Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes

April Is the Coolest Month

Emerson Dameron Season 3 Episode 4

CW: Lots of depressing stuff up to and including death, delusions of granduer, rhetoric free of content

Be shocked by the intensity of your feelings. Turn your pain into a fetish. Learn to torture others in ways they'll love. Try to be cool - you'll fail, but you'll learn something.  Become everything you hate and fall in love with yourself. Get to know your host, and, by extension, the most important person in the world: yourself.

Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is a production of KCHUNG.

Loops by Chris Rogers. Inspiration from Carolyn Elliot, Ernest Becker, Gail and Snell Putney, Museum of Home Video, and, most of all, you. Written, performed, produced, and created by Emerson Dameron, who is solely responsible for its content.

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Speaker 1:

You've got K-Chung Los Angeles 1630 AM, mostly in the Chinatown region of Los Angeles. But based on my experience in radio, there's also some very weird person in the middle of nowhere who just happens to get K-Chung in their backyard at a certain time of day. I almost guarantee that that person is out there and we would love to hear from them Repeatedly on a regular basis, even on our own cell phones, outside of the radio station, worldwide on the World Wide Web kchungradioorg. My name is Emerson Dameron. I am the creator and host plus writer, producer, technical consultant basically the whole deal here at Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, except for the music which is by Chris Rogers. Medicated-minutes is the website for the show. Kchungradioorg makes it all happen. Radioorg makes it all happen.

Speaker 1:

And because April is the cruelest month, on tonight's show we are going to address some dark and difficult subject matter, up to and including death. So if you don't want to hear that right now, I absolutely get it. I've not been feeling great myself lately either. You can peace out with no hard feelings. We'll catch up at some other time. But if you do decide to continue listening, please understand that I am a professional, you are an amateur and you should not do any of the things that I do at home. I do what I do for my art, which is my living. You need to calm down. Don't do anything that I do, and if you did, it was not my fault and I had nothing to do with it. Welcome to Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes.

Speaker 1:

It's springtime, which means it's time to get out for those of us lucky enough to be able to do that and mix and mingle and get to know ourselves a little better through the practice of relating with others, and I'm looking forward to this because I'm ready to mix it up. I think I'm as charming as I've ever been in my life, probably, and I live in a wonderful place with a lot going on. I think it's time and I think I'm ready. I have spent the last couple of years engaged in deep study on important topics and I think now I know a lot more about being cool, which is important. It's probably the most important social skill, and I think I'm about as cool as I'm gonna get just from reading books about being cool, which is what I've been doing for the last couple of years.

Speaker 1:

I think it's time to field test it and go out there and practice being cool. But you know it's not easy being cool. If it was, a lot more people would be doing it, and you can certainly go overboard and be prohibitively cool Cool in such a way that discourages people from taking you seriously as a potential friend or confidant or lover. You don't want to be too cool and it's easy to overshoot it. It's like pitching pennies you have to almost hit the wall, but once you bounce off of the wall, it's game over. You're disqualified for being too cool, so I'm trying to go ahead and leaven that by also being more relatable.

Speaker 1:

I think the qualities that I ruminate on about myself may be things that other people don't perceive and could possibly be strengths in disguise as weak muscles. At least, I think that's the proper mindset to have when approaching those things which, through that lens, I'm doing well. But I also have my softer side. I am human, after all, and I would really like to be seen and understood not just as an object. I'm not a piece of meat for you to salivate over. I want to be seen and understood and taken seriously, and I think becoming more relatable is a route to that. If it's just about my looks or my money or my social status, you can swipe left. I can share some of the best advice that I've ever gotten in my life, life-changing words Be yourself. I think it was originally from a candy heart I don't recall correctly, possibly a Valentine's card, but regardless, that changed my life and I took it to heart, and I don't know how transferable that is.

Speaker 1:

Advice that works for one person will not necessarily serve the needs of another. That works for one person will not necessarily serve the needs of another. What can sound like a trite platitude to the trained ear can be transformative in the right context. Be yourself is my motto, but I don't know that the fact that it works for me means that it's going to work for you. I have questions about that. So my advice to you is to modify that ever so slightly and, instead of being yourself, be more like Emerson.

Speaker 1:

You don't want to be exactly like me. That would be disorienting for me. Don't outshine the master, but I think if you can get close, you're going to have a lot fewer complaints in life. I don't like complaining. It's not dignified, and the closer you can get, I think, the easier it will be to get your complaining almost down to zero. Zero. I think that hero worship with the exception of what I just gave you that's okay. But hero worship, aside from that, is a sucker's game that only works for teenagers. But I do think that it's important to admire characteristics of other people because we emulate other people whether we want to or not. It's in our bones.

