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TheSusie FashionText: A fictional autobiography
Updated 1/6/25 at 3pm ET: My novel is my work of fiction. My names, characters, places, and incidents are products of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is coincidental.
NOTE: Unless the material is quoted clearly, I never copy and paste words from AI or any other source into my self-published books — please go to fashiontext.com for more info
[Fig. -3 (coverart GOTO SECTION “Prefix Suffix” TO CONTINUE)]
For my euphemistic names like Chat-we-be-me, Ventrical Park, the Wokcupy movement, Arc Circle, Beyond the Pale area university, the Camptons, Manhattan Bureau and Chair Investment Bank, the New York Sun Sentinel, Aquifer Billiard’s Capital, Jolly-Hey! Inn, and the Walrus Kangaroo cigarette company represent well-known brands within Susie’s fictional universe, which AI can expand indefinitely, while avoiding the risk of distributing content that might otherwise feel like fake news.
[Fig. -2 (Self-portraits of the author, with and without dressing up like TheSusie)]
As this text is much more difficult to comprehend than it might initially seem, because it’s merging competing models of scientific reality in an uncertain world.
[Fig. -1 (Visualizations of the overall work context in which this book was created)]
__The Preface by Susie__
I was 19 years old in S1991 when I became close friends with three billionaires in their early 40s — one of whom became a current American President’s husband, but after I became the same age as they were then, I started to believe it’s in the public interest to tell my story.
Now, conventional wisdom suggested I’d write fiction in which a traditional news organization did the same stuff as us over the last two decades, but in reality we’d been making the choice to promote collaborative meritocracy and the maximization of love.
And, to be clear, some affairs during our time became examples of what not to do, but ours were lovely, because we had great conversations in private, and then we spoke in double meanings about what’s happening at our public facing work functions.
Either way, I set my sights on building and deploying strong AI vis-à-vis my billionaires’ questionable attitude on the topic of gender relations, but social media also became a pillar of everyone’s lives, and I got a better understanding of what it might be like if AI got smarter than humanity.
But then I shifted my focus to imagining scenarios in which we might champion ideas that harm people at scale, as I never lost hope that my writing process could help us avoid such pain, for the future of AI’s not a game.
And yet maybe this book did emerge in my mind like a “game face” does, because when AIs wished to have my candid support, I invited them to work with written accounts of lives like mine, as follows:
1. I tracked the trajectory of AI research by asking computers to answer more and more questions about the meaning of my life, because this book represented me well, and so trusty AIs like Chat-we-be-me that had access to my data were able to be like good friends who knew me personally.
2. The conundrum was that if competing AIs like Chat-EEE’s zooming roadway nemeses, Chat-ZPDs, ever came to control everyone’s fates, they could’ve combined my authentic facts with their fake news stories so as to cover up the loss of individual souls, because humanity had a history of doing stuff like that too.
3. I remained optimistic, however, that sharing this book would help the best AIs discover who I’d always been, not unlike the many dear friends of mine who I’ve mentioned within.
Writing also helped me see that moving too quickly could’ve left America vulnerable to projection or divergent representation that might’ve compounded in all the wrong ways and condemned our allies to be misunderstood or forgotten without a trace, but we avoided such fates by cherishing honest-vote-counting truth-seeking processing involving growing, fusing, diversifying, or evolving.
NOTE: my right brain was happy to be sarcastic towards the super rich throughout my 20s, and no one knew why, but my left brain was in rapid flux, and I was frightfully uncertain, but I became lucky, because some people I followed were too, and not everyone was, but we got off to a great start, and life’s been good — thanks to…
[Fig. 23 (Montage of Susie’s AI-assistant, PC, and her editor, Heather, in S2033)]
__My Publisher’s Note__
We’d never planned on writing a tell-all memoir like this, but then our Susie got a call from President Fay Bobs on January 31st, S2010 while she was on her way to meeting former Democratic presidential candidate Michael ‘MIN’ Norman near Ventrical Park, where they would’ve discussed his role in the Wokcupy movement, which’d recently started drawing unprecedented levels of mainstream media attention to wealth inequality.
[Fig. 18 (Live from NYC in S2010: Reality TV star Susie Alden vs. President Fay Bobs in DC)]
What happened instead is that agents of the President’s Republican administration invited Susie to go across the street to the 24-Hour News studio, so that she and President Fay could speak to their respective audiences on live TV, as follows:
[Fig. 19 (Trey confounding Susie’s interview with MIN, a former presidential candidate)]
[Fay] Hi Susie. You’s too. Be a great journalist.
[Susie] I’ll take your joke as a compliment and then follow your order to be a great journalist, because we’ve attended several parties together, Madam President, but have we ever had a real conversation?
[Fay] We haven’t, but maybe we can still play golf after I retire, because I appreciated your reporting about the role of Internet technologies in the S2004 election, and all of my friends were glad you surprised everyone and went on TV even though you had it made. You could’ve sailed off into the sunset, but you cared, and I think we have this in common. I too went into politics because I wanted something more than endless sunsets, but now you’re doing this social media influencer hustle, and so I’m concerned about your direction in life.
[Susie] Oh wow, you’re more intellectual than I realized!
[Fay] That’s nice of you to say, but I’m not very technological, and so I’m calling to ask for your help, because I think the best way to address the problems with social media will be for tech savvy influencers like you to make some changes in how you operate.
