☆ STARSAILOR ☆

A few weeks ago, I was sitting crosslegged on my couch beneath the glow of a galaxy light and watching a movie while stoned to the bone and drinking black coffee, AS IS MY WONT. It was four in the morning and I had been imbibing liquids both hot and cold for several hours. Just then I felt that old familiar feeling well up deep inside me, and so I paused whatever pretentious French thing I had on and got up to get it over with. In the dimness of my bathroom I let loose with a fire-hose blast that would offend the taste and decency of any reasonable and law-abiding citizen. Such was the force of this stream that I could have bore a hole through the hull of an aircraft carrier from one end to the other. You ever take a piss while surfing the ghostly seas in your mind, on account of being spooked up on the spooky stuff? It is one of the best earthly sensations I know. It is a sort of wholesome thing, pure and victimless, and free of charge. . . .

Anyway: Now emptied of what had been inside me, I walked over to my darkened kitchen to reload. I poured myself a glass of Berlin tap water which, if you have never had it, is weirdly delicious, and the primary source of my gale-force urine. I drank it down quick and gazed out my large kitchen window and into the tall dark trees just outside. I looked up at the moon. My phone vibrated in my back pocket. I took it out and saw that I had received an email from a name I did not recognize. The title of the email was “An oddly personal request”. I felt a sort of excitement when I opened it. Of all the hundreds of emails strangers from the internet had sent me in the last 20 years of my life, this email ended up being one of the most bizarre . . . which is saying a lot!

I don’t suspect that this stranger would object to my posting their email on account of I have removed any identifying information to protect the innocent (AND guilty):

Hello Ryan,

My name is X. I’m writing to you today out of concern for my friend Y. Y’s friend Z wants to hookup with Y. Y asks about STI testing, and Z sends an MMS message to Y with an image of an STI panel result. The results have no lab, doctor or patient info, as well as no date. I find this suspicious. I performed a reverse image search and it led me to your blog post from Dec 19 2023 https://starsailor.co/std-test-results-dec-23/. The image they provided is a pixel perfect match, except for down having been downsampled to MMS image size (image diff tool showed zero difference. At this point I think it’s exceedingly improbable two users performed the exact same cropping operation on two similar documents.

I am wondering if you would be a hero and help me either vindicate or expose Z for lying about their STI test result.

Finally a starsailor dot co mystery I had wondered at for months was solved. See, several times a week since December I have been receiving traffic from cities and countries all over the world to the aforementioned post. The post is simply a screenshot of my most recent negative STD test. But it is by far the single greatest traceable entry point for internet strangers discovering my website, which is otherwise not listed anywhere at all. My website really is just some graffiti scrawled on a back alley next to a gutter in a space . . . anytime someone finds it, it is a gift to me.

And listen: For all my many faults, I am a responsible guy when it comes to MATTERS OF THE BED. I get tested regularly—at minimum every six months, though usually every time I see a doctor. My health insurance picks up the tab, so why not? I just ask them to take a couple more tubes of blood and then I piss into a little cup and go home. A few days later my doctor emails me an all-clear email with a PDF of my results attached, and then I feel all right. And because I am never one to shy away from sharing banal and embarrassing details about my life with all the shades in the abyss, meaning you who are goodly enough to read this website . . . well: posting my STD test results is just a thing I do. Can you think of anyone else who does this?

Oh! The mystery which had finally been solved was this: Why were so many strangers, dozens and dozens and dozens of them from all over God’s green earth, being funneled into this particular post? I could see that they had all come from a Google search, though I did not know the search terms.

Get a load of this:

Now I knew: these desperate web searchers, liars all, were searching for a clean STD test, presumably to share with a lover who had asked for one. And of all places, they ended up at this humble outpost at the end of the world and at the end of all things. I had unwittingly been aiding and abetting their shameless treachery! And so saying, at the behest of my friends I have now including an addendum to the original post, and WATERMARKED my STD test results, for god’s sake, lest it be snatched by yet another poser.

(In fairness, at least a few of those souls had perhaps ended up here in the name of research, or some such thing . . . but I decided to take a scorch-and-burn approach here because it’s more fun to write dramatically. Sorry!)

AND THEN I THOUGHT ABOUT THIS GIRL I HAD DATED A FEW YEARS AGO

. . . still a good friend of mine, who had asked me to get tested right at the outset of our relationship, as you sometimes do. I obliged, and promptly visited my doctor to be drained of blood and urine in good faith. Next day I received my results, and I texted her saying as much. I said: “I’m all good.”

She asked me if I minded sending her the PDF my doctor had given me and I did so. And then she asked if I could forward her the email that had come directly from my doctor, and I did this as well. It did not bother me but I asked her why. She told me a sad story I had not previously heard, about how she had discovered her previous boyfriend of many years had been cheating on her. I knew already, vaguely, that this guy was a real rat bastard, who had hurt her in ways that echoed into the present moment, and now I heard one of the major reasons why.

