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.
073/365 11/02/2025
Fall was never fall in Gainesville. The students came in late August, it was still hot. The fall equinox arrived in September, it was still hot. Finally, two days in early October would hint at the season elsewhere in full bloom, so to speak, but then the spirit of summer would rear its ugly head again and press its hot, humid hand down on the town and send everyone back inside.
072/365 11/01/2025
After Momma died, the trains I could hear in the night—well, how I felt about them changed. Before, I could hear them out across the hills and pastures, and it made me hopeful. I thought about all the coal and grain and people riding across the land and I could think about those people and decide on where they were going and how they were going to be once they got there. I liked to think them going up to Chicago or out across the plains and mountains and all the way to California. But after—well, they just sounded mournful.
071/365 10/31/2025
The wife turns to you, her eyes wide, one hand braced on the dash, the other clutching your forearm. “I think that was a body.”
The two of you race across the desert hills: scrub brush you have no idea the name. Tan sand and top 40 from the car stereo. “No way,” you say. You check the rearview and can’t see anything. Nothing in the road. “There’s nothing in the road. Maybe it was a mirage.”
“No,” she says. “In the ditch. There was a body. We have to turn around.”
A fear grips your throat. Makes your windpipe small.
070/365 10/30/2025
Like most of us, there were many things he didn’t know: didn’t know how pirates navigated the seas. Not specifically. Didn’t know the reasons for crop rotations (or only vaguely). Didn’t know the routines and customs of courtiers of the French Court or why, really, the French Court went away and then..Napoleon? What was that all about? The list went on and on: oldest settled city in Egypt. What happens when tornadoes start. What’s up with ducks?
069/365 10/29/2025
Whispers on the wind foretold of his coming. Captain Coconut Adams who outfitted his flotilla with sails painted sky blue and bedecked with palms and rocks. Ships hung with mosses and grass. Spotted lands became untrusted. Sailors seeking respite glassed the horizon and saw false islands. Sailed excitedly across the waves only to know too late they had fallen for the trap.
068/365 10/28/2025
We hid in caves and holes and barns. We hid in crawlspaces, hollowed logs, abandoned cabins high in the hills. Abandoned grocery stores, gas stations, churches and mosques. Janitors’ closets. Attics. Long-dry drain pipes now jutting high above the cracked and desiccated riverbeds. And still they came, their clicking legs and mandibles. The heat of them thrumming as they passed.
067/365 10/27/2025
In the spring of 1347, the stench of death hanging like dark angels in the cities, seven noble families journeyed southwest from Prague to seek refuge in Karlštejn Castle.
066/365 10/26/2025
And then one day they all come back outta the hills. All those folks that went up in there those years ago. They came back with their tents and their VW microbuses and all that hippie shit. We always figured they’d turn into some kind of cult and come back and try to kill us all in town. You know? That kind of thing. But they just came back down one day, and that skinny fellow, Lyle, who had been in charge in the first place, just shrugged and said, “Well, I guess it didn’t really work out.” And that was that.
065/365 10/25/2025
The very first thing I remember is a club. The smooth warmth of the wood in my hand. The hefty swing of it. I’m crouched low in grasses tall as my eyes and sneaking slowly towards a great brown beast. I can hear its breathing. The long rumble of an in and out. Looking now, I can see it must have been terrified. Mystified. It ran and ran and ran as best it could, but I still came. My brothers and I still came across the plains. Standing monkeys who could walk and walk and walk and walk. Ever coming. Never tired. And now we would feast. Now we would eat for months. I remember my hand gripped the club. I remember the weight of it as I crept through the tall grasses.
064/365 10/24/2025
I got all my friends in here: Glenda the Good Witch; Alfonso, who’s a graffiti artist. Beckman Houndstooth III who advises me on crypto buys and handles some of my above-board portfolio investments; Vladdy The Pick who handles my crypto sells and additional portfolio investments. Girlfriend Claudia, Girlfriend Miko, Girlfriend Sally Ann. The Ol’ Colonel. 10-Gallon Slim. A half-finished model that’s mostly the good bits from my mother. All right here. All within reach.