- 015 — Arcade
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.
NIGHT MATERIALS
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E15 - 18m - Nov 8, 2026 - 014 — Tornados
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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E14 - 13m - Nov 6, 2026 - 013 — The Beginning of the End
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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E13 - 30m - Nov 5, 2026 - 012 — The Stiffness
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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E12 - 28m - Nov 4, 2026 - 011 — The Granny Move
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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E11 - 42m - Nov 4, 2026 - 010 — Last Night in the Hotel
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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E10 - 17m - Nov 2, 2026 - 009 — Answering an Email
A woman from Ottawa has written to me about a man she's been seeing, and whether the desire for something more profound in a relationship is altogether reasonable, or merely another of those extravagant expectations we impose upon the unfortunate people who find themselves in our company.
It's a good question, and I don't suppose I'm especially qualified to answer it, but I give it a go anyway, with a White Claw in hand and a perfectly comfortable hotel bed waiting to receive me. Somewhere in the midst of it all, I find myself reconsidering what it means to be fulfilled, and whether there's any particular virtue in learning to live without the things we want.
I may have made the matter worse.
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E9 - 12m - Oct 31, 2026 - 008 — Happy Halloween
Well, by some extraordinary act of generosity, I've finally found myself in possession of a hotel room. A proper one, with a bed and a shower and a door that closes behind me, and no obligation to explain myself to anybody on the other side of it. When they handed me the key I nearly laughed. After everything that's happened lately, I felt as though I'd successfully committed some magnificent fraud.
So here I am in downtown Toronto on Halloween, comfortably swallowed by a mattress, with an entire weekend in which to recover whatever remains of my faculties. The city is full of costumed lunatics, the restaurants are charging criminal sums for ordinary food, and I've been reminded that there are still some remarkably generous people wandering about this miserable old planet.
A happy Halloween to you, wherever you happen to be spending it.
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E8 - 20m - Oct 31, 2026 - 007 — Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls
I've been thinking about propaganda, about art and the extraordinary power of symbols, and how we've come to surrender so much of our imagination to the people who manufacture the things we consume. A corporation can survive the loss of its executives, its factories, even great fortunes, but what becomes of it when the symbol itself is made worthless? There's something in that worth considering. The artist has a peculiar advantage in these matters, being permitted to speak in a language that can mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people, and I wonder whether we've made sufficient use of that privilege.
Anyway, I'm lying on this goddamn cot again, Halloween is approaching, and the accumulated deprivation of sleep is beginning to interfere with the ordinary arrangement of things. There's a great deal on my mind, although I seem to be losing my ability to keep any of it in one place.
Don't go chasing waterfalls.
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E7 - 23m - Oct 30, 2026 - 006 — Parking Privileges
A warning has been left on my windshield, informing me that my parking privileges are in jeopardy. Parking privileges. Christ almighty. As though there were some great honour in leaving a Ford Escape overnight in an industrial parking lot in Etobicoke.
So here I sit, waiting for the gentleman responsible to come wandering out of his security office and explain himself. I have a few questions, and increasingly fewer hours of sleep with which to exercise the patience ordinarily required to ask them politely.
It's a beautiful autumn evening, at least. The planes are passing overhead, the debt is nearly paid, and there's still some life to be found among the lunatics and dreamers.
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E6 - 52m - Oct 29, 2026 - 005 — Switch
Eleven fourteen on a Tuesday night and I'm back on this goddamn cot, a miserable arrangement of canvas and metal that has been slowly conspiring against my spine for the better part of a month. I don't suppose I've slept more than a few hours at a time in weeks, and whatever faculties I've managed to preserve are beginning to behave in ways I don't entirely recognize. But there have been some good people looking after me, some unexpected graces amid the wreckage of recent days, and I find myself profoundly grateful for them, even as the rest of me seems determined to come apart.
