09: Home is a Twist and Go duner kebab
GoogleMaps and time and change
When we first started living in Sofia, GoogleMaps didn’t register our apartment as a place. “Block 251, Residential District Geo Milev” was not in its index of pinpoint-able locations. So when I set my “Home” location, I picked the closest building it did recognize: the Twist and Go Street Foods duner kebab stand. “Building” is giving Twist and Go a lot of credit — it was a kiosk. It advertised pizza, burgers, and kebab on the facade but as far as I know only sold the latter two items. The stand was run by three cousins from Iraq and was only open for lunch. We’d wave and say hi to each other as I was walking to the tram and they were chopping tomatoes and firing up the roasting spit. And if I’d worked through lunch in a fugue state, I would time coming back to grab a duner before they closed at 4 p.m.
But more than the duner itself, Twist and Go was wrapped up with my conception of home. When I punched in directions from a less familiar part of town Twist and Go was the destination. It was the end point of my journey after travel. When I asked my phone to take me home in Sofia, it took me to Twist and Go.
A few weeks ago, I came home and Twist and Go was gone. This development was not so surprising: the Sofia metro is expanding, and our neighborhood is getting multiple stops. Property prices are going up. The lot in front of our building that used to have a few old houses and a dog with a baritone bark are being cleared for a new building. As a kiosk, the Twist and Go was not so official, not so permanent. I wasn’t surprised at the hole where the kiosk used to be, but I was surprised by how much the hole moved me.
In GoogleMaps, Twist and Go still exists: the most recent Street View photo is from August 2024. I’m not sure when the little car with a 360 camera will drive by again and write a new layer on the map, maybe one that will have an apartment building rising behind the metal fence. The image of Twist and Go still lives in the machine, but when I input “Home,” GoogleMaps tells me it’s permanently closed.
Outputs
Museum No. 20 — the capstone project of my 2025 Sofia time: I made a pop-up museum about the 20 tram inside a 20 tram, parked near the Iskar Depot for one night as part of the Devet Slona festival. I spent months interviewing drivers and depot workers and riders about their experience with the tram, and they all came together as small exhibits. Wouldn’t have looked as good as it did without Nikolay Doychinov’s photos and Izabela Markova’s design. I could write, probably should write, thousands words about the whole experience but will leave it short for now.
Flying Paper #2 — there’s the thrill of the first zine coming into existence at all and the thrill of the second one that says it’s something ongoing, not just a fluke.
Inputs
A Life in Google Maps — the canonical Jess Zimmerman essay about time and memory and Street View.
The Secret History — a friend left a copy of this early Donna Tartt book at ours in Sofia because who wants to travel back to the US with 500+ pages you’ve finished? Turned out to be a nice trick of the mind to transport myself to a snow-covered Vermont liberal arts college in the middle of the Sofia summer heat wave.
Audition — inhaled the new Katie Kitamura book in about 24 hours, which feels correct to its structure. Perfect at distilling the moments when a small phrase or gesture from someone you thought you know so well can escalate into wondering if you ever really knew them at all. She remains the queen of the comma splice. (And, in my opinion, Intimacies remains her masterpiece.)
Taskmaster, Season 7 — British comedians doing inane tasks (perfection)
I cannot stress enough how good the new Alex G album is for a long slow late summer night on a deck or out for a drive, when you can feel the heat leaving the day just a little. (I am often thinking about how much of my favorite music from the last decade originated in the Philadelphia DIY scene of 2016— Alex G is on that list along with Waxahatchee, Hop Along, Mitski—like, COME ON.)
One of the joys of coming back to Florida after being away is the waiting pile of Orion Magazines.