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
The Art of Changing the Subject
The flaming potpourri! Riffs, rants, rambles, gems, jewels, storytelling, etc. It's a show about infinity, nothingness, and everything in between.
Get lost in liminality with Emerson Dameron, LA's number-one avant-garde motivational speaker, Bloomsday birthday buddy with Tupac Shakur, and your witty and wounded romantic hero. Levity saves lives.
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If you're gonna be a sucker, be a sucker for love. It's a dangerous form of insanity. There's an art to going insane. You can plan better. You can't necessarily decide when and where and with whom it's gonna happen, but you can recognize the signs If you know how to go insane. You're part of a select group, so learn to recognize the other people who love to go insane and know they could lose everything, but know that they have to risk losing it all to win it all. And take that leap of faith. Get good at being a sucker. Get rare thrills, peak experiences and see heights of sublime beauty that most people would be afraid to look at because they know it might make them sick and they might just not see anything. And then they would know there's a juicy, beautiful, profound part of life that they will be forever oblivious to because they lack the courage to do the damn thing. If you're gonna be a sucker, be a sucker for love and get good at being a sucker. You'll get a lot more leeway. K-chung, los Angeles, 1630 AM. Kchungradioorg.
Speaker 1:This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson Dameron Medicated Minutes LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson Dameron, your host, producer, writer, witty and wounded romantic hero. Everything you need more than you ever dared want, and my avoidant personality means I'll never get close enough to let you down. The premieres on K-Chung happen the first Wednesdays of nearly every month. It's been every month for years. After that the show becomes the only good podcast. At medicated-minutescom or wherever you cop your casts and find podcasts are downloaded. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you personally. Levity saves lives.
Speaker 1:It was the things that weren't said in the office conversations. Everybody in the office made friends Social life, pretty much, was that group of people. As they got to know each other, as they enjoyed the perks of working for this company together, which were not bad considering the performance that they performed and the amount of money that they brought into the company. They were rewarded and thus encouraged to work harder, longer hours, to spend more time at work. They could sleep in the office. It was nicer than where most of them lived, although they were doing well financially where most of them lived. Although they were doing well financially, their private lives had suffered and they've become closer to each other, so their private lives were kind of not dissimilar from their work lives and they were very intimate, very well connected, and occasionally they would have those experiences where things got a little bit too intimate and they learned things about each other that they were not intended to know.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that can happen when you've let your guard down with someone and you're not sure what they think of you now is resentment. You can turn against that person, and they were turning against each other, but they knew that if they turned against each other too hard it would complicate the good thing that they had going, so they just stopped sharing some of the things that they used to share, and if you paid attention you could tell by the words they did not say. The worst thing that ever happened to me happened in February. Of course it did. When else would it happen? You'd have to compete with things that happened in February if it happened in some other month, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me or possibly anybody it had every advantage. Murphy's Law. The worst thing that ever happened to me was one of those things that I did not see coming, I can honestly say. But when it arrived, when it made impact, it was very clear that I could have seen it coming had I squinted, had I paid attention, had I been there then? Had I been perceptive, or with it or not deep in denial? I was obviously had to be deep, deep, deep in denial, at least throughout January, if not through most of the previous year, if not through most of the previous year. Everything just kind of stopped in the wake of the worst thing that ever happened. It wasn't an immediate sensation of pain, it was numbness and slowness, indistinguishable from stoppage, From the end of everything, or at least everything grinding dramatically to a halt. Everything was sepia tone. I wasn't eating or sleeping. It was great.
Speaker 1:My grandparents were aging, they were missing a step, maybe a few, and they were going to live in an assisted living facility so they could be cared for rather than just rattling around their big old rickety house which was full of junk. And after they left, junk. And after they left, the junk was to be divided between the, the younger members of the family, myself, my cousins and you know some other, some other interested parties could come in and go through it and take what they wanted to take, I guess, guess. The rest of it went to yard sale or something like that. Maybe it was destroyed, maybe it was sent to Bill Drummond at the KLF and he destroyed it as part of a performance arts stunt.
Speaker 1:There was one thing that I remember and always will. It was a little pot like a bowl, ceramic bowl, with a lid. That was an anthropomorphic onion and I guess you put onions in this thing to keep them and the onion was crying. The onion had a face. The ceramic onion did, and I remember arguing over that with my cousin. We both wanted it so bad. She spotted it first. She had the claim on it. I had to acknowledge that too, but I wanted it really badly and we had a playful not really serious, but maybe a little bit. I was hoping maybe she would respond to my good natured ribbing by letting me have it. She did not. She took it. I hope she still has it. It was a gravid moment, so much of the sadness we were pushing down came through in, not the way that would have been its original form. It manifested in another, humorous way and thus a better way.
