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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
First Blood, Best Blood
It's not what happens to you. It's how you get revenge. Let the lightning live through you.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is a production of KCHUNG. Music by Visions of the Universe and Ohmu Shell. Written, performed, produced, and created by Emerson Dameron, who is solely responsible for its content.
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It's OUT! Sophistication Nation: Brief Interviews with Women I Pretend to Understand: https://emersondameron.hearnow.com/sophistication-nation
Feel the heat of the blue flame of the divine masculine. At Camp Manhood, a three-day retreat for men who are ready to become men. We're going to do it all. We're going to do internal family systems, embodiment work, shadow work, holotropic breath work. It's going to get wild. You're going to scream, you're going to cry. You're going to work on yourself. You're going to do the work. You're going to find out where you're stuck and unstick yourself so you can go stick it to somebody else. You're going to exercise your body, mind and soul, your breath, the portal. You will return again and again to the breath, your connection with the essential polarity inherited. All things in, out, in out. We're going to feel everything, all the feelings. No feeling left unfelt, because feeling is healing and why that's appealing. We're in a welcome challenge. Bring it. You're going to make your needs a priority, cultivate a mindset of ridiculous abundance. Don't take anything personally, because you're going to be irrationally self-confident, fearlessly, radically honest. Remember, today is a good day to die or go outside or talk to somebody.
Speaker 1:K-chung, los Angeles is 1630 AM worldwide on the World Wide Web kchungradioorg. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. Music on tonight's episode comes from Omu Sounds and Visions of the Universe. I'm Emerson Dameron. I am the producer, performer, the warm and fuzzy center of the universe of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, and also red-hot and rock-hard center of the universe. And tonight I would like to take the liberty of sharing with you a compelling dream that I had, a compelling dream that I had. Perhaps your heart sinks at hearing this proposition.
Speaker 1:A lot gets lost in translation, typically when people talk about their dreams, because so much of it is drawn from our own soups of symbolism that some of it's universal, some of it is distinct to us. Enough of it is ours and not anyone else's that a lot gets lost in translation and a lot of times it makes sense to us on an emotional level in a way that we have not fully sussed out. But other people don't have that luxury. They don't have all of the same material that we do. Nevertheless, I would posit that this dream is not only relevant to the intensive work that I've been doing on myself, but may be of broader general interest. I think it's worth the risk of sharing it.
Speaker 1:To begin, I will say that I am more a fighter than a lover. I'm working on making peace with my capacity for violence, and there's a lot of violence in this dream and I'm okay with that because it didn't really happen outside of the dream. Who is of symbolic storytelling utility within the dream? And it is important for us to acknowledge and cultivate our capacity for violence. If we are not ready to kill when necessary, it makes us hard to trust and rely on in a potential combat scenario or the age of discontinuity, which comfort will give way to chaos. It's already underway. You must be ready and able to kill, but not willing. That's where it gets weird. You should never initiate any violence in real life unless it is very much called for.
Speaker 1:And I was not initiallyering my way through a woodsy landscape and it felt like I was in an apt milieu for me. I spent a lot of time in the woods as a child, time with nature. I think nature has healing power. I think it can potentially save us from our own self-destruction or maybe accelerate it. It takes the Mark Fisher accelerationist approach and just get us off the planet so it can start undoing the damage. Either way, nature is going to be an important part of what happens with the human race. It always has been. You should acknowledge it.
Speaker 1:The woods have always been a place of peace for me. It's where I went when I got dumped the first time, when I stopped believing in God. In the evenings, in the twilight hours, I would walk with my father down a paved road which was surrounded by woodland on either side, and we would sometimes encounter copperhead snakes that had come out to make themselves comfortable on the pavement. My dad carried a hatchet for the purpose of beheading them. On sight, they're poisonous snakes. I guess he wanted to exercise an abundance of caution or make peace with his capacity for violence and actually kill something that would not be missed by anyone who could have an effect on his freedom or reputation. I don't necessarily condone it, but I was always interested in if a copperhead loses its head, is it still a copperhead? It's a bit of a ship of Theseus flavored problem.
