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 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 if the person is fooling you for their own selfish ends, and putting your health at risk, and on and on, then 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 ask 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.
Well:
this painting is so cute it almost makes me sick!
i wouldn’t mind dying like this (being drowned by redheaded water nymphs)
la notte
mccune once said that i’m into girls who look “sanguinated”
it’s amissa’s birthday
Listen: I have written many times about my black denim jacket, which, barring serious illness or a particularly cold day, I have worn essentially every day of my life for the last seven years:
I took this picture back in May 2023. Since then, my jacket had developed a handful of small holes along the arms or in the pockets or in the armpits, places where I kept my keys and chapstick and comb, and so on . . . any place that encountered daily friction. But of course in THE WORLD OF DENIM, a small hole is a sort of cavity or even tumor which will only grow in larger with time. You let something like that go long enough and you’ll end up with half a sleeve missing. For god’s sake!
Well: I just couldn’t have that, so when I was home last fall, I took my jacket to a seamstress who has a shop across the street from the hospital where I was born. This woman has been hemming my jeans for years, but nowadays she’s a big deal on account of how good she is. Since the pandemic, her storefront has doubled in size and she mostly does bridal / wedding stuff now, and someone told me recently she’s even running for mayor. I guess I believe this. But amazingly she still makes time to hear my desperate pleas to stave off ruin of my ratty black jacket.
I remember taking off my jacket and flattening it out on the counter. I pointed out all the areas where I needed it reinforced. She took out a little piece of white chalk and drew squares around the holes. She never said as much, but I could tell she was thinking “. . . can you really just not get a new one?” which I reckon is a fair thing for a law-abiding taxpayer to wonder at. She said she would do her best, and I surrendered the jacket over to her. Her turnaround time is one week, so it was a painful week. I didn’t even really feel like leaving the house. I felt naked without it!
Just as the LORD took seven days to create the heavens and the earth, so too did The Master Seamstress rebuild that which is most precious to me. I could hardly believe it when I came back around to pick up my jacket: she really had fixed it! In my head I figured I was going to look like fuckin Raggedy Andy from then on . . . and yet from a few feet away you can barely even tell there was any work done to it at all. Rather than just slap a patch on top of a hole and call it Christmas, she does some sort of zigzag stitching on the inside so it blends in with the surrounding surface fabric. Bless her heart, she went through and zigzagged every single stress point that had begun to fray or tear open. Newly restored, I once again, I crawled inside my aging black armor and went back to doing whatever it is I do with my life, which is more or less to travel around aimlessly and hang out with strangers and cute girls and strange cute girls while contributing almost nothing to Western civilization.
Believe it or not, such a thing does take a lot of out of you . . . and if you are a childish loser like me who wears the exact same uniform every single day of the year, that sort of lifestyle is going to chew up your clothes about as quickly as it chews you up as well. Which is to say that last year, after six months of being on the road nonstop and in a different city every three or four days, and sleeping on buses and trains and airplanes and couches and floors and sometimes spare beds or else next to a friend or goodly stranger in their own bed, and on and on, my denim jacket took a beating. I flew back to Berlin and was particularly gentle with my jacket for many months, knowing I didn’t trust anyone else to fix it, and biding my time until I could return here to The Master Seamstress.
AND SO IT WAS
. . . that I did return as was foretold by The Elders in The Long Ago, and on my back I bore the fabric of my brethren, being faded black denim that had only ever been washed beneath falling rain or snow. It was time once again to Frankenstein-stitch my old friend back together. Because if the tottering structure of my beloved jacket collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that I will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death, as the fella said. If it is my fate to go on in this way, to find myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway has been lost . . . then I must have it with me. My jacket, it protects me as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You know?
Before handing over my jacket over to be revived and made new again, it was with some sadness that I removed everything inside and out, including the little skull rider pin from PSYCHOMANIA (1973) on my lapel, which grocery store cashiers have been complimenting me for since the day I pinned it there:
Starting from the parking lot of the hospital where I first made contact with the people of planet earth, I dashed across two broad lanes of traffic to get to a shopping center across the street that has comfortingly not changed since 1994. Inside, the woman behind the counter remembered me and greeted me as “Mr. Ryan”. She pushed a button next to the register to summon the seamstress. As if appearing from the abyssal vapors of a dream, there she stood before me now: the future mayor of my hometown, and in her hand she held a bundle of dressmaker pins. I once again pointed out all the little areas that required her god-given talents and diligently she pinned them all. Here is an accomplished middle-aged woman and small business owner who designs wedding gowns that cost more than everything I’ve ever owned combined, and with a sort of reverence she beheld my old beat up denim jacket as though it were the Shroud of Turin.
“You must really love this jacket,” she said, and she surveyed its many one-of-a-kind points of wear that can only be got from living inside the thing year-round in places far and wide upon all God’s green earth. “I’ll just do a, you know—” and she made a zigzag motion with her index finger over a tumorous hole that had developed on the right elbow that I had been most worried about. I said yes, please zigzag the hell out of it, and she nodded and told the woman at the counter how many holes she would be repairing (10), and to charge me accordingly. Bless her, it’s a flat rate for every hole, no matter its size. (I realize that’s an uncomfortable sentence.) I whipped out my credit card and handed it over. I paid a $20 fee to expedite the work. There was no way I was going to go seven whole days without the thing again.
