U9O.net: You and I Know.

[Link: Click here to read about 46 stories]

Note: I’ll be creating a new piece of imagery for each story arc. They will be done quickly, usually within a 20 minute period of time without retracing any steps. Much like the stories here.

Prayer
Dave, May 15, 2001 01:31 AM

Her eyes were downcast as she laid on the bed, staring at her reflection on the window, unconsciously brushing hair away from her face, and smoothing out the wrinkles on the fabric of my pillow.

Her mother complained of her looks when she was young, she told me earlier, with a smile, meant to be a joke, but even I felt such pain that I felt like a clown with a smile on my face that was not meant to be.

I looked at her reflection. Her looks were above average, her figure slim. Her face was more regal in a royal way than pretty, and her hair was smooth. Her breasts were firm, and her skin smooth. She smelled of lilacs and loneliness. Emptiness in the sunshine.

Nothing I could tell her would change anything, I knew. So I kept quiet, and in one of those rare times for me, I prayed for her.

sigh
Kazutaka, May 15, 2001 10:15 AM

and i wondered how long i could sit here without him.

i wondered why i let him go without saying a word.

i should have let him know… somehow… someway… any way about how much he meant to me.

and now, it is too late.

for so many years he allowed me an escape, to get away from this sad, sad, sad world. to get away from this hum-drum life i lead.

he will truly be missed.

now where do i turn? to a new author? do i just forget all that i was afforded by him? my hermetic tendencies are lost now. douglas adams, i thank you.

slowly dying…
Susan May 16, 2001 01:18 AM
I watch her silently…
Her back is turned to me…
I try to picture how I would tell her about my suffering…
And see her suffering with me…
How could someone ever turn their back on someone they love?
My pain will be her pain if I tell her…
What can I say to make things right?
I only see more suffering…
Our bond has already been broken…
Not by just one incident but countless others…
All built up into a structure of agony….
What am I supposed to do?
No more pain for her…
I’d rather not say…
I’ll only dwell within myself…
And suffer alone…

Return and Reflection
Dave Amerio May 22, 2001 09:30 PM
Turning our suffering into my own…
I dwell on these things alone…
She has left me to this misery…
Taking along my sanity…
But, alas I can move freely…
Without this chained feeling…
I know that I have lost…
But, at what cost…
The cost of joy…
Or was it the other boy…
These things I do not know…
I only understand that I must go.

I thought
Dave, September 10, 2001 09:43 AM

I thought about calling her, but I was too guilty to. I was an ass. I was a dirty slut.

So I didn’t call her, and she still remains a memory. I hope she fades away.

I hate him but…
Jenn, September 19, 2001 05:29 PM
I hate him but I miss him.
I waited for his phone call.
What do I do if he calls?
answer…hang up?
answer…act like i didn’t care?
answer…listen to his reasons?

I hate him but I love him.
He never called…
I’m left with nothing but memories.
Memories that I wish to erase.
Memories that we once made together…

The exchange
Dave, May 2, 2001 06:21 PM

“You got a cig mang?”, said the grizzled black man leaning against a waist-high wall made of concrete. He was wearing what would have been fashionable during the 70’s if it weren’t so torn up and oil stained. I peered at his shoulder and there was a small bloody wound. His face was heavily pot-marked and he had facial blemishes even though he looked about forty. He had lazy eye. He reeked of a cheap 40 ounce bottle of beer. But he looked sane. And his one eye that was looking at me was lucid and had empathy. i liked him already.

“actually dude, I do”. I did. I had just come out of the seven-eleven with a pack of benson and hedges menthol 100s. I don’t smoke. but today I guess i felt like it.

I packed it quickly, rapping the carton on my palm and opened it, tearing the metallic foil off and flinging it away. I took a cig and gave it to his out-stretched hands. I thought better and I gave him two more.

i put a cigarette into my mouth, and reached into my pocket for my Zippo. i realized i didn’t have it.

“Here, take this.”, said the bum, handing me a new Bic lighter.

“It costs more than the cigs I gave you.”, and I don’t have any money. I didn’t.