Speaker 1:If you're reading it, if it's sucking you in, there's some message in there for you. There's some reason you're reading it. There's something that you're trying to get out of. There's some message in there for you. There's some reason you're reading it, there's something that you're trying to get out of it. There's something that you need to be reminded of, that perhaps you already know but nevertheless need to learn, by eliminating whatever block. It is that you have to knowing that thing in a way that you can act on it. Knowing that thing in a way that you can act on it. This is always the case. If you stumble into something, whether it's a Wikipedia deep dive or just pinballing around between different subjects or the constellation method, where you find one thing that's interesting and then you find things connected to that, and pretty soon you've got a bitchin' constellation of information going. All of those things. In all of those cases there's a reason. It's trying to tell you something, the same way that dreams are. It's pretty cool just by itself that your brain makes David Lynch films for you to watch when you're asleep, Often based on incidents from your life. Hell yeah, that's amazing and very cool and hot as well. But there's also something in there that you need to know, that you are ready to know, because this stuff comes up as you're ready to know it. You have an inner healer that takes very good care of you that is on its job and there's almost nothing you can do to throw it off, and it will show you things you need to see when you need to see them. And even if none of this is true, it makes life more interesting if you believe that it is.
Speaker 1:Most relationships end unhappily, including the ones that don't seem to end at all. When people die together, a lot of times it's because they knew that it wasn't going to get better somewhere else. Some people would be happy married to anyone. Some people would be miserable married to anyone. Some people would be miserable married to anyone. Some of those people learn through age and through losing their libido and through just being beaten down or beating themselves down. If you want to say that they're responsible which maybe it makes more sense to assume some responsibility, because then you have a little bit of agency the world's just a cold place. Or if it's singled you out for punishment, there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Speaker 1:What are you supposed to do exactly? As long as you're alive, you have to keep doing things. You have to keep breathing. If you're a shark, you have to keep swimming. If you're not a shark, don't pretend to be one. You get eaten alive by the genuine article and maybe at some point you just figure out that even if your options were unlimited, as long as your time is limited, you're not going to be able to exercise all that many of them. And with the information you have, which is clouded, defined, limited, the parameters of it are set by your mood and how you perceive things Maybe you just know on some level that it's time to give up and there's a happy ending. That is really not that happy, but it's the best you can do. So what the hell you know?
Speaker 1:I was thinking of it would make sense if we pooled our resources. Things are getting more expensive and I don't know about you, but I've noticed that I have to work harder every year just to have a baseline, acceptable existence. It's's this red queen race. It's giving me not only a headache but also digestive problems or exacerbating digestive problems. I already had and I've been doing some napkin math and I think if we got together and started living together and maybe got married and took advantage of some of the tax breaks and other incentives that come with that, it would be beneficial for both of us. Life would get easier. And if life got hard for one of us, the other one would be there to help out, to lend moral and material support, and it just makes sense, does it not? I have calculated this. I've been turning it over and kicking the numbers around. I just don't see a good argument against it. We hang out together all the time anyway. We could split rent, so our combined rent would be half of what it is now, and we could half that. It just makes sense. I feel like every argument against getting married is just not impressive. So will you marry me? Will you ask me to marry you? How about that?
Speaker 1:Clutter is one thing. I kind of enjoy clutter. It's definitely since the I want to say I started noticing it in the recession era of the late 2000s. There's this very clean, sterile, minimal looking design aesthetic that was taking over for the quasi bohemian cool coffee shop clutter that I remember from the 90s, where the cool places had a bunch of stuff that had obviously come in from different places because it was not aesthetically uniform in any way. It was aggressively clashing, and if it created any sort of larger gestalt, it was either by accident or by somebody doing it on purpose in a way that you were just not going to get. And it's hard to tell the difference between somebody just throwing stuff at the wall or, in this case, getting a bunch of junk and putting it in a room junk and putting it in a room and you hang out there and read books or have conversations on dates and listen to Coltrane wafting through the room, through the speakers, and you make of it what you will. Or if they are doing something on purpose that you just don't understand and you're never gonna understand. And experts use jargon to streamline communication with each other and charlatans use jargon to obfuscate communication with the general public.
