Where In The World Is A Good Night's Sleep?

There's a teenager deep inside me that still views going to sleep as a defeat, who wants to rock-and-roll all night and a gradually decreasing portion of every day. To combat this cagey party animal, I match his dimming wits with my equally defiant inner geography nerd. The two wage battle on most work nights as I lie in bed attempting to find sleep. 

Kerry finds it odd that, rather than tune out with books or whale-song, my approach is to instead force my brain to perform overtime. Fortunately this brain is a great deal like the rest of me; when challenged, there comes a likelihood it will zone out. It's like listening to that womp-womping teacher in a Peanuts cartoon.

Geography is a passion – commence your own womp-womping now, if need be – and on a typical night, this is how things go down. OK brain, I say – typically not out loud – tonight we're going to name ten U.S. cities that start with each letter of the alphabet. And because you were such a smartass about it the last time we did this, an added rule: only one per state. Go.

Anchorage. Astoria. Austin. Albuquerque. Anaheim. Ann Arbor. Akron. Albany. Augusta. Annapolis. Easy peasy, Albany-zy.

Bellingham. Boise. Billings. Bismarck. Berkeley. Baton Rouge. Boulder. Biloxi. Brainerd. Birmingham.

Carson City… Cheyenne… Zzzzzzz… *snork*

… Des Moines… Zzzzzzzzzzzzz…

The next night: World cities. But nothing in Canada, the United States or Europe, big guy. Go.

Adelaide. Auckland. Agra. Amman. Algiers. Abidjan. Ankara. Acapulco. Aomori…

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. The lights go down in the city.

The Word

We are raising a child who loves books. It's so rewarding, to see her interest in the library, in bedtime readings, the written word in general. Here are five stories I like to parade out at naptime or bedtime:

5. Bus Stops (Taro Gomi, 1988)

This book tracks a bus around a vaguely San Francisco-esque city, letting riders off at various stops. Nothing fancypants. But it teaches Scout to learn how a bus functions – useful for the fantastic years to come when it becomes her only post-apocalyptic option to avoid the C.H.U.D.s and get to the nearest hover-mall.

4. Lost And Found (Oliver Jeffers, 2005)

"Once there was a boy, and one day he found a penguin at his door." Thus begins a fantastical tale that will forever lend Scout the impression that penguins are mute, idiot navigators and she's free to push off to sea in a rickety rowboat every time there's some minor penguin-related incident on the home front. Scout's interest in this book got a second wind when I started calling the boy Avery, her cousin whose name she loves to sing-song.

3. The Golden Egg Book (Margaret Wise Brown, 1947)

A rabbit stumbles upon an abandoned egg, kicks it around, throws rocks at it and rolls it down a hill – but fails to destroy the life inside. Eventually it grows tired of trying, falls asleep and accidentally incubates it, giving birth to a vengeful duckling who turns the tables on its dozing tormentor. But because ducklings are also suckers, it imprints on the bunny and they become friends. By changing every second adjective to 'sleepy', it gets Scout in a snoozy way right quick.

2. This Is Not My Hat (Jon Klassen, 2012)

A simple story, in which a pipsqueak minnow pilfers a bowler hat from a slumbering fishy behemoth and tries to justify its decision-making to the reader while on the lam. It's fun to know the thieving snot gets his just desserts off-page – though not likely in as bloody a fashion as the shifty-eyed bunny who dares poke the bear in its companion piece, I Want My Hat Back. Both books feature fabulous life lessons. Don't take what's not yours. Pick on someone your own size. If you're a crab, don't be a snitching rat. I like to read this book in the voice of a snooty Victorian-era aristocrat.

1. Where The Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak, 1963)

I will never tire of this book. It's wonderful. I started Scout on it while she was really young, unsure of what effect the presence of so many monsters in her head just before bedtime might have. But she's been cool with it. There's a spread in which brave Max instructs the Wild Things to BE STILL, knocking them to their butts in fear – and Scout leans in on these pages and shouts BOO (translation: "Yeah, you bunch of clowns, be still"). She also used to like how Max would chase his dog down the stairs with a fork, but lately not so much.

Draw!

Time out from writing. I spent last night sketching instead, with friends – and their incredible burgers – at The Tallest Poppy (my stars, so many good things right there in one sentence). A fluctuating crew over the course of perhaps a half-dozen outings in the last couple of years, it's been decreed we amp up our number of events. Hopefully, the next one happens sooner than three months away – we'll make it so. We've now been labeled "The Draw Mob", so the pressure is now on to live up to the moniker.

