Pick Red, Green, or Blue and Don’t Panic

Pick a color and don’t overthink it. Red, green, or blue turns into a three-card tarot pull that feels uncomfortably specific, not because the cards are magic, but because you are paying attention. I start with a blunt pep talk about self-belief and the fear of your own power, then move straight into a tarot reading format that gives you something rare in the self-improvement world: a clear prompt to act, not just reflect.

For Group A, we talk about the spark of a new project and why execution beats inspiration every time, plus the underrated skill of finding the right partner and letting go of lone-genius mythology. Group B brings the heavy machinery: Wheel of Fortune, Death, and Judgment as a map for real life transitions, endings, and the moment you finally decide what you’re doing next. Group C is the anxiety arc, moving from the Magician’s agency to the Nine of Swords, then landing on the Knight of Pentacles as the only dependable exit plan: routine, patience, and follow-through.

Then the episode opens up into avant-garde personal development storytelling: a glamorous oracle monologue about walking into obvious trouble with perfect outfit choices, a noir motel confession about desire and consequences, and a sharp rant about rumors, identity, and refusing to be emotionally reactive. We also get into meditation as a non-negotiable mental skill, plus the strange realities of writing online, search terms, and how a “data void” can turn vulnerability into impact.

If you like tarot, meditation, personal development, and narrative audio that takes risks, press play, subscribe, and share it with a friend who needs a wake-up call. What color did you pick, and which card hit hardest?

Transcript

You're Good

Emerson Dameron 0:00

Uh okay, okay, okay. Where are we? Where was the thing? Okay, okay, okay. I might do that one. That was kind of amusing to me. I get it myself. K Chung, Los Angeles, 1630 AM, K Chung Radio dot O R G. You're listening to Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program, airing each and every first Wednesday of the month at 7 o'clock p.m. Pacific, after which it becomes a new episode of the Only Good Podcast. Which, if you have to go to a website to figure out where that is, it's medicated-minutes.com. But it's it's Spotify. If you're one of the few people that doesn't use Spotify, maybe you use Apple Music or Deezer. It's there too. Check it out, but you're already doing. So don't worry about that. My name's Everson Dammer, by the way, as you likely have deduced from the name of the show. I'm known for many things, many achievements, many big ideas. I'm known to do some light mind reading. And I can tell you, you're good. You don't have to sweat it. You're looking good. You are smarter, funnier, more interesting, more cruel, more compassionate, more fascinating than you think by a country mile. I would say a city mile, because then you're gonna be in traffic and it's gonna take long to navigate. Perhaps the 405 freeway would be the best place for that mile that we're using as a metaphor and a very imperfect metric for how much cooler you are than you think you are. You have no idea. Because you're afraid of your own power. That's okay, we're gonna fix that. Don't sweat it. You don't have to worry about yourself. You got this. Think about something else. Turn your attention to matters of importance. You have my permission. You're not perfect. There's always more work to be done. Many rivers to cross, but it doesn't have to be the sole focus of your thoughts. I trust that your asshole is a wonderful place that I might like to visit sometime, but you gotta get your head out of there once in a while. Touch grass. I hate that so much, but we're gonna use it because it rhymes with just say no to ass. Welcome to the show. You are among the elect. Pay attention, but the important instructions are to follow.

Pick A Color And Commit

Emerson Dameron 2:30

We are gonna be doing three card tarot pulls, one for each of three groups. So three altogether. And when the time comes, you will know which group you are in. Pick a color: red, green, blue. Don't think too much about it. Got it? That's it. Can't change it. You're stuck with that choice. Red, you're in group A. Green, you're in group B, blue, and group C. You're now either an A, a B, or a C. Keep that in mind. You're gonna need it.

