CONTENTS

WALTER: Donny was a good bowler, and a good man. He was...he was one of us. He was a man who loved the outdoors, and bowling, and as a surfer he explored the beaches of southern California from La Jolla to Leo Carrillo, and up to Pismo.           

For the past couple of years, I've noticed just how closely my life has begun to follow the Dude's from the Big Lebowski - perhaps the only two things missing are a dirty bathrobe and loads and loads of pot. 

LEBOWSKI:  Sure!  Fuck it!  That's your answer!  
Tattoo it on your forehead!  Your  answer to everything!  
                 The Dude is heading for the door.
LEBOWSKI:  Your "revolution" is over, Mr. Lebowski!  
Condolences!  The bums lost!
                 As the Dude opens the door.
LEBOWSKI:  ...My advice is, do what your parents did!  
Get a job, sir!  The bums will always lose-- 
do you hear me, Lebowski?  THE BUMS WILL ALWAYS--
                 The Dude shuts the door.

Since my return, I've told more than one person that this was the first trip to California that California itself made sense.  I've always fought the Left Coast as my native East Coast roots allow me to, but never spent enough time in California to find out why its so laid back, diverse and simultaneously larger than life, shockingly awesome and beautiful on such small scales.

ALLAN:  Dude, uh, tomorrow is already the tenth.
DUDE:  Yeah, yeah I know. Okay.
ALLAN:  Just, uh, just slip the rent under my door.
DUDE: Yeah, okay.

And so it is, with having to scrape together rent being such a precarious matter seemingly eleven months out of the year.  Air-conditioning, eating, medicine, laundry, and even haircuts being luxuries I jokingly tell folks are things that white people can afford.  But in California, none of that mattered, and I attributed a bunch of not worrying to the 
weather itself, where there's no complaints whatsoever.  Talking to my Dad while working, he asked how the weather was - I didn't know how to answer him - awesome? great? sunny? Freed from the oppression of the North's nasty snow covered winters and Austin's sweaty, humid summers of unending death, people can breathe, relax, cook at the beach, and maintain a status quo laid back nature that's not a Hollywood cliché. 

THE DUDE: God damn you Walter! You fuckin' asshole! Everything's a fuckin' travesty with you, man! And what was all that shit about Vietnam? What the FUCK, has anything got to do with Vietnam? What the fuck are you talking about?

Spending a couple of unfettered weeks out in the sun and surf, I realized just how trivial most of the world can be - worrying about TV shows, hating celebrities, politics, war.  I gave up voting and caring about the news two years ago, and instead began to fret about the pettiness of celebrity gossip polluting the real news.  Now, with my California mindset, I've began to embrace those very pet peeves, and take them in stride, with a stoner-like grain of salt, and just strap myself in for the ride.

WALTER:  HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE CRAZY?  
AM I THE ONLY ONE HERE WHO GIVES A SHIT 
ABOUT THE RULES?

Of course, there's a fine line in accepting the crap you can't change around you and revolving your life around it - don't take that last paragraph as any statement of surrender and think I'm a Jessica Simpson fan all of a sudden.  Its just the little battles I've fought on art vs. pop culture, our TV nation, and the rest of the insignificant crap (blonde girls getting kidnapped, celebrities getting married, breaking up, having babies) that haunts normal life. 

In California, everything seems to be taken in stride - the good and the bad, acknowledged with varying degrees of acceptance, but in the end, the knowledge its beautiful at the beach outside your door and the sun is about to set over the Pacific seems to be all the elixir that a troubled soul needs.

Everyone in California takes to their environment well, including these children of the punk scene.

 

"Now this story I'm about to unfold took place back in the early nineties-- just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the Eye-rackies.  I only mention it 'cause some- times there's a man--I won't say a hee-ro, 'cause what's a hee-ro?--but sometimes there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here-- sometimes there's a man who, wal, he's the man for his time'n place, he fits right in there--and that's the Dude, in Los Angeles."