Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
LA’s #1 avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.
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Regularly scheduled episodes premiere on the first Wednesday of the month on KCHUNG Los Angeles.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
Excess! On Ice, Plus Cocaine and Adderall
Do the damned thing. Do it to it. Like we always do about this time.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is a production of KCHUNG. Music by Chris Rogers. Written, performed, produced, and created by Emerson Dameron, who is solely responsible for its content.
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Speaker 1:Sometimes excess is your friend. Sometimes excess is good. Sometimes it is necessary to go all in and all out simultaneously. Although that may seem paradoxical poetry and paradox to. Excess can be what you need, it can be what the world needs. It can be the way to make that love connection that's going to turn things around for you. If you're going to go, go hard. If you're going to do it, do it to it. Leave it bleeding out on the floor. I do not advocate hurting other people. I do not advocate hurting yourself. I will say that sometimes both of those things have served me well. In periods of tranquil reflection and equanimity, I can see the value in those difficult parts of my life. But life is for living and if you're going to live, find out what your pleasure is and live it and love it. Violently. Hit it so it'll never forget it. Do not quit until the job is done.
Speaker 1:Do what you do with conviction, because how you do anything is how you do everything, and you want to overdo it sometimes because that's fun and it makes an impression and it tattoos your name and your logo onto the face of the universe. Be excessive, be, be excessive. This is K-Chung, los Angeles. The show is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. Music is by Chris Rogers. My name is Emerson Dameron. I am the star of the show. I make the magic happen. K-chung 1630 AM in Chinatown, downtown Los Angeles. That vicinity Los Angeles, that vicinity Worldwide. On the World Wide Web, at kchungradioorg. The back catalog for this show is at medicated-minutescom.
Speaker 1:There's not an excessive amount of stuff, but we're working on it because sometimes excess is good and sometimes ideas are dangerous and if you really live inside the molten core of the ideas that you believe in or claim to believe in, they're going to kill you one way or the other, whether in the short term or the long term, the short term and the long term, the macro and the micro, as above, so below, and all that good, bad, ugly, neutral, beyond good and evil type of stuff. So do be somewhat selective in what you choose to believe and then really live the hell out of those ideas, be in it so deep in it that you're out of it. Drive yourself barking mad. I believe in freedom for one thing, for myself and for others, for myself and for others. I think there's less to it than just being free to slack off and eat ice cream all day Not that those are bad things, they can be great once in a while but there is freedom in structure. Constraints are the best friends of creativity. That's a different kind of freedom. But we need to have the freedom to teach ourselves the responsibility to do those things sincerely, in good faith, not because we're getting flacked for breaking the rules, but because we really understand it.
Speaker 1:I believe in freedom. I'm not afraid to be cynical and strategic about that when it's called for to play it close to my chest if I think there's someone trying to hurt me out of confusion from their own wounds or for whatever reason, or just not getting it. I also ache to be passionate and improvisational in my love of freedom, about living that out, and I love doing it in communion with others. That kind of relating, sometimes love-making, sometimes just profound understanding is an act of exuberant creativity, is an act of exuberant creativity For better or worse.
Speaker 1:I believe in love For better and worse. It's something that doesn't go away when I try to stop believing in it. I've tried to get it out of my system. I've felt more bad in love than I ever thought In those moments I was ever going to be capable of feeling good. It hurt so much and there was so much anger and shame stuck in a cul-de-sac over that, that I tried to purge all the love out of my system and I thought I'd succeeded. But then there it is again stronger, hotter, more powerful, volcanically so, than ever before. I know I believe in love because it keeps almost killing me.
Speaker 1:Alcohol used to do that. That was not fun. I stopped doing that. I have no interest in doing it again. I think if I was going to start drinking again, the pandemic which ran concurrently with my divorce would have been a perfect opportunity for that, and now that I've missed out on that opportunity, I don't think I'm going to do it now. I missed the best time to drink myself onto the sidewalk that I'm ever going to have again. I hope I could be wrong, but I just don't think I'm going to do that anymore and I've tried to abstain from love. But that doesn't work for me. Love is part of who I am and freedom is what I believe in. And if you feel the same way, I would invite you to come to California if you're not already here. I don't want to gloat over y'all back home and the other homes that I've had at other points in my life and say it's better out here, but I worked hard to get here and I work hard to stay here, to pay the exorbitant cost of living, and every day it gets a little bit more worth it.