Group A: Spark, Partners, Moderation

Emerson Dameron 3:14

Alright, let's do a three-card tarot reading. First of three, you will do groups A, B, and C in alphabetical order, which just makes too much sense not to do. Group A, you have, let's see. On the left, the Ace of Wands. In the middle, the Two of Cops, and Temperance over on the right hand side. You are uh embarking on some sort of fresh project, initiative, idea, flight of fancy, short road to the commission of professional suicide. I don't know what it is. It's entirely possible that you don't know what it is, but you are up to something. Ideas are worthless. Especially now. It's always been in the execution, and that that continues to be the case. You have to risk something to win something. So in this case, it's an opportunity cost. You could be pursuing something that other people want, like health care, something of that nature. Instead, what you're doing is taking advantage of your own idea, which could be spending eight years in medical school and then lording it over everybody for the rest of your life. For a living. Regardless, it's coming into focus for you. I don't know what it is, but I think for you, you know what the Ace of Wands means. I don't have to tell you, you just have to make that leap yourself, and well, not entirely by yourself. If you think that you can pull off anything worthwhile by yourself, you are shackled to a bizarre concept of genius, which is Aristotelian in the metaphysical sense. Your genius is not one of the organs in what you think is your stomach that actually is not. It's usually you're talking about your intestines. The worst stomach pain I had of my life was when my pancreas exploded. That has nothing to do with my stomach. Well, it does, because it filters the alcohol that I was putting into my stomach. So my stomach was in on it. We're gonna have a talk about that belly. I understand things that I didn't before. It's coming into focus for me, as it is for you, this initiative that you're working on. But you can't do it alone, and the belief that you are special, and especially the attachment to the care and feeding of that belief, will hold you back in anything worth pursuing. You're gonna need someone on your side, like Morrissey said, the most disappointing person alive. I don't know if that's true. The most disappointing person I've heard of, who's a celebrity. I will always love the Smiths. The entire purpose of consuming art is separating the art from the artist. It's at best, the artist is giving you a gift, and I think in Morrissey's case, you're getting the best of him, but then it's yours. However that affects you. I have no idea if you are hearing reel around the fountain the way that I do. I kinda hope you are. If you're not, you're missing out. But maybe I'm missing out. Maybe you've got a better interpretation. But if we have different interpretations, then that's also cool because when we put those together, we get a result that is, if not better than the sum of their parts, then at least interesting and more likely to be something that no one has seen lately. It's nothing new under the sun, but it's it's one of the less well-known things under the sun. And that partnership is happening right now. The opportunity for that partnership is happening right now as we speak. So look around and see who is roughly aligned with you or complimentary. You're looking for a partner in whatever this idea is. I was gonna say not a romantic partner, but maybe that's what you're pursuing. And in that case, it's fine. And it's also great in other cases. If it's somebody and you're banging, you don't have to be partners forever. You could have a great six months that will not turn into a miserable eight years. So, temperance, as a matter of fact, temperance is relevant here. Think about it. Moderation, percolation, integration of the percolation. Don't rush this. Take time, look at it from the angles above the angles above the angles. You don't have to make an extreme choice. You're not PETA, try to get attention. Think about it, feel your feelings about it, let it come to you, then forget about that and go play mini golf by yourself, and then come back and if it's still there, great. If not, butterflies are free. Figure out what's gonna work. So a new opportunity or new impulse, a new winging of some kind is presenting itself to you. Probably already has. The partnership that's gonna make it happen. Is there if you're able and willing to see it, and moderation is advised in all things, including moderation, extremity in moderation. This has been your three-card tarot poll, group A. Congratulations, or I'm sorry that happened.

Group B: Change, Endings, Reckoning

Emerson Dameron 9:16

Death in the middle, which you know by now is not bad, or at least not bad, like the tower is bad, and judgment over there on the right, which seems appropriate somehow. Wheel of fortune means that a shift in your circumstances, in your tectonic plates of your life, is happening, and it's happening to you, and it's mostly outside of your control. So this is the landslide brought you down, or signs are pointing to yes. Signs are pointing to yes, and this is bigger than you understand, and so much better than your tiny, shriveled brain is able to understand. Your big, robust heart is what matters. So don't take that personally. Don't take anything I say personally. I don't want to take responsibility for it, but I do want to say it, even though I don't think you necessarily agree with me. I'm not one of those people who assumes that everyone agrees with me, and I'm just the only one brave enough to say it in my bunker somewhere in I'm not gonna tell you whether it's Montana or Idaho. I'm flexing my muscles right now, MF. Try me. Something's happening, something's changing, change in status, change in conditions. Death is happening right now, and always was and always will be. Death represents something ending, wrapping up, maybe after a long struggle with irrelevance, or something is being abruptly cut off. Like your electricity when you don't pay the bills, or a tree falls somewhere, or someone drives recklessly for whatever reason. Don't drink and drive. It's not worth getting a DUI. I don't understand the people who get multiple DUIs. I got one and that straightened me out. It was in Georgia, and I think an actual book was thrown at me in court. The bailiff had a book. It was an abridged book of Mormon, but it was hardcover. And yeah, that hurt. More than the weekend in jail, more than the exorbitant fine. I haven't adjusted it for inflation, so I'm not gonna say it because you'll think it's a pittance, because everything is gonna get more expensive forever, at least until we start jacking these fools and taking it back. And that could be death, the literal death of the masters of the world. But it usually means things are drawing to a close with no pat moralist conclusion, because that ain't how it works. But sometimes there's an end, or if not, you can create a grieve it and leave it ceremony. That can be really powerful. The psycho magic flavored approach to this, which is to create some physical copy of it, if if such a thing does not already exist, and then destroy it in a way that walks the line between the sacred and the profane. Death is something ending. End of a chapter, end of the book, end of your dignity if somebody throws a book at your head, and especially if it hits, but really either way, I'm telling you, don't get in that situation. I know you're gonna drive drunk anyway, but that's one of the few ill-advised, self-destructively candid things that I would not advise you to do. And there is the judgment. That's it's a little bit what it sounds like. There's no E in the middle. There's only one E in judgment. Except I think if you're in the old world, there are certain places that do it. And I don't think it's better one way or the other. I learned it because the judgment night soundtrack was a very big part of my high school years. I know right now exactly what the cover looks like. It includes the correct American spelling of judgment, which is J is in Jack, U as in Udemy, D as in Dickensian, G as in G Funk, and then no E. We're right onto the mint, M-E-N-T, judgment, signals, evaluation, looking at outcomes, the metrics, means testing, all those little things that make the world so much better and make liberals feel good about themselves because they're doing stuff that might have made some kind of difference in the 70s, which is where they are stuck. 1972. The pummeling of George McGovern is what created the triangulist suck-ups that are now considered the left wing of American politics, because that's just where we are right now. Scandinavian socialism would be a centrist position anywhere else. I'm an anarchist, but I would say anarchy tomorrow. You know what? You can't schedule an anarchy. Let's just say Scandinavian type socialism today, and then anarchy when we feel like it, and you won't know. It will be a reckoning, a judgment, if you will. I won't, but you can if you want to. A reckoning, a realization, an epiphany, a decisive moment of making a decision that will then in turn clarify what comes next, which could be descent of a line of dominoes. It could be nothing. See for yourself. Spin that wheel.

