Fifty Shades of Black (18 page)

 

 

To
P
or Not to
P

I
'm having a wee problem with the sixteenth letter of the alphabet. You know—the one between
O
and
Q
.

Right . . . it's
P
, or more specifically in my case, Pee.

Peeing is something I've done several times every day of my life but I'm still getting mixed messages about it.

When I was a kid I risked anything from a dressing down to a cuff upside the head if I didn't wash my hands immediately following the deed. This taught me that urine is a dangerous substance and a threat to my health and well-being.

Then I found out that Mahatma Gandhi drank the stuff.

Really. He downed a glass of his own urine every morning. Couldn't have been too toxic—he died at seventy-nine.

And not just Gandhi. Ancient Romans brushed their teeth with their own urine to brighten their smiles. French in the Renaissance wore scarves soaked in urine to ward off strep throat. The Chinese have practised urine therapy for a variety of maladies for centuries. It's advocated in the Hindu scriptures where it's known as
amaroli
. Even the King James Bible promotes urine therapy (“Drink waters from thy own cistern.” Proverbs 5:15).

Not just the ancients either. Moises Alou, the one-time Montreal Expos baseball star, claimed he pees on his hands to prevent calluses. Madonna confided to David Letterman (and his audience of millions) that she pees on her feet to alleviate athlete's foot.

So which is it—a foul body-waste product or the golden elixir of life? Some medical specialists still consider it a potentially dangerous commodity, but don't try to tell that to Old MacDonald down on the farm.

Turns out I've been neglecting my garden by not peeing on it. I know a rose grower in my neighbourhood (no names to protect the piddler) who anoints his rose bushes on a regular basis. He says his personal daily blessing results in luxurious prize-winning blooms year after year. Agronomists in Finland claim that a combination of urine and wood ash resulted in a whopping 400 percent increase in tomatoes, and a report in the
Washington Post
credits the application of human urine for a fantastic increase in cabbage yields.

Makes sense when you think about it. Urine is rich in potassium, nitrogen and phosphate—just like those bags of fertilizer you pay an arm and a leg for at the gardening store.

Mind you, urine is also highly acidic so you have to apply it judiciously. Fortunately for males the dispenser is, um, flexible. Professionals advise applicators to “keep moving,” so to speak.

Reminds me of the story I heard in an English pub years ago. Seems Lord Grantham, a local member of the aristocracy, had been shot by an irate husband.

“What did he do?” I asked the bartender.

“He was walking in the garden with Lady Cynthia, the other man's wife,” he said.

I pointed out that that a mere walk in a garden with another man's wife seemed harmless enough.

The bartender polished a glass. “Yes,” he said, “but you see, it was snowing. During the walk Lord Grantham paused to relieve himself. They found his name ‘written' in the snow.”

I allowed as how that was eccentric, frivolous, and possibly tasteless—but hardly a shooting offence.

The bartender shook his head, leaned in and whispered, “You don't understand. The signature was in Lady Cynthia's handwriting.”

 

 

Road Rage: A Handy Guide

I
t was a sweltering midsummer day and I was stopped at a traffic light. The AC was on the fritz so I had all the car windows open.

Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have heard the cursing.

It came from the car behind me. I could see the driver's face in my mirror. It was deep magenta, his eyes were bulging, the veins in his neck standing out like sail shrouds. He was leaning toward his front passenger window, directing a Niagara of expletives at the people in the car alongside him. In that car sat a frail and elderly couple, frozen in fear, staring straight ahead.

I don't know the nature of the old folks' driving infraction, real or imagined, but the berserker's reaction was absurdly over the top. What made it extra ugly was the little boy sitting beside the driver—his son, presumably—also staring straight ahead.

Nice lesson in civility, Dad.

Road rage. What a weird phenomenon. Where did it come from? Was there such a thing as horse-and-buggy rage? Roman chariot rage?