Speaker 1:

We're memetic creatures and we're gonna want what other people want, because they want it, and I don't know it makes sense if you read the books about it. But that's what we do. You're going to try to be like someone and in my case that is me. Two years from now, I think in one year, I'm going to be cooking with gas. In one year, I'm going to be cooking with gas, and two years from now, my life is going to be almost entirely unimaginable to me, right here and right now. And that's where I'm trying to go, that godlike iteration of Emerson in that dimension. But part of how I get there is by enjoying the journey. So it's absolutely crucial to love the struggle, be in the moment, love the struggle, be in the moment Because otherwise you miss it and this is all you have right here. So when I get there, where I'm going, part of that is going to be I loved every minute of that. I hated every minute of that. I hated every minute of that. I felt feelings. I was there Because that's the fuel. That's the only way any of this makes sense. That's the only way any of this makes sense, and I will be fearsome when I take my final form.

Speaker 1:

But I'm also doing alright right now, and if you're not, I can lead by example. I have a lot of things I'd like to do in a limited amount of time, so I can always use some help. There are things that I can do that other people can also do competently, and I should create opportunities for those people to make a living doing that. So I do have a couple of positions open. They're not posted anywhere, but if you know, you know. But if you know, you know. I don't put out random calls for people to get in my mix, but the right people. I will go above and beyond to sway those people to my cause. You'll be glad you knew me. I'm reliant on Google products to an embarrassing degree in terms of organizing my information.

Speaker 1:

I'm a digital hoarder, making occasional attempts to kind of declare bankruptcy and delete all of my emails and try to get my files organized. Progress on getting out of that hole has been incremental. I still have a lot of stuff on my Google Drive and it's so easy to find information in there just by searching that it's unrealistic to think that that has not had a negative effect on my recall having that much help. But there are things that I remember without effort. I remember all the hidden passageways and make-out spots and rotating bookshelves in my memory palace. And I remember the date of my birthday, in part because it's the holiest day on the calendar for me, but also, coincidentally, it's the day in which the action takes place in Ulysses by James Joyce, a book that I reread for pleasure at least once a year, along with the.

Speaker 1:

Art of War, the Lionel Giles translation please. I've been learning a lot, I've been growing a lot, I've been changing inside and there's a lot that I could teach you, but some things you just need to learn by yourself. I believe it's better to think your way out of blind faith than to have all of the information given to you ahead of the game. That's cheating in my mind, or maybe you just need to be spanked and put to bed.

Speaker 2:

I create my own reality. Therefore, everything bad that happens is my fault. I'm unhappy because I'm weak and I'll never be strong enough to change that. That's just the way it is. It's too bad. I'm too weak to accept it. I know myself well enough to know that others will reject me when they get to know me. Therefore, I'll shut them out. Know me Therefore, I'll shut them out.

Speaker 2:

When I try to connect with others, I will do so in ways that are pretty much guaranteed to fail. I'll look back on all the experiences of my life and I'll realize that the good experiences were over too quickly and really weren't that good, and the bad ones were utterly ruinous. When someone likes me, I'll freak out and act anxious and weird until they give up. I will adopt pathetic self-soothing behaviors, such as wearing ugly, loose-fitting clothes or listening to planetarium music for hours on repeat, or staging my mediocre one-act plays with cast of stuffed animals in an attempt to offset my pulverizing loneliness. I'll indulge my eccentricities until I become totally unreachable. Then I'll get confused when people think I'm a weirdo and don't want to sleep with me. When someone lashes out at me in rage, I will freeze. I will stand there silent and rigid and take it because this is what I expected, this is what I deserve.

Speaker 2:

I will stew in my anger and resentment until I lash out at someone. It won't be the person who lashed out at me, or even someone who treated me poorly. It will be a random bystander who didn't do anything to justify my outburst. When I lash out at this person, I'll insult them in ways that are really petty and mean, ways that are revealing, indicative of some deeply screwed up aspects of my value system and how I see the world. Then, when I've had some time to cool off and reflect, I will experience intense shame and frantically try to walk it back. I will try to do too much. I will half-ass most of it. I will wonder why I don't feel as successful as I thought I should by this time in my life.

