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
Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: The Liberating Path of Apathy
"The less you care, the harder you come."
Your therapist won't tell you this, but caring too much is the ultimate cockblock to pleasure. And you, my sweet, overly invested friend, are drowning in a sea of giving-a-fuck when you could be floating in an ocean of delicious indifference.
Welcome to this week's episode, where we're going to strip you of your precious concerns like a dominatrix peeling off your armor of good intentions.
You think you need more love? More connection? More meaning?
Wrong.
What you need is the courage to stop giving a damn, and I'm here to hurt you in all the ways that'll set you free.
Get ready for:
- A master class in the art of strategic apathy
- The dirty truth about why your caring addiction is cock-blocking your evolution
- How psychedelics might divorce you from your neediness (and why that's hot)
- The sexiest thing about power (hint: it doesn't care what you think about it)
Listen as we explore why drama is the foreplay of existence, and how your resistance to pleasure is just fear wearing a consent-culture costume.
This isn't self-help. This is self-harm in reverse – destroying the parts of you that keep sabotaging your liberation.
If you're clutching your pearls of wisdom too tight to let new pleasure in, this episode will teach you the art of letting go like a zen master having a tantric breakthrough.
WARNING: Side effects may include:
- Spontaneous outbreaks of not giving a fuck
- Increased pleasure tolerance
- Decreased tolerance for your own bullshit
- Sudden urges to prioritize your pleasure over others' comfort
- The ability to say "no" without writing a thesis to justify it
Available now wherever you get your permission to stop caring so damn much.
The stakes are high, but your anxiety about them doesn't have to be.
Come play in the space between caring too much and not caring at all. That's where the real pleasure lives.
And remember: If you're worried about whether you should listen to this episode, that's exactly why you need to.
Your enlightenment is optional. Your pleasure is mandatory.
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
K-Chung, los Angeles, 1630 AM. Kchungradioorg. On the World Wide Web, this is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, la's number one avant-garde personal development program, home of Ask a Sadist, proudly sponsored by the First Church of the Satanic Buddha, birthplace and habitat of bite-sized erotic thrillers. My name is Emerson Dameron. I'm the writer, producer, host, everything. I love you personally.
Speaker 1:Levity saves lives, lives, and I think the main thing to do with it is Riff it out and then run it through the steps. Keep raising the stakes. How can I do that? I'm going to be talking about death. I'm going to be talking about trying to break out of the cage that my depression presents to disprove my big idea that I'm a worthless human being. God, so much other stuff. It's gonna be fun. Y'all Come along. I will be doing some of that and that's the main thing I want to do Get that done and out of the way, and then I'm gonna work on finding some work to do, a way to present myself so that I can make some cash.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow's gonna be all about the money. Honey Gonna do all of the stuff that will make the ends meet or just make ends Means is what I'm gonna be working on and I'm gonna be mean to it. I'm gonna rough it up. Hell yeah, you'll see. Well, you won't, but it will and it will feel and it may not see anything anymore because I'm gonna gouge its eyes out, make ends, meet with a vengeance and use my anger. That's what I'm gonna do. The next step, the new me, hell yeah, and maybe other stuff too.
Speaker 1:Life would be so much easier, so much less confusing if it didn't have so many other people in it. People are confusing, right. They're frustrating. You don't ever really know what they're coming from. It's hard to read, it's hard to pick out the signals, it's hard to do the dance. People surprise you. You don't really know who your friends are.
Speaker 1:Prankster Alan Abel, in 1979, faked his own death and at the beginning of 1980, he placed his own obituary in the New York Times and the reactions of his friends to the news of his death surprised him. Some people he barely knew were brokenhearted and some people he considered his best friends. His MySpace top eight just shrugged. So you don't really know who your friends are until you alienate everyone, and of course you wouldn't do that, that's not in your nature. But you do have to wonder sometimes why we can't just be real with each other. The reason is nobody wants that. That would be boring, it would be oppressive. We're headed toward that Our private lives fully exposed. It's gonna be hell. We're not ready for that. We like the mystery. You like stories where there are stakes, where there's suffering, where there's drama, conflict, mystery and intrigue.
Speaker 1:Life needs stakes to be interesting and to be worthwhile, to keep you engaged. When life gets boring, you get pulled into dangerous, poisonous distractions Because you're missing the drama. You're missing the action, the lust, the erotic intrigue and the push-pull, the friction. Risk and freedom cannot be sacrificed. Life is not worth living without them. If you're willing to take a risk and be free and understand that freedom hurts and requires you to challenge a lot of your assumptions, which can be really uncomfortable at first and can provoke cognitive dissonance, if you're willing to embrace that, you will discover that security and safety are a lie. So you sacrifice your risk and freedom on the altar of security and safety and a sense of continuity and knowing what comes next. You are deluding yourself Because everything is always in flux and everything is theater, everything is play, everything is storytelling, everything is mystery. There's kabuki, there's kayfabe, there's all kinds of drama Push-pull, friction, intrigue, betrayal Also really hot sex.
