Snackable A Cappella Medicated Minutes

This episode is for my friend, the brilliant Michaela "DREAM PARTY HOTEL" Costello. If this goes well enough, I might do it again.

We go a cappella and turn a dedication into a string of monologues about desire, surveillance, addiction, power, and the weird comfort of honest machines. We move from microfilm hidden in office junk to dating polarity satire to psychedelic time collapse, then land on practical tools for boundaries and refined anger. 
• ditching the droning bed music and making the voice the whole instrument 
• collecting obsolete office equipment as a defense against the pinging present 
• an authority figure renaming a hobby into inventory and leverage 
• hidden microfilm and the thrill of stumbling into secrecy 
• desire as an asset that always gets audited 
• a satire of being wanted by everyone and still craving solitude 
• Polarizer as a parody of modern dating and sexual polarity logic 
• Helena Mayfair’s experience collecting and fear that nothing means anything 
• platitudes twisted into sharp one-liners 
• quitting cocaine framed through empathy, discipline, and embodiment 
• Saffron as a haunting made of symbols, metaphor, and paradox 
• Bufo alvarius and ego dissolution as a reset that changes everything 
• living in paradox as pleasure and peril at once 
• refined anger as a blade instead of a wildfire 
• the two-page practice for safe-and-alive love plus a rule against early confusion 
• fear of not belonging and the urge to cut people off first 
• late poetic fragments about freedom, choice, and obedience to nothing 
you really need to investigate for yourself. 
So get polarized today. I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.

"The Meat Obeys" is written by Emerson Penn Dameron and Anton Donovan Provost, performed by Anton Donovan, from his album Never Enough, courtesy of LSL Productions.

Transcript

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By Way of Explanation

Emerson Dameron 0:00

Welcome, welcome to a special edition of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. And this is dedicated to my dear friend Michaela, who runs something called Dream Party Hotel, which you really need to investigate for yourself. You will be glad that you did, especially if you're a fan of this show. Michaela does not like the bed music that I use on the show. I believe that's an essential part of what makes Emerson Dameron's medicated minutes the number one avant-garde personal development program in Los Angeles, but some people don't like the droning music. So, as a modest gift to my friend Michaela, because we keep missing each other and I feel bad. And now I don't feel bad anymore because I'm dedicating a special episode of the show to you. This is the a cappella, Emerson Damron's Medicated Bennett's. A few pieces from the last few shows and a couple of real throwbacks. All the true heads will have much to marvel over, but it's all just talking. So strap in. This is the a cappella edition of Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes. I'm Emerson Damron. I love you personally. Levity saves lives.

