JD

7:30am- 8:30am: 

I wake up feeling unrested and pretty grumpy, I slept poorly and spent the night between stressful dreams and waking up thinking about things I needed to get done.

My partner Jo and I slept in our spare bedroom last night because our main room faces the street behind us where 4th of July parties and fireworks went late into the night. Our spare room is always a funny reminder that when Jo and I moved to Philly from Nebraska together we were just roommates and old friends. We were definitely in love with each other but not yet really acknowledging it, so we had sought out a two bedroom. Us using those two rooms separately lasted almost no time at all, our 5 year moving to Philly anniversary was on July 2nd, our 5 year relationship anniversary is on July 27 (lol.) 

It’s overcast but already 80 degrees which doesn’t bode well. I make coffee and pet my cat who is relieved the fireworks are over. Her purrs and little head bumps as she sits in the window watching the birds makes me stop feeling sorry for myself for sleeping poorly and helps me find some gratitude for the morning. One of my jobs is as a promoter with a Philly show booking collective so I spend the next hour writing a couple formal offers to agents and sending those off with a flurry of other emails, making a flyer, and writing/ scheduling a couple social media posts for the collective that will need to go up while I’m at one of my other jobs, cleaning houses. 

8:30-9:30:

Shower, shave, brush my teeth, finish my coffee, kiss my partner goodbye, pet my dogs, out the door. Someone keeps putting little flyers on my windshield that read “cash for clunkers” or “we buy junk” which is both insulting and very funny. 

9:30-noon

I have a weekly client I clean for every Friday, we chat about the new movie Kinds of Kindness for a bit since we both happened to have seen it on the 4th then she goes in her office to work and I clean her place and listen to a podcast. Cleaning houses is a job I genuinely love, sometimes it really sucks but when it’s a place I’m in often with a client I know well it’s calm and meditative work. There’s a very clear start and finish with cleaning which is contrasted by the work I do in music which doesn’t really start or end with any definition. 

Noon- 1:30pm

I finish up my clean and head to Bourbon and Branch to meet my friend Angela for lunch. I get there a little early but the bars full of Germany fans watching the soccer match which makes me feel validated about having a drink at noon so I order a city wide. I check ticket counts for upcoming shows and send some booking emails on my phone while I wait, lock in a band for a big event we have coming up. Angela arrives and we catch up and eat spinach and goat cheese salads with berries and lemon vinaigrette.

1:30- 4:30pm

Angela is an amazing artist and is in the middle of redoing their home studio and they needed some shelves and such. I drove them to Lowe’s and IKEA and we bought shelves and some other stuff for their studio and then ate an IKEA hot dog. We talked about how the pier landlord is thinking about sinking the SS United States ship as we drove by it. We were in south so I drove them across the city to their home in far west and then drove myself back across the city to my home in Kensington which took an eternity. My car has no AC so by this time I was kind of dying from the heat, so as I’m writing this I’m sprawled out on my bed with the AC and my bedside fan blasting trying to cool off. Very grateful to have good central air in my apartment and I never forget it. It’s 95 outside right now.

4:30-4:45pm

I get up and go down to try and fix my cars AC with a Freon refill but the plastic dispenser on the canister flew off and compressed refrigerant sprayed on me and my car, my AC is still broken. 

4:45- 8pm

My partners brother from Wisconsin was passing through town and stopped by with his partner. We hung out and had a couple beers and caught up. They wanted cheesesteaks while they were in town so we went to Joes Steaks and had some dinner then they got back on the road and my partner and I came back home and I took our dogs out to the park across from our place for a bit. 

9pm

After our walk I took a shower. I just got another session done a couple days ago on a full back piece tattoo I’m getting from my dear friend Raylo (@radnines on instagram) so I cleaned my tattoo and got in cozy clothes. I sent a handful of emails and scrolled on my phone for awhile.

9:30pm

Jo and I put on the newest episode of the kardashians and listened to the sisters argue with each other from the tv while we played scrabble. Kris is getting her ovaries removed, Khloe is spending a lot of time at home and the other sisters think she’s not being present, Kylie bailed on their trip to Aspen last minute. I win scrabble and we snack on golden Oreos.  

10:30- 12:30

Jo and I start another game of scrabble and put on Lady Bird. Neither of us had seen it in awhile and it seemed like fun, it was. The movie gets over and I finish writing this while Jo scrolls on their phone and my dogs snore next to us on the couch. Jo bought our cat a new tunnel which came in the mail today and she’s laying inside of it, content. It’s 12:31 and I’m about to go brush my teeth and head to bed. 

JD is a promoter with 4333 Collective and cleans houses on the side. He lives in Kensington and encourages you to donate to Community Action Relief Project who do harm reduction mutual aid work in the neighborhood