Speaker 1:You know that there's more to life than this, intuitively in your gut. And you're doing well. You're quite successful. In some ways, life has turned out a lot better than you expected, certainly more interesting. You've done well and you've been rewarded. That's because you deserve it. You've worked hard, you've worked smart and you've applied yourself. Things are working out, but you nevertheless have a growing sense, certainly manageable, but noticeable, as the years go on, seemingly much more quickly than they used to.
Speaker 1:You have the sense that you're missing the point. Here's the thing If you want to dig into that and figure out what's going on there and get your fingers in the grease, you're going to have to unlearn some things that you think that you know. You know dominance and power. Flexing your power and warding it over people is wrong. Powerful people, masters of the world, are bad people and they got that way because they're sociopaths. Money corrupts. Power corrupts absolutely, especially if it's absolute power, because power is evil. Humility is good and suffering builds character. Community is good. You're just like everyone else. Everyone is the same. Nobody is better than anyone else. Nobody has the right to flex their power over everyone else, except that that's totally wrong.
Speaker 1:Power is value neutral. It is necessary to get anything done. Martyrdom is taking power in a Rube Goldbergian way. That's an example of power. Power is much more complex and multifaceted than your narrative would indicate, and power can be good. It can also destroy you. But you have more power than you know what to do with already, and that's why it drives you crazy, because it can blow up in your face. It can take out your whole neighborhood if you don't figure out how to use it. But here's the thing, power is responsibility. You're responsible for the power that you have, whether you're owning it or not, and your power is scary and you're right to be afraid of it, because it can kill you and everything you love. But mastering your own power is the work of a lifetime, but it cannot begin until you acknowledge that you have it.
Speaker 1:When you do that, you might get a little excited Because your power is sexy, so it makes you a sexy MF and you already knew that about yourself. You just have to own it. Don't be scared, don't be shy. It knew that about yourself. You just have to own it. Don't be scared, don't be shy. It feels good. Come on in the water's fine, it's got bubbles in it.
Speaker 1:You're a basically good person. You know you're hardly perfect. That would make you boring and untouchable and kind of plastic and evil and unknowable, kind of disgusting. But you're good. You put other people first. You're kind, you're considerate, you do the right things. You hold the door for people and you defer your own gratification. You don't complain, but you do kind of resent people. You're not getting back from the system what you're putting into it. You're a good person. You don't burden people with your own needs and they don't get met. People should just figure out what you need and do it for you. Because you're a good person, you deserve that. They should just know. But they don't. If you're not taking care of yourself, no one else will. Here's the truth. You might be more intuitive than other people.
Speaker 1:You might be more intelligent, you might be more soulful. You certainly have qualities they don't have, and if you're thinking about these things deeply which is why you're here you've got the edge on a lot of people. Frankly, most people are walking around in a walking daze and don't know what they're doing. Neither do you, because nobody knows what they're doing. But now you know that you don't know what you're doing, and that is true leverage power, and that gives you the responsibility to dominate people when they're asking for it. If you run into somebody and it's clear that they don't know what they're doing, put that person in a headlock and give them more than they want. You're doing them a big favor, especially if you're getting them out of the cockpit of whatever plane they were about to fly into the side of a mountain. But you can only do that because you know that you don't know what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Life is a game. You know that pleasure feels good and so does fun, and there are different kinds of fun. There's a bad buzz and a good buzz. There's the fun that you put on a credit card, metaphorically or literally. That creates greater pain down the road, and there's flywheel fun that creates more fun. That's the fun you want to go to. But you want to go toward pleasure, and that's what life is about. It's not about self-sacrifice, unless that's what gets you off. It's not about money. It's not about sex per se. It is about pleasure and fun and that's really the whole game.
Speaker 1:And life is a game. It's theater. Everything is in flux and you can cut out your moralizing. It's exhausting. You don't really believe it yourself, which is why you're a raging basket case. It's because of the cognitive dissonance, because you're not buying what you're selling because it's worthless. Get over the moralizing crap. Just cut it out. Live a little bit, find out what's actually true for you, and that involves understanding that life is a game. It's about pleasure and play. It's why plants turn toward the sun, it's why butterflies are free. Be in that. Adopt the playful philosophy of the seducer, the libertine. Get a little bit decadent, fun-loving, embrace the sadism or masochism within you, dominate or submit because it feels good. And because it feels good, it is your responsibility. Any sort of portentousness or ominousness that comes with any connotations of the notion of responsibility will be easily mitigated by the fun that you're going to have and when you get all kinds of hot in the crotch from embracing the pleasure and the play and the fun and the flux and the theater of life. Let go, do it. Wake up, show up. You're already here, come on Rarely.
Speaker 1:Have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path? On our path, we avoid hard drugs and alcohol while indulging whole hog in weed and psychedelics. Or we drink socially, smoke weed and avoid anything else smacking of fun, or we smoke weed and then forget we smoked it, convince ourselves our cocaine is vegan, or only drink for the gram. It depends on who you ask and when and who they're trying to impress. We don't agree on the rules, so we can't lose. The name of our path is Cali Sober. Those who do not succeed at Cali Sober are people who cannot or will not just chill and understand that everything is relative. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault. They seem to have been born in Utah. Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like and then trail off into nonsense about how we're all different. We're all the same and nothing really matters. If you've decided you want what we have and you can afford the ridiculous rents we pay, then you are ready to take certain steps.