Group C: Anxiety And Steady Effort

Emerson Dameron 15:16

Oh, it's looking good. The magician on the left hand side. That means the duchy that has been passed to you already has been magical. The nine of swords in the middle, not so great, but it's not too late. On the right hand side, that which is yet to be, we have the Knight of Pentacles. Starting from the beginning, I love the magician, the wizard, which, whatever you want to be, archetype, is all about competent chaos and agency. Not being so afraid of your own power that you don't want to accept that it's real, just scared enough to take it seriously. I was a huge fan of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I started with the Disney version. There are a lot of other versions out there. There are things every American young person should be required to do or highly pressured to do. I don't know how this works. Kids are okay to compel because they're idiots and they don't know what they're doing. And if you let them be free and self-sufficient, they're probably gonna get into something bad or something sticky at least and disgusting, because they're little petri dishes. Almost definitely they are going to hate you pretty soon. You've got a long way to fall off that pedestal. And if you're throwing money at them, I hope that helps. I don't think it will. Here are things I believe every American young person should be required to do. Americans should, A, work a service job. The worse the better. Fast food. I think there should be less fast food, but I think everyone should have to work. I'm sure we can find other things that are menial, that are public-facing, especially things that are largely dependent on tips. Everybody should know how that feels. This country would run so much differently overnight if everyone had to dip the fries in whatever the hell that is. For a living, three more things. You gotta do them all, but that's all you gotta do. Take an improv class. Did wonders for my social skills, brought me right out of my shell. Particularly the level two improv class that I took at what was then called IO Chicago with Susan Messing, one of the best teachers I ever had. It changed my life like a few other things, and the other things that changed my life were horrible. So that one gets a special place of honor. Number two, learn a language, preferably one that's useful, like Spanish, Arabic, and so on. I learned Latin, which has the power of getting me laid, except I didn't really need any more of that. Quite the opposite. A lot of women are throwing themselves at me already, and I have to delegate most of them now. Moving on. Number three. Watch Fantasia. Go ahead and watch the Disney version. It's a people's guide to classical music, and it is so much else. That is only a molecule of a smidge of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent what Fantasia is about. Do those three things, and you could spend the rest of the day watching people die on yourself because you've earned it. Maybe we won't tell the kids that we're just testing them. This is an experiment, not unlike the completely unethical mid-century experiments that established a lot of our unknown nodes, the assumptions that are so pervasive that we rarely recognize that they're there. You're already a magician, you got the magic in you. Then what's going on right now with the Nine of Swords? There's some free-floating anxiety, or it could be sinking you, but it's happening. There's worry, there's psychological distress. I hate that. I really do. I wish I could save you from it. What I'd prefer is to see you deal with it as you do, because that could be entertaining for me. Unfortunately, for anyone who enjoys being a spectator, a consumer of these spectacles associated with the Nine of Swords. Sometimes I would say it's more probable in your case that this is an internal struggle session that's going on. There's been a little mix-up as some organs are slugging it out. The genius has left the body because that's what ignorance does. Think about it. In response to pain, there's some of that going on right now. And I've got good news and bad news. Card number three says there's a way out of this around it through it underneath. Perhaps you get a helicopter and do it that way, but it has to be steady, methodical, grinded out effort. Your friends here are routine patience, whatever equanimity you can scare up, and follow through, commitment, keeping the commitment so that you trust yourself to continue to keep the commitment. And then you wake up one morning and you notice it's keeping itself, which is a conscious competence. Looks like you made it, but it took a while and it took work. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. You're still gonna have the nine swords. Nine-inch nails, we call them, sticking it to you. So hang tough and keep listening, because we'll have more guidance on Emerson Dameron's medicated minutes.