Depreciation of Desire: A Bite-Sized Erotic Thriller

Emerson Dameron 1:22

I didn't start collecting obsolete office equipment because I yearn for the past. Don't give me that look. I know what that means. I can tell when someone's romanticizing me. If you put me on a pedestal, I'm just gonna fall off and bang my head. I'm tall. If I liked knots on my head, I'd know by now. I started collecting obsolete office equipment because the present wouldn't stop pinging me. You know what I mean. The present is chatty. It touches in, checks bass, whatever. It wants to know how you're really doing, like it's allowed to care. Much as much pity is sugarcoated contempt. Concern is just surveillance with better table manners. A man can only be looped in so many times before he begins to crave the honest click of a rotary dial. The kind of sound that doesn't flatter you. It resists, it drags, it makes you work for it. You seem like the type who appreciates a little effort. I wanted machines that didn't pretend to be friendly, machines that didn't smile with their fonts, machines that didn't ask about my weekend while quietly archiving my loneliness. So I bought them. Adding machines, staplers, a steel three-hole punch that looked like it had survived a war it didn't understand and didn't feel the need to explain. I arranged them in my apartment like parishioners in a small tax-deductible cathedral. No, I don't know how that sounds. And I don't care. Moving on. I told myself it was a hobby. I told my accountant it was a business. That was the first lie I ever enjoyed telling, so I told it extra slowly, slowed and bass boosted with a reverb. The second lie arrived wearing Brooks Brothers. He was polite, unhurried, dressed like a man who could ruin you without raising his voice, which, I'll admit, has its own kind of charisma. He held my documents the way some people hold hands, with a tenderness that implies anticipated leverage. He didn't look at me at first. He looked at the stapler. Interesting, he said, stroking the chrome like it might purr raspily. Vintage. Conditions intimate. I laughed. That reflex courtesy laugh, you know the one. You do it when someone makes your possessions feel indecent. You'd have laughed too, giggles. Don't pretend you wouldn't. But he didn't laugh back. His mouth stayed flat, like humor was an expense he'd already budgeted for. He'd asked to see the inventory, which I'd never called it before. Funny how authority renames things just by looking at them, colors them in Schrdinger's beige. I led him through the apartment. He walked slowly as if each step were a fresh evaluation. When he touched the adding machine, it made a small, obedient whirr. He closed his eyes, not in pleasure, too decadent, too undisciplined, but in recognition. Like the sound had said his name. Do you know, he murmured, what people used to hide inside these dust? I said. Regret the occasional stray paper clip? He smiled with no teeth. Film. And there it was, the chill. Nothing dramatic, just enough to notice, as if the air had been reclassified. He pointed to a mustard yellow telephone with a scuffed receiver. This one, he said. May I? He didn't wait. Something twisted, something I hadn't known could twist, and a thin brittle strip slid out like a tongue microfilm, old enough to feel illegal just by existing. He held it up to the light as if checking the transparency of my soul. Then he looked at me. Congratulations, he said. You've been laundering history. Now here's the part I won't pretend to be noble about. When I saw that hidden sliver of narrative, I felt a thrill, a charge, not because of what it contained, whatever ledger favors and bribes and quiet destructions, but because something had been hidden so carefully for so long and I had found it by accident. I had stumbled into someone else's secrecy, which, if you think about it, is basically how intimacy works. Maybe you haven't tasted that yet. You will. He sat at my kitchen table as if it were a courtroom and I was the furniture. He explained gently that the film documented a ring, embezzlement, blackmail, private arrangements recorded in office language so dry it could start a fire, names, dates, amounts. The kind of numbers that only add up after you subtract your dignity and divide it by the sum of your self reproach. Why are you telling me this? I asked. I've never even wanted to be part of a ring. He tapped my receipt. Because you claimed depreciation. I claim truth, I said. This was a mistake. I knew it as soon as I said it. You probably did too. Don't worry, we all have our little tells. I've already caught two of yours. He leaned in closer. I caught his aftersave, clean, bureaucratic, faintly predatory. Objects lose value, he said. But desire doesn't. It just changes its packaging. I felt the sharp tickle of that sentence worming its way into my brain. He offered me a deal. No sex, no romance, those are amateur bribes. He offered protection, anonymity, assistance, a clean path through the labyrinth, if I handed over the collection and kept my mouth shut. It should have been easy to refuse, but I'd recently learned the eroticism of paperwork. Divorce will do that to you. Who signs? Who yields? Who keeps the Russian doll collection, which is a blast to inventory? I knew how cleanly a life could be reduced to initials on a line. So I told him no. Not dramatically, not heroically, just no. Like closing a small door while maintaining eye contact. His eyes narrowed. But then you understand, he said, that you're choosing risk. I'm choosing ownership, I said, of my mistakes. And yes, I know how that sounds. He stood, smoothed his suit, and headed for the door. In the pause before he left, I felt the full ridiculous weight of it. This morning I lived in a house full of dead office equipment. Now I'd moved into a live grenade. He didn't threaten me. He didn't need to. He just said, keep your receipts. After he left, the apartment felt louder. Every machine hummed with new attentiveness, like I'd awakened something that had been waiting patiently inside metal and dust. I sat on the floor between the adding machine and the rotary phone and realized the real depreciation wasn't on my tax forms. It was in me. The slow annual decline of my ability to pretend I didn't want trouble. Desire, it turns out, isn't an expense you can write off. It's an asset. You already know how this ends. Someone always wants to audit it. Yes,