Speaker 1:Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of California sobriety. Step 1. We admitted that doing as many drugs as possible, as often as possible, had become unmanageable. Step 2. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could help us chill, help us hash out our childhood traumas and make us feel special. Step three we made a decision to chill, to smoke a bowl and turn our will over to whatever higher power had the shortest waiting list. Step four we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and figured out how to monetize it as IP. Step five we admitted to our higher power, to ourselves and to a famous person, the exact nature of our wrongs and understood that their halt is part of the journey.
Speaker 1:Step 6. We were entirely ready to experience transformative personal growth through the ingestion of Toad Venom. Step 7. We hallucinated contact with various entities some clockwork elves, a blue axolotl with a trident, henry Rollins and others, and immediately referred to them as our good friends. We humbly asked them to remove our shortcomings or to let us know if they had the hookup for that.
Speaker 1:Step 8. We made a list of all the persons we harmed and were totally ready to make amends to all of them, because we have no time to hate Step 9. We didn't make amends to all of them because we have no time to hate Step 9. We didn't make amends to any of them because it would mean putting up with their bad energy in an hour of freeway traffic, and we have no time for that either.
Speaker 1:Step 10. We continued to take personal inventory and, when we were wrong, smoked enough weed to chill and stop judging ourselves, or vaped enough DMT to transcend good and evil For good. Step 11. We sought through shrooms, sound baths and combo ceremonies to improve our conscious contact with our higher powers as we understood them, praying only for a million dollar idea that would get traction before an earthquake swallowed us all or we went broke and had to move back to Topeka. Step 12. Having experienced ego death as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others by bragging about it. Many exclaimed what an order. I can't go through with it. Do not be discouraged. No one takes anything seriously.
Speaker 2:Your dreams are just content If it feels as if the world is ending just chill, or switch from Sativa to Indica, or try a hybrid the 12 steps of cali soap.
Speaker 1:When I met her I knew she was tough and tender, but mostly tender. The toughness was played up, genuine, but also a coping mechanism, a facade. To the extent that she played it, I treated her like a pal. We had a lot in common. We were both conversant about art, great literature and psychedelic mushrooms. She was a serious person with a lot of responsibilities.
Speaker 1:Sex is where people hide things. Our sexual personas can be almost like photo negatives, the selves that we present, that we want to be identified with professionally, socially or to ourselves. Even Everything is hidden in the sex. She was so busy, competent with it, responsible, or to ourselves. Even Everything is hidden in the sex. She was so busy, competent with it, responsible and respected and taken seriously, and such a good girl that she would do anything to get dropped down like a bad one, humiliated, used, degraded. I made her my dirty little else and she couldn't get enough of it and she would do anything to get tossed, cooking gifts and treats and vacations that I specifically asked for. When she was preoccupied or out of town, she would find toys for me to play with, sometimes younger women adjacent to her friend group that she mentored At first. It was women of the type that she preferred and we got some explosive electromagnetic threesomes and foursomes out of that. And then she started coming through with the girls. I like Rock and roll girls A little dirty, a little edgy, artsy, not yet thoroughly corrupted, ready for it, cognizant that there's a first time for everything. It's probably going to happen soon.
Speaker 1:I was taking advantage of her, but not. She did all of this because she loved me. She knew I was part of the deal, she wanted the case and she went above and beyond to get it. It was a wonderful relationship, I would say for both of us. I felt loved, desired, longed for, worshipped. I felt like a p***y. She felt sweet, submissive, sexy and, more than anything else, useful. She had found her higher power, leader, authority figure so you could dominate her and make her love it. It was a wonderful relationship until I reconnected with my soulmate if such a thing exists my twin flame. If you believe in that crap, she may as well be.
Speaker 1:She is very unavailable, but that's not stopping me from loving her profoundly, fully and completely. She deserves nothing less. I love to hold her through her feminine storms. She shakes and cries and then that gets way to rolling laughter. I roll around in each other's arms and I straddle her. She shares her profound sensuality, deep, deep down to the earth's core. I go deep, deep, deep and dominate the hell out of her. I straddle her, I flick her sternum below. She holds gas that's going to the head. I make her an awkw awkward and I slide back down. I f***ing gas, even though she's a little too tight for me. I pump it. I pump it, I put my hands in. She looks next. I remember now she sees stars, so she knows who's in charge around here. I'll love her for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1:I think it's probably going to be mutual, because we're never going to be able to have an adult relationship. We can let each other down, but not catastrophically. Domestic bliss usually does it. That's my twin flame. She's around. We can't stop pounding it out. We got caught.
Speaker 1:Last time it was by her husband, this time it was by my ultra-compliant girlfriend who, it turns out, had some festering resentments around the third parties that were entering and exiting through the revolving door in our relationship. I kind of had a feeling, but I didn't want to press the issue because I didn't want to stop that train. But that's when it became untenable. That was the end of what, in a practical, material sense, is certainly the best relationship of my life, and I what in a practical material sense is certainly the best relationship of my life, and I was not in a hurry to get in another one, because I'd reconnected with the love of my life and she was unavailable. So I didn't have to have a relationship with anyone else, which is good, everyone's horrible. I could have sex with anyone else I wanted, because we're not really a thing and yet we are. So I don't have to have sex with anyone else I wanted, because we're not really a thing and yet we are. So I don't have to have sex with anyone except for her. I want that. It was good. It's not going to last. Nothing does why. That he saves lives, but only temporarily.
