Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
LA’s #1 avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.
The home of Ask a Sadist, Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers, and the First Church of the Satanic Buddha. Levity saves lives.
Regularly scheduled episodes premiere on the first Wednesday of the month on KCHUNG Los Angeles.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
Hollywood
Say yes to the universe on Caheunga Boulevard. Find a universe in each life on the Walk of Fame. Join the ranks of the beautiful people. Welcome to Hollywood.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is a production of KCHUNG, streamed live on Lumpen Radio's Twitch channel.
Loops by Chris Rogers. Inspiration from Beowulf Jones, Mitch Horowitz, and Combo's New York Pizzeria. Written, performed, produced, and created by Emerson Dameron, who is solely responsible for its content.
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As you drive or walk or bike or scoot west on Sunset Boulevard, you will see the old Amoeba Records building to your left. It's right down the street from the Dome. When you see that, make a right and you will find yourself moving up Coinga Boulevard, moving up Coinga Boulevard, which has the distinction of being one of my favorite strips of street in the United States of America. I love it here. I've been walking up and down Coalinga for many years. I always come here when I'm either feeling open and optimistic and ready to receive the guidance of the universe, or I'm really not feeling that way, and I would like to feel that way a little bit more. And, failing that, I at least want to see a lot of little restaurants and coffee shops and clothing stores and a little bit of sleaze not like one used to see sleaze, not like one used to see. Right now, of course, we're in the middle of the pandemic and the sleaze you see is a little bit different. It's a little bit raw. The sleaze you see now in Coinga Boulevard, it's not so much the party sleaze as the barking desperation of hitting bottom in a world where maybe we're losing our support, our places to crash, or we're realizing that we didn't really have them in the way that we thought or hoped. Still plenty of life out here, of course. The walking of small dogs continues. Some places are reopening for business, others are takeout only or seating on the sidewalk to be closer to the city. That has a reputation which I don't think is entirely fair of being a city that most people experience mostly through the windows and windshields of cars. I'm someone who walks in LA. My name is Emerson Dameron. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. Production of K-Chung kchungradioorg 1630 AM in Chinatown in Los Angeles. Dedicated website medicated-minutescom.
Speaker 1:The Velvet Margarita Cantina was one of the first places I enjoyed a drink after I moved to Los Angeles, back when I still drank. It was also the place where one Memorial Day, my brother and my sister-in-law came to town from Chicago and were desperately seeking a place to belly up and watch the Blackhawks play hockey on a wall-mounted TV, and such a thing was proving difficult to find. We looked in most of the bars that were available in the Hollywood area and the vast majority of them were screening the Lakers game that was going on at the same time. We made it to Velvet Margarita and my sister-in-law just asked, and Margarita and my sister-in-law just asked she was getting desperate at this point if the bartender could switch the TV over to the Blackhawks game. And the bartender let us know that he was from Philadelphia, the team that was in the process of either winning or losing to the Blackhawks. So he switched it over and the four of us traded barbs and talked about some cross-country stuff and had a good time on a Saturday afternoon.
Speaker 1:Oh, why don't you see that in the news? There's a lot of grim stuff in the news now, but still people drinking. This bar has a little porch seating area, which I guess qualifies they're not inside. So the probability of infection is contagion, sickness, death, pestilence, famine Probability of all of those things happening is lower, I suppose, if you're sitting outside.
Speaker 1:And now we're reaching Hollywood Boulevard right next to a Popeye's where one of my friends was flashed by a gentleman. He dropped his pants and exhibited himself to my friend who was shaken up. My friend is a comedian and he posted about this on his social media channels because he was sincerely shaken up and disturbed by this experience and of course a lot of his friends are comedians. So they just post joke responses and try to out-cut and out-mean or out-weird one another, and that's not what he wanted. He wanted someone to say I'm sorry that happened to you, and these people were not ready to do that at this time.