Everybody Wants Me: A Humble Tribute to Joe Frank

Emerson Dameron 8:35

I know you want me. It's laughably obvious. When I come into the room, you lick your lips and gyrate your hips like some awkward, besotted Elvis impressionist, which doesn't work for you when you forfeit your swagger charm and charisma. The horny, desperate gestalt is unmistakable. You want me, and I'm not mad about it. Attraction isn't a choice. We don't have much conscious control over who gets us crushed out and hot at the crotch. Usually it's someone German-engineered to make us miserable, and I am, it must be said, devastatingly sexy. Maybe it's my penetrating eye contact for my soulful wounded brown peepers or my hypnotic and sonorous voice, the wave on which my stimulating message of libertine decadence rolls in. It could be my sly and sophisticated sense of humor, or the strong stillness of my deep grounded masculine presence, or my well-honed skills as a patient and passionate lover, which are internationally known as those who experience them are doomed to run their mouths. Whatever it is, everybody wants me, and I'm reluctant to complain. The party doesn't start when I walk in, it follows me everywhere I go. There's someone for everyone, and that someone is me because everyone wants me. Once two seductresses and Femmes Fital competing for my attention both hired skyrider planes that collided mid-air near my home in Venice Beach. The wreckage landed on Oceanfront Walk, killing and wounding several tourists and traumatizing dozens more, but even if I wanted to, I couldn't reward either of these women with denerate burger lords. My dance guard is full front and back, and the waiting list is an unwieldy scroll because, as I mentioned, everybody wants me. I crave solitude. It's my curse, and one of my two strongest desires. I'm a little hot for myself, too. Some things are popular because they're the best, but with all the attention and stimulation I get, I've lost touch with my desires. I'm not even sure how to properly masturbate anymore. My other strongest drive, somewhat paradoxically, is my hunger for authentic human connection. I want an algonquin roundtable of my fellow witty cynics and wounded romantics, but everyone is in love with me, which makes them want to be what they think I want them to be, which isn't at all what I want. I've tried disfiguring myself. I've tried scaring people off with vulnerability and neediness, and I've tried hiding in plain sight, which works about as well as you'd think. It's a melancholy life for the modern Marlborough man, stranded alone in a crowd. Since you ask, I haven't made up my mind about you yet. I like you too much to get your hopes up or reject you outright. Our genetic imperatives make monsters and fools of us all, but we have some choice in how or whether to act on our attraction, and I prefer to deliberate and take my time deciding who's going to ruin my life.

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Emerson Dameron 11:39

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Helena the Brit in "A Glam Collector Fears Meaninglessness"