Probably. Where there's testosterone, there's a way. The term, however, is only a few decades old, originating back in the 1980s as a description for a rash of car-to-car shootings that occurred on the freeways around Los Angeles. Road rage doesn't always involve firearms. It can manifest as verbal abuse, rude and menacing gestures or simply aggressive driving.

Had a case of it myself, once, many years ago. A younger, stupider version of yours truly was tooling down Highway 401 north of Toronto. I blew by a middle-aged dawdler in a station wagon, not thinking much about it. A few seconds later I looked over and there he was beside me, hunched over his steering wheel, driving fender to fender, determined to pass.

Was I sensible? Did I hit the brakes and let him have his way, tut-tutting him with a mild finger wave?

I mentioned “younger and stupider,” right? I floored it; he floored it; I floored it some more. We both hurtled down the highway at probably twice the speed limit, both of us white-knuckling the wheel, determined that We'd Show That Jerk.

Nothing tragic happened. There were no rollovers, no caroming off the guardrails or wailing cop sirens. My exit eventually came up and I took it. As my car and my heart slowed down in tandem I remember thinking: what the hell was that about?

I still wonder.

Why did the doofus in the station wagon feel he suddenly needed to risk his life to pass me? Why did I feel I had to risk my life to prevent him? That's the scary thing about road rage: it makes no sense at all. Some drivers describe “a red mist” swirling before their eyes and an overpowering urge to “get even” at any cost.

The typical road rager? Male. Single. Spotty education. Mid-level income.

And of course, young. Usually under thirty-five.

Usually, but not always. Clyde White of Corbin, Kentucky, recently ran afoul of the law. The cops finally collared him, but not until the conclusion of a chase that reached speeds of over a hundred miles per hour. And not before White had rammed two other cars with his own. One of the rammed cars was driven by his brother, aged eighty-two; the other by his sister, aged eighty-three.

Clyde himself is seventy-eight. Proving that when it comes to road rage, it doesn't matter if you're young or old.

Just as long as you're stupid.

 

 

Too Much to Bear

Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At most the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

—John Berger

I
acquired an early distaste for zoos when I was just a kid, maybe ten or twelve. My dad stopped for gas at a Hicksville service station/greasy spoon just north of Toronto on Highway 27. Near the pump I spied a crudely lettered wooden sign that said “BEAR,” with an arrow pointing toward the back of the garage. I followed the arrow and came upon what looked like an old wino in a scruffy wool coat.

Turned out to be Tiny, a sad-eyed brown bear stuck in a cage that was hardly big enough for him to turn around in.

That's what Tiny the Bear did—turn around. Around and around and around. He didn't look at me, he ignored the wieners and doughnuts visitors had tossed in the cage. He just turned around and around.

Oh, I know that modern zoos have come a long way since Tiny's time. Nowadays the enclosures are bigger and more “natural”; the animals—in this country at least—are well-fed and cared for by professionals.

But they're still inmates; they're still in prison.

It's a conundrum. We continue to clear-cut, subdivide and pave their natural habitat, so what's the alternative—let them starve? No, better to “relocate” them to the safer environment of a zoo—sorry: a “monitored wildlife refuge.”

You know—like we did with the Indians when we stole
their
land.

I hadn't thought about Tiny in years. What brought him back to my mind was a story about another bear, named Clover, presently residing at a wildlife centre near Smithers, BC. Clover's only about a year and a half but he comes from a broken home and he's already got a rap sheet. His mother was shot by hunters and Clover subsequently broke into a shack at an archaeology camp looking for food. Campers had been tempting him with food so they could take his picture, but never mind. Clover was now into breaking and entering and that is usually the kiss of death for any wild bear. Once they associate humans with food, they become too unpredictable. Indeed, when conservation officers trapped Clover they fully intended to shoot him on the spot. Only one thing saved him.

Clover is pure white.

He's a kermode or spirit bear—a black bear with a rare genetic trait that renders his coat a creamy white. There are fewer than a thousand—perhaps as few as four hundred—spirit bears in the world and they all live in British Columbia's central and north coast wilderness. The fact that there are any spirit bears at all is probably due to the protection of First Nations people who have always held them in high esteem. They neither hunted them nor mentioned their existence to Russian or European fur traders and trappers.