She said one day she developed symptoms that were textbook chlamydia. She got tested and they told her she had it. AS SHE HAD BEEN TRUE TO HER BOYFRIEND, it could have only come from one source, which was him. When confronted he insisted he had not cheated on her, and said he did not have chlamydia. She demanded he get tested. Acting as though it were some ridiculous inconvenience, he threw up his hands and sighed dramatically and said, “Fine!” Days later he showed her his test results, which were negative across the board. But how could this be? As it turns out, he’d simply found a negative test online and Photoshopped his name onto it!

At the time I remember thinking this was wild as hell that someone would do that. I mean, that’s a real jerk move. Was his intention to not only shirk responsibility for cheating on and infecting his girlfriend with a sexually-transmitted disease, but to also manipulate her into creating a false memory that SHE had cheated on him, or else had spontaneously manifested chlamydia as though a witch had placed a curse upon her? Did he really think she’d shrug it off? Maybe he figured he had nothing to lose by taking the coward’s path, but of course it cost him everything: he destroyed his relationship with this beautiful and very special person. She told me he exhibited no remorse. So she cut him loose and went it alone for a few years on account of she didn’t trust Dudes anymore, and who could blame her.

Though yeah: This is why I had to send her my STD test straight from the source. I did not think it was an unreasonable request. She had every right to want to protect herself from once again falling victim to the diabolical machinations of someone she wanted to trust. I said, you know, the day I start falsifying STD tests is the day I finally charter an icebreaker down to Antarctica and begin walking to the South Pole until I die, because at that point my soul will have been swallowed up by some dark thing, never to return. I know myself well enough to know that, at this point in my life, such a deceptive act would trigger a self-destruct sequence in me. I can’t go on in that way. For god’s sake!

Five years later, here in a world grown wearier by the day, and my having grown wearier inside it, I now know that this creep is not alone in perpetuating what is frankly some pretty bizarre human behavior. The poison seed that he nourished in his mind was one that had also been realized by a bunch of motherfuckers just like him. It is such a sadness to me. I reckon I just don’t understand the ultimate point of such a thing. Is it laziness? Are these people cheap? Are they so horned up to get down and sloppy between the sheets that they couldn’t get a Planned Parenthood appointment before the weekend, and decided to chance it? Man, just wrap that thing up till you get an all clear from the lab! And if you are walking around with an active syphilis infection, you should probably take care of that as soon as possible. Eventually your nose will fall off! Really!

To venture forth into a romance with shameless deception as your guiding star is, to put it charitably, pretty inauspicious. And what if you do end up giving your new bedfellow chlamydia or HIV by accident—or, even worse, KNOWINGLY giving it to them? Well, this is sin whose debts must be paid in hell. IN FACT: in some states, namely California, it is against the law to not disclose your status to a sexual partner before doing the horizontal tango. You can get sued for it. Just ask Usher, who had to shell out $1.1 million when he gave some woman herpes. Oops!

(To be honest, I would probably take $1.1 million in exchange for herpes, which is actually overly stigmatized and not at all a big deal. There are worse fates. Still, after lawyer fees and taxes, you can probably cut that number in half . . .)

Anyway: I don’t mean to come across as sanctimonious or self-righteous. I’ve been a real jerk in the past when it comes to relationships, and I got a lot of problems otherwise . . . but this seems so low. I would feel so repulsed and betrayed if someone pulled this on me. And lord knows I don’t want to drag out an overplayed word, but you could say that this sort of thing is straight up abusive in that you are taking someone’s consent away from them. Because the person you are fooling is fooled for your own selfish ends, and you’re putting their health at risk, and on and on . . . that is truly vile. You’re taking the decision away from someone who, had they known otherwise, would have kicked your ass to the curb. If you got something going on south of the border and the other person can’t make peace with it, well, welcome to earth! But baby, I beg of you: don’t do this to someone. It is heartless. If you can do no good on this earth then at least do no wrong.

And remember, as the poet Virgil once said:

HEALTH IS WEALTH!!!

OK?

FINALLY: It is now October, which means I’m Way Overdue to get another test. I’m not worried about it . . . I have not chanced it in the interim. And listen: Lord knows we’ve all thrown caution to the wind when a condom could not be located in the dark, or else you trusted each other’s verbal confirmations of an infection- and / or virus-free body mere seconds before honkin on down to clown town. But I am going to avoid that sort of thing from now if I can help it. I got a vasectomy when I was 29, so I have effectively sliced the potential risks of unprotected sex clean in half, yet still: I don’t want anything disrupting my boys if I can help it. I respect my boys. I endeavor always to protect them from the harshness of the world.

. . . though I reckon I gotta start watermarking these things from here on out. It makes me feel like a huge dork to have to do that, but my friends say I have a sort of obligation to. Like I said, I don’t want to be some vector of false salvation for a legion of horny scumbags . . . so sure, I’ll do it. Such is my tale.

Now that I think about it, the stranger who emailed me asked if I would like an update on the unfolding story. I really ought to email him back, because I definitely want to know what happened. Maybe I’ll keep it a secret. Maybe not!

Well: