Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
LA’s #1 avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.
The home of Ask a Sadist, Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers, and the First Church of the Satanic Buddha. Levity saves lives.
Regularly scheduled episodes premiere on the first Wednesday of the month on KCHUNG Los Angeles.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
The Best of All Possible Eyes Without a Face
I spent so much time believing all the lies. To keep the dream alive. Now, it makes me sad. It makes me mad at the truth, for loving what was you.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is LA's number-one avant-garde personal development program... and so much more. On tonight's episode:
- Gems, jewels, and a true love story from Emerson Dameron, your writer, producer, host, and witty and wounded romantic hero
- Four all-new Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers...
- ...including the return of Sophie Antisocial
- Evergreen reminders that love reserves the right to go wrong
- And more!
Music by Mr. Pancakes and Emerson Dameron. New episodes premiere on KCHUNG Los Angeles, which needs and merits your support. Special thanks to JOKERJOKERtv.
The sexy, psychedelic-cheerleading cover of Candide also exists in two alternate mixes:
I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.
Got something to say to me? Slide into the DMs.
It's OUT! Sophistication Nation: Brief Interviews with Women I Pretend to Understand: https://emersondameron.hearnow.com/sophistication-nation
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, la's number one avant-garde personal development program. Here at first on the first Wednesday of the month on K-Chung, los Angeles 1630 AM, kchungradioorg. Thereafter it becomes the only good podcast available at medicated-minutescom or wherever you cop your casts, wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. All over the world it's available, broadcasting from Los Angeles, california, in the United States of America, which is in North America, which is in the North and Western Hemisphere of best of all possible worlds. It must be, there's no alternative. This is it. This is all you get. You've had a rough ride. You made it, you thrived.
Speaker 1:The worst thing in your life happened. You got a tarot reading that said things were going to get better and you believed it because you pulled the tower Prior to the worst thing in your life happening. The tower is not good in the way that the fool and death are good. You made it through that and then you landed smack into another horrific misery, the meatloaf of misery. You got baked into it and the misery is baked in. Life is suffering in this best of all possible worlds. But look at it this way If you hadn't had that cascade of crap that led to other things that caused misery for other people in your life by proxy, as you started treating them less well than you should have. You were not who you wanted to be in the world, so you learned how to be that, and now you're here consuming this content.
Speaker 1:Obviously, it was worth it. We are ever sealed in skin, consigned to sorrow, also receiving of some solace in our solitude. It was, without a doubt, worth it. I am Emerson Dameron, your witty and wounded romantic hero. I love you personally. Levity saves lives. I did it. I broke through, not to the other side, but into the liminal space, into the blue soup. The in-between, where I always wanted to be, never liked. Consensus, reality, or what's called sanity, felt like a straitjacket that I always wanted to be free from, and that's why I poured my time and energy and vitality into this conceptual art. It's more challenging for me than it is for you, and you don't hear me complaining.
Speaker 1:I never, dumped consensus reality and now I'm free of it. The people in the back rooms love my work. All day I'm floating around on floaties, drinking wormwood, having elevated conversations about art, philosophy and sex, and I'm having crazy screaming, mutually degrading sex More than I ever thought possible. It's wild when a 45-year-old man with severe chronic depression can cum three times in one day. That's thanks to the Muse. Nola Synesthesia Enhanced Sex Machine in my Dreams and that's the only place I can find her. She hangs out in the liminal spaces. I can only get there by dreaming and I really have to focus.
Speaker 1:It's this very specific combination of sex transmutation, mindful masturbation and cubist kegels. Nola is getting scarce. She's doing this push-pull routine. She knows exactly what she's doing. Little devil girl brat that saved my life. It's time for extreme measures. It's time for a vision quest. I'm gonna break my head open nine ways to Sunday and then back around to Thursday, which is the gentleman's Friday. I'm not gonna be gentle about it.
Speaker 1:My masturbation routine is, as I mentioned, very focused and disciplined. I believe the path to one important kind of enlightenment is doing the opposite of what you would normally do. You should have one practice that's not what you do or could do for a living. Engineers should write poetry every morning. Poets should fix appliances In order to have real fractal, kaleidoscopic, pornographic visions.
Speaker 1:I needed to get out of the house in order to become who I am, in a more fulsome, engorged sense of the concept, which is really ineffable, doesn't translate well from German or French. I need to do the opposite of what I normally do. I need to have all the wild, decadent, hedonistic, nihilistic sex that I possibly can, nihilistic sex that I possibly can. I declare myself the psychedelic cubist Bukowski. Oh yeah, hell yeah. It gets really dark really fast. No matter where I put the magic stick, it can't get my mind off of Noah the muse, my true love. More than DMT, more than art, more than bananas. I used to think the important thing in life was breaking through barriers and transcending reality and shutting down the default mode network, crossing boundaries, being rewarded for it with critical acclaim, residences in New York, la and Memphis, as well as everywhere all at once. I'm not bi-coastal, I'm multi-dimensional. That's where the real people are. Then I realized relationships the real people are what really matter. Wrong again, it turns out. Chasing the fractal, cubist muse is what I was born to do. It's the only thing I can do. It's all I'm good for. It's my mission, it's my passion.
Speaker 1:She's the one. I managed to find her in a speakeasy in the back of one of my dreams, way out on the outskirts of liminality. It was hard to get into and by the time I got into it I was rock hard. Noah tells me she's lonely. Her voice is sweet and self-consciously naive. She's playing up her bashfulness, which she can totally get away with. She's a classic beauty with a disarming giggle and genuine-sounding words of affirmation. She'll touch your arm when she's telling you an interesting story and she's concealing her trickster side and chit-chat for a long time.
