There’s got to be a connection between the words “sabotage” and “sabbatical”. Sabbatage? Sabo-tical? Sabbotagical. Yes. That’s it. That’s the one.

 

“Time off is okay as long as it’s structured and has an end date.”

—Brittaney Splears

 

“It’s good to have dreams, ideas and interests, but don’t let them get in the way of the shit you really wanna’ do.”

—Thomis ABBA Eddisen

When I think about it, maybe my whole life has been a sabbatical—in the sense of a giant sabotage fest. I’ve always had a vision, but that vision has had a lot of offshoots. And I’m usually exploring those offshoots as opposed to heading toward the vision point. I see the target, but…..Oooh, look at that pertie thing over there. Mama wanna’ have a little look-see.. I call it “Dancing around the bullseye”. It’s clinically known as a lack of focus.

It’s just that I’ve got many sides. I want to explore everything before I really head into the vortex of my destiny. Who says your lifetime can only hold one life? Well, maybe that is true but where’s the imagination in that?

I went to London to scratch two lifelong itches. One itch was the comedy itch. I wanted to explore a new comedy scene. The second itch was the international itch. I wanted to do comedy, but I wanted to be out of the US so I could broaden my horizons. I felt I hadn’t traveled enough and needed to be a fish out of water for a while. Admittedly, I was limited by language. I couldn’t do stand up in Morocco. Not yet, anyway. I chose London because it was overseas and English is the official language (although Polish is a strong second). Done. Sorted. Two itches scratched. Book that flight.

The thing is that the one itch got itchier than the itch I thought had been the stronger of the two itches. I thought the comedy itch was the strongest, and it was in theory, but once I got overseas, I realized how long that other itch-the international itch, had gone unscratched. To make it worse, I didn’t leave Seattle on a high, go straight to London and hit the ground running. I did leave Seattle on a high, but first went to Greece for three-and-a-half months before heading to the Big Smoke. I hadn’t been to Greece in almost fifteen years, and this was to be my reunion with my dad’s homeland—a place I spent a huge part of my childhood and young adulthood, a place that meant a lot to me and that I had disconnected from for a long time. A very deep itch to scratch, indeed.

So, I had this long summer hiatus from comedy. I reconnected with my peeps and discovered a place that was almost unrecognizable from the place I’d left all those years before. I was a stranger anymore. I had to burn my laurels and humbly go about learning what this new place was about. This European Greece. It was a great experience on many levels, but it also involved a verb depressing first-hand look at what economic crisis can do to a place (that was the lowest point in the Greek crisis). So, I did that. Then I went to London. Kind of culture shocked, kind of shell shocked. But ready to scratch.

LONDON:

London is…..dark. Big. Cold. We all know how London is. I won’t get into the weather.

Anyway, London’s London. It’s overwhelming. Difficult to navigate. Expensive. Ugly in a lot of places. Really ugly. Sorry, but when you’re riding into town from Heathrow, the first images of suburban English neighbourhoods are grim. The colors, the design, the uniformity. Yuck. Then, later, you kind of get used to it. Like everything else.

I knew I didn’t want to live anywhere outside the main center of action, which I was to find out was a very large center of action. I grew up in Washington, DC. It’s not London. There are two or three neighbourhoods worth living in per lifestyle in the DC area. If you’re a climber, you’ll live on Capitol Hill, near your job. If you’re a hipster, you’ll live in Petworth, near your fave bars. Done. (NOTE: I’ve probably got these totally wrong as I haven’t lived in DC in years). But London’s got choices. Too many!

After about three weeks of living in hostels and searching for rooms to rent, I found one in a big house in Northwest London, not far from where I was staying. I liked the neighborhood, the price was great-ish, and I’d be living with eight other people who were all moving in at about the same time as me. No chance to sink into boredom and loneliness unless I was really determined to do so. Besides, I’d be doing comedy all the time, right? Who would have time to even worry about who was living where when I’d be busy honing my skills at the open mics every single night? Right?

A house full of Brazilians, Italians, a Jamaican and an American. Yes, we had a lot of fun. Parties, nights out, nights in, cooking together, helping each other out with anything we could help out with. We became a family. It was great. I’d never had housemates like that before. And, boy, did it scratch that other itch. The culture itch. I got into all of it. I was practicing my dusty ass Portuguese that I had sort of learned a thousand years earlier in college. I was getting to know what Italians were like. The Jamaican and I both discovered how much people from our hemispheric vicinity have in common. We were all getting to know what London was all about. It was nuts. Fun. An experience. And it all came to an abrupt end one day when we received a raging knock at the door informing us that the property was being rented out illegally and that we all had two days to get out. Man, London. It is true what they say about your slumlords! I guess the guys who were renting out to us were doing it well after their lease was up. In other words, it wasn’t there’s to rent out and hadn’t been for a good six months before the raging knocker came to find them. All change!

I moved into my next digs in Autumn 2013. The place is owned by a family friend. She rents a spare room out to foreign students who go to London to study. The room was empty at the time I needed a place. Very thankfully, I took it. It was in a great neighborhood. The rent was the same. She cut me a deal because of my circumstances, and because she knew I’d be staying for a while. So did I, but I didn’t know it would be four years. Damn.

The old housemates tried to get together for a while to keep the connection up, but it got harder and harder. The Jamaican guy had his own life and circles to move in. The Italians stuck with each other and went on to rent a place by themselves. The Brazilians did the same, although they did ask me to go along. I didn’t want to glom on to anyone. I felt I had to carve out my own scene in London and not rely on already formed groups of people to provide me with entertainment and a sense of belonging. Besides, if all truth be told, as good as our household connection was, we didn’t really all have that much in common. Especially me with them. I was the only sort of artsy one in the whole house. Everybody was either a business type or a cleaner or a hairdresser. A lot of times, I felt like a weirdo. But that wasn’t that weird for me. I always feel like a weirdo. Anyway, the point is that you need to be around like-minded people sometimes. Otherwise, you have nothing reinforcing the motivation you need to pursue your goals and interests. Unfortunately, I hadn’t articulated that point to myself yet, and while I had the insight to strike out on my own socially, I didn’t realize how inept I would prove to be at that over the coming months and years.