Helena Mayfair 12:42

Oh darling, where does one even begin? I suppose if we're being terribly honest. And I do try to be honest, at least with myself, though that's somewhat harder than it sounds after four glasses of Prosecco and a night that ended somewhere between Soho House and a dingy apartment over Kibab Shop in Hackney. I'm what you might call a collector, not of things, mind you. Things are boring. If you don't throw them out when you move, they make moving a miserable experience, and I will not be tied down with a mortgage. Not after that DJ wearing what he called stunner shades annihilated my credit rating in less than 72 hours in Monaco. I collect experiences, peak experiences, the sort of divine, debauched encounters that Jarvis Cocker and Sophie Ellis Baxter would spontaneously duet about. As he once put it, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, the common people will never know what it's like to live as we do, which is so regrettable really, for them, don't you think? Be that as it may. Just last month I found myself at an absolutely ghastly warehouse party in Berlin, or was it Rotterdam? One does lose track, where I met this sculptor, Danish, enormous, beautiful tarantula hands. He kept calling me his quote puddin' pop, unquote, and I thought, well, that's anthropologically fascinating. Before I knew it, I was bent over a Bauhaus chair in his studio explaining finer points of British restraint and its fascinating knock-on effects that ripple through our culture, society, and sometimes our more off-colour sexual fantasies. You know the ones. Danish affixed me with literal external restraints, after which he demonstrated precisely no restraint of his own. And I was in. I was all in. Perhaps I always had been. One must never do culture by halves, darling, you understand. Although perhaps such middling dilettants who find that sort of thing acceptable aren't fully welcome in their homes either. I've been accused of being pretentious, which I find hilarious. Pretentious people pretend to have taste. I simply have it. There's a difference. I can discuss Goddard and reality television with equal facility. I've cried at the Rothco Chapel and in the Sedona MacDonald's, also at a truly inspired drag brunch in Shoreditch. I contain multitudes, glamorous, prosecco-soaked, desperately hungover multitudes, and lately none of them ever seems to stop crying or screaming or both. The truth, such as it is, and don't you dare tell anyone, is that I'm absolutely terrified that none of this means anything, that I'm just floating through life in a half awake, half delirious fugue state, accumulating experiences like stamps in a passport, waiting for someone to check my homework, to tell me I've done it right, that it's replicable, but not like too replicable. But then some devastatingly inappropriate man whispers something filthy and degrading in my ear, and I think, who cares? At least I'm not boring. I never bore myself, and I do have impossibly high standards that only the swashbuckling wild men who devote their Sundays to rabbinical passing of Schopenhauer after a long week of conquering windmills, especially the windmills with rent control, could ever even attempt to understand. But boredom, darling. Boring yourself, wishing your life away, pitting your own convenience and lassitude against your heart and all the people who will love it, and you, whether you love your heart or not, or not yet. That, darling, to be boring, that is the only unforgivable sin. It's the fate of boring people and perhaps a long game masochist or two. Please do note that I don't need to forgive you to fuck you. Oftentimes it's more transgressive and better and fun and more delightfully post everything if I don't, don't you think?

Platitudes With Attitude

Emerson Dameron 16:57

Emerson Dameron'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. And 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. Torched, smoked. It was the beach read of the year. There's no I in team. There's no B in Team, because we killed them all. There's no D in team, but there could be. There's no E or M D M A in Team, so I'm out of here. This has been platitudes with attitude, bitch.

Can I Kick It?

Emerson Dameron 17:58

Hey baby. You been working out? The booties looking fine. Looking stacked as always. Better than usual. I don't want to kick it with you. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Kick that cocaine. It's the only thing cramping your style, baby baby. You've got too much going for you. You have stuff going up your nose like that. I know what's up with that. Yeah, I'm tired of it. It was fun 18 months ago. Back when we were kicking it, when I was kicking it with you and unkicking that cocaine, I know you're back on it too. You gotta do something about that. It's gotta be real hard to get off it. Like some other things that are real hard. Higher level calculus. That's hard. Cement, things of that nature. The bottom of the pool, if you dive in the shallow end and hit your head, that's real hard. Kicking cocaine's not that hard. The hard part is the first part. Kind of like uh my hard part has always been the first part. Starting a new lifestyle. It's like that. You got style. I want to get in your life. Get in some other things. Get in the program. No, I'm not talking about twelve-stepping, not talking about half-stepping. Got another kind of program in mind, baby. Based on Buddhism as a meditation. You don't have chips. It's not about time. Time has no meaning when you're having hot, hot sex. Time can go by slowly. Kairos, they call it, in literature, when everything just s seems to stop. Then when it's over, you're thinking, damn, those three hours go. I don't want them back. There's no better way to spend them. Definitely not doing cocaine. Cocaine will screw up the empathy centers in your brain. It'll make you desirous of love making, but then unable to make it good because you're not really in the present, because it screws up your ability to defer gratification or your willingness to. You still can. It just feels like torture. Everything feels like torture. It feels real bad to get off of cocaine. It feels bad when you're on it. It's like, what kind of bad do you want to feel for a couple of days in the interest of feeling real, real good later on? And it's not like your whole life has to change. People complain about the recovery programs where like all of a sudden your whole life revolves around that. Your whole life's gonna revolve around something. I'm gonna tell you what it is. It's not the 12 steps, it's the 12 inches. Because that's how thick the books are that you're gonna be reading. Damn, you got nice legs. It's a shame you had to sell your car, but then again, a damn. As they say nobody walks in LA. That's why nobody's fine like you are. Everybody's beautiful in their own way, not in your way. You're exquisite, smooth, delicate skin, like onion skin typing paper. Yeah, it's a hard world for someone so uh bespoke, so artisan, so exclusive as you. That's gonna help both of us. You know, learn and grow together. I'm growing right now. I'm uh growing by leaps and bounds. And I might tell you about it later. It's gonna change your life. Hell yeah.

