How I Almost Blew It

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           Eating ice cream cones

                    

                        Jeff Schneider 1972

As you can see I was a pretty introspective kid circa1972. I thought I was a poet, had read the requisite Kerouac, Buk, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsburg and smoked a tremendous amount of weed while dashing off reams of overwrought verse. Kerouac for me was the man. The fact the he allegedly wrote The Dharma Bums in 2 weeks high on bennies furthered the allure as I cast myself as a hitchhiking bard making a living selling poems door to door to the great unwashed. I would heal the knaves with my poetic insight while soothing my own artistically fevered brow. Weed in those days was $10 an oz.; a cheap plexi-glass bong was $5. The bong invariably leaked putrid bong water, but for $1 a tube of epoxy sealed the sieve-like seams.

For 2 1/2 years I attended Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and fourth floor Irvine Hall was a pot smokers Mecca. Most nights we laid around rolling tuskers, giving each other shotguns while listening to Tull, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. To this day Close To The Edge gives me an olfactory flashback to the nights when a 19-year-old acne laden, chronic masturbator by the name of Jeff Schneider sat in a haze of pot smoke, scared shitless not knowing what the fuck he was going to do with the rest of his life.

Even then I thought the world was bullshit and could never figure out what the big deal was. Sadly, I was never really suicidal either. I was stuck in the middle. What was all the excitement about? Even as a younger man, things the normal world seemed to accomplish like paying taxes and worrying about investments didn’t hold much truck for me. Any sane person knew we were just dust in the wind. To me people lived their lives like cheerful robots and gleefully cheered on cue. How else do you explain the pasty-faced loons in one giant orgasm screaming for the homophobic, anti-Semitic Tricky Dick in 1972?

Somehow the masses glommed on to something I was clearly missing. What was it? As a young man I was born into a Jewish family and had the requisite shotgun Bar Mitzvah and left the Jewish religion the same day through a plate glass window. I was gone, the hollowness of the experience so great I haven’t stepped into a synagogue since that day in 1966. WTF? How could the whole world be right and me wrong? It was more like the 1000 fly rule, which states “If 1000 flies land on something, chances are it’s a piece of shit!”

So here I was in college listing like the Titanic. I’d spend most of my days freaking out; smoking pot and stuffing my chow pipe like I was going to the gas chamber. The only exercise I could muster was a daily anxiety attack. I had no direction, and a constant gnawing feeling that life was slipping away. Apparently, I had hit an iceberg too. It always killed me that anyone the age of 18 had the self-determination to pick a major their freshman year. Do you mean to tell me you are ready to be a CPA for the next 50 years? This is it? No mystery? Nothing? You are ready to clip on that pocket protector forsaking everything else that might come down your way? Pre-law? Pre-med? Who were these cats kidding? I was the oracle, the guy who wrote poetry with the passion of a priapic Dylan Thomas.

I hated everything collegiate life had to offer especially the pep rallies, which kept me away from my precious masturbation. Never once in my life did I ever have school spirit. Popular culture seemed to me like an exercise in thumb twiddling, a time killer to keep you interested just enough. People got excited about all kinds of crap that didn’t interest me. The low hum of modern life burned in my head. To me there were not very many highs and way too many lows. Everything was a hassle.

I distinctly remember looking out one afternoon over the West Green watching the student population scurry back and forth between classes and was suddenly overtaken with the feeling that it didn’t matter where they were going or what they were doing. These seemingly individual individuals were all headed in the same direction, on the hamster’s wheel to the suburbs. I was despondent. To be a mechanic or an insurance salesman reeked of death. Life for me limped along, but meaning was never in the forecast. I had always had uncorroborated existential feelings, but how do you bring them up during a dodge ball game when you’re eleven?

In1974 I left academia and headed for a fresh start in Los Angeles as a standup comic. My father had just died of a massive heart attack on the tennis court, alive in the morning, dead that evening. I listened to Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard/A True Star that night in my room while my mother sobbed in hers. The next morning with the winter wind whipping I walked a broken woman from bank to bank steadying her so she wouldn’t fall on the icy asphalt to extract the family savings before the state could lay their greasy mitts on it.

We went to the Berkowitz-Kumin funeral home to pick out a coffin when the specter of the absurd appeared. What model would appropriately suit the life that was my father’s? The Eterna 2000? The Permanent Suite? What would it be? I listened to the funeral director’s pitch. My mother really in no condition to decide finally chose a middle of the road model guaranteed to keep the conqueror worm out for 2 years. I could care less. My father was dead and that was that. In the illogicality of the moment my mind drifted to thinking about pussy. Beautiful. It all boils down to pussy. My father was dead. The funeral needed to be planned and I was thinking about pussy.

Blink and you’re 50. Blink again and you’re dead. One day you will stare into a steamy mirror and wonder what the hell happened. Two thirds of your life has passed like the days were fence posts you watched whiz by from the back seat of the family car on the way to the lake. So many of us end up in this position, the position of what could have been. But how did it actually happen? How did all of that bottomless youthful exuberance mysteriously evaporate only to be replaced by some creaky, complacent acceptance? It is a riddle that plagues us and yet we seem satisfied to create illusions to insulate us from this horrible realization.

The most salient feature of life is its remorseless nature. Reality does what it does with a bold indifference. It is this indifference that paves the way for possibility, but at the same time can stultify. We are given the opportunity to take a lump of clay and mold it into something great, but instead choose to create an even larger lump of clay.

When I was young I never had a mentor to grab me by the collar, point me in the right direction and inspire me to achieve my authentic self. Why am I here? What was I put on this planet to do? How can I be used up in my quest to fulfill my destiny, the thing I was designed to be? So much time is invested in making a living, finding a trade that it’s no wonder that the dreams of youth are so often summarily squashed. In the course of many great lives researchers find a common thread, a helpful witness, relative, teacher, friend who saw the potential and refused to let it be crushed.

So many of us fit into the former and now two thirds down the line it seems too Herculean to even wonder, what if?  But I will offer hope. I grimly watched “the days run away like wild horses over the hill” to quote the aforementioned Buk, Charles Bukowski. Each year would pass and I’d wonder if I might run out of energy or time to achieve the possibilities that I now could see for myself.

The most important thing was I never allowed the artistic feelings I had inside me to die. I knew I was a late bloomer, but decided to dedicate myself to the modest photography hobby I had In LA once back in Pittsburgh. That was 18 years ago. I specialize in the nude female form. In that time I’ve achieved a level of work I’m very proud of, have sold prints to numerous collectors and have been in both group and solo shows.

This blog has given me a forum to talk about things that you would never, ever be able to write about in the mainstream media. I have been given carte blanche without censorship by the egalitarian nature of the Internet to delve into any flight of fancy that comes my way. This is a gift greater than gold.

You never know what is around the corner and that plays positively into the passive hand of existence. Create something and put it out there. The world is a much better place after a creative act then not acting at all.