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.
177/365 02/15/2026
Milton Keyes died in his campus office just after office hours on May 19, 2012. His desk piled high with English papers he was set to grade, the shelves behind him packed with books both pedagogic and pleasurable, sometimes a single book enjoying both qualities at once.
176/365 02/14/2026
The lists. He had them everywhere: daily planner, post-its, a little notebook he carried for when he didn’t have his daily planner with him. Things to do in the next hour, the rest of the day. Tomorrow and next week. Calendars marked for next month. Summer vacation. Thanksgiving and Christmas. Doctors appointments, travel plans, car maintenance, yard guys. Important meetings and unimportant meetings, a whole year ahead of him. Planned and marked and ready. All future, all the time.
His present began to slip. So focused was he on the future he began fading in the present. No one noticed at first. His few friends still seeing him when he had energy to leave the house. The dumb daily tasks at his work computer, fingers still solid on the keyboard. But he could feel it himself. Small, unconscious moments when he glimpsed tiny holes in his reality.
175/365 02/13/2026
The soft quiet of the kitchen where kids used to run, shout, giggle with glee. The afternoon sun slanting through warbled glass and glinting off drinking glasses, polished silver, the chrome faucet and handles. All light. All sound.
174/365 02/12/2026
The evil Dr. Vargoz, formerly of Fort Wayne, Indiana; before that, Chicago, Illinois, and now—this moment—of Cell C-118 in Hayworth Meta Penitentiary, sat up late nights and plotted his revenge.
173/365 02/11/2026
And so it came the humans finally rebelled against hyperbole, purposefully missing opportunities labeled as “can’t miss.” Hiding their eyes and looking elsewhere when the world asserted “MUST SEE!” Buffalo wings were no longer amazing, and everyone agreed no one was HUMILIATED on live TV, as much as the news headlines screamed otherwise.
172/365 02/10/2026
This was during The Lonely Years, right after you’d left me for Prague and that whole thing happened between Pablo and Ramone.
171/365 02/09/2026
He desperately longed to return to a time where pretending wasn’t what happened. To the time when he was a boy where riding his bike was flying an X-wing. Not pretending to fly an X-wing, no. A time when the world would drop away and his brain constructed a new one in its place.
170/365 02/08/2026
There came to him, from time to time, a great and shining feeling. Life unmoored, his vision swam; feelings inside him like being trapped in a fun house. Tilt-A-Whirl while walking to the office restroom.
169/365 02/07/2026
IT is the great leveler. The computers asking people to make predictable systems. To regulate processes. They bring all the little bits and pieces and one-offs, corral them, and make them same. Smooth the edges. Eliminate surprise.
168/365 02/06/2026
The Gentleman Scholar. Not a gentleman scholar. The Gentleman Scholar, an award bestowed by The International Society of Gentlemen once every four years in recognition of the highest achievement in scholarship and gentlemanliness. And this cycle, it belonged to Lord Edward Scalesdon of Merryweather, who discovered the news in a paper he was forced to steal from the news agent because he did not, at the moment, have resources enough to buy it.
The Gentleman Scholar. He let the phrase gambol ‘round his brain a turn or two.