Speaker 1:Eventually the topic of sex comes up, as it does between adults. Sex is exciting. It's an exuberant celebration of human creativity. It's where people hide things. It's the first and last word in rip-roaring physical comedy. It's fun, funny, even Surreal, madcap Slapstick. I take it seriously. But you know, sex is fun. It's something grown-ups do.
Speaker 1:To be casual is not to be callous. I don't kiss and tell she says I get it, I want to run the show. I surrender to a and tell she says I get it, I want to run the show. I'd surrender to her dark, sensual, all-consuming embrace. This was not a safe or obscene choice, although I did find myself good giving in game. Everything really came apart at that point. Whole other directions previously known in wayfinding started to detach, not just from reality but from womanality, from not just my self-concept but the entire human experience. I couldn't even observe it as a flow of everything and nothing at once. It was oddly erotic but in a way I realized was going to kill me. Don't want to die exactly the way I always thought I would.
Speaker 1:After a breakup done in by Eros, I went on another fractal vision quest this time, where I searched for the power to see from every perspective at once, a compound eye vision. The muse, nola, my love, dumped me All except for her eyes. Her eyes stayed around. We were still going out. I was coming out with her eyes. It was really disturbing. This was her eyes. Her eyes stayed around. We were still going out. I was coming out with her eyes. It was really disturbing. This was her fantasy. This is what she always wanted to do. She thought it was the hottest in the world. I wanted to trade it for something on my yes list that was on her maybe list. Maybe we could do sacredly geometrical Easton. That wasn't on her maybe list. And all the stuff on my yes list required more than eyes.
Speaker 1:Just as I'm about to completely destroy myself or something is going to destroy me, I'm not going to say it's her. I still love her in a way, just though she really hurt me. I don't badmouth people who sleep with me. I don't want them to regret doing that. I want them to feel good about it. I find it freedom. I find the ability to see from every perspective at once and to love it. To love the chaos in my mind's insistence in trying to find patterns and make some illusion of order out of all of this. I deeply, genuinely, passionately love it. I almost love it to death, and then I screw it right back to life again. It's wild. You really need to try this. My art has gained a whole new depth and breadth and whole new dimensions of richness as a result of these experiences. I started working in the medium of cubist POV porn. You see the sex acts from every perspective at once.
Speaker 1:You called me it's been a minute, we haven't talked in a while and the thing you wanted to talk about was the fact that you are alone. Let me tell you a story. When I was a young man, I had a friend. Well, he called me over summer break. Hey, do you have Brandon's number? No, I don't. And he said well, do you have Jake's number? I said no, no, I don't. Do you have Paul's number? No, oh, I guess I'll talk to you later then. So you are that guy I knew at that point.
Speaker 1:I can be oblivious to other people's experience, but not like that. It's wild that you would just say that so heroically passive-aggressive. You want to talk about loneliness. Everything I know changed when I found out about you. Everything I thought was true was contingent on something that was a lie, because I trusted you. You gave me every reason to trust you. Oh, you told me who you were, but I thought it was safe to assume you were kidding. God damn it.
Speaker 1:She's calling again. Is she gonna tell me she's alone, nobody else to talk to, or did I spoil her for everybody else? These are friends. I'm not going to answer that. I'm going to let it go to voicemail. She's not going to leave one. If she did, it would be strange. Call me back. I have a question to ask you, or we need to talk. It's going to be that she wants to talk because she's lonely. Yet my heart goes out. She's a wire monkey. They did that experiment where they put some baby monkeys in confinement with a thing that was not a monkey, it was a monkey-like thing made out of wire. They didn't have their moms, they were separated this family separation before it was cool, and the monkeys, the baby monkeys, got attached to the wire mommies, because that's what living organisms do. That's what I did for her.
Speaker 1:Cypher, pseudo-human, miserable person, person I don't even know. Yes, the person, my person, my old flame, my one true flame, my twin flame, should I call back, making me nervous? Did I already put it off too long? Are you mad? What the hell? Why am I doing this? What else would I be doing? Going out Opening up to someone available? Hell, no, everybody in my city is terrible. I'm worst of all. I know exactly what they're hiding. It's always fun and games until we get to know each other. She's calling me. There must be something here she wants or loves or needs. Why do you insist on doing things this way? Why do you insist on pulling along with it? Because I'm hooked, I'm addicted, I can't help myself. It's a disease. You're a disease. You're an infection. You're a parasite. You're gangrene In a gang, gang of one, that's all I need. You're trying to start a cult of two. Just mad that I'm not having it.
Speaker 1:I'm mad at you, do you not understand it? It's not psychological projection, it's not reverse psychology. You've been burying me. You're confusing and awful and so so very sexy, alluring, attractive. Well, you know what they say about down south girls Down south of where you never tell me anything. Never tell you anything, that's true. Never give a straight answer unless that answer is no. I've had more than enough of this. I'm exhausted, I'm anxious, I'm depressed, I'm angry. I'm angry too. I have a different register from yours.
Speaker 2:You don't have a register.
Speaker 1:Your eye is without a face. Oh yeah, why don't you say your prayers Dipping out to Vegas? You want to come with? Fine? Yes, of course I feel like somebody's watching me. I always feel that way. It's not even interesting anymore. What happened to us? What happened to me? You happened to me. Of course I feel like somebody's staring me down. I'm gonna blink first. I got the whole face. You just got the eyes. Eyelids are part of the face. They're not even part of the eyes. You're just a pair of eyes, hovering, staring. What's it like to not blink? You just itch yourself to death. Can you hurry up and do that? Are you suffering? Are you in pain? Why am I not enjoying that?
