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
Give Them the Gift of Missing You: Naked Truths, Desire in Flagrante Delicto
Your consciousness is a cage built by dead people you never met. You're in hock to the company store, and now you're paying with your one wild and precious life. But stay tuned, because liberation can be yours when you discover this week's episode of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes.
We're serving up taboo topics like psychedelics and power dynamics with a side of raw vulnerability that'll make your therapist blush. Get ready for a sonic journey through the underbelly of your belief system, where we'll perform emergency surgery on your certainties and replace them with questions that bite back.
Think you know something about success? Money? Sex? Think harder. Think smarter. We're dissecting the corpse of conventional wisdom and finding love notes from chaos tucked into its pockets.
Your favorite influencers are lying to you about meditation and manifestation, but they're too afraid to tell you about 5-MeO-DMT or why your horniness might be hiding an existential truth. We're not.
Listen as we strip away the Instagram filters from mental health and expose the raw machinery of depression, anxiety, and the cosmic joke of trying to give others what they want for you in a world that's collectively losing its mind.
Warning: Side effects may include:
- Persistent questioning of reality
- Sudden attacks of authentic self-expression
- Reduced tolerance for societal bullshit
- Uncontrollable urges to create art from your trauma
- A strange new comfort with uncertainty
Get ready to dive deep into the beautiful mess of being human, where porn meets philosophy and luck arm-wrestles with destiny. Your regularly scheduled programming of polite repression will be interrupted by breakthrough insights that'll have you questioning everything – especially yourself.
Don't just listen. Let it wreck you. Sometimes, destruction is a form of creation, and your comfort zone is just a pretty pet name for a prison.
Available now wherever you get your existential wake-up calls. Your ego won't like it, but your soul might thank you later.
Trust us. We're just as confused as you are, and that's precisely why you should listen.
"The Hyperliterate College Town Canoodlers" is a sequel to Salacity in Bloom, or at least exists in the same universe, or perhaps an adjacent or contiguous one.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is LA's number-one avant-garde personal development program. New episodes premiere on KCHUNG Los Angeles on the first Wednesday of the month.
The writer, producer, host, and witty and wounded romantic hero is Emerson Dameron, who is wholly responsible for its content.
Levity saves lives.
Got something to say to me? Slide into the DMs.
It's OUT! Sophistication Nation: Brief Interviews with Women I Pretend to Understand: https://emersondameron.hearnow.com/sophistication-nation
Change is a choice, but you only have the options that you know that you have. You are this close to finding more options than you ever thought would be possible, but there's a problem blocking your way, and the problem is you. You haven't figured out how to get rid of yourself, yet. The ecstatic experiences that you've tried to create have left you with a sense of emptiness inside, not solitude. You're still there, feeling sorry for yourself and ruminating over an internal monologue. That's the most boring writing on earth. Change is a choice and a process. It can take time or it can happen in an instant. With 5-MeO-DMT, the easiest way to obliterate yourself merge into the flow of human experience. Your problems will still exist, but they won't bother you anymore because you don't exist, and problems are funny when they happen to someone else. Getting there is easier than you think, but you've got to make a jump and all you need is a little bit of encouragement and the time of your life on Mr Toad's wild ride, 5-meo-dmt, it puts other psychedelics to shame and it kicks you to the curb where you belong. Now that you're ready to discover your true desires and own your power. 5-meo-dmt the solution to you. 5-meo-dmt the solution to you Home of Ask a Sadist, proudly sponsored by the First Church of the Satanic Buddha, birthplace and habitat of bite-sized erotic thrillers.
Emerson Dameron:My name is Emerson Dameron. I'm the writer, producer, host, everything. I love you personally. Levity saves lives, lives.
Emerson Dameron:What is taboo? What are we not supposed to talk about? And it's still important to talk about those things, whether we know what they are or not. We have to go on a quest in search of our taboos and be like Sherlock Holmes. What are the things that we can't talk about? What are the unknown knowns, the things that we take so for granted, the ideology that we swim in? We can't even name them. You think this is just the way things are. We have to do everything we can to surface those things. It's not fun.
Emerson Dameron:As Zizek says, freedom hurts. There's a reason that people don't want to put on the glasses and they live In many ways. Life is a lot easier if we just keep on keeping on assuming the things that we assume. Talking about taboo topics is kind of taboo itself. Many people use it as an excuse to be obnoxious and be bullies and draw the wrong kind of attention to themselves in an annoying way. Just want to hurt people and get a reaction, so that they know they exist, so they know they have an effect on someone, which is kind of sad and it compounds the tragedy and makes it a bit farcical when you give them what they want by getting reactive. So let's see if we can suss out our taboo topics together. What would you rather not talk about? There's money.
Emerson Dameron:That might be the big one Money, power dynamics, sex as related to power dynamics and sometimes to money, the rampantness of herpes in Los Angeles. What do you really think? What do you think about? Let's start there. You are alone with your thoughts. First of all, how do you survive? I can't do that without a very deliberate daily practice. And what are they? Your brain is hijacked by you, whether it's the drill sergeant, the mother, the drama llama, one of the other Jungian archetypes. What are you thinking about? What are you thinking about it? Once you know that you can always change your mind? Ideally, you want to cross over into a life sans belief systems. There's a reason they call them BS. Beliefs are impediments. You gotta believe some things in order to get your shoes tied in the morning, Free will being the obvious falsehood that a lot of people believe for convenience, because it's useful. But ultimately, you want to be skeptical of your beliefs. I am deeply skeptical of mine, and mine are more deliberate and thought out than yours.
