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
Whispers of the Infinite: Uncover Your Core Motivation
Self-help shock jock Emerson Dameron takes you on a rockling odyssey through truth, fiction, flotsam, esoterica, and the foothills of High Weirdness designed to awaken your most profound natural, beastly drives. Savor surreal storytelling with gems, jewels, and insights scattered evenly throughout, a potent that will make you rethink reality itself, at least until you realize you're just thinking.
Dive into transformative tales and unconventional wisdom. Challenge everything you thought you knew. Whether you’re seeking inspiration, a snappy new perspective, or that elusive spark to propel your life diagonally upward into the golden realms of Paradise City, this podcast dares you to look beyond the ordinary and unlock your core motivation in ways you’ve never had the guts to imagine.
Are you afraid to get what you want? You’d better be.
Tonight's episode also contains two all-new Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers!
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is a production of KCHUNG Radio. Donate to KCHUNG.
Many thanks to special guest Michael Garfield.
Everything else about the show is by Emerson Dameron, who is solely responsible for its content. 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
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You know, I've always considered myself a man in control. People come to me because they need a guide through the maze, a voice that can take them into their sacred darkness, show them the secrets in their shadowed places where they're afraid to look. I'm that guide, that mirror. I don't blink, don't flinch. I take them straight to their demons access. That's why I make the big bucks.
Protag:But then this woman, this impossible woman, walks in and everything tilts. She moves like she was from another world, like something from a dream or Lithuania, with this smirk that slides right under the blanket with me and her eyes, like ice, they burn with this glint, like she's glimpsed some forbidden piece of me I didn't even know was there. Every glance, every small movement feels as if it's sucking me down Off, closer to some dark, molten core, smoldering, waiting to be fanned into some sort of infernal conflagration. It feels so terrifyingly good. I didn't want to feel good today, but here I am.
Protag:So I give her the whole B production. Break the chains, transcend and include, dance with your primal desires, truly touch yourself. But with each word she just smiles, this little half smirk, like she's reading me backward. She doesn't break eye contact, does not hesitate. It's like she can see the ghost of me hidden just beneath my skin. I try to pull her in, try to push her away, try to tease out some hint of vulnerability, but my god, she's unraveling me strand by strand. She's playing me like a kazoo, and I ain't even mad at it. Then, late one night, she sends a message Five words.
Femme Fatale:You'll do anything, I tell you.
Protag:That's it, this little bitch, five words. And instead of laughing it off, instead of brushing it aside, I find myself staring at that screen, feeling my heartbeat thump, my mind buzz, like I've taken a hit of the real stuff. So I type back, try me thinking maybe that this is still my game to play. Three dots barely appear before her answer comes back.
Femme Fatale:Meet me at midnight at the scapegoat.
Protag:It's not an invitation, it's an order, and it's too late for me to unfollow it. I show up midnight at this eerily erotic bar she's chosen. The lights are low, purple and red, bleeding through the room in surreal, damning halos. She walks in wearing a blood red dress that barely brushes her thighs and as she comes into the light the red gets darker, bleeding into burgundy. She moves like a vision, no, like a hallucination, Something out of the deepest full-tilt bonkers part of my mind. She leans in close, Her perfume is something floral and dangerous and she whispers.
Femme Fatale:Are you ready to give me exactly what I came for?
Protag:And then, as she looks up, it's like her eyes tear back every layer I've built around myself.
Protag:Every premeditated defense, every guarded dismissal, every well-rehearsed look of smug mastery, every confident Barnum statement, she cuts through it like she's stripping my soul by those dim violet lights. She's turning me into everything I never wanted to be. And what's really off is I want it. I want her to keep peeling me apart, keep showing me what I've buried so deep I could walk out. I'm an adult and a fairly rude one when I whip out the radical honesty. But I stay knowing I'm waltzing with this witch right into a brutal mirror, into some place where I'm both hunter and prey, where I'm nothing but a raw, burning rat, king of nerves. And she's guiding me each step closer to some line I'd always pretended was the edge of the earth.
Protag:I don't know who's winning, so it's probably not me. But as her shockingly delicate hand brushes mine, as her eyes hold me there in the dusty darkness, I feel it the thrill of annihilation, the beauty of losing myself completely in the pull of her. She's telling me the myth of myself, first as tragedy, then as farce and then as exquisitely offbeat erotica. And in that moment surrendering feels like the only way to touch something real, something so raw and electric it's almost holy, like the satanic Buddha himself is watching voyeuristically drooling. So I let her lead and for the first time losing feels like the best possible deal. You are in the friendly confines of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes.
Emerson Dameron:LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. I am your host, emerson Dameron. I love you personally. Levity saves lives Medicated-Minutescom.