Speaker 1:We have so many abortions here. My biggest concern as a Californian is getting aborted. I think we're gonna be expanding abortion rights in response to the clawback that's going on in other parts of the country, and I would not be surprised if we reach the point of retroactive abortions, which I support. We have too many people right now and I wouldn't be totally shocked if my mom made that move. She lives in Illinois. I don't know what the laws are there, I don't know how that would work, but I could find myself retroactively aborted and I would be willing to make that sacrifice and be collateral damage in the fight for basic human rights for all of us. The girls I went to high school with in the South who got abortions were heroes to me. They showed me how to give society the finger to create freedom for yourself for the rest of your life. They showed me it could be done. I could do it too, and my life is radically transformed by all the women I've known who got abortions. So I think they should be plentiful, and California is the place to be for that, and it's the home of Emerson Dameron's medicated minutes on K-Chung Excess Freedom. Let's do this.
Speaker 1:Don't try to be perfect. You don't have to be perfect, you don't need to be perfect. Perfection is a false goal. There's a part of you that wants to do things perfectly, because there's a part of you that wants to do things well that gets conflated with a part of you that wants to do things correctly. And there's another part of you that wants to do everything to excess. So that goes to perfection, the logical extreme of acting out on those impulses. There's something noble and endearing and funny about that. It's like slapstick, existential pratfalling, upro, voracious, screwball comedy. But you can't be perfect. If you try, you're going to screw it up. And you shouldn't try to be perfect Because perfection isn't good enough.
Speaker 1:You need to be better than perfect. It's the 1% of the 1% of people that succeed in this game, and at least 2% of people are already perfect. They're doing it right. You're not going to be able to compete with that. You're gonna have to do something different from perfection. You're gonna have to stand out. You're gonna have to present yourself in a way where you smell like a winner. You've already found value in what you have to offer. You're proud of what you bring to the table, or you can convincingly fake it. There are different paths up that mountain. But whatever you do, if you think too much about perfection, if you try to do things perfectly, you're only going to distract yourself from the real task at hand. So diversify your portfolio.
Speaker 1:This is your year to try new things. Take a walk in the woods, get lost in the wilderness, drive that golf ball way out into the tall grass and go out there and try to find it and be prepared to spend half an hour looking for it. And maybe you brought some cocaine and you can have an enjoyable half an hour and have a discursive, philosophical conversation with whoever your golfing buddy is that particular day. And I would consider rotating your golf buddies a little bit. Don't have the same standing group all the time. Have a few people that you golf with consistently and maybe do different kinds of golfing with those people. Do mini golf, try a different kind, of course. Go to the driving range. Just knock some balls around in your basement on lazy summer nights when there's nothing much else going on.
Speaker 1:Although, if there's nothing much else going on, although, if there's nothing much going on, I would recommend just savoring the hell out of that. If there's ever another evening in our lives where there's nothing going on and nothing to be piqued about and no one trying to claw back the freedoms that we've carved out for ourselves, just bask in that. If that happens again, it's like when I feel sick, I make a mental note to myself. If I ever feel well again which I hope I do, because we're pleasure-seeking organisms. You can see that if you watch Butterflies. That is clearly not a Darwinian struggle for survival. That is pleasure-seeking and reveling in ecstatic, exuberant joy of being alive. And all the other stuff, all the violence and the struggle and the eating and defecating all of that is just to facilitate the pursuit of pleasure. That is why we are alive and maybe you take pleasure in being physically ill. It's not my kink when I'm feeling sick.
Speaker 1:Usually what's on my mind is something like if I feel well again, I'm going to savor that and appreciate it. I'm going to take notes, I'm going to notice what it feels like, just to feel okay. So maybe just sit in that if you have that luxury again anytime soon. But maybe if there are a couple of days in a row like that or you just take a week off of work to decompress and you don't make any plans, bring your golf buddies over one night and just Get the putters, get some golf balls and See if you can drive one right into a fragile antique of some kind that's decorating your house, because then you will understand impermanence and the wisdom that you gain from that act. That practice is going to be more valuable than any piece of junk that you could own that's going to end up in a landfill anyway. Piece of junk that you could own that's going to end up in a landfill anyway. When you find the lost golf ball, you will necessarily be a different person from the person who started looking for it, and that, not perfection, is the point of all this, and I would argue that living in that state is better than being perfect.