Speaker 1:So if I made it, if I really broke through, if I made it as much as it's possible to make it and then made it a little bit more, because that's the kind of success we're talking about here, purely theoretical realm, so we can succeed as hard as we want, and I did that to the point where it's impossible for me to take the L. Nothing is a risk, nothing is an expense. That's how hard I made it. If that were the case and I had the power to do so, I would save everyone. No questions asked from all of us. What's it to me? I've made it so hard that I have no hard feelings anymore. Things could not have turned out better than they did, so why would I be mad at anyone? And it's impossible for me to take the L. I can do whatever I want and set it all on fire, and it'll all just come back. I'll just make it again. That's part of making it all the way, and past that, I would save everyone from this, all of this. That's the first thing I would do.
Speaker 1:So why is God a bigger asshole than I am? Not just me, like everyone I know. If I knew someone that was as big an asshole, as petty and vindictive and violent as the Old Testament God, I would end that friendship immediately and not feel bad about it. Also, needy, weak, pathetic, incapable of doing anything without external validation, god is a bitch. You can do better than this. Maybe that's the price of fame. If you succeed too hard, it does seem to create challenges that most people can't handle. Maybe nothing, not even omniscience, omnipotence and all benevolence all at the same time isn't enough to defeat the curse of fame. In that case, my heart goes out to him. Do I worship him? Hell, no, I'm actually better off worshiping myself.
Speaker 1:Things to do that might help Go outside. You promised yourself hours ago that you would go outside, did you? No, you did not. You haven't been outside much of at all in the last few weeks. You used to go for walks. What happened? Are you scared? What is this? You don't talk to people. You used to go for walks. What happened? Are you scared? What is this? You don't talk to people. You're scared to death.
Speaker 1:The more days that go by and you don't talk to another soul, the harder it feels like it's going to be, which is the thing that does the most to make it hard, and it is not insignificant. When you think something is going to be a miserable experience, that goes a long way toward making it one. Not saying that it wouldn't be anyway. If you're out of practice, you're not going to have a great night the first time you go out. You're not going to have one of those nights where everything just comes together, and if you do, that might be the worst thing that could happen. It's like getting up doing stand-up the first time and you kill. You're going to be chasing that dragon for the rest of your life A lot of the rest of your life at least the next 10 years is going to be sucking out loud at stand-up comedy or, in your case, getting out among the public, which is something that you have not done much of in the last calendar year and change.
Speaker 1:Human interaction has a lot of variables you can't control, so make sure you're maxing all the variables that you can control Hydrate, exercise, don't listen to as much sad music. Listening to sad music makes you feel worse. It doesn't help. That's an established fact. Of course, we do it anyway because we like to torture ourselves and we like to tell stories about our suffering, which is our favorite thing to do, and that's why we always overdo it like you have. Maybe. Just do the opposite of everything that you want to do, but don't know why you want to do.
Speaker 1:Just try it For a while. Do the opposite. It'll be a pain in the ass and you can go back to ruining your own life as soon as you a story as this goes on. Pay attention not just to the words, but to how you feel about the words in your body. The words, but to how you feel about the words in your body deep down, in all those places that are so energetically charged that it's a little scary to go there.
Speaker 1:By the end you will know me and yourself much more intimately than you ever expected to, than you thought you would ever be able to, but you are because you have courage that you're afraid to express. That is so powerful. With me, it's all about pleasure and power. I have this friend. We're pretty tight. He asked me once how should I solve my problems and I said let me get back to that. I'm amazed at how disgusting you are, entranced with your vapidity, shell, shocked at the warmth of your heart and the depth of feeling I see when I look deep, deep down in your eyes, deeper than I ever expected to penetrating opening all my windows and doors and saying seduce me.
Speaker 1:What I said was take a different view of the problems, take different views of different problems, take a unique view of each problem, if that's what it takes. And he did, and his problems dissolved. We celebrated by smoking 5-MeO-DMT, the venom of the Colorado River, toad Bufo Alvarius, known as the Everest of psychedelics, although, now that I think about it, we may have done that before all of the problems disintegrated. It's neither here nor there. Welcome, welcome. I'm glad you're here. I'm very excited for the ideas that I'm going to share. Really, just one big idea that I'm thoroughly confident will save your life. I'm seriously thrilled about it. I'm experiencing a whole spectrum of positive emotions. That is not a typical day at the office for me, as you'll discover.
Speaker 1:I used to care very deeply and profoundly and dangerously about almost everything, all sorts of things. I cared way too much. I just cared about whatever happened to be going on in front of me, and it was more than I could handle. I oscillated wildly between anxiety and depression. I sought out depression as a relief from anxiety and I sought out anxiety as a relief from depression. There wasn't much I could do about most of the things that I cared about and I knew deep down that I was wasting my energy. I was driven to care, to be invested in my life and the times that I was living in.
