Platitudes With Attitude

We reframe sabotage as protection, make success feel safe with a simple ritual, and unspool the love triangle myth by integrating continuity and intensity. Grief becomes color, hatred gets a job, and art returns to sacred waste rather than a product to optimize.

• platitudes with attitude and tonal cold open
• fear of exposure beneath success and speed limits
• ritual mixing success with familiar plus two‑minute seal
• eyes, intimacy, and the power of restraint
• immersive theatre satire as catharsis and self‑reveal
• silence as leverage and default wisdom
• choosing futures over people and pillow ritual
• grief as loss of color and one‑time portal rite
• boundaries, two‑chair anger transmutation, reciprocity
• dating filters, accountability and loneliness screens
• art as appropriation, sacred waste, and anti‑commodity
• closing station ID and monthly cadence

Make this a gift to yourself. Go right now to wherever you get podcasts. Subscribe to this one. It’ll put all of your other podcasts deep in the shade.

Chapters

• 0:00 Platitudes With Attitude Cold Open
• 1:03 You Are Not "Afraid of Success"
• 8:24 Helena the Brit's Immersive Theater Experience
• 13:11 The Power Of Silence And Restraint
• 16:00 Desire Without Permission
• 22:01 Villainous Flirtations
• 25:40 Grief As Loss Of Color
• 30:30 The Dirtiest Nights Never Come with Itineraries
• 37:15 What to Do When You Can't Get Over It
• 41:10 Boundaries, Reciprocity, And Dating Filters
• 44:00 Nothing Belongs to You: Art as Useless, Sacred Expenditure
• 55:35 Beach Fantasy
• 56:34 Back Matter

Transcript

Platitudes With Attitude Cold Open

Emerson Dameron 0:00

Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes presents platitudes with attitude. Bitch. Money can't buy happiness, but it can sure make other people miserable. There are plenty of fish in the sea if that's what you're into. It's always darkest before the dawn, because you're asleep. You can't see a goddamn thing. If you're up, you're lit up. And that's not dark at all. Unless you're talking about turning off the lights on some people. Follow your dreams away from here. So I don't have to hear you talk about your stupid dreams. Don't judge a book by its cover, lest you be judged in the pages. You got roasted in that book. Torch smoked. It was the beach read of the year. There's no I in team. There's no B in T, because we killed them all. There's no D and T, but there could be. There's no E or M D M A in Team. So I'm outta here. This has been platitudes with attitude, bitch. You are not afraid of success in the cliched way. You are afraid of what success exposes. Because when things start going well, the quieter part of you appears. Now there's proof. Now I can't hide. Now people will want more. Now I'll have to keep being this version of me. Keep ramping it up. Because I'm only as good as my last hit. They want more. They want more always. And some older survival program, loyal, blunt, ancient, steps in and says, Hell no. Too much light. Too bright, too visible, too binding, too blinding. So it helps by pulling a tripwire, spilling the ink, picking a fight, numbing, perfecting, procrastination, revenge procrastination, anything that returns you to the familiar weather of frustration. Self-sabotage is not stupidity, it's protection using outdated maps, obsolete instruments. Now let's loosen that curse with a few precise turns of phrase. What you call sabotage might actually be your nervous system enforcing a speed limit. Not I ruin it, but I don't yet feel safe going this fast. That changes the opponent from me to an unmet need in the safety category. If success triggers sabotage, then the trigger is not success. It's the meaning you attach to it. Invisibility, responsibility, envy, abandonment, pressure, identity change, being out on display. So the work is not to stop sabotaging, the work is to change what success predicts. Notice the hidden loyalty. Part of you may be keeping faith with an old rule like don't outshine the master. Never stop grinding. Need is a weakness. Keep your options open. If it's real, it can be taken away from me. That part isn't your enemy, it's your bodyguard. It just needs a new job description. Here's a lever to use on yourself. I'm curious, what benefit does sabotaging give me right before the finish line? That question alone often cracks the whole thing open. Here is your ceremony to make success safe. Do this once, tonight or tomorrow. Get two cups of water, put them on a table, label one familiar, label the other, success. In the success cup, drop a pinch of salt or a small coin and say out loud, This is the part of success that feels dangerous. Blank. Fill in one real word, visibility, expectations, responsibility, being judged, being left, losing control, pressure. In the familiar cup, say, This is what I get to keep by staying here. Again, one real word, certainty, invisibility, rest, belonging, not being disappointed, invisibility. Now, do the key move. Pour half of success into familiar. Mix them up and say, My success will contain familiarity. Choose something specific. One day off a week, slower pace. Private wins, celebrated. Privately with a circle of intimates, smaller promises, help from others. Messy drafts allowed. Wild experimentation encouraged. Finally, drink only the mixed cup and say, I can have it without losing myself. Unless I want to. Then, tiny behavioral seal. This is the most important part. Pick one goal you're currently sabotaging, or think you are, and take a two-minute, too small to fear action on it right away after the ritual. Not 20 minutes. Two hours. Two minutes. You're teaching your system. Success is not an emergency. The things I'm afraid of are not happening right now. They may never happen. Right now, it's adequately chill. You're listening to K Chung, Los Angeles, 1630 a.m. KCUMRadio.org. This is Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program, each first Wednesday of the month, 7 o'clock Pacific. And after that, it lives on as the only good podcast. And if you love podcasts, I'm sure you know how to get it. And if you hate them or you've never heard them, this is a great one to start with, because it's the only good one. I'm Emerson Tameron. I love you personally. Liberty Saves Lives. But you have the most intriguing pair of eyes. Yeah, maybe you don't know that. You don't get to look yourself in the eye directly. You can look in a mirror, but that is not gonna do your eyes justice. I found when I meet somebody with eyes like yours, the intensity, those people tend to be somewhat different from others. Their eyes seem to indicate, in a way that cannot be faked, there is a riveting story to tell about that person and her personality. This was not an off-the-rack personality. This is crafted. When you look deep in someone's eyes, you could feel like you're just looking straight into her soul and reading her deepest inner thoughts. Skipping language and feeling completely shockingly at ease with this. Sometimes intimacy takes years, sometimes it just comes at you. With me, it's really interesting how people can communicate with their eyes alone without saying anything. How you can get the attention of a bartender from across the room. You can tell a lot about someone from our eyes. In some cases, someone can be an open book to you, or he could well be hiding something from you. The eyes are just so mysterious, it makes you want to really find out what's really going on with this person. What he's really thinking about you. It's interesting, don't you think?

