Episode 4: Hit the Slabs

Last week, Michael and I had the wonderful opportunity to go down to Slab City. And so I wanted to write a story centered there.

 Here are my NOTES:

(1) I understand that "hit the slab(s)" has a couple of slang meanings, but one is to get on the highway.

(2) In this bit, I speak of Slab City indirectly, but - Air Force base, Salton Sea - it's silly quibbling. I demur from calling out SC specifically, because I made up most of the particulars inside town. So we have a Slab City of the imagination, if that works.

There is a library in Slab City: an Anarchist Library run by a wonderful woman I've barely briefly met named Cornelius Vango. Hers is not the library I describe here, but I was inspired by it. I was also inspired by Salvation Mountain, and the idea that Salvation Mountain was built by a lovable old crank who passed it on to younger apprentices when he died.

(3) Rancho Costa Nada is one of my favorite books. It is simultaneously a screed against civilization, and a manual for how to build a passable desert hermitage ("hogan") for under a thousand bucks. To me, Philip Garlington, author of RCN, is an unknown cultural hero.

(4) Kilgore Trout is one of the greatest things Kurt Vonnegut ever dreamed up. He is a disgruntled writer appearing in many of KV's novels - a crank whose strange, dreadful-seeming, or possibly-visionary science fiction broadsides are published in innumerable porn mags. Due to postal laws of the time, a certain amount of print matter was required in blue periodicals. Trout could not publish anywhere else, and poured supposed millions of words into these spaces. I love Vonnegut's strange idea of Kilgore Trout. Trout was a man who made his way as he could before the day of online 9-11 conspiracists.

(5) The Richard Brautigan quote is from his novel The Abortion. It meant a good deal to me to quote this specific book, because, title aside, it's about a man who runs a fancifully surrealist library in San Francisco in the years before the summer of love. It's an economically-impossible reverse library where people bring the librarian books that they've written, full of their hearts' ideas. They deposit these documents so that they will not be seen again. In the end, a woman entices Brautigan's protagonist to enter the real world and stop living in a repository. I felt I was almost thinking of a mirror-reflection of all of that.

(5) If you didn't know, the quote from Col. Colby is from Apocalypse Now.

(6) I would be remiss not to send people to the Slab City reality show of Jack, a raconteur with whom we were happy to spend a hunk of an afternoon on Sunday, May 15. Kirsten Dunst was right in the neighborhood filming an indie movie about aliens - Jack was participating. That's not a joke. We will all be eagerly looking out for this Kirsten Dunst movie.