s t e p h e n

mi c h a e l

m c d o w e l l

stephen michael mcdowell by Stephen Michael McDowell (August 2013)

IM 12 IM 12 IM 12 IM 12 I WANT TO GO HOME ARE WE THERE YET IS IT CHRISTMAS I NEEEEEEEED THE NEW TOMB RAIDER FOR PS4 OH MY DUCKING GOB PLS KILL ME MOM YOU FORGOT TO FILL OUT MY VYVANSE PRESCRIPTION WHERE TE FRUCK IS THAT ONE PIC OF SHANNON FROM MRS STAFFORDS PREALGEBRA CLASSS BOOBS ON REDDIT I DONT I DONT I DONT I DO NOT WANNA PLAY INTRAMURAL LACROSSE THIS QUARTER IM GOING TO THE SKATEPARK IM TRYNA GET A BLOWJAY IM NOT TRYNA LIVE UP TO ANYONES STANDARDS EXCEPT 2CCI KID KHALIFA WEEZUS BOY-Z PURP RAFFS AN IM SORRY NOT SORRY GET THE FRUCK OUT MY ROOM

you are, to me, not unlike a simile conveying a symbiotic, or perhaps symbolic, non-differentiable relationship between you and yourself, akin to that of a door and its frame, but as if the construction of the two occurred spontaneously, and the hinges, knob, and lock, much like the various lubricants between the web-like interlacings of flesh, and neurotransmitters interspersed in an ever-growing braid of desperately attempted time constriction, were somehow a blatant reflection of the willful, trap-like conflict of me, not knowing how, but, with demure acceptance of the reality of what currently passes as real and awareness of the semiotic incomparability of an instance of one person longing to understand another, like the absurd image of, say, two doors attempting, independently, to enter or exit the other, wanting, whether on the inside or outside of the structured, discernible statement of you, to possess some key, some simple device by which to transect the impassible, but functional-seeming portal you, seeming like me, undoubtedly are, in order to... like... somehow... you know, empathize with your concern... or whatever may be similar... to that sentiment

i spent 99 to bribe okcupid to send someone i had never actually communicated with, because their message inbox was full, an apology for behaving in a way i discerned as creepy, though, at the time of the initial infractionwhich ostensibly (almost definitely in my view) resulted in that account getting deactivated by twitter (probably via them reporting it)i had a significantly larger amount of money (not realizing, until yesterday, that money used for okcupid message bribing comes out of the users itunes account, the receipt for which i was just emailed, reminding me of this incident) which i spent on dumb games i dont play, but now i dont have enough money to buy an app i really want and that person probably wouldnt have otherwise been aware of me or what i did, which was do research to find their twitter and send them an @ message from an alternate account, telling them i didnt know how else to contact them, because our match percentage was unusually high and they live within five miles of me and we have very similar interests, but will probably, as a result of this whole debacle, never meet or interact, which is, in my view, vexing and bizarre from an internet-based miscommunication standpoint

feeling a strong urge to write poems about people i have crushes on who i am aware of through the internet, but instead im putting that potential energy into remembering, in-detail, the progressively shitty events andon my part, behaviorof my last monogamous relationship, as a remindermaybe for myself, maybe everyonethat allowing social expectation to influence and convince a person what seems socio-culturally normative isnt ever more than a modal signifier, and that discerning what they want is a valuable thing to spend the brief time life allots, working out; just because there is a word defining an idea, this doesnt mean your brain is one of the brains well-catered to its application, in thought or action; just because you feel extreme about a person does not mean they are a thing you want as a fixed accessory to your life, especially since every human is too complex to be conceptually reducible as such

the clandestine will of so quietly bleeding i wake up and take the most lonely dust bath of my life i look both ways while crossing the street and then think of you wednesday will be the first day of my being not thursday which was a speculative prospect but lost itself somewhere else in next month im sorry ill never be the eponymous poetry collection of you because each time i think about seashells i think fabolous the rapper space is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of double pronged male electrical inputs when i wake up tonight i will eat just one slice of pizza and also, and then again, think distinctly of you im sorry im sorry im sorry im sorry most cats are fifty percent adequate cuddlers on days when larry david is the eponymous poetry collection of my life somehow, most fridays, equidistance is a hard concept when i think of the point in exact space between us i think of trajectories tangental to the moon everyday that i miss you is the day that i hope is the last day i will miss you again, i am sorry i havent been kind enough to most hermit crabs ive met but neon and felt are fixed as one concept in my periphery so i will try to be kinder to the both of us in this