Helena the Brit: The Priestess and the Fool

Helena Mayfair 21:18

That is my gift, my curse, and my stock in trade. At St. Catherine's, while the other girls were learning lacrosse and emotional repression. I was sitting cross-legged in the locked music room at midnight, wearing a tiny black cocktail dress under my school blazer, and listening to Duran Duran through contraband headphones, convinced Simon LeBon was communicating ancient mysteries directly into my nervous system. Everyone said I was being dramatic. Everyone was wrong, or boring, often the same thing. There is beneath my frivolity a chamber, not a heart, exactly. Heavens know I had mine laminated after the second failed novelist. But a velvet-swaddled hidden library, where all my secrets sit upright like duchesses at a bad luncheon. I know which man will ruin me before he kisses my hand. I know which party will end in sirens, which friendship will curdle, which compliment contains a knife. I can read silence the way other women read Tatler. Everyone knows that, darling, at least everyone who matters. And yet, with all this knowledge, this damp, moonlit, horrifyingly accurate little oracle inside me, I still climb into the car. That is the divine joke, isn't it? To see the cliff edge in perfect detail and think, how cinematic. To hear the universe whisper, Helena perhaps don't follow the Serbian conceptual artist into the abandoned conservatory, and respond, but he owns first editions and has sad wrists. Wisdom is all very well, but it rarely has cheekbones. Last winter I stood at the threshold of a townhouse in Belgravia, snow falling like dandruff from God's most expensive coat. Inside, candlelight, menace, a chaise long, apparently upholstered in betrayal, and a man named Alistair who said he collected medieval devotional objects and emotionally difficult women. I knew, instantly, that he was dangerous in the most tedious possible way. Privately educated, publicly wounded, erotically over-reliant on metaphors involving sacrifice. My inner library slammed every door at once. Naturally, I went in. I wore black satin, patent heels, my grandmother's pearls, and an expression of luminous idiocy. Not stupidity, you understand. Innocence weaponized into performance. A girl stepping blithely into annihilation because annihilation had excellent lighting and a drinks tray. He poured champagne. I accepted. He said, You seem untouched by fear. I merely laughed into my flute. Darling, I am entirely composed of fear. I simply accessorize it beautifully. By midnight he was explaining my psyche to me using yung, which is always when a woman should leave. By one I was barefoot in his mirrored drawing room, spinning beneath a chandelier shaped like a nervous breakdown, feeling something ancient open behind my ribs. Not love. God no. Something older. The terrible pleasure of beginning again with no evidence I had learned a thing. Perhaps that is my gift. I know the abyss intimately, and still arrive overdressed. I am the secret and the stumble, the locked door, and the girl who trips through it laughing. I carry prophecy in one hand and a bottle of Prosecco in the other, and somehow, against all available data, I call this balance. Was I ruined? Briefly, was I enlightened? Improbably. Did I look marvelous? Darling, I looked inevitable.