Helena Mayfair 8:24

Oh darling, I can't begin to explain what I've just survived. Imagine if Sleep No More had been curated by Baz Lewman after three espresso and a minor head injury, and produced by Frog, the ghost of Dorothy Stratton and Toad. That's what we're reckoning with. An immersive theatre experience, they said. I was promised catharsis. What I got was a traumatic promenade through someone's untreated attachment issues and several damp and mysteriously shiny polyester curtains. It began, as all such things do, in a warehouse in Hackney so aggressively unrenovated it gave me ocular tetanus. The ushers wore gauze and practiced disdain. I was handed a marionette's head and told to find the bride. Naturally, I assumed it was a metaphor or a new sort of psychedelic mushroom, but no, there was a bride, possibly two. One of them wept silently in a bathtub with Epsom salts but no water. The other screamed, I am the miscarriage of Artemis, while hurling rose petals at me. Honestly, it felt a bit on the nose. Like, how is anyone going to appreciate subtlety if we end up in a world in which no one's experienced it and overstimulation becomes simply stimulation, yeah? Oh yes, I am good with metaphors. How kind of you to notice. You have such gentle wrists. Are you a Libra? At any rate, at one point I was locked in a pantry with a man in a plague Doctor Musk who recited Pound while pouring custard into his vintage cowboy boots, which he swore he wasn't wearing ironically. I wasn't entirely sure if he was part of the show or just a confused local, but I applauded his bold, refreshing lack of self-awareness. It felt apt. And then, of course, there was the fox. No, not a metaphorical fox, a real fox. Or at least a man in a foxhead who led me by the wrist through a tunnel of Mylar streamers into a room that smelled like Goi Lin and the gradual onset of future regret. He whispered, your father never loved you, which felt both cruel and unoriginal. Then he fed me a grape and called me Ophelia. And I went with it, darling. I opeliaed so hard I practically drowned in the sink. I whispered back, we are all sea glass waiting to be shattered, which made him cry. Poor thing. Honestly, I think I'm due equity in the production. But you know, theatre people are so defensive when they know they're being outshone. You're sweet, but let's not pretend it's unusual for strange men in masks to weep in my presence. I bring out the performative masochist in everyone. I'd just make it look so effortless, I suppose. Then again, most people don't know a quality flogger when they see one, and I've tested crops on myself since that frightful summer at Equestrian Camp. The whole thing climaxed, don't we all if we're lucky and believe in ourselves, in a chapel constructed entirely from day old everything bagels and Intellivision Frogger cartridges. The fox removed his mask. It was my ex, Charles, the one who fucked me on a grand piano and then wouldn't give me a songwriting credit. I should have known by the scent of unprocessed jealousy and sandalwood number five. I screamed. Everyone clapped. Apparently it was part of the narrative, obviously. My reputation precedes me, alas. And they did ask for an awful lot of information on the registration form. But do you know the strangest part? I loved it. Every sordid, disorienting, quasi-sadistic yet plausibly deniable moment. Because for one shimmering hour, I wasn't Helena the Brit. I was just a girl being pelted with petals by a woman in a blood-stained veil, while a man in stilts shouted, Love is a prison, and you are the warden. A girl who just wanted to be seen, held, loved. So yes, it was transformative, cathartic, quite possibly illegal, wildly unethical, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Oh, you were trying to flirt, weren't you? How darling. Tell me, how do you feel about costumes?

