Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes

Full-Spectrum Avant-Garde Personal Development: A Preview of Coming and Extant Attractions

Emerson Dameron Season 6

Emerson Dameron welcomes listeners to a special bonus mini-episode showcasing selections from the EDMM Extended Universe, featuring profound conversations, darkly humorous storytelling, and experimental audio art.

• Deep exploration of human connection and the courage required to be authentically vulnerable
• Examination of humor as a coping mechanism and its role in creating emotional distance
• "Helena the Brit and the Astoria Love Triangle" – a literary audio piece about desire and artistic obsession
• Raw, unflinching apology for the fictional "Metta Bomb" incident, exploring proper accountability
• Preview of upcoming releases, including Sophistication Nation
• A musical outro that could've been helped, but wasn't

Catch new episodes of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on the first Wednesday of each month at 7:00 PM Pacific on KCHUNG Los Angeles or anytime as The Only Good Podcast at medicated-minutes.com. Remember, levity saves lives.


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Emerson Dameron's Sophistication Nation - April 4th - All major music-delivery platforms

Support the show

Coming Soon! Sophistication Nation: Brief Interviews with Women I Pretend to Understand: https://emersondameron.hearnow.com/sophistication-nation

Speaker 1:

This is Emerson Dameron, la's number one avant-garde motivational speaker and the host of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, the acclaimed radio program on K-Chung Los Angeles and the only good podcast. Welcome to a special bonus break-in mini-sode sampler of selections from the EDMM Extended Universe. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you personally. Enjoy what you will. Incredible sense of style yeah, I gotta know more about it. Anybody with a killer sense of style and aesthetics? Yeah, you got my attention right away. You are what they call conventionally attractive, but no.

Speaker 1:

I don't care. That's everywhere. This, um, I haven't seen it. What would you? Is there a name for this? Is this a post mod? Yeah, put a name If it's like. Uh, like Louis Armstrong said about jazz, once you've got a name for it, it's dead and you're alive. You can tell that I would not look this stylish if left to my own devices. No, I look awesome because I take advice from the right people. That's what life is all about. I learn from what other people have already figured out and I leverage my relationships and extract the maximum value. That's what life is for. Yeah, I'm totally heartless.

Speaker 1:

Machiavellian, psychopathic Narcissism is weak sauce. You're in love with yourself, but it's a toxic relationship because you're empty inside. You depend on other people, not by choice. When your parasitism doesn't work anymore, you know, when you lose your social status or your looks or whatever it was, you totally fall apart and you're left alone, and that is devastating for you because no one wants to be alone with you if they really get to know you. Pascal said something like all of the problems in the world are because of people's inability to be alone with their own thoughts. Oh, meditation's great for that. Yeah, I think everyone knows that it's good and he doesn't do it. How do you? Uh, if you don't mind reveal the secrets of your practice, absolutely anything can be a practice. I get the feeling for you almost everything is a practice. How do you? Get to know yourself.

Speaker 1:

I wanna know, because I wanna know more about you. Yeah, if I was trying to hide that I'm not doing a good job, ah, what gets you excited about that? Yeah, what's the thing in you that drives you in that direction? You don't just get jerked around. You go where you wanna go and do what you wanna do, and you know what you like and what you don't like and why. Yeah, that absolutely means I can trust you.

Speaker 1:

Yes life is hard and full of brutal, crushing disappointment. That's a low vibe topic. It is boring. Everyone knows that. What warms your heart? I can feel it from here. I can see it pouring out your eyes and I look very deep in your eyes like this, like I've rediscovered my longost lover from three lifetimes ago. All right, snap out of it. That's all you get now, no more. Ooh, yeah, you know these things that sound like platitudes get real, real fast when you start actually working with them. Yeah, when you turn them into a practice. Oh, I think life is hilarious.

Speaker 1:

But, yes, I use humor as a coping mechanism. Sick humor is not the healthiest coping mechanism, but it's my go-to, it's my favorite, it's what I'm good at, it's what I love. Sometimes I get paid for it and, yes, I use it to keep people at arm's length. Right, because I don't want to get close to most people and I used to think I needed all the friends I could get. I was wrong about that. Most people are not anywhere close to that. You know that better than most people. Because you need to trust, right, you know that we are who we are in relation to others and that's what life is about.

