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.
184/365 02/22/2026
We often wondered what the ghosts did come summer’s end. When we had the staff cover the furniture in white sheeting, the tables and chairs and end tables and lamps themselves become ghosts of a kind. For the summer house on Montauk was well and truly haunted, though not in a way that made any of us scared. It was haunted in a gentle way. Haunted like sea breezes.
182/365 02/20/2026
It’s a funny thing about endings. We think they come loud and dramatic. Doors slamming and raised voice. The anger of betrayal or discovery. The fiery hurt of “not enough” turning and reflected outwards in a hot beam of hate. But it’s mostly not true. Mostly the endings are quiet. A silence that stretches slowly, slowly until it’s just bigger than the conversations. A water glass unfilled.
181/365 02/19/2026 (Extra 03)
My dad fell in love with fig spread. He tried it on a sandwich and said, “Oh my god this is divine!” He said things like that back then. Now he’s dead, so he doesn’t say much? But back then he was all, “divine!” and “fantabulous!” and things like that. Not in front of my friends, though. In front of them he was mostly just a normal dad.
Anyway, when my dad fell in love with fig spread he told me he was going to put it on every shopping list. “Every time! It’ll be marvelous. Fig spread at every meal!” And he did. And honestly? For a while it was fine. He ate it on biscuits and muffins and bagels and bread. He ate it a lot. But then he stopped, but he didn’t stop. He stopped eating it, but he didn’t stop buying it, and slowly, slowly, then all of a sudden our fridge was nothing but fig spread. “How odd,” my dad said. “There’s not really room for the spinach.”
Me? I was 10. What the hell was I going to do?
180/365 02/18/2026
He had dreams of a barren, white waste, the ice floes extending all around him from horizon to horizon. His feet sliding on the ice and the ice cracking deep and loud. The long, seismic rumble of cracking ice, rumbling through him, the dark fissures forming as slabs stabbed toward heaven. A long, black crack appeared beneath him, and he started awake just as his dream self fell into the blackness, the night now around him in his bed, and his bowels loosing terrific, rumbling farts mistaken in dreams for cracking ice.
He gasped in the dark, stomach cramping, and marveled at the sounds his body could produce without his guidance. And before dawn, even…
178/365 02/16/2026 (Extra 02)
It was spring of 1890. After two years of gray skies, unseasonable cold and winters of heavy snow, the sun came through. The snow up in all the mountains around—gleaming white mountain caps—melted down and became whitecaps in rushing rivers through the gullies and <other mountain feature>. The water picked up all the tree fall and rocks and boulders and loose debris and bought it all down to the town. Buried half the place completely, and wrecked most everything else. We lost half the town over those few days. Close to 1,200 people.
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.