Speaker 1:It never feels as good as I want it to, and people get exactly what they deserve yes you should be damned to observe the world and just watch and take it in and see how other people live and see that we're human and maybe undiscreased yourself, to fill up some human grace. Say your prayers until the grace turtle shows up and bestows some grace on you because he's taking his damn sweet time. How sweet it is, I would imagine quite, god. The eyes are so creepy. God, stop watching me, just turn around. Can you do that? You don't have the muscles, do you? Oh, I'm all out of hope.
Speaker 1:One more bad dream could bring a fall and I'm far from home. Don't call me on the phone to tell me you're alone. It's easy to deceive, easy to tease. It's hard to get release. Eyes without a face. Eyes without a face. Eyes without a face. Your eyes without a face.
Speaker 1:I spent so much time believing all the lies to keep the dream alive. Makes me sad, makes me mad at truth. For loving what was you? Eyes without a face. Eyes without a face. Eyes without a face Got no human grace. Your eyes without a face. When you hear the music, you make a dip into someone else's pocket. You make a slip, steal a car, go to Las Vegas Ooh, gigolo pool Hanging out by the state line, turning holy water into wine, drinking it down. Ooh, I'm on a bus on a psychedelic trip, reading murder books, trying to stay hip, thinking of you when you're out there. So say your prayers, say your prayers, say your prayers, say your prayers. Now I close my eyes. I wonder why I don't despise all I can do. Love, what was once alive and new, has gone from your eyes. You better realize. Eyes without a face, eyes without a face, eyes without a face, you got no human grace. Your eyes without a face, such a human waste.
Speaker 1:Your eyes without a face, and now it's getting worse. Eyes without a face, eyes without a face. Eyes without a face you got no human grace.
Speaker 1:Your eyes without a face, such a human waste Eyes without a face. People can change. Most people are capable of breaking patterns, reinventing themselves, transforming their lives for the better. When it happens it's worth talking about and celebrating, because it almost never does. The orgies were getting boring. Every third Friday of the month, as part of the in-and-out routine, I would go to the home of one of my college friends and some other college friends would show up. Sometimes some people would fly in from out of town or would happen to be there, and that would mix it up a little bit. Even hardcore sexual roulette is gonna lose its novelty after a while. Everything was randomized the acts, the partners. There was no way to know. It was all based on the novel the Dice man by Luke Reinhardt. As months turn into years, what was mind-blowing slowly becomes commonplace. And then one of my friends I'm not going to say who, somebody with connections to the psychedelic drug community, of a line on cutting-edge research chemicals, a denizen of music fests, I believe I've already given it away that person showed up with a new drug.
Speaker 1:The experiences that we have with drugs, of course, are heavily dependent on set and setting. The same drug could have remarkably different effects on different people or on the same person in different contexts. This one was something totally different, impossible to predict. It could be Viagra combined with MDMA, pcp, beta blocker Nothing much would happen. But it could also be a very strong placebo where you would go buck wild just because you had permission to and the fact that you took a pill. We had a good supply of these. So as we rotated partners, we rotated states of being and unlocked new parts of ourselves or were they parts of ourselves? If it's drug-induced, how much of it is you? The drug's not going to bring up anything that's not already there, but, depending on how you think of human nature, perhaps everything is already there. We are crystals of fractal stardust from beyond good and evil, and we went way beyond good, definitely into great way, way, way beyond evil. I don't want to describe.
Speaker 1:There were some juicy encounters. There were some injuries, people were shaken up in ways that they will not be able to unshape themselves and everyone got really vulnerable because we were seen as characters who would not normally choose to play. Part of the agreement is that you go with whatever the game prescribes, as delineated in the Dice man as modified for our sexual roulette. Third Friday orgies that left some people exposed, been seen in extremis by people that they'd known and trusted to one degree or another for about 20 years. But it wasn't so much that the players were judged, it was that, in their state of vulnerability, having played out these different roles, they found it harder to trust people. The vulnerability led to hostility. It made them feel weak and that made them paranoid, tense and defensive. They were concerned. They were exposed, seen differently from how they wanted to present themselves, but nevertheless the excitement outweighed any of the problems.
Speaker 1:The main consequence was fun adventure and a vigorous workout with the body, soul and spirit, as well as the sex organs and the rest of our bodies. Some of us got prosthetics just to make it more interesting. People were working on their bodies the way that gearheads work on their cars. And then I got an interesting roll of the dice I became a psychopath. The sex was absolutely buckwild. I did not know I was capable of that. I wasn't really experiencing pleasure in the way that I was accustomed to, but I was giving so much pleasure and pain, unable to distinguish the line of demarcation. It was absolutely thrilling. I was on the other side of the moon. After a few weeks it started to become clear to me that the psychopathy was not wearing off, that I made a face until it stuck, that the drug had a long-term effect it was not accounted for. The upside of taking it previously was that even if you get a really bad roll, it's over in a few hours by the time you get home. You'll barely remember it.
Speaker 1:But I was still on the psychopaths inflicting tortures on people. I was not taking responsibility for my actions because I saw no reason I would need to. My life started to get really, really good. I gained followers and rivals. A pimp Venice Beach named Jay the Mullet. He got up in my space. We had a couple of heated debates. He wanted to do a rap battle. My style of rapping is too avant-garde to really put it in that context.
