Does bowling always mean bowling?

[Judd Dude]

Well, as I said elsewhere on the forum, I recently took a lady friend bowling.
Turned out it was just bowling.
We'll go again soon though, so who knows?

Well dude, we just don't know...

[Judd Dude]

Personally I like to go sailing. Not really in a big yacht or racing dinghy kind of way. i have a really cool micro yacht. She's over thirty years old and has a great character. i go out on the Med' with my friends, chuck a mackerel line over the side and all the troubles of the world melt away. Now when i go down to the boat to work on her or take her out i say I'm going 'bowling' because I'm talking about the vibe not the specific activity.

What do you think? Does bowling go beyond bowling?

I think in the film it means just bowling, but that just happens to be the Dude's outlet that he enjoys immersing himself in. In Dudeism, I think it can be anything that sets one's mind at ease or fully distracts one from the stresses and mundanities of daily life.

I too like to go boating, and find it hard to care about much when I'm floating listening to the water crash against the boat's hull. I also enjoy motorcycling, and being alone on the open road with the bike, heading to wherever, yeah it's a pretty good feeling too man.

Whatever sets you free man!

[Yeti]

[Walter Mode]

Goddamit! This thread just gave me a headache.

Study the history of the movie. Peter Exline, one of the two real-life inspirations for The Dude, was obsessed with his softball league - neither he nor Jeff Dowd actually bowled on a regular basis. The Coen Brothers changed softball to bowling in the movie not for some grand symbolic or philosophical reason, but because bowling would be easier to shoot indoors at all hours of the day or night in a climate-controlled location (they could bowl at night, for instance after they threw a ringer over a bridge), it required fewer ancillary characters and complex action shots, and it allowed for the actors to sit and talk to each other for extended periods. Here's a relevant quote from Wikipedia:

Exline also belonged to an amateur softball league but the Coens changed it to bowling in the movie because "it's a very social sport where you can sit around and drink and smoke while engaging in inane conversation", Ethan said in an interview.

If you're obsessed with bowling simply because it was in the movie, you're missing the point and being un-Dude. Your bowling can be softball, or fishing, or pool, or pinball, or video games, or swinging, or LSD, or a thousand other casual pastimes that help you relax and reassess the condition your condition is in. Just like your drink doesn't have to be a Caucasian, bowling doesn't have to be your sport unless you dig bowling.

[/Walter Mode]