i told my girlfriend that im at an impressionable age and that if she didnt hurry up and date me i would leave her for an ideology she didnt believe me so now im a monk i rolled over a record number of times in bed this morning debating whether or not my dogs arent actually cats, as a sort of practice for nothing in general the nothing in general i will be sanctifying in my new position as celestial brainfart is what you can expect from me henceforth one day i will achieve the ultimate goat i wish my girlfriend had appealed to my humanity and not my deity because then id have an excuse to not perfect whatever delusion im now married to i am not dad enough, and am no longer only twelve i am the oracle of the eternal will of spacegod the nongod, godlike entity of cyberwebspace i implore you to keep your devices operating at maximum capacity i implore you to contemplate the unfathomable tragedy of last slice of bread

ppl recently ive been behaving obsessively with regard to ideas of politics and money in a way i feel existentially threatened by ppl i want to combat this in myself because it is detracting from individual human experience in a way that seems radically broken and that is manifesting in me as necessitating i enact an impulse to construct PTSD-resembling hyper-associative narrative as a desperate means to justify it ppl life is very complex and reducing it to memeable constructs does not feel fulfilling or engaging to me, nor does it help reinforce the realization that i caused these problems and that i did this to myself ppl according to wikipedia there is less than 0.4% genetic variation between any two humans ppl there is probably a greater amount of variation between preoccupational themes in myself of who i thought i was at age 14 vs who i think i am now than there is quantitatively between me and any other person ppl if a person does something, no matter how insane and destructive, controlling or insipid, it was done by a more functional representation of me than any government, corporation, fanatic group, or fiscal policy ppl whenever i discern myself feeling palpably assaulted by my ideas re politics, economics, religious dogma, industrial preference, or injustice, i want to try and remember i made this, this is me, this is not outside of or controlling me, this is a feeling i am experiencing of wanting and not knowing how to help me feel okay ppl i dont think there is an ultimate truth that is interested in revealing itself as anything, except exactly how time has collapsed into the moment that i am now experiencing

ppl i want to be kind to myself, i want to be kind to every other human i encounter, i want to be kind by not referring to any person as a statistic or by assessing them as homogeneous to their net worth or worldview ppl i dont think there is a way to fix what having invented laws and currency have done to how we think, but unlike the metaphor ignoring the problem doesnt make it go away if your house is infested with rats i am choosing to acknowledge that i am not plagued by parasitic ideas, i am irrevocably attached to 7+ billion negligibly differential versions of myself, whom i value individually more than any document on assembled fabric, reductive waveform on a graph, or currency symbol followed by arabic numerals on a screen ppl

an interesting idea i had re losing hope: hope is an abstract concept that seems to mean the desire to continue pursuing goals, but because it is very abstract it is typically given a qualitative connotation (usually positive, similar to love, peace, faith, etc) and can therefore express attempting anything from microwaving popcorn to outrunning a nuclear bomb. i think hope is one of many made up things that people use to describe impulses or a group of coping/defense mechanisms that human brains act on but that cant be given simple name designation. religion, myth, and storytelling have made words like hope very popular but along with love, peace, and faith, hope is not a thing that people have or do or can keep they are simplified versions of complex/strong behavior that can be used to manipulate a persons desires through rhetoric. for example, if a person thinks hope is a discernible, concrete expression of behavior, they can be convinced to put their hope into nearly anything that seems attractive, and can, if that thing becomes unattractive lose hope in the context of that system. similarly a person can feel love but, only if they think love is something explicable can they be convinced that love is supposed to cause happiness, feelings of security, and for things to make sense. but if one is able to understand that love and hope, when analyzed are most likely biological means to continue life, it seems likely that fear is a necessary binary or coexisting thought/belief. i think it is impossible for me to not feel hope, love, fear, hatred, but that it is also possible, if when feeling them, i try to remember the biological, reproduction-driving basis for them, i can distance myself from the way i react and focus on trying to discern them as manageable. ive lost hope is similar to saying the fire in my brain has gone out or i give up. its something that can be felt, and is probably better expressed through action rather than words. i give up. there, i said it. im giving up hope. ive typed it and put it here. im not dead, doing this did not kill me, its okay, things keep going. im giving up, self-rhetorically, but im not going to stop doing the things i want in the instances where i discern they seem fun or funny or valuable to do. rather, i dont care about hope anymore. its no longer a tool i find intrinsically useful for how i want to navigate my life.