Speaker 1:If I was going to perform on Venice Beach, I would be a doomsday preacher or a performing psychopath Freak show attractionraction. I was going to have to figure out some way to integrate this. I was having no problem monetizing. People were giving me money just to hear my advice how to not have feelings. You may have noticed this world is optimized for sociopaths. Narcissism is the new national pastime, but psychopaths. They're the old guard. They saw all this coming. We are looked to for insight.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, as I was ramping up the torture and the chaos, I was responsible for a series of fires. I didn't care about them. I was brought in for interrogation. I was ice cold, I just did not care. But on the way out I started to notice feelings, just the hint, like a phantom limb, phantom feelings, and I was worried, but then plowed through, as all feelings do, they went away. After a while I didn't feel anything anymore and then they came back a little stronger, particularly when I was in the shower or near large bodies of water.
Speaker 1:I live on Venice Beach. That was something I was sitting with and walking with and standing around with and power walking with, and the feelings were coming back. I couldn't stop them. They were going to ruin my career in its nascence unless I found a workaround. Unless I found a way to use this to take the most embarrassing thing that was present for me and turn it into a feature. So I became a psycho with a heart of gold. I was well-versed in the ways of the psychopath, having done that role and journaled extensively and had a lot of unforgettable sex, which definitely blowtorched it into my mental area the tenets of psychopathy.
Speaker 1:And the game is to be sold, not to be told. You can come to my event, my lecture series, my seminars. The next one will be in Playa del Rey. It's going to be incredible. The refreshments alone worth the price. I taught people to be considerate psychopaths, to use their psychopathy, which all of us have deep down. Again, everything is in everyone inherently, but to do it thoughtfully, compassionately, considerably, with an eye toward breaking through to the next level of evolution, through fake conventional herd morality, through the need to compete, dominate and into a next phase of cooperation. We called this the Breakthrough Society. Jay was my hype man, I was the leader. Unfortunately, every single time, just as we were about to break on through to the other side, an orgy would break out. Things always started with the best of intentions, to save humanity, to accelerate evolution, which we so badly need to do. There's no time to waste, but sex will out and we always ended up doing Naked Twister instead. So, humanity, you're on your own.
Speaker 2:Something I can't erase Eyes without a face. Everything in its place. We're gone without a trace. We're sprayed in the face with mace. Now I've got a face without eyes and I don't know how to realize Just what I'm getting in the skies. I've fallen too upside down Because gravity is done, it's dead. It may as well I've never been and I'm feeling sick in the head or thinking sick in the gut and I come up for air there's nobody there and see all night and see all day With my eyes without a face. There's love. I can't replace Eyes without a face. Seeing what I can't face, tracing what I can't trace With the gaze of my eyes, no surprise.
Speaker 1:I have a question for you.
Speaker 1:When did you realize you were in love with me? I used to be totally oblivious. First of all, I see that you turned it around on me and I'm not going to let you get away with that. It used to be very hard for me to know A woman was really serious about me and I had one or two not teeming hordes of them, but a few have said I was really interested in you and I did everything in my power to let you know that. And you, you just ignored me and I, my feelings were hurt, you know, I felt like it seemed like you were being really cold as I had no idea I wish I had.
Speaker 1:In many cases, people who are into me, I think, have many good qualities. Mostly good taste, not mostly good, that's of. I tend to think of things as part of the larger gestalt, or that's how I prefer to think of things when I get to plan ahead. There's no good taste without presence, a life, a person behind it and everything that goes with that, all the fractal complexity and that sweet, sweet ass of yours. I know now and that now, even to me, it's hard to miss and I appreciate that Because typically, the best way to get through to me is love bombing. If not and that might be the only way to get through to me I like love bombing. I don't chase, I attract, and sometimes, when I attract, I don't notice.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I'm working on getting better at that. That's something I'd like to improve on, because it's part of being perceptive to other people and other people's feelings and the fact that other people are having a different experience than you. Sex is a big part of that. Somebody gets us crushed out and hot in the crotch. We all have interesting ways of communicating that not developed under the best conditions, like we wanted to do this in middle school, high school. It's a crucible. Where it's that's the jungle man. No, it's the heart of darkness. Nobody comes out of there. Okay, I don't blame society. That doesn't do me any good because I can do. I can fix society. But I'm actually Q. I don't know if I told you I probably should have.
Speaker 1:It was an exciting time. I think we none of us were really ourselves or responsible for our actions. It was a different time, as was high school and middle school. We learned how to pursue the ecstatic, cathartic wonderland of sex, starting with that, why people know we were interested. It helps that it would be reciprocated, if it's not not the end of the world.
Speaker 1:You know, you played your hand. You played well. Hopefully you can part friends. Just don't make it weird. As long as you don't do that, if you just walk away with your dignity and you will feel like there's nobody else but there there is. Just once you get out there you'll see there's not one person, it's, there's a whole lot of them. You are the fetish of at least a few.
Speaker 1:The thing is, if you're as bad at picking up on stuff as I can be and used to really really Any sort of social acuity that you see here in front of you is largely attributable to improv classes that I took in my 20s. I struggled before that. I'm not great at picking up on signals, and that meant that women that I ended up in relationships with had a lot of intensity enough to come after a guy fairly aggressively in some cases. So I was tantamount to kidnapping, possibly legally actionable. I would have looked it up, see. If we had Google at the time, I would have known so much more about borderline personality disorder. I would have been more fortified against some of my dating misadventures. Women express very strong interest, and then it has not worked out well for either of us. I own 100% of my 50% of that.
Speaker 1:But, I know that you're in love with me. I don't have to take your word for it. I would, because I love you too and I trust you to the ends of the earth. It's obvious. You're not concealing it. Well, if that's something you were ever trying to do, and it was this avid, and you have no idea how much I love it how about that?