Speaker 1:It's not easy. It is much easier to get distracted. It is much easier to diminish ourselves. Get distracted, it is much easier to diminish ourselves. So if that keeps happening, find some other way to be better than perfect. Don't give 110%. Give 111 or even 112% of your heart, your soul, your groin to the world, and do it now, because we need something. Something's got to change and perfection is not going to cut it anymore. That's yesterday's news. That is old hat. That hat is out of fashion. People aren't wearing those hats anymore. Players don't wear hats like that. We gotta find something else. So play on, find your edge and live there and see what you learn and jump over the edge and find the ledge beyond the edge and be there and have some energy bars in your pocket so you don't get too malnourished in these explorations.
Speaker 1:I'm not necessarily the best example of how to not get malnourished. I have a weird relationship with food. I don't have much of a palate. I don't like raw onions. Most of the rest of it is pretty much the same to me. It's just content, and I'd like to connect with some foodies because I want to learn to appreciate food more. That's one of the ways that I'm going to be better than perfect in the back half of 2022. That's one of my challenges. What are your challenges? I'm not telling you. I'm asking you Figure out what you need. That will inform you what the world needs and how to be there and be present. Be generous when it matters, where it matters, which is right now, and it was really sometime.
Speaker 1:Last year was the deadline and we're past that. Now we are redlining. It is time. Do it, do your thing, do somebody else's thing to see what that's like. Pay attention, take notes, learn what you learn, bring it back, do it badly. Anything is better than perfection at this point.
Speaker 1:Whatever you do for self-care, there are a lot of things you can do for self-care. You can swim in the ocean. You can do shrooms and ketamine. You can meditate. You can do some car screaming. Scream where it's not going to be disruptive for anyone else. You can scream where it is going to be disruptive for people who deserve to be disrupted. That's an act of self-care, as is eating a donut cut in half with ice cream patted in the middle. That can be self-care. That can be self-care.
Speaker 1:Staying up late and reading a book by candlelight and feeling the way the book feels in your hands as you absorb the story that can be self-care. Getting out into nature absolutely can be the epitome of self-care. The epitome of self-care Right around late January, early February, after the rains in Southern California, driving up the coast towards San Luis Obispo and seeing all the stuff that is normally brown and now it's lush and green, and getting out and smelling it, that can be self-care. Going into the redwoods, where you don't hear much noise compared to other kinds of forests, because there aren't as many birds but there are a lot of banana slugs, and finding a banana slug that you find particularly adorable, deep in the heart of mere woods, letting it crawl into your hand and kissing it, but not on its blowhole. You want it to be able to breathe.
Speaker 1:This is a two-way relationship, can be self-care and care for another living thing in a special place that may not be the way that it is for much longer. Being with what is now and will not always be, because everything is impermanent, that is obviously, on its face, an act of self-care. Doing jumping jacks in your apartment, even if it bothers the neighbors, you can stop if the neighbors get upset and at that point you can run outside and jog around the block. Sprint, controlled hyperventilation is an act of self-care. Stan Groff used to give rooms full of people LSD. That became against the law, so instead he developed the practice of holotropic breathwork, which is basically controlled hyperventilation and an excuse to scream and cry and break down in a room full of strangers. Participating in something like that could be extremely therapeutic. Your self-care can also be care for others. In fact, it almost always is. You do these practices not just for yourself, but for all the people in life that you have to hold. It's a supreme act of generosity to practice gratuitous acts of self-care, whatever that might be.
Speaker 1:However you practice self-care, I would consider letting it evolve with the times. I would consider letting it evolve with the times. Certain forms of self-care are suited to certain sets and settings. During the pandemic, different kinds of self-soothing behavior became sacred practices. Ketamine and shrooms were big. Meditation was big.
