Fifty Shades of Black (3 page)

 

 

Memo to Self: Wake Up

E
very morning I submit to a dose of physical exercise, deep breathing and forced meditation under the mentorship of my two dogs. It's an hour-plus walk they take me on every day and it is beautiful. Through a rain forest along a salmon creek to the ocean. It's like walking through an Emily Carr or Carol Evans landscape. My walk is, in the ancient sense of the word, a blessing.

And far too often, I ruin it by doing an abidingly stupid thing: I think. I retreat to that hidey-hole in my head to stew in a dog's breakfast of past memories, future plans and other cerebral Post-it Notes, fleeting and meaningless. Sometimes I'll go twenty minutes on autopilot, wake with a start and realize that although my dogs have been sniffing and peering and barking and peeing, I've been elsewhere. I'm still moving, but I haven't seen or heard or smelled a thing for the past quarter mile. What a waste.

Now let me introduce you to a book by a man who is the opposite of all that. The man's name is Adrian Dorst. The book is called
Reflections at Sandhill Creek
. The creek in the title is a small one that empties into Long Beach, up Tofino way. Chances are you'd pass over Sandhill Creek without so much as a sideways glance. But not, I think, after you've seen this book. Adrian Dorst lived near the mouth of the creek for two years and he's lived on and traversed around the Clayoquot Sound area for nearly four decades, taking photos and doing what I so often fail to do: paying attention to the surroundings.

For thirty-five years Dorst hiked along the beaches, watched the sunsets, listened to the waves . . . and took photographs. Everything from mountains in the moonlight to moon snails at low tide; from a delicate blossom of Indian paintbrush in a coastal meadow to a couple of hundred pounds of quizzical cougar stretched along a branch gazing back at the camera.

This book would be worth seeing just for the pictures but it's more than a picture book. Dorst has married the photographs with thoughts. Not his—others. There are quotations from Einstein and Henry Miller; from the I Ching and Aristotle; from Herman Hesse and Bob Dylan. It's eclectic, and it works. Under a panoramic photo of a massive breaker crashing against a rock in Pacific Rim National Park he puts the Buddhist saying “Everything that arises, does its dance and dies.” The photograph of the languid cougar—about which animal we are hearing dread warnings on the news almost daily—bears an aphorism from Marie Curie. It reads: “Nothing is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

There is also a photo of a tiny bird, a plover standing amid seashells and facing into the windy grey skies off Stubbs Island.

The caption comes from La Rochefoucauld but it's got my name on it. It reads: “Little is needed to make a wise man happy, but nothing can content a fool.”

I'm pretty sure that's what my dogs are trying to tell me every morning.

 

 

Male Vanity: It's Inhairited

A
ccording to the Guinness World Records, an Indian gentleman by the name of Ram Singh Chauhan has the longest one in the world (4.2 metres if you can believe it). Groucho Marx had a rather splendid attachment and the Oriental mystery-solver Charlie Chan was very well endowed indeed. Hitler? Well, it's no wonder the man was nuts. He had just a stubby little tuftlet about half the length of your pinky finger.

Get your mind out of the gutter, madame—we're talking about the moustache here; a.k.a. soup strainer, cookie duster, Fu Manchu, handlebar, walrus, toothbrush, pencil and, Canada's contribution—the lush and luxuriant Lanny McDonald stable-broom special. Growing a moustache is an unrepentant Man Thing and it's an altar that males have been genuflecting before probably since we bunked down in caves.

For no good reason, as far as I can see. There are few physical affectations more useless than a moustache. Aside from storing toast crumbs and frightening small children, they're not much good for anything.

But don't try to tell that to Selahattin Tulunay. He's a plastic surgeon who practises in Istanbul. Dr. Tulunay specializes in a surgical technique called “follicular unit extraction,” which is a fancy way of saying he re-seeds body hair. He plucks healthy hair follicles from one place—say, your back—and replants them in an arid zone. Say . . . above your upper lip.

This does not sound like an operation many North American males would line up for, but Dr. Tulunay does a brisk business in the Middle East, where moustaches—particularly big, bristly, walrus-style moustaches—are serious symbols of virility.

The procedure is painful, unsightly and takes six months to show results. Oh, and it costs about seven thousand dollars per upper lip. Dr. Tulunay is booked solid for months in advance.

According to Andrew Hammond, a journalist based in Saudi Arabia, having a huge, substantial moustache is, well, huge, for Arab males. “Most Arab leaders have moustaches or some form of facial hair. I think culturally it suggests masculinity, wisdom and experience.”

The converse is also true. A few years ago militants in Gaza kidnapped an opponent and inflicted on him the most severe and humiliating punishment they could devise, short of death.

They shaved off his moustache.

You want to smear a Middle Eastern man with the worst slander possible? Don't belittle his politics, make fun of his belly or cast aspersions on his family. Just look him in the eye and growl, “A curse be upon your moustache!” When I was a teenager I cursed the place where my moustache wasn't. Long after my pals had sprouted facial hair the area between my nose and my upper lip remained as bare as Senator Duffy's pate.