Speaker 1:Caring is its own punishment, as I discovered. It wears down the nervous system. It wastes your time. It takes your focus off what really matters, which will soon be revealed. That's foreshadowing In literature. It's an open loop in marketing, and I put it there because I care about you and I care about this big idea. This is my retirement tour from caring. I'm gonna care just long enough to share this big idea and I'm gonna hang up my jersey. It's so important that I wanna share it with you, and that is that much. As caring is its own punishment, apathy is its own reward. The correct approach to life is apathy. The less you care, the better off you are, and you should really focus your energy on getting your level of caring down as close as you can to zero.
Speaker 1:There is an art, a science, to not caring. Primarily, it is a daily practice. You are what you do every day. You are what you don't do every day. That's part of the practice. This practice is the practice of learning not to care. I had to learn not to care. I was not born not caring. It was a very deliberate practice A lot of trial and error, a lot of frustration, a lot of caring a lot more before I learned to care a lot less. And one of my goals in sharing this information is to make things easier for you, share what I learned so that you can learn from what I've already figured out and not care as much now and then really not care later and you're truly done caring. What this really requires is a fundamental mindset shift.
Speaker 1:It's a rewiring, not just the way that you think, but the way that you perceive the entire world the frame that goes around the picture of your life and your perception and who you think you are, and what this means is that your practice is cultivating the attitude of apathy. It begins with admitting the problem. The problem is that you care, probably way too much. That must be followed by contrary action, in this case a commitment to change and rearrange first your thinking, then the stories you tell yourself about yourself, your commitment to caring as a form of suffering, self-abuse, self-sabotage, and then you will be on the royal road to a life of magical, a life of magical, mystical apathy as your spiritual practice. Caring is caused by neurotic idiocy. It's caused by the misperception that anything matters. Almost nothing matters. Very few things do. Some monks and contemplatives devote their lives to trying to figure out what those perhaps half a dozen things are. They stare at the sides of cliffs and sit in silence for months, possibly years, in the attempt to figure this out. Some of them believe that they have, and they've tried to share that information, but it gets lost in translation. My belief is that the things that are worth caring about are largely ineffable. There's very little hope of getting enlightened in that way in this lifetime, so you're really better off cutting your losses and not caring about anything that will solve the major problem in your life.
Speaker 1:The contemplatives are right about one thing Meditation is your friend by this time. You've been hit over the head with meditation for the last many, many years. Thousands of years it's been around. If you've lived previous lifetimes, you're probably hassled about meditation in previous incarnations. You're getting a lot of stuff about it now from Tim Ferriss and Sam Harris and your therapist and people on dating apps. If you live in Southern California, as I do, everybody wants to meditate. They want you to meditate. They're right. Unfortunately, they are annoying, but they are correct. Meditation is not a nice-to-have. It's not a cute woo-woo.
Speaker 1:New Age hobby. It is absolutely crucial to make sense of the modern world, and the way to do that is by managing your emotions and eventually killing them dead, murdering your feelings, absolutely slaughtering that part of your experience. It will be much easier to not care. You will open up whole new vistas of possibilities and capabilities that you were not aware of before. The next thing you want to do physical exercise Also not news to you that this is a good idea. You want to hydrate yourself, move around every day, get into your body, which gets you out of your head, out of your heart and soul, in those conceptual places and into the physical realm where you can rely on your animal instincts. Get jacked, because that makes you dumb, or it makes it easier for you to be dumb, because you're hot, remarkable looking and thus don't need to indulge this idea that being smart is an advantage. It really, really isn't. You just have to be smart enough to know that you're an idiot and then be smart enough to stop caring. Then the next thing is to desensitize yourself.
Speaker 1:I was very squeamish as a kid. I didn't like horror movies. I didn't like amusement park rides, particularly roller coasters. I had a nervous stomach. I didn't like gore. I was just easily scared to death Not all the way to death, because then I would have stopped caring and that would have solved my problems. I was very much alive, all too much. In some respects, I was able to desensitize myself by the time I was in high school. I discovered at that time the underground press. I did not have internet access. This was in the mid-90s. I loved getting stuff in the mail, which is one unique facet of living in the middle of nowhere. The mail was very exciting to me and I ordered certain materials through the mail certain publications, small press zines, pamphlets from fringe activist organizations and threw myself into the extreme. I was interested in serial killers for a bit. Being into serial killers is kind of like being into the Doors. It's cool if you're a teenager. If you're in that phase, enjoy the hell out of it. It's very fun.
Speaker 1:I was very into blood and gore and low-budget horror films and metal music. Ghetto Boys, the Gravediggers, Horrorcore was a genre of rap at the time and then when I went to, college I majored in journalism.
