What do you write and how long have you been writing for?
I write DIAR DTC KYT and I have been writing for at least 15+ years now. It’s hard to really say when I got serious about it and if you can count the time since I’ve been paralyzed.
How did you come up with the name DIAR? Is there a story behind it?
I was 16 years old and had recently been locked up for six months for a case I caught, and then shortly after I got out I was locked up again for painting a legal wall (actually a skate park) using the same name. Even though it was a legal wall I was violating my probation. During that month I was sketching a lot and tried to come up with a name. I knew that I wanted an ‘I’, ‘A’, ‘S’ and ‘R’ in my name because they were my favorite to sketch. I had a couple ideas for names that involved some of those letters but when I got out and ran them by my friends, either somebody had one of the names or a name was too close to someone else. I remember being with my friends painting and I would just sit there and watch because I didn’t have a name and wasn’t trying to get locked up for painting my old name again. A couple weeks after I got out, some of us were eating breakfast somewhere and talking about it when one of my friends suggested Dyer. I didn’t know it at that moment, but he read it off a real estate sign across the street. My first thought was Dire Straights or being in a dire need or situation. I liked it because of its meaning and that there were so many different ways to spell it. After experimenting with it for a couple weeks, I decided to spell it DIAR sometimes substituting the ‘I’ for a ‘Y’, and stopped using it with a ‘Y’ within a year or two.