Desire Without Permission

Emerson Dameron 13:11

Shut up. That's enough. Take it down. We need to cool out. People are too fired up at enough excitement over stimulation. So we're keeping it cool in here, like some jazz cats. Shut up is the best advice I could give you, or that I could give myself most of the time. It's almost always good advice. And it's something almost everyone needs to err in the direction of doing. Shut up until further notice. The ability to shut up will make you a powerful force. You will win standoffs. You'll be a screen that people can project their fantasies onto. You'll see people love you and hate you and experience the four seasons of feelings. You haven't said a goddamn word. If you're smart, shut up. Be smart enough to not tell people how smart you are. If everybody knows you're smart, that compromises your capacity for evil, and we need you on that team. There is not enough evil in the world. There's a lot. With the martyrs just popping out of that Mario pipe. Everybody's aggrieved. Everyone's under siege from all sides. We need qualified bullies and sadists, evil people who know what they're doing, who can handle responsibility. Keep your mouth shut. We'll talk about it in the meeting. If you're stupid, shut up. That puts you in the smart category, and the rules of that category apply. There are a few reasons. What's the opposite of shut up? Open down. You can open down when you're public speaking, like what I'm doing. Dead air has long been the scourge of broadcasting, and if I stop talking, that would make a lot of people uncomfortable for no reason. Plus, how are you gonna know to shut up if I can't tell you to shut up? It's also good to convey information to people that they need to know but don't want to know. Be the bearer of bad news. It's fun to see people at their worst. Barring any good reason to speak, shut up. Shut up is your default setting. If you're innocent, if you're guilty, if you got a plot, if you're totally confused, shut up. If you're inclined to describe an email that you send as a friendly reminder, or if you've ever prefaced something with the expression, I'll say this in the nicest way possible, I can think of one nicer way to say that, and that's not to put that caveat in there. And if you have to say it's a friendly reminder, it's not. Shut up. Shut up does not mean hide. As long as we have private lives, which may not be as long as we would hope, we can share our inner worlds with trusted, like-minded intimates. Those should be people that you have blackmail material on. Something to shut them up with, because when in doubt, shut up. When in faith, shut up. All of you, shut up. Because I do, in the way a lock knows the shape of its key. You are not actually torn between two people. That's the surface story. What you're torn between are two futures that both claim to be you. One future says, I will be safe, intelligible, and steady. I will be chosen by time. The other says, I will be alive, incandescent, and dangerous. I will choose myself. And here's the uncomfortable truth you haven't let yourself say out loud yet. You don't fear losing either person. You fear becoming the person who chose wrong and then had to suck it up and live with it quietly. You're nearing the age where choices stop feeling reversible. Your body knows this, even if your mind pretends it doesn't. So this triangle has become the stage on which your deepest question is acting itself out. Is my life meant to be built or meant to be burned and remade? Now let me gently but firmly tilt the frame. You've been telling yourself a belief that sounds like wisdom, but is actually a spell. Stability and chaos are mutually exclusive. I must choose between safety and liveness. One person represents maturity, the other represents madness. Notice what happens if we turn that belief slightly like a prism catching a different light? What if the calm, steady choice is not the safe choice, but your mastery of continuity, your capacity to sustain, deepen, and endure? And what if the unstable, brilliant choice is not the dangerous choice, but your relationship with intensity, your appetite for transformation, risk, peak experiences, and erotic truth. Seen this way, neither person is the problem. The problem is that you have outsourced two parts of your psyche to two different bodies. No wonder you feel torn. You're asking one person to hold the future and the other to hold your soul. Here's the reframe that usually lands hardest and is most liberating. If you truly needed chaos, you would have already chosen it. If you truly needed safety, you wouldn't still be dreaming. So this is not about which person is right. It's about which intermarriage you have not yet consummated. You are not meant to amputate one side of yourself to prove that you're an adult, nor are you meant to burn down your life to prove that you're still alive. You're being asked a subtler question. Can you become a person who can contain both intensity and continuity without needing two extra people to do it for you? Now let's move this out of thought and into the body where the real decision will happen. This is your assignment. Do it precisely without improving it. One, on two separate pieces of paper, write on the first, the life that holds me, on the second, the life that ignites me. On each paper, write everything each person gives you. Not their traits, but how you feel in their presence. Be ruthless and poetic. Three, fold both of the papers, place them under your pillow for three consecutive nights. Four. Each morning, immediately upon waking, write one sentence that begins with, Today my body wants. Do not edit, do not explain. Five, on the third night, take both papers outside or to a window. Tear one of them to pieces. Only one. Do not choose logically. Let your hands decide before your mind catches up. Flush, burn, or release those pieces into moving water. Keep the remaining paper. Not as a record, but as a mirror. Whatever remains is not the person you must choose. It's the quality of life you're finally ready to stop betraying. After that, the outer decision will begin to rearrange itself quietly, inexorably, without drama. You are not late. You are not foolish. You are standing at the exact age where a person stops asking, who should I choose? and starts asking, who am I willing to become, even if it costs me love? When you're ready, tell me what sentence your body wrote on the third morning. Sometimes you'll need to take a pause and start to dig deep into your own soul to find the answer to this question. What do I really, really desire? When you are completely true and honest with yourself, you'll realize that there are no limits, no boundaries to what you truly desire. Because inside yourself, all the rules and restrictions that others impose upon you do not exist at all. Inside that special place where you keep all your true desires hidden from the outside world is where only you alone can set the rules. It's where you can truly see what you really want out of love and out of life. There, in the special place, you're able to see all your hidden desires in their full naked glory. When you get what you truly desire, the experience is tremendous or even orcasmic. It's really powerful. You'll feel excited that you can fulfill those hidden desires, and you'll want to share the excitement with someone who truly understands you. Once you truly embrace your hidden desires, you will never fear the judgment of others. Because you know you should only be true to yourself and the people that you love and desire.

SPEAKER_04 22:01

Private rooftop lounge. Fire pit flickering. A chilled bottle of vintage champagne on ice. Isabella enters in a soft gold slip dress, gliding like she owns the skyline. Jeremiah doesn't rise. He watches her approach like a jaguar watching a feather fall.

Isabella Rose 22:19

First dates with Isabella Rose aren't conversations. They're foreplay, darling. So, are you always this irresistible, or is it just tonight?

Emerson Dameron 22:29

I don't seduce. I strip, I unmask.

Isabella Rose 22:33

Oh, I love masks. I collect them. And sometimes that's the only thing I wear.

