — one person even told me that I would do just that, and I hated him. Still do. Other, even huger parts of me rejected the idea that I was doing it out of peer pressure. I had, after all, felt no desire to partake for the past several years, felt no particular pressure from anyone, and had thought about it for weeks before doing it. It wasn’t a split-second decision made in the heat of the moment — except, in retrospect, that every day of your teenage years feels like the heat of the moment, and it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking a split-second decision was made in good accord. Maybe that was the problem.

If I had to give advice to kids, I’d tell them not to smoke pot. But that’s only because I know that half of them would disobey me anyway. The fact of the matter is, a drug is a drug is a drug, and it isn’t really good or bad, it’s what you make of it. Some drugs are just harder to make positive than others. I have conflicting opinions on pot, which are pretty apparent if you read my other articles on the subject. I do firmly believe that the substance should be legal, but when it comes to its actual use… I have no idea what to honestly say about it other than the hard truth of my own experiences.

Marijuana can be fun, it can occasionally be useful, but it can also, above all, be a profound waste of time. As a social lubricant used in the same manner as alcohol, it’s completely fine (in moderation), and the laws about its cultivation and sale are absurd. The one thing it has over alcohol is its ability to inspire introspection, which can be useful — however, it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of “introspection” can more accurately be called “pointless navel-gazing”. Some time spent in one’s own thoughts is healthy, but most people don’t really have thoughts worth mulling over for any significant length of time. Marijuana has a way of tricking you into thinking that you’re deeper than you are; that’s how people become hipsters.

I’ll beat you to the joke now: I’m sober while writing this. I’ve been sober for a long time.

Back to the point, though — my decision of whether or not I should try smoking pot is one of the decisions I think about the most because it’s one of the decisions I’ve made that I can directly link to many, many major events in my life. In many ways, probably even most ways, it was positive for me — but sometimes I still wish I’d never done it. The decision I made to try it for the first time was wholly fueled by a desire to fit in, even if it didn’t seem like it at the time. It wasn’t made through an immediate thought process that blatantly said “I want to be like these people”, but it was fueled by the increasing loneliness I felt being the only person not involved in the parties, the “friends”, and all the fun I was missing out on.

As long as we’re being honest, it was a lot of fun. But not at first. It’s not until I grew up and got away from the so-called “fun” that I was able to appreciate pot for what it is: a drug. Not a lifestyle choice. The people who think otherwise are no longer my “friends”.

Usually I conclude that my decision was good, even if the reasons for it were not. I spent time rubbing shoulders with the wrong people, but they were more shitty than evil, and I’ve gained valuable experience from it. The people I’ve met have been turned into characters in my stories — one of them inspired Different, and many more of them have inspired various characters in stories I’ve yet to publish. I can tie some of my greatest accomplishments to marijuana, but how do I know if it was actually a good decision to try it in the first place? Has the good actually been worth the bad? Or would everything have been even better if I’d just never tried it in the first place?

I’ll never know. You’ll never know. It’s pointless to think about. But it’s the kind of thing you think about when you think about suicide.

One of the things I learned from smoking pot, when I’d smoked too much of it, is that life is literally one experience after another, like sequential steps in a computer program. Never, prior to pot, had I thought about how I could feel the inside of my shoes against my feet while walking, or what the exact texture of either side of a pizza slice felt like on either side of my mouth, or other inane stoner thoughts. They sound stupid (and let’s admit that they are, profoundly stupid), but that’s the kind of thing that got me to thinking: if life can be boiled down to a series of precise events and experiences, can we actually be thought of as giant, super-advanced computers?

The literal answer is… probably. I’m sure my smarmy ass of a high school science teacher would have said so. But the pragmatic answer is obviously no. Humans don’t store information in a sequential, defined manner the same way that computers do. We see life as a big cluster of emotions, thoughts, impulses, and sometimes the rare actual memory of an event. We live by connotations, not denotations; with every event being coloured by another one until we lose track of why, how, or when we got to be where we are.

Suicide is confusing because life is confusing.

Do I wish that I’d never tried pot? Maybe. When I realize that I’ve wasted an entire day getting high instead of studying, yes. When I realize that I might actually be even worse off without experiencing pot for myself, maybe not. I know people who never tried pot or alcohol until they went to university, and now they’re totally hooked and ruining what might be some of the most important years of their lives. If I didn’t try pot then, would I have tried it at an even worse time? My baby of a screenplay, the script for a movie that I have rewritten nearly five and a half times now, would never exist if I had never tried pot. But might I have written something better instead?

It’s easy to say that there’s no point worrying about the past. Except history repeats itself, and you can’t understand your future without understanding your past. Aphorisms seem to contradict themselves a lot, don’t they?

I’ve thought about suicide. Everyone has. Everyone thinks about it because life is hard. Life is really, really hard. Mainly because it’s confusing. What am I supposed to be doing with myself? How am I supposed to know?

How do I find the strength to do the right thing instead of the easy thing?

Suicide is logical. Life is far more pain than pleasure. My friends betray me. None of my dating ever goes anywhere satisfactory. I’m only passionate about career paths with no job security, and I’m not particularly confident that I’m good at them. Become a successful screenwriter? I’d love to see you do it.

I constantly find myself either being rejected, or having to grit my teeth and hate myself while rejecting someone else. I find myself writing long diatribes on the internet about my personal feelings, even though I know I look like a moron in doing so. I find myself doing all sorts of stupid, stupid things; why not suicide?

