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.
103/365 12/02/2025
Morning on the last day of my high school junior year, I shuffled out of my room and found my dad sitting on the couch, wearing my letterman jacket. I went on past and into the kitchen, hoping there was coffee. As I poured, I called back into the living room, “I’m gonna need my jacket!”
Two beats later came his response, “My jacket now!”
I sighed and let my head fall forward with the weight of it before scanning the counters for empty beer cans.
102/365 12/01/2025
I knew a man who ran the Tilt-A-Whirl during season. Off-season, he worked with us in the warehouse, hefting boxes, taking inventory. He was racist as all get-out, but not in a mean way. Just in a slurry way. If that’s a way.
Anyway, this guy had stories.
100/365 11/29/2025
His life had come to hold so many numbers:
Social Security
Drivers License
PIN
PIN
PIN
PIN
How many angels could dance on the head of a PIN?
Door Code (shared by everyone in the building)
Door Code (shared by everyone in the building)
Security Code (shared by everyone in the building)
Routing Number
Account Number
Credit Card Number
Funds
Sometimes, late at night or in the early morning, the numbers swirled and swirled and began a faint throbbing, just behind his eyes.
099/365 11/28/2025
The whole, vast city stretched in a crescent across the bay. In summer, the sun-sparkled water cast dazzling, pinpoint lights across the alabaster buildings. Gold minarets shone back on the water and doubled the dancing <lights>. In winter, a cold wind blew down from the hills behind the city, though the streets and alleys and out across the bay, a most curious weather that pushed forming ice out and out across the water to pile against the rimming sandbar, some ten miles off shore. The ice stacked and splintered there, shunting spires toward heaven. In the quiet night the tectonic groans echoed back across the bay as the ice pressed against itself and surged and swayed with the tide’s incessant rhythm.
098/365 11/27/2025
You open a story on Christmas—warm light twinkling, kids nestled all snug in their beds, all that stuff? Someone’s gotta die by the end. That’s the way of it. The ups and down of stories. You open a story with someone dying? Maybe a baby gets born by the end of it. Or maybe the remaining folks get to have Christmas, slightly melancholy but somewhat hopeful. The memory of their dead grandmother swirling about the room on the scents from the Christmas candle, and that warm aroma—the cinnamon and pine and maple—breathed deep while kids tear through paper is somehow a comfort and blah blah blah.
097/365 11/26/2025
Lotta people end up on shitholes.com as, like, a warning? Place of places to stay away from. Or, I don’t know. Dive bars or some shit like that. But man, it’s not that at all. I started it because it’s impossible to take a shit in this town without paying someone a dollar or risking tetanus.
You had the tetanus? Brutal. Not TB mind you, but still.
096/365 11/25/2025
Look here. This book. This dusty tome taken from the shelf and bound in leather. Faint imprint of title, author, date still visible on the spine. Feel its weight. Its significance and power. The way it vibrates in your hand, as if ready to burst forth with a tumult of knowledge.
095/365 11/24/2025
Dear Mr. Musk,
I write to you today with what I feel is a unique proposal:
094/365 11/23/2025
You’re gonna need a watcher. You go out, dead of night, you got all kinds of stuff with you: cans and nozzles, rollers and brushes. Maybe a gallon container or two. You got your respirator, which—I’m sorry—which makes it tougher to see, hear—everything. It makes everything tougher. So you’re gonna need a watcher. Someone to keep you safe if cops start coming around or neighbors start rubbernecking.