“In fact, I hated Loomis—let me count the ways. His imprecision and laziness maddened my compulsive instincts—his patchiness, the way even his speech was riddled with drop-outs and glitches like a worn cassette, the way his leaden senses refused the world, his attention like a pinball rolling past unlit blinkers and frozen flippers into the hole again and again: game over . He was permanently impressed by the most irrelevant banalities and impossible to impress with real novelty, meaning, or conflict.”