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.
288/365 06/06/2026
They never tell you about the blackness. Or they do, but there’s no way to recreate it. Not on earth. The immensity of space through a small portal. It’s like the brain can’t compute. It looks nothing. A bottomless pit. And the same time looks like a flat disc, some kind of light-absorbing material glued the ship’s outer hull. It sometimes makes me dizzy.
287/365 06/05/2026
Every day we watched the ships. Every day we sat on the small dock papa had built and watched the ships move through the deep channel cut by men and machines into the channel’s bottom. They loomed, towering like buildings from the city center. Red and black. Blue and black. Yellow and black. They bristled with cargo, containers bigger than our hut stacked one atop another the length of the ship. I wondered how many huts the ship cold carry. Dozens, easily. Hundreds. Thousands? The size of them made me dizzy and I always lost count.
286/365 06/04/2026
She began to feel like her like her hands and feet were filling with concrete. It was subtle at first. A heaviness in her fingertips. Texting seemed to fatigue her. Typing became a chore.
285/365 06/03/2026
It was June 2nd when the cat began watching me through the window. A little black and white cat with a small, round head and one ear that went sideways.
284/365 06/02/2026
After I had I summoned courage and asked Agnes Dreck if she’d like to “go with me.” And after Agnes puffed herself up and asked me, “Why do you have to be such a jerk, Alan?” And sent me scampering away, back to my desk in our seventh grade social studies class. And after she started going with Ronny Pearl, an asshole rich kid from the north side of town who at some point had become one of my sworn enemies (though I doubt he knew or cared), I developed a raw need to remain unperceived. Not invisible, mind you. I believe there’s a fundamental difference. I didn’t just want to be unseen, I wanted to be unknown. To be able to move through a day, an hour, even a minute without the risk of anything entering my sphere of perception.
283/365 06/01/2026
The sun rose over the city, the eastern sky ranging from pale grey through yellow-pink across the great bowl of sky to the west, where an inky indigo still clung to building tops. And in his rooftop garden, Jacob Alonse tended his pigeons.
282/365 05/31/2026
They tell you, don’t get comfortable. You know when you’ll be sent on your way…
281/365 05/30/2026
Someone once told me if I start a story on Christmas morning, someone has to die by the end. And if someone dies at the start of your story, you can go ahead and end the story on Christmas if you want to.
This story isn’t about either of those things. It has them. Yes, someone dies. And yes, we’ll experience a Christmas together, but it’s just a regular one, with a mix of presents, some good feelings, a couple awkward moments and a solid fight that, with time, has turned into something pretty funny. But it’s no Truman Capote “Christmas Morning,” and the Christmas and the death aren’t hinged in some battle to balance the narrative. They’re just two points in a long series of events that catalog and in some try to make sense of the best and worst days of my life.
See? I tricked you. There’s balance to the narrative. Best and worst. They’re just not Christmas and death, because my God, how boring could that be?
280/365 05/29/2026
The early bees lighted on spring’s first blooms, and we knew the long, harsh winter had finally ended.
279/365 05/28/2026
There’s always the first to die. The first grandparent, the first parent. First friend or enemy. First acquaintance. If we’re lucky, the first to die is a throw-away. It’s harsh to say, and harsh to hear, I’d imagine, but it’s true. The first should be the one you’re not close to. Maybe it was always that way, or maybe it became that way because of a long, protracted illness. The first friend? Someone with whom you’ve lost contact, maybe. Just drifted apart over the years, and when the news hits, it’s more a reminder of your own mortality than a chest-crushing loss.