Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
LA’s #1 avant-garde personal development program. Experimental storytelling and comedy. Power, drugs, and mental health. The home of Ask a Sadist, Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers, and the First Church of the Satanic Buddha. Levity saves lives.
Your host is Emerson Dameron, writer, competitive storyteller, occasional comedian, and possibly some sort of performance artist. I'll let the critics decide.
Regularly scheduled episodes premiere on the first Wednesday of the month on KCHUNG Los Angeles.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
Embrace Chaos: Self-Love, Sadism, and the Power of Creativity
What if the very things you think you can't control are exactly where your power lies? On this episode of Medicated Minutes, we challenge you to rethink the inevitability of life's events and the importance of personal responsibility, all wrapped in Emerson Dameron's signature humor and wit. We kick off with a passionate monologue that tackles these existential themes head-on, urging you to embrace life's chaos rather than resist it. From the ironies of trying to stop the unstoppable to finding freedom in the mundane, we present a philosophy that turns conventional wisdom on its head.
Can you love yourself without succumbing to the trap of fame? We then pivot to a deep-dive into the paradoxical dance between self-love and sadism, exploring how public attention can wreak havoc on mental health. By drawing parallels with historical figures and examining consensual sadistic practices, we illustrate the necessity of rigorous self-discipline and mutual respect for personal growth. This segment is a hard-hitting look at how embracing one's flaws and leveraging past pain can pave the way for true healing and transformation.
Finally, we explore the transformative power of shedding one's ego and embracing observational awareness. Through the poignant story of Scarlet Obscura, a Nova Scotian artist seeking meaning in Los Angeles, we emphasize the importance of creativity and curiosity in understanding both ourselves and others. This narrative serves as a testament to the power of art and self-expression amidst life's unpredictability. Tune in to discover how you can harness creativity, humor, and empathy to navigate the chaos of existence and find deeper meaning in everyday life.
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About to hit you with the last knock-knock. Emerson Dameron can't ever fly. Medicaid medicine city fun time. Harmony for slice, like a son's child. Tune in and let's ride.
Speaker 2:This is here to go, mine. We're ignited. We turn the mundane to delight. We're on topics. We ain't fighting. We got you rolling on the floor. Can't stop. From the punchline to the mic, drop LA's number one. I've on card punched it all. Development program, home of fans, mercedes and vice-size. Eat by the frill is Gage From Los Angeles. Let me be sage Lies.
Speaker 3:The time has come to pass. Oh, this is happening. This is very much happening. This, in fact, is happening more than anything has happened for a long time around here. It's happening and I'm surprised that you are not prepared, or at least accepting. You had ample time.
Speaker 3:There were many dress rehearsals in which you participated. You didn't think it was gonna happen. What do you think this is? You had all the same information everyone else did and yet came to wildly different conclusions which put you way out on the crank fringe and you are drummed out of scholarship on this topic because you are wrong. You knew that it was going to happen, but here's how you defeated yourself. I'm going to tell you exactly how you kicked your own ass and made yourself lose when I gave you a perfectly good shot to win because I love you and we got it like that and I don't even care. I'm over that. Now I don't have to win. To win or have fun. To have fun, you can imagine where it goes from there, or maybe not. Maybe you're dumber than I thought if you thought that there was anything you could do to stop this from happening.
Speaker 3:I know you don't want it to happen. That sways me in the direction of doing it. The fact that it bothers you is in the plus column of reasons to do it. If you pretended to like it, I probably wouldn't be convinced, because you're not good at lying. Astounding considering the frequency in which you do it. The only person you are fooling is yourself and you believed by telling me not to do it Not even asking.
Speaker 3:It wasn't even worth it to be polite to try to get what you maybe thought or wanted to believe that you want, which was your freedom, which you absolutely cannot handle Self-respect. You wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it. You don't want it. It's going to make you sick, poison, or the medicine is in the depths, and we both know that you're lightweight. That's not a good or a bad thing, but it was your responsibility to factor it in. Surely by now you know your own weaknesses. It baffles me and I find it hilarious.
Speaker 3:You thought that I wasn't going to do this because you didn't want me to do it, or you thought there was some move you were going to pull off at the last minute that was going to stop it from happening. You missed the bus. If you even were at the bus stop, you really don't know where the bus is. You're too arrogant to ride the bus, so you're going to destroy the environment and break yourself financially by buying a luxury car that you can't afford. You are at liberty to do that.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna bust on you about it because I care. I didn't care. I would just watch you humiliate yourself. I would enjoy that, but there's a lot of other forms of that content out there for me to consume. I've got more suffering in my to-watch-later queue that I can really handle. So much like sex. I'm turning it down Very selective. My standards may be too high. I'm totally okay with that. I'm gonna wait for someone special or something, some idea somewhere, some why you really thought this wasn't going to happen because you didn't want it to and that was it. You weren't even going to do it.