Speaker 1:I was traversing the wilderness day and night, using the North Star to navigate, and I was extremely dissociated. I was not in touch with my body. I could tell from looking at myself that I was quite jacked compared to how I am in waking life in which I have. My nervous system has taken a beating. Over the last few years. I've lost a significant amount of weight, as more than one person who has known me for a minute has observed In the dream I am a beefcake extraordinaire, but I can't really enjoy it in an embodied way because I'm just very dissociated and not in touch with my body.
Speaker 1:Some people love dissociation and pay good money for it. Aficionados of ketamine and other dissociative drugs will overpay obscenely for the experience of dissociating. I wouldn't say that I love it, but I see the utility and I could feel or not feel, as the case may be in the dream that I was becoming a more effective conduit. I normally assume that I have free will. I think it's a convenient misapprehension, interpretation that is not accurate in the way that we believe it is and perhaps need to believe it is to keep society humming along. I believe a lot of stupid things for the sake of convenience. I consider that to be one of them.
Speaker 1:In this dissociated state, I felt much more receptive to letting the lightning live through me. I felt possessed by strength, electricity that was not strictly my own, and I was on a mission and I had a sense that time was of essence. I was going to find my old friend, who I considered the one person that could understand the pain that I was carrying around in my chest the pain that I was carrying around in my chest. Beneath the dissociation, the sense of frozenness, there was a sharp pain of heartbreak that had been getting worse over time. Heartbreak sometimes gets better over time. I mentioned that I'm more a fighter than a lover. Love is the more frightening of the two. My advice to myself at this point is to be the less invested partner or the least invested partner in a potential polyamorous situation. But the romantic will out. The romantic is stronger than the cynic. It has more to live for. If you try to lock it up with cynicism, its revenge will be bloody and brutal. So my recommendation is try not to invest more than you can afford to lose and if you need excitement, practice the art of sex transmutation. That's where you take your sex drive, the very force of creation, and turn it toward backgammon or something where people don't get hurt.
Speaker 1:I was trying to find my friend. I did find his home, which was very hard to get to, or would have been for most people. I was not having any trouble. I was getting out of my own way, letting the lightning guide me, and it was almost as though I wasn't even there, like a force was living through me and I just kept thinking today is a good day to die or feel my feelings if I need to, but right now I'm not feeling my feelings and I'm covering a lot of ground. Maybe this is unconscious competence or the mysterious realm of Paradise City that exists above that. Anyway, I found his home, which is not accessible by vehicle. That would have required fording a large creek, but I made it there on foot, only to find that he had died about six months before I got there. So I was right, the time was of essence, but I started too late. The one person that I was confident would understand my plight was no longer with us, had left the building, had joined the choir in Visible, as we all will and should be in no hurry to, because we'll all get there. He got there. I was left a bit bereft but also distanced from my feelings. So I just started exploring the area, foraging, building fires, living by my wits and the abundant resources provided by nature For those of us who can attune.
Speaker 1:I did not find my friend, but I did make an enemy. A small-town law enforcement official took an instant dislike to me. He was driving. He saw me walking by the road and said that he wanted me out of town, immediately offered to give me a ride to the edge of town. I don't think he was trying to be helpful. I think he took an immediate dislike and wanted me out, which I was not terribly shocked by.
Speaker 1:I've always felt like I had plenty of enemies. I personally can't relax around someone if I don't know who they are or what they stand for. That's the disease to please. If you want to please everyone or some generic person, you're not really going to win anyone's trust. You're just trying to avoid making enemies. I'm not afraid of making enemies. Your enemies show you who you are.
Speaker 1:In this case, my enemy threw me in jail and deprived me of my freedom, which is my most valuable asset. And if you ever decide to hold me captive in this way which, if you have never spent the night in jail, it's horrifying in a way that's hard to describe If you should do this to me, treat me poorly. You can include light torture. Just keep me busy, help me, keep my survival instincts alive. Do not treat me well. Do not let me get comfortable in this jail had some flashbacks to being treated very poorly in a place with different foliage, indicating a very different part of the world.