Emerson Dameron 22:39

You're already naked. You just haven't noticed, and no one has told you.

Isabella Rose 22:44

Tell me, would you rather undress me with your eyes or your words?

Emerson Dameron 22:48

Neither. I undress women with silence. Freezes off the ego.

Isabella Rose 22:53

Is this the part where I melt or beg?

Emerson Dameron 22:56

Not yet. First you laugh, then you confuse me with your father, then you get on your knees.

Isabella Rose 23:02

Ooh, Freudian and foreboding. I love a man with ambition.

Emerson Dameron 23:07

I love a woman who thinks she's clever while she's walking into a trap she designed for herself.

SPEAKER_04 23:12

The waiter refills their glasses. Jeremiah ignores his own. Isabella sips slow, watching him with curiosity-tinted lust.

Isabella Rose 23:21

Do you want to get to know me or figure me out?

Emerson Dameron 23:24

Neither. I want to rearrange you.

Isabella Rose 23:26

My god. You talk like a villain who read too much Nietzsche.

Emerson Dameron 23:30

I bookmarked the part about breaking things beautifully.

Isabella Rose 23:34

Well, I am very breakable in all the right ways.

Emerson Dameron 23:37

You flirt like you're splashing around in champagne. You're so pretty, no one notices you're drowning.

Isabella Rose 23:44

What if I told you I wanted to please you, but refuse to be tamed?

Emerson Dameron 23:48

Dad'd make you tame yourself and think it was your idea. Just earn the pleasure of being undone. Actually shivers, then quickly recovers.

Isabella Rose 23:58

You're impossible.

SPEAKER_04 23:59

That's why you're still here. A woman at a nearby table locks eyes with Jeremiah.

Isabella Rose 24:05

Is she watching you or waiting for you?

Emerson Dameron 24:08

Neither. She's wondering why you're still smiling.

Isabella Rose 24:11

Because I don't know if I want to kiss you or ruin you.

Emerson Dameron 24:14

Hmm, you're sentimental.

Isabella Rose 24:16

I imagine you in a villa. Tuscany. White shirt unbuttoned. Me on my knees with a mouthful of olive oil, and you.

Emerson Dameron 24:26

I imagine you crying in a hotel elevator, freight elevator, lipstick smeared, life ruined, no idea what I did.

Isabella Rose 24:35

Why does that turn me on?

Emerson Dameron 24:37

Because I didn't flinch when you started painting pictures of yourself on your knees. For me, this is a day at the office.

Isabella Rose 24:44

So, if I offered you my full attention, no games, no walls, what would you do with it?

Emerson Dameron 24:52

Reject it. You're far more interesting when you're lying.

Isabella Rose 24:57

You're really something.

Emerson Dameron 24:58

I'm clinically precise.

Isabella Rose 25:01

If I leaned in right now, what would you do?

Emerson Dameron 25:05

Not a damn thing. Until tomorrow, when you're still thinking about tonight and wondering why you'd say yes to anything I ask.

SPEAKER_04 25:13

He stands, drops a black card on the table. No name, no instructions, just a key code. Use it if your dreams start tasting like me.

Isabella Rose 25:25

Wow. What was that?

SPEAKER_04 25:28

She looks dazed, happy, aroused, totally undone, and unsure why.