Speaker 3:You want this to happen because you're sick and it's delicious and delightful and I love you. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson, I do it all, so no one except me can stop it from happening. I produce it, I write it, I perform it Pretty much everything with the 1630 AM kchungradioorg medicated-minutescom. Here we go.
Speaker 3:It's already almost over. 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.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. In this baroque dream, every touch is pure. Oh satanic Buddha, make our passions endure. Submit to the fire your torment. We find bliss. With a desperate plea, we surrender to your kiss. Thank you From the shadows rise.
Speaker 1:Hear the ancient call In the temple, where dark and light entwine With desire burning, a hymn to thee we sing. Where souls revolve With a fervent pulse, our voices will ignite, oh Satanic Buddha. Guide through the endless night In silken murmurs. We gather in delight as the moon dances with stars in twilight. Our hearts aflame an oath to you. We bring, o satanic Buddha, where our desires cling, divine and decadent. Our voices ascend Under neon from it's so surreal, with everyone's. Our laughter seals the deal In a flight of fancy psychedelic trance.
Speaker 1:Oh, cosmic Buddha, join in our dance With a swagger in our step. We conquer the night in a kaleidoscope world. Nothing feels quite right In a cosmic cabaret, in a cosmic cabaret With velvet shadows and glitter in the view. We tip our hats to a laughing Buddha's grin. In this world, dance where colours lead the way, with never not be celebrating that you don't exist. Choose what you believe and be specific what you wish. Indulge your sacred passions, don't complain when you can quit, never take it personal and don't take any With equanimity, with lust, in polarity. We trust you are everything you love and hate and knew it was Satanic Buddha's helping you get through it. Through which cause, oh Buddha, oh Beastmaster Ascended. Aesthetics were the glorious disaster. Oh Buddha, oh Beastmaster. A synesthetic world and glory and disaster.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to let you go, thank you, thanks for watching.
Speaker 3:I only know that I know nothing, said Socrates, one of the notoriously wisest people who ever lived, to his eventual detriment in that, like almost everyone at the time, he had an excruciating, senseless death.
Speaker 3:At this point he would still be alive, but who knows what he would be up to? Probably nothing good. How that translates in my love language that we use in this house is that one must possess a certain acuity to really commit to the ultimate bit, which is the adoption of a beginner's mind, as the great DT Suzuki called it, to approach with a willingness to override your assumptions, which is intellectual honesty, which requires some emotional honesty, because your emotions will raise a ruckus when you start to actually embrace dangerous ideas and ask obvious and painful questions about what is going on, as you have. And you know that there's more than this. You know that the world is not just brutally transactional. You've seen butterflies at play, which is all that it takes to know that life is about pleasure to the extent that it is a bloody struggle and a slog that is only in service to play, never the other way around. Pleasure and play the embrace of anger and fear and suffering and risk.
Speaker 3:That's not what life is about, because life is not about anything. But if it were, it would all fall roughly under that rubric. You are ready to unlearn what you know? Disclose what is within you, because if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you and perhaps a couple of other people who know you well. If you don't bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. Hopefully you're not in the subway, because it would affect other people the way that your lies affect those around you.
Speaker 3:I can only speak for myself, but you know, you know. If you know, you know, you definitely know, and it's time to wake up. This is your call to adventure. You see the chaos. You see the darkness. You see how the light would not exist without the darkness. You get it. So reach out and get it, grip it, grab it, have it. Don't be shocked when you slip headlong into nihilism. If you're lucky, it's easier to get out of than narcissism, not as damaging. Because what are you going to do? There's nothing to do. There's no reason to do anything. The fact that meaning is not fixed makes you feel that it does not exist, because you are not used to looking for it in its unconventional, nebulous, fractal form that I am smart enough to know that I can't totally explain, and the fact that there's stuff that neither one of us can adequately explain is enough reason to keep exploring, which you do Eventually you accept the call.
Speaker 3:Generally, it happens one of two ways. You get on Mr Toad's wild ride and smoke 5-MeO-DMT and you free yourself from yourself for a 15-minute slice of time. That is the longest 15 minutes of your life and everyone else's, or at least your ancestors, all of whom will be in you when you come home, or rather, you will recognize that they were there all the time and they have seen everything that you've done, that you've got nothing to hide, what you feared has come to pass. That might convince you. You might be fortunate enough to find yourself in the circumstances where it happens.