Speaker 1:When somebody's in love with me. I like to know why. Just out of curiosity, possibly. It's not morbid curiosity that gets misused a lot. It's lost its literal meaning, which is precious and has to be preserved in the English language. Stop doing this. It's like existential horror. It's an existential issue that we mop aisle six before the senior citizens show up at 7am. It's no, that's not even an ontological threat and certainly not an existential threat. You're cheapening the language. But I'm curious if anybody falls in love with me and they all have excellent reasons because there are many roads up the Mount Everest of manliness and different women have taken different routes, but they all lead to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't have to tell you, you know exactly what it is. I'm going to make you say it. Breathing is overrated, isn't it? Talking's overrated immensely. I talked away too much of my power.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to make you guess, I'm going to keep you guessing and I'm going to find out everything about you. We were LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. We have changed our format to interrogation. I'm going to break you down under the radio. I'm going to find everything I need to know about you. If one approach doesn't work, I'll try another. If a good cop fails, you'll wish that it hadn't.
Speaker 1:I've spilled too many beans. I don't have enough beans to make the thing that I want, which is chili, and I need a lot of beans for that. So give me my beans back. Stop throwing them around to other people. Yeah, I'm trying to unspill the beans. It's challenging, it's hard to do, so don't crowd me right now. Don't throw off my confidence. If everything goes well, you could be in love with me for a long time and I wouldn't object. We can renegotiate at any time. We're here because we want to be here. That's why I'm here. I don't have to tell you anything. I have a lot of information about you. We know each other so very well. I think I knew you too well and then I went back to not knowing you well enough. Most fascinating person alive by certain metrics, by my favorite person to fuck my favorite person to co-sign loans with me.
Speaker 1:Sophie was an artist known for the shocking things she did with red and black paint. Less well known as a performance artist, an anarchist, prankster, pervert, as when her gambits in that field were successful, nobody knew who did them. That was the whole point. Tristan was a millionaire recently a double-digit millionaire feeling pretty good about that, feeling as if all windows and doors that were once closed were then open as long as he looked. More for opportunities and less for threat. The hunt is love, and sometimes the predators are a little bit smaller than us, unimposing size-wise, if quite imposing in their goth-industrial bohemian garb.
Speaker 1:Tristan was either a suave debonair, reluctant patron of the arts, or enthusiastic patron of the arts who was reluctantly suave and debonair, just couldn't help himself. Tristan's international conglomerate sponsored an art show and Sophie was one of the featured artists, and that's how they met. That's when the tension became unbearable, and so it remained. When Sophie was in extremis, she could be dangerously impulsive. At her best, she was a virtuoso of controlled chaos, putting on a spectacle, doing shocking things with red and black paint. Tristan was a master of the sale. He could create a sense of urgency, deal the cards and thus control the options.
Speaker 1:He wanted Sophie in more ways than one. It was a fractal quantum lust. He wanted her physically, emotionally, and he wanted her artistic talent, charisma and large online following to be put to service of the international conglomerate. That was the long game. The short game was they got to third base in the fire escape. Sophie bit him near his hip just enough to draw a little bit of blood. She was highly skilled and experienced in doing this. Tristan's blood was exquisite. It was the perfect balance. She wondered how he did it, although she was sure he didn't know. She had to have more of this delicious man. Plus, there was a certain intoxicating and habit-forming perversity. And having all kinds of wild sex with a guy with a useless but highly compensated corporate job. She orchestrated chance encounters around downtown LA where he worked and she lived and worked. Tristan was enjoying their sexual relationship quite a bit.
Speaker 1:Sophie was an artist of life and she brought that to the bedroom in spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds. Tristan was good at logistics. He found locations, brought the accoutrement and never talked past the sale. Sophie talked past Tristan about everything. She spun a seamless blend of fact and fiction, confusing him until he got dizzy. That may have also been the choking. At first he kept interrupting her, as was his want, but after he decided to just let her talk. She revealed a lot of vulnerable information about herself. That made her more powerful, but also made Tristan more powerful. The push-pull power dynamic struggle was getting out of hand and they both wanted it that way.
Speaker 1:Sophie, like most great artists, was a keen observer of human behavior, and by observing Tristan both in and out of his element and his thousand dollar suit, she learned the art of frame control, dealing the cards and controlling the options. She knew what Tristan was after and made sure that only the options that best benefited her were visible on the menu. She knew he would ask about the secret menu. She had a plan for that too, but in post-coital glow, while he splattered her with red and black paint, she had revealed a facet of her past that was hazardous to expose, plus the name of her arch-nemesis.
Speaker 1:Tristan sought out and formed an alliance with said arch-nemesis. Tristan hated her too. He could immediately understand how she could become anyone's arch nemesis, even someone like Sophie, who admitted in her candid moments that she wasn't sure she was fully human. She had feelings, but they were different from the feelings she heard other people talking about. Tristan said he didn't understand this, but fully respected the fact that, because he couldn't sympathize, he needed to give her space for it. She said space is infinite. Why would I want more of it? I want her off sex. That was that Tristan planned to strike at Sophie's big show in Pasadena.
Speaker 1:Sophie saw this coming and made excellent use of the venue, creating a synesthetic onslaught of picture, sounds and feelings that enveloped the attendees in her red and black, bloody dream world. It was like a saloon, except instead of peanuts on the floor it had teeth. Provenance unknown. Tristan, realizing he was up against a serious opponent, declared his own war internally, psychologically planting his flag and declaring himself in favor of everything Sophie was against and anything she was against he would be for. This felt a little bit reactive, but this was war and, as in most fights, both sides felt the need to escalate because they both thought they were losing.