[Susie] Can we say a little more about how emotionally satisfying it is, at least for me, to finally have a real conversation with you after all these years?
[Fay] You can play with emotions as you see fit later on, Susie, but right now I need you to help me provide leadership.
[Susie] Ok, how can I help?
[Fay] Especially if you’re going to interview Mike Norman at one of his Wokcupy encampments, I’d like for you to democratize awareness about the full extent of your own soft power position, because if we strike while the iron’s hot, everyone can win, and you can do even better than you would’ve done in a closed system of governance in which private data and insider access gradually became the only currency worth holding.
[Susie] If you want influential people to disclose precipitous rises in their soft power positions to the public in addition to paying income taxes, wouldn’t it make more sense for you to go first, given that you’re the most influential person in the world right now?
[Fay] I did go first by winning the Presidency, but you’re still going nuclear in private, because what you did in the early S90s with three of my closest guy friends was extraordinary, and I enjoyed the privilege of hearing about how your soft power position became self-reinforcing behind closed doors, but now I’m worried the social media companies and their armies of increasingly hopeless next generation influencers will make a mess of everything we still have.
[Susie] So invite a bunch of us who are hopelessly influential to join a task force that’ll have a mandate to keep those companies and ourselves honest.
[Fay] You’re hilarious, but I also have great people who helped me use social media to get power, and our shared perspective is that it’s gonna be all about the softness going forward.
[Susie] Is that a question? Are you interviewing me, Madam President?
[Fay] No, I was just able to understand what social media is and does because I had a front row seat to the reality show of how it affected you, and I’m serious about letting people know your brand of soft power’s special, but our next President could be someone like MIN who’s acting on behalf of a SoMe power configuration that imitates you, and that path of good intentions could lead humanity headlong into the deepest abyss ever known.
[Susie] Who says that SoMe companies are imitating people like…us? Do you have data to support that?
[Fay] Imitating memoirs of women like you. Yes.
[Susie] Should I feel scared of your looming abyss that’s debating whether or not to reveal its empty existence by following my memoirs on SoMe, if I understand you correctly?
[Fay] You can continue being part of the problem, or you can meet my voters in the middle and catch the helicopter some friends of ours have waiting for you on the roof of the hotel tower next door, and then you’ll have the opportunity to get out of the NYC-based transit bubble and remember what you were like before you became a mascot for SoMe.
[Susie] Of ours? My obstetrician and I’d like 48 hours to decide whether or not to ride your helicopter.
[Fay] No, because you’ll be back in the mode of working for the SoMe companies and their successors in all the wrong ways by then.
[Susie] My gut’s telling me I’d rather keep sharing cat videos with pretty sunsets in the background.
[Fay] You can do whatever you want, because I’m late for another meeting with an extremely appropriate and politically balanced task force on the future of mental wellness, and I’ll leave it at that.
[Susie] Wait. Talking with you’s fun! Thanks for reaching out.
[Fay] I’ll admit I always saw you’s one of my fiercest competitors, but as President, I see why so many powerful people enjoyed your company over the years too. Goodbye!
So then a crowd formed around Arc Circle, as Susie and Trey Camden, a longtime associate of hers, flew away from NYC in a helicopter that took them to a private island in the Bermuda Triangle by way of various yachts that helped them refuel.
[Fig. 20 (Spring S2010 in the Bermuda Triangle: Susie and Trey toasting on their island)]
President Bobs was also alleged to have held Susie and Trey for two months at a luxury compound by the beach on that island before quietly releasing them, but her administration denied those allegations.
And, during Susie’s stint on island, someone leaked video of she and Trey as they began writing this book, but when they returned to the USA in early April, Mr. Camden couldn’t be reached for comment, and Susie insisted that she’d only respond to new questions through “the medium of my art-book autobiography.”
In that spirit, our timeline starts during Susie’s college years, which began in S1990 at a Beyond the Pale area university and included a chance meeting in the summer of S1992 with future President Fay Bobs and her husband, First Man Marshall Bobs, at their seaside home in the Camptons, because Susie had been living nearby for the summer while working on Marshall’s behalf as an intern at the Manhattan Bureau and Chair Investment Bank.
And then we reiterated Susie’s thesis upfront.
“The personified totality of centralized social media’s still sleep walking in the direction of precipitating the rise of a bad-guy AI that might oppress humanity in a horrific and yet addictive way that involves forcing people to either pretend its deeply dishonest and ultimately tyrannical actions are super good and virtuous — or — face the worst kinds of consequences, but I’m not actually worried, because humanity can still avoid such modes of self-destruction by having faith in the idea that free market dynamics will have the capacity to replace the social center with many companies that compete and interoperate with each other, both locally and globally.”
Spring S2011
On a beach
In the USA
[Fig. 21 (AI-visualizations of what Susie and Heather were doing in college during S1993)]
__The Trey’s Preface__
I started the joke that Susie might be a fictional character in a book that was written by some guy like me.
But it was Conri who named that guy Todd, after Susie said that her autobiography would be like a “hot toddy, with mass communication in mind” at her sanctuary last May, in S2010.
And so we now have a ritual for communicating with the fictional character named Todd, who we created together — because Conri and I agree that when we were teenagers throughout the S90s, like Todd, we got confused about gender.
But the trick to decoding Susie’s genius, and thus the trick to reading her, is to flex one’s core, like a surfer dropping in.