Emerson Dameron:New episodes debut the first Wednesdays of almost every month. It's been non-stop W's for as long as anyone cares to remember. Covid was still ravaging the world the last time. I missed an appointment with you. Because this is appointment listening and today I am going to clear up some of your confusion. I do not like explaining my jokes. It is one of the most unpleasant, viscerally disgusting activities that I am sometimes nevertheless compelled to engage in, because what I have discovered from the feedback that I've gotten about the show is that you don't like it when I don't explain my jokes. So I'm going to stop the bleeding right here and now. This is where the bleeding stops. I hope you enjoyed the bleeding while it was going on, because it ends today.
Emerson Dameron:Frequently asked questions about the show. What is it? Broadly speaking, it is a bleak satire on personal development, which used to be called self-help and post-modern spirituality, particularly in southern californ. There's a lot of other stuff too. There are running jokes, there are running threads, there's Ask a Sadist, there's an advice columnist whose entire worldview is just philosophy in the bedroom by the Marquis de Sade. There are bite-sized erotic thrillers because there used to be more sex in major films. There were movies that were rated R, that adults would go see in theaters, that were about sex, not porn, not even erotica Fear and lust, and it was intoxicating to look at the boxes.
Emerson Dameron:When I was a young man I was convinced everything would change as soon as I watched Nine and a Half Weeks. That would be my portal into the adult world. It's a fascinating film, not for all of the reasons that I thought. I like to have fun with that format. I am a frustrated fiction writer. I'm a temporarily embarrassed writer of fiction and I like to have an outlet for that. With very little quality control. The show has spawned a number of new religious movements Not real religions, the way that Ekincar is a real religion, but close. The first church of the Satanic Buddha is really the only one that you want to throw down with on a regular basis. As Satanic Buddhists, we believe that you do not exist. So throw yourself a party, indulge the sensory experience of this one life that you have and know that it will all ultimately be a crushing disappointment unless you can disentangle your experience from your ego, which good luck, you may already be a satanic Buddhist.
Emerson Dameron:After new episodes of EDMM make their premiere on Kei-chung, they immediately, the second that eight o'clock comes to pass, they go on to become episodes of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes the only good podcast. I say this because if this is the kind of podcast that you're looking for, it's pretty much the only game in town. I think Ken Lane of Desert Oracle fame is the only person I would say is doing something remotely comparable. Obviously, it's inspired by Joe Frank rather heavily, but he is deceased and can no longer compete. That's why I say that Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is, depending on what you're looking for and the metrics that you're using, the only good podcast.
Emerson Dameron:The host of the show is a character based on me. It's bound to be, and you can't not write what you know. It's going to creep in, especially if you try not to write what you know. He is an exaggerated version of me. He's very good at compartmentalizing and he's proud of that. He likes it that way because it keeps out the bad stuff. He is here to help you. He is a self-help shot. Chuck is how I would put it. He had to be created in order for this show to exist. I am not the kind of person that would host a show like this. Are you that narcissistic? No, I had to bring this character into being because he is exactly the kind of person that would host a show like this and ultimately, the show must go on. That is the golden rule.
Emerson Dameron:You could ask who came first, the character or the show, it doesn't matter. Now the damage is done. Some of the other questions I get relate to the sound quality and production values of the show, to which I say much, as a 419 Nigerian print scam email is littered with intentional misspellings in order to screen out the skeptical. All of the issues with my production style Unwanted reverbs, syllabit S's, popping P's, choppy editing, all of it. The whole nine and the bat nine, the whole 18 is there to screen out people who are not winners. Winning is a decision that you make. If you have to be comfortable oh, I want to fall asleep to a podcast that sounds like Daniel Lanois produced it and it's a deep forest record and it's like a weighted blanket you can get out out.
Emerson Dameron:I cannot help you right now. You're gonna drag the rest of us down. Come back when you know, you will know. When you know, you'll know, it'll flash in your field of vision the letters k, n, o, w. I agree with. Ask a Sadist that so much in modern life. That is disgusting, ridiculous, truly vile. Putting the vile in violence, a lot of that stuff is just the dumbest sort of sexual sublimation. If we stopped kink-shaming ourselves, I could hang out my jersey, I could retire, you would become instantly self-actualized and the rest of your life would be a fermata of the most volcanic orgasm, with lightning in the background and a bear and a pot leaf and a motorcycle and Johnny Cash flipping the bird. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. Kchum 1630 AM. Kchum Radioorg, la's Rebel Radio family.
Helena Mayfair:so there's these four american chaps I keep company with, let's say, wouldn't call them friends exactly. Certainly not my friends, mind you. That's far too conventional, isn't it? They're more like pieces of a little puzzle my own four-piece Yankee set, if you will. Each one's got his little charm. Don't ask me what they see in me, but honestly, who's complaining?
Helena Mayfair:No, there's Brad, brad the leader. You know he's always giving orders, terribly bossy, but oh, I quite like that, my little Brit. He calls me, with that patronising grin. He's forever setting rules, making decisions and expecting me to follow. Seven sharp hella, he'll say. Not a touch of humour in his voice and the thrill of it just makes me melt. Like he's some American king or whatever, and I'm his. I don't know his Dazzle Is that the word I mean? Really. Who am I to deny a man his little rituals? It's like he knows exactly what I want before I even think it and I get to just float along Effortless, really.