Speaker 1:At this point, I think meditation and mindfulness practice is no longer a nice to have. I think it's absolutely necessary to deal with the challenges of these times, and you are going to lose it if you don't make mindfulness, meditation practice a daily part of your life. I think it should be mandatory. That's a way to practice self-care. And the most important way to practice. Self-care is to let your practice of self-care evolve, be with what's happening and calibrate for that, feel what's going on in the room, in the space, even in the zeitgeist, things are changing. Covid's still going on as of this recording. There's another spike going on in Los Angeles right now, but we've decided to pretend that it's not Because people want to get back in the mix and nobody can stop that. It doesn't seem like. So that's something to adapt to, and part of that is the choice of self-care practices that we make.
Speaker 1:Self-care practices include the drugs that we ingest. As I mentioned, certain drugs go better with certain times and flavors and scenes and historical epochs. Some people can vape DMT at festivals and dance. I'm not one of those people. If I'm going to have shattering visions of the ineffable and have my head explode like the guy on scanners, I can't do that with thumping music and crowds. I need a sacred space to do that, perhaps my own inner sanctum, where only those who truly get it will be in my company when I have those profound experiences. And I think it's important to select the right drugs for the time. And so I posit that the next round of self-care practices that we undertake should involve cocaine, because I think we all need to feel good about ourselves and the world, if only for half an hour. Just enough faith in the possible to get us through an episode of Seinfeld would be so good, delicious right now.
Speaker 1:Don't you think there's danger in cocaine? Obviously it's considered the second most dangerous drug that is currently prohibited. I think heroin is number one. Tobacco is more addictive. Alcohol is absolutely ruinous to many, many, many more lives.
Speaker 1:Cocaine has a worse reputation, and I think a lot of that is because of prohibition. The stuff you buy on the street that's full of rat poison is going to make you feel like garbage, and you're going to be doing something that is verboten, which will tweak your paranoia. Perhaps A lot of bad feelings will go with it. You might be surrounded by social climbers, aspiring psychopaths and sociopaths, who are always the most tragic people in the world, because if you are not a sociopath or a psychopath, but you're trying to be, you will get eaten alive by the genuine article, and if you spend a lot of time around those people, you're going to regret it one way or another. Those are regrettable things, and I would say that they have more to do with prohibition than they do with cocaine.
Speaker 1:If you go to one of the places where cocaine is created and you get the real stuff, which is going to be a lot cheaper than if you get it in MacArthur Park, you can have hilarious, rambling, discursive conversations with people that you love. You can truly appreciate the music of the Afghan wigs, including the late period stuff. You can feel like royalty and be the uber minch that you want to see in the world. If only for a short window of time, you can have that experience. Therefore, I think that cocaine should be legal and I would consider making it mandatory, because everybody needs to feel like that right now. Because everybody needs to feel like that right now, and you might disagree or think it's a bad idea, but you will change your mind when you hear the music mix that I made.
Speaker 1:Empower yourself, take control of your self-care. Release your powerful inner healer. Restore your faith in the future. Have digressive and circuitous all-night conversations with geniuses who love you. Don't feel good about yourself. Feel great about yourself for an entire half hour. You deserve pure, uncut cocaine.
Speaker 1:You don't have to be perfect. That's not good enough. Don't try to be perfect. Try harder. Don't try to persuade us. It's, frankly, unconvincing. Look deep inside yourself. There's not a lot going on. You have a long way to go, but you'll get there. You have to, otherwise you'll really be screwed. If I stop doing what I'm doing long enough to start feeling my feelings, I notice that I feel like there's a screw being drilled into the side of my head. The pain is excruciating. It's not depression or anxiety or anything meaningful. There's no content. It just hurts like hell and it keeps destroying my brain forever and I'd do anything to make it stop, and I know that it won't stop until I die.
Speaker 1:What is the best way to share your thoughts and feelings? Believe what you want, but behave like others. You don't have to share everything that comes into your head. I think it's beneficial to have an idea of what you're about. I think that's an ongoing process of self-inquiry. I don't think you can sit down in an afternoon and have a glass of water and scratch out all your beliefs and then just stick to that for the rest of your life. I think that would be limiting, and I see a lot of people planting flags and limiting themselves, because it's hard to change your mind about something when you've declared to the world that that's your position and you've invested in it. It's easier to keep doubling down than it is to pull up that flag and move it six feet to a better place for it to be. So there's something to be said for not planting the flag. You don't have to have an opinion about everything. You don't have to share all of the half-formed ideas that you have with the rest of the world. It's okay to mind your own business and enjoy the show.