I’m not afraid of death. I never have been. It’s not denial or anything — for as long as I can remember, I’ve figured that, if I were to die, I’d be too dead to be sorry about it. But I don’t want to die. Maybe it would prove someone right. Maybe it would hurt someone I love. Maybe I just don’t know where to start and don’t want to ask.

Is the main reason I don’t commit suicide actually pride?

Suicide is confusing because life is confusing. And life is confusing because nobody know what it is, why it exists, or how to do it right. Everything just happens. I often let pragmatism dictate my actions; but if pragmatism dictated my thoughts, would I have killed myself long ago? Life is, after all, completely pointless.

Maybe that’s the point.

Or maybe I should go back in time and stop myself from ever hearing that damn country song in the first place.

It’s through Amie Street that I discovered a little alternative/acoustic band called Minor Kingdom. At first I only downloaded one track, Choir of the Lilies. I was hooked, so I downloaded another. Before I knew it, I’d actually paid money to Amie Street for the first time in exchange for $10 of credit, which I promptly used to buy their entire album and recommend as many tracks as I could. If you’re a fan of the genre, I strongly recommend checking out Minor Kingdom on Amie Street, and then becoming a fan on Facebook.

Hopefully I’ve brightened up your day by bringing these two things to your attention. See you soon!

Scrobbling seems to have an interesting effect on most people (or at least some people). People on Last.fm will often leave music playing all day, while not listening to it, just to get higher play counts on their profile. Having high play counts has no practical purpose, of course, but people do this anyway. How do I know? I could point out that my best friend Ryan does it, and I would be right, but the honest part of me points out that I do it, too. Sometimes. I try to refrain, but sometimes I slip and leave music playing for hours just for the sake of it. It’s an egotistical competition, yes, but it’s kind of fun. Besides, there’s no real harm in it, right? The numbers really are meaningless, after all, and the competitiveness that so many people create actually has its positive effects: namely, the fact that it makes people listen to more music. I listen to music sometimes just because I want more plays on my profile, but I also enjoy music that I would normally forget about. That’s kind of admirable, I guess, in a dumb sort of way.

One serious negative quality about scrobbling, however, is the fact it is is completely dependent on the ID3 tags. These tags are filled in by the users, which inevitably leads to mistaggings that clutter up the entire website. For the more OCD amongst us, this can be infuriating, and take the joy out of music. I asked my friend Matt Rebeiro for an exploitable quotation related to this phenomenon, and this is what I got:

“I usually avoid listening to things that are tagged wrongly [and I] listen to video game soundtracks less because I’m always unsure how to tag those.”
–Matt Rebeiro, obsessive nerd

It’s not the catchiest quote in the world, but it gets my point across. I’ve ignored albums before because I didn’t feel like filling out the tags. Granted, this is a problem that doesn’t apply to most people (because most people listen to music that’s actually in music databases, so they don’t have to tag everything manually). It applies to me, though, and it’s a very annoying side effect of the Last.fm experience.

I’ve also used my Last.fm profile as a reason to stop myself from listening to music even when I really wanted to. If you look at my Last.fm profile, you’ll see that my top artist by a huge margin is Lemon Demon, which is probably one of my favourite bands. Yet the stats on Last.fm are somewhat misleading; Lemon Demon was basically the only band I listened to back when I first joined, and then my music taste evolved on a generic MP3 player that wasn’t able to scrobble. I only got an iPod (with scrobbling capability) recently, so you can only see the beginnings of other top artists now. Since getting an iPod, I’ve barely listened to a single Lemon Demon song because I want to give the other artists a chance to catch up.

It’s very annoying, because I’m genuinely embarrassed at the huge gap between my top artist and all the others — it makes me look silly, like I only listen to one band ever. Still, I want to listen to Lemon Demon every once in a while. The competitive quality I’ve assigned to Last.fm is having a negative effect on my ability to enjoy one of my favourite bands, which is slightly annoying. It’s all my fault, really, since there really shouldn’t be a competition here at all, but it’s an inevitable side effect of the website. I have an exchange from Twitter to prove it:

mattgcn: Manually scrobbling two weeks of listening? Don’t mind if I do!
RyanLalonde: What do you mean by manually scrobbling?
mattgcn: http://lastfmstats.livefrombmore.com/universalscrobbler/
RyanLalonde: Oh wow, you can really cheat from this. I won’t do it tho.
mattgcn: Yeah, I only use it honestly but looking at the numbers it seems some people abuse it

That was an exchange between two people I follow, Matt Rebeiro (from above) and Ryan Lalonde. It demonstrates three ways that scrobbling’s competitiveness manifests:

1. Matt wants to manually scrobble two weeks of music, something which he later described as “tedious“.
2. Scrobbling music that you didn’t listen to is considered cheating. You can’t cheat if there’s no competition.
3. Some people do abuse the manual scrobbling system to “cheat”, combining points 1 and 2.

This is all just my long-winded way of saying: Last.fm can easily turn into a competition. It’s actually pretty predictable if you think about it. Isn’t a large portion of the music industry funded by people’s egos? Many groups are defined completely by musical tastes, and some musical tastes are completely defined by groups — when was the last time you saw a nuclear physicist listening to gangsta rap? I didn’t even like the Beatles the first time I heard them, but I forced myself to give them a chance because a lot of people I respect like them, and a lot of bands I already liked listed them as an influence. I like the Beatles now, but that only proves the point. Last.fm’s “compatibility meter” only furthers attitudes like this.

Last.fm is a lot of fun, but it might have some unexpected consequences. I do recommend that you join the site if you haven’t already, but I won’t hold it against you if you choose not to. Not everyone likes to be part of the high-horse circlejerk that Last.fm can easily become.