Speaker 1:The comedy switch takes years to perfect and once it's on, it gets stuck there. You put so much sunk cost into learning how to be funny that you just don't want to stop, even if it seems inappropriate. There's the Metro Local, the 210. Ultimate destination is the South Bay Galleria, which is a long way from here, and I doubt there's too much going on there at the moment. We cross Hollywood Boulevard and start heading up the hill where I used to find a lot of free parking when I came to LA. I hate paying for parking. I will walk a mile literally if there's a free parking space within a mile of my ultimate destination. Now there's a little more activity up here. The free parking is not quite as ample and it's near the Greyhound station where a lot of dreamers get off the bus, which makes the AA meetings around here very interesting.
Speaker 1:I didn't stop drinking at one crack. I was aware many years before I ultimately quit that this was not working out for me, that it was causing more problems than it was worth. It was outliving its usefulness. It was an adaptation to social anxiety that was no longer serving me and in fact, was causing a lot of problems in my life. That was many years before I was able to quit, but I tried a number of things. One of them was called moderation management. The idea is you can stop drinking so much and go back to a point in your life at which your drinking was sustainable. The level of booze that you were taking in made sense in that context. So you try to get back to that level and it can work if the context is similar or if things are going in your favor. I wouldn't say it totally worked for me, but it did not totally fail. The foundation of moderation management, the thing that you have to do first, is called doing a 30. That means you go 30 days dry. You just stop. You don't have a drink for 30 days.
Speaker 1:I did that about 10 years ago and it became apparent that my life was a lot more fun and exciting when I was not drinking, was not drinking. I had become kind of a drinking hermit where I stayed home and drank. I didn't even really bother to go out, and if I had, I would not have been charming because I would have been nearly passed out, so it made more sense to do that at home, which was cut off most of my social contact. When I stopped, I was immediately fired up with inspiration and I decided to take a week of my life and say yes to everything, and that's how I ended up participating in an art project that was based on a card experiment card game designed by John Zorn, and I was playing an instrument. I don't play any instruments. I stopped playing the piano when I was a kid, which every day I deeply, deeply regret. If you're a kid and you're taking piano lessons, keep doing it.
Speaker 1:I was having so much fun and then I came into Hollywood because I wanted to walk up and down Coinga Boulevard, because it's my place of optimism and creativity and receptivity, and I was saying yes to everything and I wanted to see what came up there so I could say yes to it. I was walking past the 24-hour newsstand. It used to be 24 hours, now it's zero hours, hopefully, just because of the pandemic. I do hope it comes back, although that business model may be outdated. Anyway, I was browsing the magazines and a camera crew came up and asked me what I thought of Heidi Montag's plastic surgery. Heidi Montag was a public figure at the time. He was on a show called the Hills and got a ton of plastic surgery inside. Heidi Montag was a public figure at the time who was on a show called the Hills and got a ton of plastic surgery inside of one day. And the number one rule of having a camera on you is that you have to have a strong opinion and express it emphatically. So, although I did not particularly care about Heidi Montag's plastic surgery, when I asked my opinion on it I said for a fairly attractive 23-year-old woman to have however many plastic surgeries in one day is absurd. And I made it on Good Morning America and it was probably the closest I've ever been to the burning, immolating sunlight of celebrity, of fame. I got emails from people all over the country that I knew in college or that just saw me on Good Morning America for about eight seconds taking a swipe at Heidi Montag.
Speaker 1:So you can live the Hollywood dream, you just have to be open to it. You have to spend a lot of time on Cohinga Boulevard and you've just got to be there when the inspiration arrives. Don't overthink it. Don't get caught up in wanting it to be what you want it to be. Just observe and see and feel and know it when it comes into your vista. And that's how Hollywood dreams come true on Coinga Boulevard.
Speaker 1:The difference between you and me is that I'm tuned in. I get it. I know the angles, above the angles. I know the players. I see them come and go. I've been around long enough that there are no surprises. They're repeating patterns. Some of the names change, some of the fashions, but it's mostly pretty predictable. You can see it like I do, but that's the difference between you and me.
Speaker 1:The difference between you and me is that you need a sense of magic, and that's admirable. It's a good quality to have in young people. You should be having fun making those sexy, risky investments, but you got to give that up at some point if you really want to make it in the business at some point. If you really want to make it in the business and I know what it is to do that and I can have fun doing that I don't even need to have fun to have fun, and that's the difference between you and me.
