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.
244/365 04/23/2026
We traveled to the house as if on a pilgrimage of suffering. Every summer mom and dad packed the car, and built for me a small fort in the back seat. This was back in the day of letting kids roam free both outside and in, the expectation, I guess, that two pillows and a couple blankets would serve as padding enough should we get into an accident. Or, perhaps more accurate: on this summer pilgrimage from Florida to Kansas what god would lend its hand to our destruction? What god would see fit to punish us further and take my life rather than see us drive the miles in the shimmering heat while the A/C teased us with occasional cold air?
243/365 04/22/2026
It was time to get my affairs in order. Years before—many years before, I had decided that time enough would manifest when I began to bruise in ways I thought unnatural: the bruising as mars aged skin, first blooming in deep, angry red on the spotted epidermis, a constant warning of carelessness, neglect or violence. The singular indicator of a body functioning no longer at used to but more fragile and susceptible to harm.
242/365 04/21/2026
The first stories ever told boiled down simply: man goes on a journey, stranger comes to town.
240/365 04/19/2026
Depression has none of the glamour of melancholy. I wish it did. And it would have if I’d been rich. But it doesn’t, and I’m not, and so depression was like being weighted by a damp blanket—the world muffled and tough to navigate.
239/365 04/18/2026
The greatest enemy was sand. The way it worked its way into things: folds of flesh, eyes, the machine’s best-oiled bearings. Sand became the great destroyer in our war.
238/365 04/17/2026
Carlsbad. The boy lay on his bed in Portsmouth, Ohio and stared at the ceiling, working and turning the name over and over in his mind. Carlsbad…
237/365 04/16/2026
She kept track of the men and boys by what they did after: cereal, cigarettes, sleep. Caleb, Kevin, Conroy (a mistake if there ever was one). Every boy had his own special thing. The little quirk after sex that made them an individual. During sex it mostly all the same, but she didn’t begrudge them. Mostly it was fine.
236/365 04/15/2026
A hush settled over the church, and the bride and groom stared back down the aisle toward a man neither had seen in years.
235/365 04/14/2026
Pogo do the hurdy dance. Dance, Pogo, dance! Pogo love the hurdy dance. Hands, hands. Feets, feets. Pogo remember: One, two, hurdy hurdy! One, two, purdy purdy! Pogo so purdy. Look purdy Pogo!
Turn, turn, feets, feets. Good Pogo. Pogo good!