Emerson Dameron:Give me a list of 10 things. You believe you have 15 seconds. You just got to spit it out. Just keep going, keep your mouth moving. You're good at that. What do you believe? What do you think? What are you thinking about right now? Let it rip. You've been wanting to do that forever. This is your opportunity to reveal the quotidian darkness that you have. In common with most of our species, we are incompetent beasts. We are not very good at being animals. The humans, most spiders and beetles and the modal paramecium are all being the best animals that they can be. I can't say that for myself or most of the people that I know. We're unable to forget. We forgot how to live, how to breathe, how to be here how to cooperate.
Emerson Dameron:We've got this idea that we are all against each other. If it was my job to keep people down, to keep revolution from fermenting and fermenting and coming into being the first thing, I would do is convince everyone who has the potential to revolt that they are all out to get each other.
Emerson Dameron:It works like a charm. People want to believe that it makes them feel important and they've forgotten that they have other ways of feeling important, not just breathing. You don't have to do anything. You can give up your dreams, kick back, enjoy your free time, just be here, try that for a couple of days, see how it goes.
Emerson Dameron:Then go on that drug binge you've been putting off. That'll help you get rid of your residual beliefs, as long as you pick the awareness-expanding drugs, not the awareness-contracting drugs, although I do get annoyed by the my drugs are good and your drugs are bad kind of rhetoric. I was guilty of psychedelic exceptionalism at one point when I had stopped drinking and was getting a lot of therapeutic benefit from psychedelics. But those are just my drugs. They are not inherently better than your drugs. It's all what we do with them and all that stuff is already in us. There are always to get there. Everything we do is with the goal of changing our consciousness, because God knows, we need to do something to get the hell out of here.
Emerson Dameron:If you were stripped of your privacy today or first thing tomorrow, if you knew that everyone you encounter gets a Terminator-type baseball card readout whenever they look at you. Vital stats, including your most embarrassing traits, the ways you consistently fall short. You know you're doing it. You keep doing it. It's almost like you want to do it. Part of you does. You're a sick pervert. You're not even indulging those weaknesses, you're indulging the ones that don't even get you anywhere. That don't even get you off. They could if you turn them into fetishes. You know how to do that. You're born with that knowledge. Let's get back to the point. What would you do if you suddenly had no privacy, if you were thoroughly doxxed?
Emerson Dameron:Now that stuff is out there and people can see you. Some of them don't like what they see. Some of them do but pretend that they don't. Peer pressure compels them to deny their joys, which is truly tragic. There is so little joy to be scraped out of this life. We should celebrate all the ones that we have. A guilty pleasure is neither Hypocrisy is a luxury that we can ill afford. You have experienced the horror of exposure, of being stripped, of having everything that you thought was yours, that you could keep to yourself, is suddenly distributed and dispersed and consumed by the salivating, judgmental masses. And what do you think they're going to be interested in? All the good that you've done? Several hours a month spent volunteering at an animal shelter, older people that you've helped cross the street or just talked to and treated like human beings Do you think that's what people are going to be interested in? Is that what you would be interested in?
Emerson Dameron:I understand the deaths of despair. Despair is dearer. The world that we've created for ourselves is an evolutionary mismatch. A lot of us are not built for monogamy. I would argue the vast majority of us are not built for the Frederick Winslow Taylor factory work model that a lot of bosses are still trying to use, and they're trying to drag us back to the office so they can bring it back. No more work gets done without it. It shows that that's not what they care about. Much like the anti-abortion people don't really care about the fetuses. They care about controlling the lives of the women and curtailing the freedom of others, because somehow, if you're more free, it makes me less free. I don't know how that works, but it's not going to happen on my watch.
Emerson Dameron:And we have not evolved to optimize for shareholder value. I had been fascinated with suicide since I discovered what it was, and once the suicide door opens, I don't think it ever really closes all the way. And when you have that card in your pocket, it gives you a feeling of agency in the darkest moments. Camus said it's the one philosophical problem that matters. It's always there. You've always got an option C or D, and if you get creative you want to have more than two options. At least If you have two options, they're both terrible.
Emerson Dameron:Now, orgasm in French is sometimes referred to as la petite mort, the little death. So you can have the little death, you can have a lot of little deaths. Does that add up to one big one? Distributed death, death on the installment plan. Sex and death are kissing cousins and I don't know about you, but I get super worked up talking about death. I live in the desert, I break a sweat. Rigorous sex session, whether it's afternoon delight or when we blocked off the whole weekend no talking, no clothes, just animal sticker of sex, and then some choking occurs. Or maybe it's just in the heart and the mind that the white tunnel becomes visible. The chips are down, the rubber hits the road. We are at our most passionate, our most alive. We are channeling the force of creation itself, engaged in exuberant celebration of human creativity in the highest form of physical comedy. And the skull is graying through the window. Death is omnipresent, death is universal, life is optional, sex is life, sex is creation.