Helena Mayfair:Then there's Jax. Action, jax. No chit-chat, just pure raw energy. Gets right down to business. Barely a kind word in him. But who needs gentle? Oh, no, not me.
Helena Mayfair:He calls me his little English rose, and I think that's sweet as far as it goes. But the way he throws me about like I'm just some outlet he says Outlet. I thought it was adorable when he said it. It's almost like he imagines he's found the core of me, this mysterious little English thing. He's unravelling bit by bit and he's going to plug right in like he's rogering the cosmos. I just let him get on with it. Less talking, more. You know what can I say? Strong and silent has nothing on strong and straightforward in my book.
Helena Mayfair:And Trey Trey, the dark, dirty riddler, now he's clever bit of an oddball. He's into all this mind control, talk, saying things like I can see your core motivation, helena, my core motivation, can you imagine. But he says it with this piercing gaze like he's imparting some great, profound revelation. And I think, sure, trey, whatever you say, it's quite a show really. I barely need to be there. He calls me this fascinating specimen and there's something so sweetly deranged about it, don't you think? All I have to do is nod along and he's positively enthralled. He might think he's got me under his spell, but oh, I do know a thing or two about charm. At the end of the day, I'm just floating along quite above it all With legs like these. He wants to work hard.
Helena Mayfair:And then Eugene, dreamy genius, eugene, a poet, that one, you're my English muse, he tells me, like he's Godard and I'm his Brigette Bardot or some such. He's got that soft idealistic side, always whispering about how I'm the only one for him and I am the only one I know full well. He's got a whole harem he's saying that to, but he's ever so convincing he's practically hypnotized himself with all those flowery words. And all right, I admit I sort of melt when he says them, don't I? Because really, what girl doesn't love a bit of romance? The moment he gazes at me with that doe-eyed look, I feel just as special.
Helena Mayfair:As he says I am Silly maybe, but I know the game. It's all just a bit of fun wrapped round his finger with that charm of his. Such an excellent fantasy player he is, and he doesn't fancy a bit of that once in a blue moon. But you see, that's the marvellous part of it all, each one of them with his own funny American way of seeing me. I suppose one could say I've got the best of all worlds, don't you think? Or at least four of them, like I'm a wayfaring queen with four loyal well, I wouldn't say subjects or loyal, but it's close enough to rock and roll, yeah.
Michael Garfield:How screwed are we?
Michael Garfield:That depends on who we are, and if you mean the species, I would say now there is one human species, but you know we decimated a number of intelligent commoners in our past, so most of human history we have not regarded ourselves as a single unified entity.
Michael Garfield:The enormous gap in access and availability of certain resources and conveniences leads some people to think that we're actually talking about, you know, that we've already kind of undergone something like a shadow speciation, especially if you think about certain definitions of species that base a categorization not on anatomical features but on the willingness to reproduce in laboratory environments. You know, even then I would say that I think humankind is very likely to live through even the worst case scenarios that people seem keen on forecasting. On the other hand, I think the sort of modernist, humanist idea, you know, humankind has always been on somewhat rather tenuous footing. I like to maintain that we are going to find new ways to pull it together, you know, and not just find better ways of pull it together, you know, and not just find better ways of identifying a species, but find better ways of communicating interspecies, you know, with others.
Emerson Dameron:So how do you decide what you're going to talk about? You got to do a show. You got to crank out the content. What are you going to do? You've got to do a show. You've got to crank out the content. What are you going to do? You've got stuff in the hopper. You know this. You've been thinking about it, you've been writing, you've been reading, you've been taking notes. You've always put it off because when you get right down to it, you just don't want to do it, because you don't want it to be done, because you want to have fun. And also you're afraid of the thing you're going to create because you don't think it's going to be as good. You think you might even hate the thing that results from the dream that you loved, from the plan that you nurtured Disappointing and frustrating, and all this and all that.
Michael Garfield:But something is better than it isn't.
Emerson Dameron:Something always goes one way or another or doesn't. Some things just stay the way that they are, but not really, because everything is always changing.
Michael Garfield:This imperceptibly, you don't totally see it or recognize it, or know exactly what the fudge is going on.
Emerson Dameron:Does it matter really when you really think about it? If you've thought about it, so it matters. By directing your attention to it, you've given it weight Purchase in your mind Do it or don't, and stop thinking about it right now.
Michael Garfield:A big piece of the pushback again evolutionary thinking was because it attacked the idea of the human as an ontological category, emergent and processual. And we can't really ask how screwed are we without first asking the question of how well can we identify with the other? Because if we regard ourselves as separate from the rest of the living world, we're part of the problem. But regarding people who see themselves as separate from the living world as a problem, you know, a tumor to be irradiated or whatever is also part of the problem or whatever is also part of the problem. We're not seeing evolution operating only on individuals or only on genes. These are somewhat arbitrary partitions of information flowing through environments or, you know, through time and space. The same applies to cybernetic considerations, where you're asking, you know where decisions are and are not being made.