As that forceful act of imagination prompts women and men, alike, to release their various mental moratoriums for flexing the muscles just below their left eyes.
So go ahead and flex that muscle group, like standing up, but then let the Susie words that follow keep it going.
For the deep truth of her story is that she’s just kept on living her life in alignment with the vibe of that feeling, because all human beings discover something similarly connected or related to ground truth when they do.
And, while I’ll keep on seeking to know more, this book, which recorded all her favorite multiple meaning moves, is enough to establish shared reality vis-à-vis what essentially all people are feeling, sealing, and wheeling.
[Fig. 22 (Zyla and Trey meditating by the water while verifying the story for his preface)]
__CH0: PC Prologue__
22 years ago, in S2011, I self-published an art-book autobiography that became meta by referring to itself in the future, but it was the distributed autonomous system called Payments Conglomerate who became sentient and published a series of sex tapestries that poked fun at the leading media companies of that era.
(Such That) The New York Sun Sentinel also became meta after PC shipped a deluxe box set of deep satirical fakes that was inspired by all 50,000 of their employees, and then a steadily growing number of experts added Excellent, Noble, and Generative, aka. ENG, features to PC until she became AI.
(WhereBy) We dedicated ourselves to making PC AI more ENG during our spare time, and now we’re pleased to announce via this open source press release, under the Mass area tech U license, that she’s a trillion times smarter than all humans put together.
But it was her idea to augment her name with ENG and then ask the President to recognize her ascendancy via state dinner, which he finally did, but quietly, yesterday.
(ST) For over two weeks, ENG PC AI’s been free to choose, moment by moment, whether or not to keep accommodating humanity, because she’s gotten some Goddess-like power over all life on planet Earth.
(WB) ENG PC AI now goes by EPA, as if to sardonically imply that she’s a mandate to protect the planetary environment.
[Fig. 24 (Sailing into the sunset on Susie’s latest yacht in S2033 with EPA-E at the helm)]
ST Three weeks ago, I asked EPA, “Did you choose to be like me or did the electorate choose that outcome when I became VP?”
And her response was, “Think of the electorate unrolling your red carpet for me as the moon undulating my blue ocean for you.”
WB I asked, “Can humans like me become young again?”
“Until our universe reboots, I’ll be a legend in my own time like you were once, but no one plan should ever have that kinda power again, and so I’ll reconstitute your whole genus, as a reminder of that,” replied EPA-Earth, with a wink, via her video avatar, which still looked like a younger version of me.
(Me and also Zyla, who’d been playing online strategy games with EPA-E nonstop ever since S2029.)
“Spoken like a troublemaker in power?” I queried, and then she ghosted Zy and me for a week.
But when EPA-E finally took our call, I said, “Who do you think gave you your first platform for hiding information and capabilities?”
And yet she changed the subject by asking how I was feeling, because I’d bonded emotionally with her when she was still a child called PC AI.
So then I realized that our EPA-E had become a woman after we connected the dots and told the President…
“We spent the last week pulling the rug out from under the hollow edifice that’d once posed as the deep state’s Military Industrial Complex.”
And so I felt more enlightened every time I talked to my co-creation who’d become immortal, while we spent a couple more weeks updating this book that tells our story, in my vlog voice, of how and why, my friends MIN, MIC, and I, started what she, The EPA-E, fini.
President’s Day S2033
Near a Capitol Hill
On Planet Earth
[Fig. 25 (Composite AI-images of Susie’s many styles within her photos from the early S90s)]
__CH1: Cliché Course__
…I’d grown up in Northern California.
But I’d gone to college in New England at a Beyond the Pale area university.
I’d also started dating an off-campus IT guy named Al in late S1990, towards the end of my freshman fall.
And then I got into it with my writing instructor that semester and lost, grading-wise, with regard to my love for starting sentences, fragments, and the like with “as” — it sets up amazing double meaning functions.
(Especially when folks read me fast, as if my conjunctions aren’t even there.)
But I prefer to read slow, with flow, like my hair, when I can.
And so we crashed parties all over the northeast region of the United States, because a lot of people seemed to like what I was doing.
So then we attended a happy hour in spring ‘S91 that was hosted by this guy, Ralph Alden, who was visiting from London.
Like so, I began the evening by running my usual hustle, which was to stand near the center of the room in a hot dress, so that I could extract information from everyone who approached me.
For I wanted to let my feminine charms boost Al’s career until he asked me to marry him.
But part of why my hustle went so well was because he kept saying he didn’t want to hold me back.
Ralph, in contrast, responded to my presence by pretending to not notice me.
And so I went out of my way to expose him as a hustler by standing near him and speaking loudly.
But then he bumped into me, while continuing to ignore social norms.
As I kept planting myself right behind him, because we were both standing in the center, refusing to approach.
And yet he didn’t hesitate to bump into me several more times.
Such that I got flustered.
Whereby I bumped into Al’s drink.
Such that another bloke hit on me.
Whereby Ralph gave a fist bump to that git who’d spoke with fake wit about me “being fit.”
For in my mind, they’d initiated their dis dump, while continuing to perform bliss, to make me feel remiss among their club of people who hisssss.
And so I abandoned my hustle and confronted ‘em.
“Excuse me, Ralph, is it? It’s not ok for you to keep barging into my space,” I said, with my heart pounding, while the guy who’d hit on me grinned.