Speaker 1:I had a class with a journalism professor who'd previously been a working newspaper man. In the course of his work he had to look at a picture of a young girl child who had drowned. That's when he decided that journalism was not for him and the reason he was teaching it is that he wanted to dissuade as many people from becoming journalists as he possibly could. His goal was to have one-third of the class drop out before it was done, and he succeeded in that. I was not one of them. I'm a straight A and straight F student. I'm an inverse bell curve I get A's in things that I care about and I'm good at and I get F's in everything else. I had screaming ADHD when I was a kid, which probably also explained some of the scatterbrained, scatterhearted caring that I was doing. I loved that class. I thrived. I got an A. I finished it because being in the field of journalism was an excellent way to desensitize myself, to see the horror of human existence, the morbid reality that we live in, to simply get used to it, thicken my skin, toughen up where the fringe terrors of the world became commonplace for me. I'd recommend doing the same Prepare to care a lot before you care less. That means driving into the storm, finding the thing that scares you because you care about it so much, getting used to that thing, desensitizing yourself. Have someone drop a bag of spiders in your bed. If that's what you're afraid of, you won't die and you'll care less after that. It is a process. You will care the most before you stop caring. So I remind you, as the saying goes, don't quit before the miracle happens. In a blink, the lights will go off. You will be in sweet, sweet darkness and silence. Another way to cultivate the attitude of apathy is to get good at shrugging off the things that are hardest to shrug off, which would be your successes. If you can be apathetic about your wins, through meditation, desensitization, etc. You will find it much easier to shrug off your losses as well. If you're shrugging off everything, you are what you do every day and you become that thing and you will become what you are and you won't care and it'll be glorious.
Speaker 1:For now, self-care is important. For now, take care of yourself, hydrate, work out, as we mentioned, meditate, be kind to yourself, be generous. This isn't really worth caring about that much. Yes, it is, but you want to have fun, not caring. You're working on yourself. This is doing the work, the work of a lifetime, the best work you can do. It's fun. Work is a misnomer.
Speaker 1:The idea of hard work was created by sociopaths, the rulers of the world. They were born not caring about anything. Everything they do is strategic. It's about consolidating power, and they've convinced you that hard work is somehow noble because they want you to do their hard work on their behalf and they want to get rich off of your back. And they want you to care because that makes you low-hanging fruit, easy pickings, easy to exploit. That's where this poisonous, horrific, smothering culture of caring originated People who are never able to care. You're never going to be on that level of not caring. You're just unlikely to get there in this lifetime. So I wouldn't try to compete with those people.
Speaker 1:Some humility is necessary. Don't care too much about yourself. Let your ego die. Don't care about status. Don't care about the big things and don't care about the petty things. Don't care about high school crap. Do practice self-care for as long as it takes to get to the point where you don't need to care about anything. Yourself can be one of the last things that you stop caring about.
Speaker 1:Be generously selfish. Being selfish makes you well-defined. You know what you like. You can communicate. You can establish boundaries with people and people like that it makes life easier for them if they know who the hell you are. So selfishness if you're not good at it, if you don't have boundaries, if you're not good at enforcing them when someone tries to drive a tank through.
Speaker 1:Being generously selfish will make people around you happy. Maybe they will start caring about you. That'll take some of the pressure off of you. They might take care of your needs. There'll be a few fewer things that you have to care about. You can get them to perform tasks on your behalf. Find someone who enjoys grocery shopping and also digs your action. Combine those things and have them do some grocery shopping. There's some choices you don't have to make. Some things you don't have to care about anymore. You will have the power to walk away. Your relationships will be amazing on a level that you cannot comprehend right now, because there's no way to describe this experience. Until you're there, you will be magnetic. The sex will be volcanic. You won't care, and that's okay. You don't have to. It'll be a story that you can tell and someone else will get off on it.
Speaker 1:You can go right on not caring, because that's the secret of your success. There are resources for this. Practical nihilism is one philosophical outlook if you're of an intellectual bent, but the main thing to do is don't be afraid to get up to the lip of the abyss and look in and see how abyssy it really is and resist the urge to do anything about it. Anything you do is just going to cause new problems or make the existing problems worse, or both. Caring is always a bad idea. Almost nothing is worth caring about. You don't know the things that are worth caring about. Cut your losses, stop caring and you can stop all the other things. You can stop ruminating, you can stop procrastinating. You can break through blocks and resistance and stop smoking, stop snitching. When you stop caring, that is the big stop sign that stops all of the traffic. It stops all of the honking horns and the air pollution and the rush hour traffic of the people that just care way too much. You won't be annoyed by them because you won't care. Believe that.
Speaker 1:Care about that enough to get to the point of not caring and that'll be the last thing you have to care about and you will be free, and freedom will not be terrifying the way it is for a lot of people because, to reiterate, you won't care. Bye, Thank you. Hi, I'm Emerson. You might not know it to see my boyishly tousled hair and smug smirk, but I have severe, chronic depression. Had it my whole life.
Speaker 1:For me, the way that tends to manifest is ironclad belief, gospel truth, my risen Christ, that I am a repulsive, radioactive piece of shit. No one should have anything to do with me and I deserve to die and I should try to make that happen. If you saw the old Pink Panther movies where Clouseau hires his assistant to try to assassinate him to keep him sharp, I have a highly motivated assassin in my mind that follows me around everywhere I go, which maybe helps keep me on my toes, but it's also exhausting. Most of my life has been a series of experiments to try to get rid of that. I've tried tons of antidepressants handfuls, pamela, paxil, zoloft, prozac, lithium, experimental treatment for depression for 16-year-olds there was one.
Speaker 3:It was Paxil.