The Same Rented Center of the Universe

Emerson Dameron 26:25

I used to know how to wear a suit, but somewhere along the line I forgot why. She came in out of the rain like the rain had sent her. Twenty-four, maybe, wet hair, thin sweater, doing things a man my age is supposed to pretend not to see. She took the stool to down and ordered a vodka gimlin like she was doing the man a favor. We didn't swap names. We watched the storm beat the parking lot through the window nobody'd watch since the Nixon administration. Every room in this place feels like it charges by the hour, she said. To the glass, not to me. Especially the ones with Bibles in the drawers. She turned, looked at me the way you look at a wreck. You staying here? 214. 207 for now. We blame the weather, the power flickering, the ice machine dying loud in the hall. We blamed everything except the things sitting in the two feet of air between us. And we were smart enough not to name that. Naming it would have made it smaller than it was. The lounge closed. It seemed to take a hundred years to get down that hallway. Her door came first. She didn't ask me in. I didn't wait to be asked. The lock clicked behind us like a judgment call. We kissed like people who'd already rehearsed their apologies. My hands stayed on her waist past the point of any plausible deniability. Hers went under my jacket like she was frisking me for a pulse. She pulled back, mouth red, blue eyes clear as the horizon after a thunder shower. This is a mistake, she said. I know it is, baby. She kissed me anyway. Her name was Kyenite, but she sometimes went by Ruby. I found that out later, the way you find out the caliber after you've been shot. We tried to quit. I'll say that for us, in the way trying can be the opposite of doing. I deleted her number after the first time. She blocked mine after the second. It held four days. Then an elevator stalled with her in it for 40 minutes, and when the doors opened, her phone showed three missed calls from a number she'd sworn she didn't know anymore. Mine, my darling. We met in my car that night because neither of us trusted the rooms anymore. She climbed in, still wearing her work badge. I didn't ask what she did. She didn't ask why my hands shook, why eat a cigarette I don't smoke. Third time was the backseat, another storm, her knees on either side of me, skirts shoved up, my mouth on her throat while she whispered, we shouldn't, and moved like we were making a getaway. I finished with my face against her collarbone, saying her name like it proved I was still alive. Maybe it did, maybe that was the problem. She stayed on my lap after, forehead to mine. You think I don't know what this is? she said. I think you know exactly what this is. She smiled against my mouth. Then quit acting like you're the only one hanging on to your ego. The world started keeping score. Motel signs stuttered when we drove by. Strangers at gas pumps looked a beat too long. We ducked into the church basement during a flash flood once. Damp carpet, old hymnals, and ended up against the wall anyway. My hand over her mouth, her eyes open the whole time. God watched. God didn't say anything. God never does until the bill comes. Every goodbye was foreplay. Every never again was a reservation. The appointment was in the apartment that was in a complex built during a boom nobody remembers because all it contained was false hope. Unit 4B, some previous tenant had put mirrors on three walls to make the place look bigger. All they did was make it harder to hide. Kyanite was inside when I got there. She had a key because she'd asked for one and somebody had said yes. Sodium light came through the blinds and thin orange bars like you weren't supposed to leave. She didn't say hello. She crossed the floor, took my face in both hands, and kissed me like she was digging for the version of me that could still walk away. She didn't find him. He'd left no trace. Clothes came off in pieces, her sweater on a chair that belonged to nobody, my shirt on the floor between the couch and the biggest mirror. I pushed her skirt up and set her on the narrow table against the glass. Her legs went around me without a second's debate. The mirrors multiplied us. Every angle told the same story a different way. My rough hands on her smooth skin, her back arching, my face wearing a confession I couldn't have signed sober. She watched me in the reflection over my shoulder. Is this what you wanted? Low voice. Proof you can still make somebody feel it? I drove into her harder. She gasped and kept talking. She always kept talking. Or is it punishment for the girls you didn't ruin gently enough the first time around? I kissed her to shut her up. She bit my lip and kept going. Or do you need to just feel young one more time before your body finishes forgetting how? I answered the only way I had left. She came with her forehead against the cold glass, watching herself break. I followed with my face in her neck and one hand flat on the mirror, holding the whole cheap spinning world still for about four seconds. That's the most it ever gave me. Four seconds. Afterward, we stayed there breathing, and every mirror in the room stared back. Neither of us blinked first. That should have told me everything. Morning came in through the blinds like a process server. The place looked worse in the daylight. Every smudge on the glass, every line on my face, kyanite's makeup on my skin like secret code, evidence disguised as graffiti. We dressed without saying much. There wasn't much left to say. We hadn't already said better with the lights off. She found her sweater. I found my watch on the floor, still running. Watches don't care. At the door she stopped, keys in her fist. We're not doing this again, I said. I know. She stepped close and laid two fingers on the side of my face, checking whether the damage was permanent. It was. We both knew it was. Same room next week? That was my out. I should have said no. I'd been shooting my whole life. The bluebird, 214. They always seemed to have it open. Kayanite nodded once and was gone. I stood there another 20 minutes with all the versions of myself, the mirrors had collected. Every one of them fresh off a promise. Every one of them born a liar. The room smelled like Kayanite's perfume and my crispy regret. And by then I couldn't have told you which was which. Outside, traffic was headed somewhere that still made sense to someone. Inside, gravity went on doing the only job it knows, dragging two people who should have known better back to the same rented center of the earth. We never called it love. We didn't have to. It never explained itself, and the next room was already waiting. Three things about gravity. It's got terrible taste, it always pays cash, and it knows how to shut you up.

Rumors, Identity, And Owning Desire

Emerson Dameron 33:24

Surround me every day. It makes it hard to understand the current state of play. Yeah, there are a lot of rumors circulating about me. Myths, false ideas. Some of them are true. You don't know which ones. I'm gonna tell you. I'm gonna bring you into my back office. Let you know a little bit of how things work around here. One of the rumors that is most prevalent, as I understand, you were gonna talk about my business behind my back, and there's nothing I can do about it to discourage them. Wait till I show up. That symposium is gonna go a lot better if the world's leading expert, undisputed on the life and times and many, many affairs of Emerson Pendamar and the third is not only in attendance, but on the dais, talking about what I know, which is me. Know myself a little bit better every day. I've put in the man hours. I've even done some of the legwork. I've done walk and talks with myself. I miss that. I'm scared to go outside. That's caused the rumors to spread, and they certainly look infected, some of them. One of the biggest rumors that I was gonna talk about a minute ago until I got distracted because something more interesting came up, is that I put these rumors in circulation to flood the zone, to muddy the waters, to throw chum, to be brutal and yet tragically predictable sharks out there. You wanna be sharks. You wanna be a sociopath. You're smart enough to know that the world is optimized for sociopaths, and you think that you're smart enough to be one, you got the wrong idea, and you're gonna get eaten alive by the genuine article when you encounter real sharks. You're a baby shark. You're a left shark. You can't dance. Get out of here. I do start a lot of those rumors. I've started a few true ones. Truth be told, if I'm being honest with you, and there's no reason not to. It's you can see right through me. And I don't like lying. It's too much work. I don't like doing work that I don't want to do. It doesn't feel like play. It's not fun. I turn toward pleasure. Any other living creature? Do I turn toward sexual pleasure? Sure, my shlong does. It's like a divining rod for sexual pleasure. I put in the man hours where I can chop a boom back with the thighs on my shoulders. God damn, you can't fake that kind of performance. As on some drugs, I wouldn't call them performance enhancing. They were enhancing my experience. That's what I care about. That's another rumor that circulates that might have a ring of truth to it, but you're not getting a ring, not out of me. I can't say I'm gay because I've never slept with a man in a sexual way. Sometimes just sleeping with another person is more intimate. Well, that's a nice thing that you say to make people feel good about your relationship. I've said those things. There's no manipulation in your relationship. What kind of relationship is it? You need to get a better relationship if somebody wants to make you feel good. If they're gonna use that to their own advantage, that could be a win-win. Stop being so zero-sum playa. Can't say I'm gay, I can't say I'm not, because I haven't met all the men. I can't say I'm not a necrophile. There have been many people alive throughout the sweep of human history. Most of them are currently corpses. Have I seen them all? No. Is it theoretically even worth considering that I ever would? Probably not. If I saw every corpse except for one, that corpse could be the kilf that would turn everything around and make me a necrophile. Yeah, I couldn't resist. Maybe somebody wields their corpse to me so I can have my way with it. Conclude, one way or another, what's really going on. In terms of my theoretical Schrdinger's necrophilia. I don't practice. I have no interest in being one. I like living people. Living people are the true gods. The dead and the immortal, relatively speaking, fossilized. That's what I don't like is a stiff under me. I like to feel you squarm with pleasure, of course. Always. Lots of pleasure. You can't deny it. I feel bad about it later. That's its own kind of pleasure. You know that better than anyone. Like I know you better than you know yourself. That's why I can tear it up. That's why you beg me to do it. Even though you don't like me very much, you love that work you put in. I wreck shop. Hell yeah.