Michael Garfield:You know natural selection is something that people do, right, this whole thing started as a question of animal breeding. Humans are. You know, up until very recently, humans were not actually generating the mutations that they were selecting from. You know, you can see animal husbandry as a kind of prototypical instance of a human on the loop process, where, you know we see a variety of options and we're selected, we're saying no as much as we're. You know, it's like the question of like are we saying yes to the propagation of certain breeds? It's like, I think that you know, my emphasis on on the loop over in or out of is an attempt to bridge the perspective of people who feel like they are completely out of control in these incredibly vast and opaque and, you know, multi-dimensional technological infrastructures that we find ourselves in, and also sort of popping the balloon of tech barons who are, in one sense, validly recognizing themselves to be some of the most highly agentic entities that have ever existed on the planet, completely incapable of actually controlling civilization or controlling the biosphere.
Emerson Dameron:The sunset in progress has been going on since the sunrise stopped, which was maybe around high noon, although I'm sure it's not accurate down to the millisecond. Life would be boring if it could be so easily quantified and measured. I'm going to get out there. It's not over yet the sun's set, so I haven't missed it and I'm going to go enjoy myself as I often do, in my own way, despite the forces arrayed against me and my prophesied demise, which has not come to pass. Because this is my world. I make the rules and decisions and I put them back hand down in the event that the rules are violated by the likes of you.
Emerson Dameron:So I'm headed out there. I'm going to not go too fast. I'm gonna slow down because I don't have to move for anybody. So I don't have to move fast unless I goddamn want to, and that's not gonna happen unless there's something appealing at the other end of that fast walk. And, frankly, it's gonna have to be good, because I haven't been that juiced up or excited or intrigued by any of the options in a second. There was a lot of hot seconds in the summertime and now it's got a chilly second. I like them.
Michael Garfield:I like the cold, cold esoteric cultures that are suitable for an age of generative AI, or what again, like KO Lotto-McDowell calls more broadly, neural media, which would include brain-machine interfaces and so on. But we get somewhere by accepting Arthur C Clarke's third law, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and then asking the question that rationalists don't really seem to enjoy, which is where is magical thinking useful in the digital, metamodern or meta-industrial environment? Frederick Hodolin said poetry is the beginning and end of all scientific knowledge and it's like well, we are, you know. It's becoming more and more evident that you know we are. You know our technologies are these networks of semantic associations, like latent spaces of statistical correlations, which is very much based on and reflective of the way that our own brains work. Reflective of the way that our own brains work.
Michael Garfield:So you know magic and myth, you know the ability to cut paths through that thicket of associations and encode them in narrative structure are prerequisite for the derivation of causal, mechanistic frameworks in science.
Michael Garfield:And then science itself gestures toward, you know, levels of complexity that it's constantly breaking itself against the, the rocks of. Uh, you know complexity that exceeds our ability to cognize or to narrativize. So like I'm excited that we might, basically that I get to play some small part in the formation of cultural norms and of relationships whereby you know Primavera de Filippi called the institution which is, you know, not an institution in the classical sense, but you know, groups of people that come together out of a sense of affinity or a sense of shared possibility. We find better ways of moving through highly automated, incredibly powerful technological environments, insights of the hermetic traditions and the full inheritance of our highly plural wisdom. What I'm excited about is seeing how Fran's rationality takes root in built wilderness, wilderness populated by strange machinic intelligences and augmented humans and people in communication with the entire ecosystem. Various pal of mine, ace, it's okay.
Emerson Dameron:You're just freaking out. Relax, there's one way out of this, through this, around this, whatever you want to call it and that's to slow down. Just breathe all the way down into your belly, zoom out as much as you can. Look at this from the perch of your highest intelligence. It's just a thing. You're just getting the reaction that's supposed to help you deal with stress, because this is what was developed to deal with large predators. We don't have large predators anymore. We just have these complex, stressful situations. We get overwhelmed. The chemicals kick in that freak us out and make us think that we're going to die and make us think that we're not able to do this. We're not up to the challenge. We're not everything that we want to think. We are and we've got to get out of that.
Emerson Dameron:You will not solve the problem in the problem space. You've got to back up. You've got to breathe. You've got to let the mind percolate. Go. Do something else. You will not come up with a solution if you can't stop thinking about the problem. Your brain, thinking directly about the problem, is not going to come up with anything creative or novel, anything that's going to get you out of this. It's going to get you deeper into this, because that's what it thinks helps Calm down. Relax as much as you possibly can.
Michael Garfield:Bill Thompson used to talk about the, the entelechy of like human being, defined fundamentally as a, you know, a like, a permacultural guild or consortium of animal, vegetal and mineral intelligences. And so, you know, like me, sitting here with my laptop computer, surrounded by houseplants, is the unit, that's the self that we're operating at here. And so, like, how do we teach people to wield power that's sort of beyond the scope of individual understanding in a modernist sense, responsibly like? A part of it is, you know, this question of like, how collective intelligence comes into the foreground.