I rubbed it, I scrubbed it. I slathered on gobfuls of hair restorer and even shaved it, for an old wives' tale said that the surest way to make a beard come in thick was to scrape it with a straight razor to “stimulate the follicles.”

Not.

Every morning I rushed to the bathroom mirror and pored over my facial pores looking for anything, just one small sprig or microscopic frond that would indicate my manhood was on the way. Nothing.

Now, decades later, I am trying to appreciate the fact that Somebody Up There has a divine sense of irony, if not humour.

I finally have my coveted moustache—it's no Lanny McDonald but it's respectable.

Meanwhile, the top of my head is as bare as a Sylvania 60-watt bulb.

Good one, God.

 

 

Take Back the Night

O
nce upon another lifetime it was my honour to address the gradu­ating students of a private school. When I'd exhausted my repertoire of pieties and platitudes the headmaster asked me if there was one piece of advice I could offer that would guarantee success in whatever they chose to do.

“Sure,” I said. “I can tell you how a simple, easy, healthy, dirt-cheap alteration in your daily life will guarantee success. I can also guarantee that 99 percent of you will scoff and reject it the moment you hear it. Still game?”

They were.

So I gave it to them in three words: Get. Up. Early.

How early? Crack of dawn early, I told them. Get up early and work on your dream. Read, paint, sing, sketch, write, knit—whatever. Do just an hour or so early every day. They groaned and recoiled as if they'd been clubbed with baseball bats.

For once, I knew what I was talking about. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a husband, a new father and a holder of a full-time job it occurred to me that if I ever wanted to be anything more than the above, I needed to find some extra hours in my day.

It was summer, and I lived in a part of the country where the sun was already up and blazing at five in the morning. And so, after a few coughing, spluttering mornings, was I.

It's a grand time to get things done, the early morning. There is nothing on TV, no colleagues to drop by and chat. The rest of the family is asleep, the phone isn't likely to ring and it's way too early for Jehovah's Witnesses to be knocking at the door. Best of all the mind is fresh, rested and—after a jolt of java—frisky, even.

So I got up and wrote. Not absolutely every day (I took Sundays off and there was the odd morning compromised by flu or travel or a hangover that made it too painful). But almost every day—and I got more writing done in those precious one or two hours than I did in the rest of the week.

Productive? Well, fifteen books, five seasons' worth of TV scripts, uncountable TV and radio commentaries and a raft of speeches—all written in the early hours of the day. Oh, yes—and thirty-five years' worth of weekly newspaper columns. I'm not boasting about this, because it's no big deal. I didn't erect a cathedral or compose a symphony—all I did was get up early most mornings and sit down in front of a keyboard. It's like building a home or walking a hundred miles: it doesn't get done overnight, it gets done a brick or a step at a time.

Ah, but what about the hard part? What about rolling out of the sack at an hour when most folks are in deep sleep (and some are just rolling in from a night on the town)?

Yeah, there are compromises involved. An early riser doesn't get to close the bars or watch the
Late Late Show
. People who get up at dawn tend to go to bed earlier than most, which means your social life takes a bit of a hit. But there's nothing on television that you can't tape and watch at your convenience. And having one or two fewer beers with the gang won't do you any harm.
Au contraire.

Best of all, you get to have some time to yourself to Get Something Done. Read your favourite author, complete a correspondence course, paint a watercolour, write those letters you've been putting off. Move your life along so that you're not merely putting in time.

There are other rewards, often unexpected. Some years after I gave my talk at the private school I got a phone call from someone whose name I didn't recognize. She was a film producer, working in Edmonton. She had also been a member of the student body in the school where I gave my talk.

“I just want to tell you,” she said, “that I took your advice—about getting up early. It made all the difference in my career.”

Yes!

 

 

Sung Any Good Songs Lately?

When you're thirty-five, something always happens to the music.

—Gene Lees

I
first read that quote back when I was a teenager—which is way more tree rings than I care to count up. I remember thinking at the time: yeah, the man is right.

It explained why my old man couldn't get Elvis or Buddy Holly. When the strains of “Heartbreak Hotel” or “That'll Be the Day” would crackle out of our old Philco stand-up radio, my old man would throw down his newspaper and grouse, “What the hell is that? You call that singing? Can't even understand the words!”

Now, all these decades later whenever I hear a current top ten tune I find myself channelling my old man.

Are mushrooms growing in my ears or did the music change—as in, get stupider? At the risk of offending thousands I have to say that I find most modern popular music stupendously boring and appallingly mediocre. The vocalists sound like they're singing through keyholes; the instrumentalists sound like they're playing with boxing gloves on. Haven't these nimrods ever heard Ella or Aretha? A guitar solo by Chet Atkins or a trumpet riff by Wynton Marsalis?

Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—recorded live at Woodstock?

Aren't they embarrassed to pretend they're even in the same business?

How did popular music tumble from the dizzying glory of the Everly Brothers and the Temptations to the atonal squeaks and flatulent squawks that dominate the charts today?

Beats me. Beats Beck too.