Speaker 3:Otherwise, it could be a song overheard in the pharmacy, or it could be some sort of talisman that you get in the mail that was supposed to go to your neighbor and you were going to give it to them, even though you don't really know them. Well, yeah, you know who they are and they were kind of unpleasant when you encountered them on the stairs when they were coming up with groceries and you were coming down and you had the music on and it was like that by Future and Metro Boomin featuring Kendrick Lamar, and you were kind of in your own end zone and you didn't see them. And now maybe they think you're a dick, which seems kind of judgy. You're going to give it back anyway. You didn't intend to open their mail. That's not the kind of thing you would have done, except carelessly. But then a song came on your Discover Weekly with lyrics that specifically instructed you to keep this thing as a talisman for the good of not just yourself and your neighbor, but the entire scope of humanity, the sweep of its history and future, and infinity and nothingness. You, me, them, everybody, all of them are now at your throat Because by crossing the threshold, by becoming a true sucker for love, you've joined the creative class.
Speaker 3:You have immediately ascended its hierarchy because you know that it's meaningless, which makes it easy to game as a fun diversion on your fool's journey into genius.
Speaker 3:Now you've got all kinds of haters coming at you, challengers, people who think this is a zero-sum game, when you've been begging them to just open their eyes and other orifices and mouths and sense gates to this and understand it.
Speaker 3:Maybe they can't, they certainly won't. That doesn't really phase you. You're not even really thinking about what you're doing anymore because you've overcome your fear and ego and you're free to explore and let the critics decide, and historians, teachers of the classes that will be taught on you and your approach to life as a work of art, how it brought you to sing the absurd and hear it reverberate off the walls of the innermost cave. And get the cosmic joke and understand that it's on you and look into the abyss and see how abyssy it is and understand that human consciousness on you. And look into the abyss and see how abyssy it is and understand that human consciousness itself is hell. It's nature's perfect torture device and you're willing to get zoned by the cosmic joke, to get roasted and like a phoenix reborn, having transcended and included your ordeal, as your wounds turn to scabs and those turn to scars that are bitchin'.
Speaker 3:You have embraced the chaos and you're brand at home but in a palatable, if not highly infectious, certainly catchy form, and everybody's dancing to it and all the quotidian BS continues apace. But nothing can get to you. You are free, you are loved and you are absolutely worshipped by fans who love you. Be careful Anyone who puts you on a pedestal is going to treat you like crap when you fall. You know this well by now through experience. Still, there are certain fringe benefits to having fans. I don't want fame. If I ever get seriously actually famous, I hope that you'll cancel me immediately. I think I've given you plenty of ammunition for that. I'm not kidding. Fame is unconditionally terrible. Nothing is really unconditional If you can enjoy it. You are Willie Nelson. You are the American Buddha. You are one of the elect. It drives most people insane. Those who thrive will save us all. We wouldn't have had Malcolm X had he not gone to prison. So if you end up being famous, do that and do it well. No one else does it. Quite the same. How you do anything is how you do everything. You have taken the road home. You are back. You are back. You are still challenging convention, but it's mostly just for fun.
Speaker 3:Now, hi, I'm a sadist. I'm a sexual sadist, psychological sadist. I'm an all-around general-interest USA Today sadist. I contain multitudes and they're all sadists. I used to think it might be okay to be a sadist as long as I felt bad about it, but that wasn't much fun. Now I feel good about it because I am the best kind of sadist. I'm a sadist with a heart of gold.
Speaker 3:For many years I repressed my kinks, worried they might make me a bad person. I still carry around a lot of shame and frustration and I want to take it out on someone who appreciates it. That's my kind of sadism, the good kind of sadism, sadism with flakes of real gold, the kind you'd bring home to meet your mom if you had an unhappy childhood. I want to hurt you in the ways that most help you. I want to torture you exquisitely, deliberately, in ways that bring out your best To tickle you in the places you can't reach yourself, until your eyes roll back in your head, you see stars and you nearly pass out because you can't breathe and you can't stop giggling. I go hard on myself. I'm cruel at times. I focus on my flaws and try to get better through a vigorous and rigorous practice of tough love. It can be challenging and painful at times. I focus on my flaws and try to get better through a vigorous and rigorous practice of tough love.
Speaker 3:It can be challenging and painful at times, and if anyone else followed me around and talked to me the way I talk to myself. I might get a restraining order, but you know what it's worth it Because it's good practice for what I want to do to you?