Emerson Dameron:Polarity is inherent in all things except the ones in which it is not. With sex and death, you gotta whirl in your own paths. The sparks are gonna fly, the fluids are gonna pour. It's gonna be a session and a half. You do not want to miss that. You want to be here, at least for sex and death, and when you turn that into a practice, it empowers you to be here for everything else. Nothing is really anything special when you're here for everything and there's a real power in that, almost like dying the best way to kill yourself. You do not die physically, it will change everything about your life. Showing up for all of it, or as much as possible. We've all got things to do.
Emerson Dameron:I got some bad news. You, like the rest of us, are trapped in a controlled hallucination, essentially in there all alone. The rest of us are, strictly speaking, real, but you are so much the creator of what you consider reality with a capital R. You've got your head wedged so far up your sphincter and you are so dramatically, comically, absurdly wrong about everything that you believe, especially about other people, most especially about yourself and your experience of the world, that you are surrounded by warped funhouse mirrors you are arguing with and flirting with and screwing and screwing over alternate versions of yourself. You contain multitudes and you're surrounded by them. That's who all the rest of us are in your perception.
Emerson Dameron:You are trapped in a screaming existential hell world and it's such a waste. You really should be ashamed of yourself. But you can't stop you kind of like full creative control, casting us as characters in your cinematic universe. You don't really want to get to know us. You don't even like sex that much. Sex is the way to really get to know people. Casual sex is the way to courageously get to know a whole lot of people and experience yourself from a kaleidoscopic panorama of other people's perspectives. And you can't really deny them their humanity. Because you're hitting that. You've exchanged biological fluids for the reason you're terrified is sex, because you're not happy in the existential hell world and you don't want to be happy. It's your comfort zone and you ain't leaving. You like your reality and you love your toxic relationship with the resistance and solipsism and narcissism, not really having to question yourself.
Emerson Dameron:You're the only one who really knows everything about your world. You are here because you're human, humans being the only animal dumb enough to build a world in which it cannot live. Sorry, you're here. You're here, probably, if these survey cards are to be believed which I would not but you're here to find out who you are. Do you even know what you are?
Emerson Dameron:Take the sentence I blank a body. This is like a mad wig, which is not a trademark of Emerson Dameron's medicated minutes. Some people would put I want a body. Go for it, mazel tov, you crazy kids. No kink shaming, as long as everyone's having a great time, with an expansive definition of what a great time entails very much up to individual tastes.
Emerson Dameron:I would guess that your first thought was I have a body, have Something you own, property, dominion. You want sovereignty for you and your body. What about? I am a body that, to me, feels closer. Notice I say feels, because I'm very embodied. I trust the wisdom of my inner healer more than I trust any of you, ice cold, weasels and bastards. There is one honest man left and I am going to trust my instincts and get laid like A$AP Rocky on tour, and there's nothing you can do to stop me. You are your body.
Emerson Dameron:When your body goes, what you think of as you likely goes with it. Although I believe there's some continuation of the Screaming Rainbow, hellworld and Calliope music of human consciousness, I think it flows right back into the river. Your little tributary with a driver's license and a birth certificate and a whole lot of consumer debt was an impermanent thing. The river flows. We know not to what extent, whether or not it goes all the way to the coast I am west coast till the casket drops, so hopefully my consciousness flows in that direction. But I will not care because I will not be identified with the same series of hang-ups and identifications and my whole ideology, my gestalt, will disintegrate and I will almost certainly be happier for it.
Emerson Dameron:I would say you are essentially a problem solver. That's not a compliment. The reason we typically decide to solve problems is to create bigger ones. That's what we want. Everybody's got solutions business solutions, tech solutions, solutions for all sorts of things that I suppose we have tacitly defined as problems because we've got to have more of those. It is a seller's market for problems. If you're offering solutions, you're pissing in the wind and you're getting a golden shower from the people who are divvying out the problems. They have the power. You need problems so that you don't have to get what you really want. You would go insane immediately. Almost certainly you might like it. In 1979, the polymath prankster Alan Abel put his own obituary in the New York Times. The reaction surprised him. People he thought were his best friends shrugged and people he barely knew were heartbroken, which goes to show you don't know who loves you until you've alienated everyone.
Emerson Dameron:Erica is a passionate, free-spirited woman in her late 20s, living in a college town. It's not as cheap as it used to be, but she doesn't really have to work, because when you're as full of life as Erica is, the world just shows up with dump trucks full of money every Friday afternoon and leaves them in your yard. She is able to have a yard. She's living well. She spends most of her time gallivanting around town, spreading life through the streets, through the parks, through the green spaces. Sometimes she rides the bus. She doesn't need to, she owns a car but she'll do it just to spread her lust for life to anyone who happens to be around. She meets Damon, a melancholic man in his early 30s, disheveled academic of some kind, probably an adjunct professor he doesn't like to talk about it Meets Erica in a record store. They're both fans of the magnetic fields, but that's about as far as it goes. Kind of tries to flirt, but not to the point where he is risking rejection. She kind of likes him Also. He's kind of weird. This might be too much work for her. She has to spread the joy of living to all the people. She doesn't need a project. They go their separate ways. They don't even think about it again until they run into each other.