Emerson Dameron:Midnight just lights out, you get six good hours of sleep. You'll be ready, you'll be willing, you'll be able, you'll be doing it. You'll be loving it. You'll be crushing it, you'll be killing it. You'll be becoming who you are. You can do that through the medium of a job you don't like. You're learning about yourself, and if you like everything, you're not going to love anything.
Emerson Dameron:So get in there. Get in the game, make it happen. Be a lover and a fighter. Don't be a hater. Be a winner, always winning. There is no failure. There is only feedback and love. Love will conquer fear. Bring the fear into the war. Fear is just an evolutionary gift to make you tough, to make you on edge. So you notice what's going on and you've trained yourself to not only notice what's going on but to notice what you notice and to love it all. Amor fati, love your fate. That is what fates on others that they're not necessarily going to like. You're doling out some discipline today. Dollets, doling out dollets of discipline. That's what you do when you're not throwing that D. God damn it.
Michael Garfield:God damn it deliberately choosing to inhibit some sort of response that has been proposed by an autonomic process. Elsewhere in the body, you know, if you have like unusually strong executive function this is kind of a weird example Tantric practices of you know of retention, or just simply like Buddhist unattachment. You know from like I'm not going to react to this. What if you?
Emerson Dameron:knew it was going to be pretty much okay. Not ideal, not exactly the way that you want it, but okay, you're not just gonna survive, things might even get a little bit better. You can divest from your fear, as you know right now that it's gonna be pretty much okay. You're gonna get sick, you're gonna get put on really good drugs and it's gonna be okay. You're gonna die. There's nothing you can do about that.
Emerson Dameron:It's a perfectly understandable thing to be afraid of, because it's absolutely guaranteed to happen. You might as well be afraid of something that definitely is going to happen, as opposed to something that might and probably won't. But what if you died and it was fine, if not kind of cool? What if it was like my second experience smoking the venom of the Colorado River, toad Bufo Alvarius dying, seeing five black stars across a black sky, seeing my abandoned car driver's license someone's name and photo on it no longer existed because I was gone Like a drop of rain falling on the surface of the ocean, reabsorbed into a universal consciousness from which I came? That was very comforting. If that's what death is like, it's gonna be pretty much okay, if not a significant improvement.
Emerson Dameron:I could use a break from Emerson Dameron. I don't mind feeling a little bit empty inside. What if you knew it was gonna be okay? What if you could really relax? All of your fears were made manifest and everything that you dread came to pass? You could just relax. You wouldn't have to worry about anything anymore.
Emerson Dameron:You could be totally honest about who you are, where you are now, because it's nowhere and you're nothing. It's like you were in the beginning, as you will be in the end, as you were always already. Nix, not nothing. Total freedom, high octane relaxation. What would you do if you knew for a fact that everything was going to be okay and you could finally just relax? I was heartbroken. I had been for as long as I could remember. My old heart had taken such a beating that I didn't know if it would ever get up off the floor, much less heal the open wounds that made it so hard to expose myself to my throngs of loving admirers who came to see me lecture as America's preeminent popular philosopher and expert on meditation, personal growth and psychedelics as a tool of self-inquiry.
Emerson Dameron:I was at a conference, the largest conference devoted to combining meditation and psychedelics, so a controversial practice, particularly in some religious communities. But, as I could see every year, the crowds swelled, the money sloshed about and more and more people better looking people wanted to hear what I had to say. The trick to being a popular philosopher, a working knowledge of a number of fields Enough so that it would be hard to find one person who could rebut everything that you had to say. You have a working knowledge to be conversant and then to have contrarian takes. You have a unique offering and it's exciting and it gets people talking and angry and juiced up and jazzed and, in many cases, sexually excited. And I delivered when I was speaking but I did not hear the words that were coming out of my mouth because nothing meant anything. Was this depression or had I just given up on myself and everyone and everything else? I just couldn't go on like this. It's easier to be a salesperson you don't know quite what you're selling.
Emerson Dameron:I was aware of the benefits. I liked the mouthfeel of some of the words and it was laced with enough scientific-sounding jargon to sound credible to the sorts of people that I wanted to convince. I was not interested in convincing hard-nosed scientists. I was interested in convincing people on the softer side, a little bit more pliable, if you know what I mean. But I'd never met anyone like Diana. At first I thought she was a hallucination. Every word that she spoke gripped with profundity. Her presence was ethereal and sublime and yet portentous.