Speaker 1:The difference between you and me, the difference between you and me is that I always keep my ear to the tracks. When I finish a project, it's not over, it's a beginning, it's a resource for new information and I will always come back and pay attention and build on the work I've already done, add to the stories I've already told, revise, edit, redo the whole, because life is not a product, life is in flux. I make products, but I understand a few things about life that make me a little bit better at making products and make each of my products a little better than the previous one. And I see you trying new things, seeing what works, what doesn't, what gets people clapping, then doing a little bit more of that thing and doing a little bit more of that thing eventually becoming that thing. And then people stop laughing, people stop clapping. Maybe they still do, but you know they're just being polite and you wonder what happened.
Speaker 1:And that's the difference between you and me, because I don't always know how things are going to happen. But I got a pretty good idea of what's going to happen and I can help you understand if you're interested, if you want to know, if you're interested, if you want to know. But you'd have to ask and you're proud. You want to figure things out on your own. That too is admirable. I certainly understand taking credit for things, and the fact that I get most of my ideas from other places has never stopped me from doing that. But I ask, I listen, I look and I learn. I don't try to do it myself. It does itself through me. The work flows through me, for I am a conduit For the source, for the power, for the genius, and you're a conduit for yourself, and that's the difference between you and me. How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? I can speak to that, seeing as I am one of the beautiful people Between you and me, it's pretty great.
Speaker 1:I would not go back to the way that things were previously. I was not always a beautiful person. It's something I had to work for. It's something I had to work for very hard, very diligently, for years and years and years, many, many hours. Within those many, many years that I had to put in, I didn't know if I was going to make it. I always had the attitude that I would get what I want and that left open the proper channels for its delivery. But there were many nights of despair. I was lonely, I wondered if I'd wasted my life, if I'd missed out on marriage, children, quiet life and somewhere up in the San Fernando Valley. But I kept going. And you know, it's pretty great to be one of the beautiful people.
Speaker 1:Now it's not really in my interest to tell most people that it's pretty great. I'm taking you into my confidence. You should respect that and you should be honored by it. Normally I would tell people you know, it's really not so great. Nothing changes too much. I kind of wish that everyone could experience this, just so they can know that it's really not that great. In fact it may be kind of worthless. In fact it may be kind of worthless and that may be true depending on your mindset before and after. But it's pretty good to be beautiful.
Speaker 1:Now it has its quirks and annoyances. I get a little tired of being constantly hit on, being hit up for favors, being treated like some sort of weird object. When I go out into the world it can be a little hard to connect with people. They're intimidated. They think that I'm weird. They have a story in their minds that doesn't have that much to do with me that I probably could not and would not want to live up to in their real lives. So if you've ever wondered why the beautiful people tend to stick together, especially in relationships, that has a lot to do with it and it can be limiting, it can be frustrating. It's also worth it.
Speaker 1:Now I know you came to me because you want what I have and you know what I respect, that You're willing to admit it. A lot of people resent what I have, pretend they don't want it. Not only will they not get it, but they'll create all sorts of other problems in their lives, living with that kind of a toxic mindset. But you're here and you want to know what can I do to join the ranks of the beautiful people, to manifest what I have to give in this world? And I know from what I know of you that you are coming from a place of compassion and generosity and openness to the world. That's certainly important. I must warn you that if you're coming from a place of cruelty or stinginess or craving for revenge, those are all zero-sum scarcity mindsets and they're probably going to hold you back. The very best that can happen is you will ruin a lot of people's lives and your own and it will rot you out from the inside, and that's the best case scenario. So now that we've got that out of the way, you're coming from a place of generosity and kindness and you want to join the beautiful people.
Speaker 1:Here's how you do it. Sometimes it can take up to a couple of years and you got to put in the hours. First of all, decide what it is that you really want and are passionate about, and my advice would be to do that on a micro scale. What is something that gives you enjoyment over the course of a typical day? Because if you know that, you can blow it up to a worldwide legend in the making story of stage and screen macro scale. But it doesn't work as well the other way around. So figure out what you love, figure out what you are passionate about and what you want in life. Start with what you want this afternoon and go from there.
