Music Is The Best Drug

Ok, hear me out here. I'm not saying that music is actually a drug, just that it has some qualities similar to drugs. For instance, music can get you into a mood, all kinds both positive and negative. I clearly remember playing dodgeball every day as a kid, at the old Williamstown Youth Center, where I used to go every day after school. One day some kid brought a CD player and played some pop music while we played dodgeball. I didn't even like the song! But I still found myself sort of bouncing to the beat, and once I realized it, I stopped, and then promptly started again once I realized that: one, it helped with the game, and two, everyone else was doing the exact same thing. Except for those sorry souls who had gotten out earlier in the game. These were sulking in a corner, feeling sorry for themselves. The point of this little anecdote is to show that music can affect your behavior, and make you act unlike your normal self. In a lot of drugs this is a bad thing, but not always. I have mild ADHD, which doesn't affect me all that much, but makes it really hard for me to sit still and focus, and make the right decisions. I take a medicine that doesn't make me calm, it allows me more time to think about things, almost in slow motion. This doesn't stop me from making poor choices, but it does allow me to choose instead of rushing to unpleasant conclusions that can lead to unwelcome circumstances.

Music can also be a tool, it can help you keep pace when running, or it can help you tune someone out really easily. But it can also be very inspirational, comicaly so. This leads us to our next anecdote. This actually happened very recently. My cousin and I decided to go outside and walk around in the woods next to my house. I had gotten a portable speaker for christmas and I brought it outside and started playing Two Steps From Hell music as a joke, saying that in order to climb the ridge, which was slick with snow, we would need some inspirational epic music. I have done a bit about Two Steps From Hell in this blog, but heres a few things you may or may not know about them. They write trailer music, so movies and video games mostly. But their songs are pretty well known, but they aren't. But anyway me and my cousin started dancing and generally making fools of ourselves and it was glorious, although i'm really glad that no one else was there to see or it would have been extremely embarrassing.

All I'm really saying in this post is that music is good for you, any side effects are most likely not a problem. Keep the volume down though, I'm not counting hearing loss as a side effect in this context. Listening to music should be natural, if you feel like singing along in a terrible, off key voice, please do so. If you want to dance, pretend nobody's watching, but even so, in a crowded lace neither of these are very good ideas, as the people around you might complain. Don't force your music on anybody, but enjoy it all the same. Happy 2016 everybody!