Speaker 3:I want to torture you in the ways I've fashioned on myself, knowing they're devastating and effective, because I'm not just a sadist, I'm a sadist with a heart of gold, and these are the sacrifices I make on your behalf as well as my own behalf. Consent is crucial, but consent alone is insufficient. I prefer panting desperation. I would never force you to do anything. I want you to beg for it. That's what I'm into. It takes heart, guts and warm welcoming orifices to submit to a sadist of my caliber. I honor that Respect. Submissives are my personal heroes. You make my life worth living. I'm gonna make you pay for that. It's customary to tip at least 20%, but you're gonna wanna go for 30. Come for the cruelty, stay for the compassion, or come for the compassion and stay for the cruelty. It's up to you. Choose wisely. If you screw it up, I'll let you know.
Speaker 3:I'm a sadist with the soul of a poet, the mind of a wizard and a heart of rugged gold. Come into my world. You're gonna hate it here. We're both gonna love that. It means the world to me when you, let me be mean to you. Love yourself, do it now. Put yourself way ahead of everyone else, until you can't even see them in your rearview mirror and you're smoking them, or you smoked them a long time ago and now you're so far ahead they can't even smell the smoke, which they couldn't anyway, because they died, because you killed them. Love yourself seriously. You deserve it, even if you don't. If you do love yourself, then you will deserve it. It could go in either direction. Just start loving yourself right now. Get your hand down in your pants, forget everyone else.
Speaker 3:Hold them in contempt until it gets to the point where you're like this is boring, I'm tired of hating people, I'm just going to forget they exist. Then you got all the love to keep for yourself. Because if you love yourself and you do it right and you really put your back into it and your heart into it and your loins especially Because the only person you ever want to be attracted to is yourself, otherwise you're going to make a fool of yourself and that's the last thing you want to do. If you love yourself, love yourself hard, love yourself passionately, love yourself gently, tenderly You're the only person who knows you the way that you do. Only you can, on the one hand, wreck shop and give yourself a business and, on the other hand, really make yourself feel special.
Speaker 3:It can be hard to love yourself when you have all the facts. You know your flaws, but you can always change your mind about things or at least take a different perspective. Multiple things can be true simultaneously, even if they seem to contradict each other. You're the kind of person that can get that because you love yourself. You already do. It's not hard to do. If you didn't, would you be here? Maybe you're here specifically because you don't love yourself enough or you don't think you do, and that ruins your self-confidence, which makes it hard to love yourself.
Speaker 3:I don't care. I don't care. I don't care how you got hurt, use that. I'm not even interested in fixing it. I'm interested in healing. But it's not a problem to be fixed because you are not broken. Use it.
Speaker 3:It's probably not unique to you, although you are special. We tend to have more things in common than not. There are a lot more similarities in our DNA than there are differences, and that's fine. We have a lot of DNA in common with banana slugs. It's nothing to feel bad about. Banana slugs are probably the best creatures on earth. The modal banana slug is being the best damn banana slug it can be. How many humans can you say that about? The point is love yourself. If you fail to do that, then it doesn't matter. If you love yourself, you can do whatever the hell you want. There is no failure, only feedback, until you die, and death is the ultimate feedback. And having died before, I can tell you it's nothing to be afraid of and it's a hell of a ride. Sure, be afraid of it all you want to if you're going to be scared.
Speaker 3:You may as well be scared of something inevitable. Make it your intention no, make it your plan to die with nothing left to say, because you've said and done things that you wanted to do and you've done some people and they've enjoyed it quite a bit, because you love yourself. That frees you to not care about anyone else. The only way to take care of someone is to not really care about them. If you are trying to fill a hole in yourself, you're not going to be able to take care of other people. You're not really going to see them for what they are. You're just going to see them vis-a-vis how they can make you feel complete. And they can't, because they're stupid idiots, they're incompetent and weak, and you'll see that when you see them for who they really are, and then you'll see that you need to take care of them and you'll be busy doing that and you won't have time to waste, and that'll be a big improvement over right now, because you're wasting a lot of time beating up on yourself. You can beat up on yourself forever. It accomplishes nothing.
Speaker 3:If you love yourself, once you'll be amazed at what you can do. You'll be swinging it absolutely, killing it? Yeah, of course I love myself. Who wouldn't? It's self-evident that I'm the best. The self is what I care about, myself specifically. You can care about yourself all you want. I'm good. Thanks, love yourself. Once you've had it, you can't go back. It's delicious.
Speaker 4:You're delicious, and you're about to find out just how delicious you are when you love yourself.