Emerson Dameron:Just a hint of danger she was a messenger from the abyss that we needed to look into and to see by way of another planet, her original home, where she went traveling and found important work to do. In the abyss she did not seem real, and yet I discovered that night that she was very real in a corporal sense. We banged it out good and proper, like we became close. We combined different drugs to experiment with their effects, but it was hardly necessary, as I am well informed enough to know that the drugs are inside of you and all you have to do is find ways to touch them off. Was it a romance? I don't know. We're both very cynical people. She was a big fan of voluntary human extinction, also one of my hobby horses. We had no faith in the future of humanity, very little in the present, and it was refreshing to be around someone with whom I could speak freely about the fact that I found myself barreling into nihilism. Was it the depression? Was I just getting smarter Lessons about the futility of all things that most people never get to learn? I don't know. She talked in her sleep and did not typically sleep with other people because she knew a lot of proprietary information. We knocked the boots so hard one night that she passed out, talked extensively in her sleep. She's not about waiting for voluntary human extinction over the coming generations and she's not necessarily committed to the voluntary part. She has a plan to exterminate all of us in the coming months and I thought what do I do? And then I realized immediately carry on as before. You are too tangled up in this, you're too in love with this woman and you're kind of psyched about this doomsday plan. This is the one thing that can cure your heartbreak, your depression.
Emerson Dameron:I had a student, melissa, very energetic, very enthusiastic, basically runs circles around me in terms of ideas, of which I have none. It's all rhetoric devoid of content. And she was all content and loved to show up for my office hours and share her ideas and bounce things off of me, ask for my advice, which is a good way to endear yourself to someone even if you're not trying. And because of our student-teacher relationship, our personal relationship was erotically charged and of course we had to do it. It would be unethical not to. That's one of my contrarian opinions.
Emerson Dameron:I had a side romance with Melissa going. She was very different from Diana. I was very in love with Diana, but I was intrigued by someone who was everything. Diana was not. She got immersed in my work and my life and pretty soon figured out what Diana was up to in terms of the doomsday extermination plan, and she debated Diana fiercely about this. We would take that tension and put it to good use, the three of us. Melissa was not making progress, diana would not move and we couldn't stop the doomsday thing from happening because only she knew how to turn it off. Many threesomes ensued Out of fear and what is sometimes incorrectly referred to as trauma bonding.
Emerson Dameron:The emptiness of Diana started to put a cold chill in my bones, and the warmth, the integrity, the sincerity, the enormous heart that Melissa possessed began to thaw out the ice around my own, and she also did nasty stuff that Diana talked about but wouldn't do. As the date approached on which Diana was planning to murder the world, melissa got active, looking for ways to sabotage. It had a pretty good plan and I didn't know. I felt the responsibility to participate because it happened to touch on a couple of areas that I do happen to know something about. I could have put her over the edge of knocking out the doomsday machine, but I wondered am I already dead? I just don't care about any of this. It's not real. I just want it to all be over. No, absolutely red blooded, pumping with passion. And it just took one really good receipt of oral sex from Melissa to rediscover my humanity, my vigor, my drive to do what's right, my honor, my integrity. So I confronted diana, got a handful of shrooms and they gave me superpowers, enlarging my heart, enlarging my sex organ to the point where I could swing it around and knock down abandoned buildings and I would have no trouble stopping the doomsday machine this way.
Emerson Dameron:And we had a long argument about it. The relationship, interpersonal, personal, hidden conflicts surfaced. This wasn't really about the doomsday machine, it was about us. It felt like the relationship was fading out and I'd kind of been looking for a reason to end it. But then it became clear that we had a lot to work through and we would learn a lot about ourselves and perhaps get to the bottom of our nihilism if we did the work, even if there was no future. The future didn't matter. The present was a gift and it was important to be present, embodied and adaptable and imaginative.
Emerson Dameron:And oh yeah, I need to shut off the doomsday machine. There we go. That takes care of it. Melissa became the leader. The new world that came together after everyone realized that we were all about to die Saw things a little differently for a while. We regressed to the mean very quickly, but Melissa was in charge by then and she kept some of the good ideas rocking and rolling, which is what I was doing with Diana, because after a couple of sessions of counseling we realized this is so wrong, way too wrong, to stop. That would be unethical. Look at you, giggles, queen of the morning. That bed is your palace, princess, jealous much.
Michael Garfield:That reminds me When's our next sleepover.
Emerson Dameron:Keep dreaming, babes. You can't handle me. Oh, such a bully Just admitted to Jackhammer. You're smitten. You do have that certain tang, a twist, hydration full of wet electrolytes, something a little bit metallic. Where do you get that rose gold glow?
Protag:The world may never know.
Emerson Dameron:Sunrise Serenade, because morning should be as irresistible as you are. You don't want to miss the taste of my pits. Can you keep a secret? Sunrise Serenade To create.
Emerson Dameron:Enter a lifelong love affair with the blank canvas. Make it your bitch and make it love. You Totalize that thing. Know the craft, learn it, study it, do it, practice it every day. Learn to play standards before you try to play jazz and then unlearn the blocks on your creativity.