So I lie here watching the ceiling fan turn and letting my mind go where it will, back through the years and into the company of old bastards, strange grievances, and memories that have no particular business visiting me at this hour. Somewhere along the way, I begin to feel that familiar switch, when the warmth goes out of things and the machinery in my head starts operating according to some other domain. I don't know. Maybe it's the exhaustion. Maybe I've just been awake too damn long.
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E5 - 19m - Oct 28, 2026 - 004 — After Midnight
I wonder how many establishments along University Avenue have closed their doors without anybody properly mourning them. The filthy ones, especially. The places that fed the drunken, the penniless, and the magnificently irresponsible at hours when no respectable person ought to have been hungry.
There was once a route home from Chainsaw in Waterloo that could be measured almost entirely in pizza slices, poutine, and increasingly regrettable decisions. I seem to remember every goddamn stop along the way.
Or at least I thought I did.
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E4 - 47m - Oct 27, 2026 - 003 — Trampoline
It's Sunday morning in Hamilton, Ontario. The brakes are grinding, the trains aren't running, and Wolf Johnson is sitting in an enormous parking lot trying to change his trousers without attracting the attention of the authorities.
Somebody parks beside him, naturally.
A few thoughts before an afternoon of questionable athletic endeavours. No particular destination in mind, beyond the trampoline park.
A special thank you to the Night Shift for keeping the wheels turning.
NIGHT MATERIALS
An online zine and a peculiar little world of its own.
https://nightmaterials.online/
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E3 - 18m - Oct 26, 2026 - 002 — Bathing in a Sink
There are certain indignities involved in bathing in a bathroom sink. Nowhere to put your clothes, nowhere particularly clean to put anything, a handful of pre-soaped scrubbing pads, and a dripping faucet keeping you company.
Standing naked in the bathroom of the office where he's been sleeping, Wolf Johnson talks his way through another peculiar evening. Somewhere between washing up and contemplating the rather unfortunate circumstances of his existence, his thoughts wander toward Jack Kerouac, Umberto Eco, a thwarted ambition to study rhetoric at Berkeley, and an old high-school teacher who insisted that a paragraph must contain three sentences.
There's some business about refusing to play along, the comforts and consequences of being an outsider, and the strange ways adversity can sharpen our attention to otherwise inconsequential things.
And there's the dripping faucet. Always the dripping faucet.
An unhurried recording about whatever happens to come to mind, made in a bathroom that was never supposed to be anybody's home.
NIGHT MATERIALS
An online zine and a peculiar little world of its own.
https://nightmaterials.online/
Content advisory: Contains frank sexual language and a brief, audible climax during an otherwise nonsexual conversation.
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E2 - 11m - Oct 25, 2026 - 001 — Shoulda Been a Hotel
A man books himself a hotel room after forty days without a proper night's sleep. The hotel has other ideas.
In the inaugural episode of NIGHT MATERIALS, Wolf Johnson finds himself ~$180 poorer, considerably more exhausted, and without the bed he'd been looking forward to all week. What follows is a meandering account of life without a home, the financial wreckage of divorce, fatherhood, the peculiar absence of joy, and the occasional indignities of simply trying to get by.
Somewhere along the way, the conversation wanders into the machinery of social media outrage, the increasingly theatrical nature of public discourse, the peculiar things people do for attention, and why sitting across from another human being with a cup of coffee might still be one of the better ways to make sense of the world.
There's also some talk about what NIGHT MATERIALS might become, the little world growing behind the online zine, and an unfortunate but possibly accurate description of the whole endeavour as a glory hole for expression.
No particular agenda. No grand conclusions. Just some thoughts from a tired man who really could have used that hotel room.
A special thanks to Heather and Anne for their generous contributions to the Night Materials Ledger, and to everyone in the Night Shift helping keep the lights on.
NIGHT MATERIALS
The online zine and Night Shift: https://nightmaterials.online/
FOR ALL I THINK OF HER
Poetry by Wolf Johnson, available on Amazon.
E1 - 25m - Oct 24, 2026