Emerson Dameron:Weeks later, at one of the local bookstores, erica is thumbing through a brick of a novel 800 plus pages about a throuple that live in Southern California. Has a quizzical, confused expression that Damon finds very attractive and he lets her know that he has read the book. Does she want to know anything about it? She asks what happens in the book. Don't spoil it, but just, you know, set it up. Damon can't really do that because it is too twinding, there's too much discontinuity, there's a crazy symbolism and Greek mythological references, a whole digression that goes on for a hundred pages on the raw sexuality that makes Catholicism so explosive. They both realize that roughly the same time that they've been talking about this book that he's read and she hasn't, for 45 minutes and they thoroughly enjoyed it together.
Emerson Dameron:Just talking about this book, damon says you know I wouldn't mind reading it again. I feel like there are many more surprises, little nuggets left in there, that I'd like to discover. Many more surprises, little nuggets left in there that I'd like to discover. You want to read it together, which is probably the boldest move that he's ever made. She's kind of smitten Was about half an hour ago. The sound of certain human voices is what she's into. He's got one. She's hooked.
Emerson Dameron:They set up a little book club Initially. Got one. She's hooked. They set up a little book club Initially. They'll read the same number of pages every night and then discuss it. On Signal, which they both use as a texting app, probably because they use it to buy drugs and find that they enjoy it more. But after a while it gets to them. Things get hot and heavy in the book. Taboos are broken and it's hot, steamy. They hook up At his place, at her place, in between, in bars, in public restrooms, in parks and green spaces. Once on the bus, everybody knew what they were doing. Nobody said anything. There was something so vulnerable and sweet and romantic about the shared double hand job that they didn't want to spoil it. After a while they started to wonder how can we ramp this up, and Erica suggested what if we performed the book? Use it as an instruction manual, follow it as close to the letter as we can, as though it is sexual scripture.
Emerson Dameron:It was a wild summer for both of them and for some other people, and really for the whole world A sexy butterfly effect. The people they affected affected other people and this got passed around and everybody was feeling it. It said that 90% of success is showing up. If it's true, the same thing can certainly be said of failure. Resist the pressure to be always on. Stop sticking a knife in the outlet. The most crucial and wicked thing you can do is learn to love your own solitude. Not just tolerate it, but get off on it. That's a superpower and confirms that you're better than other people. If you weren't before, you will be now. Don't go where you're not wanted. Don't go most of the places you are wanted. Practice the art of the takeaway. If it suits you, burn off your fingerprints, put on Groucho glasses and find a nice beach in a country with no extradition treaty. Risk-taking behavior is good. You've got a death drive and that's healthy. Don't even try to drive 55. Ignore people. Shut them down. The one thing that's missing from their lives might be the gift of missing you. Happy Mental Health Awareness Month.
Emerson Dameron:I'm Emerson Dameron. I struggle, sometimes valiantly, often less so, with depression. I'm a well-credentialed mentally ill person. That's the only marginalized identity group that I am affiliated with officially. So if it makes you uncomfortable to hear about mental illness, it sucks to be you right now.
Emerson Dameron:I've been depressed almost my entire life. I've also had moments of excitement that snapped me out of it for a second, which only convinced me that in the long run every joy is mitigated by a much worse hangover of futility and meaninglessness and self-loathing, and life is worthless. If you have anxiety, I feel bad for you. I feel sympathy but not empathy. I don't have that problem. Anxiety makes you very unsure of yourself, whereas I am absolutely positive that I am a repulsive, radioactive piece of cat dung that should be destroyed, wiped off the ontological chalkboard as soon as possible For everyone's good. I am worthless and I know it deep down in my kidneys. That's the only thing that I'm sure of, the only thing I know to be true. Ask if you are happy and you cease to be. So Not a problem for me. I never started and that's fine. I don't have a lot of experience with happiness.
Emerson Dameron:It's not just sour grapes to say that. I think it's dubious as a life goal. I think it's a side effect of doing some things right and having the aspects align in a certain way and getting lucky and being able to accept that on its own terms. Do not convince yourself that you deserve it through things that you did, as Americans always do when they succeed, and it always tears them apart because they know intuitively that it would not have happened without luck, and that perhaps creates an obligation to others less successful, not necessarily exclusively through their own failings, not even mostly because of their own failings, just because Because that's just how things work, or don't?
Emerson Dameron:Endless chains of causality that we will probably not be around long enough to understand because our insane cult of rugged individualism is gonna wipe us off the earth before that happens. We're the only species that got smart enough to create a world that it is not able to live in. So it sucks to be all of us and I am depressed because that's an accurate interpretation of world events, in much the same way that my attachment style is avoidant, because that is the correct attachment style. I'm not saying that depression makes you an asshole, because that's not fair. To other people that struggle with depression who are not me, I will say that if you were already inclined in that direction, it makes it easier to become an asshole Because your core belief is that nothing you do matters, and that is incredibly dangerous to everyone involved. It makes you a wrecking ball through the life of anyone who tries to care about you. If your mind is telling you that you don't matter, don't accept that Push back with the truth, which is you don't matter much.