Speaker 3:People are leaky. If you know what to look for, you can figure out what they're about To an alarming extent. First of all, they're all insane. Everyone is absolutely nuts if you get to know them well enough. It's a spectrum. I'm not dogging anyone in particular. We're all kind of awful. We are creatures that in pursuit of dopamine to our own perpetual detriment, we have no ability to think in any sort of long-term way and that's just how we're designed.
Speaker 3:We were smart enough to create an environment that we are utterly incapable of living in, that is just light years ahead of where we will ever be so much that it's humiliated us and it's driving us back towards the ocean, toward the caves. That's why, we're treating ourselves so poorly. What we really respond to is intermittent rewards. If we get what we think we want, it bores us to death or it finds some more spectacular way to kill us.
Speaker 3:If we're lucky If we get what we think we want or what we say we want, even if those are the same thing. It's infuriating. We want to get what we really want. We don't know what that is and it's driving us barking mad. We deserve what we get because we're a pathetic species and I say that's what people are like. Give them what they really want, which is torture. It's intermittent rewards, push-pull, it's manipulation. If you're into it, you should be into it freely and everything should be above board. That requires you knowing that you're into it. If you don't know that you're into it, you may find significantly more dangerous ways to get into it unconsciously, as opposed to just going to a sex dungeon like a normal person.
Speaker 3:If you do that, I'll give you all the intermittent rewards you can handle. I'll give you more than you want. I will give you what you respond to so hard that it breaks your simple little brain, and that will help you get over yourself, which is really the goal of all of this, because when you get over yourself, it's very easy to get into other people's pants. If that's something you're into, because you get to know other people and your sense of energy or intuition, whatever it is use it and you will discover it. When you begin to seriously interrogate your own ego, you'll be surprised, shocked even, and also considered very charming by people that you are suddenly authentically interested in, because you don't exist. You're the least interesting topic on earth, and so am I. You're interesting to me and I hope that I'm interesting to you. I think that's a safe assumption at this point to some degree. If I'm not give money to Kei Chung and tell them to cancel me, if I ever become actually famous, I want to be canceled immediately. I think fame is a stupid thing to want and it's hell on earth to have as evidenced by the way that it affects people, which I don't In very, only very rare cases is a net good. I want to be a wealthy, powerful, unseen master of puppets and if I ever get too close to the sun, if the eye of Sauron turns itself on me and I get actually famous, please cancel me as quickly as you can and as soon as you can when I have nothing to lose. I'm not emotionally attached to my mansion yet.
Speaker 3:When you get over yourself, you will become much more aware of other people's experience in an embodied way, in a sensitive, empathetic way, but in a way that you are aware of. So it's not totally overwhelming like out-of-control empathy for someone who clearly does not deserve it. This is the kind of empathy you can get good information from, like. You will start to notice people's body language and energy and sartorial choices and other indicators of how their life is going and what their values are, etc. Their self-image, how it correlates with their actual station in life, etc. Their self-image, how it correlates with their actual station in life. All that will become transparently clear. You'll notice it so hard you don't notice that. You notice it and maybe you're thinking I don't want to get over myself. Or like okay, I'll kill my ego, emerson, but why don't you go first? I was like well, it was my idea you go first. That's how the system works, the system I created. This is a revolution. I'm staging a coup on your system. I don't think it's going to be bloodless. You never asked me what I'm into. You're going to find out. It's going to be a long weekend If you decide to hang on to your ego.
Speaker 3:You can still get a pretty good read on people by paying attention. You can still get a pretty good read on people by paying attention. You can intellectualize it. You can look for the four or five layers of meaning that are in the modal joke. People joke in different ways and all of them are delivery systems for honesty that they are afraid to express in earnest. That's what makes them good jokes.
Speaker 3:Funny to adults is that tragically unconscious self-revelation that people do all the time because people are leaky. You can also hear it in their metaphors. What language, what slang, what argo, what pattern do they use to describe how they see and interact with the world? What jargon do they leverage to interface on a holistic, ecological level? Are they balls out or balls to the wall? People tell you what they're into.
Speaker 3:Presentation matters. If you don't exist, presentation is everything. You can't afford to forget that, but most people do, and that can tell you a lot about them. You can figure people out, and that comes with all sorts of advantages. But I'm going to tell you right now once you see this you can't unsee it when you realize you have the ability, capacity and willingness to do it, and then you do it, that becomes an obligation. Be prepared. Another jewel that I just dropped on you from my stash of family jewels I may be an increasingly eccentric, born-again bachelor in paradise now, a little rough around the edges, a little rough around the edges. A project, a nice guy on Indica, but at one time I was a Cub Scout and I'm telling you, bitches, be ready, thank you. How about this? Pick a location, a liminal point, somewhere you normally pass through without thinking too much of it, because therein lies opportunity, and block off some time. Give it an hour to sit there in a state of meditation, or whatever else there is besides meditation a liminal state.
