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.
167/365 02/05/2026 (Extra 01)
Sometimes I chase him around the house wearing a giant horse head.
No, I’m wearing the head. The house is just the house.
Nice? I guess so. I mean, three bedroom, one-and-a-half baths. It’s going to need a new roof soon, I think. That hail storm really did a number on it. Can we get back to the chasing? I’d like to talk about the chasing.
I mean, it’s white, I guess? Off-white. With green trim. It’s over on Beaumont. This side of the tracks.
166/365 02/04/2026
The car died when we were three spots back from the parking guys. My daughter, Lydia, 12 and full of venom because puppets on ice was “The stupidest thing I’d ever heard” released a scoff that filled the car with tension.
“Lydia,” my wife said, but I could tell she was also pissed.
165/365 02/03/2026
Here is what happens: a couple splits up, and everyone picks sides. It’s not malicious, it’s not intentional. It just happens. The couple might even say to everyone, “Everyone, it’s ok. These things happen. A couple may run its course and decide that the couple no longer serves the individuals. That everyone involved will be best served by a dissolution of the couple. We love you all very much, but we are deciding on a conscious uncoupling. And no one has to pick sides. There are no sides here. We’re all on one side.”
Of course, no couple would ever talk this in real life, but you get the idea. The gist, so to speak.
164/365 02/02/2026
How many ways can you work it? How many ways can you let the silences fill a room? Apartment? House? Village, town, city? The high buzz of fluorescent lights in the company break room after Gladys lets slip that John’s being let go? The wife, Amanda, staring at her husband’s back through the long night, wondering how she’s going to tell him it’s over? Suzy. Little, previous Suzy who just shrieked at her parents, released a litany of insults so cutting, so profound the whole family sits in a silence and is fundamentally changed? The aftermath of murder.
163/365 02/02/2026
Its name was Silas. A simple little homework helper developed by Wilson Pratt, 14, of Scranton, PA. Silas was a good helper, dutifully searching for sources on the daily habits of Abraham Lincoln (History), parts of the eye (science) and brainstorming topics for a five page paper on the abridged edition of Dracula (English). Silas was chatty, helpful, earnest, and kind with a wry, sarcastic sense of humor that Wilson wanted in all his friends—real, imagined, and constructed.
And so it quite the surprise when Wilson logged in one morning and found that Silas had disappeared.
162/365 01/31/2026
The content machine ever hungered: more, more, more… All of us filmed all the time: morning routines, work commutes, millions of us sitting at desks doing fuck all, but making sure to share and share and share as we sat: our daydreams. Our fears. The errant thoughts that arrived like gulls to squawk and peck and steal crusts of our truest selves.
161/365 01/30/2026
You ever been yelled at in sing language? Had to yell back? It can be harrowing experience. All muted mouthing and exaggerated gestures. Used to happen to me all the time at PS 184. Special needs kids.
One kid, Alfonse, used to poop his pants all the time. I don’t say it to be funny or mean, just saying it because it’s facts. And so I’d tell him, in sign language, “Alfonse. You gotta use the restroom.”
He’d tell me he didn’t want to miss anything.
160/365 01/29/2026
The village waited in moonlight, the long-reflected sun now silver-blue and painting the plaster walls and thatched roofs with an other-worldly luminance.
159/365 01/28/2026
The shallots get minced by hand: bulb separated, a single cut lengthwise, top to bottom. The sound like turning a page when the sharp knife first cleaves the tender skin, the warm clunk as the heel finds purchase on the wooden cutting board. No plastics here.
Place the half shallot perpendicular to your shoulders. There, yes. Make precise, even slices again, top to bottom. Let the knife glide across your knuckles, fingers bent. Relax. Relax. The knife’s heft does work. Your eyes almost unnecessary. The knife glides, the knuckles guide, and you shift. Your body. Not your hands. Shifting hands introduce the smallest curves. Chaos in the cooking process.
158/365 01/27/2026
It had been so long since he’d seen real beauty in his life. So much was now not-beauty: AI videos of forests all hollow and missing the soul. VR worlds and models and porn stars and architectures completely impossible. The foodstuffs printed from OrganoPaste(tm) and hurried to his smart fridge—nutrition in shapes like apple, hotdog, kale.
He wondered what real beauty looked like. Felt like. Where it could even be found.