Hauntological Anarchy: A Bite-Sized Erotic Thriller

Emerson Dameron 21:03

I'm haunted by my past, and I'm starting to like it. Hanging threads for my history have come to tie me down, tie me up. Saffron, my greatest friend, my inconsistent but highly enthusiastic lover, and my pen pal of many years until her untimely death, suicide by disappearance. She has come back. In a sense. She is now present in her absence. I feel her presence it seeps into every area of my life. And as one part of one's life encroaches into other areas, that can mean that one has a problem. Every fascination is is a bit of an obsession, but so is every addiction. It can be very hard to tell the difference. I said depends on where you think it's going. And I don't know, because Saffron has returned. We communicate through Signed symbols, metaphors, ambiance, poetry, and paradox. She is present in her absence, and she has returned with secrets heavy ones, dark, dangerous ones, explosive ones. She's handed me a live grenade that I have her raging heart on. I've never been this erotically charged up. I've never been this embodied this enthusiastic. I've never felt so free. I've never been as somatically and erotically charged up. I can feel lightning coming out of my fingertips, and I can hear fallen power lines snapping at night, as I hear the sounds of the trains that are both soothing and mournful and heartfelt, but also early vacant, like these memories from the past. My therapists don't get it. They say I need to get out of the past. I need to get in the present. Past tripping, future tripping. My thoughts are not the truth. I don't know if these are my thoughts. They're intuitions, they're intuitive perceptions, they are readings, they are revelations. So thoroughly haunted. I need to find someone who gets it. I do, I think. The literal madman on the edge of town. He's being gradually forced out there. He makes people uncomfortable. Not everyone. Some people who've run out of options go to find this man. Not in the middle of nowhere, but on the outskirts of nowhere, where he has an office in a strip mall where everything else in the street mall has been abandoned. And next door to him, there is something that looks like maybe it was an art gallery or a yoga studio at some point. It's been a long time since it was used for either of those things, and it's very run down. He'll sound you out. He'll listen, at least it feels that way. He'll make you feel special. He definitely used my name over and over again, and repeating my name over and over again is an excellent vocal exercise. I noticed that when I meet actors, they enjoy doing it. But this guy was not an actor. If he was, he was beyond Nicolas Cage on the visionary front. I don't think he was. I think he was truly a visionary. And he saw me, and he saw the signs and symbols and old Windows 95 screensavers and MIDI synthesizer music and pastels and computer animation that I was so thoroughly haunted by it. He understood my relationship with Saffron. We no longer communicated in language. I didn't it didn't matter what color she dyed her hair this time or what wise cracks she had to make when she realized I was learning the same lesson, yet again. We were beyond that. We were communicating in some sort of code that I understood intuitively, but not actively. Not in such a way that I could explain it or teach it or really make sense of it, or escape from it. Couldn't make maps or figure out strategies to make sense of this thing. It was beyond names and forms and time and space, and it combined pleasure and peril. And the madman shaman on the edge of town suggested that I smoke the venom of Bufo Alvarius, the Colorado River toad, which sweeps ten months out of the year, and in the other months is sometimes harvested for its venom. Which in some causes wild hallucinations, but in others there are no visuals. There there's no auditory element. Everything goes white, and you, the person whose name is on your driver's license, the person with the social security number and the childhood attachment wounds, and your addictions and the torches that you still carry for your old flames. All that just is gone. It's extinguished. It it never was. It's thoroughly meaningless. Absurd. Laughable. But it wouldn't be you laughing. And people wouldn't be laughing at or with you because you don't exist. And that's refreshing. Highly recommend it. Because things in in some ways suddenly made sense. It's like I went sane. The apparitions, the intuitions to which