For the next two days I hid inside like Nosferatu, and only went out at night wearing my wine-red hoodie that I layer with my denim jacket when it’s chilly out, and which the seamstress had also once repaired. Still, it Felt Wrong . . . I missed the heaviness of my jacket on my body, and I had no place to put my Stuff. Laura once said that until she puts on her red lipstick, she’s not Laura Rokas. And in this way I am not Ryan Starsailor until I put on my jacket. I wear it even on 90 degree days and in all forms of inclement weather, and in every social setting no matter how formal. On long bus rides through Lousiana and Texas, during naps at work under my desk, and the many times I have slept on a stranger’s couch, I use it as a blanket.
WARNING: THIS IS EMBARRASSING (FOR ME):
A few months ago I did mushrooms alone in my apartment. I lay on the floor and listened to music and burned incense and all that, as you got to do. After an hour or so of this, I put on my boots and belt and jacket and descended the four floors to get to the warm glow of my nighttime neighborhood. It was still early enough, so I reckoned I would visit my sister and her dog on the ground floor before I left. I sat on her living room rug and we talked for a while. My body was vibrating and I felt real safe and comfortable with my jacket on. Perhaps inanely, at some point I spoke at length about my sentimentality for my jacket, and I had my poor sister try it on. She said what everyone says when I have them wear it: “It’s so heavy!”
When was the last time someone had worn it? I made both Stella and Nina from Chalk Talk put it on:
And before that, it was last summer when I lent it to an insane Russian girl in Charlottenburg, who kissed me so hard it was all teeth. We’d sat in a park on a chilly summer night, and she’d said she was cold and wanted my jacket, so I gave it to her. I was terrified she would want to keep it, and if that were the case there would be no getting it back. Later, after she’d bit my lip so hard it bruised, she did hand it over, and I slung it over me and took the bus back home to Schöneberg at four am. I never saw her again after that.
And before that . . . well, here it is: During that first pandemic summer when I was in Chicago, and when everyone was going insane for lack of intimacy. I was guilty of it as well, though hey, it’s only natural. I remember making out with this cute girl in a completely empty park, and once the sun had completely set I put my jacket around her shoulders as though it were 1955. Later I walked her to her car and she took it off and she kissed me and placed it in my hand. “Thank you for letting me borrow your jacket. It’s so heavy!” And then she vanished forever.
I headed back to Mable’s place in Bridgeport and I noticed my jacket was now permeated by the best smell in the whole world: it smelled like Girl. THOUGHT I: “Yeah dude . . . . .”
Exactly four years later, all that gone now, the shoestring government-funded itinerancy and the little romances in different cities, and so on, and living here in a world grown darker, I risked 15 minutes of sun exposure to dash across two broad lanes of traffic during afternoon rush hour. I entered the shop and a smiling woman behind the counter greeted me as “Mr. Ryan” and immediately went to retrieve my jacket, which was hung up and covered with a plastic sleeve on a rod about a half-mile long and packed to the gills with pants and shirts and skirts and wedding gowns. She pulled it out as though it were card from the middle of a deck. My bill was already squared away, so I was free to go. I said goodbye and was gone.
Outside, I examined the zigzagging patches in the fading orange sunlight:
I put on my jacket and was glad. Hooray for Hollywood. I walked across the street, to the coffeeshop in the middle of the parking lot where I’d had a dumb crush on the blue-haired girl who worked there when I was trapped in my hometown during the pandemic, and got an iced Americano. The blue-haired girl was nowhere to be found. She was probably long gone, and who could blame her.
Deciding I would wait until the sun set to go on a long walk with my jacket now returned to me, I cut back across traffic and back to the parking lot of the hospital where I TOOK MY FIRST BREATH and stood outside it drinking my bitter black coffee, and wondered at it. Had they swaddled me in denim the day they took me home on some winter day 36 years ago—such that I would develop an ancient subconscious affinity for the stuff?? Probably not. I walked home and, as usual, waited for that hour of daily darkness when most reasonable people are asleep and the world is quieter and more mysterious, and where I am invisible in the blackness of it.
One of my recurring nightmares, among the others I have written about before, is that my jacket is torn to shreds or else catches fire, OR SOME SUCH THING. In the dream I despair. I wake in fright. Maybe that sounds dumber than hell, though it’s true. Anyplace I have ever gone and anything I ever did that was worth doing for the second half of my adult life was done with that thing wrapped around me. God help me: I am sentimental about it. My jacket is the most important thing I own. I will keep repairing it until it is a rag, and then you may cremate me with it on, and bury my bones and ashes beneath a cairn at the foot of Mount Terror in Antarctica where a cold wind blows for all eternity, and maybe longer than that, as stipulated in my will.
HERE LIES
RYAN STARSAILOR:
“IT WAS SO HEAVY!”
