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.
023/365 09/13/2025
Look here, the options. Even for coffee. Ground or whole bean. And ground? Course, fine, espresso. Whole bean there’s the burr grinder, another grinder forgotten in the back of a cabinet along with the first moka pot bought and forgotten and replaced with a second (not as good). The second sits on the counter next to the kettle, French press, drip machine. Over there, the espresso maker (bought on sale). The man, 50’s. Tallish, in good enough shape from a gym four times a week and evening jogs. Places one hand atop his head and stares at his watch, seconds ticking. Considers the choice barrage of this morning (and all mornings, if we’re honest) and wonders why he couldn’t maybe get to winnowing.
022/365 09/12/2025
The Starlet. Shall we compare thee to a summer’s day? Wish that we could be a glove upon that hand? That hand upon that cheek? How about one piece of originality as we stare, transfixed: she extends delicate fingers out and out and out, and doesn’t pick up the wine glass. Oh, no. As she listens with rapt attention (faked?) to the producer as he guffaws his way through some kind of tale, heaving and thens between gasping breaths—and then, and then, and then—when we all know it should be but or therefore. But we get ahead of ourselves.
The Starlet extends one delicate hand out and out and out like a movie spaceman. That kind of delicate speed and motion. And she alights a fingertip delicately (so delicately) on the wine glass’ rim, her smile radiating. Eyes glistening and grabbing attention from all over the room. The simple move. The finger tip. Our hearts swell, and we are in love.
021/365 09/11/2025
When it comes time to run, you just gotta run. Just like you practiced. There’s no time to think in the night. No time to stop and get your bearings. You run. You count steps. You cross the field. You count five in the shadow of the old hangin tree. You listen for dogs. Then it’s 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 steps down though the gulley and to the wagon wheel. You grab the shoes there and mark the red star. Pick through the two trees you can barely see, and that’ll get you to the root ball. Put on the shoes there. You’re gonna need ‘em for the next part.
020/365 09/10/2025
You can’t write a novel about skateboarding. It’s too big. Too unwieldy. What’re you going to do? Write about the Gelfand kid in Florida who soared without touching his board? Follow a scrappy team from Venice as they bring the ocean on to land? Track the trials and tribulations of one person as he (or she) suffers setbacks on the way to the olympics? How about a summer camp in Sweden as one man, career beginning to fade, decides he absolutely, positively must come up with a new trick so he can stay relevant for a few more years? Where are you even going to start?
Us? We’ll start here: In the beginning, man invented the wheel.
019/365 09/09/2025
We met in a little office front down on Houston. Every Tuesday. There was me, Marc, and Patton. Salt, who was the oldest of us. He got dropped off in a big white van, the warning beeps filling all the corners of the neighborhood as they slowly lowered his chair from the van to the ground and wheeled him in. There was a guy who introduced himself as Geoff, but it always took him a second to respond to that name, like first he had to remember he’d asked us to call him that. And then a rotating group of guys who came in and out as they got lonely or scared or had questions about things or needed a little atta boy: Mike, Scott, Jerome, Ling. You can fill it out however you want, really. It was a diverse bunch, the irregulars. We took in all kinds.
018/365 09/08/2025
Camp Pendleton sits on a small rise on the far end of town. Each day at dawn, Private Gunner First Class Milton Shawshank wakes before his bunkmates. He retrieves his brass bugle from its small case and parade-marches to the small, raised dias in the center of camp. He blows revelry for exactly one minute, eight seconds. He is never too sick. He is never too tired. He has blown revelry now eight thousand five hundred seventeen times. He is beginning to suspect that might be too many. He is beginning to suspect that he should be through with it by now. He is beginning to suspect that he might need to seek paperwork for filing. Something to get to the bottom of this. Maybe.
017/365 09/07/2025
Lothar is tired. See there, on the battlefield. Through the smoke and through the dust. Past plains of slain enemies and broken war machines. The torn banners of vanquished foes and gutted mounts. Lothar slumps in his saddle. It’s not much. Most wouldn’t notice, but we can see. See the fatigue in his shoulders. The way he favors the right one, a ball of bone and scars…
016/365 09/06/2025
We’d been at sea thirty-three days when a wave plucked Olaf from the deck and shoved him down in the brine’s blackest deep. It wasn’t even storming too badly when it happened.
We looked for him. Cut the engines, weighed anchor, threw the life ring and buoys into the water. But he never come up.
015/365 09/05/2025
Ghosts Local Union 386 has no heavy hitters: no former presidents, no ancient rulers. Not even a gorgeous starlet met too soon with a violent, tragic end. “Much too soon,” people would have said. No, 386 is just us lunchpail, work-a-day ghosts doing lunchpail, work-a-day things.
Harvey Ward called the meeting to order.
014/365 09/04/2025
We are the compilers. More than job, more than calling. Our very being belongs to compiling.
Everything, everything, everything: birthdays and death days. Favorite foods, tax statuses, driving records. Record drives, safety records, records ranked safe to buy. Colors, fabrics, detergents, washers large and small. Test scores, shoe sizes (even European). Mothers’ affairs. Mothers’ brothers’ affairs. Mothers’ brothers’ mistresses’ affairs, even. All affairs anywhere, sordid or splendid, all sorted. All displayed as we sit with steepled fingers and watch the data come in.