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.
133/365 01/01/2026
In the beginning, they say God made heaven and earth and all that shit.
132/365 12/31/2025
For the third time that year, I woke up and didn’t know where I was. It was barely daylight, trees and bench. And not one they’d modified to keep homeless people from sleeping on it. I’d still chosen the ground.
131/365 12/30/2025
I’ll tell you this: I’ve been a bike messenger about 10 years. I’ll tell you this, too, though maybe I shouldn’t: you tell someone you’ve been a bike messenger for 10 years, they say “Oh!” and have that surprised, appreciating look on their face, like they got a cheap wine that’s secretly impressive. You tell someone you been a bike messenger for 11 years, and they say, “Oh,” and give you that face like they tasted an expensive wine that’s weak. Anemic. Which side of the 10 am I secretly on? For me to know for now, but stick around. I got tales.
129/365 12/28/2025
That summer, the extended family was in a kind of Cold War. On the one side, Gemma Moses sent word it would most probably be her last summer, that fates and angels had come again to take her away. It was the same thing she had done every other summer for the past seven years, and we’d accommodated the schedule. But this summer, 87, she was supposed to keep quiet and didn’t. It threw everyone into a tizzy, not least of whom was Granny Baker, the great-grandmother on my mother’s side. A woman hewn from hardened yew, who ended each day sipping down half an ice cold Pabst while she watched the sunset from her front porch.
128/365 12/27/2025
There comes a moment—life’s fulcrum, I suppose, where you realize at some point that you have known more people than you will ever know again. That more people you have known have died, and the number will keep growing as the number of new people you meet grows smaller and smaller and smaller until such time as everything is past, and the future no longer exists as a knowable thing. Simple abyss.
127/365 12/26/2025
Sometimes, you end up seeing some f’d-up things owning a repair shop. One time? This guy comes in with a laptop on the fritz. He says it’s slow, things dropping out of the hard drive. I tell him I’ll take a look, but I don’t recognize the brand. Some offshoot Latvian shit or something. Guy’s nervous, but I got a reputation, so he leaves it behind and goes on his way. I gotta machine parts to get the thing open. Little squiggly Torx type screws holding the bottom on.
126/365 12/25/2025
There’s a hush this woodland morning. Spring, but still cool. The air’s soft chill enough to keep birds silent and sleeping a full hour after sunrise. The meadow there, nestled in hug of the forest’s long, dense arms wears her halo of mist, the gray hovering above new, grass-green shoots and scuttling voles finishing their twilight business.
125/365 12/24/2025
No, no, no. It was Dr. Terrible. Hapless fool decided to broadcast his ransom demands on actual television? It took three days for the video clips to go viral, and by then it was only the worst parts and people ripping him to shreds in the comments, all boomer this and boomer that. Except I think he might be Gen X for real. But who cares, right? “Blah blah blah Washington Monument!” and all that. I almost felt sorry for the guy. If he’d really been serious he would have streamed on Twitch and picked the data center outside Brownsville. I think then people would have sat up and listened.
124/365 12/23/2025
There’s a strange thing that happens here, where a fog comes in, but the air outside is the exact temperature of your skin. I don’t know how it happens, but you can walk in it at night, the street lights all haloed and the blinking red of late-night traffic lights illuminating the air around you. Except for the weight on your feet, it’s easy to feel like you’re floating through the mist. The damp on your skin not uncomfortable and your thoughts free to come and go as they please.