three advisory requests received via anonymous facebook account: anon: stephen what are your thoughts on connotative effects of ppl vs ideas of them etc? i been thinking much recently that the connotative effect someone has is way skewed from our idea of them, and that idea shouldnt be replicated in the parameters we see to judge someone. thats a major recurring filter in the way I see ppl i think, im trying to correct it. i think people like us have earnest desires twisted by incongruities in our nature. but really those twisted notions resonate a lot because theyre not far off from one another me: um, i enjoy viewing all ppl as nearly identical to me, because of awareness that, over the course of the development of the universe, to date, the closest thing to my own concept of self is likely attributable to most if not every other human, so i try to, despite awareness that other ppl experience and enact extreme variation on this concept (to the degree that they can convince themselves that we are dissimilar, especially if they reject the ideas of evolution, concrescence, or semiotics as how we understand things vs how they actually are, which is indiscernible), and think viewing ppl as signifiers of anything besides me or extremely similar to me just seems less logical than seeing someone as fat and a problem in america or a criminal and a danger to society or the most beautiful girl ive ever seen because my biology and tendency to discern between objects will override my choice to view them as might as well be me anyway, but, from a, like, philosophical standpoint, i try to think this person is me when communicating with any other human, unsure what effect this has, will try to think more about it, does that answer your question somewhat? feel free to ask more meant more logical not less logical i think got confused re perspective in this, i think, but i feel confident about most of the assertions anon: Stephen I need some relationship advice and werds of wisdom from you. I been seein someone for a while who doesnt live in the same country and only get to see in the summer. Idk if its the misaims of humid storms and the poignant inactivity that swell around them, or if the more people talk the less we understand, but Ive been thinking about this geographical distance shit a lot. My mom, the cherubic saint of relationships that she is, seems to think, and therefore would translate to an effort into my own thought, of ppl and relationships along the ranks of more fish in the sea, someone else (better), etc. But I think thats a p undeserving and prosaic parameter to weigh this relationship on. Besides I feel the way my psyche animates with the other persons is in total accord with the relationship itself, Id stay away from the word boundary or barrier if I didnt find either entirely unsuitable a way to describe the distance. Mostly Im thinking that the gap isnt applicable to either of our trains of thought and should

from-here-on be Men In Black poofzapped from the collective Id. I dont think that convenience is an excuse for or against something that could turn into full on emergence, so Im saying it feels shitty for the thought of distance to obtrude the relationship but then there are all these downly feelings that are pretty much unavoidably there when physical distance is placed between people me: k, thinking... i think the nearest idea i have approaching the reality of relationship is that most humans are compatible with other humans in the realm of emergence, but that there are consistently inhibiting factors, whether it be distance, belief systems, sexual preference, or some banal interest that one person feels enough aversion to to cease communication over i think relationships benefit from people being aware of this, and acknowledging that in different times in life, we each individually become different types of people. i feel entirely dissimilar to the me of 5 years ago and that person seems dissimilar to the me of 10 years ago i have felt in-love a few times, one of those times having been 10 years ago, it wasnt actualized how i wanted it to be then, but the person and i are very close and intimate currently, after 6 years of not talking more than twice a year i think its important to communicate insecurity to the other person in the relationship, and that if there is a synched element between you that seems consistent and unobstructed by distance, then maybe discussing it with them and maintaining awareness that there is possibility that distance will stop being a factor will help maintain the strength of the bond, but, like a conceptual octave of the harmony your idea for non-actualized emergence represents, isnt currently achievable, and pursuing it could cause discord in other aspects of your life i dont think seeking happiness in one other is a way to emergence so much as it is an actualized desire for and act of pursuing sex/interpersonal amalgamation, and is one of the ways the brain, being one of the ultimate problem solving devices, justifies a heightened sense of interconnectivity for that purpose if you like the person, i encourage you not to lose contact with them, but i think trying to maintain a romantic relationship that feels consistently outside your means is a type of perpetual delusion, amplified by emotional discord/distress, which seems desirable to avoid

