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.
153/365 01/21/2026
You can’t make the bed while you’re still in it, son. Life’s got truths, and that’s one of them.
152/365 01/20/2026
“The men,” she said, “Will tell you things.”
We children—we girls—gathered on the woven rug around Gemma’s feet. She was old. Knuckles like cypress knees and mouth wrinkled and soft as prunes. But her eyes shown bright in the evening dim and the reflected hearth fire danced across her pupils.
“But the things they will tell you are not the things you need to hear.” She leaned down close, and we held our breath. “They may be what you want to hear, but sometimes,” she said, “Most times, the men will just tell you what they want to hear themselves. The things that make them feel more like men.”
151/365 01/19/2026
Sometimes in my dreams the crowing rooster sounded like baby screams. I don’t know why. I get the panic that somewhere a baby was screaming, and then I’d wake up and curse that damn rooster.
And before you say you know about that old TV show where the guy is freaked out because the whole chicken/baby thing, I know about that, too. And I’m not stealing from it. Though I gotta say there’s probably something there. You don’t hear something and think “baby scream,” even in your dreams, without something going on in your life.
150/365 01/18/2026
Mostly it was dog we could hear in the night. Packs of ‘em moving up in the hills, howling into the night. Little scouting squads come into the camp at night, their relentless huffing as they sniffed the perimeter, pulled scents from the door and window frames. A big mutt with a heavy square head up on his hind legs and his breath fogging the glass. This would have been two years after all the lights went out all over the world.
149/365 01/17/2026
“You’d be surprised.”
We were jammed together on the cross-town bus. All us schlubs who couldn’t afford a ride share and had to deal with each other when the subway workers went on strike. I tried to ignore him, the man whose head nearly rested on my shoulder. His breath smelled like gunky floss and burnt coffee. I pressed my forehead against the pole.
“You’d be surprised,” he continued. “How easy a knife—some knives—will slide through skin. It’s like a...like a…like a elegant kayak parting the water.”
I took a deep breath, the pole’s metal and some other guy’s wet wool coat giving me smells that weren’t disgusting. I waited.
148/365 01/16/2026
They lead lives of careless destruction. A huge and beautiful steamer plowing through a marina of dinner parties, travel destinations, maids and pool boys. Splinters in their wake and people left clinging to flotsam, blinking in a harsh new light.
146/365 01/14/2026
We like to think war is different. That during war, people are huddled in homes with curtains drawn and one low candle lighting the night as they—the people—whisper curses and thanks. We like to think of planes overhead and the distant rumble of artillery.
145/365 01/13/2026
How does a saxophone disappear? Beauregard stood in his squalid little living room and scanned the perimeter: shitty couch, rickety table, spider plant needing water. Ancient club chair sprouting foam like fungal growths on its arms and seat. Book shelf, TV, old video game console. And then a small blank spot on the floor where his saxophone case should be. He wandered to the bedroom, a converted closet barely big enough for his twin bed. He moved laundry, checked a shelf. Forced himself between the bed and the wall to peek under the frame. No case. Perhaps he was going blind. So sure was he that the saxophone case had to be here somewhere his brain fabricated a fictional affliction, and then briefly, wildly accepted it. He had to tell himself he was being stupid.
144/365 01/12/2026
There is a city what slipped outside history. The river of time, the slow meander floating all things from beginnings to end can’t touch it. The past of the place. The wonders and horrors stacked and hardened like sediment, the persistence of wars and bloodshed, famine and strife. The fires. The slaughters. All of it buried layer upon psychic layer that soon the city became immovable. The hard weight of the past too much an actor for time’s steady hand.