Speaker 3:Be with that and ask yourself what, what is this? Allow yourself unfettered observation, set aside your assumptions and your heuristics and whatever you're looking for and ask what is this? Not rhetorically, but out of curiosity, and bring to that the curiosity of a Sherlock Holmes. You will not stop seeking and you will not stop getting more granular until you find perhaps at some point. Zoom out and then you'll see it, or you'll do something else.
Speaker 3:In this, right now, we are asking what is this? And we are asking through our senses and we are perceiving through pictures, sounds and feelings. Not answers. Not answers, but more questions, a network of questions, one sprouting out of the other. And of course, like all beautiful things, this too must be ruined, and as humans, we are the ones to do it. And you're going to ruin it in one of the coolest ways, which is by making art, although you must not try to be cool. That is the enemy of greatness when it comes to observation of this sort in what some would call creativity. But we understand to be forgetting what you forgot, how to do, and knowing that you can unknow because you unknew. And here you are feeling it and you're gonna ruin it by writing about it, making a song, a mural, whatever your preferred avenue of expression is.
Speaker 3:Puppetry is big as well. Some of it is part of the robust fetish community. Some of it is not even, arguably, porn, it is just pure art, as much as art can be pure, purely impure puppetry. If that's what you do, do, puppetry about what you are feeling, experiencing, what you are, because you are the flow of human experience and you're going to make a beautifully imperfect record of a failure to translate that experience. You might be the first one who gets it right. The fact that you are arrogant enough to try is an absolutely magical thing, and you are a beautiful brat and you're going to get the bruising that you are so obviously cruising for in a bit, but you're going to make art as an invitation to that, which I will accept when the time comes.
Speaker 3:But for now, you're going to watch other people, namely people with names that you don't know, that is, strangers, or relatives who are strangers because you don't know that is strangers, or relatives who are strangers Because you don't recognize them as relatives because they're too far out on the family tree that sprouted out when it was allowed to become what it was. Maybe they know you. Maybe the barista that you don't have a crush on because you're oblivious and you're not paying attention, has a crush on you and is telegraphing that and is frustrated by your obliviousness, but at the same time, that makes you dumb enough to be hot, which just inflames the passion of this person that you don't know but is part of your world in some sense. You're certainly part of theirs, and the part of you that is part of their world is more purchase in reality, one could argue than the part of you that only lives in your head. But let's get back to this, because this is all we get. There's nothing after this. The meek inherit nothing. Do it to it like you always do about this time, because the time is now.
Speaker 3:So observe, notice the assumptions that are coming up, the ways in which you are stubborn, in which you fall back on existing intellectual capital and insist on fighting the last battle and using the old metaphors that don't work here. Your current state of immersion is a platform for interrogation, exploration, fornication with this. Whatever this is, we'll never know. That's what makes it fun, and it's full of signs and symbols. Life is but a dream. It's also a dream, yes, and it's more than a dream. It's about as good as it gets in terms of magic. You are making up a lot of this. You are arguing, flirting and perverting with versions of yourself, and when you recognize that you might get over it long enough to have a really good orgasm or at least get inspired by one of these symbols, what does?
Speaker 3:it mean. Who cares? What is it about? What is it saying or singing or sliding into your DMs about, through interpretive dance On the low? Though, let one of those details inspire you, one of those little synchronicities, coincidences, noises that are songs, that are weeds that are flowers, let it happen.
Speaker 3:Leave it up to what you used to think of as chance Throw dice, like Luke Reinhardt's novel the Dice man, or a writing group that I used to be part of in Chicago called the Soon-to-Be-Pretentious Writers, where we would hang out in the library at Harold Washington which is a pretty bitchin' library and we would grab books off the shelves. Obviously there would be something about it that hooked us, but we wouldn't think about that too much because we would grab enough books to dip into and put our finger on part of a page and then write inspired by that. So it was kind of like improv prompts. It was a collaboration with the cosmos and the chaos and it was fun. You can do that. You can steal that idea, which is an idea about stealing ideas. That's how ideas are often transmitted. Do that until it's done and then close with gratitude. If you want to, you can say amen at the end of it. I don't kink shame unless you're into that. Say thank you for the question. Know that you gotta go back and there's no way to fully integrate this, but that creates an opportunity to understand the things that you've felt, which some people don't get a chance to feel until right before they die. This is truly a luxury. Now you are living in your city.