i dont know, i dont feel like i have authority over other peoples lives, i think life is indeterminable until it determines itself over time, so i dont have anything definitive to assert with regard to this, i am not capable of being aware of all the factors, if maintaining this relationship seems like the most apparent and realizable goal you have in your life, then i encourage you to pursue it, if you have something that seems to more readily approach your idea of inner harmony, then i dont encourage you to pursue it or, rather, i encourage you to pursue the latter anon: thank you for these very thoughtful thoughts, these words are helping me think through this, thank you me: sweet ,-{@ anon: stephen you were in one of my recurring dreams last night. all of my recurring dreams involve me and someone else running from some beast, most often a t-rex tho the significance of a t-rex im unaware, im certain its some metaphysical strife triggering them. i remember this one specifically taking place in a french castle. you and i were in a vicious cycle of searching up ladders, through clear, starry corridors and towers, both for a quiet place to talk and an away from the inherently harmless yet disruptive dinosaur. i remember hearing the paradise lost-like (in the reason that milton gives for why satan fell from heaven) verse from a sentridoh song repeating during the dream im so jealous of jesus. cause all to the world he could be. everybody wants to dance with jesus, nobody wants to dance with me. it seems slightly ominous but super interpretable to me because it was extrapolation of real surroundings. i really like that brains are able to do this. how would you interpret it? me: um anon: ? me: reading that part of paradise lost um anon: um yes um me: im composing a response

anon: exciting me: i wouldnt say interpret, it seems metaphysically accurate... my initial response was i think it means that humans are fucked, but im thinking more about it and how reality settles, i think the metaphor is a sort of resonant theme in my work, i have a part of my book ive been considering setting in versailles, with a dragon (a genetically altered reptile made to seem dragon-like), i think this is something resembling, vaguely, confirmation that... im going to have a lot of influence over how people, in the future, talk/think/understand reality... but that... im not going to be remembered accurately... or by what i wanted to convey, overall... seems like an omen... like... that ill have the amount of influence over humanity that will accrue into a beneficial augmentation of how they process things... but that me, the person, is doomed to obscurity because of humanity not wanting to acknowledge its resilience to existing tropes... essentially meaning that my awareness of whats actually happening will be transferable, but not acknowledged, due to the preoccupying force of the still reptile-like part of the brain i think it translates to i will be read, but i wont be discussed, i will be remembered, but it will be a virtual memory, not one based in what i actually did or wanted to convey anon: ...

idiot gargoyle, come play with me cricket clicks and dog sirens, train moans im home again my family is a small pond and i am an ice cube the fog beneath the fog beneath the fog is where i live your mothers cats, unowned or operated time machines, neglected hello my small glucosic pearl, i swallow you, serotonin fountain i am sad for always but whatever, make me smile lets watch a video somewhere, there are so many ways we can do this now anywhere, voracious eyes: how life is just a video i am constantly removing dimensions from what it is that is inside me i hold you and forget again bile and blood and piss so complexly between us, ignored lets sit and give each other tumors, shining while the moon erupts the warmth beneath the warmth beneath the warmth is where i find you watching giant steel and oil caterpillars wail across the earthen mound, mannequin wolves summon ghosts unknown to them, away and loud, small, gooey carapaces, flatly, move casual parabolas, fucking everywhere

life, times cursory fallopian tube, your grand, cosmic menopause may find us wholly spent jerkin it im jerkin it, jerkin it im jerkin it, cum cum cum cum jerkin it im jerkin it thinkin bout yo titties bitch thinkin bout yo pussy ho i dont give a fuck while my left hand is screamin bust a nut titties ass titties ass titties titties titties ass semen singularity, bam bam bam blow fuck a bitch, fuck a slut, fuck a cunt, im divin big black cock fuck my nigga dick, im thrivin suckin on yo titties bitch, suckin on yo swollen clit fuckin errythang in sight, what the fucks a condom hella hoes, spect a bitch, hella hoes, respect a bitch what the fuck is up wit dis, whoa what the fuck up wit dis im jumpin off yo titties bitch, trampoline o time n shit if you want my dick, fuck your reasons, hop on top of it screamin im screamin, screamin yo im screamin dreamed that i was semen what if im only semen betta get to gleamin, gold like pee in semen if a bitch could bust a nut, shit id be obsolete as fuck all i haves my dawgs my addiction bling nunrejsterd gun drownin in cum, im drownin in my own cum yo you drownin in cum, bitch you drownin in my cum cause im jerkin it im jerkin it, jerkin it im jerkin it,