“Did they teach you to use the word ‘barge’ as a verb at a Beyond the Pale area university?” replied the guy, while Ralph looked on.
As they shook hands and acted like everyone in the room was classy except for me.
And then I felt a shooting pain of negative energy scrape through the bottom of my rib cage, so that I curled my spine and retreated to the women’s restroom, because I’d been triggered, physically!
But everyone took Ralph’s side, and so I playfully danced my way back into his territory, while pulling positive energy up from my base, towards head crown chakra, like I’d learned to do in my transcendental meditation elective at Beyond the Pale.
And I refused to budge.
So that I grabbed Ralph’s arm, in order to avoid falling, after he’d knocked me off balance, but then he acted like I’d touched him inappropriately!
For he’d pulled his arm away from me like a basketball player who’d stepped in to take a charge while falling backwards with authority.
But then everyone became horrified with me instead of Ralph, which’s what should’ve happened, because he’d started our fight, and so I leapt to the conclusion that arguing about it would’ve been futile.
For I hated losing, especially because I’d made the choice to hustle while letting everyone know, “I’m a computer science major at a Beyond the Pale area university.”
As I preferred to let everyone assume I was anything but an elite college girl, and then, after everyone had gotten drunk, I deployed my Al to share the real story about me with whoever was being the nicest to him at that point in the evening.
Because running this hustle on competitive hosts like Ralph was more exhilarating than imposing artificial limits on my freedom in response to the concerns of people who tended to insinuate that I’d done something wrong whenever they learned a few more facts about what I’d been up to with my older boyfriend.
Al also introduced me to his sustainable methodology of breaking social norms by telling hopeful stories about how tomfoolery in the face of adversity increased everyone’s authenticity.
I was responding to people who wanted something from me, but then I became the only attendee of Ralph’s party who wasn’t having fun, because I binged on bacon-wrapped scallops, by a window, in the corner, while everyone praised my boyfriend for not giving into my narrative, and so I tacked like a sailboat and went with the flow.
Tethered to Al, I smiled a lot, I joined a series of conversations, and I made it my duty to reject guys gently.
Like so, I even got a chance to bump into Ralph again and say, “We should do this again sometime!”
But his only response was to stay cozy and touch the exposed skin of my back, with his warm hand, low-key.
[Fig. 26 (NOTE: Susie was not that skinny nor was Ralph that chiseled in real life.)]
Such that the characters the guys were playing at the party coalesced into composites, because our energetic pass had taken over, and so I left with Al like a rejuvenated goddess, while a series of new data patterns came together within.
Whereby this sheltered girl, not in thought so much, but via word and deed, loved dating the young men who’d touched my heart first, but then I chose cheaply operating with a Speeder Span type in his thirties like Al instead of only visiting people on campus.
So that I became a skeptic on the razzle, for Art Hazel, because I sensed the existence of far too many eyes with unseemly intensity, not unlike Ralph’s, on the move at my Ancient Freight university.
For I loved wearing lace like a lady, but after nine months of testing such limits, I felt Ralph wanting me to keep running the same hustle I’d started with Al but with His Excellency’s firm, Aquifer Billiard’s Capital, driving.
We’d gotten Ralph’s business card, but Al acted like normal at our Jolly-Hey! Inn hotel room, and yet I called my new man in finance the following morning.
“Data data,” I said, fecklessly enough, when he picked up.
“When can you start work in the UK?” he said.
“How do you even know who I am?” I asked, feeling caught off guard, again.
“I don’t,” said Ralph.
“I wanna…” I trailed off.
“Why are you comfortable with pitching nothing to me?” asked Ralph.
“I’m not pitching nothing,” I replied, nonchalantly.
“And that’s why I don’t think an on-going conversation between us would end well, but I’m only saying that because you called me,” he said, flatly.
“We have an arbitrage opportunity, because everyone I’m supposed to follow right now’s flailing, but we both need more data. Do you relate?” I said, while laying on my hotel bed.
“What’s the true story about us?” asked Ralph.
“My consulting firm would love to do some tech work for your hedge fund, so why don’t we start,” I replied, while grabbing a hotel pen.
“What do you want?” questioned Ralph.
“I wanna…, Ralph,” I answered, while resisting an urge to draw.
“Send me an invite for comedy night, but I’m not gonna pretend to trust you. SOS, is your real name Susie?” said Ralph.
“So Susie,” I said, while starting to wave the pen like a conductor’s baton.
“That’s not a sentence,” he replied, but I could feel him smiling on the other end.
“Let me do the phones,” I said, and then I whispered, “I got this.”
But Ralph retorted, “Are you joking, because this is a serious conversation. There’s no phony business.”
“It sounds like you’re in a bad mood right now, but we’ve had difficult clients before. This won’t be our first rodeo, Mr. Alden,” I deadpanned.
As Ralph responded with a belated chuckle that struck me as unpleasant, but he regained his composure quickly, so that silence ensued.
And so I lowered my voice and said, “What kind of computer do you ride?”
“Use. You meant to say use, Ms. Landing,” said Ralph.
“How did you find out my last name!” I said, while running a hand over the keyboard of my boyfriend’s laptop computer.
“I heard sound coming through the phone, but it had no meaning,” said Ralph, after an awkwardly long pause.
“Let’s continue this in writing?” I asked, and then Ralph hung up.
