THE DUDE NETWORK

INTERIOR and EXTERIOR Dudes
Interior Dudes are geographically local and share our everyday life. Exterior Dudes are non-local; usually former Interior Dudes but also Dudes met during travel, held with consciously sustained bonds.

The TRANSIENT DUDE
Clearly, a key to successful dude networking is settling into a place to explore the groups and subgroups within a city’s particular dude network. The dude that moves around from city to city for various reasons impedes this, and research has shown that, with age as a factor, repeated moving does not enhance a dude’s ability to work into dude networks; if anything, one’s dude sniffing abilities increase but a given group is likely to become more closed and territorial as they grow older, with more folk tendencies.
The Transient Dude is in thus in danger of pursuing exterior dude qualities to the detriment of interior dude development. (The reverse of this is the Entrenched Dude: all interior, no exterior, which can also happen with Dude marriages.)
Also note the Dude of Eternal Return, who keeps on leaving the hometown and keeps on coming back.

This said, initial relocation from one’s formative homestead is a crucial step in Dude Training. This is the American heritage.

Dude Training
The Majority of dude training takes place on college campuses - some drift back towards folk and occasional dick structures, but college (for better or worse) is where a person is likely to explore its individuality, and how it relates to others. This also can act like a batting tee, in that this is almost never what the actual living is like, in terms of how one actually forms a dude network.
Most dangerous of all in terms of dude training would be art schools, where a person is likely to excel at the one thing it is doing (making art, etc) while never being challenged in academic classes. The natural high from living doing the one thing it does well produces armies of over-confident motivated hipsters, vocal opinionists and the like.


Notes on FOLK TEMPLATES
The Folk templates often inform relationships among Dudes, who are known to play plastically with relationships.
• A dude may understand a certain other dude to be as a sibling, Brother or Sister. This does not necessarily follow traditional gender assignation, and the subtle qualities of an individual relationship can be brought out in deviation; a woman and a man who identify as Sisters.
• Bros, of course, are a common subset of Dudes (see Sausage Party, above). The designation “bro” has slipped into contemporary presence via college fraternity culture, organizations necessarily formed from the celebration of shared maleness or brotherhood, though more refined Dudes will use the full term “Brother”. Bros represent an interesting triangulation between Dicks, Dudes, and Folk. A corollary to this family is groupings of men who identify as a group of Sisters.
• There may be a Grandmother, a generous female figure who connects well with a variety of people. Her home is a common gathering ground and she is hostess par excellence.
• It is rarer to encounter identification with Mothers, even less so Fathers, but informal adoption does exist.


Partnered Dudes
Although partnering (esp. heterosexual) has been heavily tainted by Dick tradition, Dudes still fall in love and want to hang out like all the time. Self-conscious dudes in partnerships may report the “Sitcom Effect”, which occurs when trivial difficulties in communication and suspiciously accurate heteronormative irritations disrupt partnered dudes (regardless of gender). These Dudes feel an inexorable pull to Folk hilarity that is not welcome.