I drew a pair of quick jobbies during the beers and banter. One sketch, entirely inspired by current weather patterns. Another, purely for the sake of drawing a dude chowing on a chocolate bar (and decidedly non-seasonal). These were completed with a black brush pen and some grey markers in my minuscule 4X6 Tintin sketchbook.

The Frontier

There's a scene I like from Dances With Wolves in which Kevin Costner's Lieutenant Dunbar, presented with the choice of serving anywhere in the country, stuns his superior with a request to be posted to the American frontier. "Before it's gone," he bemoans. Sometimes I feel his urgency, in experiencing something still unbound – and his disappointment in knowing that it won't last.

When I was a boy, I couldn't swim. I still don't like it unless I'm suited up in goggles and flotation devices. It didn't stop me from enjoying the water. My brother and I surfed inflatable mats at the beach and coasted far from shore in our dinghy. At 11 years old I slipped while fording Pine Point Rapids and slid backwards in the slippery torrent in a frenetic downward-facing dog, finding footing in a divot in the rock and halting myself before reaching the deep water. I then made it across to explore the woods on the other side. As a teenager, I waded from Victoria Beach to Elk Island, tip-toeing the parts where the water lapped at my neck.

My mom allowed me to attempt all of this, because she believed in a rule of common sense. This permitted me, among other things, to self-govern – to walk to the library at a young age by myself. Go downtown on the bus. Explore the banks of the Assiniboine, looking for birds and poking clods of cracked mud with sticks. I knew, as she knew, I wouldn't be rash. I'd use the underpass instead of blindly bolting over Maryland and Sherbrook. I wouldn't dick around with the river during flood season (or that I'd search for a longer stick).

A crackdown on tobogganing in some Canadian cities this winter leaves we contemplating the austerity of a future in which my daughter won't be able to careen down the hill at Omand's Creek. Won't climb trees, won't dangle from monkey bars, won't jump from boulder to boulder at the beach like I did. Won't be able to try, and maybe fail (and try again). Won't explore. Won't know to explore. As much as I appreciate having been able to experience the "frontier" of a simpler time – of hopping from rock to rock or poking at things with sticks – I worry about the unrecognizable scraps of these experiences that may or may not remain once Scout gets older. Or that they'll be allowed under law.

Bimbo Nebo

The 15-minute drive to and from daycare is where Scout and I often get some serious talking done. She'll plead for me to recite an animated Sesame Street clip in which a gorilla with a penchant for the letter G looks for a job at an employment agency. And I comply, repeatedly. I plead to her to keep her boots and socks on; she refuses, daily. I ask about her day. We scour the streets for buses and 'diggers' (any type of construction equipment). This week's conversation revolves around who can shout HELLO the loudest – easier done in winter with the windows rolled up.

Scout hit me with a knuckleball yesterday that took the duration of our commute home to untangle. At a red light, while glancing up at an idling bus beside us, she spoke thusly: BEE EMBO NEBO. 

A second time. And again. Once more, this time a questioning tone. She's burning a hole in the back of the headrest. I need to say something. Seconds tick by. I try my best. I turn it back on her: "Nebo?" Smooth one, Dad.

NEBO. BEE EMBO NEBO. She begins to repeat it, in a sing-songy way. BEE EM BEE O! BIMBO NEEEBO!

Traffic is molasses on Portage; I'm aching to get home. She's rolling over the line like it's gospel. It strikes me, with moments left before reaching the house. Bingo Was His Name-O. I sing the line to her.

YEAH, she says. AGAIN.

Crossing The Line

Few things baffle me – and now, as a father, terrify me – as highway accidents on the bald prairie on which I live and drive. Those ever-present two- or three-graph news reports of a driver who crosses the centre line and lays terrible waste to a life, or lives. No reason why, and never is one granted. I will save for another time those who careen, not braking, into the rolling thunder of mile-long freight trains.

A September weekend in 2013. We're leaving the city to visit the Cornell Creme operations as part of Open Farm Day. Navigating is one of my finest skills – I'll navigate circles around you and your GPS unit using the sheer power of my brain – but the directions to the farm are convoluted. The highway is ramrod-straight as we near our first turn, but it does not present itself among the hay fields and thickets.