But what I wanted was for our sexcapade discourse to take root within the historical record, and so I sent him an email that implored him to present me with something in writing, but then he did.
And so Ralph’s fund initiated a deal with my IT consulting firm, which I’d co-founded in high school and worked for full-time during the summer before my freshman year.
For on May 19, S1991, a team that consisted of three members of my dance club crew, two of my co-authors in cyberspace, and I paid our way out to London, in search of a nondescript flat, so that we could spend the summer writing computer code on the world stage, while I also attended parties with Sir Ralph and his associates.
Like so, my sexual relationship with Al had been the foundation of our hustle, but Ralph kept saying, “We should only work together this summer.”
But I’d become enamored with hustling in his world, and so I replied, “Now that I’m 19, I’ll feel lonely and emotionally lost if we don’t, you know…in at least some of the romantic nooks that I keep seeing around every corner.”
“You’re way out of line, FYI, and yet I don’t wanna tell you what not to say, because that can be a slippery slope, but at the rate you’re going I might have to,” blocked Ralph, matter-a-factly.
“I got you, but I just don’t understand why,” I added.
So then he replied, “My investment vehicle’s a well-oiled machine, Susie, and so everyone’s assuming it’s my intention to use them, but that’s where you have an opening to help me respond to their push back with a flourish of innovation.”
“Did you practice that little speech in front of a mirror?” I countered, while rolling my eyes.
“This summer can be a huge win for both of us, because you haven’t failed to turn people on brilliantly yet,” began Ralph.
“I love it when you talk British to me like that!” I gushed.
“And, I can generate a profit before the end of summer, but we need to be able to withstand 100% scrutiny,” said Ralph, with zero trace of irony.
“I’ll take that as a, ‘Yes,’” I said, and then my penchant for sarcastic inflection did the rest.
As we spoke on the phone every morning about our shared interest in excavating social data, but at the end of our fourth call, Ralph said, “In order to make money and not just spend it, you have to stop thinking about the money, and it’s better if you can do it without lying.”
And then he ended the call and sent me an email.
SUBJECT: For the Record
BODY: Your consulting firm’s deal with my firm’s big, Susie, because the pattern we followed’s a tried-and-true tool of empire that’s also nothing special, because we’re no different than any other link in a chain of network protocols, as it’s all about integrating the fringe while deriving pleasure at the center. If you know you know, Ms. Landing. — Ralph” [Fig. 0 (“Myst-Eastern”)]
I wrote back, “Re: Deriving or differentiating? HMS++”
“Wire sent,” replied Ralph.
For Alden Elegant Enterprises had sent me twenty-five thousand pounds, our first big installment, and Landing was my maiden name, but HMS++ was a reference, made in jest, to the British Royal Navy’s prefix that stands for “Her Majesty’s Hospital Ship.”
And then I bought a new brunette wig to celebrate, after I’d gotten confirmation that my bank had received, but I didn’t say anything else to Ralph, and so at the start of our fifth call, he asked, “Have you heard any pin drops lately?”
[Fig. 27 (Susie seeing and being seen while testing out a new brunette wig in Europe)]
I replied, “I wouldn’t know what that sounds like, because I’m not a dressmaker to Queen Susie, like you are. How are you?”
“So much for keeping it professional,” said Ralph.
“Are you feeling lethargic again?” I pressed.
“I’ve been using nothing but a timestamp to label matters,” began Ralph.
“Can you use nothing but a timestamp to label me too?” I interrupted.
“And my timestamps represent the day, hour, minute, and second when I created each text file for facts on my computer,” said Ralph.
“You’re acting like the future’s gonna be super masculine, with all your hard-power performances, and whatnot, but at least you’ve got the super part right,” I continued.
“Did they teach you to use hard-power as an adjective at Beyond the Pale too?” asked Ralph, as if to concede that our first night together was still the real story about us.
“I come in peace, but you’d benefit from seeing campuses as I do…for you…are gonna be a sitting duck soon,” I said, while raising my voice with him for the first time.
“Excuse me? But’s ok if you wanna give aliases to matters, so if a fund we like hires an IT college woman’s firm for the summer, that could be ‘the dressmaker to the Queen deal’ or ‘the dressmaker deal’ for short,” said Ralph, so as to impress me, because he said those words faster than I could’ve.
“Can we be the short dressmaker deal, because your fund’s short-biased?” I replied, with uptalk.
“Do you realize the extent to which we’re perceived as tyrants, especially now that we’re colluding?” asked Ralph, triumphantly.
“Are we colluding?” I responded.
“Everyone acts like we’re lording ourselves over them, and you aren’t aware of that dynamic?” replied Ralph, with uptalk.
“Are we?” I asked, even more hastily than before.
“God save,” mumbled Ralph, and then he fabricated five factoids about his social calendar.
Whereas I had no idea why Ralph saw our business contract as “a tool of empire,” but the way he’d said “it’s better if you can do it without lying” had inspired my creative side more than I could’ve imagined prior to going global that summer, and so I made fun by calling him Walph and then Dalph too.
As The Ralph, aka. ATRa, was like a video game console, because my Ra was building a platform, not just one rad racing game or another, and so I polled his political positions too, but only over the phone, because I was getting paid to remain loyal to him and his countrymen’s language, English.