“Take it, I’d rather you have it. Life is ephemeral anyway. For me. A bic-lighter is something you can hold and keep. You have the pack, I don’t. You keep the lighter.”

“Thanks… If you’re sure…”

I got into the car and drove away before I started wondering how a 40 year old bum knew the word “ephemeral”.

I had the pack. He didn’t. So he gave the lighter to me.

I then remembered certain types of people destined for doom had lesions on their skin.

I turned my car around and went back to the seven-eleven, but he was gone.

bus driver
Soo, May 9, 2001 04:42 PM

One night after a track meet, I went on the late bus to get back home since I had no ride. The driver, a young Latino woman in her early twenties, and I were the only ones on the rickety bus. She seemed kind of lonely, and so started to tell me about her life.

“So what about college?” I asked, after we passed her old high school.

“Naw, I never went. I ain’t graduated from high school either. An’ it kinda sucks cuz I only had one more class to take, y’know?”

“Yah,” I said and nodded. I never even considered the possibility of not graduating high school. “So why’d you leave school anyway?”

She paused for a moment and said, “Well I got pregnant.” She stopped again. “I got my beautiful baby girl.”

She slowly told me her story. She had two daughters, and their father ran out on them. Well, she knew where he was, she said. But he wasn’t “around.” I got the picture.

“But my boyfriend right now, y’know, he’s good and he’s there for me. Even though sometimes he don’t pay the bills or nothin’.”

She seemed embarrassed by this fact, so I changed the subject. “Who’s takin’ care of your daughters right now?”

“My mama. An’, y’know, my baby girl’s first birthday is tomorrow and I gotta work an’ everythang…” She sighed.

“My babies aren’t gonna be like me. Don’ ever get pregnant too early, girl, cuz even though I love my girls, I wish I had them later.”

“But ya know what? I’m going back to high school. Soon. I’m gonna get my diploma.”

Her words seemed so futile, and I knew she thought she was destined to this life as a bus driver too. But she kept talking.

“Or my GED. Maybe take classes at junior college. Y’know?”

“Yah,” I said. I knew.

cheap, so cheap
Kyan, May 30, 2001 01:34 AM

In my mind, I recalled the recent conversation with you-know-who, and it really made me think. Not just a little, but not a whole lot — just enough to captivate me, eat into my sanity, and lodge dangerously close to my perception. I realized then, after wedging a small cell phone into the back pocket of my jeans, that I would ultimately sit on it and that would certainly not improve the quality of my phone.

I stood, and I thought, and slowly I forgot where I was. Blank gaze and lost demeanor, I phased in and out of conscious thought as my mind consistently pushed the rewind button on the conversation.

“Are you all right?” she asked with a genuine tone of concern, and that was the first time I saw her. She didn’t look like she should be selling “The Street” newspapers, but she had a bundle of them — freshly printed, stamped with a large red dollar sign — under her arm.

I don’t trust genuine human concern. I nodded.

An hour later, she and I were in conversation. How she had gotten there. How she was making such an attempt to crawl out of the hole she called worthless and pathetic. She had kids, too, and they lived far away, unbeknownst of all this. But I understood pride.

She didn’t try to sell me a newspaper, only a smile. I caught up with her after she left and asked to buy one. When I handed her a ten-dollar bill and received my newspaper, she began to hand me change, and I returned the smile she gave me and walked to my bus stop.

True story. I kind of miss that ten bucks, but I’m sure she’ll put it to much better use.

In early 2001, when I was at the stage completely caught up by the whole culture and mystique of the internet, I was able to somehow convince 41 very talented people, who were friends, acquaintances, and the like, to submit to various free-form stories which ran on a simple server side script on my flagship website “cynicworld.com”. It was a pretty advanced web site for its day, running multiple skins using server side html includes, and various perl scripts which automated the publishing of data.

I was merely a sophomore in college, but I had a wide ranging network to draw from: friends from high school, online friends, personal bloggers, etc. In retrospect, the writing was somewhat typical of the young, but on the whole, because of the quality of people I knew, it tended to be quite strong.