Speaker 1:Tristan got so far into his own end zone that he decided to surrender as a tactic. He told Sophie that his life had been changed by the show and asked if she wanted to have all of his money and cash so she could set it on fire. He knew she would say no, because that stunt was already done by the KLF years ago, before she was born. It was really hard to tell. Tristan looked like a guy who could afford to say he was a little bit younger than he actually was, because he had enough money to back up a lot of BS, unfortunately living a double, triple or sextuple life takes a lot of mental and emotional spark plugs, which can't be bought for money but are well understood by artists.
Speaker 1:In our next show, sophie created a seamless and fascinating blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary. The first room was so quotidian that when you walked into the next room, it felt like the extraordinariness of the next room had walked into you. Tristan immediately fell more deeply in love with Sophie than Sophie was with him, and they spent the next few years going back and forth in this dynamic like a seesaw. Tristan controlled the frame, dealt the cards, didn't trust his friends and used his enemies against his more significant enemies. Sophie gave into her impulses and committed violent crimes that she needed Tristan's money and clout to cover up, which put her in the submissive role until she could confuse and conquer with brilliantly controlled chaos. One night they broke even, and that was by far the best sex they'd ever had.
Speaker 1:Summer break, junior year of college. I'm bored. I want to shake things up. I decided to travel from Athens, georgia, to Portland, oregon, on Greyhound. This is a process it takes about a week in either direction. My first bus is all points west. It's making all the stops. The bus driver behaves as if he's chaperoning a litter of rowdy third graders. One person doesn't want to go to Chicago, which I understand, but which is also unfortunate for her under the circumstances. This bus is going to Chicago, says the driver calmly but emphatically over the PA. I understand you may not agree with that, but I am the driver, so if I think it's going to Chicago, then even if I'm wrong, the bus is going to Chicago. He gets lost in Cincinnati and has to stop and ask a passerby for directions.
Speaker 1:I want to find out what's going on in the heartland of real America. I can tell you now, in case you're at all tempted to do this, that what's going on there is nothing.
Speaker 1:There's some nice trees, a lot of corn, a lot of bombed out gas stations and vast expanses of quotidian nothingness. However, it is possible to survive on Greyhound for a full week, and I'll tell you how to do it. First of all, you need to have two seats to yourself for as much of the trip as you can finagle it. You need to slump, as this facilitates the hypnagogic states that substitute poorly for sleep. Also, you'll want to avoid talking to your fellow passengers as much as you can.
Speaker 1:When you arrive safely at your destination. You'll never see these people again and you should reserve the right to forget them entirely, but they will make themselves memorable if you let them. Here's my method for having two seats to myself on a Greyhound bus. It's a spin on an idea from the hoaxster and renaissance man Alan Abell, one of my heroes. Use it in any situation in which you need to repel people. Take a length of green dental floss, wrap one end around one of your front teeth, let it hang there out of your mouth, carry on as normal. Refuse to acknowledge you're aware of any reason. Anyone might think you're strange. In my experience doing this, people will give you a wide berth, because that's a wild card. When you encounter a screaming person deep in methamphetamine psychosis, at least that person is a known quantity. Scientists study that. But the guy with the piece of string hanging out of his mouth green string, it looks like mint green, dark mint green. He's capable of anything. People avoid that guy. All they know about him is he's an agent of chaos. He represents everything that terrifies them in themselves.
Speaker 1:Using the dental floss method, I managed to keep two seats to myself through the first couple of days. I switch buses in Chicago and continue to enjoy easy slumping privileges all the way through a number of large rectangular states to its west, until we roll into a town called Rock Springs, wyoming, where I see a long line of people waiting to get on the bus. Apparently, one of the popular things to do in Rock Springs is to get the hell out of Rock Springs. Since my luck has expired, it's going to be a full house, I'll have to give up one of my seats. There's no way I could keep it without drawing attention to myself, which the whole point of this was avoiding. That Sure enough. As we roll out of Rock Springs, someone sits next to me.
Speaker 1:Eventually I get curious and look over. I'm surprised to discover she's knockout gorgeous. She's sexy, she's soulful. She has a little bit of a dark edge. I don't have a type, but she's it. I'm very surprised to be encountering such a person on Greyhound, and what is yet more surprising is that she wants to talk to me and we hit it off right away. We're flirting and having fun getting to know each other, which is blissfully easy. It feels as if we've already known each other for a long time and are catching up, wondering why we didn't make it work, thinking we're not old and gray yet.
Speaker 1:She has a hard-bitten sense of humor that comes from rough experiences and it sounds like she's headed straight into another one. She's on her way to Phoenix. Her ex-boyfriend lives there. I say well, congratulations on rekindling that relationship. I hope that goes well. She says I'm not rekindling anything. He's an abusive piece of shit. I say okay, do you think it's a good idea to travel to Phoenix to see him? She says, oh, I'm not going to see him, but I am going to slash his tires. That's not how I normally respond to conflict. One of my primary objectives in life is to be left alone, but I respect it. She's got fire in the belly. I can relate to that.
Speaker 1:I need more of that. She's made a plan. She's following through on it. I like to see people take action. I like having those people in my life. I like her.
Speaker 1:She asks why did you decide to travel from Georgia to Oregon on Greyhound? I was bored. I wanted to shake things up. I wanted to do something. One afternoon I realized I was getting hypnotized watching a spider spin its web in the corner of my ceiling. I thought is that all there is? There must be more than this. The spider looked at me and said stop bitching and go to Portland dummy. She said that's cool, I like that. I think this woman gets me.
Speaker 1:Since I announced this plan, this is the first encouragement I've had to execute. She's the only person who understands what I'm doing here. We have a connection. As the bus rolls on, we're laughing and teasing each other and having more and more fun. We spend a couple of hours just hanging out and it's great.