Emerson Dameron:Let us not get ahead of ourselves. You're not going to ruin anyone's life. They have to at least cooperate with you, because people can only truly ruin their own lives and that's another thing that's your fault. If it goes wrong because you're depressed, everything is your fault. In a weird sense, you're always right and you've built a highly effective machine that protects you from certain things and destroys you in other respects. Really overrated depression, I'd have to say. Don't believe the hype. If you're not already depressed, try to avoid becoming depressed. If you find yourself depressed, get out of there as soon as you can.
Emerson Dameron:Diet, exercise, hydrate, drugs. Some drugs might not work for you and others might work insanely well, by which I mean it's so good and it makes you so sane that that drives you crazy. You get what you truly wanted and that destroys your life, as it is almost bound to do. Nevertheless, if you're dealing with depression, everything is on the table, including any drugs that you can get your hands on. I've tried almost all of them. I don't recommend all or any of them, but I don't recommend that you don't try as many as you want.
Emerson Dameron:Everybody loves their own drugs and hates everyone else's drugs except me, because I'm better than everyone. I love drugs. I accept that some of them are not for me and others I am not good at doing, but cannabis, weirdly, is one of the few that works for me. When I get stoned I am still depressed, but I'm depressed about entirely different things. There's true sadness there and it's dredged up by my over-appreciation of music and I'm emotionally shredded by the music of Future and Metro Boom and party-hardy lyrics. But his vocals sound so sad. It's profoundly tragic music and I'm crushed with the sadness of ages, not sustainable, but it beats depression by a long shot.
Emerson Dameron:Sex is good. Big fan of sex, like Gen Z is kind of down on sex. We've accepted all these different ways to have sex socially, collectively, and yet with that acceptance seems to have come a drop in enthusiasm. It could be because the world is absolutely flooded with porn. Sex, like everything else, is getting more expensive, as porn is essentially free. There's an opportunity cost and I don't think we've seen the longitudinal effects of this much porn. It's unavoidable.
Emerson Dameron:If you're listening to this right now, you watch internet porn, or you have watched it, possibly recently. You may very well have been in it, to which I can only say get that money. Everything is a side hustle. Never do anything for fun. There's a lot bad to say about porn. I kind of like it, and not just for the reasons that you pretend you don't.
Emerson Dameron:You probably think of porn if you think about it in terms that are strictly utilitarian. It gets you from point A to point O. It probably doesn't take too long. You might feel terrible afterward or like you wasted your time, which welcome to anything. You probably don't think of it as great cinema, and that, friend, is where you and I differ.
Emerson Dameron:Nothing can make a movie great like great acting. Acting is hard and it's one of those things that almost everyone thinks they would be good at, until they try it and then they realize why. Even people that get paid to do it are not necessarily good at it all the time. It's a spiritual practice, and it's hard to be a great actor. It's not as hard to be a really great bad actor, but that also has a lot of value and is relatively rare compared to just mediocre bad acting. Great bad acting opens up new fractal dimensions in storytelling. If you're not appreciating these films, you're just not on my level, which is a lot of different levels, and it's better up here. Lift yourself, read, become more like me. That's why you're here. So you've taken the first step, which is the hardest thing for most people to do. You're one of my kind.
Emerson Dameron:Great bad acting generally requires cocaine, which is one thing that can be found through porn and is like porn in that not a lot of people stand up for cocaine. A lot of people use it, not that many people sing hosannas about it, and I think that's hypocritical. Psychedelics can be like years and years of therapy in one crack. I love psychedelics. Cocaine is also a wonderful form of self-care. You know who doesn't need therapy Assholes. Cocaine is asshole fantasy camp. You will know that you're a genius. You will have circuitous, free-ranging conversations with other geniuses who know that you're a genius. You will absolutely know that you're a genius. You'll be too busy to get depressed because you'll be a genius at work. If you use cocaine in moderation, mindfully, if you overdo it which usually happens before you realize that you're overdoing it and way before you do anything about overdoing it, you will make it very clear to all concerned that you are not a genius. Access in moderation, in moderation, in moderation, in moderation, in moderation.
Helena the Brit:Well darling, I suppose everyone has a moment in their life when they're utterly swept away by the intoxicating thrust of passion. No, that's too common Adventure. A bit pedestrian, let's say artistry. Yes, that's the one, and in my case it came in the form of a man, a thief to be precise, a proper rogue, with eyes like smudged charcoal and voice like aged velvet. He told me his name was Raphael. Of course, I didn't believe him. Two on the nose, don't you think? But oh, how I adored the audacity of it all. Art isn't so much what you're capable of as what you can get away with. Raphael said that he had these marvellous aphorisms, but I'm getting off point.
Helena the Brit:It began at a soiree, naturally, the kind of gathering where everyone's pretending to admire the host's ghastly modernist sculptures but really just pilfering the canapes. I, of course, was holding court by the champagne fountain when Raphael appeared. All smirk and mystery, he told me he was planning a heist, yes, a heist to liberate, as he put it, a scandalous masterpiece from the oppressive confines of bureaucracy. Now, I've always had a deep appreciation for subversion. Subversion is art, art and vice versa, wouldn't you agree? So when he invited me to join his team which turned out to be just him. And well, now me? I thought, why not? Helena, you've been waiting your whole life to be part of an iconic duo, the Muse and the Mastermind.
