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.
120/365 12/19/2025
Insomnia never announces its arrival. It comes quiet in the night. Not to keep you from sleep from to keep you from getting back to sleep. It’s the small thing that nudges you awake at three a.m. and swirls about your mind like some half-remembered spirit. It whispers. Just enough to keep thinking. Just enough to charge your body into quiet refusal. And then you have two choices: lie mad about it, or go ahead and accept it and vow to get something done. And that’s how I ended up on Houston Street the night Brady Gray came to town.
119/365 12/18/2025
My dad wanted so badly to be a wise and valuable father. He’d come to me on Saturday mornings while I played video games in my room. Or sometimes would ambush me right when we sat down to dinner.
“How’s things going? Any trouble spots? All your friends are safe and fine?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
But I could see the look on his face. His hopeful expression. The way his eyebrows raised, and his eyes would search my face, looking for anything he could use to start in on one of his “Value Tales.” That’s what he called them when I was really little. “Sounds about time for a Value Tale,” he’d say, and then launch into a convoluted story about some event that was maybe from history but also a little bit from the Bible? And he’d toss in a couple nuggets from some other kind of self-help book, and end up with a satisfied smile while I stood there blinking. I barely remember them from back then. Except they took way too much time.
Still, I started to feel sorry for the guy. He just wanted to help. So I started making up stories that needed his advice.
117/365 12/16/2025
Our father would have hated the person he became, so late in life. The funny thing? He still had all his arrogance, even as his brain began to go and more and more he became like some kind of automaton, repeating a set of phrases to cover the spaces in his cognition.
116/365 12/15/2025
The small change happened at the grocery store, when he realized he was singing along with the overhead music while scanning the cereal shelves. Somehow, when he wasn’t paying attention, the band he’d enjoyed so much just a few short years ago had been relegated to the easy listening selection for the safe and middle aged. Then he realized a few short years ago was actually 15, and the years he’d spent not paying attention unspooled across his mind.
115/365 12/14/2025
Avec. Avec non. The words repeated in my mind as we walked bundled into one another along one of the beautiful Paris boulevards. The beauty of them. The simplicity. I dipped my head and committed to memory a quartet of aromas: her hair smelling of cedar and “fresh” since she’d used my shampoo. Skin of chilled lilac. The wooly wonder of her scarf and coat, each picked from a pile in the back of a New York thrift shop literal hours before we left. I breathed her deep and whispered the words tumbling in my mind. “Avec. Avec non.”
“What’s that?” Her voice a muffled lilt through the scarf and her coat’s upturned collar.
“With. Without,” I whispered. “Avec. Avec non.”
She stopped and chuckled. “That’s not how it works,” she said. “Avec non? Where did that come from?”
“With. Without. Or not with. Avec non.”
“Oh my god. No. With: avec. Without: sans. It’s sans. And even if you were trying to do what you’re trying to do, it would be Pas avec. With. Not with. Pas avec.” She looked at me with a look I can now label as a mix of pity and disbelief, and the next morning I was forced to learn a new French phrase: Je vais à Prague sans toi. I am going to Prague without you.
114/365 12/13/2025
3 a.m. A few klicks outside Taipei. A haggard DC-7 idles on a patch of concrete, barely a runway. Quonset hut half reclaimed by mikania where a small group sits in the dark, waiting out the silence that descended on the forest around them.
113/365 12/12/2025
If you happened to be standing at the bottom of a small rise near land parcel 284, just outside Overbook, Kansas, not long after midnight on October 7, 1938, facing east—and if you faced due east and then 10 degrees to your right, you would have seen—there at the top of the rise and silhouetted against the light of the rising, waxing gibbous—two men who had just finished digging a large hole in the dry earth.
112/365 12/11/2025
Some said the house was cursed. That each generation since the house was built had visited upon it some horror. The first, when Hepzibah was taken from the house during the 1704 massacre. Killed while being marched to Montreal. 1730, and young Samuel succumbed to fever, his tiny cries feeble at first, and then growing more and more alarmed until finally it seemed he had cried all he could. His small throat raw and blistered and his cries barely a whisper before he went quiet. 1768, William, under crushing gambling debt, strode to the barn before dawn and stripped himself naked, flogged his back with a cat-o-nine he’d made from scrap bridle leather, and then hanged himself from the barn’s seventh rafter.
111/365 12/10/2025
They spent so long without seeing planes, when the first one was allowed back in the sky, it seemed an alien thing.