by Arthur Black
The BS Factor: Here are two truisms.
Number One: There are, in fact, attractive-looking people out there who actually care whether their partners have “great hair” or not.
Number Two: You don’t want to know them.
Think for a moment about the intellectual depth of anyone who judges anyone else on the basis of what’s growing north of their eyebrows.
That’s not how you judge a person; that’s how you judge a lawn.
Being bald frees you from the time-consuming process of buying drinks or dinner for someone and wasting an evening discovering through conversation how vapid and superficial he or she is.
Being bald is like having a social Get Out of Jail Free card.
And this just in (literally): a study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School concludes that bald men are actually perceived as more powerful, more manly and even taller than men with hair.
Well, correction—not men who are merely bald—men who actually shave their heads. “The basic finding is that people view the shaved head as a powerful look,” says the study author, Albert Mannes.
Uh-huh. And what about guys on their way to going bald, with wisps and tufts and hair horseshoes around their head?
Uh-uh.
“Men with thinning hair were viewed as least favourable,” says Mannes.
So there you have it, my little studlings. You can have a polished pate like Patrick Stewart or a hirsute noggin like Justin Trudeau—but nothing in between.
Personally, and speaking as a guy who has occupied both pedestals, I’d get out the BIC disposable if I were you. Being bald is easier, more hygienic, cheaper and, if the Pennsylvania University study is correct, the more virile way to go.
Nobody said it better than the British writer Logan Pearsall Smith: “There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.”
Amen to that. Eat your heart out, hairballs.
Aging Jubilantly
I am not a coot.
Neither am I a geezer, a buzzard, gramps or old-timer—and woe betide the wet-behind-the-ears johnny-come-lately who tries to brand me with the repugnant “senior citizen” or worse yet “golden ager.”
Curmudgeon? Sometimes, for sure. Elder? I suppose, though it sounds a little priggish and highfalutin to my ear.
To tell you the truth, I don’t much like any of the terms customarily draped over Those of Us Who Have Attained a Certain Measure of Maturity.
Except for one. I think I could handle being labelled a jubilado.
It’s pronounced “hoo-bee-LAH-dough” and it’s what Spaniards call their retirees. In English it means pretty much what it looks like—“jubilant one.”
Oh—and heads up. It’s defiantly sex specific. Guys are jubilados; girls are jubiladas. Deal with it.
And truly, why not “jubilant ones”? Most of us who get to this age bracket are bedecked and festooned with reasons to celebrate. We are less encumbered than we’ve ever been in our lives. The kids are grown and unleashed; the mortgage, if not paid off, is under control. We wear what we choose, get up when we please and no longer give a fig about rush hour commutes, layoffs, pro- or demotions or the emotional ups and downs of the psycho boss in the corner office. We can choose to watch the sunrise or plump the pillow over our head; walk the dog or slurp margaritas in a hammock; spend the afternoon with a good book or catch a baseball game on the tube.
What’s not to be jubilant about? Alas, our society discourages jubilation in its jubilados. We’re treated more like hockey players past their prime. There’s a sense we’ve been put out to pasture, sent home with a gold Timex and a permanent time out. We’ve done our stretch and nothing further is expected of us. We can sit back, relax and fade into the wallpaper.
Well, screw that.
I choose to be a jubilado. I’m going to make noise, dance up a storm, kick up some dust, raise a little hell and generally make some whoopie. Why not? It feels good to be a jubilado.
Anybody can get older. Hell, boulders do that. The trick is to age in style. Some choose to do it by diversion—two weeks in Maui, a few rounds of golf, tickets to see the Jets or Leonard Cohen, a shopping spree through Holt Renfrew or Lululemon—they all make you feel good, if only for a little while.
Others turn their focus outward, embracing volunteerism, philanthropy or the simple care and nurturing of friends and family.
Still others go out and buy themselves a flamboyant red hat. Aging well doesn’t have to be a 180-degree U-turn. It can be a simple shift in your colour spectrum. Jenny Joseph showed us that when she wrote a hit poem entitled “Warning, When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple.”
Take your choice and fill your boots. But do it joyously, jubilantly.
And me? You can colour me purple. In a cherry-red Stetson.
And I Mean That Sincerely
Number one on my bucket list this week: to track down whoever it is who runs the US website CareerCast.com. Purpose: to corner the doofus and give his or her head a good shake.
CareerCast has just published its list of the best and worst jobs of 2012. I had to read it twice to be sure I wasn’t having an acid flashback from the ’60s.
According to CareerCast, two of the best jobs you can have are “actuary” or “financial planner.”
Actuary? Best job??? Do you think the folks at CareerCast actuary know what an actuary does? My dictionary defines “actuary” as a person who compiles and analyzes statistics and uses them to calculate insurance risks and premiums.
That’s a best job, huh?
Perhaps it’s because I’m still carrying grade 10 algebra, but I would rather be trapped in a stalled elevator with a case of the trots than spend a nanosecond sitting at a desk toiling as an actuary.