Helena the Brit:The Target was an erotic art exhibit, a rather controversial one at that, brimming with all the delicate filth that makes the bourgeoisie clutch their pearls. One piece in particular had stirred such opprobrium Venus uncloaked a disturbingly captivating sculpture of a goddess mid-striptease. Raphael insisted it was a misunderstood masterpiece. A symbol of liberation, he called it. I simply had to see it. The plan, my loves, was to slip in after hours, dressed as inconspicuously as possible. I opted for a sleek black number, which turned out to be slightly draftier than I anticipated. But what is art without a little sacrifice? Without the glamour, it's hard to see the allure of international art thievery, at least from my perspective. Well, admittedly, it is quite erotic, isn't it? I certainly felt it.
Helena the Brit:Raphael was all business at first, muttering about security cameras and laser grids, but I couldn't help but marvel at our raudacity. There I was, helena, harbinger of the avant-garde, about to commit an actual crime. By now we were running far enough ahead of schedule to allow for a proper shag among the exhibits. But then, oh, the tragedy. With farcical elements. Certainly the alarms went off. Apparently, raphael's so-called ingenious bypass device was nothing more than a glorified universal remote control Like Nano.
Helena the Brit:He dashed off, promising to circle back, and left me, me alone, clutching Venus, uncloaked in nothing but my heels and a trembling sense of indignation. And so I did what any self-respecting woman of my intellect and poise would do I improvised. I wedged myself behind the nearest installation a ghastly assemblage of phantom limbs and glitter, if you must know and waited. Security guards swarmed the place, shouting things like identify yourself and drop the statue, drop the statue. Imagine suggesting such barbarity. I'll have you know. I protected Venus uncloaked with my very life.
Helena the Brit:There I was, half draped over a metal sculpture titled Consumer Apocalypse, attempting to look both invisible and profoundly artistic. It's no small feat, let me assure you, this hiding-in-plains sight business. Eventually, I realised Raphael was not coming back. The guards grew tired of searching dreadfully unimaginative lot and I made my escape, barefoot and clutching Venus like a lover. I left her in the garden of a local monastery. Poetic, don't you think the monks deserve a little spice? A half-dozen terrorist organisations claimed responsibility, which put me mostly in the kheer, I believe. As for Raphael, I never saw him again, probably fled to Paris or prison. But you know what I have? No regrets. Art isn't meant to be safe or predictable. It's chaos, darlings. It's passion. It's hiding behind a sculpture in your knickers while an American goomba named Barry shouts who's there as if it's any of his business. So, yes, I helped liberate Venus. Was it foolish? Perhaps? Was it illegal, absolutely, but was it artistic?
Emerson Dameron:without question, and isn't that the whole essence of the thing? Really, I'm out, thank you. The seven most popular types of pornography according to Men's Health it's hard to gauge this because people aren't always forthcoming about it. I understand all of them, even though they're only a couple that I personally enjoy. I'm not a big porn consumer. Generally, it's the opposite of sex in a lot of ways. If I watch too much porn, I end up feeling the opposite of the way that I want to when I have what I want to be good sex, which is good. Lesbian porn number one. Okay, I am confused by anyone who is not into women. I mean, have you seen women, my God?
Emerson Dameron:I would not want women to do anything with other women for my enjoyment unless it was also for theirs. Do anything with other women for my enjoyment unless it was also for theirs? Hentai this covers pretty much everything. The word hentai means pervert or perversion in Japanese, and Japanese porn is odd. There's a lot of stuff that's bored out, and I want to go there because if there's a culture that is that different from America's, I want to see some of what it has to offer. I hope that I get to a point where I've had so much sex and seen so much of the variety of spice that that has to offer that I can't get off on anything less than tentacle porn. That's what I'm hoping for. I'm not there yet and in fact that just feels like too far up. It's like the Beach Boys dropping Pet sounds in 1966. Beautiful thing, the world wasn't ready for it. They didn't have anything to compare it to Stepmom.
Emerson Dameron:Yeah, there's a bunch of this stepfamily, step-sibling, pseudo-incest stuff. I didn't have a great childhood vis-a-vis my family of origin. I have no appetite for this stuff. Just the humiliation and betrayal of it is a lot too much for me to get off on. I just need something a little bit, not quite that fractally disgusting. I need one thing to be gross at a time. I would never ban incest porn, though Incest should be banned along with families, marriage and procreation.
Emerson Dameron:Get rid of that stuff and then watch all the porn you want about it. Milf fetishizing older women who we start treating like shit around the time they hit 30 and then push out toward the edge of society unless they're willing to be servants. I have a rock hard boner right now. All of that is very hot. It's hard to compete with.
Helena the Brit:Big ass.
Emerson Dameron:I'm not really an ass guy. I don't have anything against them. I prefer a big ass over no ass. I might as well Sure, why not? I'll throw that in. Yeah, I'm a leg and titty man. I can see legs anytime I want.
Emerson Dameron:I would say. Gestalt is my thing. It has to all work together somehow. So I certainly enjoy a big ass. In context, would I just want to watch a bunch of asses? I haven't quite made it there yet, but go for it, knock it out. I like hitting it from the back. It wouldn't be in my top seven. Cream pie porn. I totally get that is one of the things that we are literally born to do. If life has a purpose and that purpose is to recreate it, which seems like it would be a strong candidate top three perhaps, along with feeling good and creating our own Meaning the urge to raw dog it or take the rubber off is very strong.
