November twelfth, Toronto, Ontario, and I've woken up considerably later than intended, surrounded by people who've already begun their working day. There's something faintly humiliating about climbing out of a cot while your colleagues are going about their ordinary affairs, though they've been remarkably decent about the whole thing, and I suppose I ought to be grateful that nobody decided to wake me with a broom.

I've been getting back into photography lately, and thinking about the curious things an image can preserve beyond whatever happens to be visible within its borders. An empty doorway, an unremarkable corner of a room, the ordinary geometry of a place you've passed through a hundred times. Some of these photographs contain entire afternoons for me, though I doubt anybody else would know what to make of them.

And then there are the objects we carried around as children, those magnificent pieces of cheap plastic and cardboard upon which we invested such tremendous fortunes of imagination, ambition, and occasionally our very reputations. I've been remembering some of those things, and a rather formidable young gentleman named John French.

NIGHT MATERIALS

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November ninth, Toronto, Ontario. I've just finished a rather magnificent falafel wrap from a Turkish restaurant down the street, where the people have taken to treating me with such extraordinary kindness that I find myself increasingly reluctant to go anywhere else. There's a cup of tea involved, naturally, and a woman whose understanding of hospitality seems to have survived whatever dreadful transformation has overtaken the rest of modern commerce.

The cold is settling in around Lake Ontario, and I'm sitting in the car, contemplating the peculiar events of the past twenty-four hours. I've slept rather badly, though the circumstances were sufficiently ridiculous that I suspect I might have difficulty explaining them to anybody who hasn't already made peace with the general absurdity of my existence.

There are some encouraging developments, at least. The debt is finally approaching its end, and I've got a bowl of soup waiting for me. I've also been thinking about Jean-Claude Van Damme, among other things, which may or may not be a consequence of the exhaustion.

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Sunday morning in Toronto, and I'm sitting in the car remembering a rather wonderful evening spent in the company of some old friends. We gathered for Fox's birthday, four gentlemen of varying degrees of respectability, and made our way into the city for a proper bowl of ramen before surrendering ourselves to the flashing lights and mechanical indignities of an old arcade.

There's something about being reunited with people who've inhabited so much of your life. You spend the first hour discovering what has happened to them in your absence, hearing which old ambitions survived and what new adventures have found them, and gradually you begin furnishing another set of memories together. I find that a rather beautiful thing.

Anyway, I've got somewhere important to be today, and the Ford Escape has apparently decided to develop another goddamn opinion about the matter.

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I've been lying here on the cot, staring down an imaginary highway toward a great congregation of storm clouds, those magnificent black formations that gather at the edge of the world and make a man reconsider his importance in the grand arrangement of things. I've always had an affection for tornadoes. Terrible old dragons of the sky, drawing their strength from forces we scarcely acknowledge until they come tearing across the countryside.

It's getting late, and I'm somewhere along that curious passage between wakefulness and dreaming, where the imagination begins furnishing its own scenery and the ordinary affairs of mankind seem increasingly preposterous. I've been thinking about money, among other things, and the peculiar value we've assigned to invisible quantities that pass between us through glowing electronic boxes. Quite an extraordinary arrangement when you consider it.

Anyway, somebody's calling. At eleven o'clock at night. Christ almighty.

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Content note: Contains discussion of suicidal thoughts, severe emotional distress, and past thoughts of violence.

November fourth. Rain falling over an Etobicoke parking lot, the evening already black, and I've found an old appointment in my calendar bearing a rather dreadful title. The Beginning of the End. Extraordinary how a few words, left there by some former incarnation of yourself, can reach across the years and take hold of you again.

I've been remembering a day by the lake, a restaurant full of strangers, and the strange loneliness of finding yourself in a world that continues celebrating while your own has come to ruin. There are places I can scarcely visit anymore without feeling the weight of what happened there, though I suppose there is something to be said for the endurance of memory, even when it is a miserable companion.

The rain continues, and my thoughts eventually turn toward the great machinery of authority, the strange comforts we take in its rituals, and the possibility that we've mistaken the management of our discontent for something resembling freedom. I've been thinking about that quite a lot.

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I've been thinking about an old friend of mine, a gentleman known as the Stiffness, whom I met many years ago when we were employed in the noble profession of hauling other people's accumulated shit out of their houses. I was the driver, and he was the navigator, though his understanding of geography was so profoundly defective that I remain astonished we ever managed to arrive anywhere at all.

He was a marvellous lunatic, enormously intelligent, possessed of a deeply unconventional temperament, and capable of transforming an otherwise ordinary evening into an episode of such magnificent disorder that a man could scarcely believe he'd survived it by morning. We had some wonderful times together, though a fair number of them would have been difficult to explain to the authorities.

I'm lying here on the cot again, thinking about those years and the curious ways our lives have changed since. I don't see him nearly as often as I'd like.

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Content note: Contains discussion of suicide and childhood sexual abuse, alongside accounts of violence.

November has arrived in southern Ontario, bringing with it the miserable grey afternoons, the premature darkness, and that familiar melancholy which ordinarily suits me well enough. I've returned from a weekend of extraordinary comfort to find the world much as I left it, with its various troubles waiting patiently for my arrival, and I'm having a harder time reacquainting myself with the whole arrangement than I might have expected.

So I'm sitting in the car, watching the trees, thinking about the things we carry through life and what remains of us after the collisions. There was a time when I fancied myself a stand-up comedian, wandering onto stages without a word prepared and attempting to make something of whatever lunatics happened to be seated before me. I suppose there are worse ways to spend an evening.

I've also been remembering some people from my childhood. Strange old recollections, a few of them considerably more savage than I'd have cared to believe at the time. But there were good boys among the madness, too, and I find myself wondering what became of them.

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The last night at the hotel. The clocks have changed, the cold has finally settled over southern Ontario, and I've gone out walking through downtown Toronto with a camera in my hand and a body that's beginning to remind me, in no uncertain terms, that it has already endured a fair bit of living.

This one isn't about much in particular. Just a walk through the city at night, a few passing scenes, some thoughts on loneliness, silence, and the strange comfort of briefly stepping through the edges of other people's lives. Street parties, pubs, people waiting for something, people with nowhere to go, people in conversation, people in motion, people standing perfectly still.

Then back to the room. Back to the bed. Back to gratitude.

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