Speaker 2:

I'll try to protect myself by vamping, blustering and pretending to be someone much tougher and cooler than I am. Then, when I can't take the tension anymore, I'll burn it all up in an explosion of self-destructive candor. I won't trust any of my feelings. The things that scare me aren't that big a deal. The things I'm angry at others about are really my own problems. I can't really be sad if I'm physically incapable of crying. It's all self-deception.

Speaker 2:

But I'll make an exception for depression. Depression is real. It's reliable. It's the gospel truth. I feel bad because I deserve to feel bad. I'll take comfort in my depression. It's safe. It keeps me off the streets. It keeps me from making a fool of myself. I'll wallow in self-pity. I'll convince myself that my pain is special. I wouldn't be special without it. The truth hurts. The more it hurts, the more true it is. God loves winners. God smiles when winners win and laughs when losers lose. God is laughing at me because I'm a loser. People don't like me because people can smell a loser. They are disgusted, repulsed. They avoid me because it's part of their survival instinct, like moving away from a rotting animal carcass. I will never write that perfect one-act play I keep promising myself, but I'll constantly come up with novel, creative and innovative ways to screw up my life.

Speaker 1:

As the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung tried to tell us, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate. I don't know about you, but that's heavy for me. I think the optimal way for me to understand a lot of the thinking that gets wrapped up in my emotions is psychological projection. I hate in others what I fail to accept in my own psyche, what I fail to accept in my own psyche. I'm mostly unaware of things for which I have no context, unless something is true in some way for me. It can't hurt me because I don't believe in it. So it could be so powerful that I have to adjust my belief system in order to accept it. But if that doesn't happen, it's not happening to me in my world, my world, and it gives me pause to consider that idea, because I hate lots of things and some people. Some of the time it varies. I can realistically describe my feelings most of the time as mixed, but it's a trip to consider that everything you despise is within you Right now and you can't wish it away. And pretending that it's not there may be working for you, but maybe not as well as it used to, or not well enough.

Speaker 1:

I know I had to reconfigure my thinking around this idea when I encountered it, which I was fortunate to do in high school, thanks to a very strange speech and debate teacher who somehow managed to do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted in his classes and get away with it.

Speaker 1:

I don't know if people didn't know about it or they didn't care, or maybe recognized his genius. He seemed out of place in the rural mountain community that I grew up in. He lent me a book called the Adjusted American. Actually, the whole class read the book. He Xeroxed it. He made enough physical copies on paper for the whole class on a Xerox machine and then passed them out, presumably at no small expense. That school was on a shoestring budget even then, and I'm glad he did, because it's a fascinating book. I don't know why I don't hear about it more often. The basic idea is you're miserable because there's stuff in your vicinity that you think is making you miserable, and it will continue to do that until you can accept that the stuff that's making you miserable is inside of you, and then things can get better.

Speaker 1:

If not, right away, then over the long term, you'd be surprised how fast the results start coming when they start. Be surprised how fast the results start coming when they start. It's destabilizing because it's obviously important for us to believe that we're good people. Otherwise it would be challenging to get through the day and I know what that's like and it's anxiety and depression and it's identified in different ways depending on how it presents. That's the demon and we're all bedeviled in our own ways and the devils are inside. The incantations are coming from inside the house. There's a ceremony going on in the basement right now with open flames, but it's okay, you don't have to be concerned about it.

Speaker 1:

But if you are, I think it's worth considering as an experiment why that stuff is there. Was it useful at some point and now it's not? Did you grow out of it? Was it something that went sideways when you experienced shame around that, perhaps condemnation for an authority figure? And now it's just there and in a lot of pain, in a lot of pain, and it can't. It can't unblock that, unless you embrace that, comfort it. If you're comfortable with that and even consider maybe I'm getting off on this in some way, that's not fully conscious and that's not something I can really work with, but and thus not something I can really work with. But I'm bringing all this misery into my life and it's obviously serving some purpose, but not the bad events themselves, but the interpretation is causing a lot of suffering.

Speaker 1:

But you want to believe that you're a good person, and part of that is humility, and part of that is humility you make yourself small to invite help from adult caregivers, but after a while nobody cares.

Speaker 1:

But you keep doing it because you care and you want to think that you're a good person. And that's what good people do. They shrink, they are afraid of their own strength and what might happen if they started to get the things that they ostensibly want. Is that something you can handle? Is that something the world can handle? On some deep level, you understand your own power and that's why it's scary. It should be in a way Maybe not as much as it feels, not in the way that we interpret it.