Speaker 1:The New York Times later determined it should not be given to teenagers because it's resulted in extreme antisocial antics. Anyway, I tried a lot of stuff. Nothing really helped in a groundbreaking kind of way, which I wanted. 10% happier is not going to cut it for me. I listened with interest when I started hearing some gurglings around the fringes back in like 2016, about ketamine as a treatment for treatment-resistant depression. At the time it was in clinical trials and you could sign up for a clinical trial and then wait interminably to get into that and then possibly not get into it, or you could go to a ketamine clinic. Basically, they rig you up with ketamine, fill you up with it and then they send you on your way. There's no therapeutic component, it's just drugs, and it can cost sometimes into five figures Obscene, prohibitive amounts of money. If you could afford that, you have no excuse for being depressed. So I realized it was going to take a while before I got to try that. But I also figured out that there is an active group of psychedelic enthusiasts psychonauts who get together in LA for salons, parties and events. I was a late comer to psychedelics. I've self-medicated nine ways from Sunday. I was mostly a cocaine and early times guy, from way back until that stopped being fun and then for a long time after it stopped being fun, I hadn't done a lot of psychedelics and I was excited. I ended up learning the secret handshakes of the psychonaut world, shaking some hands and eventually getting myself in a position to try the motherfucker of psychedelics.
Speaker 1:5-meo-dmt Different from regular DMT, that's for weaklings. This is the venom of the Colorado River Toad, which used to be called Bufo alvarius. It's a toad that sleeps for 10 months out of the year and when it wakes up it secretes venom that is a psychedelic baseball bat to the head. The experience is ineffable. It's completely indescribable. I've done it four times now. It varies from time to time, it varies wildly from person to person, but I'm gonna, as I always do with the ineffable, I'm gonna see if I can F it. My experience of it was I showed up in the home of a very enterprising young woman on the scene of really some of the best people I've ever met. Like some of the psychedelic folks have definitely been the cream of the crop in terms of people I've known.
Speaker 1:They can be a little evangelical. Some of them have flowers coming out of their mouths when they talk about psychedelics and will give you the idea that they can fix everything, when really they're more like big homework assignments. You have to do a lot of the work. They show you where you're stuck and then you have to work on that. There's also some folks who are obnoxious.
Speaker 1:In the psychedelic integration circles there's a lot of like people bragging about ego, death or I saw God dick measuring contests. If you do this, you will have the experience of there is no separation between you and God. When you cease to exist, the lines of demarcation are gone. If you bring that back as your ego returns and you interpret it as I am God, they can excuse some pretty horrible behavior on your part, which explains some of the people that are involved in that scene and why it's having some problems. It gave me the experience of dying. I will always be grateful for that.
Speaker 1:The way it usually worked with those experiences in general is I would be scared to death right before I did it. I would be very optimistic leading up to it. I would make lots of things happen, go way out of my way to make it happen and then, when the time came, I'd be like, oh no, I don't want to become someone else, I don't want to start believing in God, I don't want to be exposed to the true beauty of the universe. I'm not ready for that, I'll never be ready for that. I'm going to die. I'm going to be one of the people who dies. I'm going to die with this hippie.
Speaker 1:You know it? Kind of figures, let's fucking do this. I took a big hit Orgasmic, explosive, propulsive, mindfuck, absolutely devastating, exhilarating ecstasy. You are flying through the universe, terrifying and exhilarating, and shows you how there's really no difference between that and they're matters of interpretation. Without interpretation, you got nothing. You are completely unmoored from reality, and when that happens, that can go in any number of directions. In my case, I saw a trap door in the fabric of the universe just swinging open.
Speaker 1:I said fuck it, I'm going in, let's fire it into the sun. That's a mixed metaphor. I like the sun better. I think people will get that more. I went sailing right into it, came to sort of. It felt like it was really happening. I had no sense that I'd taken a drug or that this was going to be over in 15 minutes which it is. It's the longest 15 minutes of your life.
Speaker 1:While I was in it. I didn't know any of that. I just knew that I was in Deep in the woods I could see an abandoned, rusted out Honda Civic nearby. I found my driver's license which said Emerson Penn, dameron III on it. But I knew that it wasn't my driver's license because I knew that I was dead. His problems were no longer mine, which made them kind of hilarious. I was being reabsorbed. I was a drop of rain hitting the surface of the ocean, reabsorbing into a universal consciousness from which I came. Life continued. I didn't experience life as myself. I was not recognizable as myself. The boundaries of that container dissolved. It was nice.
Speaker 1:I would do it again. I will at some point. I've been in love with death my whole life and terrified of it, too True of most of my relationships. I've always had a really strong drive to kill the pain. When everything I do in my attempts to kill the pain makes it worse, I want to end it. I want peace. I've always considered death to be this just profound release and a peaceful experience.
Speaker 1:What I learned from dying firmly believing that I was dying in the way that I'm not capable of firmly believing much of anything is that I could only love death or fear it, because I didn't understand it, or rather, I didn't understand that I didn't understand it. I thought it was possible to understand. I wanted to F the ineffable, which you know. That's what art, love, having kids and all kinds of stuff is. It's the impossible journey you have to take it. You're a coyote and Don Quixote and you're the shit, and that's what you're here to do. It's follow through on your mission to make a fool of yourself. It's the fool's journey to joyous excursion.
