You I’d say that before slow-mo I became a typical institutionalized educated Western man in other words I was driving a BMW to work I was working long hours I was paying my taxes and doing everything by the standards of society and so on just like everybody else in the
Workforce and frankly I intended just to work myself on into oblivion and get old and die and that was pretty much the scenario but now I Spanish myself like the tip of a great iceberg of consciousness huh no I mean he might have been a musician he might have been an actor he
Got this disease where he can’t recognize faces like if he looks at your face he just sees like a blur I think he might be like a veteran no one knows if he’s homeless if he’s not he hangs out here all day every day he’d roller
Skates on one like such you say slo-mo to anybody Pacific Beach they know exactly he’s talking about what’s the nursing to me is that nobody knows who the slo-mo really is let’s say that you know that they’re saying like that was Batman there must be something happening in the city what we’re gonna
Do is let the music determine everything the imagination is picturing a forest and onions knowing John forty years what he’s doing is clearly a radical departure from his background I grew up in North Carolina on a little dairy farm I was typical of a little southern boy
Doing the simple things but going to school and playing cowboy and all that type of thing when I graduated from college I didn’t have a plan but I’d been ushered in the direction of a medical school I got credentialed in both neurology and psychiatry had a full
Practice and I was going all these different hospitals and doing very well and it was kind of the zenith of my manhood and I was in the cafeteria line behind an old man who was all bent over and everything and I’d asked him how old
He was and he said it was 93 and he was by himself and he was kept getting one thing or after nothing putting a lot of food on his tray and I thought I would wise off to him a little bit so I said how does a strapping young man like me
Get to be an old codger like you and uh he looked at me and said do what you want to and at first I was thinking this old man just made more sense to me than anything I’d ever heard in my life let’s just do what you want to
I was lost in a rational world for a good twenty years after that I got married and had a son and the marriage didn’t work out we got divorced after about a year in two-thirds I was hard working thinking only about material things 12-cylinder BMW a
Ferrari an exotic animal farm I lived in a mansion I remember I would leave the office and I would think to myself how much of today promoted me spiritually and how much of it promoted me financially and I would take a little reckoning it seemed like at the
Beginning it was about 90% spiritual and as the years went by it got about 90% financial I reckon what I’m talking about is my experience in the middle part of life the large part is a grinding affair working away having a family making the whole thing happen and at the end of it
Most people pretty worn out they don’t believe in God they don’t believe in anything beyond this ephemeral existence that we’re in now and their attitudes cynical they’re what we in America called and I was one of them it occurred to me one time when I was
Driving to work and I had a lot of reports to dictate that day that I was still shoveling which had been the way I started my life on the dairy farm and I look back on it I’m just thinking this is the most absurd stupid way to go
Through a life that person could have a dream up but we’re all being pushed on to do this and then I had the opportunity to stop I gradually began to notice that I was getting things backwards like x-rays and I began to be aware like Kylie I might not be able to
See as well and I think I can I got to work couldn’t recognize faces I couldn’t tell for sure if this person was somebody I’d seen before so I was thinking gosh if I’m going blind I’m losing my vision and it’s affected my work and my work is very
Unsatisfactory to start with I’m thinking suicide and that type of thing half the time why don’t I just cash it in and start a whole new life like be another person reinvent myself I don’t have to be a doctor to the last minute and then kill off into the blue beam that way
And I remember that old gassing do what you want to so I started counting down on it and I found out all I really wanted to do was the basic things and skate and every day I would come out and just skate as long as I could
And sometimes I would skate like even through the night I just love to skate I love the feeling and it the more attention I could put to it the more enjoyable God but it was the only really spiritual boat my life god be out there thinking about God and subjectivity
And every night I just went back to it like some sort of religious thing I think what I’m doing with all due modesty there’s a type of flying I was always trying to protect this technique skating in slow motion I realized that there was an aspect to lateral
Acceleration which made many of us feel good I studied this and there’s a neurological explanation for this type of thing acceleration stimulates a set of receptors which in the inner ear that connects us with the center of the earth by gravity a piece of calcium sits on a membrane so
That any change in the relative position of gravity will make this stone roll and therefore there will be some indication that the body is moving relative to the Sun of the earth when I skate the whole idea is to keep a continuous feeling of acceleration even though it’s very small
And if you keep it constant the feeling of expansion continues to build anything where you can get this angular acceleration feeling you can use that for meditation because it puts you in those well I thought I might be going crazy something because I’m too happy and I
Kept waiting for what of this was this obsession was skating to differentiate itself into some sort of diagnoseable problem but that was 15 years gift almost nobody felt I was normal even me I’d been trained to think that these felt this is a type of mental illness or
Mental some sort of aberration of the mind so I’ve been called every name my first thought was look at that homeless guy with those nice rollerblades where did he get those used to laugh at him but then I would see him riding around with a thick mane that guy really is
Barely even pushing himself down the boardwalk yet he seems to be gliding does he’s definitely tapped into something he’s really good you know I mean for his age it’s great everybody has the capacity to dream up and believe anything he wants to the shrink so the psychoanalyst would call
It a personal delusional system and you believe it because you choose to when I skate I try to regress down to what I think is about age eleven and a half which is the last of the idealistic years before the testosterone and all the other stuff takes off and then
Before you know it you’re in the middle third of life so much of the popular media that we read is you have to have X amount in your IRA you’re driving a nice car and that means you’re okay you know you’re retired and John could have all
Of those things but he’s chosen a wonderfully simple lifestyle he’s got a studio apartment he’s got his life down to the bare essentials all he needs to buy is a nice pair of skates and he hangs around at the beach once we see the light we know that there will be no
Satisfaction until we experience a kind of divinity something that’s close to divinity as man can experience and I had an opportunity to get in that when I start skating it happens to me hey dude I don’t identify as a doctor anymore I mean I still for a family and whatnot I
Give some opinions here and there but frankly at this point I’m just trying to get to the end of my life for that becoming an again hey I like a look I like it how’s it going hello purple your way perfect the people that love slow mug are cheering for one
Person that got away that escaped and got to real freedom very escapes all day doesn’t apologize he’s simply doing what he wants to this is your good old days it only gets worse from here on okay the good old days of these wait do you see what happens as you get older
Okay gentlemen we are ready to skate you you you you you Oh Oh
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