Speaker 1:

You're screwing up your life so hard that it makes me wonder if you're getting off on it, and I would say that's not a bad thing at all. I think we're all doing that, at least subconsciously. So why not acknowledge that? That's what's going on? Accept, embrace, love your own sickness, bring it in, give it a pound, enjoy it. If there's shame around it, that's because you've got a sick and dirty mind and you should be ashamed of yourself. But you know, don't bother, you don't have to be ashamed of that. Just get into it, feel it, feel the pleasure and the pain and feel them bleed together into one another and just get everything out of it that you need and then let it go. Get bored of that particular sickness. Get bored of that particular sickness. Go find some new and terrible ways to be sick.

Speaker 1:

If you want to get deeper into this, there's a book by Carolyn Elliott called Existential Kink. That is one of the first interesting self-help models that I've encountered in quite a while. She is doing something new and I would check that out if you want to get more into this. Sometimes you get big insights from reading something and sometimes it just says something that you already knew in such a beautiful way that it's very exciting and addictive to read that stuff. And one of the things that I got from Elliot's book is that I want to torture people people I very much always have started young with that in mind. I think I've kept it to myself mostly, but I don't think I'm the only one.

Speaker 1:

I think that you also would like to torture people theoretically Maybe not as much as I do, but I think it's there and I think you do that. I think a lot of conversation is people torturing each other. Maybe that's just me, we don't know that we're doing it, but a lot of the passive-aggressive BS. We're smart enough to understand what we're doing, at least in the back of our minds. It's back there somewhere, but maybe Certainly not in the moment, because we have to be good people. Certainly not in the moment because we have to be good people. But yeah, you're smart enough that there's no good reason to treat certain people the way that you do, unless there's something gloriously sick going on deep in your psyche. I know that's how I feel and it is nice.

Speaker 1:

And I think the challenge is to accept that you want to torture people, at least some of the people, some of the time. You're not completely out there. Acknowledge that, own it and think about how you want to torture people Exquisitely, thoughtfully and meticulously Bespoke, personalized, artisan, artisan torture. And you have to earn that, you have to learn it. And then you have to practice a little bit. I often practice on myself, often practice on myself, which is not the most healthy thing in the world, but it's low stakes and when you get good at torturing yourself, then you can torture others Because you'll know what you're doing. You may even become a professional. There are lots of occupations that exist only to torture people. That's the only reason, only to torture people. That's the only reason. So embrace it and watch those doors open up in front of you. Speaking for myself, that's what I want. I want to inflict the most exquisite torture. The good stuff, the stuff that I practiced on myself. I want to share that Thank you.

Speaker 4:

What's your love language? I bet it's physical touch, isn't it? It is? How did I guess? I don't know?

Speaker 4:

There's something about you that tells me you're aching to be cuddled, held, stroked, worshipped, given affection. You seem like someone who loves physical touch. Your body aches to feel loved, to be touched. It's too bad that nobody wants to touch you. Nobody wants to touch you because nobody likes you, not even as a joke. When you were a kid, there were some other kids who pretended to like you as part of their hilarious pranks. Kids are mean, adults are busy. Now no one has the time for you, not even as a joke.

Speaker 4:

It's getting late in the game. You're lonely, sad and old. As your body decays, you become more and more physically repulsive and disgusting. As your body decays, it takes your mind, your heart and your soul down with it. Takes your mind, your heart and your soul down with it. You've let so much time go by. You've wasted so many opportunities, or maybe you never had them, it doesn't make much difference now, does it?

Speaker 4:

Your last relationship was an utterly ruinous experience. You gave it everything you had. You kept giving until it was all gone. Your partner got bored of you after a few months and eventually got tired of pretending. Now you've ruined yourself for nothing and you are very much alone, and that's not going to change anytime soon. You don't know how to connect with people. You can't make room for anyone else in your life until you can learn to love yourself. And that's never going to happen because you're not lovable. And even if you were, you wouldn't let anyone love you, not even yourself. And why should you? Adults are busy. You've got too many other things to do, and so does everyone else.

Speaker 4:

You may be a loser, but at least you're polite. It's nice of you not to waste anyone's time. Life is a brutal competition. Nobody cares about you. They care about what you can do for them, and you can't do anything for them. You can't even do anything for yourself. You've never done anything with your life. You're not even a husband. You never were. You've alienated everyone who ever even tried to care for you. No one reaches out to you, not even salespeople. That's because people can smell a loser. People hate losers. This is the life you deserve. This is how it should be.