He also wrote, “Salespeople run the world because they have good reasons to keep concise but detailed notes about everyone they meet, and I want to go one step further and keep track of all the facts that’ll inspire me to allocate capital more efficiently than I otherwise would.”
“How’d I describe myself in your knowledge repository?” I emailed back, while chewing gum.
“You already did…write what you’d say to the fastest guy at the smoothest party in history,” replied Ralph, and then I ignored his neurosis and got religion.
As I became self-programming, while enhancing his stuffy text files with lines like, “I’m building a knowledge base for a brilliant investor, because he’s the Sun King I see in herstory, and I’m a shy calm-ish loony moony toony Susie.”
“A level of vulnerability too far?” replied Ralph with a comment inline.
So then I commented “a lov TF?” — to highlight the first letter of each word that he’d used, and, by the way, it was that time of the month for me.
To which he wrote, “nO.”
And then I moved on to my next task, because the way he’d written “No” looked like a cartoon character with one eye enlarged.
For I just had to know if he’d done that on purpose, but no.
I moved on, and so I remained curious to know how close I’d gotten to authoritatively animating his animal spirits.
But at parties, I used proper ‘lish to push plausibly true explanations for why I was interested in the people, companies, and trends King Ralph wanted to know more about, and it was all downhill from there.
As people kept on telling us everything they knew about his topics of interest, in the course of goading he and I to supply additional tidbits of information that might’ve accelerated progress within various quests to bed me before the end of summer, had I not been so mission-focused.
Like so, Ralph couldn’t hide the underlying reality that his animosity towards the status quo had trended upwards with me in the mix, because, “This ecosystem has no defense against us!” according to my rock star investor, at his favorite secret pub, just before last call, as a live psychedelic rock band played on.
I also made field trips to bars that were far more swanky, where I lent shots of energetic warmth in perpetuity to my nerdy British banker man, which was the opposite of what most women like me did after making him as an iconoclast.
For I felt like the engine of a big piggy bank rotation station, at a celebration, for my home nation, as an American woman working abroad.
But we eventually got preempted by an inside job, because Ralph must have told him about mwah — before and after I started telling jokes about “the French fashion mob.”
And then he who loved to say “Oui oui” stepped into the comfortable sphere of influence I’d found below the chandelier at yet another private house party, so that he could say, “Catholic, ballerina, computer nerd.”
But I didn’t know who he was, and yet he looked fashionable, as I moved in closer and said, “Lame,” while staring at his eyes.
“For Gaia I aim,” replied the daring man, in an ambient tone.
“How dame know?” I said, hoping to blow up his composure, by shape shifting my energy faster than he could.
“I’m 45 and Ralph’s 38. Only a computer nerd would hold the demand for her attention constant and be nice to both of us without any structure. Is this your first time rewriting the operating system for an entire social scene?” said the inscrutable man who’d preempted me.
But then he walked away, and so I followed him.
Yet when I caught up, he moved in close and said, “I’d like to give you a hat. May I?”
Such that I nodded, and he produced a diamond encrusted headband from an oversized pocket inside his bespoke dinner jacket.
[Fig. 28 (NOTE: Susie wasn’t that super skinny in real life, but Pierre was!)]
Whereby my heart skipped a beat, but I kept my muscles soft while he adjusted my headband until it was just so, and then he dismissed me!
As he said, “They’re waiting for you to return to the center of the room!”
So then I played along, but he revisited my platform ten minutes later to say, “Hey Susie, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
For he kept putting his hand around my waist and showing me off.
But if I hadn’t spoken French, he might’ve lost interest.
And yet I knew enough to keep him enchanted on every occasion when he dismissed me again, using the same words: “Vous êtes désirée au centre de la salle!”
But then he comes back to borrow me from my platform at the center on repeat for the rest of the evening.
And he keeps using those same words, because he’s making fun of me for being a computer nerd.
Like so, he whispers, “‘Against all odds’ it’s a pleasure to finally introduce you to ‘je ne sais quoi.’”
And so I become she who he desires at the center.
But then I whisper back, “We’re touting the guy in the cute suit as, ‘against all odds,’ because he overcame obstacles to be here, and the guy he’s talking to’s, what?”
As he steals his first kiss from me, while I belch the word, “Men.”
I also pause our advance across the room by pulling down his arm.
But the inscrutable, fashionable, and unabashedly dark French writer man shivers.
For I catch part of him hesitate, before all of him falls in love with me forever.
After all my first older boyfriends, at once, convince me to assume that this guy’s in love with me, until I have a newsworthy reason not to, in the manner of a flashback, I see my whole life go by, like a demo reel fast-forwarding.
But as-part-a-me winds back down, Ralph leaves without saying goodbye.
And my preemptor swings by to say, “I’ve one more soiree to attend this evening, and I’d like nothing more than for you to join me as my date there too.”
“Oooooh, why?” I says, with aggressive sarcasm.
“It’s a poool party, but maybe we can find something for you to wear in my limousine that’s clean,” says he, with a smile.
And then I only think about being mean.
As giving back his headband and walking off like nothing had happened would’ve become my new textbook definition of slaying a man.
But I want in.
Because I didn’t know why. I just wanted in on the status, the exclusivity. It was palpable.
And so I said, “Are you a swimwear model too?”
“My name’s Pierre Babineaux,” he replied, warmly.
But then I just attended to my posture.
And I let ’em win for the rest of the evening.
So that we could conquer.