Speaker 3:People ask Henry David Thoreau why he didn't travel the world. He said I've traveled extensively in Concord, which was his town. Now you've done that where you are. I hope it's a serious city, not a made-up city like Boston. But you know, bloom where you're planted.
Speaker 3:Towering talent, terrifying tenacity, scarlet obscura, the toast of la getting buttered up, smoking hot, distinctive, pleasant smell. Was she gonna get burned? She was willing to continue her conquest. Film, fashion and performance art. Rest with with the questions. Los Angeles, where reality is a dream, dreams become reality and sometimes life can be a waking nightmare. Or is that simply one interpretation? Certain people thrive on this sort of ambiguity. Despite its heavy-handed symbolism, clunky cliches, obvious and smarmy moral appeals, what is called the square-up reel at the end, where all of the debauchery in the first two acts is justified, made not palatable but put in a context that the normies can understand. It's a place where lost souls go to find themselves and others go to lose themselves.
Speaker 3:When Scarlet first touched down at LAX, she was Amber McCallaghan, an intense young woman from Nova Scotia, blessed and cursed with a rich inner life. Despite her bashfulness, she was cerebral, synesthetic, wild and yet acutely specific sexual fantasies that drove her to a certain kind of frothing not unpleasant insanity, made it hard for her to play well with others in the real world and easy for her to make unforced errors which, it was said, would go on her permanent record. She was bullied and taken advantage of. She found sex to be a wonderful form of artistic expression. Unfortunately, one of her partners bragged to her friends, gossiped to their friends and pretty soon people were putting all kinds of labels on her and putting her in buckets Not in a fun way. There's nothing quite as dissatisfying as finding yourself in conflict with people who have already permanently made up their minds about everything. So she got out.
Speaker 3:She went to Los Angeles. She had struggles. Her car broke down. Her car got broken into, her hot plate got stolen. Suddenly the car did not seem like such a pleasant place to live, and neither did Los Angeles. Just as she was about to give up, she ran into Maxwell Manman, edgy avant-garde director the critics call brutally transgressive and calls his own work quote porn with ideas. Unquote In the matter of philosopher Georges Bataille, who communicated his anarchist ideas through buckwild, hallucinatory polemics of the solar anus and works of smut such as Story of the Eye. Maxwell Banwin wanted to screw the world in its mind. His work included violence, vandalism, loitering, criminal acts of provocation. The truth of his work was that he wanted to be God and he wanted the work to be his finest creation.
Speaker 3:And it was just never as good in reality as it had been in his imagination before, and that made him feel insecure, which made him mad at being a cult leader, which is where some people land when they try to be God but don't quite get there. He wasn't doing a great job of that too. He didn't trust himself, and it showed. But he did that one thing that Scarlet Obscura liked, and she did a few things that he liked, and even in a metropolitan area of more than 12 million people they just couldn't imagine finding other partners who had the hookup for those things, because they got it like that. Most people don't get it, certainly not like that. She conquered fashion by wearing a particular magical shade of lime green, contrasting with just the right hue of silver. Her films were reinvigorating the whole art form. She released them through proxies so as not to upset Maxl, but even in disowning them, there's nothing she could do to dampen the crackling heat of their brilliance. One of the things that limited her freedom to move was her empathy with.
Speaker 3:Maxl which came from having her own unresolved inner conflict. We need ideas, good ones, right now. The clock's ticking, anybody. If you've got any ideas, I'll even take bad ones. Step up, you gotta have bad ideas to have good ideas. I won't rag you down too hard. Okay, no takers. You got to get some ideas tonight and I'm going to give you a simple process for how to do that. So listen up.
Speaker 3:First of all, do your research. Consult the experts, read the articles, read the books, read the scientific white papers, read the cranks, read the unreliable sources, read the garbage, know the whole spectrum of opinions and decide which ones to disagree with, and know what you're talking about. When you do you don't have a lot of time, so don't do too much research. Do all the research you can handle. It might not be that much because you're an amateur.
Speaker 3:I'm a professional. I learn everything. I do extreme amounts of research. I devour all of the material that I can gather about the subject and then the rest of it comes my way, because once I'm charged up, I'm a magnet for information and I get thoroughly immersed in a subject, to the point where there's no distinction between me and this idea, this body of knowledge. The borders are porous. I don't know where my life ends. I've died five times and I don't have to tell about it. I don't know where I end and the thing that I'm researching begins. It's almost like I've always known, it always will, and there's no history, no beginning, no end. I just know. I just know, I always knew. I just have to forget that I forgot that I know and get out of my own way.