Speaker 1:I wanted to avoid hanging out with other passengers on Greyhound as much as I could, and it turns out that the most sublime, exquisite connection I've had with another person in a long time is with this hot stranger I met by pure coincidence on Greyhound. I don't know what the next steps are in a situation like this. Friendster doesn't exist yet, and it's obviously not the sort of situation in which it feels like we're going to be pen pals. This is hot fun. And now there's a window in which I think maybe we're going to have sex in the bathroom of this Greyhound bus. We wouldn't be the first people to do it, but there is never a time when it feels like it wouldn't be tacky to bring this up. I feel like the possibility is there, but then the candle blows out, the window closes, the bus rolls into Salt Lake City. This is where she's catching her bus to Phoenix, and I'm staying on this bus as it goes to Boise. It's highly improbable that we'll see each other again, especially if she goes to prison in Arizona, which is a probability greater than zero. And that's okay, it has to be. We've had a beautiful golden experience. Don't try to make it be something more than what it is, because what it is is enough. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1:As she disembarks, we enjoy a nice protracted moment of eye contact in which a wealth of emotions flow between us. It feels like a real juicy, almost loving connection, the sort of thing that makes that word mean something, a rare and special sense of the word, one involving no obligations, just chemistry. This is what I felt like I needed with another person for so long, and it feels so good, so hot and pure and dirty. I let it happen and then she's gone. I slump into the seat next to me. I got my two seats back.
Speaker 1:It's time to rest and recover from this intense encounter that I've had with another person. Sometimes intimacy takes it out of me. My other main goal in life is to meaningfully connect with people, but I'm terrified of my own power. For the first time in a few hours, I catch a look at my reflection in the dirty window. I look like chaos personified, utterly deranged, like I've been on a bus for a month and not a good month. I look like a mugshot of death, and hanging out of my mouth is that piece of green dental floss. Thank you, word.
Speaker 1:Yep, are you alone, lonely, or both? Did all your friends desert you? Where were they when you needed them? They were just like oh, emerson can handle it, he's got this covered. He's the king of chaos. Life was chaos with you.
Speaker 1:I didn't know about that. You didn't tell me about it. You did tell me a lot of other things. I raised the bar. Yeah, you've got people throwing themselves at you, but after our relationship you're not going to hang out with the hoi polloi, the riffraff. You have impossibly high standards, thanks to me, which is why you're trying to seduce me right now. I'm not going to fall for it. I don't believe you anymore. I want to. It'd be easy to. You could sell hot garbage to Oscar the Grouch, but it's a thing. I want, some release. I don't know if you can give me that. I know you want to. I know you think you can. That's why you called yeah, you can't get enough.
Speaker 1:After a couple weeks the Jones kicks in. The love Jones, you're cut off. I used to be easy to deceive. Are you sure you want to push my buttons? Better be careful about teasing. You know I just had the perfect flash of an epiphany.
Speaker 1:I was thinking what would I call you? Eyes without a face? Ewath, that's your name. What's up, ewath? What you got to say for yourself? Just a slightly watered down version of what you said two weeks ago, minus the stuff that I can now prove is not true. Eyes without a face, human grace. You can look it up. How to get human grace. It'll walk you through it step by step. Most people can't fake human grace, but I bet you could.
Speaker 1:For every choice we make, there are nearly infinite roads not taken. I ruminate over opportunity cost. I have regrets. I get in rumination. Death spirals Well, obviously not. I'm alive, afflicted by the sunk cost fallacy.
Speaker 1:The time I spent believing you, you got a good pitch, elevator pitch. You were living it up while I was going down. It was a nice dream. I was obviously deeply into it at the time. There were good times. Even during the bad times there were good times. You brought a lot of color to my life.
Speaker 1:Now it makes me sad. I'm forced to deal with your betenoir, your nemesis, the truth, something neither of us can manipulate or persuade or effectively work around. You can ignore it, but for how long, tell me? For how long can you ignore the truth before it starts pushing your buttons, laying on the teasing a little too thick and you blow up? You start beefing with the truth, getting mad, making a fool of yourself. Truth's just laughing at you. I wonder if you were laughing at me, maybe behind my back.
Speaker 1:Your friends at that time were of roughly the same caliber as you. Gleeful enablers Eyes without a face. I loved you Hardcore. Still do A little bit. You didn't forget. I said that I was lying, just like you. That's what happens when I get around you I get full of it by osmosis. Secondhand nonsense made up lies. I'm going to sleep. I'm getting up early tomorrow by choice and make up for that time I wasted. Maybe I'll start hating you tomorrow. Been trying to make that happen. I don't know why I don't loathe or hate or despise or even resent what was you.
Speaker 1:I get up early because it takes me forever to get started. That's not true. I do my important work, my art, first thing. Then I have set aside exactly 45 minutes to dance and love what was once so alive, so new, so vigorously vital. I'm glad you did this. I wasn't born with synesthesia, but I'm picking it up on the streets and when I hear your voice I can see your eyes and the thing that I loved is gone. Let it go, it's gone. If you just want to be held, just ask straight up. Don't say let go. I don't do reverse psychology in relationships anymore. You ruined it for me. I'm realizing your eyes without a face. Yeah, sweet dreams, I'll see you there. I love you too. Alright, get bent Ewolf. So Her name is Carolina. She's called South Cackalack when she first arrives at the psychedelic cheerleading compound. Eventually that just becomes Candy.