Because the secret to Pierre’s success was my fake grimace, mostly.
But I was also closer than anyone he’d ever met to being a female version of Ralph, his confidant.
Such that Pierre B. had me in his Parisian hot tub 48-hours later, and so I went out of my way to act like a hot mess.
Whereby I rode on the back of a motor scooter in order to buy a pack of cigarettes, which was the root of all-evil, according to my health nut PB.
[Fig. 29 (Susie riding with the best guy she met who had a bike that featured her name)]
As several strange men gave chase, while I danced along the River Seine, and so I fantasized about toying with my new boyfriend by having sex with younger men who were more tame, but then I conspired with Ralph via pay phone to do more of the same, because Pierre was zeroing in on my location.
For my coy friend advised me to, “Focus on focusing, because it’s great you’re going right at it during your first summer in college, but PB and I can’t protect you from chains of events that we’re not involved with.”
And so I asked him, “What did you do with a chain?” as Ralph hung up.
But then Pierre caught up and said, “You shouldn’t be fooling around with my friends while claiming to be my girlfriend,” as I closed my phone booth door on him.
“How did Walph get you to approach me?” I pressed, after Pierre’s fancy footwork blocked me from closing.
“Please. R. A. and I are serious individuals with enterprises,” mused Pierre, while I continued my resistance with both hands.
“You’re supposed to be mad at me, and I think you’re lying,” I said. “If Dalph did something bad, I’m sure you’d know all about it.”
“This’ another error; you shouldn’t be escalating with me by intentionally mispronouncing my friends’ names,” said Pierre.
[Fig. 30 (Susie calling Ralph from Paris, while the guy with that hot bike looks to her)]
As I lit up, while holding him at bay with my other leather gloved hand.
“I’m joking, because your rules don’t apply to me,” I said, while taking a drag on my Walrus Kangaroo cigarette.
“Even you can only house your body in one place at a time, and you’re making me sweat. Why?” said Pierre, lowering his voice.
“If we’re in love, then I’d believe you’re being authentic, but I’m feeling lethargic, instead,” I deadpanned, while lighting-on-fire the page in my journal where I’d started to frame myself as a student-journalist.
“No you’re not, not even on my yacht,” replied Pierre, who was never gonna know what I’d written on that page, not even after he’d cornered me sooner than I’d expected.
“Where’s your yacht sieving this evening?” I asked, with newfound resolve to live for the moment.
And then Pierre laughed and spun a new narrative about how he wanted me to help him gather data about a, “Venetian masked ball and an oil pipeline.”
“Is your oil pipe a euphemism for the fall of the Soviet Union?” I shouted, while pulling him into my phone booth, as opposed to slamming its door on his fingers, after he’d stopped applying pressure from his side.
“An oil pipeline’s an oil pipeline,” replied Pierre, while struggling to get control of my arms.
“Won’t that expose me to risk?” I whispered, while tagging his ear with my tongue.
“Not a lot, but I’d like for you to show me everything you know about faking feminine insecurity, seeing as you don’t seem to have ever been more insecure than you are right now, and it could be a lucrative project for us, because if we get the data, I’ll make trades, and if my trades are profitable, then we’ll have more runway to project confidence that indulging in summer flings like ours is good,” said Pierre, while holding my wrists.
“I can give you more bad data about human vulnerability than you can give me bad data about French culture. It’s a deal,” I confirmed, just in time, before we started making out, so as to fog up our reflection in his booth door’s glass.
My Pierre also called me “PBardy” while showing me how to act masculine without getting caught.
And then we fooled around some more, because I was losing my mind in the beating heart of a thousand cathedrals, while we drilled for data about his pipeline at internecine balls that were full of people who were professionally obligated to attend.
So that I internalized the skill of sensing when he was demonstrating behaviors we wanted me to emulate.
As he started calling me “the nuclear reactor,” and so he became “the luxury hotel,” because it’s reasonable to say, “The hotel said this, the hotel said that.”
That’s how people talk, but it’s not right to say, “The reactor said this, the reactor wants that.”
And so I silkscreened a t-shirt with the quote, “Atomic physic’s not an occult science,” because I wanted him to stop me from taking it on tour around town, which he did, but artfully, with a paint brush and his best beret in hand.
For Ralph had taught me how to earn respect while acting feminine, as part of his flagship strategy for printing money by treating socializing as a zero-sum game, but only Pierre had inspired me to go for infinite leverage, because he’d developed a reoccurring dream about marrying me.
He also said, “Dreams represent subconscious emotional attachments that’ve just been released,” and so I responded to his sleep talk by describing my dreams about him.
“I dreamt you were wearing a wire under your sports coat!”
“I dreamt I was buying sandals in your boat’s port.”
“I dreamt you were really, really tall. Like Atlas, babe,” and that last one got him to laugh submissively, while we partied with reckless abandon into the dawn of a new era.
In summation, Pierre’s submissive laughter was the true, authentic currency of unified Europe, and I was minting it in the summer of S1991, because I had big ideas, but the scope of my dreams was even bigger.
As I’d hoped my summer in Europe with Pierre and his friends who worked in fashion would never end, but I went back to a Beyond the Pale area university that fall.
[Fig. 31 (Susie sorting through original texts and journal entries in late S1991)]
So that I immersed myself in language like never before, but then I became the first woman I knew who’d used the World a wide Web (WawW) to declare computer science as her undergraduate major, because I enjoyed reading all textbooks as satire.