Speaker 1:The take on suicide that I've always defaulted to, and what has kept me from doing it successfully is, rather than killing yourself physically, eventually that'll happen. You're just being impatient, rushing it. If you want to do killing yourself physically, it totally makes sense to be afraid of it, because it is guaranteed to happen. You're probably not going to have a cat burglar, but you're definitely going to die, so you might as well be afraid of that. Rather than killing yourself physically, why not kill yourself as frequently and thoroughly as possible, Constantly be in a process of dying and reinventing yourself as someone else?
Speaker 1:I didn't manage to do that until the fourth time. I smoked toad venom, which was different. This time I died, not hard enough. When I came back, whatever her name was thoroughly congratulated me for really doing the work and getting in there and doing it to it. My heart had grown three sizes that day. Great, I was happy about that.
Speaker 1:I left it was the middle of the day on a Saturday. I immediately slammed into traffic on the 405. I kind of knew it was going to be raw for a while. I had not vanquished my ego at all. It was back in full force. You really need people around One at all. It was back in full force. You really need people around One of the issues. You need people to make sense of these things or not make sense of them.
Speaker 1:Bathe in the liminal poetry and paradox. Integration circles are good for that. I think it should be more mainstream. I think the fact that it's taboo is the most dangerous thing about it. Like sex or anything else, Rock and roll should be taboo again. I think it almost is. You wouldn't tell anyone.
Speaker 1:If you like new rock music, you have to listen to pop the poptimus one, and I have to thank Bufo Alvarez for helping me get there. If you're gonna do that now, which I can't unconditionally recommend, it worked out well for me. I got to experience death. Will you be that lucky? I don't know. Past performance is no indicator of future results and a terrifying experience. I don't wish death on you because I don't need to. It's going to happen anyway. Would I recommend it? Possibly? I don't think people are called to anything, but if you get the sense that this is really going to open things up and show you what you need to see and you can learn what you already know and forget you forgot how to do it, look into it.
Speaker 1:Get the synthetic stuff Because the actual toads people are going around harvesting them. It was trendy for a while. I think there's now a psychedelic backlash, which sucks, because that's the one thing that's really helped me. I go to bat for it, for the psychedelic baseball bat to the head. I really changed and I don't like pant stories where what I learned that day is that really we're all the same. We kind of are, but you know, try to be more subtle or not. It's hard to get attention. So maybe just let it all hang out and blast the fuck through the stratosphere. Absolutely fucking do it. Go for it. This is the time, this is your chance. This right here is all we get. Fucking, live it. The world is so strange. When you're exposed to all of it without the prophylactic of your self-concept, it's overwhelming. You're gonna be absolutely overwhelmed. I hope you're okay with that. You're not gonna be the Dom in this relationship. You'll count the spankings and you'll get a lot of them and they'll hurt. One of them at least will be one to grow on, and you'll get a lot of them and they'll hurt. One of them at least will be one to grow on, and you'll probably get multiple ones to grow on. Once you've had the experience of not existing, it's hard to take things as seriously anymore. The problems are still occurring, but they're happening to someone else, which again makes them kind of hilarious.
Speaker 1:I love drugs. I've become wary of psychedelic exceptionalism. I highly recommend reading the book Drug Use for Grownups by Dr Carl Hart, who takes issue with the romance, the shroud of positive valence that has formed around psychedelics, in particular over the last few years, as tools of personal growth and optimization for already wealthy people. It's going to change you a little bit when you fucking tear yourself a new asshole, Tear yourself a million new assholes, Get fucked by the universe in holes you didn't even know you had, Throw yourself into the fire and then into the ice and then into the earth and way up into the air and just keep flying and flying and flying. Are you flying or falling? What's the difference? How can you tell there's no up, no down, no right angles anywhere? What is going on? How can you tell there's no up, no down, no right angles anywhere? What is going on? How do you know it's gonna be okay? It's not gonna be okay. It's never been okay. You don't want okay. You need something bigger than that.
Speaker 1:And it's happening right now because your head is Exploding. You are getting mind fucked hard and your mind fucking right back. This is as the the harder it gets. The more you get, the more you're able fucking right back. This is as the harder it gets. The more you get, the more you're able to give. The louder you receive, the louder you transmit, and it's almost louder than you can stand. You didn't think that you could possibly stand it this loud. It is blasting you, it's blowing your hair back. You'll be slightly shifted from that experience. In all likelihood, you won't be exactly the same. So if you want to be, good luck, Because that's the most unlikely thing Of all the idiotic goals that you could possibly have. Maintaining a state of equilibrium consistently is absolutely hopeless. That's the dumbest thing. That's dumber than pursuing your passions. I don't know how you're going to get there, but good luck, and let me know how your passions.
Speaker 3:I don't know how you're going to get there.
Speaker 1:But good luck and let me know how it goes. I have spent my whole life trying to fight my depression, Tried a lot of things that either did more harm than good or basically, on balance, left me right where I was, Got into psychedelics in order to see if I could change that. I got more than I asked for Because I didn't want to be happy necessarily. Happiness is not necessarily a false goal. I think it's got. It makes a lot of false promises. I got to die. Any day above ground is a good day. I found that being below ground kind of also made things interesting. It's really in how you interpret it. So go die.
Speaker 3:Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde. No-transcript.