A truck is approaching in the distance. I have time to look over at the map in Kerry's hands, pointing out the road we're traveling on. Peer up. The truck is two metres across the centre of the road. A nanosecond. Lock eyes with the driver. His eyes become saucers, and he corrects his course without a screech, a honk, any noise. No time to swallow my breath – and it's finished. I blink twice – and Kerry, head still in the folds of the map, asks me if we've passed highway number this-or-that. Scout, in her rear-facing bucket seat, bats at a dangling toy, sees the power lines swoop down and up, down and up and down. I say no. I say nothing at all.

Skills, Set

"Nunchaku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills… girls only want boyfriends who have great skills." – Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Are you looking for an ever-evolving career in a fast-paced environment on the vanguard of the creative industry? Great. That's super. Me too… once in a while.

I wage a daily internal battle with my chosen career path. I absolutely adore its bare essentials, its sense of order. Structure. Hierarchy. Common sense, unless not needed. I realize now, sixteen years in, that's never going to go away. Neither is the push/pull of constantly nagging change.

I can accept change, pick and choose morsels of it I can use and enjoy. I wouldn't say I naturally embrace it. I anticipate it, but I have a pace I like to maintain. I'm a clinical thinker; I weigh and consider options before proceeding. I wish that was still perceived more as a benefit, and it may be in some circles. Just not mine, where expediency is fast becoming king and thinking things through can be a luxury. It's only with as much experience as I have, that I manage this balance and produce as quickly as can be required on any given day, from years of learning how the rules can be bent and shortcuts discovered and followed.

Look, I have discernible skills. I can differentiate vocalizations of a red-breasted nuthatch from a white-breasted nuthatch, eight or nine times out of ten. I can make pretty authentic farting noises by squeezing my palms together. I've made French toast. But it took time to learn those skills. Time that today's lifestyle doesn't often wait around for to develop – and that's not always fair.

But I also appreciate consistency, or a semblance of it. That can be the death knell for someone in my field. I think of my sister (the dentist) and brother (the teacher) and think, there's always going to be teeth and students. Probably even roughly the same number of teeth and students, year in and year out. I think, during sourer times, why didn't I think of that. There's so much variability in design, so much flux. Differences of opinion: paper is dying, paper is dead, paper has never been more in demand. Here's the Next Big Th… wait, here's the Next Big… wait, here's the Next Big Thing. 

Technology trickles into all careers. Certainly mine. It's a bitch goddess, giving with one hand and taking away with the other (I can't take credit for that nugget; it's an old Kids in the Hall line). Too much of the change in design is change for the sake of change. Chasing technology, as opposed to using it smartly. It's easy to get swept up. Even I do, on rare occasion. I have a cellular 'I-Phone 5-S' that I like to play the video games on. But I also take comfort in that those bare essentials of design, the skeleton, the nuts and bolts – will never change. And so long as they don't, I'll have a place and relish in it.

Dear Diary: January 1-4, 1985

When I was nine years old I got a diary in my stocking for Christmas, which I then used to half-assedly document the year 1985. A lot of it was spent chronicling the lives of my ookpiks and other plush animals, likely a case of suppressing traumatic moments in my childhood. I stuck with it for the whole year, which covered the back end of Grade 4 and the first months of Grade 5. I present to you, a curated look at This Day in Jeope, 30 years ago this week…

January 1, 1985

Dear diary: Today I read my book from page 104 to 131. My book makes me fall asleep. Brian Adams song was at 11:53 p.m. That is the song that was on when I was writing to you. Tonight I will read from page 131 to 151. Good night diary. See ya tomorrow!

I'm not positive what book I was reading; books were awarded in my Grade 4 class for acing pop quizzes. My best guess is either Underground to Canada or Anne of Green Gables. And I'm not sure which Bryan Adams song I was listening to, either. I'm hoping it was "Run To You" because damn, that song kicked ass. With the video? Of him running through the woods, finding his guitar under a pile of autumn leaves and then just laying into that solo? Come on. Kick ass.

January 2, 1985

Dear diary: It is the second day of 1985. Today was very busy. It is 11:35 p.m. We went to a movie called "Dune". We had hot dogs for dinner. It is warming up. It is minus 14°C today. Tomorrow it is minus 5°C. I will read from page 151 to 176. See ya tomorrow!

Dune was the only film I ever saw at the Met when it was a functioning movie theatre. My mom took us; she was a fan of the book, and though I felt it was just the best movie, what with those giant worms, and a greased Sting in his underwear and all, she thought it was an abomination. A year later, a friend and I snuck into The Living Daylights there and promptly got the boot. We went to the North Star to watch Adventures in Babysitting instead.