Doing What You Want Without Apologies

Emerson Dameron 39:21

It starts when you do a naughty thing. Something a little bit off-color, not salacious, we're not going over the uh borderline into perversity to see it, but you make yourself giggle a little bit. It's a funny story. And uh as you go on, you do some naughty things, and then maybe an evil thing or two. Pretty soon you're doing catastrophic things. Uh you've entered the world uh deviance and uh anarchy. And sexy sexy peachy. Strawberry eggplant time. Oh yeah. And it's undeniably alluring. You can share this with people, but we're still pretty shallow this. The arousal scares of the power that it brings. You can keep it to yourself. Uh you can be uh somewhat brazen about it if you find the right place. You can get into the clubs, the back rooms, the underground, the speakeasies, and you meet your people. You might meet a someone or someone's who are just right on your wavelength, captivating, charming, funny, deep, and passionate. And they can be rowdy and salacious, perverse, altogether delightful. And now you've found the place for this. I don't know how fast the merry-go-around goes is a metaphor. Uh it's the earth spinning around. I know time is a circle and it's everything happens over and over again. So the idea is you're you should be compelled to make the best of things. Uh, all the things, whether you think they're good or bad. Forego moral judgments. Uh, don't do what other people want you to do, because maybe, you know, you get them off your back right now, but then you have to do it over and over and over again, and that's gonna suck. So basically live like you mean it. Like, what what would you do if your life depended on it? What would you do if you have to live with it forever? You have to do this again and again and again. What would you do um that would be worth doing again and again and again? Uh how can you turn a bad experience into something that would be worth doing again and again and again? I don't think that's how time works. Uh I think time is an evolution. I see what he's going for. You gotta live like you mean it. Don't take any crap. That's played out. Don't live like you're doing it for somebody else. You know, you don't need bosses of your life. You get them, but uh you you should deny those people uh whatever pleasure they get. I don't know if they're getting pleasure or not. Whatever it is that makes them want to run your business, just take that away. That'll be fun. And you could take it away again and again and again, and uh spend a lot of time having sex. I'm always regretful of the opportunities to pound it out that I passed up back in the day, and I really would regret it if I found out that I would get to do it over again. I kind of do jerking off, and sometimes I get to have sex that I didn't really have in real life. Or somebody else gets to have it. A lot of times I do it by proxies, because then I can do anything I want and not feel too bad about it. I've got a life. You got nothing on me. Everyone to see. I want you to be completely debased. Because it's fun for me. I like knocking you off a pedestal. I hate that I put you there. I have to bring you way down. After a while, maybe I'll get tired of that or I'll start feeling sorry for you because I really. You have a heart of gold, but maybe you'll like it. I hope so. You might as well. Amorfate. Some comedian I want to say it was on Dr. Kat's professional therapist's underappreciated 90s Comedy Central cartoon show. First John Benjamin material that I was aware of. Sarah Silverman's sister was the receptionist, so I kinda had a crush on as much as I can for a cartoon character without being too self-conscious about it. And the patients were comedians. And I wanna say it was on the show that I saw a comedian mention that it is impossible to look manly while drinking through a straw. Got in a big fight. Yeah, you should have seen the other guy. And I don't know that I've seen James Bond suck on a straw. I know he likes his martines shaken and not stirred. So sturdy sticks, I suppose, are out as well. There's no need for them. He does something else with them. I don't know, I don't take shame. Maybe they could be if they're plastic straws and you're drinking through them for purposes of fighting up the environment. Because that sucks like rolling coal. You love watching turtles suffer and die, or just knowing that it's happening and you caused it. Maybe that's how you could get a straw drinking session past the goalie. If that is something you wanna do, the manly thing is to do whatever the fuck you want. If you want to drink through a straw, you wanna carry a poogle around in a papoose to be a pushover. And that's what you want, you go for it. You got one life, dude.