I was giving ammunition and as they were coming to fruition. Those things got even crazier. Subjectively. Because I was making more sense out of things, I was now trying to make sense of something fundamentally nonsensical. That was challenging. That was a new thing for me. I was growing up. I was becoming uh uber something. A little bit mensch, a little bit monster. Both. It's always both. It's always pleasure and peril. It's always risk and reward and ennui and angst. Repetition is torture. It is also so soothing and reassuring, and paradox is poetry. But it's challenging to rest in paradox. Desperate for answers that aren't necessarily available. When we open to all of these experiences at once, uh it is can only be described as sexual ecstasy. It can be a purely cerebral experience because your whole body is a brain. And when you understand that, living in this complexity, this fractal absurdity, this embarrassment of riches can be so exciting. After uh I had the kind of orgasm that I thought was only available to women, and then had five more of them that day. Keep in mind, I'm a severely chronically depressed 45-year-old man. I was killing it. I was experiencing all of the pleasure that I think had just been backed up in my system. Ah, it was such a relief. So exhilarating and cathartic. And I think I crossed some kind of threshold, because then I began to be haunted by past projections of the future. I was seeing that time was an illusion that can be convenient, but it was also limiting. I got to the point where I could handle the true weirdness of things and look into the abyss, see how abyssy it is, and jump and realize that the bad news is there's no parachute. The good news is there's no ground, as Chilliam Trump Aurinpachet said. And the past projections of the future were revealing hopes, the anxieties, sublimated libidinal force of the past, the collective that created them, that was now displaced, was lost in the ether, and was haunting the very technology that we used, through which we perceive things, through which we define ourselves and try to make sense of the ultimately nonsensical, and this led to a confrontation, a showdown in queer time, which is not exactly what it sounds like, but it does include that. It is the time that you experience when you uh comprehend that time as you previously experienced it was an illusion. I took a few L's, but then I started taking W's. I would say I was putting wins on the board. I would say that the work on myself, such as that person was, is, has ever been, was paying off. It really didn't have anything to do with me. It was just kind of happening, because I was letting it happen by embracing and experiencing and thus harnessing the force of the triumph of my own desires, and allowing the triumph of my desires to happen. And as I let go of my need for control, desires ceased to be my masters and became my faithful servants that served me beyond what I ever could have possibly anticipated, expected, or desired, or had the imagination to ask for. And I had a passionate relationship with something ineffable. I don't know if it was the infinite. I I wouldn't say that it was, because there's a certain kind of unknowable perfection about the truly infinite, and we were doing really rough deconstruction. I was pounding it out, getting it on, inflicting pain, loving it. It was living up to my responsibility and others' expectations of me, but that didn't even matter, because what mattered was the sheer joy of taking the ineffable, putting it in a headlock, beating its ass raw. That I've discovered that was where it was at for me, and the ineffable liked it even more than I did. If you've ever been in proximity to the ineffable, it has a shattering cascading orgasm, you'll know what I'm talking about. Otherwise, perhaps you won't. I've been to the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is just a ditch in the ground compared to this experience. After that, I couldn't really come home. I'd been told by my former therapists that I could always come back. But the shaman at least had the self-imolating candor to let me know that he would see me on the other side, but I would be fundamentally transformed in ways that were unpredictable. And I was found that I was able to juggle the sublime in the abject. I was able to release my resistance, embrace the transitory nature, the fluidity, the flux, the flow of everything. I kind of went a little nuts after that. And it was cool. Everything changed. And it was chill.