As for being a financial planner, let’s see now . . . would that be like filling out your income tax form FOREVER?
CareerCast’s list of worst jobs is equally exasperating. The absolute worst job, they say is “lumberjack”—what Western Canadians call “logger.”
Well, I’d call it dangerous, for sure, and there’s no question that felling trees in the forest is a strenuous way to make a buck. But worst job in the world? Do you think the folks at CareerCast.com ever unclogged a septic field? Dodged a rodeo bull? Crawled on their bellies through a rat-infested attic?
I’ve never been a logger but I have been a dairy hand and a restaurant waiter—and those jobs also make CareerCast’s worst job list.
Balderdash. I’ve worked at both those occupations and, aside from crummy tippers and the occasional cow tail in the eye, found plenty to enjoy about them.
As somebody once said, anything can be a dead-end job if you’re a dead-end guy.
I’d be happy to simply dismiss CareerCast’s dismal listings with a shrug if it weren’t for the job they’ve slotted as the tenth worst—“broadcaster.”
Now hold on just a minute.
I worked behind a microphone at CBC Radio for thirty years and I can tell you it was easily one of the best jobs I ever had.
Well, think about it: no heavy lifting, all the tea or coffee you can drink, a roof over your head, a company computer with unlimited Internet access, free review copies from book publishers and the odd complimentary ticket to a hockey game, a movie or a stage show.
No dress code of course—it’s radio, nobody can see you. I could read the six o’clock news wearing a Bozo the Clown nose and a purple tutu and no one would be the wiser.
Plus, all the training you really need for the job is usually under your belt by grade four. Can you read? You’re hired.
Okay, it’s not quite that simple—but close. As my first radio mentor explained to me in a plummy Shakespearian basso profundo: “My boy, the most important quality you can have as a radio broadcaster is sincerity.”
Broadcasting one of the ten worst jobs? Nonsense. It’s the best job ever.
And I mean that sincerely.
Big Bully? Big Deal
Runt: n. 1. A variety of domestic pigeon. 2. The dead stump of a tree. 3. Any animal which is unusually small compared with others of its kind.
I come from a family of two girls and two boys and I was unquestionably the runt of the litter.
Oh, I wasn’t feeble or sickly as an infant, but I was . . . small—and slower to develop than most of my kiddie colleagues. By the time I hit puberty my classmates were already sporting sideburns and breasts (each to his or her own, you understand). Public school was unrelieved misery. I never won any ribbons on Field Day and I stayed on the bench at school dances—mostly because all the girls were at least a head taller than me. Naturally, I sucked at sports. When the captains chose up sides for baseball games I was usually the last pick.
“Okay, you have to take Black,” the opposing captain would say.
I was definitely low man on the totem pole. The skinny pup on the hind teat. The runt of the litter.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Being a runt reveals social Darwinism at its most cold-blooded. Runts are automatically at the bottom of the pecking order and they have to think fast if they expect to survive. They have to hone their hearing to stay out of the way of their more robust siblings. They have to sharpen their vision and sense of smell to snatch the scraps before the Big Guys get them. Runts have to develop a kind of radar to be able to analyze situations more quickly.
Otherwise they’re toast.
I remember when I was maybe nine or ten years old, rafting in a creek swollen by spring runoff. I was poling along the creek doing fine until Timmy Fermier, a big kid, took a huge leap from the creek bank and jumped on the raft with me. Not good. The raft began to settle ominously in the water, which began to creep up my boots. Inspired, I faked hysteria. “WE’RE SINKING! WE’RE SINKING!” I shrieked. “WE’RE GONNA DROWN!”
It worked. Timmy freaked and leapt into the creek (which was only about three feet deep). Naturally, when he abandoned ship, the raft bobbed up and I poled serenely to shore.
True, he beat me up later—but at least I didn’t get wet.
Being a runt made me learn other survival skills. If Timmy Fermier was the bullmastiff in the motley mob of mutts I hung around with, I was the Jack Russell terrier: yappy and annoying but fleet of foot and an artful dodger when the other dogs turned mean.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote: “Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.”
It’s true. And it’s a lesson every schoolboy runt learns early and remembers for the rest of his life. Some runts never get past it and go on to live nervous, stunted lives, shrinking from danger, some of it real but most of it imagined. Others learn to play the hand of cards life dealt them.
As Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
My all-time favourite runt hero? The skinny little guy, who, legend has it, went for a wilderness hike in the Yukon accompanied by a larger, beefy guide. After a few kilometres they come to a clearing and spy a huge male grizzly on the other side. The bear spots the hikers, gives a gut-shivering roar and begins to gallop across the clearing toward them. “Quick! Take off your jacket and wave it at him!” yells the guide. Instead, the runt shrugs off his backpack, opens the flap and pulls out a pair of running shoes. “Are you crazy?” says the guide. “You can’t outrun a grizzly!”
“I don’t have to,” says the little guy as he sloughs off his heavy boots and slips into the sneakers. “I just have to outrun you.”
Memo to Self: Wake Up
Every 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
According 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 specia
lizes 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.
