Two Weeks in London has Forever Changed my Life Trajectory

It’s the subtle personal experiences that became important to me because the Rats are always racing all around the world and I’m too f**king tired and disgusted to compete with them.

“Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the world becomes a market place for you.” — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Sunflower Paradise (2023) — An original work of AI and appropriated image collage art by the author.

I am a 63-year-old multidisciplinary, mixed ancestry artist who was born and raised in Southern California. I am a disabled veteran of the United States Air Force and the Intelligence Community.

Whatever I may have believed about “The World” before I left from LAX to fly to London last August of 2023 has folded into a haze of past memories. The 63 years of life I’d lived prior to that, along with all the supposed “insights” I’d formulated, were wiped out by the reality of arriving in a major world capital that is vastly different than what I was led to believe. It turns out that the world is a lot smaller than I realized, and the people in this world are a lot more alike than I ever could have imagined. It appears that most of us eat too much sugar, fail to brush our teeth as often as we should, fart rudely in public, and likely are far more critical of others than we are willing to admit to ourselves.

I wanted to believe that the omnipresent political and cultural insanity of the United States of America was unique in the world. I wanted to believe that Europe, which at a point included the United Kingdom, had a better educated population than in the U.S. and that the social and political insanities that define life in the U.S. were somehow less prominent and less destructive in the UK. That delusion was shattered by my very first experiences after deplaning in Heathrow Airport Terminal 2. The lack of “User Friendly” amenities, even in obtaining affordable transportation from the airport to my destination, exploded my expectations. The immediate specter of the distant interpersonal reservation of the Londoners also threw me for a loop. Things went downhill from there.