Speaker 1:

And you haven't always been surrounded by the right people, but part of you loves people, in spite of all the reasons why you shouldn't, and so you open up. Not everyone is ready for that. Not everyone gets it. Maybe they won't in this lifetime. Maybe they'll come back as someone unrecognizable to themselves and to you, and then they'll get it, or they won't, and then they'll join a 12-step recovery group and they'll call you to make amends and just talk about themselves. You'll know that they're not really doing the work.

Speaker 1:

You've got radar for manipulation, manipuladar Highly acute. I'm not going to tell anyone your trade secrets, I got them too. Scratch a cynic, particularly a witty one, and you get a wounded romantic.

Speaker 1:

Not every time time, but reliably, if I were, a betting man, which I am, almost always put money on that and I would be wealthy as a result. Not that I'm not. I am rich in experience and love. You gotta love everybody. It's a huge pain in the ass, but then's the breaks. That's one of those things everyone knows is true, but once you start working with it you start to realize what you signed up for. Oh, you're very inspiring. Here I'm working on this thing. I want to show you my work in progress. That doesn't happen much. You're a dream collaborator. You're a cheerleader and a critic in equal measure.

Speaker 1:

You know that to praise something that is awful in order to protect someone's feelings is going to set them up to make a huge fool of themselves. That's not going to happen on your watch, but you celebrate the things that you love. Dare me to double down on my darkness and weirdness. Because of that, I've made leaps and bounds. Yeah, I want you to check this out. This is a special one. I think you'll dig it the most. I don't know anyone remotely like you. There are no cops.

Speaker 1:

I've tried but, yeah, I don't even want to tell you it's embarrassing. Oh, it's been a very slow burn. You like it like that, don't you? You like it like I do, sick bitch. We're very, very, very patient, and it almost feels better to dole that gratification.

Speaker 1:

But, not, because nothing feels as good as when our lips meet and our tongues start dancing and that slow burn just explodes. Ball of fire takes out three city blocks and people are grateful to us because we make their lives interesting. It's impossible to be bored when you're around. And yeah, there's a almost I don't want to say traditional, but yeah, there's this deeply. I don't want to say feminine, but that's close. Yeah, there's this extremely courageous vulnerability. Might get you a medal for your birthday, but not this next one, because you'll forget I brought it up and then it'll be a surprise. I don't care if you don't like surprises, I do. I like surprising you. You look cute when you're confused.

Speaker 5:

I awoke in Astoria with a hangover so profound it felt like an art installation Something bleak, pretentious and vaguely misogynistic displayed in an abandoned warehouse curated by a man in a turtleneck who had most certainly fingered me poorly once and then critiqued my reading habits the sort of thing that would be reviewed in Artforum as an unflinching interrogation of female suffering, while the Prosecco-drenched corpse of my dignity lay in the corner. My last clear memory involved a bottle of Prosecco always the fucking Prosecco and a Ukrainian bartender with war in his eyes, one of several he'd fought in recently, most of them just for fun, and an Adam's apple that jutted out like a monument. The next thing I knew I was in what I presumed to be his apartment. The walls were covered in oil paintings, all depicting the same woman screaming, her face twisted in ecstasy or agony. The distinction, like my own moral compass, had long since dissolved in lie. A gas heater hissed like a snake whose family you wronged in a past life. He sat across from me rolling a cigarette with the precision of a man who had been incarcerated or loved badly or both.

Speaker 5:

Fifty-something, with cheekbones sharp enough to open mail eyes like a wolf that had gleefully devoured a poet and kept his soul. He watched me, not like a man who wanted to fuck me, like a man who wanted to carve me into a series of small statues and enter them in the Venice Biennale. We never spoke of love, we barely spoke at all. His hands delivered his manifesto, bruising, insistent, a dialectic of force and surrender. He made me feel like raw material ready to be sculpted. When he slapped me just once across the face, it was so theatrical, so deliberate. I half expected a gallery opening to break out around us. There she is, he whispered afterward, like my face had finally collapsed into its ideal composition. It was exquisite, I felt, chosen, elevated. The pain was transcendence, something Catholic, something primal, humiliation that was for lesser women. I was the patron saint of aesthetic suffering, and every last morsel of it was sustained with my enthusiastic consent, if not pleading desperation.