Speaker 1:The second step get it in writing. Now I advise having a daily writing practice. I go for at least three pages, or about 750 typed words per day, but if you don't ever write anything else in your life, write down the thing that you want, the thing that you will have. That will get you into the ranks of the beautiful people Could be a song, a film, something on TikTok. It usually takes the form of a story. I will tell you that. Write it down, learn it, know it, know the words. Be able to recite it by rote Tomorrow morning. Write it down again Tomorrow morning. Write it down again.
Speaker 1:Step three choose the period of time in which you plan to achieve this. You want to be somewhat realistic, but you also want to be a little bit overly optimistic. And I'll tell you why. Because when you make a big promise, your brain kicks in and starts giving you information about how to deliver on schedule. So your best ideas will always come from over promising just a little bit as long as you plan to over deliver, keep your commitments to yourself. If you don't follow through with what you tell yourself you're going to do, your brain stops trusting you and the magic will not work. So if you say you're gonna do it, you got to do it. If you got to do it, you'll find a way. Set a fixed period of time.
Speaker 1:I would recommend three months, six months a year, a couple years. On the outside I wouldn't want to drag it out too much longer than that. The way things are going, we only have a certain amount of time on earth and I would not waste it. Choose your interval of time. I will have X thing that will catapult me into the ranks of the beautiful people in Y amount of time. Now buy a calendar. What you're going to do with the calendar? You're going to hang it on the wall and every day you're going to draw an X through the box that represents that day and that will prompt your mind to say what have I done today to follow through on my agreement with myself to create the initiative or the story or the product that will vaunt me into the ranks of the beautiful people? You'll never stop thinking about it as long as you don't break the chain.
Speaker 1:So, every day, put an X on that calendar and every day, as often as you can, meditate, visualize, use your affirmations as you're standing in the mirror wearing the clothes that you will wear, as you receive your gift from the universe and deliver it to the people of the world. Meditate on it, pray to the higher power of your choice. This is what you do now. This is a full-time job with overtime, hours, nights and weekends. Pray, ponder, visualize, affirm, be relentless and it will come to you.
Speaker 1:If you watch very carefully for its arrival and as you do this, I want you to keep all the channels in your eyesight it may not happen exactly the way that you expect, so you have to keep open the paths of communication, of manifestation, of delivery of the goods. And you want to keep watching. You want to keep an open mind, mind Like your mind should stretch out like silly putty to accommodate any new ideas that it needs, and you're going to need them, because you will not know the exact day, hour or form that your gift from the universe may take. Do not ignore and do not overlook potential avenues of delivery and if it happens in a way that you did not expect, do not turn it down. Sign the documents for delivery, accept your package, open the gift, understand that the universe is living through you and it may be calling the shots, but if you know how to play, you can join the ranks of the beautiful people.
Speaker 1:Your needs can be fulfilled. You can experience love and abundance and opportunities, creative, material, sexual, you name it. It's there for you because this world we live in is one of abundance. It may not always seem that way. Some games are finite, some games are zero-sum. Those are games. The big game is infinite games. The big game is infinite, and when you win, everyone wins, and you may find yourself like a baby in utero with everything you need Perhaps an inability to conceive of anything that you might want that you don't already have. And that's when you'll find that the one thing missing is freedom, and you can never have total freedom. You can never have total freedom, but you're always going to be seeking it, and in that search is where most of your best work will be done. As you now represent the ranks of the beautiful people who needs sleep Not me.
Speaker 1:I get all my best work done when you're sleeping. All my thinking usually happens in the wee hours. Right now, all of my hours are feeling a little bit wee. I haven't had eight hours in weeks and I'm on it, I'm in it, it, I'm in it, I'm feeling it. I'm getting insights that feel like revelations. I know and I know, I know I'm working on solutions, not gonna be mistreated. I'm going to stand up for myself.
