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.
348/365 08/05/2026
On drunken impulse, Agnes dragged Hyacinth into a late-night tattoo parlor—though it should be said here and now the tattoo parlor was just open late on weekends for just such occasions and did not, in fact, regard itself as specifically late-night with all the seedy connotations and knowing winks such a label would encourage. Hyacinth, who could always hold her liquor better, decided on a small caterpillar on her left ankle, a kind of metamorphosis-in-waiting for the butterfly on her right. Agnes, leader of the charge, and barely presenting sober enough for the tattoo artist to legally do her job, requested something resembling a street sign on her right shoulder blade: Man-buns need not apply.
347/365 08/04/2026
Somehow he had convinced himself he was the type of guy who should have a thing for clowns…
345/365 08/02/2026
“I don’t know,” Agnes said. She took a drag and stared at the end of her cigarette while she exhaled, a sign she was really thinking. “All these guy you date are like cult leaders.”
Hyacinth reached out and extended two fingers, scissored them twice to indicate she wanted a drag. “Explain yourself,” she said.
Agnes handed over the cigarette.
344/365 08/01/2026
The real extent of our dad’s decline came one day when my sister happened to be home and watched as Dad went around the house and collected the drips and drabs and coffee remainders in the cups throughout the house. He collected them al back up into the carafe that sat ever-warming on the kitchen counter. The two of us, my sister and I, wondered how many times we’d unknowingly consumed these old coffees, and each of us felt a little queasy.
342/365 07/30/2026
At 50, he began writing down the things, big and small, he thought worth remembering…
340/365 07/28/2026
Mortimer Spencer was the only brother who didn’t want to carry on his father’s legacy. Penmanship, he thought, will meet the same fate as hand loom weaving and manual type founding.
339/365 07/27/2026
It was spring when the fence fell down. The fence that ran between the side of my house and the neighbor’s back yard.