Beau Miles Quotes

There are a few things in life so beautiful they hurt: swimming in the ocean while it rains, reading alone in empty libraries, the sea of stars that appear when you’re miles away from the neon lights of the city, bars after 2am, walking in the wilderness, all the phases of the moon, the things we do not know about the universe, and you.

I’ve come to realise that everything is a waste of time unless you think of it otherwise.

This book is dedicated to anyone who has lived a hard life in order to get by. Such people are seldom regarded as adventurers, yet I think they’re the mantle-piece characters.

I can’t get two words out of her, and here you are, turning down what she’s offering for free,” he lamented flatly. “What did you do, anyway? Save her cat?” “No. That was Jess,” Duane mumbled. That made me laugh. “Jess was eight, Duane. Eight. All I did was climb a tree and get her cat.” And she’s yours now in any case. “That’s right!” Hank snapped his fingers then pointed at Duane. “I forgot about that. Didn’t Jess have a thing for Beau before you two hooked up?” “We didn’t hookup, Hank,” Duane bit back. Hank lifted a hand, palm out, as though he surrendered. “Fine. Before you twopledged your troth. Is that better?” Duane grumbled something I didn’t catch, then shrugged. “Yeah. So what? The past is in the past.” My brother glowered at me as he said this. “Oh good Lord, Duane. What was I supposed to do? Not get the damn cat? You didn’t even like her then. You used to call her freckles, remember that?” “I still call her freckles.” “No you don’t, you call her princess,” I said, not about to lose an opportunity to correct my brother about his recent domestication, mostly because I was envious of it. Hank pointed at me with his beer. “So, let me get this straight. You saved Jess’s cat when she was eight, and she had a thing for you after that?” Before I could decide how to answer, he turned to Duane. “And you’re okay with that?” “Hank, let me tell you something.” Duane’s voice took on an instructional air that cracked me up, likely because it sounded like an imitation of our brother Cletus. “If you’re looking to pledge your troth to a woman within sixty miles of Green Valley, you might as well assume she’s had a thing for my brother at some point in her life.” Duane tapped the neck of his beer against Hank’s. “Welcome to the club.” “I’m the founding member of the club, Duane.” Hank’s tone was dry and sour. “And what club would this be?” I tapped my bottle against both of theirs just to be obnoxious. “The Beau gets all the girls club. 

I always seem to have a perverse attraction to chaos, and a toothache-like appetite for occasional misadventure. Sure, I don’t like rotten teeth, but if I have one, I play with the spectrum of pain it provides because it tells me I have a galaxy of nerves in my mouth – a universe that was dormant until the rot set in. Misadventure is a toothache – to be avoided, but embraced if it comes along because there’s no other choice.

To think at a deeper level about my irritable state of play, being unsure of this thing I’ve come to call adventure, I make toast. As I stand eating at the sink, crumbs going everywhere, it occurs to me that, in a horrible stroke of symmetry, I’ve lived roughly the same number of days as adult and non-adult. This is a somewhat arbitrary statistic, other than to say the physical meat of me is no longer prime. Lamb is turning to mutton. I can no longer, for example, share a birthday with the winner of the Tour de France.

Backyard adventuring is about concocting meaningful events and experiments that challenge me, that redefine my childhood sense of the hero’s journey, that force me to look intimately in everyday places, and question how I live among others.

Within all this is what’s commonly called real versus perceived risk; an example of real risk is Alex Honnold’s free solo climb up the face of El Capitan in Yosemite, while perceived risk would be climbing the same route attached to a system of ropes and anchors. One version means certain death when you fall and the other is a wedgie.

When something familiar to you feels exotic, you're winning

The best things I own are often the last things I think about

But I’ve come to see easy googling as the antithesis of innovation and invention, likely pegging us back in the evolutionary stakes, because: 1) it obliterates curiosity, which is a foundation for fun, and cockups; 2) having oodles of information makes me feel like I’m about to roll out a script by the time I get to the start line, and I’m not an actor; and 3) getting to the point of something being easy means truckloads of energy has been spent gathering and scheming, and is potentially a critical waste of a lifetime if you consider mortal life to be all about bang-for-buck.

C'est fini le beau baudelairien, place à l'instagrammable !