Emerson Dameron:The birth control available for men is not great. I have a vasectomy, which I think was a wonderful idea and totally worth the money. I hate condoms and I think a lot of people do. We were told in the 90s that sex with a condom actually feels better, and if someone has told you that and then you haven't, you're not going to believe anything that anyone ever tells you again. That said, I don't recommend going around and doing this without really thinking it through and you're going to want to and it might happen. I've had a very condom averse ex who was very convincing, convinced me effectively that nothing bad would happen, nothing did we had a lot of close calls, very awkward weeks which would end in jubilation.
Emerson Dameron:When she sent me a gift from the shining the blood pouring out of the elevator and she wasn't pregnant, and we'd usually end up without a rubber again in celebration because it's.
Emerson Dameron:I mean, there's almost nothing that feels better If you're going to watch porn of something in lieu of doing it. I can think of some things that are in league with this, but I think this is a great thing to watch other people do if it helps you deal with your very natural but potentially very destructive urge to do it yourself. And then we have lesbian scissoring. Porn brings us back around. I don't think a lot of people really know how lesbians have sex unless they themselves are lesbians, which I think everyone is really deep down. I know that that's not true, I know, I know. I know I'm not telling you that if you don't, your sexuality is not real. If you're not into Shakira, I don't believe that. I know that. There's a lot of experience I can't relate to. I love that. The thing that people zoom in on is like the closest you can get to PNV without Peggy or a dildo, because there's just so much more to sex than this.
Emerson Dameron:If anything good comes of the proliferation of porn that's happened since the wide adoption of broadband internet we can branch out a little bit, not in terms of what we watch, but in terms of what we do.
Emerson Dameron:When it comes to sex, I adopt a Burning man attitude that there should be no spectators. At some point we'll get all the way from PNV sex for the purposes of procreation once every three years and the sanctity of a Jesus-ordained, miserable marriage. The only way to have sex toward basically always having sex all the time Breathing is sex. Everything you do is sex and has a similar potential for chaos and destruction and joy and comedy and exuberant human creativity. I can see it. I can see it. I can see it. I can see it. I can see it. I have a strong residual fondness for you. I don't resent you like I did. I don't want you to be miserable every day for the rest of your life. I want you to be happy eventually, after you check yourself and get smacked around a little bit.
Emerson Dameron:Erica and Damon had a bit of a falling out. They wouldn't call it that. This was not a bridge that either of them wanted to burn. They needed some space. They had gotten into some stuff that they both felt like they weren't really ready for and they weren't really ready to talk about why they weren't ready for it and it was too much, too soon. Things got weird and they didn't talk for a couple of weeks and they stopped reading the book, and that's when everything went to hell.
Emerson Dameron:Damon's mom died after a long illness. Erica started to experience hard bouts of depression. She had some experience with depression when she was a teenager. One time it got really bad and that's when she decided I'm going to live life like it's life, like this is all I get. I'm going to thoroughly embrace it and relish it and spread that around. I'm going to be an engine of love, pumping it out into the world. And that worked out really well.
Emerson Dameron:For about 10 years Now, the Black Dog seemed to be catching up with her, and sometimes she couldn't leave the house at all. She was no longer able to enjoy music that she loved. She could only listen to opera Tchaikovsky, a couple of others. It was ugly Only listened to opera Tchaikovsky A couple of others it was ugly. Damon was kind of always on the sad side. He was experiencing grief, which hits different people in all kinds of different ways, and one day he was down and the next day he went kind of nuts and would go on a bender. He was very lonely. So was Erica. They were profoundly isolated and after a while they both decided to reach out to each other. They wanted to hear each other's voices. So they did this a couple of times. By the time they finally connected, they knew they needed to get back together. They needed to finish the book, take the ride that they bought the ticket for, fully express these sexual demons' passions.
Helena the Brit:The pain.
Emerson Dameron:Joy at its extremes is indistinguishable from pain. Only through its full expression can it be released. Also, they were in love. They really dug each other's action, didn't like being away from each other for that long. Both hit rough patches and they wanted each other there. They loved each other truly, breaking through the threshold In a way the English language is unfit to describe. As they got back into the book they saw what was happening with Leo and Megan. That was going to be okay, much as it had always been. They knew that they needed to help Steve. So they broke every erotic seal. Anything that they wanted to do ever, they did it With each other. They hired some help in some cases, inspired as they were by the character's journey through the sexual underground. They came up with the resources If they wanted to do it. They made it happen. They loved Steve back to life.
Emerson Dameron:He got out of town he had to. He had needed to for a while Went to live somewhere else Nobody knew quite where, but he was putting some cool stuff on Pinterest, taking it slow, working through his grief, and was starting to make art that was interesting in a new way, not like the summer stuff. He couldn't get back there, chased that dragon for a while and then just decided to let it go. He was possessed by a demon. What do you want? He had some healing to do. The best way he found to do that was through his work, because if he stopped working he became a pretentious hipster douchebag and he wasn't going to let that happen. So he kept making art and it got interesting. There's a certain quality to it, a glow product of the process of sex transmutation, channeling sexual energy, the force of creativity of life itself, into the work. It was cool. The use of orange in that one painting was interesting, the blue one really sexy. There's something going on there.