The Dirtiest Nights Never Come with Itineraries

What to Do When You Can't Get Over It

Boundaries, Reciprocity, And Dating Filters

Nothing Belongs to You: Art as Useless, Sacred Expenditure

Emerson Dameron 25:49

You're not grieving a woman. You are grieving color itself. She became the living proof that your nervous system is still capable of enchantment. She didn't just love you, she relit the circuitry that says, life can still surprise me. And now the terror isn't that she's gone. It's that you've discovered you can survive without her, which feels like emotional euthanasia. You adapted, and to you, adaptation feels like betrayal. Here's the uncanny part. You don't actually believe she is the only love of your life. You believe she is the last portal. That belief is what's suffocating you. Let me gently but firmly turn this belief inside out. You're telling yourself a story that goes something like this If this level of magic was real once and it's gone now, then the universe has closed the door. But notice what your own story contradicts. You didn't lose the capacity for depth. You demonstrated it repeatedly across decades. She didn't bring magic into your life, she responded to something already active in you. The chaos she's choosing to escape isn't your essence. It's the unfinished business of a man who hasn't been initiated into his next form yet. You're interpreting her choice as a referendum on you, but from another angle, her choice has nothing to do with your worth and everything to do with her threshold for uncertainty. Here's the reframe that matters most. What you're calling settling is not resignation. It's hibernation without a vision. And that is deadly. Not dramatically, but quietly, gradually. Now I want to give you something concrete, something that does not depend on optimism, dating, money, or belief. Do this exactly once. Don't repeat it. Rituals lose power and they become habits. You are what you do every day, and that's what we're trying to break you out of here. What you'll need, one object that reminds you of her only indirectly. Not a photo, not a message, something symbolic, like a book you read then, a shirt you wore, a song written down on paper. You'd also need one sheet of paper and a black felt tip marker, or pen, if you must. On the paper, write this sentence in large letters. This was not the last time I felt alive. Underneath it, write, without censoring yourself, the three qualities she awakened in you that you are most afraid you'll never feel again. This could be wonder, erotic curiosity, gentleness, mischief, depth, play, now. Place the symbolic object on top of the paper. Stand up. Say this out loud. Yes, out loud, even if it feels ridiculous. You are a messenger, not a destination. I release you from carrying my future. Then take the object and put it somewhere inconvenient but not hidden. Like a high shelf, the back of a closet, the trunk of your car. It's not gone. It's just relieved of duty. Now, tear the paper in half, not angrily, but deliberately, and throw it away. That's it. What this does is subtle but powerful. It breaks the unconscious equation that says color equals her. Once that equation dissolves, something else can move. Finally, one truth I won't soften. You are not too old. You are too uninitiated. There's a version of you that has not yet lived, one that does not orbit unavailable women, or tolerate dreary people, or talk about Trump out of psychic exhaustion. That version requires fewer illusions and a lot more audacity. You are not done. You are between myths. And that is an unstable, dangerous, fertile place to be. So when you're attracted to a guy, how would you behave around him? The dirtiest nights never come with itineraries. Just a shiver, a fireflies wink of an impulse, a pocket dial that picks up breathing heavy, a shirt you wore because it still smells like last night's little devil girl. And now she's staring, like you've already been her over in the dream she's too ashamed to finish. Me? I'm just killing time until something worth ruining walks in. They said ten minutes. I said, nine's plenty if you're already shifting in your seat, crossing and uncrossing your legs, taking off your left earring and hula hooping it around your index finger. I know something you don't know, Giggles. I could clue you in if I felt like it. If you leave with a single new thought, that's your own filthy little secret. File it under seeds I let strange men plant deep inside me. Let me tell you about her. Earrings like tiny silver daggers. The kind you want pressed against your throat just to see if you'll flinch. Name's irrelevant. Memory's cheaper when it's only the scars, tattoos, and addictions that last. When she entered, the silence got so thick you could. She already knew every violent desire you'd never admit out loud and had already decided you weren't man enough to own it. But she stayed anyway, forgiving you in advance, with eyes that said, Go ahead, disappoint me. I've done worse. I practically wrote the Wikipedia page for scuff at each little mill. She purred. Style is what's dripping down your thigh when the meaning's pulled up its weakened corduroys and snuck back into its boring little life. Skepticism, alas, is not my default setting. Someday, but not tonight. I believed her. My dick was paying closer attention than my better judgment ever did. Speaking for myself, we, all of us, lie all the time. But only the beautiful lies leave you hard and haunted. Truth is just gossip that's sobered up on some farm in New Mexico, took a look in the mirror and hated what it saw. You don't want content. You want rhythm, baby. You want uncommon time signatures, you want a man who smells like overpriced cruelty and wears an ellipsis the way other men wear boxer briefs. You want the contradiction, the paradox that wakes you up at 3 33 a.m. touching yourself, the scruffy anti-hero who ruined you so slow you'll thank him for it. Then cry real tears when he takes you to the woodshed and then kisses you on the top of your head goodnight, because he knows you'll never be the same. Not by degrees, but in kind. You want just for one poisoned heartbeat, to believe you were the one hot that sh it almost made it stay. That's why style always truth into submission. Style doesn't need documentation. It knows what goes and what recurs. It just needs you close enough to sense how worked up you already are. There's a girl once who only spoke in metaphors. I took her in simile, proposed an allegory, her destiny symbolically. She said yes, poetically. It literally ended, and then it ended literally. Pity that. She quenched so beautifully around hypotheticals. Another one said I reminded her of her father. I said, he must have been fing lethal. She said, no, he left. I said, good. Before I unzip, I like to set manageable expectations. I've been called emotionally unavailable. Avoid it. Correct. But only to those who think they can diagnose you from across the room and use that diagnosis as an insult on the same night. The dull ones who look for the exit instead of the handcuffs, blindfold, fake blood. You laugh, but I know you're not innocent. You're playing the same twisted little game. Selective blackout. Erotic absolution, the sublime, exquisite thrill of pretending you don't remember exactly how you sounded when you begged. To yourself, to me, you don't want to know, but you do. You're the type who tries to forget the