Speaker 5:

He had a theory. Of course they always do. Pain purifies, desire debases and thus reveals. Art emerges from the collision of shame and pleasure. He believed men should push limits, women should survive them. Not because he hated us, oh no, quite the opposite. He revered us as one reveres nature Beautiful, destructive, amoral. The greatest thing a man could do, he implied in his cigarette silences was witness a woman survive him.

Speaker 5:

Then there was Ricky. Ricky with the chin-strap beard. Ricky with the self-produced mixtapes Astoria slaps, volume three. Ricky who fused throat, singing with rather slipshod trap beats, producing a sound that evoked both a garrotted hippo and a demonic dial-up modem. Trying to connect to the spirit of murmur, he wore track suits in the colours of chemical spills. He spoke exclusively in record scratch aphorisms. He spoke exclusively in record scratch aphorisms. He worshipped Gangster Pat with a fervour that suggested he had seen the Virgin Mary in a Memphis strip club or at least found some real ecstasy. His other touchstone was Arrington D Dioniso, an artist he'd discovered while high on airbrush propellant, whom he spoke of with the reverence others reserve for Chekhov or shoot from the hip era. Sophie Ellis Baxter, you deadass Helena, you vibe different, he told me on our third date.

Speaker 4:

You got that old money energy like down in Abbey, but you suck dick. Your accent makes me horror. On like a spiritual level. You look like you teach yoga to milfs. But low-key. You a freak. You ever been choked out while listening to Gangsta Pat? It'll change your life.

Speaker 5:

Reader, I stayed. I mean, who else was going to convince him? The plural of milf is mils.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Speaker 5:

And so my soul became a diptych Ricky by day recording trap throat fusion in his cousin's basement. The artist by night carving free verse into my collarbone with his teeth, as the screaming women on the walls besottedly bore witness. One dragged me through the sublime while quoting Xenophon, the other dragged me to the Athens Grill and Sports Bar at 3am. I oscillated between these poles of masculinity Ricky, who once rhymed Balenciaga with Guantanamo, and the artist who locked me in his bathroom for three hours because I had to learn patience, eventually offering me a so-called swirly which I accepted, just to feel something cold, in this case, at any rate. Then came the performance.

Speaker 5:

Ricky had a show A dive bar in Queens, sticky floors, a bouncer who looked like he had been cut from a Bond film for being too emotionally available. The artist agreed to come with the air of a man bearing witness to war crimes. He wore black. As always, he barely spoke. As always, he gave me several orgasms purely through eye contact. As always, ricky took the stage. His opening track was called Swallow Pride, throat Goat, slight Return, combining mumble rap and what I can only describe as eldritch chanting from a purgatory for disobedient Intellivision consoles. It sounded like an exorcism performed by a demon with a sound cloud and a deservedly failing line of graphic. T-shirt.

Speaker 2:

Serve the big dicks. It's what you do. Swallow pride, swallow my groove. Sluts love real men. Sluts are right. Open your legs, keep it tight. Dick is king. That's the deal. Take this load, that's real.

Speaker 5:

Crowd turned hostile. A man near the pool table shouted Turn that shit off. Ricky ignored him, transitioning into an interpolation of gin and juice. I glanced at the artist expecting disdain. Instead he was laughing, real full-body laughter. He looked human. I loved him then, not for his violence, not for his darkness, but because he could see the absurdity. He could see art where others saw madness. After the set, ricky bound over, drenched in sweat, eyes, wild.

Speaker 4:

Yo, that was historic right.

Speaker 5:

The artist leaned in his voice low grave, you are the future of sound. Fifteen minutes later, ricky knew all about the nurse with wound list, the continuing relevance of Mayo Thompson and Harry Parche, and how the artist plans to rebrand the entire concept of outsider art, starting with Ricky himself. As Ricky beamed, I felt something inside me crack dignity maybe, or the last fragile link to my baseline concept of normalcy. Or perhaps it was just the logical end point of desire, trapped between a sadist and a soundcloud shaman in a borough named for Catherine of Briganda, that I barely tolerated.

