Fifty Shades of Black Read Online Free

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.

 
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    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