Speaker 1:It was a talisman forged in turbulence. We had arguments right from the beginning about how to make it exist. It was custom made to, thus not returnable. It really was a beautiful thing, although it symbolized a lot of miscommunications, disconnections, potential points of failure, resentments that we had about ourselves that were perhaps harbingers of worse things to come, perhaps what the Gottmans call the four horsemen, the most foremost of which is contempt, and when that shows up, the relationship's pretty much doomed. But it comes with some energy that hate can be transmuted into, in this case the creation of something so lovely, something so gravid, with the wonderfully disgusting, horrifyingly mixed feelings that we were developing for each other, that it was really something, something remarkable and yet ineffable, which made it hard to remark on, and something that could not be destroyed. Believe me, I tried and I know that the other party also had strong incidents to wipe this thing off the face of the earth, but we couldn't. We didn't really want to.
Speaker 1:Maybe that was why you gotta go back to work. Gotta go back to the office. You gotta commute. Make that commute your own. Your job can be boring as hell. It can be soul-sucking. It can be soul-sucking. It can be life-negating, it can almost kill you. But you can bring yourself back to life by taking ownership of your co-op.
Speaker 1:Nobody said you had to take the straightest route. Take the longest route. Take the long way around. Take a different long way home. Take the bus, walk H hitchhike. Take mass transit of other kinds. Petition for a roller coaster to be put in your community as mass transit. It's not the most efficient way to get there, but it's pretty damn exciting. You'd sit through a lot of boring work, a lot of pointless meetings, a lot of BS, if you can pack a little bit of excitement into that part of the day that is your own. You don't get paid for commuting, but you're not really expected to do anything else. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you're given so much work that you have to work on your commute, and maybe you have to. You're given so much work that you have to work on your commute, and maybe you have to write by talking, and then some transcription software turns it into a piece of writing that you have to edit again. Make your commute a bold adventure. Say no to all of that. Say yes to any sort of adventure that your commute may provide. Make it exciting, make it different every day, make it life-threatening, make it potentially deadly. Make it your own. Make it count.
Speaker 1:Nixon and Kennedy were masters of kayfabe. Of course, he was set up to move the storyline along. Nixon didn't want to win that election. He had other things to do Down the road. He knew what his long-term character arc was. He was older than Kennedy. He'd been around for a minute. He knew what Kennedy was getting set up for.
Speaker 1:Well, he didn't think it was going to be real. He thought it was going to be staged. He thought it was going to be staged. He thought it was going to be something that was simulated and after it happened he felt pretty awful. Nixon almost always felt pretty awful. He was an awkward person. He wanted power. He didn't like people very much, and the easiest way to get power over people is to like them Nay, nay, even to love them. To love them to ridiculous extremes, joyfully, unrestrained, and then you'll start noticing that you can get them to do things. Nixon never experienced that and eventually it brought him down, which he knew was going to happen.
Speaker 1:That was the, the story that he was planning on participating in. That was the k, the k-fabe. Nixon kennedy k-fabe. He didn't know it was going to hurt that much, but you never really know what something's going to be like until it happens, or how you're going to react to things. Things that don't seem like a big deal in theory can be not so unimpactful in real life, and things that are scary as hell can be nothing. You don't know.
Speaker 1:Chit chat is life. Life is chit chat. It's really those most pointless conversations, the ones that aren't about anything, where you're talking just to talk. That's really what life is about. That is real intimacy, because it's not even about the exchange of information. It's about being with another person as you size each other up and smell each other's asses the way that dogs do. Sometimes, when you exchange cringe humor that you don't know if the other person's going to be into maybe they are, maybe they aren't you can recalibrate or you take the relationship to a different level. And when you chit chat about stuff it's always got five different layers of meaning, whether you intend it or not. If you're paying attention and watching, you'll see or hear the stuff that you reveal, that maybe you didn't want to or you weren't supposed to. You can feel out that person's reaction. It's easier if you don't know what you're doing. That's what really sanctifies the chit-chat conversation Bumping into each other in the elevator, the saying good morning, well, it's a Monday.
Speaker 1:It's the gravity of meaning that that conveys. These conversations are important. Small talk is huge, it's everything, it's the universe. And if you're not making the most of these little incidental conversations, these collisions, these bumping into other human beings, your life is worthless. If you think it has to have meaning, it doesn't. Goodbye For every choice that you make.