Meditation, Ego Death, And Writing Online

Emerson Dameron 46:21

I was at a program called Super Saturdays, uh, for what were then called academically gifted kids. Those of us who just couldn't get enough learning would get rides up to Asheville and take more classes. And I took one that had a kind of self-improvement, personal development focus. I wish I could remember more about it. I was obviously influenced by it. That field is like my number one area of fascination, but they taught us a basic meditation practice and presented it framed as here is a way to get anything that you want. Which, you know, I don't know if that's entirely accurate. Uh, it certainly got me excited about it. It's a way to stop wanting things. So maybe they were being cute, though. A little bit of a coyote trickster in there. I certainly had a different view of things after I smoked the buffo the last time. That was a bad name to say where I don't want to dime anyone out inadvertently. I was gone. I lost myself. Everything just went into nothingness, and I don't remember if I was screaming. I remember they was offered another dose and I turned it down because I I had peaked. It was scary, but only momentarily, you know, it was more intense, overwhelming. There was no one there to be scared. That person was thoroughly overwhelmed by the uh undeniable reality of his own non-existence, as though it had always been thus. Closer to God, maybe? One of the reasons that there's so many egomaniacs in the buffo world is that when you have the realization that there's no distinction between yourself and God, and then come back and behave as though you are God, it creates some problems for you and those around you. You've had the experience of not existing, you've had your fucking head blown open by smoking the toad, you've become a friend of the toad. Yeah, you've ridden it, you've indulged in the magic of Mr. Toad's wild ride, and hopefully you learn to be a friend and an ally to the toad and become more toad-like yourself. That's really the the ultimate goal. My second big viral piece on Medium. The first one I had was about alcoholism. There's five things I miss about alcoholism. I just fessed up. I'd stopped drinking and I missed it. I missed the the fun. I had not learned any new ways to have fun, and I was frustrated with that. I wrote a piece about it, it did really well. I think it was number one on medium, so I had some followers after that. The next one I wrote was called The Best Way to Kill Yourself. The idea was crib from Carl Jun. The best way to kill yourself is not to kill yourself physically, but just to kill everything about yourself. Except for the part that's physically alive. And it was stream of consciousness. It wasn't good, it wasn't edited. The other one I workshopped with Ao, one of the biggest guys on Medium. This one was just totally from the gut. I didn't think it was gonna do anything, but I discovered a data void inadvertently. A data void is something that a lot of people Google, but there's not a lot of good information about it. So if you know what you're doing and you know where the data voids are, you can really exploit that. And just put, you know, whatever you want people to find, and a lot of people are gonna stumble into it, and that's what happened. There'd you have tons of people were Googling the phrase best way to kill yourself. I would assume for the reasons one would expect, and they found my piece, the reactions were mixed. I had a couple of people reach out to me and say that it saved their lives, so I can't complain about that, and I wouldn't take that away from them. I had other people tell me I should kill myself. It was useless and they were looking for a painless way to die, and I just wasted their time. Eventually I turned off the comments, because I really can't handle much. At the time, I was really manate. It was a little too much. John Benjamin material that I was aware of. Sarah Silverman's sister was the receptionist, so I kinda had a crush on as much as I can for a cartoon character without being too self-conscious about it. And the patients were comedians. And I want to say it was on the show that I saw a comedian mention that it is impossible to look manly while drinking through a straw. Got in a big fight. Yeah, you should have seen the other guy. And I don't know that I've seen James Bond stuck on a straw. Uh, I know he likes his martines shaken and not stirred. So, sturry sticks, I suppose, are out as well. There's no need for 'em. He does something else with them. I don't know, I don't take shame. Maybe they could be if they're plastic straws and you're drinking through them for purposes of playing up the environment. Because that's like rolling coal. You love watching turtles suffer and die, or just knowing that it's happening and you caused it. Maybe that's how you could get a straw drinking session past the goalie. If that is something you wanna do, the manly thing is to do whatever the fuck you want. If you wanna drink through a straw, you wanna carry a poogle around and a papoose via pushover, and that's what you want, you go for it. You got one life, dude.

Rain, Motivation, And Cleaning Your Space

Emerson Dameron 52:14

Shocking nobody. We're gonna do this rain thing again. The forecast, the hourly forecast, predicts that it's gonna stop by six, let's say, and then at six it's still going strong, and they pushed it back a little bit. Now it's gonna stop around 7.15, which it doesn't. It's now maybe gonna stop at 8. That doesn't happen either. Then it does. 8.15, no rain. I look outside. I notice I can't tell if it's raining or not. Usually that means it is, but I go out to take out one piece of trash. Not enough. I gotta clean this place out. And soon. I don't gotta do anything. It will be inspirational. It'll galvanize me to have my abode looking and feeling good to be in. So I would benefit from doing that. That's why I should do it. Not because I'm forced or coerced. I will take one piece of trash out at 815. I'll notice that it's dry. It's dry, manna from heaven. I need to go for a walk. No, I don't. It's not compelled either, although I kind of want to. By that time, it's pouring rain again. And now I've got ants in my pants, and nothing to do with them.