Speaker 1:I don't remember much of that. It happened, it affected me, but I was not experiencing things in a direct way. It is hard to describe. It was scary, but not in the way that you typically experience fear. I managed to break out. I made use of the lightning living through me, the broken heart of the warrior, the deep reservoir of pain, and I got out of there without even thinking about it. I muscled my way out. I decked some people.
Speaker 1:People generally love their own freedom and not yours so much. And when people get together in groups look out, something asinine, ill-advised is bound to happen, and that's. And I was at war with all the people of this town. I had not one friend. I was betrayed by the institutions that shaped me, the former allies who I waited to have them come to my aid. I was on my own and that's exciting in a way. We're all on our own a lot of the time when we're born, when we die and many times throughout. But it's not so great when you're vastly outnumbered.
Speaker 1:I survived long enough by my instincts or whatever was living through me that I now know that, if it proves necessary, I can MacGyver my way out of hell, but in a situation where I'm that dramatically outnumbered, there's just a limited amount that I can do. I'm typically afraid of my own power. I keep my power. I own it. In this case, I was quite selfish with it, as I had no allies and I needed it all for myself with it, as I had no allies and I needed it all for myself. Sometimes I don't know what I'm capable of, especially when there's lightning living through me. I was not able to hold off an entire town for more than a certain amount of time. There were numerous casualties on their side, not on mine, I only had myself.
Speaker 1:But eventually my good fortune began to run out. I was cornered and I had to resort to my own personal honor code, which is so complex that I don't understand much of it, and I considered ending it myself, which is If you have three options and one of them is suicide. You need more options. It should always be the very last resort. People who attempt suicide generally think what the hell have I done? I assume it's not a pleasant experience, but I needed somewhere to go and I considered possibly back to whatever soup I emerged from. But I decided instead that I was going to allow myself one final showdown with SeaTac, the enemy who definitively showed me who I am. I took him right out. I expected his allies to come after me at that point, but I guess they didn't like him much either. They anointed me the new king of the goons of this town, which is more of an inconvenience than anything. I'm still not quite sure how I'm going to handle that, or if it's the kind of power I want going to handle that, or if it's the kind of power I want. But I was hailed as a hero, at least by some, reviled by others, as any hero must be, and somebody handed me a copy of a book called the Body Keeps the Score, and that's when I woke up.
Speaker 1:If you knew what people really thought of you, you'd be as disgusted as they are. The better people know you, the less they like you. So walk away before they walk in on you during your elaborate masturbation ritual. People are scum and will hurt you for fun, so make them feel as bad as you do. Remember it's not what happens to you, it's how you get revenge. Rejection makes us stronger. So if you want to be a hero and a minch, find someone you like and reject them. Love yourself first and then tell everyone else to kick rocks. Don't play stupid games with children and if you do, set the board on fire. That means you win. It's time to grow up and accept reality. Life is hard, so make sure you go it alone and remember trust is for suckers.
Speaker 1:K-chung is a celebration of the street-level activism, experimental theater, comedy and performance art, wildly eclectic music and edge-of-the-world weirdness of the most diverse city on Earth. We're LA's rebel radio family, the hub for Southern California conversation and chaos. We're LA's rebel radio family, the hub for Southern California conversation and chaos. We do a lot with a little and we need your help in the form of your hard-earned frog skins. Go to kchungradioorg. Slash, donate, give what you can and be honest.
Speaker 1:We open in a dingy apartment in the aftermath of a drunken hookup. Dingy apartment in the aftermath of a drunken hookup. Tommy is lying on his stomach, face down, face in the pillow, continuing to snore. Still thoroughly passed out, natalie has woken up once again, facing a brutal hangover as a result of having a little bit too much to drink. Brutal hangover as a result of having a little bit too much to drink, getting older, carrying around the disappointments and indignities of a lifetime. When Tommy wakes up, they do a little hair of the dog, do a little straightener from the eight ball that Natalie has in case of such emergencies, and it brings them back to life and they start talking. And Tommy starts talking about his plan, which he's been talking about for two years. Almost everyone around town is familiar with it. His plan is to solve all of his financial problems and get revenge for an old grudge of the sort that he has against many denizens of this town by robbing a rich local celebrity who everyone knows, who's got plenty of money, very high status in the town, to rob him by first tricking him into a threesome. Tommy's been talking about this for ages. It has not gotten back to the designated mark, although everyone else knows about it, because no one sees any reason to tip him off because it's such an inept plan that it's never gonna happen.