Speaker 1:If I'd been sleeping, I never would have figured that out. I don't want comfort, I want reality, I want the truth. I want to know the things that get squeegeed away from the mind. In the sleeping hours I want to feel so fatigued that the seconds just drag by and I have so much time, and the fatigue, the tiredness makes everything feel like a lot more effort, which makes it feel a lot more real. There's no half-assing it.
Speaker 1:When you've been up for three days straight, you're in or you're out. It's hell yes or hell no. And I say hell no to sleeping. Never let me sleep, because if I sleep, then I'm sleeping, and if I'm sleeping I'm not getting things done. I'm not putting the boots to the people that want to give me problems. Oh yeah, I'm not drinking water either. Drank a gallon of water about three days ago. Now I have no need for it. Even if I did drink it, I don't think I could keep it down, because I'm not keeping anything down right now feels like I'm on a boat right now, and in a sense I am, because I can control my own perception. What's going on in my waters? I can edit, I can enhance, I can add madcap, comedic elements. This is my domain and it's only because I resisted sleep for so long that now I can't sleep.
Speaker 1:I have a confession to make. I thought last night maybe I really need to get some sleep, and I tried and it wasn't happening. So I thought, you know what, as long as I can't sleep, I'm going to meditate, and I'm going to meditate until I fall asleep. And I thought this would incentivize me to fall asleep, because if I don't fall asleep I have to keep meditating, and that's hard work. I meditated for four hours. I saw God, or something like it. I revisited my childhood. I revisited earlier childhoods that I'd forgotten about. That's what I'm doing. That's what I'm doing if you're sleeping, enjoy that. Thank you, I'm not safe.
Speaker 1:I have discovered some information that has come to light that has taken me from the point of thinking well, this is a pickle into. This is a really screwed up situation and possibly not a safe one for me to be in. Since then, I have, as I mentioned, had some difficulty sleeping. I've felt waves of nausea which have made it difficult to keep my food down, and I've had the overwhelming sensation of physical fear, a fight-flight-freeze that tells me on a molecular level that I'm not safe, on a molecular level, that I'm not safe. I've learned a little bit more about people that I thought I could trust. I've seen the other side, seen the lack of consideration and I'm accepting now that I may be much more alone than I previously thought. I'm very much alone right now at home with a sense that the world is closing in. The problem-solving part of my brain is spinning trying to figure out an exit strategy, a way to get out of here.
Speaker 1:I know that I took a big risk, just followed by a series of bigger and bigger risks, and they were fun. I enjoyed the risk compromise some of my safety to get that jolt of adrenaline, to see what would happen, to make this place my laboratory. But maybe that things have turned around on me, maybe aren't going so much in my favor. I'm starting to get scared. I'm sorry to think that perhaps I'm not safe. There are people that I thought had just screwed up. I rarely attribute to malice what could be tribute to malice, what could be just as well explained in terms of incompetence or mistakes. But I'm starting to think that not only are these people hurting me on purpose, they might be getting off on it, and that's a little scary.
Speaker 1:I don't want to go down. I don't want to be in pain. I don't want to lose what I've worked so hard to gain. But if I do. I at least, don't want people to enjoy it. I want to run but there's nowhere to go. So I'm hiding in my closet, rocking back and forth, just shaking, until I'm all shook out. But that's not happening. Shakes just keep happening and it's getting a little harder to deny that I'm not safe. I'm sorry, please forgive me. Thank you. I love sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you, I love you. Please help me. I'm still here, but I'm not safe.
Speaker 1:I'm on the Hollywood Walk of Fame walking past the Jerry Fairbanks star. Now, I don't think Jerry would be surprised to find his name next to the great, illustrious Joseph Cotton, good friend, a mentor to many, true star in the classic sense of the word, but not quite. George Putnam. George Putnam of the small screen made it seem like the big screen, made it seem like the big screen, in collaboration with Robert Goulet, lassie Anne Bancroft and other stars of the day Chris Farley, andy Devine, rodney Dangerfield, excellent comic trio, immortalized all together here on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, opposite of Jack White, not the Captain Jack Sparrow, resembling rock musician, because that guy would have a music icon on his star. This guy has a movie camera, so you know he came from the world of the silver screen, the movies, the business. Of course I know that Because I pay attention when I'm on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That's how Bill Welsh would want it. Bill Welsh made it to the heights of success in television Without ever kicking his habit of eating entire apples Not just the good part of the apple, he ate the core as well.