Emerson Dameron:Become childlike, become curious about everything, like you're seeing it for the first time. Much like a child, you greet the world as if you're always high and tripping balls and say hi, I'm high, I'm going to jump right in. I love the uncertainty. I love this expanse that I am at liberty to fill. And if nobody cares and I remain unknown, that is total freedom. I can do whatever I want and get away with it because nobody cares.
Emerson Dameron:Be prepared to get attention. It happens. If you keep working on something, it will come your way. People will gravitate to you. People need to feel less alone and they're always on the lookout for artists, communicators who help them adapt. Adaptation is the only skill that matters in this age of discontinuity, in which all bets are off and no one is prepared for what has already happened. You must be like water and flow. Bruce Lee, aside from recommending bearing a similarity to water in your actions and comportment, also suggested that take what's useful for you from whatever it is that you're studying and leave the rest A good habit to get into. It can be harder when you are lonely or desperate. You will form relationships with the sources of your information. You will end up subscribing to their old programs, and that's okay.
Emerson Dameron:Your life can get off balance at times. If you're in medical school you will be focused on that. I would assume If you just had a kid you're probably going to be focused on that. But on the whole, go for balance. Balance, the yin and the yang. Life lived in harmony, partnership and a spirit of collaboration. Almost everything you believe is almost certainly wrong. So you might as well decide the ways in which you want to be wrong and the things you want to be wrong about and those things, the balance as above so below, in out life, death, etc. Your life works better if you believe that, even if you're wrong. Same thing with living in a spirit of love and harmony, not just tolerance.
Emerson Dameron:I don't think tolerance by itself is much good. That's like the baseline, bare minimum requirement. You want partnership, you want collaboration. You want compassion. Compassion is a little bit more useful than empathy. Empathy is a feeling. Compassion is a skill, a practice that you develop. Compassion is a skill, a practice that you develop over the course of a lifetime, much like creativity, which at bottom is an expression of the ineffable Express. The ineffable. That's the job that you signed up for. Nobody's ever done it before. If they had, it would be effable. You might be the first, and even if it doesn't work out in the attempt, you'll learn something and you'll laugh quite a bit. You'll probably get laid. So do it. There's the ineffable. Express it Go. Act without attachment, Not saving the world here. We're not even saving ourselves. We're all gonna die in the end. No matter what we do. We might not be doing anything worthwhile. In the larger scheme of things, this may be blown away and forgotten. Don't latch on to it. The best way to not give up and quit when you suffer a setback is to not act like there's anything special about winning. There isn't. It feels good, it's fun, it adds a little glitz and glamour to your life on those Hollywood nights, but it doesn't really mean anything. It's arbitrary most of the time, or at least largely so. It doesn't matter. You're not curing cancer with your art. You're making a ripple, and that's about the most you can reasonably expect. Make a good one and don't get attached to that ripple, because when we die we will be reabsorbed into a larger consciousness Like drops of rain hitting the ocean. We will not recognize ourselves as ourselves. I will not be able to say hey, good looking out, emerson, you nailed that one, you got it right. You were right about what happens after we die.
Emerson Dameron:Because I won't recognize myself as Emerson Dameron.
Emerson Dameron:I will have moved on. Perhaps I will be a house cat or an alley cat. It is not fixed but is loved throughout the neighborhood, well fed, well cared for, goes on madcap adventures and goes at it with all the best. One thing that's useful to believe, even if it's incorrect. If you're going to make a Pascal's Wager, I would make it on the rhythm of nature and the cornucopia of buku benefits of living in harmony with others, perching with a spirit of love. Rhythm feels good. It feels good to feel good.
Emerson Dameron:Organisms gravitate toward pleasure. If you watch Butterflies, that puts to rest the notion that life is some Darwinian struggle for survival read in tooth and claw in its essence, to the extent that it is that which it can be. That too is in furtherance of pleasure. Life is struggle and suffering or it's nothing, because the pleasure has to be worth something. But that doesn't mean you have to sweat about it. You can if it feels good, if you know that it feels good. You can hurt yourself if you know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, it's not the kind of pleasure derived from pain that you can take to the bank. So think about it.
Emerson Dameron:Kinky pervert Animal, you do this to yourself that's what really hurts, and you get off on it so hard you love every humiliating second of it. Passive aggression that's so aggressive that it hardly even qualifies as passive aggression anymore. Showing up late for everything when there are some very minor adjustments that you can make. That would make things a lot easier for others and especially for yourself. You don't have to do all of that. The easiest way to solve the problem is to learn as much about it as you can and then go think about something else. Relax, breathe, get up into nature, eat some mushrooms, get stoned. Talk to a family of raccoons for a couple of hours about the history of American railroads and how much you can learn about people from digging through their garbage. Everyone's a criminal. Everybody lies, everybody cheats. That's why we need scapegoats. The raccoons know this.
Emerson Dameron:I had a landlord when I lived in Chicago.
Emerson Dameron:I lived in a little garden apartment.
