Erdedy waits for the pot to arrive (pp. 21–22)
It made his thoughts jut out crazily in jagged directions and made him stare raptly like an unbright child at entertainment cartridges—when he laid in film cartridges for a vacation with marijuana, he favored cartridges in which a lot of things blew up and crashed into each other, which he was sure an unpleasant-fact specialist like Randi would point out had implications that were not good.
Context
The rapt-child posture is the book's baseline spectator, sketched here as a symptom. Loaded, Erdedy watches "raptly like an unbright child," and what he wants is pure impact — things blowing up and crashing, spectacle stripped of anything that would ask something back of him. The tell is that he already half-knows the diagnosis ("implications that were not good") and reaches for the crash-cartridges anyway. The passive viewer isn't a person the era produces by accident; it's a posture people choose toward, a way of arranging the self so that nothing is required of it but looking.