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author noting that having sex four times a day seemed hardly excessive. He adds:
“I came to regard career—^hell, even paying the rent!—as a trade-off against sexual
adventurism, and eventually I had to do something to limit my hedonism” (56).
Michaels ends up invoking a set of rules that insisted that he view other aspects of
daily life as more important than “getting laid.” Probably the fullest measure of his
acceptance that he played a role in his own fate emerges in the following passage:
“Just image how much sex there was in those 1970s that you had to make rules to
distract yourself in order to get anything done: the statistics are just staggering!
Surely, such opportunities arise only rarely in human history—and are bound to be
abrogated by epidemic disease” (57).
Sex Death Enlightenment
In the mid- 1980s, Mark Matousek was an influential writer and editor at Andy
Warhol’s Interview magazine. He hobnobbed with celebrities, attended trendy
parties, and enveloped himself in the ghtz and glamour of the New York City elite.
But with friends and acquaintances of his dying from AIDS, the shallowness of his
work was becoming clearer by the moment, leading Matousek to re-evaluate his
life in the pursuit of something more spiritually meaningful. As Matousek put it:
The fist in my gut was getting tighter. Life at Interview went from
maddening to intolerable. With matters of life or death closing in around
me, the demands of the magazine seemed more ridiculous than ever. My
pleasure at scooping my colleagues, bagging the big name...was gone
for good. Let Kim Basinger give her cover to Vanity Fair, or walk off the
end of the Brooklyn Bridge — it all felt the same to me (68).
When the feeling of hollowness became too much, Matousek quit his magazine
job, survived by taking freelance assignments, and embarked on a quest for spiritual
fulfillment that involved experimentation with Zen, meditation, yoga, kundahni,
and even a twelve-step program for sex addicts (188-91).
The stakes for achieving spiritual enlightenment increased dramatically when
Matousek was diagnosed with AIDS in April 1989. Following his diagnosis,
Matousek veered between terror, numbness, “and the sense of this as a holy
opportunity.” He notes: “The terror burned me, caught me off guard, made
everything urgent. It also pushed me on the spiritual path. I was grasping for answers
as a way to save my life — if not my body — something to hold on to as the water
slipped over my head” (169,172). Matousek’s memoir. Sex Death Enlightenment,
is an account of how the viral bomb ticking inside him redirected his spiritual
journey, trading in New Age fads for a personal quest to find a more authentic