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.
142/365 01/10/2026
Our mother was not an architect, designer, nor decorator. She wasn’t an accomplished cook, nor did she seem to enjoy anything to do with it: shopping, prepping, cleaning, doing dishes. She liked food well enough, enjoyed very much going out to eat. But her own meals, which we ate at our dining table most nights, always seemed like some kind of march. It was surprising then, when she announced one day she had hired contractors to manifest her vision: a new, bigger kitchen. Island, Tile floors. Space and purpose. She would conceive it. Design it. Oversee its construction. We could see, then, the glint of promise in her eyes, and none of us could conceive the wreckage a new kitchen would befall us.
141/365 01/09/2026
They rode south, across the dusty salt flats, mountains in the distance to the right, the bright, hot plain to their left so vast and far they could see the planet’s faint curve through the shimmering heat. Their mounts plodded on, snuffled and sneezed the salt dust from their nostrils. The riders kept their hats low, rags doubled over and tied across their faces.
140/365 01/08/2026
Here is how everything changes: You find yourself running. You are running and your brain is screaming at you to do stop. You are running and your brain is screaming and you are not stopping. You are running, running. Not away. Toward. You are running toward and running and heart pumping and legs and arms moving like they haven’t in years because life has been so comfortable, so normal. Such a place that running is never necessary. So unnecessary it becomes a burden. A thing scrawled in notebooks only to be willfully forgotten: “Must run tomorrow!”
But this moment, you run. Amid shrieks and confusion and the small of gunshot and sounds of shattered glass and voices commanding everyone to stay where they are, you do not. You run. And the world forms a small, hot pinpoint of focus: must.
139/365 01/07/365
There is a frantic joy in the desperation. A feeling that comes from the not-knowing like hearing the roller coaster’s last click, click, click at the crest of the first big hill. All thrilling fear. All potential energy.
Skip Monroe was felling that feeling now. Skint, owed money up and down the strip from $28 he’d borrowed from Gary to cover lunch to $138,000 he needed for a wild real estate investment gone horribly, horribly wrong.
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.