Speaker 1:I personally tend to share the most disgusting parts of my personality rather freely. I live for my art, so that's what I do. I am a professional, you're an amateur. You don't have to share all of that stuff, and a lot of times it's better if you don't. You can take some time to consider what you really believe and feel your feelings about it, see what wants to process, what wants to move along and move through and move out, and not have a charge when it's time to think about things in a more lucid way, even if you are pretty forthcoming, I think that it's important and beneficial to have have a sanctuary in your life where you believe what you will in private.
Speaker 1:Perhaps that could be a room in your house or a relationship or a secret society that you're affiliated with, whatever it might be. You don't need to share that with the world and in fact it would be cheapened if you invited everyone to that party and put it up on Facebook and made it an open thing. You need a sanctuary in your life where you can believe whatever you want. Refusing to share some of your innermost beliefs with the rest of the world gives you a lot of power. You can practice those beliefs in private and you don't have to worry about being defined or confined or shackled to an opinion that you've expressed in some public forum at some time in the past. You can keep moving and be like water Be of this time, because things are changing more rapidly than we're ready for. We're not ready for what's already happened, so it's good to keep things loose.
Speaker 1:I would avoid fame as a rule. I think it's generally a bad thing, or at least more trouble than it's worth. I think it's generally a bad thing, or at least more trouble than it's worth. I think power can be a lot of fun. I think money can be useful, depending on what you do with it. My life goal is is the unseen puppet master, a powerful figure who holds private salons and shares my innermost ideas with a close-knit group of people who get it and there aren't that many people who get it. The feeling of being gaunt is so magical and intoxicating for me.
Speaker 1:I assume it is for you as a listener to this program. I know that you have a complex inner life and resist simple definitions and you've certainly had the experience of being seen and beheld and gotten and loved, and perhaps it was. It's agonizing, the absence that it creates feels like an ache. You want to go back and fix it, but you can't. You got to be here and don't make it too hard on yourself. One way to make things easier on yourself is to withhold a certain percentage of who you are from the large majority of people you interact with. That is okay, even to the point of light deception, I would say it's okay.
Speaker 1:Nietzsche, of all people, was a big fan of what he called masks and misunderstandings that there is tremendous power that accrues to people who can withhold some of themselves from the public discourse and channel it into great work or self-actualizing, or having amazing small-scale ragers with the denizens of one's private salon. There's great power in all those things and it comes from a little bit of withholding, a little bit of stepping back, a little bit of reading the room and behaving as others, as much as it's beneficial, and getting in the habit of that until you can see the patterns and the consistency of characters over time and you can enjoy the theater, the play-by-play, the chalk talk of it all, see the diagrams of the plays and the games that make up the human drama, plays in the games that make up the human drama, and withhold some of your own thoughts about that until they're properly incubated and become what they are, what they need to be, and perhaps with a lot of that kind of self-inquiry and patience, so important contemplation are gotten again. If that happens, you will be more and maybe to hurt that person in the most helpful way that you're capable of, and connect in a much more profound, nourishing way. And when you've experienced that oh yes, when you have been in that space, it just doesn't seem necessary to bleed all over the place, to plant flags in places you don't really understand and have opinions on things you don't know anything about. Everything seems a lot less urgent when you make that space for yourself and learn to be alone there and learn to savor the experience of sharing it, and that comes from patience and sitting down and shutting up.
Speaker 1:Inside you, there is something indomitable. If you've made it this far, there are reasons for that. You have a mission. You have a burning desire. You may not know about it, you may not be well acquainted with it or on speaking terms, but it has brought you to this point and it's not stopping now. You've persisted through so much and who you are here and now is the result of so many fantastically improbable coincidences and triumphs of the will that you should absolutely be proud of that. There is something in you that can cut diamonds, that can walk through fire, and that is you Walk through fire and that is you, and you need to own that, because that burning desire is such a precious gift to the world and if you could share that and if you can be vulnerable with that and lead with that and hold it. That is a precious commodity indeed. You cannot put a price on it and it's scary.