Speaker 5:

Later that night, the artist made love to me differently. Tenderly, he traced the bruises he had given me like a cartographer of my suffering. You don't have to stay, he murmured, but of course I did, because I deserved it all the bitch slaps and the knee slaps, the poetry and the mumble rap, the bruises for which I so enthusiastically cruised, and the mixtapes I was too embarrassed to chuck in the bin. Was it degrading, perhaps Deranged? Almost certainly. But was it glamorous? Absolutely. If I could bring glamour to Queens, I could do anything. Besides, I had learned things A power men and Tuvan throat wrap that would absolutely get me arrested in Europe someday, if I'm lucky. Thanks for watching.

Speaker 1:

I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart, with everything I have, for my inappropriate, irresponsible, arguably evil use of the Metabomb. I don't believe in good and evil, but I might have just invented evil myself. It was me. It was my fault. I did it. My underlings will try to step in and take the bullet for me. Don't let them do it. It was all me.

Speaker 1:

I'm entirely responsible for my deliberate use of the Metabomb for purposes of destruction, inflicting harm, pain, damage. I deeply regret my actions and the results. I knew exactly what I was doing. I had a million outs. I didn't take them. I went through with it knowing what was going to happen. I lied, I laughed out loud. I lied, I laughed while I was doing it. People died. I can't fix that. That's permanent damage. It negatively impacts them.

Speaker 1:

To this day I decided I was going to use the Metabomb. I was going to take out three blocks. I did it. I wanted it to be worse. I took out a block and a half. I did it intentionally. I did it with malice, I thought it through. I knew what was going to happen. I knew it was going to be awful and I did it because I was awful in that situation, acting from a place of pain, of resentment, of just pathetic.

Speaker 1:

I'd like to think I'm better than that In that moment. I was not. I do not offer any of this as an excuse. Perhaps the proper context will accelerate the healing and understanding. Perhaps the proper context will accelerate the healing and understanding. I, although I'm obviously not an expert in compassion, when I put myself in the shoes of the people I harmed, I understand the anger. I understand the damaged trust. I understand the fear, the regret. I don't know what it's like to be dead. I hope it's wonderful. I offer amends. Therapy is expensive. Emdr is especially expensive. I will pay for EMDR. You will get that for free, no questions asked, no strings attached. Emdr works really well for some people. For some people it's way too intense.

Speaker 1:

If anyone ends up warped by the experience, I will do this again because I am committed to change. I'm working on it. I'm going to be working on it for a while. I will take time off from public life. I will become a better person. I torched the relationship. I destroyed your trust. I'd be incredibly fortunate if you ever wanted to have anything to do with me. That is up to you. If we decide to reconcile.

Speaker 1:

I will expect to do all of the work. I will take it seriously. I will not make fun of you. I will give you room to tell me when I'm hurting your feelings. I will forfeit my license to own a Metabomb. I can't be trusted to handle it responsibly. I will feel like I'm walking around naked without it. I brought this upon myself. That's what really hurts. It hurts other people more, but if I can take that pain away and experience it myself, feel it fully, the white hot shame, and thus release it on behalf of everyone, that's what I'm gonna do. That will be my spiritual practice. I will become that. That will be who I am. Watch me. You're gonna know how sorry I am. You're gonna feel it in your bones. It's going to make you whole Trust. Believe that you don't have to trust me. You'll see. What matters now is what I'm going to do.

Speaker 1:

You've been listening to a special presentation of emerson dameron's medicated minutes sampler of coming attractions in the edmm extended universe, starting with we are who we are in relation to others, which is from emerson dameron's Sophistication Nation Brief interviews with women, I pretend to understand, hitting all major music platforms on April 4th. Following that, we heard Helena the Brit and the Astoria Love Triangle off of the audio recording of the same name, which is available on March 28th on all major platforms, and an apology for the ill-advised use of the Metabomb. That's from Emerson Dameron's Metabomb, which is available on all major platforms currently. This has been a special presentation of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. I hope it's been as special for you as it has been for me. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you personally. Levity saves lives. Emerson Dameron's Medicaid Admittance is LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. New episodes premiere seven o'clock pacific time, first Wednesday of the month on K-Chung Los Angeles, kchugradioorg 1630 am, if you happen to be in a very fortunate geographical area of Chinatown downtown, a little bit of Echo Park, maybe on the other side of some mysterious wormhole and are thereafter archived as episodes of the Only Good Podcast at medicated-minutescom. Thank you for everything.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can't get myself, sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself, sometimes I can't get myself.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes I can't get myself, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself, sometimes I can't get myself, sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't get myself. Sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't.

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