Emerson Dameron:I want to take that ride. Enough with the damned excuses. It's a beautiful day, get outside, go enjoy it. It's real windy. Californians are very special children, as in Illinois, and it's adorable when everything shuts down because of rain and wind.
Emerson Dameron:Go outside, you'll build character. I already have character. I suppose your character develops. It's in flux. Whether you work on yourself and take a hand in developing your character or not, it's going to develop. So, yes, you have character of a sort. I'm a character actor. How's that working out for you? I don't know. I've got Zoom auditions tomorrow. Well, go get some sunshine, get some cherry in those cheeks, fire it up, start me up. But you're dead. Right, tell me more about this audition tomorrow. You gonna bring the noise for that. Do you care about anything? Yes, borges wrote A writer and I believe generally all persons must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
Emerson Dameron:All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. I absolutely do not believe that everything happens for a reason. That's a horrible thing to say to someone who is suffering that there's some purpose that they should be aware of, and if it just feels like suffering and it just feels like life bites right now, that that means they're not doing it right or they're missing something important, I would save that. I would put a sock in it if you're talking to someone who's grieving, however, what if it was true? I don't think that it is. I think that we spend our days telling stories and looking for patterns in chaos, because seeing things as they are would just be way too confusing for our little brains. We make meaning and thus have more control over the meaning that we make, if not unlimited leverage.
Emerson Dameron:I don't think that you can just manifest millions of dollars and an apartment in Manhattan and have it happen. If you did, what's the point in doing anything? But what if you take the attitude? This is, depending on how you work a puzzle for me to solve, something to work on. There's a message in here that I need to suss out. This is a demonic white whale that I have to resign myself to an obsession with, because it's going to drive out everything else and I'm not going to be able to think about anything else, and I'm not really going to make any progress until I'm able to not think about the white whale, because you can front load a lot of information, but the insights don't really come until you stop thinking about it, at which point perhaps they will show up like the North Star in the Arizona sky, or it might never present itself. There could be no closure. Eventually, you could move on with luck. There could be no closure. Eventually, you could move on with luck. But what if you look at your heartbreak, as I'm going to have to do something with this, because I'm an artist and I think you are. I think everyone is.
Emerson Dameron:Art to me just means being on your mission. It's doing the work. Anything that you do well and devote your full attention to becomes a creative practice and a spiritual practice and becomes art, not artifice, although that applies to everything in some sense and to nothing in another sense. Stay with me I am certainly an artist. It took me a long time to realize that that's all I've ever been. It's all I ever wanted to be. I don't care about enlightenment, I just want to make art. I want what I need to support myself in making the best art possible. If it came down to it, I would consider going to Slab City making art and living off of scene points. Fortunately, I've found a nice little middle way between art and commerce, having created the number one avant-garde personal development program in Los Angeles and the first and only good podcast. I've struck gold, but I've also found myself in the dirt on occasion in the past. I want very much is to be part of a creative partnership, collaboration or community, perhaps all of those things. It hasn't happened a lot. I also like having complete creative control, as I do over this show.
Emerson Dameron:If you get hit hard on multiple fronts, it can be really devastating and it can take a very long time to figure out what the hell do I do with this, and you won't feel like the kind of person that can love and be loved and make great art. You will feel like worthless garbage. I did. I can't speak for you. Maybe you have very high self-esteem, as do I. Everything has its shadow side.
Emerson Dameron:I discovered a lot about myself through that pain that I didn't really want to know right away. In a very short amount of time, I really put myself out there and really got hurt. When something like that happens, you're kind of stuck with it, because what else are you going to think about for the foreseeable future? What are you going to do with these parts of yourself that you've discovered that you have no idea how to love or do anything with, celebrate, make jokes about, muster up all of the patience and self-compassion that you can in that case, because you're going to need it. It's going to be a while. This is going to drag out like the last week of school and you're not going to make great stuff right away.
Emerson Dameron:I just started a new job, so I was not in the position to say OK, you know me, you know that I'm a hard worker who can be trusted. This is what is happening and this is where I'm at right now. I'm not planning on eating or sleeping properly for the next month or so, so my performance may suffer. Bear with me. You know I'm better than this. They had no idea whether or not I was better than that, so I just had to knuckle up and do what was expected of someone with basic competence at least. That wasn't easy or fun to pull through and I felt very much alone and I'd like to say you don't have to feel alone. I'd like to say I've got you in a parasocial way. I will provide any resources that may be of use. I hope that we can have a few laughs.
Emerson Dameron:I will not guarantee that things will be different on the other side. Well, they will absolutely be different. Will they be better? I don't know. I don't have a currency converter to judge the value of your experience. I feel for you and you don't have to believe that it happened for a reason. Ultimately, I don't think that's the case, but just imagine what if it did, if I had to make sense of this and do something and use it as fuel for my mission. How would I, even just theoretically, do that as a thought experiment? See what happens. I wish you the best. 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. Thank you, so Thank you.
