Mainlining vanity.

The man was insane, thought Dennis. This was an investment-bank executive? He sounded more like a preacher working the inspirational-speaker circuit. He was on a six-way overdose of smugness, as if vanity-packed heroin needles hung from his every vein: as a Jew, he was Chosen; as a Calvinist, he was Elect; as a Protestant, he was in personal communion with God; as an American, his destiny was manifest; as a New Ager, he was one with universal Energy; and as a successful capitalist, he was the animal at the top of the food chain. Any one of those things was enough to kill you. This guy appeared to be mainlining all of them at once.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 4: Hoarding & Wasting. Work in progress.

Chinese Prices ALWAYS!

The names didn't matter. No one thought they did; no one thought about them at all. They were just placeholders, numbers expressed as proper nouns. Even the stores' names didn't matter. No one was bothered by the fact that Best Buy was as ridiculously hackneyed a name as Downy fabric softener or Ivory soap. It didn't matter. 1995 was long past the point where people took postmodern pleasure in mocking mid-century advertising literalism. It was the lifestyle associations that mattered, and the name that they were associated with was nothing but a handle, an icon, an empty plastic bucket. Coke could just as easily have been -- was, in fact -- Pepsi, Snickers Baby Ruth, McDonald's Burger King, Popeyes Church's KFC. Even Dennis' own employer's name was merely an unfortunate historical accident that no one paid attention to. It didn't matter if the founder's name was or wasn't Walton any more than it mattered that that long-dead man's long-dead company had once proudly wrapped its stores in banners that read "100% Made In America." Buying American was a lifestyle myth once profitable to market to; no longer. Buying at Chinese Prices Always took its place. One day it too would die. It wouldn't matter if the sign out front said Walton's Five-and-Ten or Shanghai Mart or Accenture Global Tradeplace LLC; the candy bins would always be up front. Across the parking lot, the Fernglen or Glenlake or Lakewood 12 would keep shoveling out ever-larger grocery bags of popcorn and hogsheads of fountain soda and keep tearing out seats to accommodate the wheelchairs of those whose ankles couldn't bear their body weight; on every corner, the McTaco Burger Churches would keep slinging ever-larger quantities of ever-cheaper salt-and-sugar delivery devices and keep adding additional drive-through windows for its ever-growing base of customers who were too ashamed to, or physically incapable of, getting out of their cars.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 3: Gluttony. Work in progress.

Sorry, Walter Benjamin.

Sure, computer-generated porn makes perfect sense. Even considering the advanced state of modern medical technology, there are still physical limits to the human body. Aren't there? Surely there must be a few left. Either way, there aren't any limitations to the virtual realities that computers can generate -- in three-dimensional high-res, with naturalistic shadows and lighting and photo-realistic textures bit-mapped onto every surface. Here breasts are bound by no physical limits of saline bags, here models need no quarter-inch of makeup, here photos require no retouching, here chainsaws are used as dildos and no one's the worse for wear, here every girl is fourteen and has eyes as big as saucers in fear and trembling anticipation, here every boy is not leather-faced and beer-bellied but handsome, young and cut, here children can be as young as you please and no one gets arrested, no one gets sued, no one needs anyone's permission or releases from models because there are no models and there is no anyone: there's nothing but 256 colors assigned to little squares arranged into a matrix, and behind that matrix the 1s and 0s that tell machines how to generate the matrix, and behind those 1s and 0s there's only more 1s and 0s, those of animation software packages and more machines, there is no human original, no aura, Walter Benjamin, no fragile bag of blood somewhere back there that could wash away the sins of mechanical mediation, no physical or legal limit -- no limit whatsoever save what the engineer can enable, what the designer can imagine and what the market will consume.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 2: Lust. Work in progress.

Fogs.

Tuesday rolls around and the marine layer with it, thick and damp and low, as if the Pacific were smothering the Los Angeles Basin in a warm, wet blanket. It's not the sort of fog you might find elsewhere -- not the icy knifing fogs that cartwheel down the streets of San Francisco, so animated and charismatic that you can't help seeing the faces of murderers in them, nor the static fogs of Massachusetts, monstrous banks hundreds of miles wide that silently materialize in place, not at all icy but just below the temperature of a human body, just enough to make you think that you can stay outside as the microscopic droplets of water on your skin silently suck the warmth out of you until you suddenly realize that you've lost core temp and it's too late, you've got a cold or something worse. No, the Los Angeles marine layer is more like an apology, more like the gentle Pacific's saying Sorry, you're about to get a sunburn, you'd better cover up. Or maybe You didn't forget what weather looked like, did you? But she just wants to protect you from the sun's harsh rays. She just wants you to be well-rounded. She doesn't want to ruin your day, so around mid-afternoon she gathers her gauze up from the city and takes it back out to sea to keep it cool and damp, returning you to your regular programming.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 1: Limbo. Work in progress.

Snap, Crackle, Holy Ghost.

A two-part message says conflict: one-two punch. It's in motion: left, right, left, right. A three-part message is stable, like a tripod. It's complete: it's got Snap, Crackle, Pop! That's the seed right there of every story; that's world literature in three words. Even the meanings, sounds and word-lengths (all three) fit: you slip into a snappy start; you crrrrackle through the development, as cracks open up in the story and things get crackin'; and then you Pop 'em in the eye, send 'em out with a kick in the pants, Biff Bam Boom! Earth, Wind & Fire? Three-cheese bagel. Blood, sweat and tears? Triple-Berry Blast. Past, present, future? Coats, soothes, relieves. Father, Son and Space Ghost? Triple-protection! Three bears, three pigs, three mice, three meals, three Stooges, three strikes; what a Breakfast of Champions. We Try Harder. Why? Just do it: ABC, RBG, that's how easy love can be. Veni, vidi, vici with a triple-blade razor. i'm lovin' it!

Excerpt from American Inferno, Prologue. A work in progress.