Speaker 1:That didn't hold him back. He was a functional whole apple eater. A habit that nearly brought down Kira Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon. Drove a wedge between that and their relationship. Drove a wedge between that and their relationship, which was healed through the use of pure MDMA in a therapeutic setting, a splash of Jodorowsky's psychomagic and a whole lot of patience and kindness and dedication to rekindling the attraction is the foundation of good romantic relationships, no matter how long they've been going on. Robert Young also played his part. Dorothy Phillips knows the whole story. I've only got his second or third hand.
Speaker 1:At one point he got really into climbing and this was before like rock climbing gyms were invented. He didn't want to climb mountains, so instead he had a, a jungle gym built in a wing of his house that happened to have very high ceilings. A lot of people got injured on that jungle gym. There's a lot of boos at the Bacchanals that happened. Mostly, we didn't feel it until the next day. One person who never got hurt was Diana Lynn. I don't know if she was sober the whole time. I don't know that I ever actually saw her do a line or even have a drink. It seemed like she was having fun. She was sober. She wasn't preachy about it, but she was always the adult in the room and she would always do you a favor and I think she ultimately kept everybody safe and a lot of us really needed it.
Speaker 1:Ramon Navarro certainly had his decadent moments. A lot of people go and not as many come back from. But he always had support, our support, support from people around him and his integrity, which was integral to not only his survival but to the remarkable success that he's achieved in several different fields. The man was what we used to call a polymath. Dear friend of Bela Lugosi, alas, could not overcome his own demons. In the end, most of us are addicts of something. We need attention, we need to be right, we need to be validated, and some of us need hard drugs such as heroin or cocaine. Paul Gilbert, william Collier, robert Wise and Stan Kenton and Irene Harvey are all immortalized on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, specifically right in front of Combo's New York Pizzeria.
Speaker 1:One day in Combo's New York Pizzeria. One day in Combo's New York Pizzeria. A few summers ago simpler times, to be sure, during the big sleep between the end of World War II and the beginning of COVID-19, when it was declared a global pandemic in March. During that time, a young man was running from the police down Hollywood Boulevard and turned into Combo's New York Pizzeria and ran right back to the bathroom and a stunned, confused man who'd been sitting outside eating a calzone saw this happen and then saw the cops in pursuit who seemed to have lost track of the man and, without really thinking, just looked at them and pointed back toward the bathroom. Looked at them and pointed back toward the bathroom. He didn't really think about it and he felt a little conflicted later on. Is it ever okay to help the cops? It depends on how much you love New York pizza and calzones and salads and the other offerings available at Combo's New York Pizzeria on Hollywood Boulevard.
Speaker 1:On the Hollywood Walk of Fame were Henry Rowland, james Mansfield, wendell Corey, marion Davies all are immortalized Ernest Borgnine, sherry Jackson, william Farnham, william Frawley, humphrey Bogart some of them dead, some of them still alive. For the time being, nothing is forever. Nothing is permanent. King Bagot and Patty McCormick, helen Mack they probably thought it would never change. They were on top, they were winners and it would always be that way. And when they were on the bottom, it felt like hell, packaged into eternity, never changing, just washes of pain, humiliation, frustration and disgust. But eventually they discovered that nothing is permanent and how we treat each other is what really matters.
Speaker 1:I'm Emerson Dameron. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-Chung 1630 am, for the show is medicated-minutecom. The little loop-de-loops in the background are courtesy of Chris Rogers, and everything else is written, produced, performed, conceived of and created by me, emerson Dameron, who is totally responsible for the content of this show. Live your Hollywood dream. Take care of yourself and the people around you. Levity saves lives. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Take a beat, 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 You're 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 multitudes 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.
