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.
138/365 01/06/2026
There is a silence in the aftermath. The morning after. Not a blanket, not a muffling. It is a silence that clears space for all sound. A silence that makes all sounds clean and clear and brittle in the cold morning light.
The woman. She stands at the kitchen counter, both hands flat against the soapstone, shoulders hunched. The man stands in the doorway, his breathing shallow, a slight warble in his ears, tracking his heart beat. The woman breathes in, her lungs filling the room one small second, the rush of air like the rush of wind, and the cabinet door’s magnet release like a train uncoupling. That kind of volume.
There are the mugs. Mismatched, obscenely colorful. Vulgar. The man watches. Waits. The woman extends a hand. The man wonders a test: how many mugs will she retrieve? Two? One.
137/365 01/05/2026
The seasons came and went and the village waited. Summer, with it audacious, verdant spectacle and long days wiling into soft-lighted gatherings in the village square, the night air pungent with blooming vines and field grasses. Autumn, with its first crisp-air flirting and its color cacophony’s audacious arrival: yellow, orange, holly red as if the trees themselves had lit aflame. Winter, and the slow damping of days as night encroached and frost climbed the windowpanes. Low, gray skies, and the people’s retreat indoors.
136/365 01/04/2026
Mamma say the cows always knew before anyone else. She could see it in the way they stand, up and close to the barn, all facing the coming storm. Mostly those came down across the prairie. Northeast, I guess. It got real bad when they started bouncing off the Rockies. Just like a kickball, except with winds and rain so bad you’d think God himself forgot to tell you to build an ark. The cows knew, though. They knew and all faced the direction even when the smartest folks on TV kept saying it was impossible. That it wouldn’t never happen.
135/365 01/03/2026
The quiet times were nice. A time to breathe. To wander the halls. There was a little alcove tucked in behind the women’s bathrooms on the second floor we could use to close our eyes for 10 minutes during lulls.
The lulls came. Every hospital has them, and if someone tells you otherwise, they’re lying. Trying to be more than they are. But you get the rhythm of the place. The surge between 2 and 3 when the bars close. The bump around 7:30 in the morning when poor moms realize their kid is sick enough to need some medicine. About 12 hours later when people head home from work and wreck their car, eat bad sushi, decide Wednesday afternoon is the perfect time to clean the gutters. A 6 PM game of pickup basketball that blows out a knee.
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.