The Internet has become the fuel for many entertainers to rocket to fame.

No one exemplifies this more than Jon Lajoie, the Montreal-born comedian-musician who went from buying a low-quality camera to making comedy videos in his basement to a tour of L.A. looking for representation and listening to offers, to finally landing a role on a new series on cable channel FX.

“If I think about it that kind of stuff, I’ll go, ‘Oh, what the hell’ and start getting nervous,” says Lajoie, taking a break from his first North American tour, calling between dates in Iowa and Houston. “I just kind of go, ‘This is the situation now, deal with it, make sure you’re good, make sure you do everything right.’ Then keep moving on. It’s absolutely insane if I think where I was two years ago to where I am today.”

Like many people that haphazardly wandered into the cannabis lifestyle, I picked up a few bad habits along the way. And while some of them--an ability to relax into a near comatose state often confused as laziness and simply enjoy things and an unhealthy fixation on eating potato chips--have been easy to re-contextualize and mitigate, the nastiest of them, smoking, has been an unavoidable and predominantly negative consequence of the fateful decision.

Blame it on the refocusing effect of that post-toke smoke, the easy bar-adjacent socializing, the stimulation of dopaminergic reward pathways in my brain or blame it on a simple lack of willpower, through the year or so I have been smoking I have been waxing and waning through alternate states of enjoyment, despair and hatred, all the while unwilling or unable to give it up and all the while the pain in my lungs getting worse.