That would be Bek David Campbell, a forty-something American singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who prefers to be known as Beck. He's been around and on the charts for a good twenty years. Last year, Beck put out an album with a difference. Beck doesn't sing on this production, or play an instrument.

Nobody does.

Song Reader
is not a CD or an LP or an iTunes download.
Song Reader
is a book of sheet music containing twenty original compositions along with a hundred pages of art. Beck's idea is to take listeners back in time, back to when people sang songs with and to each other.

“You watch an old film and see how people would dance together in the '20s, '30s and '40s,” Beck told an Associated Press reporter. “It was something that was part of what brought people together. Playing music in the home is another aspect of that that's been lost.”

Beck points out that nearly eight decades ago—in 1937—Bing Crosby recorded a song called “Sweet Leilani.” Fifty-four million copies of the sheet music were sold. That means almost half the US population was trying to learn how to play and sing the song for themselves.

Well . . . yeah. When I was a kid, we didn't have a car or a TV but we had a piano in the parlour—as did most of the families I knew. And in our piano bench was a pair of castanets, a tambourine and a couple of dusty old harmonicas.

Mom and my older sister sang harmony, my other sister sang and played tambourine, while the old man chorded on the piano.

Me? I still play a fairly mean “Freight Train Blues” on the harmonica.

I know, I know . . . corny as hell.

On the other hand, I watched a family of four waiting for their dinner in a restaurant last night. They didn't talk. They didn't even look at each other. They were all texting, off in their separate corners of cyberspace.

I'll take corny.

 

 

A-Mushing We Shall Go—Not

I
'm a double-edged, multi-tasking (some would call it obsessive-compulsive) kind of guy. I love doing two things at once because I hate wasting time. If I'm going to be stuck in a lineup at the bank, I take along a yo-yo. If I get caught in traffic jam I rat-a-tat the drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on the steering wheel with my thumbs. Even for short ferry rides I carry more gear than a Sherpa for Martha Stewart—food, magazines, my diary, a harmonica, even an inflatable pillow for naps.

When I heard about Canicross my first thought was: this is for me.

Canicross? The latest exercise craze. Apparently it began with some anonymous dogsledder in Lapland looking for a way to exercise his doggy cohorts in the summer, snowless months. What he or she came up with is essentially one-on-one dogsledding minus the sleigh.

Oh yeah—and instead of holding the reins, the human portion of the equation (formerly the sled driver) is lashed to the dog by a harness.

You're familiar with walking the dog? This is running the dog. Fido picks the trail and sets the pace. Your assignment is to keep up and stay vertical.

Oh, and in order to keep your hands free for balance (and to make it extra interesting) Fido is attached to your crotch.

Pretty much. The Canicross harness fits around your waist and loops about your upper thighs, terminating in a snap buckle in front of your . . . front. The buckle attaches to about six feet of leash, the other end of which clips to the dog's collar. All you have to say is “Go!” and you are officially Canicrossing.

Canicross is pretty green as sports go. Historians have traced it back to its Scandinavian origins in the early 1970s. Within a decade it had spread south to France, where the world's first Canicross meet was held in Paris in 1982. Since then it has blossomed, eventually hopping the Atlantic to take seed in Eastern Canada and parts of the US.

I know—you're asking yourself why would anyone willingly attach themselves to a dog and let it drag them through the bush.

Because in this hectic, stress-heavy world we're stuck with, where people fumble with their BlackBerrys even as the waiter is handing out menus; where parents text their offspring on the bus because it saves time—in our world, Canicross is the very essence of multi-tasking. It enables you to take care of two chores at once: your dog gets exercise and you get a serious cardiovascular workout.

How perfect is that? I've got a dog and I've got a gym membership. But there are not enough hours in my day to walk my dog AND toddle downtown to the gym. With Canicross, I don't have to.

I ordered the starter kit. It includes the human harness (they call it a hands-free belt)—for fifty-two dollars—and a pooch harness (they call it a Shorty Ripstop Sport Harness)—for thirty-four dollars. I donned the belt, attached a long leash to it and clipped the other end of the leash to my dog, Homer.

“Go!” I said.

I don't speak fluent canine and Homer is a critter of few barks, but I'm quite certain his response was the dog equivalent of “Huh?” Homer cocked his head, looked at me sideways, wagged his tail and sat down.

Homer (he is named after the doughnut-driven Homer of Springfield, not the Greek) is a bearded collie. He has never been a ball of fire, nor is he the Einstein of his breed—but he knows bedrock Stupid when he sees it. For the next hour we stumbled around the neighbourhood together, Homer sniffing, peeing, pausing briefly to scratch and then onward to sniff and pee and scratch some more.

Homer, I mean. I merely followed behind, a flunky biped, tethered to my dog by eighty-six bucks' worth of clearly superfluous yuppie gear.

Garrison Keillor famously said, “Dogs come when you call; cats take a message and get back to you.” Mr. K. never met Homer, who is unmoved by the command “Come!” Nor does he respond to “Mush!”

Anybody want to buy a barely used Canicross starter kit?