whole thing. That is, unless you're the one who made it hurt so good, they'll never forget your name. I once saw a man own an entire room just by lighting a Macanudo. He didn't smoke it, just let it burn between his fingers like he was teasing an ilk with the ember. I tried it, set my cuff on fire. Rookie mistake. She was watching. Dagger earring girl. You always choose the pain you could tell yourself a story about and then bash off to later. Damn right. Silence doesn't bite your neck and call you a good boy when you come. I talk. The only way to get me to shut up is to say I love you, but when I actually fall, I go dead quiet. So quiet they think I've already snuck off to Buenos Aires. That's perfect. They were never meant to stay. Just to leave teeth marks on my throat and fingerprints on hotel mirrors, I'll probably never fog up again. You don't want to be understood, baby, trust me. You want to be felt. Felt so deeply, some poor bastard loses sleep trying to decipher the way you clinched around an invisible blood when I said your name like a threat. I'm not your doctor, not your minister, although I could be. I'm the dirty little mind off you write on the inside of your thigh with your own deep red lipstick. Then pretend you don't see every time you spread for someone's safer. They gave me 10 minutes. I took a few. Because I don't take unsolicited instruction about what I can do with my tongue, my voice, or the way I look at you right now. As if I already know how you'll taste when you finally stop pretending you're not a weird for me. If you remember one appropriate word I said tonight, I apologize, I have failed you spectacularly. But if you walk out of here throbbing, howling, aching, replaying my voice on a loop while your fingers try and fail to get you back to that moment, you know the one. Then we're finally playing the game right, and you are one beautiful loser. It's fantastic to be out on your own or with your friends, but why would he want to be anywhere else in the world to be with you and enjoy your company right here and right now? He trusts you, and I totally get that, really. But he won't know if you're gonna meet some guys who will, you know, try to hit on you and pick you up. Wouldn't he be just a little, you know, worried? Or maybe he's also out with his buddies, or guys night out. But again, you don't really know what he's doing. Is he having a drink with his buddies or is he out picking up women? I'm quite impressed with how open he is, but I don't really know if I could let you go out on your own just like that. It's not that I don't trust you, but there are certain things that are so important that I just need to be 100% sure. I suppose I just don't get it. If I had a girlfriend like you, then I'd want to be with you as much as possible. I'm sure he's a great guy and really cares about your feelings, listens to you, and makes an effort to really understand you. Of course, you're the kind of woman who will demand that from a guy and you wouldn't settle for less, yes? You don't just hate him. You hate what his choices tried to make true about you. That you were replaceable, that your sacrifices were naive, that your devotion was a weakness, that your body and history made you less desirable, and that your daughter somehow cost you your aliveness. And you are furious because you can feel the unfair math. You carried weight, he dropped it, then strutted into a clean new narrative with a younger wife, like a new skateboard that says, See, I'm fine, I'm cooler than ever. Meanwhile, you're standing in the wreckage being the responsible one. Again, trying not to let bitterness drip onto your kid's childhood. Your past matters here, not as a trauma plot, not as spice, but as identity. The communities you've been part of weren't just fun. They were places where you felt initiated, chosen, embodied, powerful. So the grief isn't only the marriage. It's the loss of the self you once inhabited with confidence. Now, you don't stop hating someone else by arguing with yourself. You stop hating them by giving your hatred a job to do that isn't poisoning you. High-functioning hatred is a guardian. It's trying to protect dignity, protect boundaries, protect the part of you that doesn't want to be fooled again. Here are a few reframes that might loosen the grip. Hatred is not proof that you're broken. It's proof you still believe you deserve better. That's a healthy signal. The task is converting the signal into action that serves you. Forgiveness is not reconciliation. Forgiveness is cutting the cord between his behavior and your nervous system. And it's up for you to define. You can forgive and still keep him in the unsafe slash unreliable category forever. His quickie remarriage does not mean he won. Often it means I can't tolerate the mirror of being alone for one second. Your work is to stop treating his next chapter as commentary on your value. Your daughter doesn't need you to be saintly. She needs you to be clean. Clean means I won't make you carry my resentment. There's a practical method you can try. The two-chair transmutation. One, set two chairs facing each other. Two, sit in chair A as you who hates him. Speak rant for three minutes uncensored, out loud. Three, move to chair B as you who refuses to be tethered. Respond for three minutes. Four, end with one sentence you can live by. I release the hope that he will finally understand. Do this three times in one week. Hatred often softens when it has been fully heard and then redirected. A useful target. Not I feel nothing, but I feel contempt without obsession. Indifference is a long game. To your second question. No, you don't have to constantly be the adult in the room or in town or on the planet. But you've been forced into a role. The nervous system that stabilizes everyone else's chaos. That can look like competence, but it's also a kind of esteemed captivity. Why it happens? You learn through trauma and repetition that being capable is safer than being cared for. In many families or social systems, the reliable one becomes the default container. People unconsciously offload to you because you don't drop the ball. If you came from environments where needs weren't met, you may have a deep program that says, if I don't handle it, it won't get handled. Breframes you can try. Being the only capable adult is not a virtue. It's a systemic problem. Systems that keep using the strongest beam until it cracks are not good systems. Your competence is not your identity. It's a skill set. You're allowed to put it down. You don't need less responsibility, you need more reciprocity. A boundary practice that actually works. The minimum effective adult rule. For the next 14 days, pick one domain: household work, co-parenting, logistics, extended family, and do only what is necessary for safety, money, and your daughter's well-being. Nothing extra to prevent other adults from feeling consequences. Expect discomfort. That discomfort is withdrawal from overfunctioning. If you stop rescuing, some people will call you selfish. That's often the sound a system makes when it's losing free labor. To your next question. It's worth it only if dating becomes a choice and not a referendum on your worth. And only if you date as the woman you are now, not the woman trying to catch up to lost time. Three solid options. Number one, don't date yet. Stabilize, heal, rebuild pleasure, deepen friendships, reclaim identity. This