erryday im fuckin uhp yall knoe i be shinin i dominate the ruining-things-that-were-progressing-well-until-i-imposed-my-misconceptions-of-howbest-to-navigate-the-situation-given-awareness-of-the-flagrant-likelihood-that-everyone-includingmyself-would-overreact-to-how-the-information-was-conveyed-slash-interpreted-given-my-emotionalstate-and-the-reactive-tendencies-id-previously-observed-in-the-other-people-involved game combined wid awfuhl timin

on writing i think that human capacity for memory is unimaginably dense, that ppls brains, bodies, DNA, and other, metaphysical and memetic tools retain what happens to us and the universe in general as a, most likely, i think, purposeless, but reflexively entertaining dance or interplay, but that there are emotional responses and instinctual, animal survival tactics as well as physical entropic laws and misreadings/reductions of observable data that prevent memory, and therefore fun from remaining consistently experientially tangible in ppl, and so i think transcribing thought is a sort of aesthetic game of attempting post-animal reticence and simultaneous transmutation of data, in nostalgic reaction to, and paradoxically inspired by, those emotions, instincts, and self-degrading processes i think at some point in the past ppl arose from a genetic supercomputer in computational reaction to the universe getting wound into a sort of potentially entropic, unobservable knot, and have been trying to understand the mechanics of the knot, and that language and technology are extensions of genetic and neurological attempts to remember accurately while also attempting to increase the overall entertainment value of being, and that the grander, more absurd the interpretation, the more ppl w access to it will feel inspired to try to solve that absurdity, resulting in enjoyment and perpetuation of that form of transcription i try to focus on the process of writing and view expectation as a sort if glitch, assumptions seem like one of those instinctual behaviors/reactions that inhibits being from seeming fun, but i feel obsessed w how ppl react, i usually feel over it when i finish working on something (including this idea/paragraph... lol...) i dont think theres such a thing as intrinsic value, that that idea is maybe an emotional misreading of experience, i try to dissolve any message i may feel compelled to convey bc ive observed how moral/ethical messages tend to perpetuate what theyre reactions to by mimetically empowering them i think, as a writer, im reacting to frustration re how often i feel ppl seem to misread things based on their prejudices and fears, i view myself as an observer to a degree, but mostly bc, i think, active participation in society seems unnavigable and life-denouncing currently i think i feel something resembling shame for how i behaved and viewed things previously, and am sort of manically attempting to resolve or offset ways in which i feel aware ive misread i rhetorically want ppl to TREAT WOMEN BETTER and to be aware that u r what u h8, but also

want to maintain detached awareness that im as much a part of the memeplex/memory bank as anyone/thing else, i want to have fun playing in/with reality too, i dont think i view my position/preoccupation as particularly unique except for how i choose to convey my experiences and the aversion i feel to what others accept as normal, appropriate, and necessary i think im attempting to make an attentive/poignant/nuanced contribution to the non-narrative supermemory thing while avoiding behavior i view as destructive/restrictive wrt its development, or something