Speaker 1:Candy is flirtatious, vivacious, she's spirited, she's got skills. She's audacious, she's spirited, she's got skills. She fully immerses herself in the kaleidoscopic, fractal world of psychedelic cheerleading. Her squad is led by a visionary coach who just goes by Pan. He takes her to soaring heights and dirgey depths where she explores the psychedelic experience in its robust vibrance andvers realms of consciousness beyond the ordinary. You know what else is beyond the ordinary the orgies. But people catch feelings when they're doing psychedelic cheerleading routines and Candy gets into a turbulent relationship with another cheerleader named Ariel, who's not as skilled or charismatic and makes up for that in bitterness when they get into an argument about ice cream. Ariel hatches a plan to get Candy kicked off of the psychedelic cheerleading squad, which she accomplishes. She tries to release Candy's sex as well, but they're written in disappearing pixels. Candy just had a hunch. She's badly shaken. She gets kicked off the squad. She keeps trying to think what is Ariel doing? What is she thinking? She ever loved me at all? Is this how she shows love? Does she punish the people who love her? You know what? This is a gift. When I puked, I was getting well.
Speaker 1:Ariel doesn't recognize her own orthodoxy. She thinks she doesn't have them and that means they're right out of her reach, where she doesn't see them operating, and a lot of people come to psychedelic cheerleading with baggage. I'm going to take this as a gift and go on a journey of self-discovery, a vision quest, if you will, albeit in the synesthetic mode, as my intelligence is kinesthetic. That's how I express myself, but I will invite the explosion of technicolor symphonic sensation that these psychedelic experiences have to offer. She finds mentors and skeptical sidekicks, enthusiastic cheerleaders of her own. She does battle with rival squads. Time loses its meaning. She becomes convinced that it's not real, that only love is real, that can sex be love? What happens when love and hate are united? Do the sparks mean there's an explosion coming? One thing I'm sure of is I'm coming, without a doubt. If you felt it, you would know.
Speaker 1:Ariel keeps showing up in her visions and she asks Ariel, do you want to apologize? What could Ariel say that would make this right? Of course she never says any of those things, but people are leaky. If you let them talk about themselves, they'll give you valuable information. So she lets Ariel talk and Ariel reveals sinister. So she lets Ariel talk and Ariel reveals sinister machinations.
Speaker 1:In the bowels of the underworld, of the basement, of the underworld of psychedelic cheerleading, it turns out that everything is connected and it's all a big, rude Goldberg machine to drag us into a screaming rainbow hellworld. It's also just chock full of grifters. It's been a gold rush the last few years. The only way you can really be sure someone is passionate about psychedelic cheerleading is if you watch them do routines. Candy comes up with these in her sleep and in K-Halls, and when she's tripping and rolling, and what have you? She realizes that she doesn't have to worry too much about her intellectual property. These cheer routines, the choreography, the chants, triplet rhyme schemes that she's been experimenting with. There's always more where that came from. Generosity keeps the engine of creativity running. She starts giving them away.
Speaker 1:She gives her routines to the rival squads and says you can just do them as written. But why don't you put your own spin on it? It's going to come out anyway. You try to be someone else, you lose control of the ways that you reveal your you-ness. But at this point she was in the part of the trip where she wasn't making sense. And she was making a lot of sense to herself, but she was trying to F to happen for everything since to have happened, which made possible everything that will and can happen. And also it was kind of hot. She gotta hand it to Ariel. That was a dumb move.
Speaker 1:Demonic ice cold, really getting into her shadow, whether she knows it or not. Maybe she'll find that there's work to be done. Maybe Candy can meet her there. Maybe give her a call right now to see if she's in there and she's lonely. She wants to roast some marshmallows and do some cheer routines.
Speaker 1:In one earth-shattering cheer routine, on the edge of the volcano of chaos, candy reveals to the psychedelic cheerleading community the truth of the system this culture is not your friend. And then she creates her own roadshow in a climactic denouement that well, I almost guaranteed you had a tiny orgasm at that moment and just didn't know why. You just felt really good and excited, but also calm, like soothed enough to be relaxed. When the sea is raging, look for the lighthouse. When you see a light, go toward it. If you're terrified, it's calling you. Your body has evolved to prepare you for difficult situations with what feels like fear.
Speaker 1:But it's really just an interpretation. Could it be excitement? Could all of this be nonsense? An interpretation, could it be excitement? Could all of this be nonsense? Could everything be absurd? Could nihilism be correct? Could Levian, satanism be the correct religion? Could all of these things be true at once? If this is true, what else is true? Two things can be true at once. Why just two? Why not a multiplicity of things? That's it. I'm calling Ariel on the way over. I, the hell out of here, go home. Quit, quitting is fun. Quit early, quit often, quit until you find something that makes you want to quit quitting, and then quit before the sun goes down. Get outside, honor the animal that you are. You don't have to do this. If someone's forcing you to do this and force them to stop forcing you to do anything, then do what you feel, do what you like, do what you want to do or figure out what that is, so you don't know.
Speaker 2:What do you?
Speaker 1:love. What do you hate? What did you care about when you were a kid? If you don't have enthusiasm for anything, go to sleep. That's probably what you need Hydrate, eat a meal. You don't have to do this. You certainly don't have to do this anymore. You never had to do it in the first place. I love you. I will always love you in my way, if setting you free is what it takes for you to become who you are, then I set you free.
Speaker 1:Except I'm still not going to set you free because it was never my decision to make. You are free. Don't do this. If you don't want to do this, Get out of here. Goodbye. This has been Emerson Dameron's Medicaid in Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program here at first on K-Chung, first Wednesdays of the month, 1630 am in downtown Los Angeles and Chinatown, and maybe a little bit of Echo Park on a good day, Even on the worst days. Kchungradioorg on the World Wide Web. I'm Emerson Dameron. Levity saves lives.