Speaker 1:There's a nearly infinite array of roads not taken, options you don't get to try once you commit, and yet there's nothing that you want more than to have it both ways. You can't have it every way, but damn it, by hook or by crook, you're gonna take at least two of them, and whenever you have two options, both of them are usually terrible. And yet maybe there's a sense that two bad options cancel each other out and you end up with one good option or no options, which is what you had anyway, because free will is a lie. You want to have it both ways. You want to do what you want and you want to be liked by others. What you want and you want to be liked by others, which in your mind, entails doing what you think they want you to do, or wanting what you think they want for themselves or for you.
Speaker 1:That sounds like a raw deal. Option A is the obvious choice. However, option B comes with a pretty cool bonus, which is that if you cater to others to get them to like you, you also get to resent them for it. You want hot, degrading porn, sex All the crazy stuff that you've ever heard or dreamed about. You want to have an affair. You want zipless fucks. You want anonymous encounters, anonymous encounters, and you want a loving spouse at home to walk the dog, to provide financial security and social status and to be allergic to fun themselves. You don't want them to do this to you. You know not what you do. Maybe you don't care.
Speaker 1:It's a small minority of psychopaths. Probably you're in denial, you just don't want to think about it. You don't think it's that big a deal if you're depressed or a nihilist. Maybe you think that you're so small and insignificant that you couldn't hurt anyone if you wanted to, because nothing you do matters. What's the big deal? It all comes out in the wash. You don't get what you want. When you do, it makes you miserable because you don't know what you want. You don't know what you really, really want.
Speaker 1:Because of that, you are bound to sow chaos and be a wrecking ball through the lives of people everywhere you go. It's an astounding lack of conflict resolution skills. Who you are as you change is forged in conflict. Go through the fire. Feel 100% of the pain now so that you don't have to feel 14% of it every day for the next 10 years. When you tell the truth, you don't have to keep track of your own crap. The world is your memory. If you're wrong, you can course correct.
Speaker 1:The thing that fascinates me about the adulterers I know is the Princeton-level project management skills that that requires. Some of them are also drunks, which makes it doubly impressive. This is about communication, conflict resolution and treating people well, because you can't treat people like garbage not if you want the world to be the sort of world that you want to live in. The poly and kink communities are at least trying to come up with ideas for this. Check in with them. Most of the poly people I know have bookshelves full of books about how to fight jealousy. Some of the kink people I know are a little Ren Faire for my taste and they have a lot of rules and taxonomies and terminologies.
Speaker 1:It can seem to take the fun out of degrading sex with multiple partners, but they know they're playing with dynamite. They're thinking about this stuff. Read their books. Let them do some of the thinking for you, because it doesn't seem like you're doing it yourself. I'm not innocent here. I've done it For years. I served as a hot douchebag side piece for women in relationships, a vibrator with a screenplay and a thesaurus, and it was great. I didn't have to worry about getting into a relationship and it can feel exciting to take advantage of people. But it's not a clean buzz. No one ever gets away with anything.
Speaker 1:Reciprocity is a real force in the universe. If you feel small, if you've been bitter and feel like you've been hurt, it can be thrilling to get one up on someone or think you did. You can also just put what you want out there. If what you really want is terrible, go ahead and ask for it. You will get haters. Haters are going to hate you. You will be compelled to shake it off. That's conflict resolution. Once again, think about what you don't want me to know that you want. What are you ashamed to want? That's probably what you really want. Maybe it's what you want most. Put that out there. You may get a few genuine haters, but you'll also get people who pretend to hate you because they want the people around them to like them. But they go to sleep admiring the hell out of you and if they could, they would put a poster of you on the wall because you know how to ask for what you want, which means that you might get it, and then you won't need to have it both ways. That would just be confusing and make it dizzy, like double vision. Thank you, so little flickers of memories digging into an omelette in a coral cafe in Burbank and around to work, a place of peace, one of the few.
Speaker 1:After experiencing the worst thing that's ever happened to me. The pain, of course, continued to reverberate as I was there with time to spare, by design, scarfing down an omelet, but it was almost. I don't know memory. Memory is a reconstruction and it's a story that we tell ourselves based on the limited information that we retain from the limited information that we were getting at the time about what was happening, and we tell those stories to serve our current narratives. So, depending on what the narrative is, maybe it feels good, maybe it feels bad. Maybe it feels good to no longer feel as bad as we remember feeling at the time. Maybe we can appreciate those things, removed from the sad, bad, mad context, in a way that we couldn't before.