Speaker 1:But Natalie Natalie is a bartender by trade, but really she is a painter, a digital glitch artist and one of the most perceptive people that you could meet or imagine knowing. Excellent listener, listener always looking for opportunities, despite her deadpan demeanor which covers up a sometimes violent temper and passionate core, which manifests in intense loyalty to her friends. She's very engaged and curious about whatever's going on and right now that is Tommy's plan to get rich, which is of interest to Natalie. She wants nothing more than a windfall that would allow her to not work anymore, which he's never enjoyed, and simply make art which she has always enjoyed. Even simply make art, which she has always enjoyed. Even the tedium and disappointment of it are meaningful in a spiritual sense. And she listens and comes to the conclusion that it might work if almost everything about the plan were changed. It might work With the right team, which would be almost entirely her. That's Tommy's intellectual property, the plan. So obviously he would be part of it, inevitably and perhaps unfortunately.
Speaker 1:But Natalie knew that the success or failure would be contingent on how she strategized and planned every contingency and pacified Tommy's ego to keep him from screwing it up, and pretty much did the whole thing herself. As a proof of concept, that weekend she effectively seduced the designated mark. The local celebrity Found it remarkably easy to do. She just found out which lounge he was hanging out at on Monday night, which, if you didn't know, is when famous people go out because they're not likely to be bothered Less likely to be bothered. Likely to be bothered Less likely to be bothered. If they don't mind being bothered a little bit but they don't want to deal with the Friday crowd. They go out on Mondays. She tracked him down, the sparks flew, she knew how to make that happen when she wanted to, and they had good sex for the first time and a connection was established.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, on the other side of town, tommy was getting into a fight with one of his enemies, who stayed on the other side of town specifically to avoid this scenario playing itself out. It was over an ex of Tommy's from four years prior, who had dated the enemy three and a half years prior, had now thoroughly moved on, but Tommy never got over it and this guy became the target for his hostility and they finally ran into each other. Despite his best efforts to avoid a confrontation, they came to blows. Tommy was arrested, arrived at the jail very inebriated and leaked some crucial details of Natalie's plan to his cellmate. Natalie figured this out from getting communique from the cellmate demanding to be cut in on the plan, which is frustrating to say the least, but was always something that was in the realm of possibility. So she went ahead and got him to come along with her to the party at the Mark's house two Friday nights later, on a holiday weekend, where they planned to make this three-way happen.
Speaker 1:Originally Tommy was going to be part of it, but he was usually too drunk to get it up and there was no way that was going to happen in a MFM three-way scenario. Natalie was perceptive enough to see that ahead of time, and so it actually worked out a little bit better because now she had someone who was a little bit less sensitive. Tommy was a aging hipster and once hot musician who was fading fast, well aware of it, drank to overcompensate and was at a point in his life where he was slipping on a lot of banana peels. So Natalie actually got a better co-conspirator out of this. But what they didn't anticipate was that before they could initiate the threesome, they would compromise the mark and allow them to drain his assets.
Speaker 1:The party turned into an orgy, and it was obvious that this was not an unusual occurrence. Many of the parties to which they previously not been privy to not been invited, turned into orgies on a regular basis. That was something that happened in this house. Tommy showed up, his house, tommy showed up and in the chaos and confusion, tommy and Natalie got into an absolutely massive blowout fight in which they revealed many of their hidden insecurities and engaged in coked-out gunplay, and the other partygoers didn't know whether this was real. It looked real, but was it some kind of kinky sex game? That seemed more likely under the circumstances. They wouldn't be here if they didn't belong here. And if they belonged here, you could assume that what they were doing was part of their fetish.