January 3, 1985

Dear diary: I almost fainted over vacuuming. I hate vacuuming. It was very warm. It is 11:51 now. I am wide awake. What should I do? Good night.

My brother and sister will tell you I never had to vacuum. I was usually tasked with wiping down the bannister and cleaning telephones and my mom's ashtrays.

January 4, 1985

Dear diary: Today was very warm. We deserve warm weather Sharon says because it had been freezing. Jacob made me feel terrible today. Sometimes I could just pound him. Bye! Good night! It's 11:41, see you tomorrow night.

Sharon is my mom's name. She preferred we called her that, until I got old enough to think it was weird – probably early in junior high or so, I'm guessing.

Not Safe For Work

We got this big-ass, arcing floor lamp years ago. Weighs a ton, costs a ton, that sorta thing. A couple weeks ago I used it to test whether another lamp's bulb was working, and the dealie – the housing, the goddamn whatchamacallit – goes right on ahead and snaps off in my goddamn hand. Like, right the hell off. And this thing, this fucking thing, it's just the flimsy aluminum doodad the bulb twists into, but it's like it's the fucking nexus of a whole goddamn million-dollar lamp. It's as if the International Fucking Space Station was held together by a goddamn 25-cent screw. Nothing functions without it. And so this doohickey, this thing in my hand, has a cracked hole-punched jobbie with a twisted little pellet-esque whatever missing. The socket – I know this word, at least – holds this fucking tinfoil housing with these custom pellet doo-bobs. Not screws – that would make too much sense. Not an adhesive. Not by twisting or clicking Part A and Part B together. No. It has to be a complete and total fucking jerk about what it's been put on Earth to do. Now we stand around like idiots in the dark because this bumblefuck whatzit refuses to be a sensible and inspired piece of engineering. A goddamn bulb-holding, tin-scrap, ass-faced… whatchamacallit… standing between us and a sufficiently-lit living room.

Resolve This

I hardly ever make resolutions. When I do, I'm certainly not going to be so cliché as to start them on New Year's Day. 

Resolutions so rarely eke their way into my consciousness enough to become regular habit – the lofty end goal of any Day-One promise to one's self. I think back to some of the few times I held myself to task for changing myself in one way or another. The first example, as I so often bring up, is this site. Go ahead: look back to the initial post on Jeopopolis and see. It was Resolution City. I made three, and would up with a solid C average, holding myself fairly well to one, and kinda sorta meh to the others (and if you could see me now, I'm wavering one hand side-to-side in a meh gesture).

A Twitter companion coaxed folks last December to perform 30 pushups, 30 crunches and 30 squats each day of the month. I did that. Scout would climb on me while I struggled with crunches in the early going. My shoulders would pop during pushups. But on New Year's Eve, I executed my final day's exercises at work – at the foot of my desk – when no one else was around, and whooshed through them like a warmish knife through a tub of margarine. On January 1, I stopped. Again, a solid C student, putting in the work required.

The best example of a resolution conquered would be a 365 photography challenge, which started inexplicably in mid-February of 2010. Everyone with a phone and an Instagram account does it now, but I'm proud of my mantra during that year of snapping a picture a day: No Crappy Photos. No shots of my feet. Nothing without forethought. And I survived days in which nothing eventful happened, days sick, days with my camera having been stolen.

OK. I make resolutions here and there, when I choose. It stems from one of my mom's fabled teachings: Just do it. But she'd never say it in the sloganeering Nike way. More of an exasperated, on the verge of cursing, I'm-telling-you-for-the-last-time way. It's how I would tidy my pig-sty of a closet, how I got my job as a paperboy, how I decided what to do after high school (since I'm not going to sit around on my ass doing sweet-tweet).

Later in life, my mom – the career smoker, sun-worshipper, red wine drinker, red meat eater – was sublimely impressed by a decision of mine to stop chewing my fingernails. In hindsight, perhaps moreso than my ability to land a good-paying job or father a child. She took my hand in hers and looked it over, saying – and I remember this clearly – "Jeope, that's amazing," and asked me how on Earth I did it. I told her I just decided to. I began with telling myself one hand was off-limits. Then, I allowed myself upwards of two fingers at any one moment; I could not have another until total nail regrowth was achieved.

I still don't do it. Kinda sorta.