on patriarchy western obsession w resolution seems, to me, like what inspired and perpetuates restrictive/reductive institutionalization of memory to physical modes (e.g. possession, written language, religion, politics, money, reduction of love to a small group of geometric symbols and one, extremely vague word), and that, by exploring the world, white ppl, or, more accurately, in my view, chronically afraid/guiltstricken/self-hating groups of ppl, expressed an earnest desire to cure themselves, but continued resorting to setting goals and trying to fix everything which resulted in socially conditioning and infecting the ppl they [subconsciously...?] sought insight from, which seems to have perpetuated the guilt and self-loathing, caused ongoing cycles of PTSD-like behavior and currently prevents them from ever realizing that a potential cure is goallessly integrating w everyone else, which seems hilarious to me... conquering as a sort of cannibalization (this is a theory, no facts to reinforce it rly) at one point i viewed hipsterdom as a move in the direction of goalless integration, but now hipsters seem to be resorting to similar glorification of the other (e.g. beyonce, kanye, tao lin, lil b, gucci mane, obama, ai wei wei, the dalai lama, trayvon martin, etc) in a sort of exhale in the respiratory cycle of that same compulsion, trying to one-up and/or sanctify and constrict an exclusive aesthetic instead of openly recognizing the self in every other type of person and continuing to encourage new types of aesthetic every culture does this, i think, but the resolution-centric mentality of the patriarchy seems, to me, to power the system, idk... terence mckenna posited that humans used to be more orgiastic and werent always aware of lineage/pedigree, but once ppl started moving north in smaller groups, it became obvious that sex = baby therefore baby = 50% mine therefore my baby my wife therefore my family ~ my land, etc, until it got out-of-control in search of possessive resolution, while the rest of the system is still like errything is errything, wtf u tryna prove bruh? felt distinctly aware of this behavior in myself as a teenager and am trying to encourage constant reassessing of possessive behavior in myself to, i think combat it, or dispel it rather, bc i dislike seeing women and alt systems of thought go ignored or dismissed or be worshipped or destroyed seemingly bc of a cycle of reactional sympathy and apathy, both of which seem like ideas/misreadings of something more grey not actual emotions

i hate u all imagine back when the word hate still meant love, 10 mostly forgotten half-minutes from now, the intense reaction you have to these words, this perceptual reset, bisecting your life, isi implore you, imaginethe same as each other intense stimulation, each halt in perception, each tightening string, nausea, warmth, your skin quickly tingles, your heart palpitates, this happens so fast, you cant change or stop it, youre searching, redundant, for words to react: i... you think first, ...feel... you think second, ...intense... probably. what it is you believe, how you think youre reacting, the plastic illusion, the panic, the push, a blunt call to action, preset by desire or memory or time, is all just one thing, a grip of, attack on, a twist of the senses, a whip still left over from animal us, i hate u, i love u, laugh moan cry contorting, its all out of focus, nothing makes sense, the inside of your head, chest and stomach all swirl, the impulse is either to love or hate back, to feel good or bad, to reach for another, to balance the offset with the fulcrum of why? why? whats the reason? why? what does why mean? why? what should i do? is this good or bad? i dont know, i dont really think anyone does, i dont earnestly hate you, youre me, whom i like, i dont think i hate anything that im aware of, theres no reason i did this, nothing to discern, if this upset you, thanks for still reading, thanks for your self, your life, and your time ,-{@

i sometimes think its funny to be this jesus thing this compacted tube of flesh that can just spout these words this language, that, if learnt could fill us like a baby but some times its deeply saddening im in a trans stilly hypnagogic from a sleep thing where i was woken by a non-thing telling me to write these words to post this poem for no reason thats the reason, im sorry it seems fucked or illogical the entire message is that she said, i know what its like to be dead and that another thing like me said this from an overtone of what time sometimes looks like from beneath a wave between a wave just for me, now, for no reason to me from a music (music being an adjective) friend-like thing i knew until a few days ago im speaking for the nothingness when i say i recommend this song

s theory the function of the strings or fractal energy slips that affect matters appearance as its currently expressed can be seen reflected in in the function of all known forms of matter spiral galaxies are probably the most apparent due to their size and variation the slips can exist in any dimensional state, meaning they can occupy any position on an x-y-z-etc imagined axis, however, in the universe in which humanity is expressed, they prefer to align in a t shape, but are not incapable of interacting in any direction the slips themselves resemble strings except that each string is the same as every other string, there is no end to each string, rather they are all expressly the same string variably expressing its inability to touch itself the slips allow the illusion of motion and time by warping into an s shape at an apparent central fulcrum, wherein law or the concept of logic breaks down correlative to the increasing tension and resonant frequency accumulating at the slips center at some point, when the stress from the tension has reached critical flux, the ends of the slip invert, causing the illusion of motion there are three or four rules that govern the slip fractals: a slip never comes in contact with itself and is incapable of performing this action, inversion occurs and therefor concludes /before/ the slip snaps and never evenly, due to the first stated rule, and finally, the center fulcrum of the slip defies physical and linguistic meaning at a rate that increases proportional to the warping of the slip until reaching critical flux Sent from my iPhone

Stephen Michael McDowell (b. 1988)