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.
115/365 12/14/2025
Avec. Avec non. The words repeated in my mind as we walked bundled into one another along one of the beautiful Paris boulevards. The beauty of them. The simplicity. I dipped my head and committed to memory a quartet of aromas: her hair smelling of cedar and “fresh” since she’d used my shampoo. Skin of chilled lilac. The wooly wonder of her scarf and coat, each picked from a pile in the back of a New York thrift shop literal hours before we left. I breathed her deep and whispered the words tumbling in my mind. “Avec. Avec non.”
“What’s that?” Her voice a muffled lilt through the scarf and her coat’s upturned collar.
“With. Without,” I whispered. “Avec. Avec non.”
She stopped and chuckled. “That’s not how it works,” she said. “Avec non? Where did that come from?”
“With. Without. Or not with. Avec non.”
“Oh my god. No. With: avec. Without: sans. It’s sans. And even if you were trying to do what you’re trying to do, it would be Pas avec. With. Not with. Pas avec.” She looked at me with a look I can now label as a mix of pity and disbelief, and the next morning I was forced to learn a new French phrase: Je vais à Prague sans toi. I am going to Prague without you.
114/365 12/13/2025
3 a.m. A few klicks outside Taipei. A haggard DC-7 idles on a patch of concrete, barely a runway. Quonset hut half reclaimed by mikania where a small group sits in the dark, waiting out the silence that descended on the forest around them.
113/365 12/12/2025
If you happened to be standing at the bottom of a small rise near land parcel 284, just outside Overbook, Kansas, not long after midnight on October 7, 1938, facing east—and if you faced due east and then 10 degrees to your right, you would have seen—there at the top of the rise and silhouetted against the light of the rising, waxing gibbous—two men who had just finished digging a large hole in the dry earth.
112/365 12/11/2025
Some said the house was cursed. That each generation since the house was built had visited upon it some horror. The first, when Hepzibah was taken from the house during the 1704 massacre. Killed while being marched to Montreal. 1730, and young Samuel succumbed to fever, his tiny cries feeble at first, and then growing more and more alarmed until finally it seemed he had cried all he could. His small throat raw and blistered and his cries barely a whisper before he went quiet. 1768, William, under crushing gambling debt, strode to the barn before dawn and stripped himself naked, flogged his back with a cat-o-nine he’d made from scrap bridle leather, and then hanged himself from the barn’s seventh rafter.
111/365 12/10/2025
They spent so long without seeing planes, when the first one was allowed back in the sky, it seemed an alien thing.
110/365 12/09/2025
None of the townspeople would have gone on record as saying they liked Father Grimoire, but none of them would have said he was a bad preacher, either. He had a kind of distance to him. Would listen calmly to folks’ problems. Let them really unload their burdens. But no one ever thought to invite him around for supper just to be nice or enjoy his company.
109/365 12/08/2025
We went to see the rock singer. To bathe in his musical glory and have ourselves transported through music to the best times from our pasts.
108/365 12/07/2025
Commissions were the worst. Sure, the money was good, but then you had some plebe calling shots about color and composition. “What if it had a little more red? You know, to tie in the couch.” And so he’d add red. Bitchy, grumbly red in a put-upon cascade down the canvas. Always on the right. And he’d hate himself for it.
107/365 12/06/2025
Were you there when history changed? You might not know today, and you might not know tomorrow, but some time you might. Some time you might look back 15, 20, 50 years, if you’re so lucky as to still be living, and think, “That’s the point.” Or “Remember that time?”
106/365 12/05/2024
What he’d had—he could see it now—was a failure to communicate. Of course! All the setbacks. All the foibles and missed opportunities. Every job, woman, chance—all of it! All of it lead back to that one singular failure.
He nearly had to pull over, the realization hit him so hard and so fully.