Speaker 1:And during the blowout, natalie lost it. She saw her chance at this massive windfall slipping away. She took the mark hostage, held him in front of the guests, put a gun to his head, said Everyone, while it's out, I'm taking all of your stuff, I'm running it. And it turned out that this was the mark's fetish, which he discovered only after it occurred. It was something he'd wanted forever and did not know about. But now he did, and he was highly intrigued on many levels and became immediately enraptured with Natalie for this level of creativity that could bring out previously unseen parts of his own sexual makeup, and he hired her on the spot for some kind of ambiguous creative role that did not involve too much work.
Speaker 1:They gave her a lot of free time to work on her own projects and brought her a better life and a degree of fulfillment, despite some continuing struggles. Maybe just that sense of disappointment and me against the world and I never quite feel like I belong here. I was just baked into Natalie's bones at that point she could never totally get comfortable. But it was a better life. It made use of her good qualities loyalty, the ability to be a highly engaged, perceptive, creative listener, even her volatility, which factored heavily into their sexual play, the scenes they would create as collaborators, which also satisfied something she'd always wanted to do, which was have a real creative partnership with somebody on her level. And she doesn't use coke anymore, so that's good. She knows how to channel the anger. She's making art. She still has to work, but much as it isn't all good, neither is it all bad and it's good on the good days for Natalie. And Tommy is going around to bars talking about his new plan, which is similar to the old plan, with a less realistic mark and details so far-fetched that he could have only come up with them himself In the Rube Goldberg workshop of his booze and coke adult mind. And in his way he is also providing entertainment.
Speaker 1:Love, bomb me, baby. I'm not a come-and-go guy, so drench me with attention all day and all night. Turn me inside out with the sheer force of your gothic romantic intensity. I want to hear you say I'm the red-hot, rock-hard center of the universe to you, if you want it. I want you to beg for it so I can tell you to slow down and ask very, very nicely. Our sex is bananas in a blender because you sold me a timeshare on your nasty side. If I get another woman on the side, I want you to throw a monkey wrench in that so I can learn some discretion. The thing about me is I have treatment-resistant, chronic depression and I like love-bombing. It's the only way you're going to get through.
Speaker 1:The Beach Life Experiment may have an expiration date. It's been a couple of years and change. I've enjoyed much of the experience. I love the absurdities, the radical relationship with impermanence, the end-of-the-world intensity of the place, the creative inspiration that comes from its proximity to the wrath of Poseidon, all of the various healing modalities and cults to participate in in the area. All of that still fascinates me.
Speaker 1:As some of you don't know and others know and others know quite well, I've been practicing solo polyamory. I don't have a primary partner but I have playmates, rotating companions. Nothing is anywhere close to getting serious. Nothing is anywhere close to getting serious and I think maybe I'm just not at the point where I can move on From the last disappointment. I just find a certain sadness, a longing for connection. Not knowing quite what I want nor how to get it, has been following me up and down Oceanfront Walk, on my daily walks to the pier, back home through the canals. It won't leave me alone. It gets a little bit heavier. It plays off my habitual negative self-talk and starting to get painful to deal with. So I appreciate distractions, especially ones that I don't need to initiate.
Speaker 1:One day recently I was sitting doing my work at the cow's end when a charming younger woman invited herself to sit down across from me. Normally this would have felt presumptuous, maybe a little bit obnoxious, but there was just something about her presence that I enjoyed quite a bit and we hit it off immediately in a way that I don't typically hit it off with people right away. We had not similar but in interesting ways, complimentary creative projects on the burner. I told her about some of mine. She told me about the book that she's working on as part of her coaching practice, which rests on the assumption that emotions are dependent on thoughts and can be reverse, engineered and elicited through series of practices and exercises, and, sitting across from me at the table, she began to demonstrate some of these methods and strategies that she devised through which to elicit and then wave away certain emotional states.
