Slomo (in 2009)

"Slomo" skates along the boardwalk for hours daily at Pacific Beach and Mission Beach in San Diego California.


John Kitchin, aka "Slomo", was born in 1943 on a small dairy farm outside Wake Forest, N.C. Kitchin attended Duke University where he wound up in pre-med. The young neurologist moved to San Diego, where he married and had a son. He bought 30 acres in Ramona and imported a menagerie of exotic animals, including llamas and a camel named Elvis. Kitchin was crazy for downhill skiing, taking winters off to indulge his passion. A friend developed a method of negotiating moguls in slow motion. Staring into your eyes, Kitchin says he suffers from prosopagnosia, an affliction that makes it difficult to recognize faces. He believes his uncanny balance skating in super-slow motion with balletic grace might be a compensation for his visual disorder. In 1998, Kitchin retired from medicine. He already had taken to skating with headphones at Dana Junior High School in Point Loma. He began to see slow-motion gliding to music as a portal to religious ecstasy. He moved into a "monastic" studio a half-block from the boardwalk and took to skating the length of the boardwalk seven days a week. He spends his days writing, creating art, mixing music and, of course, dressing in the Slomo outfit and skating for hours into the cosmos. "I want to think about eternal questions in the state of mind I call the Zone," Kitchin says.