is not failure, it's strategy. Two, date lightly. Low stakes, low pace, high standards. Think curiosity, not audition. Three, date intentionally. Queer filter. Emotionally available, respects parenting realities, doesn't fetishize your history, celebrates your autonomy. Reframes. The question isn't, is dating worth it? The question is, what kind of connection is worth my energy? Your past is literacy. You know consent negotiation, shadow, ritual. That's not damage, that's depth. You don't need many options. You need good screening. Simple screen that saves months. On day one or two, ask, what does accountability look like for you after conflict? What's your relationship with your own loneliness? How do you feel about a partner who has a full life and a kid? If the answers are vague, defensive, or performative, bounce. The ceremonial act, psycho magic, safe, concrete, and effective. The severing and the summoning. This will take about 30 minutes. One evening, you'll need a candle, a bowl of water, small stone, paper, and pen. Write two letters. Letter number one to him. Everything you will never say. End with, you no longer get to live in my body. Letter two to yourself. What you're returning to. Include, I reclaim my desire without apology. Two, sever. Tear up letter one into tiny pieces and drop them into the bowl of water. Stir clockwise nine times. Say, I release the hope of justice through him. 3. Anchor. Hold the stone and name three traits you know you have. Not roles, traits. Examples. Enduring, playful, discerning, resilient. Summon, light the candle and read letter 2 out loud. Then place the stone somewhere you'll see it daily for two weeks. This ritual isn't magic because it changes him. It's magic because it changes where your mind returns to. Octone, baby. Listen up, because I'm gonna say this once, and then I'm gonna say it 18, 19 more times in slightly different variations, until it drives you to the connections you so richly deserve. No one owns art. Period. The end. Full stop. You have never created anything ex nihilo because you're not God. If you are, you're deep undercover. What I'm thinking is you are a delusional primate with opposable thumbs, a credit card, and a vague recollection of reading Aristotle in tenth grade. If you make stuff, Mazeltav on that, everything you've ever made was stolen. You are a thief, maybe an elegant thief, a sexy thief, a hard scrapple thief with a past. All creation is appropriation. Your personal brand is just the clown distracting the public while you're loading your art into the getaway van. The myth of the lone genius is like the great man theory of history is marketing. It's capitalism at its most pornographic. Beethoven and Mozart were brands, franchises, who were fortunate enough to understand themselves as conduits for something else, something they didn't need to understand in order to channel it. The myth of the lone genius author exists. To make art a commodity, something you can own, sell, trade, control. Genius is always a group project, with one person taking the credit, cashing the check, and then complaining about not being acknowledged enough. Treating art as a container for you, for your essence, for something in your DNA, is a selfish thing to believe, and it impoverishes everyone. It poisons the well of the commons. The fact that your fingerpoints are on the canvas just distracts us from the peace. The death of the author is not a homicide, it's a mercy killing. If your art just screams, this is me, it's either expensive therapy or it maps well onto someone else's narcissism, which makes it damn fine entertainment. The job of the artist is to provoke. Entertainers entertain, artists provoke. They're not mutually exclusive. If you can do both of them, you're cooking with gas. That does not make them the same thing. Art exists to resist commodification. It responds to capitalism, the way that your body resists poison. True art is a hand grenade. It scares the money changers out of the temple because there was nothing better to do on Friday night. Art gets kicked out of everywhere you want to be. It cannot be stored, it cannot be optimized, it cannot be understood through the prism of metrics. The value of art lies in its uselessness, in the spectacular waste, the sacred refusal to be useful, to be productive, or to think so much about itself that it can't really serve as a conduit for anything. Art belongs with sex and meditation as a mode of unproductive expenditure. These three things. Fucking sitting still and making stuff. Our civilization's only hope because they produce nothing. The anarchist philosopher Georges Bataille understood. We need waste, excess, expenditure without return. We need to set a million dollars on fire. What cannot be monetized cannot be controlled. It's the skull peeking in at the banquet. It's the jester, it's the coyote, it's the problem child, it's the release valve for the fully justified anger you feel being locked into this sweaty panopticon. Much like the orgasm, it is the mortal enemy of every tyrant everywhere. It can hold back an army, but you can't save an orgasm for later. You can't put enlightenment on way away. Art is not a retirement plan. The experience is impermanent. It evaporates. This is the point. It's not a problem. This distinguishes art. The perfectly flawed crime requires a perfectly flawed getaway. As soon as you cash the check, they've got you. The value is the vapor. It's here, it's gone, it changed you, and now it's yours. Whether you're a capitalist or a Marxist, you have decided ahead of time to reduce everything to economics. You are catastrophically wrong. You're wrong in the most unfun, poisonous sort of way. If you're on the right, you want the art to make the number go up, to goose the economy. The Marxist wants art to serve the cause, the revolution. If it's art, it's not investment. It's not propaganda. It's that third outpost. The money pit, the sinkhole. Once that gets on your suit, you'll never get it out. You'll have to buy a new one. Art is a seance. It's a panel discussion with the dead. If you think that you are making this alone and that it is yours, you're screwing over ghosts and calling it inspiration. If you could be honest about this, you can admit that you are a medium, not a god, not a maker, not a creator, you are a channel. The stakes are quite high here. Remaining human requires practicing non-instrumental experience. This is not a nice to have. This is not a cork, a lifestyle affectation. If everything you do is useful, you are a machine that has the embarrassing little hobby of thinking that it has a soul. Art, sex, meditation. These are the last places you're allowed to be wasteful, pointless, gloriously inefficient. And in the unlikely event that this sad little species can save itself, it will be through this sort of practice. It's probably gonna fail, but you gotta do it anyway. The odds don't matter. The surrender, the commitment to the bit is everything. Success in the arts is a fool's mate. It suspends you in amber, it makes it impossible for you to channel anything new. The commitment, the losing of yourself, that is the treasure chest. In this sphere, long shots are the only honest bets because you know the game is rigged, and if you can't burn it down, you can make it look ridiculous. The practice is the practice, is the justification of itself. That's it. Everything else is just a noise.