Speaker 1:I also remember lying in the grass near the Vance Monument in Logan Square in Chicago and shooting nine seconds of video of just the trees overhead. I remember walking around listening to up-tempo pop music which I enjoyed perhaps more than I otherwise would have, because I was drunk, and one of the things that happened when I got drunk was over-appreciating music. There were many humiliating things about being a drunk. I was more of the stumble-bum, walk-myself-out-of-my-apartment kind of drunk, and being apologetic for my very existence was generally how I came out of that, for my very existence is generally how I came out of that, in terms of the next day, the hangover, which I tried to immediately quell by drinking more. There are also drunks who will go out and tear things up and sow mass discord and cause real problems for people and then wake up the next morning and say we, that was fun, let's it again.
Speaker 1:I was not one of those. I was not having fun a lot of the time. Most of it. I had fun for a while in the beginning and then it stopped being fun and I kept doing it as I was wanting the fun to come back. I was chasing the fun dragon, and if you had seen the fun dragon you would have chased it too. It was very, uh, attractive in that way, irresistible almost, but very hard to catch. It was fast, much faster than than I think I could have possibly uh been to catch up with it, no matter how hard I wanted to.
Speaker 1:I remember writing a note to myself, or rather waking up one morning, hungover, with red wine spilled over the stack of books that was stacked next to my bed, which that, somehow, is just extremely humiliating, and I had scrawled a note to myself and left it on my end table that said you are not happy. And the worst times, the times when I felt the most humiliated and helpless, were Sunday evenings at my then girlfriend's parents' house, where we would go and watch television and I would do everything I could to not seem as drunk as I was, and the whole night was basically me trying to not appear drunk, and I guess I didn't, because they would continue to offer me beers, which had I just had three beers in the company of people whose company I enjoyed. It would have been one thing, probably fun. But if I spent the whole day pre-gaming which I did and had most of the time, the whole ordeal was just gut-wrenching, absolutely humiliating.
Speaker 1:I felt terrible and I deserved to. In the art film All the Vermeers in New York, which came out in 1990, we see a French actress who is living in New York City and taking in the culture. Specifically, she's puttering around in an art museum looking at the paintings. Around at an art museum looking at the paintings, and a loud mouth, rather aggressive stunt broker notices that, at least in his view, she looks just like one of the Vermeer paintings. Is that a nice way to come up to somebody and let them know you're interested? It really depends. He does it, he's gonna take his shot, he's gonna throw the dice. He comes up and starts talking to her about this and as a reason why that she looks like a vermeer to him and that's enough that he wants to get to know her. More obviously there's the communication of some sexual or romantic interest behind this and in fact he may have a reason to be so forward because he is going to die soon before the end of the film, and he's going to die while he's on the phone with her, because they do end up having sort of a relationship. There's some conflict and you could tell like it's really not gonna work, but then he dies as the relationship is still in some form extant, so maybe that's a happy ending, and the last thing we see is her disappearing into a vermeer painting. There's another day, not not unlike the last. They're all a little different, but just in minor ways.
Speaker 1:The other day I noticed when I was driving in that there were some new potholes on my route into work. The rain came down a couple of weeks ago and you know the infrastructure is not really set up for that. There's one big pothole that was right on the right hand side of the road that I use when I'm getting ready to merge onto the freeway, and so I was bound to hit it. I was not prepared. I hit it hard, full force, full speed, damn near, knocked my teeth out.
Speaker 1:I actually bit my tongue. That's how much of a jolt it was and I thought man, I've been making this drive rather mindlessly. If this kind of thing can happen, I haven't been paying attention. If this kind of thing can happen, I haven't been paying attention. I've been on robotic autopilot, not exactly because I'm not flying a plane, I'm just driving my vehicle to work, and as a result of that, as if a punishment was meted out, I was made well aware that I had not been being there then, and I'm not being here now, although I am right, well, right this second.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just had a little flash where I was right. In the moment I'm learning to be that and do that as a response. As a response, he sometimes tells stories about himself. They're almost always about how he was the victim of some injustice. He was accused of a crime that he did not commit and was railroaded, and protested and insisted on his innocence and had evidence to back it up that they didn't want to hear. They had found the guy that they wanted to throw out of the helicopter and they just went ahead and did it and as much as he complained, it mattered not a whit. There was one about I think he was in elementary school and he'd been walking down the hall in a line with a bunch of other kids and had his index finger on the wall next to them, kind of tracing the wall, maybe the little space between the cinder blocks, and they decided he was drawing on the wall with a pen or a pencil or a crayon, probably a sharpie, so they could be extra mad about it, and he was punished for that, even though there was no line on the wall and there was another one that was quite dark where, um, he had. It was a relationship that went south and the, the other party, retroactively interpreted their relationship differently. This is through the filter of him, but I believe it. I've heard him lie and I've heard him tell the truth. I think he was telling the truth. He also has a picture of a cabin that he used to live in after a tree fell on it and his cats ran away.