Open Advice: Refined Anger And Safer Love

Emerson Dameron 31:44

You don't actually hate all those men. You hate what kept happening to you through them. The boredom that asked you to die slowly, the excitement that turned predatory, the marketplace of dating that keeps presenting entitlement in different shirts. What you hate is the visceral sense that the game is rigged. The humiliating arithmetic. You took a risk to get more alive, and instead you got punished. And now your nervous system is trying to protect you by turning discernment into a totalizing creed. Never again. None of them. The whole category is contaminated. That move makes some sense. It's strategic in the short term. Hatred is often grief wearing armor, but notice the price it extracts. It lets the worst men in your story become the authors of your perception. It recruits your intelligence into permanent guard duty. It turns your loneliness into a political identity which can feel righteous and solid, but still leaves you alone at night. The belief feels strong because it organizes chaos, yet anything that explains everything usually starts stealing from the person who believes it. Another thing, you are comparing your raw life to other people's edited summaries. Their husbands, kids, careers, big happy lives is the old trick of distance. From the outside, other people's lives look like finished houses, but from the inside there are wiring problems, leaks, compromises, stale resentments, private griefs. Your menial job is not proof that your life is lesser than. You are in contact. The deeper wound here may not be men are the problem. It may be, I made a choice for desire and I do not trust myself now. That is the serrated, much sharper knife. Because if the world is the problem, you stay frozen. But if some part of you no longer trusts your chooser, that can be rebuilt. So let me shift the frame. Your task is not to become less angry. Your anger has been doing useful work. Your task is to refine it. Crude anger says all of them. Refined anger says these signs, these dynamics, this kind of charm, this kind of minimization, this kind of hunger in me that mistakes intensity for safety. Crude anger burns the whole field. Refined anger becomes a blade. And loneliness is not always a verdict. Sometimes it's the detox period after living inside the wrong gods. You left boredom, then got captured by danger. Of course, ordinary life feels thin right now. Your system got trained to confuse activation with aliveness. That can be untrained, slowly, without shaming yourself for it. Here's your practice. Tonight, take two sheets of paper and a glass of water. On the first page, right at the top, what I mistook for love. Under that, list everything that now in retrospect seems obvious. Thrilling uncertainty, being chosen intensely, volatility mistaken for passion, having to earn tenderness, ignoring your own boredom, ignoring your own dread. Be specific and ruthless. On the second page, right, what my life feels like when it's safe and alive. Not ideal, not fancy, felt sense only. For example, I laugh without performing. My body unclenches. I do not have to audition. My no is enough. My yes is unhurried. I'm not competing with a fantasy of womanhood. Then fill the glass with water and speak. I return the job of punishing the world to the world. I keep only the job of protecting my life. Tear up the first page and throw it away. Keep the second page under your pillow for seven nights. For the next 30 days, impose one elegant discipline. Do not date anyone who creates confusion in the first three interactions. No decoding, no generosity toward mixed signals, no chemistry discounts. You're not screaming for excitement, you're screening for coherence. And one more prescription. Once a week, initiate one small intimacy that has nothing to do with romance or status. Invite one friend to tea, a walk, a cheap lunch, a voice memo exchange, a museum free day, a porch set. Not when everyone is available. Name a day and ask. You do not need to have a big, happy life. You need repeated human contact that does not cost your nervous system. Your life is not overgrown with lack. It's overgrown with false comparisons and scorched earth conclusions. That can change. You're not a woman who failed and got stuck with the leftovers. You're a woman in the aftermath of disillusionment, learning the difference between intensity, ideology, and actual nourishment. That is a harder education than most people get. It's also a real one.

