Why the Dude doesn't surf

So Halloween costume story time!

I decided to wear a beach bum costume because I have the hair and the shirts and the trunks. One of my first conversations someone told me, "Just tell people you're the Dude" (Big Lebowski).

No this is not about my life, it's an awkward segue into talking about El Duderino, since brevity is not my thing.

So when I first watched the Big Lebowski, I couldn't help but wonder, why does he not surf? He is within reach of living the California dream life, with a little apartment and no real need or motivation for income.

Full confession, the movie really went over my head. I have no idea why anything that happened happened and I also haven't seen it in a long time.

But still, over half the people I talked to today knew who the dude was. What can I say?

As long as we're over analyzing I daresay there is plenty of attraction to the possibility that we can just live. We don't need to work or worry about tomorrow.

Most of us find that possibility repulsive, not without reason. Most of us have plans for our lives that we would rightly feel ashamed to let slip away without a thought.

But the dude doesn't have that problem. He doesn't worry about plans for his life; he reacts. He is as simple a human being as one could imagine.

So I think that's why the movie stuck with bowling. Bowling is frowned upon by most people I know as anything other than an odd night out. Surfing is easy to romanticize, and easy to connect with the beauty of nature and humanity as that goes.

To be able to live like the dude, you have to let go of any thought about yourself, whether it's one that you have or one that you think someone else has about you, or one that someone else gives you about yourself. It's more than just not giving a Damn, it's leaving yourself out of your conception of the world.

Whether that thought process is healthy for most people, or anyone for that matter, is not a case I care to make at this point. All I can say for sure is that it's more fun to be the dude for Halloween than it is to be a beach bum.