He wears thongs (on his feet) virtually everywhere he goes but he’s never going to the beach. He wears them to a ball game even though it’s likely that beer will be spilled all around him and that he may need to wade through a men’s bathroom with overflowing piss troughs. On rainy days in February, he exposes his feet. He wears the cheapest sandals made when he’s out on the town, he wears them with Dockers, with gym shorts, he wears them horseback riding. If he needed to go to a construction site he’d wear them there and there’s no amount of potential dirt or fashion advice or public humiliation that can dissuade him because, well, he’s Flip-Flop Guy. If you pay attention in the course of daily life you’re sure to see him.

What makes Flip-Flop Guy tick? Laziness mostly. He wants to walk out of his shoes at night and walk into them in the morning. He’s into hands-free. He doesn’t want the pressure that comes with shoelaces nor does he need the shoe-tying stress that comes with remembering, Over, under, around and through, Meet Mr. Bunny Rabbit, pull and through.

His total lack of fashion sense and decorum would be oddly refreshing if his feet weren’t so weathered and disgusting. He would walk around totally barefoot except one night he stepped on a thumbtack when he was drunk. It didn’t hurt, in fact, he didn’t even feel it, it was as if you stuck a pin into the leathery hide of a rhino, but he kept hearing this clacking, tapping sound as he walked, and sure enough, when he lifted up his filthy foot, there was a red thumbtack in his heel.

Flip-Flop Guy believes he’s just mister casual, that shoes are just a head-trip forced on society by the establishment. In this flower-power explanation of life, Flip-Flop Guy is a lot like Hippy-Dippy Weatherman, a seventy-year-old version of Flip-Flop Guy who has a scruffy beard, a ponytail, lives out of a VW bus and wears a tank top that says, Catch A Buzz, Drop Acid.

In the end, Flip-Flop Guy just never came back from summer vacation. He’s living life without a dress code, just barely acquainted with hygiene. He’s a close relative of another alien life form – Put-Stickers-All-Over-Your-Car Guy. What kind of dude starts at the back bumper and then proceeds to cover every square inch of his vehicle, including the windows, with stickers? I’ll tell you what kind of dude, a dude that only wears flip-flops.

On the surface, Flip-Flop Guy is probably just a simpleton drifting through life with dirty feet. Afterall, not everyone can be a deep thinker and there might be a certain organic value in those amongst us who don’t overthink things. But what are we to make of a person who views life as so informal that it doesn’t even require shoes and socks?

Common sense dictates that you should avoid him. If a guy thinks that shoes and socks are too much work, how much effort do you think he’s gonna put into a job or a friendship or staying sober? What makes you think he would bother with a driver’s license or insurance or pay attention to any detail in life if the most obvious thing you know about him is that he’s likely to wear flip-flops to a wedding?

Flip-flops were designed for those times when you have on swim trunks, so that your feet won’t get burned on the asphalt walking from your car to the shore. Flip-Flop Guy hijacked a happy day at the beach and turned it into a pathetic lifestyle. Come to think of it, Flip-Flop Guy tends to wear swim trunks almost all the time too, in a lot of inappropriate places like the mountains, church … a job interview. Maybe he always thinks he’s at the beach?

Steer clear of the guy with the nasty feet who doesn’t know where he is.