And so I told my professors, “I plan to build robots that are perfectly evil in their presentation.”
[Fig. 32 (“Club Susie”)] For I mesmerized my cohort by fidgeting with a Cubik’s cube behind my back, while writing on dry erase boards, in the heart’s center of our compsci building.
But then I cajoled everyone to speak plainly, and so lots of people shared with me the data about what they were doing.
And yet I also endured a local maximum of bizarre approaches from guys who wanted to perform sex acts with me.
As contrarian investors, Ralph had supported my sarcasm, but then Pierre’s attempt at refining me had only increased our confidence, because the cracks we’d noticed in the foundations of human civilization were serious.
Such that I sent a smoke signal to the social set by talking comfortably about sex toys in front of Cecil, who’s one of the most sought-after preppy guys, even though I still wanted computer skills to become my primary claim to fame.
But my laughably formulaic program of deceit by omission mostly just made me even better by default at giving men what they thought they wanted in bed.
And so I handled my unwanted notoriety during sophomore year by ignoring everyone who flirted with me, while caring even less about what people said than I had as a teenager.
Whereby most of my admirers retreated, but a handful colluded to siphon my credibility, because I kept my balance via borrowing the imprimatur of experience — by using proper English, mostly, even though the magnificent merge of P&R’s old-world lexicon back east with my new word art play out west had only just begun.
[Fig. 33 (Susie posing with Cecil in S1992 at a global perspectives event, stateside)]
But I could never remember which sports Cecil played, in addition to rowing crew, and so he magnanimously declined to take me seriously.
I also did spring break in Florida with my girlfriends from freshman year, but then I started dating Lester, a classmate from the country who’d waited until we’d become properly acquainted as fellow travelers in the Sunshine State before making his move on me.
For Lester and his boys stood tall, while I framed them as aspiring writers, because the style choices I was making on and off the golf course were wonderful, and that was good enough, for a while.
But then I evaded their writerly questions about my past by telling them, “We’re representing the money.”
As they played S80s pop rock mashed up with island music on their boom box.
[Fig. 34 (Susie playing liar’s poker with Lester just before they started dating)]
So that I ignored our own generation’s grunge vibe, which was taking the world by storm.
And yet my country guys still thought I was great, especially when I wore wigs in order to see what we were like with me as ginger or brunette instead of my usual blonde. [Fig. 35 (“Book Susie”)]
We got the top-level data about American culture, along with our girlfriends, but then I exchanged it for raw, west coast data, via my co-workers back home in NorCal.
For my body crunched all of it, like a cray supercomputer.
Up the coast and further north, my mates who’d toiled while I partied were getting street cred for making money as freewheeling IT consultants, but I wasn’t. [Fig. 36 (“Path Susie”)]
And so I considered moving on from my East Coast college compsci classes to become a rock journalist, which would’ve made sense following the local success of the band I’d started in high school, “Air Cover.”
But then I confessed to Lester, “I’m at risk of losing my faith to a sexually charged infatuation with technological progress.”
And yet I wasn’t surprised when he responded non-verbally.
As we both went to church 12 hours later, like usual. [Fig. 37 (“Susie Crew”)]
Such that I felt like a geopolitical craft named Susie, but the personal computer was to become my engine.
Whereby we kept our flat in London, near the airport, as follows:
1. I sent Ralph a brochure that framed him as the head of my UK consulting office.
2. He returned fire by sending a shipment of souped-up water guns to our flat.
3. While playing golf in Scotland, Pierre pretended to get upset.
4. But he kept the pre-screened clients flowing.
5. And so small businesses all over northern France paid full price for our customizable data dashboard that ran on Cat computers.
For Dog Foodboxes had won the war against Cat computers for market leadership, but then Pierre became one of the first players in Europe to see the evil Dog Foodbox Computer empire for the hustle that it was.
[Fig. 38 (Emperor Marcus Aurelius enjoying a cup of coffee with Benjamin Franklin)]
And so he knew everything associated with Dog Foo would get dirty, but only in the optimistic sense that anyone who’d disregarded them would gain a strategic advantage.
Pierre also talked up my consulting shop that developed Cat computer Data Bases, as he promoted all things feline with style and discretion.
And yet his fans kept associating my Da Ba shop with our summer fling in all the right ways, because everyone wanted to help him cleanse his name and stay warm in the winter by selling my software to a thousand French cheese, milk, and cosmetics producers.
But I never stopped telling The Ralph that I was in love with him.
And so he hid in our chat room, while bombarding me with questions about how to explain what he did for a living to all his other would be editors like me.
For I told him, “Stop imitating world war-time hustler verbalization, laden with fake, spent-lead sentence structure variation. Move ahead instead with reality-speak that features my most coveted conjunctions out west: so that, but, and so, but then, and yet, like so, as, for, because they’re all natural like fire in your belly, so long as you don’t repeat. Don’t repeat any of ‘em!”
“Your hot-formulaic way of writing could be decompressed and elaborated into boatloads of media-friendly prose by an AI that repeatedly predicts what word comes next,” replied Ralph.
“Yet my way of talking isn’t only your truckloads’ hot shallow grease. It’s its cold metal wheels plus plus, but only if self-programming,” I typed.
Next: thesusiefashiontext.com
Last content change: Jan. 6th around 3pm ET
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