Speaker 1:The one we practiced with was the state of being in love, where I tend to get stuck. State of being in love where I tend to get stuck, particularly when it is not requited or reciprocal, and that causes a lot of suffering for me, or I cause a lot of suffering for myself out of frustration with that condition, and I'm going to tell you a couple of things that you will need to take on faith, for reasons that I will try to elucidate. Number one is that it worked after doing this exercise with this beautiful, alluring, almost magical-seeming young woman, perhaps because of her flowy dress and tiara, and I would posit that there is no outer person and inner person. The two are intimately connected and we become what we pretend to be in. The costumes that we wear reflect who we are and can help us become who we want or need to become, and I'm not sure which came first the sparkles or the aura of sparkliness, but she had both and I'm sure that helped with the set and setting aspect of the effectiveness of this exercise.
Speaker 1:But by the end of it I was able to not only fall out of love, which I'd been aching, yet weirdly reluctant to do because I didn't know who I would be on the other side of it. It's been so long. I just didn't know who I would be on the other side of it. It's been so long. I just didn't know what to expect if I managed to extricate myself. And what happened was I could and I did.
Speaker 1:We continued, we were, uh, we'd been there, I now realized, for um Almost four hours I usually don't hang out for more than two At the longest, because I tend to get restless, but I did not notice the passage of time and our work together continued and I found that by the end of it, much like certain romantic partners that I've had, who have special circumstances, support systems that they've worked over years to develop for themselves, are able to create these intense romantic and sexual connections with people that they can then freely dip into and out of, and I found that I could wish away my feelings of romantic and sexual attachment. That activated all of my old attachment wounds, which I always thought was just. You know, there's nothing but passage through the fire that can really work with that. But as I found, through doing this work I could get out of there and then go back in. I could re-elicit that feeling of being in love under much the same circumstances or for a random passerby or passersby. It was going to be that kind of Friday or Saturday night. I did try it out that weekend and it proved devastatingly effective and then I was able to get out again. To get out again. I'm going to ask you to take this on faith, because I don't feel comfortable sharing the structure or the details of the practices themselves in a way that could be replicable, because the thing is, once you've seen this, you can't unsee it and there's a sense of responsibility at that point to control how you experience emotions.
Speaker 1:After this very intense experience, we agreed to spend much more time together. I agreed to punch up the jokes in her book and add my expertise in storytelling structure, and she agreed to continue working with me on the elicitation and later eviction of emotional states as they became desirable, fell out of fashion. The four seasons, the six realms of life and death. I was now equipped to control my feelings and I was mystified, astounded, baffled. I never thought this kind of thing would be possible. I was fascinated by the experience. Kind of thing would be possible. I was fascinated by the experience and we went back to my place and had sex that was absolutely off the chain Top five, at least in the conversation for the most rough and tender and sublime, exuberant expression of human creativity that I've ever participated in.
Speaker 1:As the next couple of weeks rolled on and our collaboration intensified, I found my fascination with this material starting to feel like an addiction. In some ways. It was taking on the aspect of something beyond an enthusiasm or a new, even fascination. It became a channel for some of my less savory obsessive qualities, which I found myself not as readily able to wish away, and it started to seem like all was not well in Lou's land. She assured me that as we worked through the material over the course of a number of weeks to the point where addictions and diseases and things that we would normally consider outside of our sphere of control could be manipulated in very much the same way that she'd showed me to work with my feelings of romantic attraction and attachment and horniness and to demonstrate.
Speaker 1:She let me in on other aspects of her life, including things I was not entirely cool with, that were a little bit on the other side of kosher, from where I normally want to be. I saw her online marketing operation, some of her underlings operation, some of her underlings. We took my ritual walk around Venice Beach in each other's company and I saw her convince people from different walks of society, people with no knowledge of each other, nothing evidently in common aside from their location and get them to do her bidding. And her bidding was not always wholesome, but they always felt good about it because she could make them feel good about it. And if people feel good and they feel good about doing what you want them to do, well, that's a good thing. What could be wrong with that? And I just wasn't entirely convinced.