Clover's life will be spared too, but his roving days are done. Bears can't be “un-trained” from looking to humans for food.

So Clover will spend the rest of his life at the BC Wildlife Park in Kamloops. Folks there are excited. They've set out to raise half a million dollars to construct a new bear facility just for Clover.

“I anticipate enormous public interest,” says general manager Glenn Grant. “It's hard to quantify in dollars or visits, but we know there will be tour companies that will want to come to Kamloops to see this bear.”

Lucky Clover.

 

 

C'mon Canada—Do the Locomotion

If you think North Americans are a vigorous people . . . just watch the natives in the business centre of any United States town. They'd rather park illegally, pay a fine or go to jail than leave their cars two blocks away and walk to their destination.

—Armando Pires

D
o you ever get depressed? Angry? Tired? Confused? Then throw your hat in the air and your meds out the window because scientists at Essex University in the UK have identified a simple physi­ological cure that they claim dramatically reduces anger, confusion, fatigue and depression in humans.

That's the good news. The better news is, it's universally accessible, easy to master, non-addictive, safe when taken as directed and cheap as borscht.

They call it walking.

Really. A team of Essex U. researchers tracked a study group of 1,252 walkers (various ages, men and women, dispositions ranging from happy to gloomy). The assignment was a simple one: get off your duff and go for a walk. Every day. In natural surroundings—in a park, along a riverbank, through a forest if it was handy.

The results were gobsmacking. Seventy-nine percent of the partici­pants reported feeling more “centred,” 86 percent said they were less tense and 92 percent claimed they felt “happier”—even after a short walk.

That was the biggest surprise. These walkers didn't traverse the Scottish Highlands or rappel down a cliff face in Wales. They went for short, gentle strolls well away from the bright lights. Researchers found that people's mood, self-esteem and overall mental health showed an improvement after just five minutes of simply walking in the woods. The most profoundly affected? Young people and folks with mental health issues—but absolutely everybody got a buzz.

The Japanese have recognized this phenomenon for some time. Living in one of the most paved-over, built-up and altogether urbanized nations in the world has perhaps made them appreciate their precious green spaces more than Canadians.

That's why so many Japanese have taken up the practice of
shinrin-ryoho
. Literally, it means forest therapy.

In practice, it means going for a walk in the bush. According to a report in
The Globe and Mail
, there are forty official forest therapy sites in Japan. They plan to increase that to over a hundred in the next decade. Citizens are encouraged to come with their families or alone and immerse themselves for a few minutes—or hours—by going for a walk in surroundings conspicuously lacking sidewalks, roadways, vehicular traffic, concrete, neon or seething throngs of harassed humanity feverishly waiting for the lights to change.

The researchers at Essex U. basically discovered what is old news to the Japanese.

North America, please copy.

We don't walk much on this continent. Even the urban Japanese average 7,168 steps a day. Adults in Western Australia are the world champs. They take an average of 9,695 steps a day. Americans limp in at a little better than half that—5,117 steps per Yank per day.

Canucks aren't exactly marathon class either. A study published in
Health Reports
shows that 41 percent of us—nearly eleven million sluggos—admit to walking less than a half-hour per week to get to school or work or do errands. That goes a long way toward explaining why the same study shows that one in three Canucks over the age of twenty is clinically overweight.

One-third of us. Check out the folks standing (more likely sitting) on either side of you. If they're both skinny—then it's you.

The beauty of the walking cure is it's cheap and simple. You don't have to get a doctor's certificate, join a health club or buy expensive gear. Just pull on a pair of sneakers and start putting one foot in front of the other.

It's never too late, but a word of warning: results can be unexpected.

Take my Uncle Vernon. Big smoker. Heavy drinker. Seriously overweight. On his sixty-first birthday he made a resolution to do something about it. He started out walking just one mile a day.

That was just three weeks ago. Now we don't know where the hell he is.