Speaker 1:What's the correct attachment style? Avoid it, because we might suffer, we might get lonely, we might despair, but we're not going to drag you down with us. We either deal with it ourselves or we don't deal with it and we just keep going. And it's very attractive to some people to not be cared about. Many people will pretend to not care when in fact they do, and many people you meet along the way will claim to not care about you. But nothing will ever care about you less than the ocean. So remember that Avoidance is first of all, a way of not getting close enough to let you down and also and possibly more importantly or significantly from my point of view, it's a prophylactic against rejection. If you don't put yourself out there, you won't get pushed away quite as much, and you may not get used to getting pushed away the way that people who put themselves out there a lot, whether they be pickup artists or salespeople or this pushy networkers, nosy parkers, whoever is in your face with the wanting to be friends. I don't do that as much. I don't chase. Sometimes I attract. Every now and then I will either put myself out there or someone will approach me and I will engage and it will end in absolutely brutal rejection. It doesn't happen a lot, which is probably why, when it does, I feel like my soul has been absolutely annihilated.
Speaker 1:Certain conversations can be tricky. You have to weigh the pros and cons, the incentives on both sides. Do you want connection? Well, we need it and most of us are starved for it.
Speaker 1:Loneliness is perhaps the most under-researched major social malady that's killing people, scores of them as we speak, maybe me, maybe me too. I'm not going to tell you because I'm hiding that, because intimacy can be scary and you have to make sure that you're being intimate with the right people in the right ways and not putting yourself at risk of seriously lowering your status, because when you give away information about yourself that makes you vulnerable, by making other people privy to the things that you perhaps should keep to yourself, you give them power over you. Do you want to do? Do that, maybe it's worth it. Maybe there's a healthy power exchange where they are now at liberty to, without worrying about you using it against them, give you some information about themselves that it feels good to share. Because if we bring forth what is within us, what is within us may save us, what is within us, what is within us, may save us. If we fail to bring forth what is within us, it may destroy us. But then if we bring it forth and give it to the wrong person and give them our light and they screw it up or they use it against us, they can destroy us and maybe we don't see it coming or maybe we do, and that's why we zip our lips when the time is right and sometimes, maybe, when it isn't right. But we're within our rights to be paranoid, because people are animals.
Speaker 1:It's rough out there. Get out of the problem zone. The hardest place to solve the problem is from within the problem zone. If you're not solving the problems that bedevil you, it's probably not that you're not torturing yourself enough. It's not that you're not working hard enough to get to a solution. It's that you're deep, deep in the problem zone. You gotta get out. You gotta get out of the airport, get out of the traffic jam, get out of the soup, go somewhere where you can breathe. Take a walk, go to a storefront that says oxygen infusions for free and get one of those, or just sit down somewhere and breathe. It's hard to find somewhere to just sit down and exist in a lot of American urban environments. But see if you can Go to a public park, a beach, wherever it might be, and don't worry about the problem, don't even think about it. If you can help it. I mean, don't beat yourself up if you end up thinking about it, or don't make a rule that you can't think about it, because that guarantees that you will Maybe find something else to think about. Have a day that's incompatible with ruminating over a problem that you don't know how to solve. The solution may come to you. It may come in a flash of insight. It may just slowly start building up in your head and the click clack of the connecting thoughts and ideas will happen and you'll have a strategy, you'll have a game plan. That might not happen, but if it's going to happen, it's not going to happen in the problem zone. Get out of the problem zone. What's wrong with you? What are you doing in there? That American hero that you've never heard of, unless you have? Maybe you have, if you're interested, inago improv and comedic theater. You might be familiar with susan messing.
