Lyle's weight-room supplicants

Even the ten-year-old's imagination is a cartridge-deck. Kent Blott, too young to masturbate but pre-worried about it, conceives of his own future fantasies as "pornographic cartridges" that "run through his psychic projector" — the interior life already colonized by the vocabulary of screens and playback. It's a small, funny, telling beat: in this culture the mind isn't a place where images arise but a projector that runs cartridges, spectation so total it's become the default metaphor for consciousness itself. The self has been recast as an audience watching its own psychic programming.