Speaker 1:I started to feel conflicted about this and my depression and its rumination death spirals that are its most salient characteristic, its hallmark, if you will returned with a vengeance. I've been able to wish them away with help from these practices, but now it's really flooding back and I'm trying to get rid of it and it's not working anymore and I despair. I really feel like this is the end of the line. But then it occurs to me what if my depression gives me this occasional immunity to what she's doing, occasional immunity to what she's doing? What if that gives me an opportunity to let people know and protect them from what is starting to look like it will inevitably become her full domination of the social landscape of Venice Beach? I know I can't do it alone and I have a hunch of what might work. One thing about New Age types is they don't really know what to do about depression, about depression. They don't have satisfying explanations for human tragedies that can really only be meaningfully understood as chaotic and outside the control of the primary participants, and they cannot stand to be mocked.
Speaker 1:So I decided to put my depression in partnership with the famous roast comedy of the oceanfront walk street performer, true Artist, rapper and roast comedian Well known by anyone who has walked through the area and become the target of his barbs. He has pointed out my nose and the size of it. I might get it fixed one day, but that's just because I am concerned that I might have sleep apnea, much as my dad does, and maybe fixing my nose would help with that. I sort of like having a trademark. Sort of like having a trademark. I like looking a little bit like a boxer who has seen some things that could not be unseen, including, uh, experiencing the sensation of a broken nose, which I'm told is agonizingly painful. I never have, but it looks like I have and I don't want to give that up. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but for some people it's just what they're looking for and it's part of my presentation. Anyway, I am getting sidetracked.
Speaker 1:True artist has a knack for busting on people and finding their weaknesses. Sure enough, we got together and kind of did an intervention. I got him to come to the cow's end for my working session with Luz and he just let her have it with both barrels. He'd been working on this for a while. He knew who she was, he was inspired and he did a vicious roast, thoroughly scalded. Luz went up in smoke. Maybe she returned to the sunshine that is her namesake. She left her solid and liquid form and disappeared into the atmosphere. I got an interesting story out of it.
Speaker 1:I got what is perhaps most thrilling to me in the areas of human connection, which is a fruitful, creative collaboration. I got one with Luz and then, when that went south, I got one with True Artists. We parted ways after that. It was a not a sustainable partnership for a number of reasons I would not want to get into. I have nothing but respect and I believe that's mutual. But I left my relationship with Lou as much as I arrived Alone, my relationship with Lou as much as I arrived alone, with a lot of good stories that I keep to myself until the time is right in order to maintain a certain air of enigma that people seem to like and that also gives me a layer of protection.
Speaker 1:I would have to admit that my avoidant behavior, and perhaps my depression itself, serves as a prophylactic against intimacy. See. So even after saving Venice Beach from what certainly looked a lot like the deepest levels of manipulation, with the intent to be roped into voluntary servitude and like it, I was still very much alone. I did have a couple of hookups as a result of my brief local hero status. None of them were on the same planet as the sex that I had with Olions, and it may take me yet more time to get that out of my system and I live with this sense of alienation and it hurts. We all have itches that we can't scratch ourselves, but part of me kind of likes it.
Speaker 1:There's valuable information there. We can always ask ourselves first of all, if you follow the money, who benefits from this? That was obvious in this situation. What was less so was the money. Who benefits from this? That was obvious in this situation. What was less so was what can I learn from this and what's funny about this? Have you heard some of those roast jokes that would answer that question. But much like the self-improvement techniques that I learned from Luz, these jokes are just too dangerous to put in circulation in this way. So once again, you're going to have to take my word for it and let your filthy imagination fill in some of the gaps. I think if anyone can do it, it's you.
Speaker 1:This has been Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. K-chung Los Angeles makes it all possible. Kchungradioorg Lots of good programming on KChung throughout the year. We are mixing it up out and about in the community. So get in touch, come hang out. I think there may be one or two of you. I promised a dinner at Burger Lord some time ago and if not made good on that. You're welcome to track me down. I feel much better when I keep my word and I appreciate accountability and being held to that. My name's Emerson Dameron. I am the producer and the man behind the dream here at Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. Medicated-minutes is the website. Tonight's music was provided by Omu Sounds and Visions of the Universe. Levity saves lives, if only temporarily. We must be ready and able to kill, but not willing. See you next time. Perhaps Today is a good day to die, or feel my feelings or ask someone out, whatever comes first.
