Alyse

3:30am- I’m coming home after a party in fish town. It was a queer play party. I started going to these parties in June and am loving the freedom that comes with structured, negotiated discussions around intimacy. How nice is it to know exactly what someone’s looking for! At any point me or the other person can stop and say “no more, thank you”. No explanations needed. It’s pretty sweet!

4:00am- Sent a voice message to one of my best friends who lives in Chicago, telling her about my night. She just got back from a trip to Ireland, where she spent most of her time floating in gorgeous bodies of water, listening to the sound of bleeting sheeps and watching rainbows rise over waterfalls. It sounds like paradise.

11:00am- I called another best friend who lives in London but is currently in Los Angeles where we both grew up (twenty-three year long friendship baby!!!). She’s in town for a wedding, the groom is someone who we’ve known since elementary school. I don’t often miss LA, but I do when she’s there and I’m not. All of a sudden I get very nostalgic and I start texting her stuff like “listen to this song at sunset when you’re driving around Venice today”.

12:pm-I took this photo of my cat posing in the window. I got Cheetah in March of 2022, seven months into being in Philadelphia. Her birthday is September 4th like Beyonce! She’s turning 3 and I’m considering throwing her a party next week.

12:05pm-Inspired by Cheetah’s sun kissed photo, I took one of me too :’)

12:30pm-2:30pm-I took a walk outside and saw a woman lying on the ground and some men trying to help her up, it turned out she had had a stroke. We called an ambulance and it took about thirty minutes for them to get to us. A group of jehovah’s witnesses asked if they could pray for her and my knee jerk reaction was to say “Not now, thank you” but the woman nodded feebly and asked them to pray for her. The prayer circle was a cacophonous blend of “Lord protect this woman” over and over again while someone played hymnals on their iphone. Eventually the ambulance arrived, and we all helped the woman onto the stretcher and carried on with our day.

3:00pm-4:30pm

When I got home from my walk I decided to watch a movie my friend Sacha (a different Sacha than the one previously mentioned in the 11 am section!) recommended to me called “Stress Positions”. It takes place during 2020 and features clanking pots! Remember when people were clanking pots to thank essential workers.

We thought, “a nurse is gonna wanna hear us clanking pots outside our windows as they come home from a 48 hour shift” Crazy stuff!

The movie is very good, I highly recommend it!

5:00pm-6:15pm

I showered and did my wash day! On the weekends I like to shower later in the day. There’s something luxurious about taking a shower when you’re not tired. In the morning I’m tired because I just woke up, at night I’m tired because I’m ready to go to bed. 5pm there is no such thing as tired! I have ample time and energy to detangle my hair, do my conditioning hair mask and put on my hot head which looks like a shower cap but you put it in the microwave for like two minutes and it acts like one of those hair hoods you see at the salons, but without the salon price!

7:00pm

I hung out on the porch with my neighbors! We drank Suntory Japanese whiskey which is by far the nicest whiskey you can get for $30. It’s soooo smooth.

7:30pm

I hung out with my friends and we listened to music while we journaled and doodled! We then had a hankering for drunk slushies so we walked to Salt and Pepper Liquor Store, then decided slushies on an empty stomach is not a good idea so we threw Asad’s Hot Chicken into the mix!

Alyse is a clown/theater maker who grew up in LA and moved half way across the country to Philadelphia in 2021 to get their MFA in physical theater from Pig Iron/UArts. They did a clown show at Abyssinia last week and if ya missed it that's a real shame, but keep your eyes peeled for other clown stuff in the works! They're on IG @alyselyselyse if you wanna talk clown, theater, music and various other topics of the sort.