I painted this while listening to THE STREETS TYPE BEAT VOL. 2. I get the issues with Talya, but that comment "This feels like destiny" stayed with me. My memory. I was thinking about A kind face. She was this Turkish girl on Twitter. It's funny how it's similar to tumblr but it's different. Talking to girls on the internet. Who you'll never meet in real life. We had messaged about Kismet, about Bulgaria, about Istanbul. The last time I was in Istanbul she was on a ship at sea. We never met. I was paul (from bible) and she was A kind face. But she grew up close to Tarsus. I would delete my twitter account and lose all of our messages. At some point I would stumble upon the wikipedia page for Petya Dubarova and realize that A kind face had used her image for her avi. Her last tweet is over a year old: Need a miracle like air. We used to write poetry, make art, in that place. The place ended.

I often think about everything that lead me into the moment I am currently existing in, writing. The moment I am writing. Perhaps "often" is a relative word, a loaded word, but I do think about it, the sequence of events that lead up to this moment, what needed to happen so that this could happen. I was thinking about this while refreshing /sinceigotpaper trying to make sense of the show. Of My Handwriting. There was the image that previously called to me, so, so strongly — the table, the writing about failure — that I used it to post that I was performing in Switzerland, after sickness and time had made it so that I wasn't able to make the video I had wanted, and then I iterated it, playing with this moment of failure, its inscription, and the image.

Tonight I used the last piece of paper I have. I made the decision after looking at scans of film negatives from an instant camera I used in Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey in 2017. I was looking for different scans, of photographs I took at a Seahawks vs. Chiefs preseason game in Seattle for the last Gang Kiss drop, but I couldn't find them, that hard drive broke in 2020 and the negatives are in my room at my parent's house on the other side of the continent. But in that search, I found the scans of photographs from Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey which I had forgotten about. I posted some of them on tumblr. I took some of those posts and made the image that I printed above: a photograph I took in Brasov of a car, a house, a gray day, a photograph of the view outside the car, a different car than the one in Brasov. Maybe it was when I was in Bulgaria and I went along with a few others from my hostel, driving to this abandoned monument. I smoked mid there, smoking mid in Bulgaria, this was something I would joke with A kind face about. The monument isn't abandoned anymore. The wikipedia says there is money and they are working to preserve it now. In the car there was a CD. The CD had Hot N*gga and Bobby Bitch burned onto it. It made me think about the world. This was the world before streaming. I have to imagine that they are streaming music in Bulgaria now, that burning CDs with songs is a thing of the past. And that I was one of the last people to be surprised by this gift of fate, from the chosen CD in the rental car, outside Veliko Tarnovo, in Bulgaria. There were these ruins there, ruins I cannot forget, and that I could not have forgotten because I had not known they existed. The vanishing shadow the Bulgarian Empire. We were smoking mid.

Once the paper was in front of me, printed, I stared at it, and thought of Romania, and the years. I thought of what to write. I called the illustrator file 'thiswritingpractice-1.ai'. I was thinking about this writing practice, about writing the present, the past, the future. This made me think of Kismet. And A kind face. But also that comment, about destiny. I went on youtube and listened to VOL. 2, then THE STREETS TYPE BEAT. While listening to VOL. 2 I was pretty blown away by how good the work was, along with the video. It had been so long. On the intro to the last track I said "there's a lot of time on this intro I might rack one up real quick / rack one up with me if you want to", as though I was speaking to myself in the future, in that moment, without having known it at that moment. Kismet.

I'm listening to that track again now. I paused Volume 5 to return there. There's this beautiful sort of purity around the first three volumes. Then you get to the 4th and 5th volumes and you have to deal with Carl and he really does fuck it up in the most Carl ass way. I do think at some point we need to have an event. A chronological listening + viewing. But I can't say when. We're still writing it. Chronology does something. A sense of momentum. This is why I designed /sinceigotpaper to be random everytime. It's an impossible sort of way to view your writing in relation to your writing, an impossibility granted by the computer. Right now Volume 6 is ending, we remind ourselves that we can always rap, there is a photograph of James Baldwin, there is an Elizabeth Peyton painting, or a photograph of one. Everything else that can be written will be. I am happy with this last piece of paper. When I print upon stone I will not think of failure, but of fate, belief, destiny.