Isabella Rose 52:08

Sterile little fantasies and dreams and blazers. They wipe the menus hourly. It's meant to feel safe, but nothing about me ever is.

Emerson Dameron 52:18

Safe is for house plants and serial monogamous. You want dangerous? You got it the moment you picked out that dress. Did it change your life? No, but it made me realize how many men sit quietly through foreplay just to say they tried. I don't try, I take.

Isabella Rose 52:35

That's intimacy, I think. Accidental, confined, and barely polite. Like foreplay with eye contact.

Emerson Dameron 52:43

Cute, but intimacy is not polite. It's a scalpel, it's a grenade. Intimacy is the transgression of boundaries. Let's not pretend you haven't already imagined me cutting you open softly.

Isabella Rose 52:57

Booths whisper. Tables stare. I like being watched.

Emerson Dameron 53:02

Of course you do. You get wet from the attention, ashamed of the approval. You live in that tension, don't you? Spoiled little exhibitionist aching for punishment.

Isabella Rose 53:12

I catalog my secrets like perfume samples.

Emerson Dameron 53:15

Baby, I don't want your samples. I want the one you hide in the back. The one you can't legally sell. The one that burns when it hits air.

Isabella Rose 53:23

They hum like something under silk waiting to be touched.

Emerson Dameron 53:28

That's not anticipation. Do you hear that clicking? That's your conscience pacing it heels. It knows I'm about to totalize your psyche.

Isabella Rose 53:35

I trace patterns when I'm aroused by danger.

Emerson Dameron 53:39

I don't look for patterns in chaos. I create them. Keep tracing, kitten. I'm the reason the map keeps changing.

Isabella Rose 53:46

Not yet, but it's preheated, and I always rise at the right temperature.

Emerson Dameron 53:53

Oh, I know. You're not rising, you're blooming like a wound that wants to be kissed open.

Isabella Rose 53:59

I ordered the chicken salad. Rituals need offerings.

Emerson Dameron 54:03

Point. Let's see if your throat opens for meat as easily as it does for myth.

Isabella Rose 54:08

Like a rehearsal for pleasure. For power.

Emerson Dameron 54:12

No, love. This is the ritual, and you are the sacrifice.

Isabella Rose 54:16

And I like how carefully you're holding yourself.

Emerson Dameron 54:19

No, you love that I see it. You like that I notice the tremble in your spine when I stop smiling.

Isabella Rose 54:26

Everyone spills. The question is, into whose hands?

Emerson Dameron 54:29

Mine. Always mine. And you'll thank me for not catching you sooner.

Isabella Rose 54:33

I work in consequences.

Emerson Dameron 54:35

And I sculpt desire, cravings. Yours honestly.

Isabella Rose 54:39

Fate's just foreplay with better branding.

Emerson Dameron 54:41

Then let's call this what it is: a collision. Not a coincidence.

Isabella Rose 54:46

Hmm. Momentum. With candlelight and chemistry.

Emerson Dameron 54:50

This is gravity getting off. On the black hole, your little flame won't escape.

Isabella Rose 54:55

It'll still leave marks. And honestly, I like a little bruise where memory used to be.

Emerson Dameron 55:01

Good girl. Because if you don't have scars, it's hard to know your memories are based on real events.

Isabella Rose 55:06

That feels intimate for a first course.

Emerson Dameron 55:09

Baby, I gotta save my appetite for all those nice, right, juicy souls out in the city on a Friday night.

Isabella Rose 55:17

Hmm, that's how it starts. With an ear, a gaze.

Beach Fantasy

Back Matter

Emerson Dameron 55:20

Wrong again. It starts with surrender, and you're already halfway gone. Imagine a couple walking hand in hand barefoot on a sandy beach. I want us to be that couple. The evening sun is setting, sinking into the warmth of the gentle sea. The lingering waves reach and caress our feet and white breath turn into our ears as we continue walking down the beach leisurely. It feels so comfortable, and yet the passion is heating up as we both feel the fury of emotions brewing inside us and it's slowly becoming unstoppable. We turn to look into each other's eyes, and my thoughts penetrate your mind into and out of your soul again and again as our heart beats and feel our wanting for each other. Turns from pure love to animalistic lost mental love again. You come to realize that you're being swept into the moment of pure ecstasy as you plant your lips into mind. Kiss me now. This has been Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one Avant Garde Personal Development Program, a production of K-chung Los Angeles, 1630 a.m. K-Chug Radio dot O R G throughout the world. I am Emerson Damron. I love you personally. You can pick up old episodes or listen to this one again, because you probably missed a lot of stuff if you weren't taking notes. We will not be sending the recording out, but you could get it anywhere. Podcasts are everywhere. You probably subscribe to some of them by accident. Make this a gift to yourself. Go right now to wherever you get podcasts. Subscribe to this one. It'll put all of your other podcasts deep in the shade. I'm Emerson Damron. I'm the host and everything else. New episodes premiere 7 o'clock p.m. Pacific, the first Wednesday of the month, on K-Chung, and then promptly are archived in all kinds of places. You see episodes of the show hanging out in Paris, perhaps, or Sydney in Australia, or Tokyo, or even out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, because that's what it means to be worldwide. A lot of people think that they're worldwide and they think that's gonna be what makes them happy, and then they find out they ain't ready for it because they weren't listening to this show. I'd like to thank myself for all the hard work that I put into this so that you could soak it up like a sponge. This is pure science. Trust but verify, be skeptical. You know all those things. It all falls apart when you fall in love. So when you do that, you might as well go all in and all out. I'm Emerson Dameron. I'm the host of the show. Levity Saves Lives. Catchy on the flip side. The flip side being next month, April. What is the first Wednesday of April? I don't think it's April Fools. We're gonna find out. Yes! Next episode. April 1st, April Fool's Day. That's gonna be a delight. You've been listening to Chae Chung Los Angeles. You will continue, because we got more great programming coming at you right about now.