Speaker 4:

Life is a game with winners and losers. There is an order to the world. There is a God, and God hates losers most of all. God loves winners. God smiles when winners win and laughs when losers lose. Your misery is God's entertainment. God is a sick bastard and he's shown you his teeth. You'll never be happy, but at least you know the truth. Perhaps you can take some pride in that, but it's not going to make anyone want to touch you. Say your goodbyes, go home and engage in one of your bizarre masturbation rituals. Repeat the cycle until it's finally time for you to die and go to hell. Nothing is ever going to meaningfully change for you. It's always been this way, and you've got nothing new to look forward to, except for more of whatever this is. God will never love you, but at least you're good for his amusement.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. You're listening to Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-ChUNG 1630 AM, kchungradioorg medicated-minutescom and you know what Life is suffering. I'm Emerson Dameron and life is hard, for me at least. I mean, my life is great on the surface. It could be better, but Realistically, this is as good as things have been in a minute and it's not at all guaranteed that they'll continue to be this good. Things are good right now in all of the most important ways important ways.

Speaker 1:

I acknowledge the enormous amount of privilege that I have, based on categories that I didn't select but that I certainly benefit from in race, gender, sexuality. I understand the magnitude of my privilege. I have almost all of the privileges. I've got the full set. I'm a straight white guy. I'm a straight white guy. I think one time the mother of my ex-girlfriend said that I looked ethnic to her, like Abraham Lincoln, and I don't think she meant it as an insult. So compared to her, maybe, but I'm doing quite well.

Speaker 1:

Life is good and yet I'm not happy. All of the time I'm not as happy as I could be and a lot of the time I could use some help. Keep in mind that I'm an arrogant bastard who hates asking for help and only does it when he really needs it. I need help with certain things. Life is hard. I think it's hard for everyone in different ways. It's certainly hard for everyone in different ways. It's certainly hard for me, and a lot of that is of my own making. But you know it's work to stop making things hard on yourself. So I've been putting that off.

Speaker 1:

I don't know about you, but I'm screaming inside and writhing in agony inside almost all the time, not always on the outside or in public, but the vast majority of the time. I feel terrible. There's something that is eating me and burning me up inside simultaneously. I know that's a mixed metaphor, but it's intense and nothing really makes it better in a reliable way. I'm skeptical of most of the things that make me feel good. Am I really in love? Am I really having fun? Have I ever had fun? Am I enjoying this thing for the right reasons? It takes a lot to make me unconditionally happy out of any meaningful context, timeless bliss or pure exuberance. Having a mind-breaking orgasm psychologically all the time? That's not my life, or not most of the time, very rarely. What could the matter be? I've always had a thirst for oblivion, which I usually keep to myself because it's goth in an embarrassing way, but I've always had a craving for nothing.

Speaker 1:

I like the idea, in theory, of having no feelings. It's nice to think about sometimes and I have made moves in the direction of experiencing more of that in my life, or less fewer feelings, and I think it's a time in my life when I'm rediscovering some old interests. Like many of us, I had a disruptive last couple of years and things are different now and I haven't quite adjusted. And part of that is getting back into some of the stuff that got me excited in my college years when I was younger college years when I was younger. I've been enjoying sludge metal recently for the first time in a while. There's some really good Sun oh and Boris stuff. Boris is really uneven and all over the place, but fascinating. I haven't listened to guitar rock in a minute but I've been into that stuff.

Speaker 1:

I've been watching music videos, like old music videos from the 90s and the 80s for the first time in a long time. I was definitely influenced by MTV. I didn't get to watch a lot of it because I didn't have cable in my house, because it was the sticks and they couldn't run cable that far out into the void. So we had to watch three and sometimes four channels with the antenna and it seemed like everyone else was watching MTV at home and I was envious and fascinated by MTV.

Speaker 1:

Fascinated by MTV, I think the first time I saw the video for Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode was one of those before and after experiences. The first time you saw the movie, that changed everything. It was one of those. And I've had many other great experiences with MTV. I got sick of it pretty quickly after I had unlimited access to it because at the time it was very repetitive. It was very repetitive. That was right before the reality TV era and a lot of people hate the reality TV stuff and think that MTV sold out. But they were out of ideas for programming other than that stuff.

