Oh yeah.  College.  A college with a connection to the Internet.  In 1993, this was not as widespread as it is now.  This college, er university was a part of a state system and they had a state system network.  It was on this network, man I can't remember what it was called but it was based in West Chester, that I found gopher.  Gopher was awesome.  And then I found MUDS.  And then well my grades went to shit.  But MUDS to me were boring, even if I was talking to a actual people from Britain.  Pasty goth people, but people not from where i was from.  Somewhere along the way I discovered telnet.  telnet and talkers.  Based on EW-too.  That was in 1995.  I had joined a few, only two are still around today, one is active.  That one was based in Africa, then Denver, and then Pittsburgh.  Sometimes it was down for weeks at a time as sysadmins found people connecting to some weird port.  Thousands of people.  Yeah I'd shut that shit down too.  Eventually they found did find a friendly sysadmin at the CU Denver.

I chatted with a lot of people back then.  One of was the gal I mentioned in the last diary. She was a farm girl,and even more naive than me.  Cute too.  Then there was C.  C was also from Minnesota.  We hit it off.  We would chat all night.  We eventually started to talk on the phone.  She wanted me to to visit her.  I have no clue why.  I'm confident as hell at a telnet prompt I guess.  She sent me pictures. At one point she even sent me some rather risque photos of herself, in JPEG format.  I still have them somewhere.  She was cute, hot even.  She was I soon learned also married.  But not happy.  Funny, that's always the case isn't?  Then of course she had two kids.  The marriage I was sort of prepared to ignore, I was to fly out and she'd join me at the hotel all weekend, but the kids I couldn't reconcile.  So at least on my end things cooled off.  But I also kept things going as well.    No one is innocent in life, and neither am I.  But things did dwindle down and I think C was pissed off because she just wanted an out from the marriage.  I was not going to be that out though.

We stayed friendly but drifted apart after awhile.  A few months or perhaps it was a year later I asked how she was doing and she told me how she had gotten a divorce finally and how she was training be a good little slave for her master.

Apparently she was now convinced she was going to achieve happiness in life by getting deep into the BDSM crowd.  We drifted apart again and a few times I'd strike up a conversation and we'd chat and then if I'd log in the next day and not talk to her, or hint at chatting about the things we talked about in the past, she'd become angry and accuse me and everyone of using her for pleasure.  As you can imagine I didn't talk with her much at all then. 

She's still a member of that chat line, as am I.  I say hi, now and again, and she says hi, when she's around.  She logs on and idles for days at a time.  I sometimes wonder, if I had just went with my hormones and visited her a few times, would I have found a soul mate?  Or would I have found the C that wanted to be some guy's slave.  It's times like those that my arrogance kicks in and I think that I could have saved her, from whatever she was going through.

Next time, join me for a trip into the past, back to yet another chatline gal, this time from West Virginia. _{You thought the last two were weird}