The Backpiece of the Universe

Emerson Dameron 36:48

My greatest fear, aside from getting stuck at the top of a 100-story jungle gym, is realizing that I've lingered too long somewhere and not wanted and don't belong. Realizing that not only do I not want to be there anymore, and the reasons that I was still there are mistaken, and the hunches that I had that it was time to go, I worn out my welcome that I was getting nudged aside, thrown out of the helicopter with a parachute that right away, it was clear, wasn't in working order. Give me enough information to take all that pain, anger, confusion, and cut you off first. You were planning to cut me off, but this way I get to feel like I won, and that does me a lot more good moving on than that condescending pep talk that you didn't want to give anyway. So you don't have to tell me everything, but give me enough information to think A6ing the relationship, whether it was a business relationship, uh more likely a sexual relationship. Let me think it was my idea. Because I'm working on taking agency for things, and I'm just getting started on that. So, you know, let me win. Like you let kids cheat at Candyland. I hate pity, I hate fake sympathy, but you know, show me some grace. Show me that you love me by letting me know that you're starting to wonder whether or not you love me, and now you're gonna love me a lot. I'll make sure of it. Because now I'm so good, I'm so calibrated that I can cut you off before you even start thinking about it. That you're either not gonna like that or you're really gonna like it, in which case, come on back, because we got unfinished business. That's what you'll want to be tonight. You spend all your time being a subject, it's exhausting. Come on over, and let's make the most of this painfully confusing situation in which we found ourselves. Again, we never learn, but we do burn, in this case, in the crotch, not from herpes, but from raw animal lust. And it is our duty, as beings wired for pleasure, as flowers that grow toward the sun, to indulge that. As soon as we can, for as long as we can, as long as we know when to quit, in such a way that we get to walk away, feeling like we won, because then we'll do it again, and eventually we'll start winning all over the place. Breaking records, breaking hearts, spoiling you for any future lovers, both with our diabolical timing and our rapidly escalating skills and providing sustained, mind-shattering, psychically annihilating orgasms on an intermittent basis. So you don't get to get used to them, and you don't know when I'm gonna take them away. And now you know how much you don't know. Think about it, but not too hard, because it's five o'clock. At 6 30, we're both getting into our bodies. So get ready for that and leave your shame behind unless you're gonna use it. There are no spectator emotions in the kind of barn-burning coitus that we're gonna bring to bear on each other, on ourselves, on the world. To carve our initials into the back piece of human consciousness on the back of the universe that you only

"The Meat Obeys"

Emerson Dameron 40:18

see when the universe has its shirt off, but that's happening increasingly, almost constantly now. That can only be a good thing.

Speaker 4 40:52

He wore my shirt and used my teeth to eat.

Speaker 5 40:58

Love away to someone else entirely. Six options on the table, like organ, laid out for inspection. One said leave your wife, two said, burn the manuscript, three said order the fish. I order the fish. I'm from Halifax, and I have never like fish. That was the beginning of something that tasted like freedom. And freedom tasted like fish. The thing of this little Q are exhibiting sentence. And I live the day to finish her sentence. Listen for the floor means telling you I sexually attracted to the falling can so I told her. She wrote something down. Let me all day, the cure size. Look at the screen with the dump is good, not just the you can choose to remove the scale with probabilities, face of the die, a little death of the breath from you on nothing because you chose nothing that I chose the new chest.

Speaker 3 43:41

My colleague said this is psychosis with extra steps. I said yes.

Speaker 5 43:49

The steps of the phone. The shoe is the phone, and I did not choose the shoe.

Speaker 2 44:00

The cute designs. Let me obey the cute designs. Let me obey. The meat. The meat. And what you call love was just a number you kept rolling.

Speaker 5 44:30

In chapter 37, Luke makes love to a woman he does not find attractive because the dice said five. And five means yes to the body in front of you. He described it clinically. The way a surgeon describes opening his 100th chest. Not with passion, but with the specific attention of a man who has abandoned the concept of passion and found something worse underneath it. Which is obedience to nothing. Which is the most American form of God there is.

Speaker 6 45:57

Like a piece of bread I forgot to choose. Today I've left on the die said go to the river. I went to the river. The guy said get in. I did not get it. And then that was the day I learned I was still someone, still a coward, still a man who would not get into a river in October. Because dogs do not forgive They are just bone and paint.

Speaker 1 47:17

The dice a look alive.

Speaker 6 47:22

But what was left stood up and went to work and no one noticed.