New Year's Resolution

Today I finally turned 21. And I think it's the perfect time for me to start my weed rebellion. When I was younger there was an ethos behind smoking weed. Perhaps it was just the fact that we weren't supposed to. Perhaps it was that older kids liked it. Much more likely is that the effect is completely unexpected. Indeed I spent years trying to figure out exactly what it did. But that's just it, I think I do know what it does, and I do expect it. I believe that most people think it "feels good" in the simplest sense. Of course I don't enjoy it in the way most people do. I was always in it for the intellectual experience. One more change in perspective.

But that's all over, and it has been replaced by extreme paranoia. Now, I'm not so scared of the 5-0 nor my parents (I've figured out ways to escape those (mainly being in Montreal)), it lies embedded a little deeper. And thanks to the brain-mapping power of weed I was able to express it eloquently: paranoia = overmonitoring.

So what is monitoring? We've decided that human beings are the only creatures who are truly free. That is, we have free will. And this is because we are able to monitor our own thoughts, and change them when they don't seem to work. And the part that truly makes us free, unlike animals, is that, recursively, we can monitor any monitor, ad infinitum. One can always take a step back from whatever one's thinking.

But I don't want to monitor all the time. I mean, having to think so much is a curse. The only escape is when thinking is productive. Monitoring is fundamental to thinking, but elements that are not reflective are of utmost importance.

Imagine trying to write a haiku in the style of Jack Kerouac. An improv, a joke, a sample of writing. As he directed: "Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog." Write one word and then write another before you think. The true interior monologue. Then you mess it all up by thinking, "Boulders and pastries -- wow that's a great start... oh shit I'm thinking oh shit what would be good now, something that has to do with boulders or pastries or sounds like pastries how about pastoral junkies and..." ...and you lost it. (Note that each "oh shit" is one step backward, one kernal of popping corn). This is precisely what weed does: I reflect more. I become more of a fox than a hedgehog. But to the point of being bad. To the point of being useless.

Then, couple that with my new-found adult life. The one where I'm paranoid ever sober moment I have anyway of trying to find a good job and a good school and a girlfriend and how I always say things that are borderline dirtbag to every girl I know. That's what overmonitoring does: it stymies productive thinking on how to solve these problems while leaving me at the one point where I actually feel the anxiety of the job search, the apprehension of university, and the unmitigated shame of being a dirtbag. With no hope of taking a step forward.

That's paranoia; that's overmonitoring. That's why I'm quitting smoking phattie blunts.