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.
043/365 10/03/2025
The jungle. From our wallpapered comfort in the halls of the Explorers’ Society, we could envision it sprawled across the continent, horizon to horizon. We talked of its lush green. The bright white birds flying in small flocks across the verdant canopy. The cut of blue-green through the trees that would be the jungle’s meandering lifeblood river. Yes, in the high-backed leather chairs, our pipes and brandy snifters close at hand, the jungle was mysterious and beautiful. All lush promise and inviting possibility.
When we finally made it to her cruel shores, however, our vision went from those imagined aerial views of paradise to the dark, tangled, grounded view full of noise and wet and darkness.
042/365 10/02/2025
The scull eased into the water without sound. The still water’s edge rimmed lavender with dawn’s reflection. There was reverence in this moment. Lungfuls of cool, dry air. Not even birds yet awake. But here we are. To see us from afar you might think we’re soldiers recently returned. Just underweight but strong enough. Skinny muscle. Sinew.
041/365 10/01/2025
The hunting store sold me a full set of ghillie camouflage, which seemed like overkill, but they maintained top to bottom it was the kind used by the world’s top sniper teams and that absolutely no one anywhere would see me coming. And I could hide in plain sight and bag turkey, deer, whatever. They had me try it on and everything.
It was pretty impressive. “What about raccoons?” I asked. I was doing the little back-and-forth thing in the three-way mirror, seeing how it looked on the back side. And it really was like someone had just turned me into a moss monster.
“Excuse me?” The nice woman manning the place asked me to repeat myself. Not sure, but I guess maybe the whole fuzzy headdress thing makes it hard to get my voice out.
“Raccoons,” I said more clearly. “What about bagging raccoons?”
040/365 09/30/2025
There were rumors, of course. Dr. Endicott had uncovered scrawled marginalia that placed the artifact in Marrakesh as recently as 1911. The Cambridge sponsored archeological team reported they found tangential fragments on a dig outside Nag Hammed not long after the official naming. Church documents maintained the artifact didn’t exist, their very insistence on its absence creating the notion of something more. Then the disappearances started.
039/365 09/29/2025
They say you never stop being a parent. Once your kids are born and hold your heart in their tiny fat fists, you cannot escape. But that’s a lie told by parents still young enough to know…anything. Young enough to resent the late-night call or text message sent at 10 am on a Tuesday. Who sends texts at 10 am on Tuesday? Your 30-year-old child who’s run into some kind of trouble at the bank or with a credit card or car loan. Asking to call if you’re free, and then what? It’s going to be bad news or good. It’s never not news, and no matter what you’re doing, you have to drop everything and decide, Ok. This is it. You steel yourself and say, sure. You stare at the phone for what feels like an ungodly length of time, you own life spooling out and away and all the little pins of shit you thought you were going to do get flung to the stars. So that’s going to be an afternoon…
038/365 09/28/2025
A hot, dry wind blew out of Death Valley, swirling across Bakersfield parking lots and intersections, through vacant shopping centers. It blew candy wrappers and waxed paper from fast food stands and dotted chainlink with patterns like braille. Cross winds on the 58 shimmied tractor trailers and kicked little whitecaps across sections of the Kern River. All in all, it was less than lovely.
037/365 09/27/2025
Fred lived a long time in the bath tub before he died. First it was the hip dysplasia, which meant he couldn’t get around so good. And then…we don’t know. His front legs stopped working so well, too. It was just easier to set him up in the tub. We could bring him food and water when he needed it. And get him cleaned up when he needed it. I guess we could have taken him down to the vet to get him put to sleep, but he seemed happy in the tub. All dog smiles when we’d pet him and talk to him and looking around.
Eventually his neck stopped working, so he couldn’t even move his head. He was pretty thin by then, too. So dad was able to pick him up and put him in the back seat no problem to get down to the vet. She said she’d never seen anything like it, really. Called the disease progressive, but didn’t know what the disease was.
They didn’t let me stay in the room for the actual putting to sleep.
036/365 09/26/2025
First you prime the lungs, deep breaths in and out. In…out…it slows the heart. Plumps the blood with oxygen. Some bob in the water, get a feel for the currents and chop. And when ready—though you’re never quite ready—never quite unready. But when it is time the body knows. Descends. The blue (gray, green) water closes above. Sounds muffle. And the body descends, descends, descends into the deep.
035/365 09/25/2025
Sometimes the mines churned day and night, the rumble of boring machines and labored breaths of men moved the ground and floorboards and entered our dreams. Became lumbering beasts silhouetted against darkening skies, all muscle and teeth. The breaths our breaths as we raced to escape their churning, devouring maws. And waking, the fine dust in the air would have clouded our noses. Even far away as the village. The smell of diesel, dust, the hard-extracted guts of the earth.
Mother came mornings with a damp cloth and rimmed our nostrils, wiped the corners of our mouths. The worn, damp rag ring-marked and streaked with the red-black chalk-like dust.
034/365 09/24/2025
The Colombian mountains are green like no other. A green so green it sometimes shocks the eye. And among all these greenest mountains lies the Eje Cafetero, a triangle set across Caldas, Risaralda and Quindío. It is here that queen mountains stand.