The Van Library

I met up with one of my podcast producers Kendama Gendale on the Venice Boardwalk last night.

He’s on tour across the country with his band in a Scooby Doo style Mystery Machine van.

“Did I ever tell you I was briefly a leading expert on Dogecoin? I made a lot of money to give away to the poor.”

“Why didn’t you keep it and fund the tour?”

I told him about a pitch I’m working on, about a guy who created great software but gave it away open source, which left him broke.

“Yeah but if he hadn’t given it away it wouldn’t have spread and no one would have ever heard of him.”

I wouldn’t be making a highly capitalized TV show out of him without open source.

He was telling me about this amazing book he just read by Tom Robbins — Skinny Legs and All.

“It has coital rhythms. Like Dune.”

“That’s an old book. Where did you find it?”

“In the van library.”

The van library. The library inside his band’s Scooby Doo Mystery Machine tour van. The idea of this blew my mind, felt foundational, core, a guiding metaphor —

“What.”

He explained that before starting off, each member of the band contributed important books to the van library —

I imagine books that stood in for who they were.

This is the brain trust, the black box. If, God forbid, the van runs off the road and we’re all incinerated — or when the asymptote line of infighting and fucking inevitably runs the band to ground, this van library will stand for who we were at this moment in time.

The van library doesn’t just soothe and entertain across the interminable drives through Nevada wind farms, the van library powers the van.

By sharing our van library — our identities — we commingle and recombine who we are. We make art. We make a tour.

Mark my words, this van library thing might turn out to be my calligraphy class or my mystery box in my burgeoning empire.

Watch this space for more myth-building. I’m a pro.