Speaker 1:Leading with your desire requires vulnerability. It requires allowing yourself to get hurt. You cannot be perfectly self-sufficient. We live our lives in our relationships with others. So in order to be somebody, you got to relate, and that is who you are. You are who you are to the customer service robot on the other end of the line when you call Bank of America. As scary as that is, because how you do anything is how you do everything and you want to lead with the strongest part of yourself. And that is so scary that it becomes easy for us to fetishize our own weakness.
Speaker 1:And I'm not disrespecting anybody that's had genuine travails in life. I have. I'm a well-credentialed, mentally ill person. I've gone through some bad experiences. You've gone through others, some much more traumatic and severe than anything I would have any context for. I hold that with great respect, as much as I'm able.
Speaker 1:At the same time, the fear comes from knowing how explosively powerful we can potentially be and the retreat into making ourselves small, making ourselves weak, crouching and hiding and trying to valorize that and make it seem moral. It's limiting and sometimes we have to limit ourselves and sometimes that's okay. Recognize that that's what's going on and prepare yourself to be volcanically powerful, because that's what the world needs and that's what the world needs more. Every day. It's becoming urgent. So prepare yourself for that, that burning, howling desire deep in your heart, in your essence. That's who you are. That is your gift to the world.
Speaker 1:We may get disconnected from that and hide it because we're trying to be good people. Good can be the enemy of great. Nice kills greatness dead. If we try to be good and we try to be nice and we think those things are important, we're probably already being good and nice enough. We probably need to be warriors, and one way to do that is to connect painful, exhilarating, galvanizing, libidinal desire with our hearts and let those things work together in connection and collaboration. When we can do that, we might not have to worry about our desires making us bad people. We reconnect our desires with our hearts.
Speaker 1:Guilt can serve a function. We all screw up. Ideally, we learn from it, and guilt is one way to hammer that in. If there's guilt associated with a screw-up that we committed, it's easier to remember the lessons, because that white, hot, burning pain will make whatever happens around it that's associated with it more memorable and make it stick. So we're lucky to have that mechanism. But let that play out, let it do its thing If you stay in the guilt and the shame, and let it keep going and keep elongating the story about it and keep making cash-in sequels that nobody wants because you want to keep yourself safe and small.
Speaker 1:That does you no favors. It does the world no favors. You're not good or nice if that's how you're playing your hand. You want to go all in, and that can involve strategy. It can involve patience and practice and really getting into the details of your life and whatever it is that you're living for and about, or sometimes it can involve riding the lightning. It can involve screaming and crying and making a scene. It can involve dramatic theatrics, pyrotechnics, dry ice. Go for it, do it, make it happen If that's how it's going to do its thing, and do the damn thing, like we always do about this time for you now.
Speaker 1:Share your desire, cultivate it. Maybe you need to go on retreat or go into your sanctum or your laboratory and collect further data and parse it and contemplate, meditate, take a walk around the block, let those ideas bubble up, let it percolate, let it foam and watch the steam rising. Maybe it's time for that. Your life is the experiment. So keep collecting information, keep running experiments, keep yourself honest, keep yourself vulnerable.
Speaker 1:That is not easy to do. It is so easy to get hurt and it's so easy to define ourselves by the hurts that we accrue and receive, because those stories are a lot more sticky than other kinds of stories we can tell about ourselves. If it bleeds, it leads. And if you get stuck on a story where you're the loser, you get conned, you get taken advantage of. You try and do not succeed. That can bring you down. It's like walking into a spider web. If you shake it off, brush it off, you can move forward and move through and move on, and that's absolutely necessary for the times we're living in. We're not ready for what's already happened, but we are ready for your desire and your magic and your will and the full inspiring force of what has kept you alive to this point and what has persisted through all of the trials and tribulations and travails that you've had to go through. We need that. The time is now. Double down, ride the lightning, do the damn thing. We love you.
Speaker 1:William Blake writes that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, that some excess is needed for excessive challenges and excessive times. Everything is a lot right now it's a little extra. We have to rise to that and be excessive. Go big, be ostentatious when that's required. Years ago, I was feeling depressed. I was feeling like I was near the end of what I had to do with my life. I called a suicide hotline and the operator who was a very well-intentioned person, I could tell suggested that I read the book Think Big and Kick Ass by Donald Trump. I might derive some useful wisdom from that. And that happened because life is meaningless. Everything comes to nothing and there is something to be said for making an ass of oneself. In certain situations. Things can be accomplished through that practice and process. As much as we could be loath to admit it and to see it working out for people who inflict pain on the world through projecting their own insecurities and their own misery onto the world and punish the rest of us for that, at least they're doing something.
