“I was trying to find Sheila. I wanted to leave or something. I finally get to this like, big decadent bedroom, and there’s Sheila and this other girl, Samantha, Sam, also a girl who worked for our agency. On the big bed everybody’s naked and Sheila is getting fucked by this dude. Another girl I didn’t even know was giving a blowjob to this guy on the other side of the bed. Sam, she’s also naked, is holding a glass bong and jumping up and down on the bed as the other four are having sex. And she’s just bouncing there in between them, giggling and hysterically laughing and falling over. Sheila sees me by the door and she’s literally having sex as she calls me over because Sam keeps falling on her as she’s getting fucked, and she’s like—‘Sam, what the fuck I’m trying to have sex here, like, Carmen, come get Sam.’ So I like have to grapple this laughing girl between these people having an orgy, get her to put the bong she’s waving around down, and everything just smells like sex and sweat, you know, and this guy is like literally coming on the face of the girl next to me. At one point I fall over on the bed and land like right near Sheila’s snatch so that I could smell the wet plastic condom with that, that acidic undertone. Hear everything, you know? It was just all bodies, all around me. Just all this flesh. And I . . . Sorry, this is probably way too much, but I was like, responding, you know? And at the same time I just felt like, disgusted with myself at that moment. Getting Sam out of there I nearly threw up in the bathroom as we left. Not because I’m a prude. I swear. It wasn’t the number of people, or the openness, or anything like that. It was that it struck me as inexpressibly empty. And leaving that party I knew that I wanted what was missing. The problem is with our whole culture. There’s no mind anymore, it’s all just . . . flesh. Just half of everything. Just the material, that’s all that anyone believes in. And not that there shouldn’t be the material aspect of life. There should be bodies and mechanisms. Engineering diagrams are useful, good. Computers are useful, good. Psychiatric drugs can be useful, good. But somehow the information age, it’s just body. Just syntax and mechanism. And we, humans, we’re not just mechanisms and syntax. Like, real sex, real orgies, involve minds. Because we’re something more. And we’ve forgotten the other part of us, the consciousness part of us, so everyone’s life is now some kind of half-life. It’s like the legend, I think it’s from Aristophanes, where humans used to be creatures with four hands and four feet and two heads and we all got split in two. And we spend our lives looking for our other half. That’s us now.”