Slomo called me today.

If you’re unfamiliar, Slomo, aka John Kitchin, is a neurologist who became a suntanned rollerblading icon in San Diego. I wanted to talk to him because I’m a reporter in Raleigh, not far from his hometown, and a documentary about him made a huge debut yesterday on NYTimes.com. (Kudos to Josh Izenberg — I loved it.)

It seems like he doesn’t mind the attention that comes with top billing. He called me back a few hours after I emailed him. I’m not sure what I expected, but he sounds kind of like Jim Hunt channeling Ken Kesey.

In part, I wanted to hear his response to criticism about his life style. Quite a few commenters have asked whether it’s worth celebrating a man whose pursuit of zen is essentially self-centered. (A lot of other people seemed inspired.)

We ended up talking about way more than that for a good 40 minutes. My quote radar was going off every other second or so. I’ll summarize below. You also can read my story about his Carolina roots.

A lot of long quotes

On his father’s idea of zen: Kitchin’s dad left his career to run the family’s dairy farm outside Wake Forest, N.C. This reminds me of Kitchin’s own switch from neurology to rollerblade philosophy, except for a significant difference in age and intentions.

“He was properly educated, and he was credentialed and practiced law for five years and then quit — which has often brought to my mind … that the best thing you can do for yourself is quit a job you don’t like.”

“And then (my father) spent the rest of his life after that in somewhat of a self-sacrificing mode. He really gave everything, his whole life, back to his children and his family and friends, and lived a life of a very modest person.”

On selfishness: By contrast, Kitchin found himself in an unabashedly self-centered way.

“Now, frankly, I’m doing what I want to. I think what my father did and what many men do is that they could pursue a life of selfishness and pleasure and pursuing their own desire — but they choose to give themselves, in a way give up themselves, for their family.”

He thinks that we’re going to see an age of plenty where people aren’t so burdened, and will have more time for self-spirituality. Perhaps this is easier to say after a well-paying career in neurology. Either way, works for him.

“A lot of times what we’re giving to other people is under the category of ‘giving to Caesar.’ To give spiritually is to give the other way — and all I can say is, when I started doing exactly what I wanted to it seems like everybody liked me a lot more than when I was doing what they wanted me to do.”

On new fame: He figures its like this scene in Cool Hand Luke, where all the prisoners are working in a ditch, and “one of them stops digging and starts running for the woods,” to the cheers of the guys back in the ditch. Kitchin with his rapturous skating is the escapee in this scenario.

“I’m just running for the woods,” he said.

On the Zone: The Zone is the place Kitchin goes when he becomes Slomo, gliding along the boardwalk.

“The other state of mind, the athletes call ‘the Zone.” The poets call it a state of love. The Buddhists call it Nirvana, the hypnotists often call it a trance. But this name for it is ‘the Zone.”

In the Zone, “all of your thoughts are good thoughts, loving thoughts. If everybody were to get in that state of mind and stay there as much as possible, we’d all get along.”

“You could make a case that that’s what Christ was talking about when he was talking about the kingdom of God. There’s no question that there’s a god when you’re in the Zone — you’re completely convinced that the real world is the world that you cannot see, and not the world that you can see.”

He said everyone has different paths to the Zone. He’s just trying to find his.

“I don’t have any serious delusions … that I’m anything other than a person who’s just poking through life, trying to get to the end of it … and spend as much time as possible in the Zone.”

On utopia: “I’m fundamentally conservative, but I can see that a bigger way of seeing this whole thing is that mankind — the homo sapiens — has struggled to get us to this place, and we’ve got to pull as many people as fast as possible onto this level. This life, it may not last but a few hundred years.”

“I think that the whole thing could be remedied if we just slowed everything down. Instead of working, say, 40 hours a week, slow the whole thing down to 36 hours a week. Turn the whole thing slower. And some of these places — the Ukraine … — would have time to catch up.”

People think “the person that should be honored in some way is the doctor who worked all the way up and cured cancer, and then in his last breath he was still working at the microscope. I think that that’s the heroic model — but you wonder, what would that person have been like if he had taken a little bit more time to investigate his own subjectivity that he shared with all these other creatures and his fellow man?”

On his decision to quit and start skating:

“I just worked my ass off for so many years. And I said well, Jesus, if I’m going to be out of here — there’s no absolute certainty there’s a heaven or anything after this — what’s the value of this anyway, if a person doesn’t stop and examine what he himself is?”

And when he’s skating and people are high-fiving him and smiling and whatnot: “In my heart, I feel that God just totally approves.”

On his birthday: His birthday’s April 7. He’ll be 71.

“The real day you should celebrate is, you should think back to the time that you think you can really remember coming into being, when your first epiphany occurred. That ought to be your birthday — and your nickname, whatever people called you, ought to be your real name.

He doesn’t know what his own “real birthday” would be by this definition. His childhood was too idyllic to narrow it down, he said.

On the criticism, again: “Think of all the priests that spent their lives doing no heavy lifting and no serious work. Are you going to say that those priests — and the monks — are those people supposed to stop worshiping God and start mixing concrete?

“That’s what they want them to do in China. (But)in North Carolina, for the large part, we’re composed of a people that believe primarily in the spiritual side of man. We have not gone over totally to the material side.”

“That’s what I’m doing. It just may not seem that way from a certain point of view.”

On rollerblading: “People are made differently. If you believe the greatest of our philosophers — Kant would say that it’s categorical, that it’s put into you in some way to be a certain way.”

And for him, the way to some higher state apparently is rollerblading. Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think.