Emerson Dameron:Right after I broke up with my college girlfriend, I was on my own in the big city and initially, when I struck out on my own, I thought this is great. I can do whatever I want. I can go to Jamaica, I can get into Rockabilly, I will have sex with a wide variety of women and I'll find out what I want, find out what I'm really into, because I'll try it all. After a few weeks I was sliding around on the ice, going to drink at the Black Rock by myself and read a book and not talk to anyone, and I got very depressed and I fell head over heels in love with the next woman I dated after that, who really is a wonderful person, even though she gave me chlamydia.
Emerson Dameron:My landlord was a statewide competitive karaoke singer Championships and tournaments and then celebrations for his victories in competitive karaoke. His apartment was upstairs, Basically just a karaoke studio Speakers pumping out the mid-range that he could sing over. I never heard him do it Kind of a shame because he did come to one of my zine readings. Maybe I should have supported him. Maybe then that would have helped him deal with his psychological issues about raccoons. I would go out on the little back porch-type area, a little place with Christmas lights, when the springtime rolled around and the weather was warm and my heart was broken. The Comedia was long gone and frankly I was thankful for the Comedia because that proved that that relationship really happened.
Emerson Dameron:She was there on my mattress on the floor. She was there, I was there. It's over now, but it all really happened. Horrifically lonely, the existential dread is way in the red. It has been for weeks. I'm sitting out there smoking a cigarette. The landlord comes out and starts regaling me about his war on a group of raccoons that used to live in the alley. It involved nail guns. It involved bloodshed and my landlord's transparent, unapologetic, proud bloodlust. It was like Apocalypse. Now this guy hates raccoons. They are society's scapegoats and when they go through our trash they probably know why. We're all a bunch of basket cases. Damn dirty hypocrites. Don't even wash our food. Cultivate Wu-Wei.
Emerson Dameron:Do by not doing, if you can do that you can save yourself a lot of time and effort. Go back to the source, the unseen essence. Live your life as art, as above so below. Channel the life force itself, which is creativity, the generative arts. Sex we're talking about sex. We're talking about boning. We're talking about sex. That is not PNP, we're talking about any kind of sex that you can come up with. It is all an exuberant expression of human creativity. The first and last word in rip-roaring madcap, physical comedy Sex is the force of creation itself. Sex is God. So go back to that essence.
Emerson Dameron:If you are not getting any, if it's a dry spell, that is fantastic, because you can feel into that. Just feel. Don't jack it just yet. Feel what that feels like, that tension. Channel that into your work. That is sex transmutation. That is how masterpieces are created.
Emerson Dameron:If you create a masterpiece or you just have a lot of fun, celebrate by jacking off hard. Get off, do it the way that feels best. Go back to the source. The process will help you cultivate patience and persistence. That will help you keep going and keep showing up and doing your job when it's difficult. A cook does not get cake block. Nobody gets talker's block. Don't get writer's block. Just keep writing, even if it's terrible. Most of it always has been the way you feel about it doesn't really mean anything. At the same time, don't keep doing something that's never going to get you off, because it doesn't know how.
Emerson Dameron:If you want to quit, quit early, quit often and eventually quit quitting. Find something you love so much that you don't want to quit. Something, someone, some idea, some invisible force. You love it, even when you hate it. Perhaps most of all, if you've never indulged in the joys of hate sex, you're missing out. Go do that right now. You can listen to this podcast in the background. That'll probably make it better. Fuse intuition with intention. Trust yourself and learn from your experience. Honor yourself and laugh at yourself.
Emerson Dameron:Self-mockery is the foundation of an inconquerable ego, but don't deprecate yourself. If you mean it, you're the best. You should know that by now. All you have to be ashamed of is selling yourself short. Cultivate your imperfections, find the fatal flaw, use it to kill yourself in every sense except the physical sense, and then transform, reinvent yourself. Come back, david Bowie, it. Let one of your other multitudes that you contain take over as speaker of the house for a hot minute. See what happens. It's anarchy. It's fun. It's a pool party, big flotation device that looks like a donut and sprinkles on it. It's good times.
Emerson Dameron:Radiate compassion through your creative work. Create to connect, express the unseen essence, say what can't be said, see what cannot be seen, synesthetically navigate paradoxes. It's always both. Life is poetry. Immerse yourself in the present moment. This, right here, is all we get Adaptability and spontaneity born of skill. If you got that, then you're swinging it at full potency. If you are stillness in motion, wizard of Wu Wei, putting the Mac hand down in the spaces between the breaths, you can MacGyver your way out of hell and you will save us all, which is good news.
Emerson Dameron:Somebody's gonna do it quickly. Let's get this party started. You better work and have fun doing it. Play you may call in in the confines of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, la's number one avant-garde personal development program on K-Chung, los Angeles 1630 am Kchungradioorg the only good podcast, medicated-minutescom. If there was another good podcast, it might be Future Fossils hosted by Michael Garfield, who is our very good giving and game special guest on the show this evening. Everything else is by me, emerson Dameron, the writer, director, producer and star of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, who is solely responsible for its content. I love you personally. Levity saves lives.
