In July, 2025, I began participating in the Tom Sachs/NikeCraft ISRU Summer Camp. This series of challenges was designed to help break bad habits (mostly the phone addiction) and forge new rituals. One ritual, Output Before Input, asked us to create first thing. Eyes open; set pen, pencil, crayon, etc. to paper, cardboard, wood, your cat. Didn’t matter. What mattered most was putting something into the world before letting too much of the world into you. I began with a normal ritual: a simple record of the day before: things I remembered, things I didn’t want to forget. But honestly? That was boring. On August 22, I thought, “What if I wrote openings every day? What if every day I started a novel? What if I did it for a year?”
That’s what we have here (so far). Every one is a shitty first draft. Some shittier than others.
The process: I wake and then scribble in a notebook. About once a week—every couple-few days—I type them up here, unchanged. I have no idea if I’ll ever do anything with them. If you’d like to do something with one of them, please feel free.
162/365 01/31/2026
The content machine ever hungered: more, more, more… All of us filmed all the time: morning routines, work commutes, millions of us sitting at desks doing fuck all, but making sure to share and share and share as we sat: our daydreams. Our fears. The errant thoughts that arrived like gulls to squawk and peck and steal crusts of our truest selves.
161/365 01/30/2026
You ever been yelled at in sing language? Had to yell back? It can be harrowing experience. All muted mouthing and exaggerated gestures. Used to happen to me all the time at PS 184. Special needs kids.
One kid, Alfonse, used to poop his pants all the time. I don’t say it to be funny or mean, just saying it because it’s facts. And so I’d tell him, in sign language, “Alfonse. You gotta use the restroom.”
He’d tell me he didn’t want to miss anything.
160/365 01/29/2026
The village waited in moonlight, the long-reflected sun now silver-blue and painting the plaster walls and thatched roofs with an other-worldly luminance.
159/365 01/28/2026
The shallots get minced by hand: bulb separated, a single cut lengthwise, top to bottom. The sound like turning a page when the sharp knife first cleaves the tender skin, the warm clunk as the heel finds purchase on the wooden cutting board. No plastics here.
Place the half shallot perpendicular to your shoulders. There, yes. Make precise, even slices again, top to bottom. Let the knife glide across your knuckles, fingers bent. Relax. Relax. The knife’s heft does work. Your eyes almost unnecessary. The knife glides, the knuckles guide, and you shift. Your body. Not your hands. Shifting hands introduce the smallest curves. Chaos in the cooking process.
158/365 01/27/2026
It had been so long since he’d seen real beauty in his life. So much was now not-beauty: AI videos of forests all hollow and missing the soul. VR worlds and models and porn stars and architectures completely impossible. The foodstuffs printed from OrganoPaste(tm) and hurried to his smart fridge—nutrition in shapes like apple, hotdog, kale.
He wondered what real beauty looked like. Felt like. Where it could even be found.
157/365 01/26/2025
The Echelon hovered up Delancy, the blue-black paint swirling lights to nebula across its fenders.
156/365 01/25/2026
It is known in history as the Second Children’s Revolution. The day youth rebelled and rose up, thrust tiny fists into the air and demanded reality back. Edna was ten that day, at twelve a martyr, and two years after that, a saint.
This is her story.
155/365 01/24/2026
You can see the whole neighborhood wake up from here. The sun comes up there, over the corner store. Ahmed’s already there two hours by the time it’s sunrise. Philly cheese all day long. Scotch tape, soda. Just don’t buy the batteries. He’s got brands in there they don’t even make anymore. If you’re a regular, he’ll warn you off. If you’re not, he does a hard sell. “Everyone needs batteries,” he says. And it’s true. But he still has them. So many.
154/365 01/23/2026
The drip, drip, drip of the faucet wasn’t enough to wake him up in the night, nor was it enough to prevent him from sleep when, tired and worn from the day, he lay his head on his pillow and shut off the small light on his bedside table. But the drip, drip, drip of the bathroom faucet—the sound like a faint ringing of crystal. The slow, methodical tap as some imagined someone called for attention at a party. The sound was enough to distract him from getting back to sleep those nights he woke to some unknown and unknowable fear settled in his chest. A mind that raced toward nothing. Scrolling checklists of “maybe someday” and “should get to” unspooling in his mind and insurmountable, the small details adding up day after day