In July, 2025, I began participating in the Tom Sachs/NikeCraft ISRU Summer Camp. This series of challenges were 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).
I wake and then write in a notebook. About once a week—every couple-few days—I type them here. 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.
004/365 08/25/2025
He called himself King of Cats and had a makeshift throne down on Watson that he’d cobbled from an old Fury. He sat don there with his coffee crown and paper towel scepter. Royal armor of license plates and welder’s gloves. All day he sat and sweated and called to the cats and to the kids. Nonsense, mostly, but from time to time burst with oration like channelling a god.
003/365 08/24/2025
“Sometimes dying is like a race state.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a thing from computers where they get ahead of themselves and two things end up tripping themselves up. Like cancer and hard living. But for computers.”
Jackson was always saying fucked up shit like that, and half the time I think he was full of shit. The other half, though, he wasn’t.
002/365 08/23/2025
It’s the slow creep of squalor what gets you. You leave the kitchen door open and the chickens get in. And they’re shitting on things. Not much, maybe, but some. And pretty soon that old hound pisses on the floor and everyone just looks at it. You get used to the smell, mostly. Except Granny. She never could, which is why I suppose she left the way she did.
001/365 08/22/2025
…and the rains came, and filled the strewn mountain streets, the surging current building from the summit and cascading down and down through the town: pigs and old newspapers, jerry cans and fish nets. Collected all and brought them down the mountain to deposit them at Alphonso’s meager door. The next day, he left for America.