Speaker 1:

The whole music video thing was played out. The whole music video thing was played out, and although it was informative in my earlier years in TV, I haven't watched music videos from that time in quite a while and some of them are very trippy to watch. Now there's a Twitch channel called Museum of Home Video that shows old music videos on Friday nights and if you're ever not doing anything, it's not every Friday night. I don't know it's how I got into this kick. So that's something from my teenage years that I've rediscovered. And another thing like that is suicidal ideation. I had not experienced any of that in a long time and only recently did I rediscover it in a way that made it clear to me why it was so meaningful at that point in my life as an area of inquiry for me.

Speaker 1:

I'm not going to apologize for bringing up death. Obviously, if you're suicidal, you can turn this off and get some help. It's out there, probably not in the first place. You look if the experience is anything like mine. But keep looking, it's worth it, get help.

Speaker 1:

But at the same time I don't understand why death is controversial, because it's something that we all have in common. It's one of the only things the left hates the right and the Russians hate the Ukrainians, and pretty soon we'll all be dead, which should put things in perspective, and I don't really think it's that controversial to bring it up. Most people know that. It's not that they didn't get the information. We deal with it in different ways and in some ways our lives are our denial-of-death projects. Ernest Becker wrote a book about that. That's good how we make shrines to ourselves to try to get a shot at immortality. And I'm not saying that we won't discover immortality. I'm willing to bet it will be after I die, because that's the way it goes. But it's something we all have to deal with and I have sometimes dealt with it by trying to get as close to it as I can without going all the way over.

Speaker 1:

My hobbies include playing with knives. At this point I know exactly what I'm doing, but I have had some quote-unquote accidents in my younger years. Quote-unquote accidents in my younger years. I was on a concerted campaign to drink myself to death at a number of different times in my life and that's that taste for oblivion. You get a little hit of that. You might want more of it. Once that door is open, it doesn't close all the way. I don't want to die right now because I can't really fit it into my schedule. There's a lot of stuff I gotta do.

Speaker 1:

And one of my fears is that death will be very much like being alive, except just your mind. Everything else goes, except the thing that you use to torture yourself day in and day out, and now it's just that and you so enjoy. That would be a bummer. I think it's more like getting absorbed into a larger consciousness. Imagine a drop of rain hitting the surface of the ocean. You lose your definition and just become at one with the whole. That's my guess, based on psychedelic experiences that I've heard about, and part of me wants that. I think there are ways to welcome it or at least be ready, more ready. Probably not going to be all the way ready, because nobody knows, people have different ideas, professed beliefs, what's really going on under the surface? Sometimes you can hear that from people after they've had a few drinks and if they try to walk it back, and it's usually a little bit closer to the truth quote-unquote in some way, depending on how you interpret it. I don't want that. Right now I've got a few things on the burner, curious to see how the next little bit of time goes. It's there.

Speaker 1:

But I'm really bad at goodbyes. I hate long goodbyes. I get really uncomfortable when somebody says let's head out and then the next 20 to 30 minutes are spent saying goodbye to everyone else in the party. When it's time to go, go Say goodbye to some folks on the way out the door. If you actually want to hang out with somebody, text them later. Let's go. I'm bad at goodbyes, don't like the long ones, don't like the short ones, only the Irish ones, and I've done that a lot. If I've done it to you, it's nothing personal. I've been criticized for my goodbyes. I've been told that after dates, the date went great and the only thing weird about it was that I was weird about saying goodbye, possibly because I wanted to make out but it didn't seem right. And God, I wish I'd just gone for it. But even if not, I'm still bad at goodbyes and that's enough to keep me alive sometimes.

Speaker 1:

This has been Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-Chung 1630 AM kchungradioorg. Medicated-minutescom. I'm Emerson Dameron, the writer, performer and man behind the dream at Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes no-transcript. Breathe into the experience of being here and ask yourself what am I so afraid of? Maybe you're afraid of missing some essential life experience, or afraid you already have, or that it doesn't matter because nothing does. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe you're just a regular nerves McGee, or maybe you're afraid of your own glorious cataclysmic power, the riotous multitude you contain. You are smart enough to know how nearly infinitely ignorant you are, but you're not too smart to be hot, and you may already be a satanic Buddhist. Nothing is good or bad in isolation, only in context. The Buddha and the Beastmaster are a good team. This, right here, is all you get. Life is for living up down, across, diagonally, sideways, because nothing matters. You may already be a Satanic Buddhist.

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Duncan Trussell Family Hour

Duncan Trussell Family Hour