Speaker 3:And then you begin the process of working over that idea, that material in your mind, beating it up viciously, asking the difficult questions, interrogating it. What happened on June 7th? Your story doesn't add up. Ask the hard questions Make it embarrassing, but it'll respect you if you are courageous enough to get in there and be annoying, and it'll respect you as a peer because it's used to being treated with kid gloves and it's sick of that. It wants somebody it can respect and that's you. So you will become intimate friends with your subject matter and you can puzzle and ponder, have a conversation with this material that you're researching. It turns into an argument, that turns into a fight, that turns into a rant on your part and the idea is just sitting there and taking it like a bitch because you know what you're talking about and you're giving it the business right now. You're speaking hard, uncomfortable truths that it doesn't want to hear, that it already kind of knows, but it needs to hear, it needs to learn what it already knows.
Speaker 3:And then, when all the pretense has been stripped away, you can put on a mask and you can dance by the light of a bonfire, with your subject matter, under the light of the moon, and you can also have one of those glow sticks that you wave around. You can listen to techno music or big beat music from the late 80s or early 90s, as you really get to know your idea, but then that's it for a while. You need a break. Already. This has gotten too intense too quickly.
Speaker 3:So you need to step away from the problem, from the issue that you're dealing with, that you need to get ideas about. You need to forget all about it, forget it exists. First, distract yourself, and distract yourself until you're so thoroughly distracted that you don't need to be distracted anymore. What you want to do is stay focused because you're focused on something other than this thing that you're not thinking about. You have thoroughly forgotten about it.
Speaker 3:Indulge in whatever form of fun, gets you out of your head and into your body and into the world, be it base jumping, be it the consumption of poisonous fish that can kill you in high-end seafood restaurants. But it doesn't, because the chef knows exactly what he's doing. He's one of the only people in the world that can serve this fish without murdering a bunch of people. He used to have rivals, but they're all imprisoned now for negligent homicide. And you can do psychedelic drugs or do something with permanent effects.
Speaker 3:Psychedelic drugs make you trip for a couple of hours, give yourself brain damage, sniff glue, hit yourself in the head with a hammer and you will totally forget about your idea. You will dumb it down, make yourself an idiot and then you can be receptive. You can cultivate the beginner's mind mindset and you can just sit with that and allow it to be what it is, get in the fluid flow of experience, because you're not overthinking it anymore. You're significantly under thinking it. You've ruined your brain, but that's good, because you used to think you were smart. Now you know that you know nothing. You don't even know it.
Speaker 3:You just kind of act on it. It's one of your many unknown, knowns ideological assumptions that form the framework of your life. And you are now taking a break, you're resting, you're breathing and you're waiting for your idea to come in. It may come in a flash of insight, a blinding white light, life-changing epiphany. All of a sudden, eureka, you've got it. You have already changed the world. You just need to act on this. You better act on it right now, because you're going to be heartbroken if somebody else acts on it first. But first submit to the idea in a sexual way, masochistically. Let it punk you out and make you its bitches. Then you'll really know what it's capable of, what your idea desires. You are merely a servant created for its pleasure. You'll let that happen and you'll like it. You will love it, even because you love your idea and you kind of love this new feeling of losing control, because you felt like you had to be in control for so much of your life. Now you don't have to worry about it. Now you're dumb and you're taking it hard from this new idea that just chose you. It's you think it off. It's like it was out there. It was in the ether, floating about bouncing around, and then you were just there. You were there to receive, and now you're really receiving. You will now endear yourself to the idea because, in a sense, every masochist tops from the bottom. Now it's time to take your idea out on the town, put it in the mix, make sure you get it out there, make sure that you break through the noise using all of the techniques, the persuasion rhetoric, direct mail.
Speaker 3:Marketing is a good place to look for inspiration because they always go right into it and because it's conversion. They're serious about getting people to take action. If you're just talking, if it's just food for thought chin-stroking think PC Beltway, elitist crap you're telling people about their lives like they don't already know. But he's gonna listen. Give them something to do. People are waiting to be told what to do. Don't keep them waiting. Let the idea evolve. Be receptive to feedback, but don't really care what other people think. You know this idea on an intimate basis. You know what it wants. You know its most perverse, perverted desires. You are the shepherd for the idea. But let it evolve. He wants to. Everything always changes. The idea gets better and better and pretty soon it changes the world. You might not talk for a while, but it will always live on in your heart and vice versa. K-chung, los Angeles. Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. 1630 AM. Kchungradioorg First Wednesdays of the month, after which it becomes the only good podcast. Bye, bye, outro Music.