Speaker 1:And if you are not filled with passion and intensity, if you indeed lack all conviction, it might be time to fake it. Find something to be passionately intense about, pack up the car and get out on the road of excess. See where it leads. Maybe it'll take you out to Palm Springs. If there's some kind of festival going on out in the desert, there might be a traffic jam on the road of access If you're heading out on Friday morning or Friday afternoon. You thought you would take off of work a few hours early and beat traffic, and you weren't the only person that had that idea. So it's wall-to-wall cars on the road of excess, it's a parking lot. There's a lot of pollution and a lot of frustration, but not a lot of raging swinging partying going on, not just yet. This is the road of access, not the destination of access, and if you keep breaking down on the road of access, you might want to take better care of your vehicle.
Speaker 1:Here on Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, we observe the nine laws of the satanic Buddha, and one of those recommends the practice of excess in moderation. Nothing's as bad as extreme moderation. That is a life suck and a killer. Life suck and a killer. But living on either extreme, whether exhilaration or abject horror, sometimes it's better to microdose those things. Just block off a weekend and do it then and make sure that you leave time at the end of that to sit with it and integrate. Maybe book yourself an hour or two and a sensory deprivation float tank. Let all of that process. Get something out of your excess, make it worthwhile, create some value that you can bring back into the generally moderate, moderation-loving world. What did you learn? How did it change you? What is this? Make some time to contemplate that If you're just raging all the damn time, you won't get around to that. You're really just making yourself busy. Being busy partying is being busy working. There's not a lot of difference between the two.
Speaker 1:You gotta breathe, you gotta make space, live in the gaps, live in the silences, do a little bit of box breathing. That means breathe in, count of four, hold it, count of four, breathe out gently. Count of four, feel the breath passing through your nostrils or over your lips and then sit in that no-breathing place. Count of four, be in all four of those places, fully places, fully Commit, live it and perhaps take some time to be scatterbrained.
Speaker 1:Doom scrolling can be a contemplative practice. Just notice the feelings that you're having as you read bad news or get mad at something, or someone you had a certain picture of does something that's off-brand, that contradicts what you assumed about them. Notice what happens right there and keep that very much in mind. And if you're reactive or you're reacting, notice what it is that's galvanizing, that that's wisdom that can be gained from scrolling the social media, because there's wisdom to be gained everywhere and sometimes you can do it excessively. Sometimes you can do five things at once and half-ass all of them, because that's the way that works. Multitasking doesn't work. Be in that space. Be an octopus, with each tentacle in a different dish. I'd say pies, but that's not what octopuses eat. Maybe octopuses just like the tactile sensation of getting their suction cup covered tentacles inside of a pie. Octopuses are complex creatures. Some people think that they're aliens. I don't know if anyone really feels like they know where home is right about now, but you've got a place to crash here.
Speaker 1:This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-Chung, los Angeles 1630 AM. K-chung Radioorg worldwide. On the World Wide Web Dedicated site for the show is medicated-minutescom. The music on this episode is by my good friend Chris Rogers. Everything else is by me. My name is Emerson Dameron. I am the writer, director, producer and the talent of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-Chung, where levity saves lives, where excess is best practiced in moderation. Sometimes excessive moderation in moderation to excess can be good. I don't know. I don't know if I've tried that. Maybe I will. Maybe that'll be the next episode. The show is every first Wednesday of the month on K-Chung Radio. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, where good and nice are the enemies of greatness.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it's nice to be moderately nice to excess, in moderation.
Speaker 1:I love you. I'm sorry, please forgive me and thank you. I love you. May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe and protected.
Speaker 2:May you live with an open heart.
Speaker 1:I so um At first I thought this was seriously a setup. She seemed really into it. Then I thought maybe she loved taking my discipline and also was using sex for power. I don't know if that blew my mind, but it blew simple. Steamy dreamy and way too hot for radio Crimson Transgressions.
Speaker 2:A bite-sized erotic thriller by Emerson Dameron.
Speaker 1:Find it before it finds you.