Speaker 1:I had for a level two improv class at io, formerly improv olympic and she was such a genius in so many areas that I was grossly deficient. She described me charitably as cerebrally led and she came from explosive emotions. She came from interpretive improvised dance in rip-roaring physical comedy. She once said if you want to make jokes about Nietzsche, write a sketch. Improv is about the human presence. It's about physicality. It's about being there and engaging and leading, pacing, doing the dance. She was a huge fan of the mass games in North Korea that could be seen on youtube. She recommended that we watch those. If she started a cult, well, let's put it this way if every teacher that I've ever had that I admired started a cult simultaneously, each their own cult, that's the one I would join. There was just such a torrent of love raining on that class. It changed my life utterly, entirely. Most social. Any social acuity that I might have right now is largely attributable to social acuity that I might have right now is largely attributable to improv and almost entirely attributable to Susan messing. Within that category, this is a scary one.
Speaker 1:I've been told near the ends of different relationships that I've been in, as they were disintegrating to the point where we'd given up on damage control and we were starting to report, with no varnishing, no sugarcoating, no holding back, exactly what resentments of each other led us to this unpleasant juncture. I've been told that I neglected things that should have been obvious, that I displayed thoughtlessness in the things that I didn't do when the time was right to do them, that I was not there with what was needed. I hesitate to go into specifics because I don't want to. I think there's more to it than the specifics. I think it could be a pervasive pattern of thoughtlessness, neglect, indicating that I have not really experienced these people in their whole fulsome humanness, that something is lacking in the perception that I have of the people in relationships that indicates maybe I don't have the consideration for them, that I should, that I, that maybe I can't.
Speaker 1:I'd like to think that I can, because I think it would really enrich my life to care about someone that much. Am I capable of it? I don't know, am I aware of? That's the problem. There are things that I never thought of, that never crossed my mind. The things I get called out on are things I was oblivious to and I called out on them in the format of. You should have just known this. If I had to tell you this, that would have removed any of the value that would have come from you just doing it. How could you not just know? And I can give you a million excuses it's my depression. I don't think I have any power in the world. When I get into the depths of my depression, I don't think I can hurt anyone. I don't think I can help anyone. I don't think anything I do matters, and that makes it easy to hurt people If you can believe that nothing you do matters, then why not just treat people poorly?
Speaker 1:And what's the point of treating people well, or even considering what that would look like, or asking the questions? Not what can I do for you? Give me orders so I can just do the thing mechanically that you want me to do, but questions that lead to understanding where thing mechanically that you want me to do, but I questions that lead to understanding where it's not that you just know, but, like you, understand that person on the level that it occurs to you what they need when they need it. Is it too late for me? I really hope not on you.
Speaker 1:Your combination of intimidating brilliance and primal animal magnetism is intimidating for a lot of people. It represents for them the fear at the threshold of adventure, and they may be right to feel that way. You may be too much for them. There are people that cannot handle the journey that you're going on. But make it clear you're going in regardless and if they get left behind, any regret that results from that is on them because they botched it. Anyone would be lucky to know. Anyone would be lucky to spend time by your side. You are a cure for boredom and you can cure them. With a wink of the eye and a snap of your fingers, you enrich and defile the people that come into your life in all the right ways. It is your artistic practice, it is your gift to the world and they will love you for it.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-Chung, los Angeles 1630 am. Wwwkchungradioorg. Medicated-minutescom. Donate to K-Chung. K-chung needs your support and deserves it as well. Kchungradioorg. Slash. Donate. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you personally. Levity saves lives.
Speaker 1:To be a romantic is to be a player. Player, but not in the sense of playing games with people. We do this for real and for keeps. To win it all, you gotta risk losing it all. That's the only way to play. Romance is adventure, it's art world creation. It's the refusal to accept the base ugly cynicism of the real world. Looking around, seeing there are a lot of impediments to being a romantic, there's a lot of discouragement and deciding you don't care, deciding you are going to be a joyful lover, an unshakable optimist, love the hell out of people. Despite all the reasons you shouldn't, you are going to go to war on your own cynicism, on your own hatred, on your misanthropy, on self-pity, cowardice and distrust. This, right here is all you get. Express your love fully, make people feel good. There are a lot of openings for romantics, maddox.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I can't help but listen. Sometimes I can't help but listen. Sometimes I can't help but listen. Sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't help myself. Sometimes I can't help myself, sometimes I can't help myself, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't.
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 riotousitudes 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.