Victimhood, Stoicism, And Emotional Control

Emerson Dameron 53:50

Up is down, left is right. We have reached the point as a society, as a species, where we're valorizing weakness. We're trying to, but doesn't really work. Everybody's trying to be the biggest victim or get the most victim points. But your victimhood is only interesting to you, and just barely. Self-pity is like crack cocaine. It's exciting at first. If you got nothing else going on in your life, it will kill you, it will embarrass you, it'll subject you to public humiliation, you will not be able to stop until you killed yourself. But then if you get some self-respect, get some dignity, get something to live for, get something to be proud of, so you don't feel sorry for yourself. You own your power, and you know who you are, and you know what you represent, and you're selfish enough that we know who you are, and we can respect you. Because if you're not a little bit selfish, you have no idea who you are. You're just trying to be liked. What do you even like or hate? What do you represent? I don't know. You're useless in a combat scenario. If a bigger schlong comes along, you're gonna go suck it. Because all you care about is bowing down to whoever's the biggest authority at the time. You're like a bitch that way. Unbitch yourself. It's important to feel your feelings so you can get control of them and manage them. Nobody else cares about your feelings. Nobody wants your vulnerability. You might say that. If you're in denial and you even have emotions, you're a threat and a danger to yourself and those around you. You gotta manage your emotions. You gotta sit with yourself. Pascal says all the problems in the world are the result of man not being able to sit alone in a room with his thoughts. You have to be able to do that. And that's why we've got meditation. It's the way men have mastered their emotions or time immemorial. It's good stuff. It's better than that. It's better than that. It's not a nice to have, it's an absolute requirement for surviving in the world, because otherwise you're gonna be reactive, you're gonna be manipulated, you're gonna be taken advantage of by everybody that comes through, and you're just gonna be looking for a bigger schong to suck because you don't even know who you are. And it's all because what you are is a slave to your emotions. Put the Mac hand down on your feelings, get control of them. Other people want to fall apart and they want you to hold space for that. Other people want to be victims. They don't want to be around anybody who's gonna out-victim them. As long as everyone's trying to be a victim or a martyr, there's a wide opening for a man who is gonna be a man and is gonna be stoic and is gonna run things, slap some asses, and smack around some people who need it. Whether they're causing problems for people that don't deserve it, or they need to get the bitch slapped out of them because they need to grow up and get past their own fetish for their own weakness. Get over that. Relax. Don't take everything so seriously. Nobody cares. And if you relax and if you zoom out, and if you get over yourself and stop making excuses for weakness, you will say challenge is opportunity. And the bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity. And as soon as you start conquering your domain and mastering your craft, everything else is gonna fall into place. If you're worried about money or getting sex or anything else, you putting the nice, fancy, luxurious, plush cart in front of that badass horse, and that's what you gotta be, that's what you gotta ride. Why this chaos? Let that bitch feel you. The way you do that, what you just said that you were gonna do, which is to get some control over your precious feelings, is to suck it up and meditate. I don't know where you got this defiant attitude about meditation. Yes. And the way you say meditation is the one-step solution, prove them wrong. You know what? If you're gonna be an asshole about it, just get down there and meditate like your hair is on fire, and in a couple of years you can say you wasted your time. You're not wasting your time. You need this. Suck it up and do it. Stop being a bitch. Get down and meditate as much as you possibly can like your life depends on it, because it fucking does. You

Sex, Relationships, And Final Sign-Off

Emerson Dameron 58:32

know this. You don't need a relationship. You don't want a relationship. You want sizzling, mind-building sex strictly for the purposes of catharsis. You're bad at relationships because they're terrible. That's what screwed up your parents enough to make you. If someone says they want your vulnerability, it's because they want to hurt you. Work on yourself until you don't care about anyone else. Casual sex is fun, cool, and casual. It's right there in the name. If it leaves you empty inside, that's the space where the misery and self-hate used to be. Give people respect, crushing dumbfounding orgasms and aftercare. Don't lie to them unless the truth destroy them because they're true idiots. Have a good time and cut your losses, or get the bitterness and disappointment over with. To be fully alive, you have to love everyone, which is the nicest way to not love anyone. Don't get in a relationship, get in a ship in the night, and catch fish, not feelings. K Chung, Los Angeles, 1630 a.m., K Chungradio.org. You have been in the throes of and enthralled to Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. Now that it's over, this episode will become an episode of the Only Good Podcast, which is available uh wherever you cop your casts or at medicated-minutes.com. I'm Emerson Damron. I love you personally. Levity saves lives.