"All the preachers are right, but the reason they’re right is why they’re wrong, too. Everything here is trying to sell you something. Lots of lights and whirligig suction to seduce you into throwing your energy into it—in the form of money. People mostly come here to buy or to be titillated up to the verge of buying. The tension between wanting to buy and the resistance to buying can give you a charge. That’s what I get into: I let it tickle my glands, but I hold back from paying into it. You know? Just constant titillation but no orgasm, because you waste your money or you get a social disease or mugged or sold bad drugs or something ... I mean, anything sold here is pointless bullshit. But it’s harder for me to resist tonight ... " Because I’m stoned. "Makes you susceptible. Receptive to subliminals worked into the design of the signs, that gaudy kinetics, those fucking on/off bulbs—makes you flash on the old computer-thinking models, binomial thinking, on-off, on-off, blink blink—all those neon tubes, pulling you like the hypnotist’s spiral pendant in the old movies ... And the kinds of colors they use, the energy of the signs, the rate of pulse, the rate of on/offing in the bulbs, all of it’s engineered according to principles of psychology the people who make them don’t even know they’re using, colors that hint about, you know, glandular discharges and tingly chemical flows to the pleasure center ... like obscenities you pay for in the painted mouth of a whore ... like video games ... I mean—"