The web application worked like this: an author would start a story line, by typing into a form, and another author would add to that story line depending on how he or she felt. After a while, there would be a web of many stories that different readers (all word of mouth) could add to, with each thread of stories often with a common theme. After awhile, a lot of people had contributed to the stories in their different ways.

This was before blogs were very popular, and experimentation of various dynamic elements to the internet was absolutely new, and I found it completely compelling. In fact, I find this free-form type of blog very compelling, to this day.

After a few months of this, my server host had a meltdown (quite common, in those days), and shortly after, my computer hard drive had an unexpected failure that was caused by me and all the data was lost for a period of 5 years. It was only in 2006 that I spent the $600 necessary for a lab to retrieve my old information, and it was only today I was able to dig through the garbage and retrieve many of the stories. I tried for a few hours to get the old perl script to work with my new web server, but alas, it’s using ancient code that is no longer compatible. I was able to extract the stories into individual HTML files, which is composed of each story arc or line.

This is the first story line. There are a total of 46, many with multiple authors. In this first story line are my high school friends Shinah and my college friend Waylan, who I met through James.

Shinah was one of the first people I bothered to “contribute” to my free-form story application, and she obliged with an open mind.

Waylan was much easier to convince– he didn’t need any convincing at all. To this day he never does need much convincing at anything to do with experimentation in terms of the communicative arts.

[skchang at fas.harvard.edu]
April 29, 2001 11:33 PM

Fresh Start - Not so fresh mind
Wow, the first one to write on a brand new slated Cynicworld and I have nothing much to say. Why? I’m thinking about pornography and censorship and why pornography tells men to dominate women and tells women that they are objects to be dominated and they better f*cking enjoy it. Does it cause the power-dominance relation between men and women or is it a symptom of it? I don’t know; it’s late and I’m tired of thinking. I want a hug. And a cute, black puppy.

[editorial note: my family was breeding black pugs at the time, and i was boasting to shinah at how a black pug was a girl magnet]

[skchang at fas.harvard.edu]
April 30, 2001 05:30 PM

Spring
You know you’ve been living in winter too long when you look up at the trees everyday, watching the buds’ progress as they slowly swell and finally uncoil into delicate new-green leaves. It’s the prettiest sight when it’s just rained so the trees’ bark is stained a deep brown and the pinkish-white blossoms stand out against that darkness. The greener it gets, the happier you feel. You even find yourself encouraging the soft blades of grass that are finally pushing through the hard-packed earth. As bad as Boston winters are, spring has never looked this gorgeous.

Waylan
[TuShort007 at yahoo.com]
May 1, 2001 03:03 AM

A Cleansing

for a single night, the sky unleashed a downpour unlike any other, drenching and flooding all in its path, leaving nothing dry in its wake. and for a single night, it seemed alright.
It seemed fine, even noble for nature to wash itself, to fully cleanse itself, removing and purging all impurities.. to attain a newborn balance; perfection.
4/7
for a single night, everything in the world seemed to be in perfect equilibrium. the moon shined brighter than ever before (99% visibility in fact); the skys were curiously clear, serene, and tranquil after a night of harsh rainfall; trees still, grass damp, the night completely peaceful… flowers and colors more briliant than flowers and colors had ever seemed. And a smell that can only be described as “fresh,” “clean,” and “new.”

It was as if the world itself had come alive again, reveling in its new appearance. Like a flower blooming from its slumber within a bud, the night had sprouted anew. Like a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly, nature had managed to evolve itself, if but for one night only.
Glorious, beautiful, picturesque, natural, breathtaking, relaxing, surreal; perfect.

** This is what I believe to be the perfect night, one that follows unexpected sudden showers. Akin to a much needed shower after an overdrawn physical ordeal, and the cleansing of the body as a result, the result following a rainstorm is the cleansing of the earth. from this, nature becomes relaxed, rejuvenated, and balanced as a whole. everything is in equilibrium. **

• On my way to red pearl kitchen for Krystal’s birthday. #
• T.G.I.M.F.F. #
• is it wrong of me to like the style.com app for the iphone? #

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